The book begins like this: «This is a true story and, as such, it must include a confession. Between 2016 and 2018 I was contacted by different women to help them with a very specific task: they wanted to ruin the lives of certain men. What follows is a novel of more or less delirious events in which the writer Pola Oloixarac (Buenos Aires, 1977) goes to meet these men to tell their stories: a certain Lola wants to cancel Tobías because he infected her with herpes, although the The relationship she had was not exclusive and she was sleeping with a prostitute and an economist at the same time; Mireya, one of the most famous feminists in Argentina, decides to cover up her old relationships with a minor of her new partner, Perro, a macho among males, but as soon as their relationship ends she brings them to light; Laurent was canceled from a French university after a social media campaign that included fake accounts in which he was accused of abusing his students, coinciding, coincidentally, with the moment in which a position in the History department had become available. Ancient, almost a miracle. ‘Bad Man’ (Random House Literature), says its author, is an exploration of the current power to destroy a man. “When society, or a certain part of it, gives you the tools to get rid of someone, are you going to waste it? Are you going to miss it?” he asks himself on the other side of the screen. —Are all the stories real? Really?—Yes, they all are. I was interested in working as a journalist on this case, collecting data, working with sources, and then using the methods of fiction to turn it into an experience. They are all real cases and they all, in some way, involved me. I only included the cases where I was involved as a participant, as a necessary witness.—What were those meetings like?—At the time, the truth is that it was quite clandestine. Meeting them, talking, was a pretty tense situation. They were very impressed by talking. It was quite dramatic, really. And for me it was very strong not to put myself in a position to judge them. I tried to listen to everyone and not let my judgment cloud the reader’s perception.—At the beginning of the book she says that a woman accused her of being an anti-Semite for not supporting her in a lynching. He sent letters to the main newspapers in Germany asking them to cancel it at a literary festival in Berlin. —The way in which they push you to have to take sides no matter what in these cases is very violent. They force you to take sides in something that you don’t know to begin with, but nevertheless on principle you should take sides in a sense. Because on one side they put virtue, the defense of women, and on the other, evil. Suddenly there is a lot of social pressure to make decisions about other people’s lives, and in some way judicialize the cases but without judicial guarantees. I was interested in examining the power that women have now, because I consider myself a feminist, and I am interested in ending gender violence and combating and understanding it. And I believe that cancellation is not a good instrument for feminism, because what it does precisely is take the focus off of law and justice, which have to be your true instruments, and the place where you have to trust, and put it in another space, and make us believe that justice has to do with that other thing that is outside the world of law. At the same time, it is interesting, and it is also legitimate, to understand that a woman with a broken heart is an avenging god, and you are not going to stop her with anything. —I quote: «What interested me were these women who had made being victims a personal form of cruelty; I wanted to listen to Circe, to feel the curse like someone climbing a volcano.”—I always loved the ‘femme fatale’. I don’t like books that tell me what I have to think, that start from the fact that women are a threatened species. I like to investigate the power that women have. Because it has been transformed and has been different over the centuries. And I find it much more interesting to look at women in terms of their powers. And not so much as victims. Sometimes you can choose whether you want to empower yourself or not. And it seems to me that the victim’s position is disempowering. Because what it precisely does is make sexist power increasingly bigger and more opulent. And I don’t think that’s the best way to combat it, to enlarge it, to make it ominous. The interesting thing is to study us, the power we have.—The book gives itself the freedom to question women’s stories, cast doubt on them.—Precisely because we have to protect women and because gender violence is something super serious. that we have to combat, it is interesting to pay attention to when the idea of violence becomes a piece of gum that is suddenly applicable to anything. No to anything: to anything you don’t like. If you got along badly with a guy, if you didn’t like him, ‘bye’, I don’t know, you block him, you don’t see him anymore. Or well, you say: I don’t know, let’s go home anyway, like what happened to Elisa Mouliaá. She said: I didn’t like it at all, but I’m going to her house; It was horrible, but I’m going home anyway, although I have a perfect excuse which is that my daughter has a fever and my dad is calling me, and she is one year old, which means she is most likely breastfeeding. But who was the important infant? It was Inigo! With the baby face he has [a carcajadas].