I just read “Hit Me, Baby,” in the “NYRB” (November 23, 2023), by the brilliant writer Namwali Serpell. She read 10 novels by young women and wrote entrancingly about them, as well as about theories she's formed on young women writers, feminism, the novel as a form, the history of the novel, men and women doing stuff to each other involving power, SM sex that isn't really hot, and how nothing stays the same even for five minutes.

You put it down, and you can’t find it, and it’s moved on its own, and someone moved it, and it escaped, and not just an object but everything you have learned and experienced and had ideas about. It’s moved off. And there you are. Where are you? I thought it was the understandings of men I’d grown bored with, but it turns out it’s the understandings of everyone. This is not a complaint.

In a moment, I’m going to quote some smart and interesting paragraphs I put brackets around in the piece. I can’t say why. I like that things have happened. I don’t like the explanations people offer for why things have happened. I’m not saying I accept anything. I don’t like theories of the causes of human behavior on the micro level or on the macro level.

The novels Serpell read by young women are offshoots of Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends” and offshoots of “Jane Eyre,” in that they depict young women at war with the way women are understood by the world, young women who get with some kind of older, rich Rochester or other, and then other stuff happens along the lines of “Jane Eyre.” Art gets made. Marriage occurs. There is S & M sex but not really hot, Serpell says, because sex isn’t the thing driving the women to move from point A to point B.

“The post-third-wave bedroom isn’t an Eden. It’s an arena, and the contestants are fighting to out-shame each other. Ashamed of her weakness—whether it be her relative lack of worldly success or her unfeminist wish to be hit—the woman in turn shames the man for his power. She can’t punish him materially, not even with her absence. If playing hard to get doesn’t work, playing easy to hit will do. In this way, she makes him complicit in a desire to wound her—which even if he doesn’t feel, she can conjure into being, simply by naming it. ‘Hit me’. You know you want to. . ..

“‘Hit me’ is de riguer less because literary fiction has absorbed a pornographic script than because it is expressing the contradictions of an ideological one. The transgression at the center of these novels is not of sexual or social mores but of feminism itself, which has indeed calcified into an ideology with specific practices and contracts and badges of honor. . . .

“’The personal is political’ has always been susceptible to a bathetic inversion: ‘the political is personal’. These novels depict feminism in flight from demands for equality—the right to vote, the right to a bank account, the right to equal pay, the right to divorce, the right to abortion, the right to be free from assault—and toward a politics of grievance as it plays out in the bedroom. . .. this crisis is not between the genders. It is within the ideological form of feminism, which now has to square ongoing pervasive misogyny—bias, harassment, abuse, rape, lack of autonomy, femicide—with women’s growing gains in higher education and recent dominance in white-collar industries like publishing. The latest wave is cresting.”

My head hurts. What’s my name?

This was my thought when I finished Serpell's piece. It's a little while later, and this is what has come to me that Serpell doesn't say. Why the flight from the principles of feminism--that is, a pushback against misogyny in all its forms and the naming of those forms? I think women are heartbroken about the absolute failure of all our efforts to make the slightest dent in the granite persistence of misogynist thought and practice and culture. It's a dead failure, and people like me who still do it look out of step with the present time. I think younger women are so defeated and so heartbroken they've decided to put their energies into anything other than an effort they know will fail.