A while back, a chap named Alan Riding explored the necessity of literary prizes like Britain's Orange Prize, which is exclusively for women. Were they still necessary, he wondered? Aren't women represented pretty equitably in the literary world? Even though, in the end, he comes down in favor of such prizes, there's something not quite right about the question itself, something that smacks of whining about special treatment.
Every now and then someone, usually a man, asks this question, in varying tones of annoyance and/or condescension. To be fair, the existence of such "positive discrimination"—a term that in itself denigrates women's efforts at equitability—makes some feminists uncomfortable. They claim that it has the effect of ghettoizing women's intellectual endeavors and art, and to an extent, they're right. It's easy, when there are special prizes for women, to confine them to their own sandbox, watch them from a distance and say, Isn't that cute? They're giving each other prizes! and ignore whatever it is they're being awarded for. The prizes seem to annoy men simply because it's something they can't compete for. Isn't that enough already? they say. You've made your point. Now let us in on it.
The prizes, however, are not really about prizes qua prizes. They are, and always have been, about visibility and to some extent, about marketing. But are they still necessary? Aren't women equally represented now, after twenty years of complaining and making a fuss?
It depends on what you mean by "represented." Do we write (or create art) in equal numbers to men? Sure. Do we write (or create art) about the same kinds of subjects? No. Are the subjects we write (or create art) about equally valued and discussed? Not hardly. Just to illustrate, here's an item from one of the writer's newsletters, Moira Allen's Writing World, that I subscribe to:
Study reveals men read books by men
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A study released on May 30 disclosed that men mainly read novels by other men, but rarely read novels by women. Commissioned for the Orange Prize for Fiction, an annual British award for female authors, the research was carried out by Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins, professors at Queen Mary College, London. According to Jardine, she's received dozens of emails from irate male readers insisting that they are "immensely well-read in women's fiction". Yet she adds, "These are the very men who turn out not to have read any novel at all by a woman recently." The survey, sent to 50 British "opinion formers" (cultural critics, book festival organizers, professors of philosophy, etc.), asked a variety of questions. Jardine and Watkins found that 80% of male respondents had most recently completed a novel by a male author, and many had trouble remembering the last book by a woman they'd read. Female respondents, on the other hand, were split almost 50/50, with over half having recently finishing a work by a female novelist, and the remainder, by a man. They also found that men are aware of authors like Carol Shields, Monica Ali, and Andrea Levy (past Orange Prize winners), and are willing to classify their books as important. "But they were endearingly candid about not having read many of them," said Jardine. The professors are working on another, larger study on men's reading habits, which they will release this fall.
Why is this? Why do women split their reading more or less equitably between genders and men read each other almost exclusively? Could it be that we're not worth paying attention to in the male mind? That our subjects are not worthy of attention? That our viewpoints and ideas are not worthy of attention? Or could it be that women have a wider-ranging curiosity and intelligence? It can't be that we're reading men's writing purely for survival puposes, can it? That would just be wrong.
According to another study, it is women who buy and read the most books, both in Britain and the U.S.:
Of 216 million adult books sold last year, 99 million - almost half - were bought by men. Where women pull ahead of men is in fiction. According to research by Book Marketing Limited, only 44 per cent of men read fiction, compared to 77 per cent of women.
In fact, men and women buy books in almost the same proportion that they exist in the population; women outnumber men in the West about 52-48 at most ages. So if men read less fiction than women, you would think they would have less say about what novels are worth reading. But that's not so.
In my own wholly informal and unscientific weekly survey of the New York Times Book Review during the last 20 years, I've found that women are rarely represented equitably either as reviewers or the objects of those reviews. When women are reviewed it is most often as fiction writers, and when they do the reviewing, it is most often of fiction, as though no women anywhere in the world were writing anything interesting or worthwhile about, say, national policy, history, philosophy, or cultural criticism. Yet in the early part of this informal study, I would turn to the Women's Review of Books and discover they were writing important and interesting books on everything.
But we were speaking of fiction. Even there, the TBR fails us. According the Times, women only write fiction, and it's not the kind of fiction that's really worth reading, anyway, if you're male.
Here's the table of contents from the Book Review for July 24th, 2005. All by itself, it could be subtitled: "Why the Orange Prize is Still Necessary."
- No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (fiction)
Reviewed by WALTER KIRN - The Secret Man by Bob Woodward (history)
Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS - Spinning the Globe by Ben Green (sports)
Reviewed by IRA BERKOW - Under and Alone by William Queen (memoir)
Reviewed by GARY KAMIYA - A Way From Home by Nancy Clark (fiction)
Reviewed by LIESL SCHILLINGER - Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem -- and What We Should Do About It. By Noah Feldman (cultural criticism)
Reviewed by By FRANKLIN FOER - War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres (journalism/current events)
Reviewed by GARY SHTEYNGART - Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. By Jimmy McDonough (biography)
Reviewed by RON POWERS - Dancing With Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. By Inga Clendinnen (history)
Reviewed by ADAM HOCHSCHILD - Trance By Christopher Sorrentino (fiction)
Reviewed by TOM SHONE - Star Dust By Frank Bidart (poetry)
Reviewed by LANGDON HAMMER - At Day's Close: Night in Times Past By A. Roger Ekirch. (history)
Reviewed by GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS - The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. By Sam Weller. (biography)
Reviewed by ANDREW LEONARD - The Interruption of Everything By Terry McMillan (fiction)
Reviewed by CHELSEA CAIN - The Loss of Leon Meed By Josh Emmons (fiction)
Reviewed by MAUD NEWTON - Truth: A Guide By Simon Blackburn (Philosophy?)
