How to Give Neurotic Losers the Main Character Treatment

In “The Feminist,” the opening missive in Tony Tulathimutte’s profane and profanely hysterical book Rejection, a narrow-shouldered tryhard brands himself a feminist ally to have sex with women. It doesn’t exactly work out for him, but that’s also the point Tulathimutte is trying to make—the man's attempt at sexual conquest is blinded by his irredeemable narcissism. Among Tulathimutte’s moralizing flock of neurotic loners who animate the frictions and trapdoors of online life, he is simply one of many, many more. In the story “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a man named Kant reluctantly joins a gay hookup app—“a miniscule butcher shop”—and is turned off by its “infinite display case of rumps, loins, and wursts.” Later, he pays an adult-content creator to cosplay what I can only describe as one of the most demented, and hilariously specific, sexual fantasies I have ever read.