Distracted by the Penis
Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pmSo, the editors of Publishers Weekly have made a list of their top 10 books of 2009, and they’re all by men.
“We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” they said. “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male,” they acknowledged fleetingly in the middle of a paragraph of self-congratulatory rah-rah.
Well, it disturbs us here at Chez Bishop, too.
Lizzie Skurnick’s essay contra PW’s list is worth reading, particularly for her description of one awards-deciding process, in which, she says, “we have…called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.”
The trouble is, we’re not yet in a position to say that we can ignore gender. (Or race, or culture, or sexual orientation.) Our biases are deep as shit. As The Mumpsimus puts it, ‘ There is no objective, essential “best”. There is stuff we like and stuff we don’t — texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as “great”.’
Which is why I think we probably ditched affirmative action too soon. Patriarchy still informs our tastes and appetites, and we can’t evade it any more than we can evade our own genes. And it may not just be a matter of taste regarding the books themselves. Skurnick writes: “It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”
Which is even scarier, if it’s true, because it doesn’t speak just about a cultural tendency to prefer men’s writing but a tendency to cut men more slack, to wish them more success, to extend them more compassion and goodwill — in short, to love men more than we love women.
In the interests of honesty, I have to say that I’m a woman who has been helped, encouraged, and promoted by men. I’ve had so much male support, I should be able to insert something witty about jockstraps in here, but I’m getting over a bit of food poisoning and ask to be excused from wit. At any rate, it’s not on my own behalf that I complain. Or rather, it is — if I ever succeed in writing this book I keep failing to write, the one with all the women in it, doing womanish things, though not having affairs, because that would be too sensational.
On to the second part of this post, which is much more ruminatory…
Lizzie Skurnick writes about a group of awards judges finding texts by men “ambitious” and texts by women “domestic”, and rewarding the former even if they fell short of their goals, though the latter may have been better written.
Assuming that this was not the only time that such a finding as been made, it raises some troubling questions. Like, do women actually tend to be timid, preferring to do a good but limited job, where men might take a wild risk? Or do we fail to see where women have been ambitious because the ambition is disguised? Do we simply prefer sloppy-ambitions to skilful-safe because the former seems to inject more new material into the cultural meme pool? Or do wild ambitious works by women go unpublished because publishers know that women’s writing within certain safe bounds is saleable, but when it comes to work that shoots for the moon, the reading public is more likely to look favourably on the flawed efforts of a not-quite-genius man than a not-quite-genius woman?
Perhaps a real genius, a woman who can shoot for the moon and hit it, has equal chances with an equally brilliant man. Or maybe not — maybe there are women out there shooting for a different moon, and finding that no one cares.
As I say, ruminations. Questions, all of them hard to answer.
November 8th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
“Or maybe not — maybe there are women out there shooting for a different moon, and finding that no one cares.”
I wonder if this is, at least, one major issue.
November 9th, 2009 at 5:26 am
I don’t know what to say about the forest of cocks that has formed in this list.
I struggle to tell the difference between a man’s writing versus a woman’s writing. could there be a bit of a boys club happening with the judges. I am assuming the judges for this list were mostly males.
and would the results be any different if the panel was mostly women?
or could it be swayed differently if the panel were brick workers?
I find that we tend to prefer the “so called” work of males over females (I say “so called because” who knows what happens behind closed doors)
I don’t know why we do, maybe there is something in us that don’t want to see too many women get a head of us as individuals
November 10th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Brick workers, or younger people, maybe. But — I dunno. I dunno if most of the judges were male, even. What I do wonder is whether women, as well as men, have a subconscious idea that men should win.
>>maybe there is something in us that don’t want to see too many women get a head of us as individuals
Maybe — but honest as that thought is, I truly haven’t ever got that vibe from men in my field. But I could be an exception — or the spec fic field could be fairly egalitarian.
I’ve never done a blind testing of men’s and women’s writing. It would be an interesting thing to do, to see if you could match gender to prose.
Forest of cocks, heh — that certainly puts images in my head. (There is in fact a penis garden here in Bangkok.)
