The Bookslut Gets Surreal

I really do want to offer you dear readers reblogs that are simple, but I must share the posts that I find most interesting. Once again, I want to share with you something the Bookslut had to say. I wanted to share this untitled post because it includes one of Remedios Varo’s pictures, and she is one of my favorite surrealists. The Bookslut also talks about how the women in the surrealist movement are overlooked, which I never knew because Varo was my entry point for the movement.

Another reason I wanted to share this post is that I wrote about the VIDA count this year, and about how it inspired me consider my own reading habits. But I didn’t do anything as systematic and intelligent as the Bookslut, and I think more of us should try her rational approach to creating equity in our own education.

I hope that you will click this link to the Bookslut blog to read this post {2018 update: while its still up; the website is inactive and you never know when it might disappear} and maybe even come back here and share your thoughts.

A 2018 Caveat

{2018 Update: As mentioned above, the Bookslut is inactive. As I’ve reviewed my old posts to update links, I’ve had to delete a few of them where the post became pointless because it referred to sites that no longer exist. So in case that happens, I’ve copied the Bookslut post here. But please try the link above first, just in case that site generates revenue or benefits the original author in any way.}

The Bookslut’s Original Post

I have some friends who work in video games, and so I read a lot and hear a lot about the debate over the predominance of male protagonists. (I don’t really play video games, but I enjoy reading about them. I like the worlds, I like the imagery, I like walking around the rooms and looking at stuff and interacting with pretend people, but don’t ask me to do anything in that world. Kill a guy or put together a puzzle? Yuck. No. I get anxious and irritated and hand the controls over to someone else and say, “Do that for me, will you?” I remember getting Myst with my PC when I bought my first computer [OLD] and whenever I actually had to do something that was a little bit complicated, I’d call in my little sister from down the hall to do it for me. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and, us both being sleepless folk, she’d be there, unlocking some new level for me or tracking down the thing I need before I can move on.)

I got really off track here.

Okay, so, there’s this debate because all of the protagonists of video games are men, and if you try to create a video game with a female protagonist, you are going to have a hard time selling it. Why? Because dudes don’t want to play as women, they can’t relate. And a lot of the misogynist blame gets pointed at nerd culture right not because it’s a little rabid over there. Look at the comments section on something like this, for example. It’s a terrifying world. But come on. The literary world has the same problems, just played through at a different volume.

Working with Corinna Pichl, our new features editor here at Bookslut and managing editor over at Spolia, has been fun because she has sort of shaken up my complacency. I handed over an interview to her to approve, and her first comment was, when the author is asked to list all of his favorite writers and his influences, he only lists men. Which is a thing that happens everywhere. Read an interview with a male writer, his influences are almost always exclusively men. Maybe there will be a token lady in there, but for the most part, men read men. It was Corinna who said, Make the interviewer go back and ask him about women writers. It hadn’t occurred to me to do that, I’m a little ashamed to say. I hadn’t really realized, when we run one of those interviews with male writers listing other male writers, talking about other male writers and reading books with male protagonists, we’re kind of perpetuating this idea that men read men because men are the universal, and women writers are for women. It’s tiered. So now, when we see an interview like this, we send it back. Ask about women. If he says he doesn’t have any women writer influences, ask him why the fuck not.

There are all of these statistics about men not reading women writers and trying to figure out why that is. About how women have to use initials or androgynous or masculine pen names to be taken seriously. That the cover art for women’s book are just flowery, script writing nightmares that could easily be used to sell vaginal douches, because publicity teams have given up on trying to sell a female writer to a male audience.

This is boring. This is a boring conversation to have. Because it’s idiotic but everyone is deeply entrenched and men have excuses and women have complaints. Also, I’m aware that I’m preaching to the choir. The men who read my website obviously read women writers or they wouldn’t be here. Bookslut is a nice safe environment, and the male readers I do hear from are, you know, enlightened. Conscious. Hooray for that. I appreciate you guys.

I don’t believe in hierarchy. Nor in page views. We cover what we are passionate about, and so we give the lead feature to the writer we find most important each month. This month it’s a Mexican woman. We review the books we think are the best, or most worthy of attention, and this month that is six women and two men in fiction, three out of three women in poetry, and a bunch of men in nonfiction.

Same in Spolia. We seek out the best writers we know, and a lot of the time we are publishing more women than men. And men subscribe, they read the magazine. They read Bookslut, they read the books we cover on Bookslut. To me, it’s not that hard, you read what is good, what is innovative, what shakes your world up. Sometimes that’s writing by women. Sometimes that is writing by men.

And there are men who are entrenched, who refuse to read books by women or play video games with female protagonists, but for the most part, there are just men and women who don’t think about it, who are told by the culture and by the literary establishment that the most important books are written by men, and so oh okay I will just read that. And literary magazines and publishers and book critics all reinforce that. It’s part of the reason why I hate the VIDA statistics time of the year, because you see a lot of book critics making excuses, or pointing fingers at other publications or saying yesssss it’s so terrible what ever can we do and then going immediately back to reviewing a disproportionate number of men. Or a publication that looked bad will do a special Woman’s Issue! and then immediately go back to publishing mostly men in their “normal” issues. But because they put on the display of caring about this, no one looks at their behavior, their unconscious beliefs about male writing and female writing.

There was a time when I read predominantly male writers. And so what did I do, I started writing down every book I read, title and author, so I could see the patterns. And I started thinking, okay, so I really like the modernists, who are the female modernists who get left out of those definitive lists of the great modernist writers. Okay, Mina Loy? HD? Djuna Barnes? Etc.

I’ll stop now, but I will say that I read an article that listed the greats of Surrealism, and there was not a single woman on that list. So over on the Spolia tumblr, I’m posting great female Surrealist artists, just in case you need a little direction on where to find them. That is the responsibility of those of us with an audience. To know and seek out and then display the people who are being ignored and forgotten. If you’re just propping up those already in power, what the fuck are you doing with your life?