Photo-illustration: The cup; Photos: Black Bear Images via Everett Collection, Getty
Ladies, would you like a wicker basket in the shape of a man? He’s never heard of podcasts. You won’t have to cook for him. It has a nice stiff log. But on the other hand, he East highly flammable. At the beginning of August, independent studio Black Bear unveiled the racy trailer for Wicker, a surreal comedy about a single fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who finally gets the husband of her dreams (Alexander Skarsgård) – one woven from willow. Online, human women reacted with a loud and unexpected groan. They declared themselves proud HomeGoods prostitutes, broken sisters. As one Instagram commenter poetically put it: “Mr. Wicker can snap, crackle and bring this back to oblivion.” » Responding to overwhelming demand, Black Bear agreed to a one-night only 4DX screening of Wicker — personal vibrators not necessary.
After years of wish-fulfillment fantasies about men falling in love with sex robot companions, women are flipping the script on objectification. Wickerbased on Ursula Wills-Jones’ 2008 short story “The Wicker Husband”, is the most common entry in the burgeoning category of modern woman/thing romances. In 2017, the New Directions publishing house reissued Ms. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls’ 1982 novel about a neglected housewife who has an affair with a runaway amphibian; the following year, Guillermo del Toro explored a similar narrative in his film The shape of water. Two years later, the film Giant represented an employee of an amusement park attracted by a ride that she cleans, and the film by Julia Ducournau Titaniumabout a showgirl who has dangerous sex with a car at a car show, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021. Recent years have seen the birth of a Noah’s Ark of weird literary fiction involving trees, planes, blobs, pangolins and soon towers – not to mention an ever-expanding universe of monster smut and “sentient objects”. “The human didn’t work very well for me,” admits one pastry chef of her shiny new countertop appliance at Krista LaRae. Creamed by My Monster Stand Mixerafter scrambling her insides in a way that no Homo sapien male has done before.
Imagine being a misogynist who believes women should stay in the kitchen and finding out the stand mixer stole your daughter! These absurd romances, which predominantly associate human women with male creatures and objects, breathe lightness into the depressing subject of modern (heterosexual) love. (Gay people seeking representation should seek out Chuck Tingle, sentient object legend behind gems like My mac and cheese is a lesbian and she’s also my lawyer And Pounded in the ass by losing my Hugo award.) The stories also correspond to this era of debauchery, stranger than fiction. Last month, FBI Director Kash Patel defended the agency’s decision to remove “bestiality” as an automatic hiring exclusion criterion, to the surprise of stunned members of Congress. One rumor (debunked, but who’s to say) about Vice President JD Vance is that he once fornicated with a couch. What else do you expect from a far-right administration that promotes “family values” while being overrun with perverts?
Wicker is perfectly calibrated for our moment of maximum heteropessimism. In the film, gender is represented in a binary manner. Marriage is literally imprisonment; Wedding ceremonies end with the groom enclosing his new bride in a metal collar. The Fisherwoman, WickerIt is single protagonist, is self-sufficient but lonely, bullied by townspeople into remaining single. Desperate for acceptance, she pleads for the local basket maker (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband. He obliges, and the wicker husband enters the church to say “yes” a month later.
The husband is not human but definitely a man. He is over six feet tall, chiseled and skilled in manual labor. He’s not socialized enough to understand the patriarchy, but he somehow possesses the expert ability to make women cum. (It also helps that he’s played by a svelte Skarsgård.) Ultimately, what Wicker what I have to say about gender is not particularly new. What’s more interesting is what this might reveal about the challenges of being a real person today.
Wicker is set loosely in medieval times, before the rise of capitalism and what social scientist Max Weber once called the “disenchantment of the world.” A modern tale like that of Agnieszka Szpila Deadwood Forest Hexes shows how even when women win in the status quo, they lose. He follows Anna Frenza, the ruthless CEO of Poland’s largest oil company. A cartoon villain, she lives in a rich neighborhood where the decomposing bodies of the poor fertilize the gardens of the rich. She doesn’t care about climate change; she will not suffer the consequences. However, she is not happy. Her husband, Bartek, became disabled following a car accident, so she must take care of him while working. Sex is virtually non-existent in their marriage, although even when they had it, she felt dehumanized by it: “She craved sex that involved a conscious connection, grounded in intimacy – but Bartek reacted as if someone were vomiting in her face at the mere sound of the word ‘intimacy.’ » Anna wanted to be a partner, not a dominatrix.