November 11th, 2009 at 7:15 am
That’s a very interesting image. It proves everyone loves the cock. the forest of cocks discription i got from the age when the were complaining about triple J’s hottest 100 of all time.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I don’t judge. Basically, if a book has a cover that interests me, I’ll read it.
November 11th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Alankria — I’d bet there are feminist writers who think it’s an issue.
Colin — the cock is a lucky charm here. The carved ones, er, come in all sizes.
Michael — proving once again the irrelevance of content over packaging
November 12th, 2009 at 7:01 am
is it bad that I think of you when I saw the headlines?
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE5A85L220091109
November 12th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I spend a lot of time wallowing in my own crapulance, ie visiting message boards. One in particular is 7chan’s /lit/. Anything familiar with the chans knows that they’re often the bastions of males, or at least, people who are presumed to be male by the rest of the board. (Hence, TITS or GTFO. I’m going to skip over the racism and the assumption that any anon is a Caucasian amerikkan until proven otherwise because that’s beyond the scope of this…whatever this is.)
/lit/ is a very slow moving board but some interesting things do crop up. And one of the most interesting things is the prevailing attitude that Russian literature is God-tier (I personally think it’s death but anyway) and that there are no women writers except Ayn Rand. On the rare occasions that female writers are brought up the screams are deafening and every criticism in the world is flung at them. Yet, if a male writer comes up that is deemed to be, well, less than stellar, the statement is usually made that yes, it’s rubbish but it’s entertaining rubbish so STFU. I remember a very old thread- I forget who it was centred around, I’m thinking Dean Kootz but I could be wrong- about a book that ends with a man living on an island with a woman locked in a cage. Apparently it’s a love story but the man tells her that he can’t find the key even though he has it, and there she stays, in the cage, basically his pet. The commentary provided was, “Nice dream, huh?” And I remember that further down the page there was another thread, unusually discussing female writers and the howls of rage about man-hating femminists were deafening to behold.
Another thing I notice about this board is that the writers there, although male, are usually ones with workman-like prose. China Meiville, who has a poetic bent to him, sometimes gets mentioned but that’s it. And when I go to my bookshelves, the female writers there are mostly of a poetical bent themselves; Angela Carter; Anais Nin; yourself, even. And with just about all female writers the focus is on relationships, or the relationship drives the story. With the male writers, relationships are often an important part but the plot is often driven by some outside conflict. Aliens. Fascism. Cthulu.
I overheard a frightening conversation yesterday. I work in a male dominated field. Indeed, there’s fifty-sixty odd people who work on this site but there are four females in total, two of whom work in the office and I’ve seen in the operational areas maybe twice in two years. I am not a particularly feminine female. I’m not even a particularly human human. I regard the concept of being in a REL-la-TION-ship with something close to the horror I have of becoming pregnant and bearing a child, and both levels of horror are similar to that I feel at the concept of wearing makeup or doing my hair before work. For that I’ve been awarded title of, ‘can safely be ignored’ by some of the guys when they come over for a chat to my male boss and co-workers. And what they say can be terrifying.
Yesterday the subject of pregnancy came up. My co-worker’s wife is pregnant and is due next month. And he is both resentful of that fact and, since it’s a difficult and painful pregnancy for her and he’s not gettin’ any, faithless. And quite open about that to his friends. An interesting thing for a devoutly religious Muslim who prays five or six times a day. The general consensus amongst the group of men was that ‘most (yes, they said ‘most’) women will deliberately get pregnant without the man’s permission, sometimes to trap him and sometimes because she wants kids’. The further consensus was that contraceptives are mainly the responsibility of the woman, and that it’s her fault if she gets pregnant and not because, like, he stuck it in.
Sometimes the lunchtime conversations scare the crap out of me. And two of these gentlemen have extended a standing invitation to go out horse-riding with them of a morning. Themselves, and myself. Just the three of us. Um. Yeh.
I’m not sure where all this ties together. At the heart of much female writing is often relationships; at the heart of most male writing, relationships are not. Many of the conversations I’ve overheard concern faithfulness, or the male lack thereof. Not once does the concept of morality come up, from the ones that are faithful to the ones that are faithless, whereas in a group of women, a faithless woman will often receive scandalous condemnation. I’ve been sexually approached by more than one man I knew to be involved in a relationship. I’ve known several men who were openly resentful of their pregnant partners and who were/are unfaithful, justifying themselves saying that they had to get it from somewhere.
