From toxic masculinity to the #MeToo movement, the author of Girls captures the rocky recalibrations at work in sexual culture
In the opening story of Emma Cline’s collection Daddy, a father gathers his adult children for the holidays. His daughters are distracted and hostile; one of them, we learn, called the police on her father as a nine-year-old, “after one of the bad periods”, when his wife “sometimes ended up locking him out of the house”. The family watches old movies “where the fathers were basically Jesus”. This father, however, is losing his power as patriarch: “The kids just laughed now if he got angry.”
What might the dethroning of the patriarch, and the vilification of “toxic masculinity”, feel like for the men who have been toppled, or merely become irrelevant? This is Cline’s subject, but she also explores the unsteady reckonings of #MeToo from the vantage point of women ambivalent about the power dynamics in which they are enmeshed.