There is a point in Beatriz Serrano's novel Unhappiness when its protagonist Marisa goes to a museum and admires a painting. One gets so tired of Marisa's incapacity to care about anything that it's a heartening moment when she tries to enjoy a work of art. However, the reader's hopes that there's some substance to Marisa's otherwise vacuous personality are dashed when she explains what she likes about it.
The painting Marisa admires is Hieronimus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights":
She has no use for the first and the third parts of the triptych because a religious message bores her. Instead, Marisa concentrates on the central panel that represents her idea of what the world should be like. Lots of sex in the most bizarre permutations and absolutely no other activity whatsoever! What's not to like? Interestingly, Marisa herself is not very sexual. Her sensuality is almost entirely limited to food. Plus, she's on heavy tranquilizers that don't lead to great libidos. This is not the case of a very sexual woman beaten down by a repressive society. Marisa's situation is the exact opposite: she's almost entirely unsexed in the world of extreme sexual permissiveness.
Marisa's explanation for why she believes that the central panel of the triptych would represent the world at its best is, as always, a meaningless slogan. "Such a world would be diverse and friendly [diverso y amable]" she says, oblivious to how much of an oxymoron this is. Diverse means heavily and often irreconcilably conflicted, grating, uneasy. Marisa is too sociophobic to have a normal conversation with anybody who's identical to her in culture, language and upbringing. In a diverse environment, she'd be even more lost.
The core of Marisa's personality is at full view in this scene. She was told she must be in favor of sex-centered lifestyles and diversity. And even though she has absolutely no use for either and actually couldn't tolerate them, age will cheer for them mindlessly and aggressively. The mystery of women who advocate for the destruction of women's sports or depolicing is solved! They are all Marisa.
And that's quite scary.
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