Just re-read Shopgirl, by Steve Martin.
I’m trying to process what it is about the book that I find really unsettling now that didn’t bother me when I read the book for the first time years ago.
It’s like it’s not quite misogynistic, but yeah, it kind of is.
Mirabelle’s coming of age is measured by her success at finding a man who loves her properly, but while I agree that being able to form healthy relationships is part of growing up, it’s not as if it’s any particular failure on her part that impedes her relationships through most of the book. Jeremy and Ray are both kind of assholes, and as soon as they get their shit together, Mirabelle is able to continue her own path to adulthood.
Jeremy goes away and becomes a decent person, and Ray learns how to love and support Mirabelle in a way that is good for her—instead of taking her for granted and using her to figure himself out.
The other named woman in the book, Lisa, is painted largely as the whore to Mirabelle’s madonna, which is pretty creepy. It’s like she is a caricature of everything that Steve Martin finds detestable in women, and she is duly punished for it in the end when she is humiliated by mistakenly having sex with Jeremy instead of her intended target. There is no indication whatsoever that Lisa is experiencing anything like that journeys of self-discovery and actualization that Mirabelle, Ray, and Jeremy go through in the book. She’s simply a repository for every hateful stereotype of women that you might find over at The Spearhead or some other men’s rights website: fake, shallow, deceptive, scheming, greedy, materialistic, hyper-sexual.
Martin reiterates several times that what is appealing about Mirabelle is something “simple” within her, even as he lingers time and again on details of her clothing, her hair, and her appearance. About Lisa, he points out that she will attract obsessive and abusive men—presented as a natural consequence of Lisa’s performance of the woman role.
The problem is that Ray, presented in the book as a hapless man-child trying to figure out women, obsesses over and is abusive to Mirabelle, so I’m just not sure what commentary the book was trying to make. It’s like Martin set up this sort of virgin-whore dichotomy with Mirabelle and Lisa, but only managed to show that all women can be objects of prey to men, and for essentially the same reasons.
It seems like the only difference is that in the Shopgirl universe Lisa somehow deserves her humiliation and abuse because she is a bad woman. Mirabelle, on the other hand, is simply a victim of well-meaning abusers, and because she’s so good she is able to be an agent of positive change in the lives of man-children everywhere, which inspires them to not abuse her anymore.
Ugh. I used to really like this book. Now I feel kind of grossed-out by it.
