A Short Rumination on A Subject That Deserves Far More

So this is partially inspired by Justine Larbalestier and Meg Cabot’s posts of recent days, partially by the fact that I’m planning a wedding, the traditions of which might comprise the single least feminist ritual known to mankind, and partially inspired by a conversation I’ve been having on one of my writerly email lists about what exactly you’re saying when you write a book where part of the requirement for a “happy ending” is that the woman finds herself a man. But these are all big topics — much bigger than I have time to post upon right now (deadlines and all), so this post is just about the most disturbing Amazon review I’ve ever seen.

Now, I’ve seen some whoppers in my time. Personal attacks on the author, threats, racist and bigoted posts, “reviews” that read more like the writer’s weekly therapy trip than any comment on the book, illiterate ones, comments from the land of bizarro-world that make you wonder if you were reading the same book as the poster… and I usually don’t give them much thought. But this one made my mouth drop open.

It’s from a new lead title out of a major publisher, and the review was five stars, and titled that it was one of the best books the reviewer has ever read. But then, she said:

“I almost didn’t buy it, expecting a book written by a woman to be some silly romance.”

My hackles raised instantly upon reading this line. First, “silly romance?” And then, indignation reined supreme as the words “expecting a book written by a woman to be…” sunk into my brain. This reader has a prejudice against any book written by a woman? Every book? What kind of books has she spent her life reading (she claims in the review to read about five per week) that she dismisses any novel written by a gender that includes half of the population? Does she only read novels by men? Does she…

And this was when my mouth dropped open, as the entire meaning of the sentence became clear. This person, this reviewer, was a woman. It was her “real name” she posted under. She was a woman, and a devoted reader, and she thought anything a woman would write was silly, was worthless, and would only cover one subject. She didn’t hate romance. She hated women.

What’s with the self-loathing? It takes my breath away. The way I see it, here are your choices: 1) You can appreciate and even celebrate femininity in fiction, modern romance, etc. Or, 2) you can hate and demean the “silly romances” that make up the lion’s share of the fiction market. (I know many people who do.) But, if so, then you spend quite a bit of time finding the women writers who write the books you do admire. You get all gooey for Alice Sebold or James Tiptree or Marilyn Robinson or Ursula Le Guin. Dismissing an entire gender of writers? Not so much a choice.

I know I’m talking about this one reader on the internet, one who may not have given much thought to what she was really saying in her review, but it a microcosm of an attitude I’ve seen over and over and over again.

On one list I’m on, we were recently discussing a phenomenon of writers, both men and women, who speak in media outlets about their favorite novels, and tend to dismiss those of women. At the time, one of the list members was up in arms about Stephen King’s recent tribute to J.K. Rowling, in which he listed a bunch of other amazing children’s writers, most by name or at least the title of their books, but only, obliquely, the work of a single female writer.

You know, except for the fact that the whole article was about Rowling, said her responders.

Okay, Touche, but I do think that the original poster had a point. Do we do that, and if so, why? Because we’re more likely to be taken seriously if the work we name is the work of men?

And then I started wondering if I do that. When people ask me about my favorite books and writers, what do I say? The Count of Monte Cristo. I talk about loving The Chronicles of Narnia and rereading them over and over. And I do. Wow, do I ever. But why don’t I talk about Jane Austen? Is it because I don’t want to be yet another of those Jane Austen-loving romancey acolytes? Why don’t I talk about Louisa May Alcott, or Lois Lowry, or Judy Blume? I mean, I was just in a book about how much I love the work of Ms. Blume, and my own novels owe far more to Forever and Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself than they do to anything penned by Dumas.

Why don’t I mention L.M. Montgomery, whose books I’ve reread just as often as Lewis’s, and who may have provided her Anne with a happy ending via husband, but as soon as Miss Shirley affianced herself to Gilbert (post university, mind you!), she gallavanted off for a stint as the first female principal of Summerside High School. Surely, my love for epistolary novels was formed then, not when I read Clarissa, by the all-too-male Richardson.

I spent the first year of college in a program called Directed Studies, in which we read the “western canon.” Some of my classmates jokingly called it “Dead White Men,” which isn’t funny in retrospect. (We read a couple Sappho poems, and Hannah Arendt, but otherwise, it was all male.) A whole year, studying nothing but men. And male writers formed the bulk of my studies for the subsequent four years. Even my favorite class, Women and the Rise of the Novel, which I took senior year, had as many male points of view as female (or Clarissa was long enough to balance out several books). So, in retrospect, it’s little wonder that, post-college, I leapt into the world of women’s fiction and didn’t look back. It was time to balance the scales.

And it’s funny, now that I think about it, since this subject has only been on my mind for a few days, but I’m looking at my most recent manuscript, and a few months ago, I wrote a scene where Amy laments the lack of female-penned books in a Rose & Grave library. So I suppose this has been bubbling under the surface for a while.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about feminism in college, but it’s a subject that’s increasingly on my mind. I am fascinated by the fact that I’ve received letters that both applaud me for talking about sexism and letters that ask me what century I think I’m living in, that sexism is no longer an issue.

As Demetria says to a similar statement on page 261 of Secret Society Girl: “Oh, Honey, we need to talk.”

Because if we can say to ourselves, “Oh, it’s fine, it’s not like it was in the fifties/sixties/seventies/eighties/nineties…” then we are missing the point. Because Joss Whedon is still asked why he writes strong women, and my friends are being told that they need to wear skirts, not pants, to job interviews, and writers are only talking about their favorite male writers, and women readers– women— are tossing off statements condemning everything a woman can write.