Aimee Bender: Motherfucker

Aimee Bender usually writes in two different kind of styles in her novel Willful Creatures. One of them is where she takes a completely absurd scenario and adds realistic aspects to it. This can be seen in the short story End of the Line. The other style is the opposite which is a realistic scenario told in a twisted perspective. This can be seen in the short story Motherfucker.

Motherfucker usually is a word to insult someone, like another word for jerk. But Aimee Bender takes this word literally. She writes of a lonely but confident man who only has sexual relations with mothers. He is explained as a straight-forward, confident, living-life kind of man. Dating mothers starts to sound creepy the way he does it. He sits and watches the mothers, watching how they interact with their children, and makes it sound like it is just a game to him. It is easy for him to get single women because he won't have to worry about and husbands for an affair.

He finally finds a scarlet that he seems to be really interested in. But he never really takes any initiative to stay with her. He doesn't take her on dates and doesn't return her phone calls. Maybe he is not as simple and sick as we thought he is. He seems to be more complex than a guy that just wants to get with a lot of mothers. He knows how to play with people's emotions - he is an emotional ventriloquist - and therefore he plays with the scarlet's. He probably doesn't pursue a relationship with her because he only wanted to teach her to be herself. He could tell that she wasn't happy so he threw his emotions on her during the relationship to help her out in her career and make her happy. He constantly tests his emotions and in the long run her helped her out. More simply, maybe he just didn't want to be with her because he was not ready to be committed.

Through this story, I think Aimee Bender is trying to tell us that we should not "judge a book by its cover." People may be more complex than they seem.

Bethany Davis (Post #7)