La Liseuse, by Jean-Jacques Henner

It’s an exciting time. Writers are asking important questions: Does my voice count? Am I and are writers like me getting fair representation in the public realm? Have I been held back and/or holding myself back? If I have been held back, why?

Similarly, editors of small journals and larger glossies are taking time to assess the history of their publications, asking themselves difficult questions: Do I fairly represent all voices? Are my reading preferences biased, and is that bias based on gender? Can I do more as an editor to ensure that everyone gets fairly heard? What is my role here, and how can my magazine become more diverse?

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a tangible wave sweeping through publishing. Dare I say, it’s a veritable movement.

All this makes me happy.

And yet, critic that I am, I’d like to pause for just one moment, lest we lose sight of something important: Content.

In the fever over which authors get adequately represented in bookstores, on shelves, in magazines, and in the pages of small journals, it is important that we also consider which characters get depicted within literary works themselves. Which heroes and which heroines? Fighting for which causes? Using which methods? And with what end results?

While editors and publishers might begin to seek out woman writers to balance their contributors lists, I worry that this effort may constitute little more than superficial change, mere window dressing on an otherwise dysfunctional social structure.

Thus I would like to caution readers, writers, and editors against putting too much emphasis on numbers alone. If, for instance, The New Yorker suddenly began seeking woman writers to fill its pages, that would be a good thing. But if these women writers wrote articles and stories that devalued women, that championed the limiting of women’s rights, or otherwise reinforced a patriarchal status quo, I would not call that progress.

Sadly, I can think of numerous women whose books, and the messages contained therein, actually hurt other women. Yes, they are women who are achieving success in male-dominated fields. Yes, they have been published. But I cannot say that their writing does much in the way of achieving equality between the sexes.

It’s unfortunate that the conversation should even create this either/or bifurcation. Women, like men, are complex creatures, holding a variety of political views and living across race and class spectrums. Women, like men, have a variety of tastes, and for every taste a different writing style, with different subject matter that interests them. How many women love to write stories from the points of view of men? How many men love to tell stories about women? (No one’s taught me more about what it is to be a woman oppressed by both class and gender than Gustave Flaubert!)

Nonetheless, the conversation has become about numbers for obvious reasons. When looking at the ghastly figures–in some major commercial magazines, women book reviewers a mere 4% of all reviewers–how could we not notice this stark suppression of female voices? How could we, as women, not feel hurt, outraged, demoralized, shocked, and frankly pissed off?

We can and many of us do.

Still, there is more to consider. If we wish to ensure that our reading material remains democratic, lively, relevant, and humane, we must look beyond the numbers.

Editors who have genuinely sought engaged subject matter and varied literary styles among submissions have observed that an equal gender balance arises naturally. This phenomenon was commented upon by Jeanne Leiby of Southern Review, Rebecca Morgan Frank of Memorious, and Joanne Merriam of 7×20, among others. Such editors work hard to produce journals that are not merely of a high quality, but which also display diverse characters in a range of milieus, stories narrated from various perspectives, and poetry in a range of styles. When diversity in content is sought, greater equality appears to be organically attained.

Similarly, writers interested in issues of social justice may begin by asking certain questions of their work: How do my characters define themselves? What gives their lives meaning? Do their struggles exist in isolation, or is society somehow taken into account? Are the characters fully-dimensional, with virtues as well as flaws, or are they composites of familiar stereotypes? Does the story’s end offer hope for change? Does the ending condemn the characters’ choices in some way? If you are writing outside your comfort zone, you may want to consider having people unlike yourself read your work and give you feedback.

Experimental and avant-garde writing often has explicit or implicit political messages. Because this genre usually emphasizes language and texture, deliberately de-emphasizing content, it’s much harder to talk about issues of character, story, or social milieu. The only thing I would suggest is that if you are writing experimental work, be sure to articulate–if only to yourself–your specific vision. Many feminist literary critics have spoken of experimental writing as inherently disruptive to patriarchy, in that it subverts traditional, linear narrative forms. On the other hand, several avant-garde poets have gone on to support Fascist regimes. Unless you envision yourself as the next Mussolini, experiment with care.

Ultimately, determining the message of a particular work is a much more subjective and nebulous venture than tracking numerical data. In many cases, the more entertaining a work of art, the more difficult to unpack its meaning. Throughout history, the most oppressive political systems have found ways to disseminate ideology through the most beautiful works of art.

It makes sense that questions of fairness would begin with inquiries into how many women versus men are getting published. I do believe this is a start. The numbers revealed by VIDA have been absolutely appalling.

But this cannot be the end of the discussion.

After all, in time what will our nieces, daughters, and granddaughters remember—The story about yet another disgruntled male professor who cheats on his wife, written by a woman? Or the story of a woman who wants more from life than marriage and motherhood…written by a man?

http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

– 1st Corinthians 1:18

[[What if?]]

