Sexuality and Violence

Sexuality and the violence associated with sex and sexuality is a near constant, recurring theme in Social Creature. Sexual harassment is so normalized that, the first few pages of the novel, the narrator casually mentions Louise being catcalled on a regular basis in the same paragraph as the narrator discussing her usual daily routine. “Louise walks the twenty minutes to subway. She ignores the catcaller who asks her, every morning, how her pussy smells” (4). Louise also faces a similar, casual violence in her dating life. “She checks [the dating app] Tinder…There was one guy who seemed really feminist online but turned out to practice relationship anarchy; and another who was really into kink in ways that she was never entirely sure were not abusive” (5). In these cases, the men Louise encounters shade their own ill practices against women by, say, claiming to be...