Wild West

I had some outside responses linking to my last post, which I wasn't really expecting.

I'm always surprised when Steven W. Beattie links me, because his is the sort of writing I aspire to. I don't know if I'd ever want to review books professionally, but to be able to talk about them on a level slightly more academic than "durrr, book good" would make me happy. While Beattie didn't agree with me, there was a good discussion over there.

I found another write up on the offending op-ed (via Bookslut), and hoped the author of that blog would come over here to see what I had to say. Of course, putting that link in the comments directs all sorts to my post, and one of those sorts had less kind things to say^*. In the comments section of that post, he said something like "I don't need to be right, I just want people to think." Which, in his responses to my comment, doesn't really seem to be the case. Anyway, according to his comment to me, I invented the concept of male privilege, which I guess makes me one of the greatest feminist thinkers of our time. SWB, you were right about me all along! Ha!

Really, this is all just musing on the nature of the internet. Two writers who disagreed with my view point linked me, and I find it odd. Beattie, well, we do have a back and forth. Stranger "Academic" Man? As I said to him in his blog, I think he used my write-up because it was easy to pick apart. I don't spend too much time on my blog posts: I don't get paid for this, have a regular readership of about five people, and write here for fun. I'm not in academia, or the business of writing, producing, or reviewing books.

I'm not saying I don't stand behind what I put up here. Of course I do. And it's public, it's for everyone to see, and people will take what they want from it. However, people also take the internet really, really seriously, when most of the time, it's not. I have a free site on Blogger because I was too lazy to deal with the layout issues of Typepad. I update a couple times a month. This blog is not a serious discussion of the state of literature, or feminism, or the weather. It's simply a "brain dump." It was the place I put all the stuff I didn't want to bore my friends with. Still is.

I do have to think, too, that there must have been something to that Orange Prize post, to get random people on the internet quoting it. Perhaps it wasn't so poorly written as to be ignored completely?

I'm not new to the internet by any means. I tooled around on Usenet, where I learned hard lessons about the permanence of words online, and their ability to misquoted, misconstrued, and willfully misunderstood. I know human nature is such that if someone is unwilling to see your viewpoint, there's nothing you can do (and years on the internet taught me that there's little use arguing it). And yet... and yet it's still so unsettling to see my words chopped up on the page of a stranger^**. To see them miss the point completely, in their quest to denounce the fiendish, feminist foe. How the heck did I become an example? And of what?

^*Bloggers live and die from hits. Why do you think I'm not giving him any?
^**And, granted, all blogs use others' words as fodder. Mine is no exception.

Orange Prize Brings Out the Neanderthals... Again

Every year when the Orange Prize lists are announced (long or short), someone steps up and says that the women-only prize is "sexist" and not needed. Every. Damn. Year. Boring! Yet rage-inducing! Such ambivalence!

This year, they've trotted out my beloved A.S. Byatt to do the dirty work (it's okay, Antonia, I still love you). Bah. I'm not going to get into all the arguments (wooops, I actually do, further down), since about three people read this blog, but there's no such thing as a reverse -ism, friends, and until women are equal players in the world, things like the Orange Prize are, yes, still needed. Consider that the most recent winner of the PEN/Faulkner award, Kate Christensen, is one of only a handful of women to do so.

And the opinion pieces come out of the woodwork. Here's another one, from Telegraph, that I'm purposely not linking to (for several reasons, the hateful reader comments being but one):

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers.

First, I'm not sure how it is in the U.K. but in Canada, something like 80% of the workforce in publishing is female, while only 3% of the executive is.^* So, tell me, where is the real power? Secondly, "they" sell most of the books do they? You mean most of the people in the pink ghetto of retail are women? Well yes, that's true. Or do you mean female authors sell more books? If that's the case, then you're going to have to be more clear in your writing, and back that up with some stats. I'd love to see them, because I'm definitely interested.