The great wheel of God rolls on.  It is a steamroller, trampling mercilessly all whom it catches in its path: mercy, grace, judgement and damnation, all these are handed out irrefusably and almost arbitrarily by the hideous, malfunctioning mechanics of the deity.  God has no hand on earth but those of His followers, and they are often less-than-willing glove puppets in the grand show-schemes of the heavenly powers.  Power there is, however: not only the mystic and miraculous that flows fitfully and disruptively from the hidden kingdoms but very human powers; apologetics and counter-rationalism, fanaticism and the dark and twisted psychology of heaven and hell, so fearfully angry and so bitterly afraid.  In the endless scrambling for grace and security we see the spirit of God hovering over the edge of the pit: it has the power to influence, either to pull a person back or to push them over.  It’s motives, however, are less than clear.

And in the earthly citadels of God, the earthly angels: the great unconscious psychological witch-doctors of the age.  It is a powerful irony: in this era of skepticism, smug serenity in our disbelief, we are somehow certain that we have escaped the supernatural forces that govern our lives.  We are wrong.  It is still the old gods, the priests to the old fears that haunt our thoughts in the dark, introspective hours.  From where else would come the rampant racism, homophobia, sexism?  That religious laws underpin all our own is not excuse enough: unbeknownst to most, the guilt-grace dichotomy chips away at the confidence of society, bewildering humanity with the ghost of its corrosive morality, pitting loathing against desire and self against self.  The unwitting hypocrisy of those who criticise fundamentalist Islamic states is painful to behold: at least such evil is open in its manipulation, honest in its desire to control; the creeping, insidious hold that the constant barrage of disguised theology exerts over much of western society is far, far more dangerous.  Its priests and crusaders are not only the televangelists and stadium preachers, the worship leaders and the street corner bible bashers but the right-wing politicians, the conservative media, the charitable organisations.  Old Christianity is like a gas, pervading the social atmosphere and warping out ability to see right from wrong.  For example: if a person gives to charity, they are a better person.  Why?  Is it anything more than Christian guilt-based ethical perversion to ask for two dollars, two pounds a month to ‘save a child’s life?’  What a wonderful self-affirming lie it makes!  To give two dollars a month is all very well, but let us not somehow believe it says anything about ourselves: if we give two dollars a month we do not in any way step in to save a child’s life – we step in to give away two dollars.  To imagine any one of these givers choosing the life of such a child over their own life is almost amusing.  Give to charity as you will, but don’t imagine it makes you any more heroic, or any more ‘Christian.’

So how as Christianity asserted this hold over people?  By appealing to people, as people, for and about people.  Christianity’s greatest reversal of Hellenistic culture (instead of merely stealing from it, as per usual) was to discard the ‘prosopon’, to take away the masks that people change from day to day, situation to situation and give value to the man behind the mask, the woman behind the veil.  And when a person has value in and of themselves, when a person has worth simply by the fact of their existence, the next step is fear of being denied that value.  From here the first step of Human Rights theory quickly becomes overblown politics correctness; the first step of Equal Rights quickly becomes a cringing apologetic positive discrimination; the first step of tolerance quickly becomes acceptance of and licence for open stupidity in all parts of society.  It is one of the most brilliant, intelligent and soul-destroying gifts humanity has ever been given: the unchangeable, immutable measure of oneself; the eternal candle burning fitfully at the bottom of our darkest pit of personality.  Christianity has set the person apart from the action and – above all – set the person apart from the role.  It is a gift of great worthlessness that we have been taught to cherish so highly: we love because God first loved us, and are loved not for what we do but for what we are, and we are so afraid of losing that innate sense of self-worth that we will do anything, appease or kill anyone, to keep it.  “I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it”: why on earth would we do that?  Since when is being able to talk more important than having something worth saying?  Since when is the layman on a level with the expert, the man on the street as qualified as the university graduate?

And thus, Christian ethics keep us mired in a web of fear, appeasement and violence.  The wheel of God grinds on, keeping us cruelly reliant on it for our sense of self.  Gone is the value of a person for what they do, gone is the judgement and the hierarchy of society based on capability, gone is the ability to call someone ‘wrong’ because they are wrong, the capacity to diminish a person’s position simply because it is incorrect.  Instead it is replaced by absolute equality, inalienable: what a horrific idea.  To imagine everyone equal – whether in the eyes of God or in the eyes of humanity – is to imagine a world of stagnation, frustration, illogic and incapacity: the ideal postmodern existence.  For while people may see postmodernism as one more step taken away from the old, whitebearded God, in reality it has only shrouded Him in one more layer of philosophical disguise.  While He may be clothed in the language of universalism and freedom of choice, still at our core we fear the arbitrary judgement of that fearsome father-figure.

So here is the terrible irony of religion, accompanied by the fearsome societal hypocrisy is gives birth to: in our skewed view of the base equal identity of all we find the birthplace of racial hatred, sexual discrimination, homophobia and so much more; in our fear of losing it, we find the origin of society’s disintegration, loss of cohesion and identity, lack of strength both personal and corporate, toleration of absurdities and atrocities – it is the death of the hero and the genius and the creator, for all of these things wither and die in a society that emphasises equality over ability, limits exploitation at the ultimate price of any kind of progress.  Equality, even God’s equality, will strangle society to death.

The great wheel of God rolls on, applauded by those who refuse to see the bodies of the last great people of the age crushed beneath it.  Those who stand tallest are always the first to die: may the steamroller God of the edge have mercy on their souls.