Regular content has been
suspended this week. In light of recent events, Siouxsie will be holding back
her piece on representations of North Korea in modern literature. This week’s
article has been penned by RAGING FEMINIST SIOUXSIE. Normal service will resume
just as soon as my faith in the 50% of humanity bearing meat and two veg in
their underwear is restored. Thank you for your attention.
It is a sad fact that sexism and misogyny are alive and
kicking in the 21st century. It is a tragic fact that this is true
not just of the real, flesh and blood world of politics, media representation
and day to day interactions, but also of the ‘meta’ world of fiction,
publishing and bookselling.
This is not a new topic. A few posts ago, I vented my
incredulity at the jaw-dropping level of incompetence that went into designing
the special edition anniversary cover of The
Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Let’s just remind ourselves of that particular
travesty:
Oh God. It's still so horrible...
Oh, yep. There we go. It’s a novel about the feminine
condition. Make-up must be involved
to some degree. Look, she’s having a pout. Bet that sorts out her hysterical
depression. Women, eh?! AMIRIGHT?!
I was quite happy to have made that point and reassured that
feedback from readers and customers (yes, I ranted at work, too) broadly
mirrored my point of view. Although I am a card carrying feminist, this is a book
blog, and I hadn’t intended to make a regular feature of my raging against the
patriarchy. Rather, I wanted to write about North Korea. But, over the past
couple of weeks, the two worlds collided in somewhat spectacular fashion.
1)
I was told that certain members of head office
believed my displays were too ‘male-centric’. I should, it was intimated, be
tailoring feature space with clear demarcation between books ‘for the girls’
and books ‘for the boys’.
Look. I have nothing against chick-lit. If Sophie Kinsella,
Marian Keyes et al. are happy for their books to be marketed in a certain way
with a certain demographic in mind, so be it. As a category generally spanning
romance and low-level family drama, that’s fine. But to assume that that is all women want to read is insulting. As
insulting as assuming that all men
want to read are books listing the ballistic power of various types of military
hardware a la Andy Mcnab and Tom
Clancy.
This one go BOOM
None of the above, by the way, feature anywhere in my displays. They sell perfectly well from the shelves. In
between the stereotyped fiction are a million variations on the concept of
literature with no specific demographic in mind other that ‘people that like
books’. As a bookseller, it is these people that I am aiming to please. Sorry
if this comes across as snobbish, but with our tables featuring themes such as ‘Cult’
‘Great American Novels’ and ‘Best of British’, I’m not sure where any of the
above would really slot in.
But maybe I am wrong.
2)
On recommending ‘The Eyre Affair’ by Jasper Fforde to a customer who had shown interest
in alternate history. “Oh. I’m afraid not, darling. The main character’s a
girl. I can never identify with female characters”.
Really. You can’t? You read fiction, a genre dependent on
the suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, you’re a fan of sci-fi and alternate
realities. You, as a reader, are capable of imagining yourself taking off from
Earth, into space, onto an alien planet and into a giant mech suit with a
plasma gun. But all this is dependent on testosterone? You can’t imagine
yourself out of your penis and evolutionarily irrelevant nipples for
two-hundred pages?!? Your capacity for basic empathy has been so stunted that, although the
concept of aliens is hunky-dory, a female protagonist in a novel that doesn’t
even begin to tackle anything linked to the feminine condition is just too
much? Dude. What have you got against boobs?
You need help. Also, don't call me darling.
The ultimate mind-fuck
3)
On showing a customer around the sci-fi/fantasy
section, our (female) specialist bookseller - who has garnered a certain amount
of notoriety online and in our local area for her encyclopaedic knowledge of
her section – is approached by a second customer.
“Excuse me,” he interrupts as she
recommends titles from her shelves, “but sci-fi’s kind of my thing.”
He then proceeds to man-splain her own
section to her.
This event is closely linked to…
4)
I am standing at the tills. A customer
approaches, with what can only be described as an Inspector Clousot expression
on his face. ‘Who writes your recommendations?!’ He barks, pointing at our film bay. “We do,” I answer. His expression morphs in to a Baldrick-esque parody of
cunning.
“ "Really?” he sneers. “So who wrote the card for A Clockwork Orange in Nadsat?”
“I did.”
“No you didn’t. It’s not a girls’ book.”
“Actually, I wrote part of my dissertation
about it at uni.”
“Sure.”
And he oozes off, hopefully to be run over by
a parked car.
These are all genuine examples of sexism that have occurred in
one bookshop, in one city, to myself and one other bookseller over the space of
a couple of weeks. Am I alone in being horrified?
As I have mentioned before, I studied English Literature at
university, then fell straight into the worlds of publishing and bookselling.
Unlike what I witnessed during a brief stint in bar work and catering, the book world is DOMINATED by
women. At university, my course was split 60/40 women. In publishing, although
the board level roles are still skewed towards the men, companies
I have worked for are staffed largely by intelligent, hard working women. The
same goes for bookselling.
So who’s propagating the stereotype of the illiterate female? Are people under the impression that male literature students study 18th Century literature and war poetry whilst female students gaze at the ceiling, writing emoticon ridden essays about Little Miss Naughty and Spot the Dog?
I think Spot's motivation is that he wants his teddy. A lot. LOL.
Do people really believe that some girls
learned to read SOLEY so we could slowly pick out the letters in Fifty Shades of Grey, then immediately
forgot again as the concept of shoes returned to dominate our tiny brains?
Such people must be constantly bamboozled by current
literary trends. Hilary Mantel, a multi-award winning female novelist who
writes about the political intricacies of the Tudor court. No. Frickking. Way.
She must be a man in a wig. Women haven’t even heard of Thomas Cromwell. Or
history.
Cromwell? Was he, like, cute?
The current Booker longlist is made up mostly of female
writers? Sorry. No. Men again. In wigs. ALL WOMEN IN LITERATURE ARE MEN IN
WIGS, have you not got this yet?
Responsible for all of the work attributed to Zadie Smith.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Although it is no longer strictly necessary for authors to write under male pseudonyms - a la George Eliot - in order to be
published, many of them do. Still more choose to initialise their first names
in order to maintain ambiguity over their sex in the early days of their
careers (I’m looking at you, J.K Rowling).
And that’s all folks. I have no solution. No clever way of
eradicating this hateful trend. Despite every piece of evidence we offer them; university figures, knowledgeable booksellers,
fantastic female novelists writing prize-winning works of art, every single
woman they’ve ever seen reading classic literature, sci-fi or political
treatise on a bus or train, some men would rather believe that we’re stupid by
virtue of our ovaries. Because attacking our intelligence is the quickest way
of convincing themselves that we’re not equals. That we cannot run companies,
let alone countries.
Ovaries. FEAR THEM.
