Women, Know Your Place!
A man writes some books. They’re not brilliant examples of literary prowess but are obviously entertaining because millions of people buy them, and after all, who are we to decide what someone else should read, right?
His books all follow a certain formula and you know how they’ll end but that’s fine. People obviously like that. There are hardly any women in his books and the ones that are are very one-dimensional, and often defined in terms of their sexuality. But never mind, he’s a top bloke!
People make fun of him and complain and roll their eyes when he publishes a new one but they buy them anyway. He’s very rich and doesn’t care what people think. Good for him. Nobody would be able to recognise him in the street of course but writers don’t write to be pin-up stars.
Another male writer churns out books at an alarming rate, often a few a year. He has a team of co-writers. It’s more a successful business model than a creative endeavour but he has millions of fans and has earned a kind of respect from his predominantly male readers.
His books feature women but he’s one of many authors who glamorise violence (often sexual) against women. But again, good for him, he’s found a way of making lots of money, let him get on with it. What does he look like? I have absolutely no idea.
Then we have a woman. She writes books. Their literary merit is a matter of opinion; as with any book it’s very subjective, but they have sold in their millions. There’s some debate about what her books are about, and I haven’t got room here to talk about the differences between S&M and abuse, but some say that the books are about a BDSM relationship in which the female character has all the control, others say it’s about sexual violence and a controlling, abusive partner. Some of these people may even have read the book.
Most people are familiar with what she looks like; for example, I personally know that she recently left a gym without any make up on and was wearing a blue quilted jacket, with jeans tucked into calf length boots. In case you were wondering. Oh, and by the way she’s 52.
Her books have turned everyone into a literary critic. Her readers (predominantly female) are called stupid or desperate. Her writing is picked apart, sentence by sentence. She’s torn apart on social media. It’s not bullying of course, it’s for our own good and it doesn’t count in this case because hey, most of us doing the attacking are women who are defending other women, so you can’t touch us. To do so would be to condone abuse, you animal!
Meanwhile we carry on going to see films and read books and watch television programmes that subliminally give out really damaging messages about women and use rape scenes again and again to move a plot forward, but again, who cares about those? This way, with this easy, high profile target, we can all show how terribly clever and witty we all are. And if we feel a little bit uncomfortable as we walk away from the hashtag, casually alerting our children to the damage that online bullying can do, what of it? Serves her right. What on earth was she thinking??
Another woman writes a very successful series of children’s books, then writes some more. She’s won awards. She is rich and successful. We know what she looks like because she’s all over the media, partly for her philanthropy, but we wont worry about that now, let’s have a picture of her looking a bit rough after a night out. She obviously hasn’t realised that women on a night out need only be there for the first part, to look good, then they can be wheeled away before their mascara runs down their cheeks, while the men drink port and smoke cigars while wearing cravats. She’s 49.
She writes a play and is told she doesn’t need to make any more money, she’s had her turn, let somebody else have a go. Preferably someone with a penis as successful, ambitious women make us nervous. And as we all know, there is only room for a certain number of books in the world, once we hit that limit they will all be burned and we’ll have to start again.
But women have always had to justify their ambition, their success, their decisions. Men are expected to be successful and ambitious and possibly even ruthless too, but that just makes the whole damn package more attractive, doesn’t it? Whereas a woman who displays those traits is unnatural, she needs to appear in society on terms we can understand and control, otherwise the world will shift on its axis and we will hurtle towards the sun.
Some men get away with writing what the hell they like, and they don’t give a damn what you think. Men aren’t brought up to explain themselves and their actions in the way women are, so are less likely to be affected by this online bullying culture we seem to have created in our need to be heard.
Have a look at yourselves before you make that next witty comment. And be nicer to each other.
—
Tracy Kuhn is a freelance writer who lives in York with her husband and two daughters. She’s been writing since she was a child, when she was told she had too much imagination. She has only recently started to take herself seriously as a writer and has had a couple of short stories published, as well as non-fiction articles. She is also a regular contributor Women Writers, Women’s Books.
She’s currently working on her first YA novel which was recently shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize.
Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/Tracy_Kuhn
Her Blog: https://volvodiaries.wordpress.com/
Category: On Writing
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Sites That Link to this Post
- Women and Fiction | book word | September 17, 2015
- Criticising women is not misogyny. | The Gag Order | August 22, 2015
- Jenny Reads 50 Shades of Midnight Sun: Grey, Friday, May 20, 2011 or “The Hero Portland Needs” | Trout Nation | August 21, 2015
Fantastic article.
Funnily enough, I recognize both of the women and their books/book series but I have no idea who either of the men, or books/book series written by men, you’re talking about are. I was thinking GRRM for the second one because of the various controversies about medieval sex and stuff, but then I read “churns out books at an alarming rate” and went back to square one.
“Meanwhile we carry on going to see films and read books and watch television programmes that subliminally give out really damaging messages about women and use rape scenes again and again to move a plot forward, but again, who cares about those?”