The author of this silly piece seems to think that women are a "dominant" group, like "whites" (wrong). He continually makes these sorts of comparisons between gender and race based oppressions. While -isms do work together to create layers of oppression, comparing oppressions (sexism and racism in this article), is very, very tricky business (see Hilary v Obama), and really shouldn't be done. Ever.

Then, he casts every woman he comes in contact with as unable to defend their position with logic; their only tactic is to "hit him on the head," literally or with "verbal abuse." He was called, and I quote, "a BUM." How he must suffer! Personally, if I was faced with these tired old arguments against women-only institutions, I'd be prone to violence too. Not because I'm unable to engage in "mature debate," but rather because my opponent has set the bar so low with their reactionary drivel, a hit on the head is the only logical response.

And P.S.: the patriarchy is not "a trick that men played on women for thousands of years." Leave it to a man to take millennia of world-wide, systematic oppression, abuse, and subjugation and minimize it down to something like putting a whoppie cushion on your chair. That, my friends, is what we call privilege. Additionally, with the implication that women fell for this "trick" for so long, the writer once again gets to call womankind stupid.

But yeah, we're all like totally equal and powerful and shit. *headdesk*

My ex-pat friend Axel did mention in the comments a while back, how right-wing the Telegraph is, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised to see this sort of thing published there.

I've gotten into arguments mature debates at Bookninja about this sort of thing, and it's unhelpful that there aren't (that I know of) statistics on how many books are published by men and women each year (for the casual observer, it seems pretty even in the fiction realm), how big the advances are for men vs women, that sort of thing. This is a casual observation, but I have noticed The New York Times often gets really, really excited over quirky, clev-ah, first time male novelists, giving them pages and pages and pages of press^**, yet women don't get the same treatment^†. There have been studies that indicate that women are the bulk of the fiction readers, but nothing so much on the writing front. I'd be interested to know, at any rate.

The Orange Prize long list is here.
I've read:
Jennifer Egan The Keep
Anne Enright The Gathering
Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals
Based on my small list, I'm pulling for Egan. The Keep was one of the most transporting things I've ever read.

^*This is based on my memory of a Quill and Quire industry survey I read in 2005. I doubt things are 50/50 as of this writing. Call me a pessimist.
^**I'm sorry, please allow me to indulge my incredibly shallow side. Look at that photo!! If I saw that guy in a coffee shop, my first thought would be "douchebag."
^†Sarah Seltzer, in the latest issue of Bitch, addresses the anti-feminist bias at The NYT, that I mentioned in this post. Unsurprisingly, Seltzer writes about it far better than I did. Well worth a look.

"You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make [him] think"

Whatever you think of Yann Martel's plan to send the PM a book every other week, I think you'll agree that the most hilarious commentary on it is/will be from Nathan Whitlock. Being the cynic I am, I doubt Harper will even check out the covers, but I'm sure some of his staff with be happy with the free stuff.

Surprise, surprise, the book I'm currently slogging through, Arlington Park, made the Orange Prize shortlist. I gotta say, I'm a bit surprised. Especially given that the chairman of the judges (how ironic, you think they'd have called her the "chairperson"), Muriel Gray, wrote this back in March:

As a judge in this year's Orange prize, it's hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It's called making stuff up^*.

I kind of love books like Arlington Park, if only because they prop up my child-free self, brush off my divorced-girl ego, and say "Hey look, you're not doing so bad. See what you could have wound up with?" It's a nice little fantasy, but knowing as many mamas as I do, I know the reality isn't as constantly grey as the author, Rachel Cusk, paints it. It's a roller-coaster, yes, but people with families are sometimes -- *gasp* -- happy. Then again, Cusk writes in, and about, England. It rains almost constantly in Arlington Park (not subtle!), and that can't be good for anyone's mood. Hell, this is the first sunny day we've had here in Toronto in what feels like weeks, and it's going a long way to elevate my mood.

^*Full article, titled "Women authors must drop domestic themes" is here.