Coming from a good writer, a book of gratuitous and loathsome badness demands an explanation. The Stalker by Paula Bomer, is such a book. Bomer is best known for 2014’s Inside Madeline, an edgy, excellent collection of short stories on female embodiment that resonated with the third-wave feminists of my generation. Now she’s back with her buzziest title since, The Stalker, a book which aims to satirize shitty men, but instead is unwittingly revealing of a failed paradigm: feminism’s totalizing hatred of men doesn’t challenge misogyny — it mirrors it, creating a new type of totalizing female self-hatred. We might wish that the one side could be all-bad, and the other all-good, but men and women are tied together more tightly than that, as this book proves. As a novel, it is fatally flawed, and I don’t recommend it, but as a curio object it’s worth examining.
The book, which has echoes of American Psycho, is the story of Doughty, a young, handsome, blond blueblood from Darien, Connecticut, who is also a shallow, self-involved sadist, rapist and psychopath. As a child, Doughty fries ants. As a high-schooler he puts cigarettes out on his buddies and passes around Beata, a lower-middle-class girl he’s pretending to date. In college, it’s more of the same until he drops out and moves to New York, increasingly in the grip of alcohol and drugs and ready to victimize women full-time. He pretends to be a real estate agent while insinuating himself into the lives of various women including Beata (now also in NYC, tending bar) and Sophia, a middle-aged publishing executive with a Soho loft. The time period is the late Nineties, though this feels cosmetic; the book’s concerns are contemporary. What could seem more clever in today’s culture than satirizing the very worst, privileged white man on earth?
The premise gleams with made-for-Netflix glamour, but the execution is flawed from the start by Bomer’s ideology, which forces her to be in deadly earnest, and makes Doughty into a walking cliché. “Originally I wanted him to be the devil,” Bomer told Megan Nolan in an interview published this week. “The actual devil, evil incarnate.” As Nolan explains the book, Doughty “represents the male intrusion on female life” and is “the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches.” To these didactic ends Doughty reveres his father and his lineage, believes he has natural advantages over other people, looks down on the poor, and admires his own penis a lot. He is prone to wooden statements about his awesomeness. The book’s humor is supposed to come from the fact that he’s so self-important and dim, he doesn’t realize it’s all a chimera. His mother is an alcoholic (the fault of the horrible men in her life); his father is broke; he himself has none of the intelligence or superior skill he thinks he does. But for this to be funny, there would have to be some pathos or some charm in it, which the underlying ideology could never allow.
Bomer has also gone astray in choosing to write in a close third-person point of view — the story is told in Doughty’s voice, which could be funny when the reader sees what he’s not seeing. Such a choice works well with sympathetic characters, or those with a compelling personality. But since Doughty is required to be a walking cliché, this can only result in a flood of dull prose. “He liked winning. He loathed losing,” Bomer writes. He’s a caveman grunting out the simple sentences, get it? Or, here’s another ungainly passage: “His father, who often exclaimed ‘I’m the king of the castle!’ when bossing his mother around. He had given Doughty so much… He knew authority mattered more than anything.” Bomer has fallen for the mimetic fallacy, making her prose ugly and dumb to suit the character, and it’s a slog to read.
She also seems to be unaware that satire works by skewering pieties, and that the only pieties on display here are those of her class and station. There is nothing satirical about doubling down on the evil of privileged white men in 2025; it’s the status quo perspective. Nor is the information outside the frame — surprise, the female characters are rich in virtue and humanity! — any more interesting. In this flawed work, the satire rebounds, unintentionally, on the book itself. The Stalker’s true innovation is to present what happens to women when they start seeing men as completely evil. And this makes for some ugly and chilling reading.
Bomer isn’t interested in men or masculinity, Doughty is a cardboard cut-out, and deliberately so. If she were attempting to portray a glad-handing Connecticut-bro sociopath with any degree of insight or flair, she’d have to occasionally allow him to think about stereo equipment or the comparative trunk-space in late-model SUVs. But she doesn’t. Her true interest is misogyny, which she writes about in loving detail. Despite the flat dullness of Doughty’s thoughts, his narrative perspective pays enormous attention to women’s bodies, and an unrealistic amount of attention to the women themselves. The title says it all — this is a perspective obsessed with women (though actually betraying little of the psychological profile of stalking). And it’s an excuse to indulge in an orgy of sexualized hatred.
Beata (get it?) has “the hair of a baby or an old woman,” “tiny breasts,” and, when Doughty gets there by force, “a few fine, long, dark hairs on her pussy.” Doughty’s friend Lew’s mom often wears exercise clothes, displaying “her thick hips, the tight aerobic pants crawling up her butt crack and cupping the U-shape of her pussy.” His college girlfriend has “tits larger than her head, each one a softer, and more fun, larger head.” The prose, notably, gets better in these descriptions. It’s horrible to read, but it’s more creative and there’s more invested in it.
Very little of this feels like male thinking. It feels instead like female self-obsession, female insecurity, female self-objectification, and female body-hatred. On Doughty’s first night at Sophia’s place, he describes her: “She came out of the bathroom in a small silk-looking beige nightie. It was nice. At least she wasn’t fat. Although she could gain some weight. But at her age, it would probably go to all the wrong places. Like her stomach.” This is lifted straight from a woman’s internal monologue. What young man has any idea where women in their 40s put on weight? What young man is obsessed with it? A few pages later Doughty grabs Sophia’s hips and again thinks about her weight and her stomach, now upgraded to “a medium-sized pouch.”
This is all disturbing enough, but it’s also, grotesquely, a sexual fantasy. Doughty, the man with zero virtues, is actually good at one thing — performing oral sex on women. It’s highly implausible, but nonetheless, Bomer endows him with this skill, and writes many lavish, graphic passages describing his methods. The dehumanization of her female characters that this entails — please, describe how the man responsible for my death makes me orgasm, in graphic detail, from an up-close view between my legs — again seems confused, less a critique than a fantasy.
An author could, of course, write a violent, dehumanizing sex scene that’s a critique of violent, dehumanizing sex, but they’d need to bring more to it than female pleasure and the generic language of pornography. The major rape scene involving Beata at the end is also, long, extremely detailed, and hot if you like that kind of thing, which many people, including women, do. This is an innovation of a sort, revealing as it does the essential sexual co-dependence of the genders. If you are a woman who hates men and believes their essence is to degrade you, you end up fantasizing about it. What else is there?
That third-wave feminism has devolved into misogyny porn is on the one hand surprising, but on the other not so much. In Bomer’s earlier work, she had a way of leaning into women’s fears about their bodies that felt empowering. In one story from Inside Madeline, a woman has massive, personhood-defining tits — and that’s it, that’s basically the story. In 2014 this still felt critical and risqué, part of the trend that said women could overcome negative stereotypes by embracing them. The book’s title story is about a voracious fat girl masturbating, which again at its time seemed to be doing a kind of reclaiming work. By openly daring to totally objectify and sexualize Madeline, without trying to please the male gaze, the story seemed like a monument to female power.
However if The Stalker proves anything, it’s that this approach hasn’t worked out. Viewing men in a totally negative light has only enshrined misogyny. And the “empowering” self-objectifying, a decade later, has become self-annihilation, a lesson that leaning into a bad thing does not produce something good, as much as we might wish to the contrary. The book ends in an explosion of gore, with both Sophia and Doughty’s gruesome deaths. Bomer means this as a tragedy for Sophia and a deserved comeuppance for Doughty. But what comes across instead is a mutual death-spiral, with a kind of unintentional elegant logic of its own. By fully dehumanizing men, we fully dehumanize ourselves.
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