Maybe it’s just the type of places that I work. Maybe I don’t know enough straight women. What I do know is that the concept of feminism implies that a woman can be as fucked up, cruel, psychotic and amoral and sexual deviant as any male, and that I fucking hate humanity at times.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
All of this gender inequality reminds me of “The Collector”, John Fowles. I felt empathy for the crazy dude, which is not right.
“EEK, a penis,” Southpark, is much more intellectual.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Caitlyn – what lovely workmates you have. Maybe they should read the first article on this page. Not that I suppose any of them have Thai wives — but it might put a little fear into their minds. You never know.
Although, perhaps not many men, in a virtually all male environment, will defend women. The ones who have a different opinion might just stay quiet. Strong the male pack mentality is. But I don’t think many guys will tell another guy that he’s being immoral, even in private. And I have to admit, it’s something I quite like about men — that they tend to assume other people’s lives are none of their business.
The men vs pregnancy thing is surely(?) more complicated than men tell themselves it is. I mean, they talk about not getting any, but there are obviously ways to achieve sexual satisfaction without intercourse. And hey, if his partner’s too tired/ill to give so much as a handjob, well, perhaps Sir could go off and have a quiet wank. But surely(?) there must be a lot of emotion involved, too. Fear of the responsibility of fatherhood, fear of having to share your partner’s affections, fear that the motherly part of her will no longer be available to you… all those things that a bloke isn’t going to admit in public or possibly even to himself. Not to mention revulsion at the pregnant body, which men might experience and not know how to deal with except by running from it into other arms. Not that I think any of this is an excuse for lying and cheating — but perhaps if men understood their own fears better they’d feel more in control and be less at the mercy of their impulses. Or maybe not. The penis is always distracting.
Poor old humanity. We’re living complex lives with stone age brains. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that we manage to keep civilisation going at all.
Whether women make relationships central to fiction and men emphasise outside conflicts is a general truth, I’m not sure. The male writers we call great are often those who do explore relationships and interior conflict — but maybe they’re the great and the few?
I have to say, I think it might be doing men a disservice to judge them by the inhabitants of chan boards…
Michael – even Jesus would cut that Collector guy’s penis off, then cut his head off, possibly after making him eat his own severed penis. I’ll stick with Southpark.
November 17th, 2009 at 9:56 am
The only thing I ever hold against female authors is the fact that very few of them can write men very well – most tending to write them as women with penises. (Anne Rice was one of the worst offenders at this, but many others have come to my attention over the years)
Otherwise, I’ve enjoyed male and female authors with equal enthusiasm throughout my life … even, on a few occasions, mistook one for the other and only discovered my mistake much later.
Admittedly you see a different focus, in general, between the stories written by each gender … especially in the region of relationships vs action. But there are certainly women who prefer the latter over the former and vice versa.
I find it a terrible shame that anyone should think “men deserve to win more” … don’t they win enough?
That said, if they were not careful to be certain men and women were equally represented at the onset of their judgment it is quite possible there were more books written by males in the list to begin with … as there tend to be more widely published male authors. (for whatever reasons)
November 18th, 2009 at 6:57 am
W – it could be that we have a slight tendency to write men as we wish they were, not as they are? (The same could be said for male authors and female characters…)
Do you happen to have statistics on the gender distribution of published authors? The only stats I found were skewed by a large proportion of the works being reprints/reissues.
November 19th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I had a class a few years ago on women’s lib which provided some statistics for this, but damned if I know where they are now …
And you may be right about the “writing to our desires” thing – or to our misconceptions on the part of misogynistic figures like Robert Jordan – me, I would like to see more interesting novels with lesbians as the protagonists … we just don’t get enough of those.
November 20th, 2009 at 6:04 am
In my case, at least, it takes a certain amount of discipline (which I don’t always have), to not write to my desires, if the subject of the writing is anywhere within the ballpark of my desires.
Not enough novels with lesbian protagonists, or not enough interesting ones?