So, while for some reason everyone here is engulfed in one of tumblr’s periodic debates about whether or how to police writing done largely by women for women for free, in the world of contemporary fiction there’s a meltdown going on right now over men who get paid for writing literature, and the men who give them money and prizes for it.
Specifically, Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has been accused by multiple Latina writers of a wide range of asshole behavior toward them, ranging from sexual assault to verbal abuse to deliberately trying to destroy the careers of women who challenged him on any of it. This story is complicated by the fact that Diaz recently published an essay in The New Yorker in which he writes about being sexually abused as a child and the effect it had on his sexual and romantic life as an adult. It’s a good essay, and it was greeted with universal admiration; but now, the possibility arises that it may have been an attempt to pre-empt the critique he knew was coming. Mary Karr has also pointed out that Diaz is more vulnerable to these charges because he’s Latino; the literary world has known for years that Karr was abused and stalked by David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed mega-novel Infinite Jest, who suffered no consequences fbecause, Karr says, Wallace was white. For all of these reasons, it’s worth pointing out up front that what Diaz is charged with doing is not unique amongst contemporary American male writers; and when you go farther back in time, things get worse. Just off the top of my head, William S. Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer and Ernest Hemingway was an abusive husband.
Below, I’m going to talk about men, writing, and the history of contempt for not only women writers but women readers.
Because it’s behind the cut tag, I’m going to pull out my favorite part of this post and quote it:
“Because if the critical establishment loses its taste for misogyny–if a book like This Is How You Lose Her, or a book like The Corrections, comes to be considered just bad form–that will reduce the amount of misogynistic work out there far more effectively than any attempt at direct censorship would. Think of the vast number of conventions regarding love and sex that would be discarded, one by one, if people stopped being able to enjoy and appreciate misogyny embodied in literary form. What conventions would arise to take their places? Which revered Literary texts would gradually become minor works taught only to graduate students? What kind of canon would an aesthetic that valued equality more highly than masculinity produce?”
Tag: patriarchy
I think you’re being a little uncharitable here. I was raised Mormon, and since Mormons are hyperconservative and patriarchial, men used to say things like this a lot. When men say “I didn’t realize how bad things were for women until I had a daughter” (or something along those lines)”, they’re being literal. They (usually) don’t mean “I completely ignored my wife’s struggle but now that I own a small girl-child I must Protec”, they mean “I literally have not seen some of these problems in action before and now I’m seeing them happen to someone I love in gory detail”.
Imagine for a second you live in Zimbabwe and don’t follow American politics much. You hear weird news coming out of the USA every so often, but mostly it’s just background noise. Then Trump gets elected, and suddenly every day there’s some new crazy shit happening in the US. You hear about it and you’re like ‘this can’t be real, can it?’ But of course, it is real, and the more you look into it, the more you see it’s fucked up.
This is kind of like that. Speaking as a trans man who transitioned early in adulthood– there are a lot of things women* just don’t talk about around men, because it’s socially taboo. Things like, say, periods. Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing. Or the ways that girls/women bully other girls/women and how it can fuck you up. Or menopause. Or why you’re afraid of walking home alone at night. Or abuse and/or sexual assault that’s happened to you in the past.
Sometimes it’s because women don’t feel safe talking to their male partners about it. Sometimes they think it’ll hurt their male partner to hear about it. Sometimes, it’s just that it’s Not Done– it’s as socially wrong as taking off your pants in a restaurant.
If you’re lucky, you have a good partner, you’re both willing to step outside the gender role box you’ve been assigned, you feel like you can tell them anything and you’re right, and your partner takes you seriously when you tell them and doesn’t get grossed out or go “bzuh? That’s batshit insane, it can’t be real”. A lot of people– especially people in conservative/patriarchial societies, but even egalitarian people in lefty parts of the country can fall into this mess– do not feel like they have this kind of safety with their partners. They feel like they can’t discuss the problems they’re having with their partner, because their partner is a Man/Woman and you Don’t Talk About These Things, it’s Not Done.
So if you’re a man– even if you are a good man, even if you’re kind and empathetic and care about other people and try to treat other people right– there’s a good chance you’ve never been exposed to the full brunt of the ~female experience~. It’s entirely possible for a man to grow up with no sisters, a mother who doesn’t talk about these things with her son, and no female friends until you start dating in earnest, without hating women or ignoring their problems. It’s then entirely possible that your parther won’t talk about the problems she’s having, because she’s still relating to you as A Man as much as she’s relating to you as Her Partner. Socialization is a hell of a drug.
Speaking as a trans man again… a lot of the problems that women have are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. I’m not saying ‘women don’t have problems’. I’m not saying ‘sexism is over’ or ‘feminism is unnecessary’. But if you never go clubbing**, don’t ask your coworkers about their salary, don’t watch much TV, and don’t talk to women about Taboo Topics… you’re never going to realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes, just as much as our hypothetical Zimbabwean isn’t going to realize just how bad Trump is as a president.