I can’t speak for everybody, but every single person I’ve seen write articles and essays about the harmfulness of Fifty Shades is also unhappy with the kind of writing you describe here. They just don’t spend a lot of time talking about it in that particular article, because that article is about Fifty Shades.
This! It’s quite possible to not like the work of ANY of the authors being described here.
I understand that society will move a lot of goalposts when judging work done by women as opposed to work done by men. However, I’m not going to let stuff I believe is actively harmful (or just plain bad) go by without comment just because the author is a woman. I’m perfectly capable of criticising the bad women authors, the bad men authors, AND the hypocrisy of a society that holds each group to different standards.
Tracy, I applaud you.
Thank you for reminding us that women (in society at large, not just authors, and not just EL James) are still having to justify their ambitions and success in a way that men do not. When we stick our heads a little ‘too high’ we’re viewed as unnatural and presumptuous.
We may not admire or envy a specific achievement but we can admire and respect the drive and determination that brought someone to their point of success.
From the wiki entry for J K Rowling: (whose name is Joanne)
“Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers asked that she use two initials, rather than her full name. ”
She also writes under the name Robert Galbraith.
I have heard of male writers using a female pen name, but only for Mills and Boon style romantic fiction. I think that illustrates the point.
I don’t know that everything is as simple as this. We all know that there is a bias against women on this earth, the one thing we will never be able to tell is, within the literary community, how rampant it is. The reason for this is that all literary work is subjective, it is onto the particular reader to accept or reject their work. We’ve all heard the line ‘ It takes just one acceptance.’ Men are rejected too. Sounds simple doesn’t it? It is and it isn’t! How can you tell that one work has more merit than another? How can you quantify the amount of male talent out there as opposed to the amount of female talent? The men who wrote the books of which you speak got book deals and found an audience.
I have read autobiographies of male writers that write similar novels to these men, they state that they get regular hate mail with awful words in them. They didn’t take to Twitter to talk about that exact subject and so they didn’t face the wrath of people who were looking to vent. Such was not the case in relation to the S&M lady, my guess is that people are not bitter against her because she’s a woman, but more because she normalised a subject that a lot of people don’t want to see in, as I’ve seen on Twitter recently ‘ the romance section of a large bookstore.’ That or they’re writers bitter that such a genre is beating their own!
As for the second lady, a man seen looking rough after a night out would probably get the same abuse, it’s called gutter press for a reason!
Good article, and I accept the message, but I’m not sure that things are so black and while in the world of books, and I think the examples are just a little biased. I’m sure you’ll find men deal with pretty much the same problems (written by a woman who also wants a level playing field by the way!:))
Men are not often threatened with rape, dismemberment, death, and harm to their families for having written something that displeased men.
Women are.
Individual male writers may be dissed individually because of their content, their style, their lack of popularity (when their contract isn’t renewed) but they are not told by reviewers,critics, editors that their work is inferior *because they are men*. They are not told they can’t write about something *because they are men.*
Female writers have been, and sometimes still are, told that. I write military SF and epic fantasy: both fields about which many people still say “Those are men’s fields; the good writers in those fields are men; women can’t really write good military SF/epic fantasy because (list of reasons why women writers are inferior.)” My first books (later published and still in print 25 years later) were rejected specifically because I was a woman writer. They were rejected later in some foreign markets because “only a man could write that” or “only men would read it”–and I refused to change my name to a male one to get the sale. (They’re pirated in at least one of the countries that refused to publish them legally with my name on them.)
Is every lack of sale, every bad review, of women’s work purely sexist? Of course not. Not all women writers are great writers any more than all men writers are great writers. But reviewers as a whole come to women’s work with a different set of assumptions and biases than they come to men’s work. There are instances in my genres in which a man-written book is praised for containing an element that is damned when it appears in a woman-written book. Some reviewers have, over the years, matured in their ability to see past the assumptions (that a woman’s book will be (and should be) family-centered, about personalities and feelings, about romance, about the “touchy-feely” stuff, more feelings than intellect, more “the small story”; that a man’s book will be about issues, politics, war, justice & injustice [racial or class-based], more intellectual, more “the big story.”) Others have not.
The playing field is not yet level. It’s not level at the entry level of publisher acquisitions, at the contract level of money, at the production level of cover design, at the distribution level of bookstores’ choices, placement, and in-house “recommended” lists, at the level of reviewers, critics, academic courses, and at the level of readership–too many men still will not read a book written by a woman. When Penguin recently queried academics/writers in other countries about their choice of quintessentially American books, only 20% of those mentioned were by women. (Reported in Twitter. No data were given on whether the respondents read books by women of their own nationality, or how many books by women they’d ever read.) The unlevel nature of the playing field is a black and white situation because something is either level or it’s not. How unlevel, and whether it’s becoming more level, is another topic. It’s definitely not level now.