Hexagons takes “touching the grass” to more scandalous purposes. Anna self-medicates with wine and lithium. One day, in a drugged trance, she sleepwalks into the forest, where a trip catches her making love to a fallen tree (and specifically lesbian sex, it seems): “By licking the drops of resin that ooze from the cleft of the tree’s trunk, she shares her own moisture with it. So that she not only takes but mutually exchanges.” She was forced out as CEO, which is just another failed corporate experiment in diversity. Descending into madness, she mentally transports herself to the 17th century, where she encounters a women-only commune that advocates the rejection of patriarchy and literally orgasmic adherence to Mother Earth.
This type of back-to-the-land, pussy-power politics is dangerous, because it relies on gender essentialism that is easily co-opted by traditional women and other conservatives. Wouldn’t it be nice to bake bread all day and retreat into your “divine feminine”? But it speaks to a collective sense of crisis, of the desire to reverse time to escape what we are told is an inevitable future: climate catastrophe, extreme wealth inequality and total AI takeover. WickerThe pre-modern setting is undoubtedly also part of its charm: there are artisans, gathering spaces in town and unspoilt nature. All he needs are women’s rights.
Today, violence against women is obscured, “buried in layers of hierarchy and consumption, where the potential for its use belongs almost exclusively to powerful men,” says a sensitive printer in Fien Veldman’s book. Hard copy. The printer is the only friend of the anonymous protagonist, an office worker. The worker leaves a working-class town for the big city, supposedly to escape a difficult upbringing. But the city is not a paradise. His company pays him minimum wage minus the cost of his lunch. The anonymous worker suffers from an autoimmune disease that develops when she exerts herself too much – an epidemic among young women, according to her allergist. Taking advantage of this, a male colleague intentionally sends him on a goose chase to find a package so he can claim his office. Sick, she is put on leave. His relationship with the printer is logical: for their office, they are both disposable objects.
Those who are not kicked out of their workplaces must try to stay afloat. At Ana Paula Pacheco Pandora, Ana, A literature professor in São Paulo, is broke after being hospitalized due to COVID. The novel begins with a wild account of her falling in love with a pangolin. She quarantines with him, relieved to have someone else to help her with household chores, but he becomes violent and eventually rapes her. Later, she takes as a lover a bat who insists on leaving the carcasses of her prey in the apartment while insects and vermin swarm on the floor. These appear to be allegories for the brutality of COVID; pangolins and bats were the first carriers of the disease. We learn that Ana’s ex-girlfriend has died, and it may be Ana who is going through her grief. She also transforms; in the book’s most disturbing scene, she plays a dolphin undergoing labiaplasty to restore its once-smooth skin. Youth are currency and they turn to sex work to earn money for their children.
To function, Ana takes Wellbutrin. Her psychiatrist dismisses her rants and simply advises her to be patient with her medication. He responds to her grief with cold pragmatism: “He asks why I don’t reactivate my Tinder account instead of dwelling on what I lost,” Ana says. The fact that Deadwood Forest Hexes, Hard copyAnd Pandora all feature women going crazy is no coincidence. They illustrate that mental health crises are not anomalies, but an inevitable byproduct of a horrible system. Drugs and distractions are necessary to blur reality: if you can see the world clearly, how can you not be depressed?
If some nonhuman love interests are imagined symbols of distress, others are practical justifications for avoiding other, presumably more socially adept, humans. The protagonist of Kate Folk’s Heavenly Dad, Linda, is a 30-year-old content moderator who filters hate and harassment on a video-sharing platform, training the company’s AI algorithm to eventually take her place. She scrounges for snacks at the office for her meals and lives in relative squalor in a windowless room in a basement. She only has one friend, her colleague Karina. Never mind; by then, she will be engaged to her future husband, a Boeing 737.
Heavenly Dad disrupts traditional marriage…
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