And then you have a daughter. Your daughter has not yet learnt that you don’t talk to men about Taboo Topics, and you’re her dad. She trusts you with everything when she’s tiny, and even as she gets older, she knows you’re one of the people who unconditionally love her, no matter what. You see her getting hit with all the misogynistic messages women get hit with every day and how it changes what she feels safe doing. You see her struggling with misogyny and bullying and ridiculous beauty standards. You see her dealing with the basic biological functions that women usually have under control by the time they’re getting married but are a scary mess when you’re a young teenager, the gross boys and men who treat young girls like shit, the way she gradually absorbs sexist toxicity and stops believing she can do anything she wants. If you’re unlucky, you see the fallout that comes from her being assaulted.
And it’s in your face, in a way it might not be with your wife. The misogyny that happens to young girls is much more blatant and terrible than the misogyny that happens to grown women (grade-schoolers are not known for their subtlety). What’s more, you’re seeing it all happen in real time- you’re seeing a girl who’s cutting herself down to size to fit society, not a woman who’s already done it. So it’s entirely possible that a man won’t realise the full extent of misogyny until he has a daughter, without that man being a shitheap in any way.
…I’m not saying that this is right or good or the way things should be. This is the very definition of ‘male privilege’– you have the ability to ignore bad things in the world that other people don’t get to ignore, just because you’re lucky enough to be a cis man. That is a bad thing. It needs to stop happening. It is a tragedy that men and women are not taught to communicate properly with each other, and it’s not women’s fault that they don’t feel safe talking about dangerous things with men. That is also a bad thing that needs to stop happening.
But at the same time, men saying “I didn’t realise things were bad for women until I had a daughter”… it’s not necessarily “hurr durr I didn’t realize women were people until I had a daughter because I’m a horrible person who ignores what women say :V”. It can mean “wow, I didn’t realise just how much of a problem misogyny/sexism was until I had a daughter, because there are things I didn’t know. Now that I know the full extent of the problem, I’m going to change the way I act about it”.
Stop assuming the worst of people, ffs.
*(Speaking in broad terms here, just assume the tag “cis” usually-but-not-always goes here. Trans people do tend to relate to gender/their partner’s gender a little differently.)
**(As An Sperglord, it confuses me just how much feminist discourse is about the club scene and why it’s bad. It seems disproportionate to the amount-of-a-problem-it-is.)Or why you need to be buying all that expensive makeup and clothing.
Is it ok if I ask why here? Because I still don’t know.
Yeah, of course! It’s not the end of the world not to understand things.
OK, I’m trying not to assume that you work in tech, but… you know That One Tech Guy who wears nothing but free company T-shirts and cargo pants and won’t shave or cut his hair? The guy who’s brilliant and could easily get promoted if he wanted, but no one is willing to promote him because he looks like a hobolo and training him to dress professionally would take too much time when there are equally qualified people who already know how?
If you’re a woman and you don’t wear makeup, or you don’t shave your legs (which is much more of a hassle than shaving your face, for the record), or you don’t have A Wardrobe (rather than, like, 1-3 Outfits and a week’s worth of basics to pad them out, like most men seem to), people are going to treat you like you’re That One Tech Guy, regardless of how you perform or behave. People see women who don’t wear makeup as lazy and sloppy, women who don’t shave their legs or armpits as Making A Statement and being gross in the process, women who don’t dress in a variety of outfits as poor or lazy…
So if you want to get anywhere in life as a woman, whether in your career or your personal life, you have to have many clothing and wear at least some makeup.
There are exceptions to this rule- for example, a lot of blue-collar jobs are just fine with women not wearing makeup, because they expect female workers to be ‘one of the boys’ and hyperfemininity is a detriment there. And of course there are plenty of guys who like women without makeup, and so on. But in general, if you’re a woman who’s not working in an industrial setting, you need to perform some level of femininity to be taken seriously.
(And of course if you perfom too much
femininity, people will think you’re stupid and shallow and vapid, but that’s a whole nother ballgame.)
This is a good explanation which holds in many places, but this is really dependent on local culture. Around me quite a lot of tech guys match your description of That One Tech Guy and don’t have much trouble getting promoted. I’m a woman in a non-tech job in a tech company and I dress however and almost never wear makeup and it’s fine. (Sometimes women in tech complain that there’s actually a pressure on them not to dress too nicely/femininely or wear makeup because it doesn’t fit the culture. Which is also bad, but also demonstrates how impeccable grooming isn’t always the norm.) So it’s not just industrial settings that don’t have super high feminine grooming standards.
for a long time i’ve wanted to object to the sentiment framed by the screenshotted tweet, but never been quite sure how to phrase it, and also it’s generally a bad idea for a man to object to feminist venting. not because i’ll get jumped on (i will, but so what) but because it’s rude and contrarian to jump in all I Am The Fact Police when people are upset, especially if you’re a representative of the group they’re upset at.
at the same time, though, i think promoting the idea that people are worse than they really are creates an oppressive atmosphere and keeps people from being proactive or forming coalitions, and in the end it mostly helps the oppressors.
so i want to chime in with @earlgraytay here and say, yeah, it’s not that decent guys don’t care about women’s problems, it’s that you just do not understand how deep the rabbit hole goes until you see a six year old girl try to go on a diet.
just moving along like everyone else 