Women writers are indeed treated differently than men writers at every stage: inside the writing profession itself, including in writers’ organizations, in the publishing business, by critics and reviewers, by the media generally, and by readers. On and off the internet, women are told what they should and should not have written, what they should and should not write in the future, that their work isn’t “really” what it is or what it’s about, that it’s too far-out (and two years later a male writer gets a huge contract and buzz for the concept), that it’s too tame and conservative (ditto on who later gets the huge contract and buzz), that no one will buy that kind of book if written by a woman even if a woman *could* write it, and so on. Their work will be torn apart, as stated, looking for flaws (i.e., where it differs from men’s work in the same genre, or where it deviates from someone’s idea of what a woman should write.) It will be read shallowly, because some reader/reviewer/critic doesn’t believe women’s writing has anything but surface level content.
The woman writer may be on a panel (as the only woman) in a convention and hear the male panelists agree that women don’t write X (when she has written X, but they want to talk about how X is being revitalized by young male British writers.) She will see comments by male readers of the genre in which she writes stating flatly that women cannot write it and they know because they never read books by women.
If she has ever made, in writing or in person, a comment that angered someone, she will be told that the person threw away all her books and has told the local bookstore not to stock them anymore. Because she needs to know how angry that person was; she needs to be made to feel how bad she is. (Yes, this has happened to me.) The woman writer who annoys or angers someone is a safe target (we don’t usually carry deadly weapons; we don’t usually have friends who will break someone’s arm…at least, I don’t.) Lots of people will be glad to see her taken down a notch because “who does she think she is?” She will face the usual internet threats (not unique to women writers, but also women scientists, women computer programmers, women who are the tall poppies) of rape, death, injury to her family; she will be told she is worthless, ugly, aging badly, stupid, ignorant, horrible, bigoted, and so on and and so on. If she gives lectures, speaks at meetings, she will face direct verbal abuse; she will have her expertise challenged by those who have none, because…she’s a woman, what could she know? She will be lied about.
Should women be less critical, more understanding, of other women, and of women writers in particular? Yes. Will they be? Probably not. It’s crabs-in-a-bucket syndrome, in part: people who feel stuck at the bottom will pull down others who crawl higher. It may also be related to the current political divisiveness, the rigid polarization, that leads to demands for perfection, to the ruthless attacks on any deviation from what each group considers the Right Stuff.
This article, which I read and bookmarked yesterday, suggests it’s a particular problem for the Left: http://moreradicalwithage.com/2015/07/04/still-trashing/, but as a liberal living in a very conservative state, I see it also functioning in the local (conservative) county newspaper and in a nearby city newspaper. Polarization makes everyone feel under attack; people under attack look for weaknesses to attack, rather than for common ground. And people who feel powerless attack someone they feel safe attacking…another woman is safer than a powerful man.
As a woman writing in what is still sometimes considered a male-dominated genre–who has written about (and still writes about) environments and characters considered unsuitable for women–I’ve been targeted more than a few times, from both ends of the political spectrum. It is more hurtful when women do it, but then–growing up–the boys merely hit my body with fists; it was the girls who were slicing bits off my heart.
What can a woman writer do? Keep writing. Keep writing whatever you damn well please, as well as you can, and walk right on through the firestorm. Expect the firestorm, because it will come–the more success, the hotter the flames, the more intense the attacks. Expect women to be part of the attack–pity them, if possible. Forgive them, and forgive yourself for not being perfect enough to please everyone while being honest with yourself and your work. Be invincible. Cry in private.
Tracy — I’m glad you touched on the topic of bullying directly. Bullying on the internet is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I’ve written about, in a limited way. Criticism doesn’t have to be personal; you can dislike a piece of work and leave the author out of it. Traditionally in written reviews in high-profile publications, out-and-out personal attacks are very rare — I can think of one example off the top of my head. But on the internet people seem to be unwilling or unable to distinguish between honesty and cruelty. There was a case some years ago of an author who had been plagiarizing on a large scale. A review website caught on to this and published a long post about the plagiarism, with citations. The author at first denied the allegations and later said in a kind of woeful tone that she didn’t know she had to cite her sources (or, apparently, that it was not acceptable to copy from other people’s work). Of course the whole thing was devastating for her, but in this case, she really did bring it on herself. If it had stopped there …. but it didn’t. The community of readers moved far beyond making the plagiarism public, to public shaming and personal attacks that were demeaning and cruel. I am not a fan of this person’s work — even before the plagiarism was established — but I really was uncomfortable with the gleeful, spiteful, shadenfreude-fulness of the discussion. And it’s really hard to say: hold up, your tone is inappropriate, because then you get accused of rationalizing the author’s bad choices.
This phenomenon has been happening more and more lately. Writers going after other writers, readers going after writers with what seems like coordinated attacks. Recently I decided I had to speak up when I saw it happening, and I’ve written in more detail about this case I just mentioned on my weblog: http://goo.gl/EPjm6U
This is all distressingly true, not just for women writers, but any woman who raises her head above the parapet. In Australia, we recently watched the stripping and public lashing of the first woman who had the temerity to become our Prime Minister. She was a witch, a bitch, she had a big bum/butt (this last by legendary Australian feminist Germaine Greer – I had a ritual burning of her books the day after she made those comments for cheap laughs on a nationally televised political program). Why other women aid in the bringing down of any female tall poppy is a mystery to me and causes me much grief.