: Sexism, but it's lit crit so it's cool
A few months ago, the magazine The Sun Magazine published a great little story called "Bone Frag" by Peter Stenson.
Lots to love about this story: First of all that it breaks the mold of what you usually see in The Sun, i.e. weepy stories about family, the overturning of generations, and how many obscure plant names the author learned while growing up in Rural Place. (No hate for those stories, but it's been done to death.) "Bone Frag" is about body parts literally falling out of the sky--an absurd metaphor for, you know, all of this (gesturing at 2025 environment). It's a dark comedy, we love a dark comedy.
Second of all, this story explores what some derisively call "man pain," i.e. the inconvenient reality that men, too, have emotional struggles, and that sometimes these struggles manifest in ways we might find morally unsavory (sexually fantasies, paranoia, gambling), and that helping men instead of abandoning to face their problems all alone may require overcoming a certain amount of moral disgust over these "symptoms."
Brené Brown wrote a whole book about emotional vulnerability, and here's what she said about man pain:
Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.
You can see what's coming, right? Disgruntled letters to the editor about how, I guess, The Sun should go back to publishing more stories about someone's dead spouse. Lori McFadden from Mesa, Arizona:
For many years I have found your magazine to be indispensable reading. I tell friends that there is always something to excite me—and quite often to offend me—in The Sun, and that’s OK. But Peter Stenson’s story [“Bone Frag”] in your October 2024 issue has no redeeming features. I read the whole thing believing that surely there would be something of value. But there was nothing. Awful.
And here's Sherrie Miranda from Chula Vista, California:
Peter Stenson's science-fiction story was gross and totally unbelievable. Body parts falling out of the sky? I mean, there's Gaza, but that isn't science fiction. That is a sad reality. Please think carefully the next time you are considering publishing science fiction. I can find plenty of that on TV. It doesn't need to be in The Sun.
You can just hear Sherrie sneering derisively as she pronounces the words "science fiction." A dirty, masculine genre for perverts and aspies, right? I'm saying nothing new here, but like, the point of fiction isn't not to repeat "reality" or even be "believable;" it's to provoke a change in the reader, and even Sherrie has to admit that by that standard, "Bone Frag" worked on her.
Also, while I don't mean to cheapen SF by splitting hairs, I think the correct genre term for "Bone Frag" should be magical realism. SF is about asking "what if" the world was different from ours and how the differences would play out, whereas magical realism is when weird shit happens but the characters just try to grapple with it like any other literary fiction.
(For some reason, Sherrie's note only appears in the print edition, and not the online version here; also, they did something weird with the URL scheme and I expect that that link will break and the page will be moved to this URL sooner or later.)
Edit: Ngl, they sort of phoned it in on this month's "correspondence" section. The letter I attributed to Lori McFadden above appears in the web version with that name, but it's attributed to Patricia King Sommer in the print version. Lori has a note in the print version, too, but it's more positive: "The story was brilliant and original, as I've come to expect from The Sun." I don't know what I expect from anyone anymore.