True to Life: Why Truth Matters By Michael P. Lynch
Reviewed by ANTHONY GOTTLIEB - Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story By Chuck Klosterman. (Memoir)
Reviewed by STEPHANIE ZACHAREK - We're All In This Together: A Novella and Stories By Owen King
Reviewed by JON ZOBENICA
Final tally: 3 of 19 books by women; 4 of 18 reviews by women. About average for the Times. This week, at least the split is even in fiction, but that's the bone we've been thrown at the expense of our nonfiction. It seems we can either be novelists and short story writers, but not serious non-fiction authors, and the fiction is probably less dangerous. I won't even go into the content of each review. That's another issue all by itself. As an anodyne, see what the last issue of the Women's Review of Books had in it. The subjects are similar, but different. For one thing, the selection of women's books are more critical of the current militarism, which is not a popular stance at the moment. But it's easy to ignore that stance if you, as part of the establishment, don't think the voices proclaiming it are worth listening to.
Riding's language is surprisingly revealing of this attitude of dismissal of women in the arts. I say surprisingly because it's so blatantly absurd, and yet so matter-of-fact. In the article mentioned in the opening paragraph above, he writes,
Yet, while women no longer regard the creative arts as a male province, when it comes to winning or even making the shortlist of prizes in fiction, poetry, art, architecture and music, they still fare poorly. Why? Are professional women artists less talented than their male colleagues or are women simply being denied equal opportunity?
It's not often you see such an obvious Freudian slip. Or such a blatant blame-the-victim strategy. Talented women rarely, if ever, regarded the creative arts as a male province. For centuries, well-to-do women learned the arts as part of their training to become wives. No talented woman who could write, paint, play music, or compose well thought what she was doing was the sole purview of men. She may have thought she was not good enough even when she was, or that it would be impossible to pursue a career in that field, but she never would have conceded that only men should—or could—ever be artistic. It was men who regarded the arts as solely their territory and did their best to keep women out of them. This was done in a variety of ways, many of them outlined succinctly by Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women's Writing, which was published in 1983, but is apparently still sadly relevant. The cover of the paperback edition sums up Russ's argument:
She didn't write it, but if it's clear she did the deed . . . She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. ("Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever . . .") She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Bronte. Her own "masculine side.") She wrote it, but she's an anomaly (Woolf, with Leonard's help . . .)
Most of these strategies can be applied to women in other arts, along with other tactics. But the easiest and most successful tactic of all is to simply ignore the existence of women's art. Don't review it. Don't market it. Don't notice it in any way. If it or they compete with men's art throw them a bone occasionally, but preferably not at the expense of some other male. Or, don't sell it for as much as men's art, but deny it vehemently:
WHEN asked if Sotheby's considers an artist's gender when setting the estimate for her work, Tobias Meyer, the director of the auction house's contemporary art department, replied: ''Not at all. We base our estimates on the quality of the artist's work and on their importance.''
His counterpart at Christie's, Amy Cappellazzo, concurs. ''Estimates are based on the overall position of the artist's market,'' she said, ''and the quality of that particular work of art relatively. Gender is never a factor.'' . . . As for this year's auctions, [Meyer] said: ''Are there more male artists in the catalog than female artists? Yes, but it doesn't reflect at all negatively on the quality of the work in the sale."
And yet women's art is consistently sold for less than men's art, which affects their position in the market. If the number of works by women is not reflecting negatively on the quality of the work on sale, that means that the women who weren't chosen would have "brought down" the average quality and/or value. Isn't that what's being said here? So there really are fewer talented women, and their work should be sold for less than male artist's work.
That's the crux of the matter, and the raison d'être for women-only prizes. It seems obvious that talent has nothing to do with gender, race, nationality, culture, religion or any of the other myriad ways that humans define themselves. It has everything to do with perception and definition. For centuries, there has been a raging debate about the difference between high and low art, between arts and crafts. Art that women create, unless it falls within already defined categories, has almost without fail been relegated to the status of low art or crafts, which is a convenient way of ignoring it as unimportant. And if it does fall into the predefined categories, its subject matter, its technique, its approach have all been deemed not like men's and therefore inferior.
It's this equation—different from the standard (from men, in this case) = inferior quality—that's addressed by women's prizes. It's this equation that lies at the heart of discrimination of all kinds. Until men realize that the subjects that concern women should also be of interest and concern to them; until they start paying the same attention to women's work and women's art and women's ideas as women pay to men's ideas, issues, and art; until women are allowed to compete with men on truly equitable footing; until men can make themselves give a damn, women need separate prizes to recognize their talent.
You sure gave me something to think about I had not considered. Unfortunately, I think many people share my mindset. Because most overt discrimination has seemingly disappeared, many of us don't realize that instead it has become institutionalized and most of those who consciously practice discrimination do so from "the closet."
For the rest of us, we aren't aware of it unless directly affected.
I certainly am aware of discrimination against LGBTI people, as I am one. I know ageism exists being that I am of "a certain age." And why isn't there a word in the English language that is the opposite of "bald." Hirsute or hairy don't fit. Body size and shape enter here too.
Now to one form of discrimination that I do talk and write about a lot: racism. Many in the US want to deny it still exists. But witness the tactics used against Harold Ford in Tennessee. The Republicans knew they could play the race card. At least when I see someone in a vehicle here in Atlanta with a rebel flag, I know the person is an "out" racist. Racism is still widespread in the South but closeted and institutionalized as is sexism.
There are no easy answers. However, I now realized I only posted about books written by men. My sexism is not conscious, but I am guilty of not considering it more. I plan to do better, so thanks for blogging about this. In graduate school, I read Shulasmith Firestone's excellent The Dialectic of Sex. While I am not a Marxist, I had little to dispute with her outstanding work. Keep up the good work, Ann. Your perspective on things makes me think...a lot.
Posted by: Roger | December 09, 2006 at 01:39 PM