Personally, I find these ideologies to be quite relatable. These experiences are what underpin our main character Joan and her general distrust, dislike, and anger towards men. As much as it pains me to say, I feel as though every woman has an event in their life where they have been put in a position they didn’t want to be at the hands of a man. There are a few issues with this depiction that I will discuss soon but all in all Joan’s mentality and lived experiences with men can be quite relatable for a lot of women, and I’m including anyone who identifies as a woman.
The life of a modern woman, broadly speaking, is what I saw as the focus of Animal. Women live in fear of being preyed upon by these exact types of men everyday and yet when we read about it in a fictional setting it’s argued that it’s not realistic? I disagree. I think it would be easy for readers to write Animal off as an unrealistic representation of men-and there are elements of it that lend me to agree with this assumption-but I would argue that isn’t a fair assessment. While the consistency of disgusting behaviour felt a bit exaggerated when reading in a condensed book of roughly 300 pages, if we were to think through the span of our lives I think our creepy old dude meter would be ticking right up with Joan’s. While to me it felt like that is the only perspective we got, I simply can’t argue with the fact that these people exist and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say most of us are fairly familiar with them in our own lives. The men depicted in this book mostly all fall under the umbrella of “creepy old dude,” with a few exceptions. It is hard to tell whether Taddeo was writing the men this way as an accurate or ironic depiction of stereotypical attributes we are all very familiar with. All of the men in Animal are simply: the worst.
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