Aimee Bender is Evil: An Opposing Viewpoint

Some years ago, while I was just a young lad in library school, I came across a story called “Quiet Please” (read it here: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0798/bender/sstory1.html) by Aimee Bender. The story was published in GQ and later in the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

She was quite the talk of town among critics at the time who were calling her the post-modern Kafka. While critics were praising her, I, and many librarians, were mocking her for that story.

The story is about a librarian having a series of graphic sexual encounters in the break room with various patrons, and concludes with the librarian being paraded through the library like a sexual queen of sorts.

The story explored a now popular cliché that librarians are desperate sexual predators hungry to have sexual encounters in the break room. Bender’s allegations are completely untrue, unfounded, and uncalled for. Nonetheless, Bender’s story has seriously hampered the creditability of librarians and the serious nature of their job.

For the record, I have never witnessed or heard of such encounters happening in a library, and further have concluded that Aimee Bender is evil for ever making the claims. Public librarians are nice people, but sexual addicts they are not.

Now law librarians--that’s a whole different can of beans--they can be wild animals when provoked.