— [Risas] .—What seems fascinating to me is that this cancellation occurs around one of the ugliest men in Spain. Because we are talking about the ‘bad man’, the man who seduces you, the hot blood, but suddenly we come face to face with the reality of Íñigo. It’s fascinating: not being able to resist being with the ugliest man in Spain. What a story.—The book has coincided with the Errejón case and with Trump’s victory, from which he takes the concept ‘bad hombre’ to apply it to the cancellations of feminism.—And when I was in Buenos Aires it coincided with the Alberto Fernández scandal , who is our last president, who beat Fabiola Yañez. And he was the great standard bearer of feminism. He went so far as to say: “I ended the patriarchy, the patriarchy ended with me.” [y subraya con la voz el patriarcado]. Errejón’s public condemnation has some poetic justice, because Íñigo was the one who designed the Spanish scaffold for micromachismos. That he is precisely the one who falls for being a great cultist of these micro and macro machismos, it seems to me that there is something very beautiful about him. One of the things that seemed most interesting to me when I wrote the book is to ask myself: who benefits from cancellation? Does it benefit women? And one of the things that is revealed in the book is that sometimes other men benefit. For example: behind this terrible fall there is someone who is very happy, and that is Pablo Iglesias.— …—That is precisely what is complicated. When feminism serves to mask the total gatopardismo of machismo. You have an increasingly stronger machismo precisely because it has instrumentalized feminist discourses. It’s like a kind of final straw where what comes last are women’s problems. If we cannot think about the best instruments to defend women from violence, we cannot think about anything at all and the only thing left is to remain silent and observe how violence unfolds in other ways around us. Violence or injustice. So the question is: is it better for us to make punishment our prerogative or is it worth it for punishment to return to justice? Related News standard No A psychologist explains the traits hidden in Errejón’s personality: «This leads us to think… .» ALEXIA Columba Jerez Lara Ferreiro points out that with the information we have, we can presumably talk about a portrait of Sumar’s former spokesperson—Have you hesitated when writing the book?—It always seemed to me that I had to write it, but of course, I told people about it and they looked at me a little embarrassed: why are you getting in there? It seemed to me that there was something very fascinating about this precisely because secrecy was at stake: it was something that everyone talked about in private, but no one could speak out loud, no one published anything, not even in notes. I found it especially interesting to make a novel that allows you to explore the gray areas, get deeper into people’s relationships, and investigate them. How can it be that we are all talking about something for years and at the same time nothing can be said publicly? It’s crazy.—One of the themes that ‘Bad Hombre’ proposes is hypocrisy: there is a very strict public morality, but life happens underneath. There is an extreme example, and it is the character of Mireya, one of the most famous feminists in Argentina, who enjoys staging rapes. It’s your sexual fantasy.—They are very human and very real things. This is how human passions work: what your ideology tells you is not always what you feel or what you are passionate about. Mireya likes the Dog, who is the classic Argentine male, and that collides with her ideology. And yet they have an ‘affair’ and she enjoys staging a rape. Why wouldn’t you like it?—There is something Victorian in the double standards that the book portrays, beyond that case, right?—Sure. But the shoes of North American Puritans, which have a big buckle in front, are back in fashion, and the high shirt with bollards, hyper-Victorian, is also very fashionable. The Victorian is now even in the way we dress. We use it, we wear it. Zara sells you that puritanism. It’s interesting. —If they weren’t real, those cases would seem invented by a comedian. They have a touch of nonsense, almost like a Woody Allen comedy. Did I need the distance of humor?—I guess when things are dramatic the best thing you can do about it is make a comedy. Furthermore, for me it was a great temptation as a writer: comedy of social relations is something that I love. I feel it in Jane Austen, in Oscar Wilde, and I know I’m telling you quite Victorian people. [y vuelve a reír]. The book has something of that too: there are many dialogues, situations with implied meanings… It talks about a very strange and very interesting moment in our contemporary culture in which there is an erosion of meaning: anything can mean something terrible as long as it honors me in both victim. And there is this idea that being a victim is also a sought-after place, a special place in which to locate oneself, a place that serves. It seems to me that it has a little to do with the Marian cult, perhaps it could be a secularization of that. That’s why I think about the Marian cult. —Do you think a man could have written this book?—No, and neither does another woman. [y ríe]. Neither does ChatGPT: that only serves to say commonplaces and tedious things.
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