Nick Maandag

Well, these three short stories are very...male...by which I mean misogynistic.

The humor mostly derives from the men behaving very awkwardly and inappropriately. One could almost make a case that the book is anti-male, the men are so awful. But of course, even the worst man in these stories gets to take sexual advantage of the female characters. A professor uses a bad disguise to trick his student into a sexual encounter with him in the first story. In the final one, a peeping tom at a co-ed monastery leverages his seeing the head monk using a position of authority to seduce a young woman into lessons of how to do the same for himself. The story ends with a sickening wink between the two men.

In the middle story there is no sex per se, but the teacher at a night school docilely follows a janitor's orders to strip topless in front of her class so he can clean and permanently maim her "sullied" breasts with a vacuum cleaner.

The more I think about this book, the worse I feel for having read it.… (meer)