Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part Two)

I first learned of the VIDA Count from a friend on Facebook. The first article I read about it was Laura Miller’s Salon piece about how men aren’t paying attention to women writers.

My first response to her was that I feel like I live in a world dominated by women. I was estranged from my father, who is now dead. My closest male friends are all married with kids and live in other towns. Most of my immediate friends are women. I live with my girlfriend. I pay attention to women all the time; therefore I prefer male writers because it is one of the few times I get to hear a male voice that I feel is worth listening to (other male voices - politicians, libertarian businessmen, athletes, aren’t worth listening to and I don’t value or pay attention to them). Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Alexs D. Pate, Laird Hunt, James Tate, Stephen Dunn, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, and lots of other male writers are my masculine, authorial role models because there are so few in my day-to-day life.

That being said, two of my closest writing friends from graduate school, whose work I read and consistently publish in The Project for a New Mythology are women: Laura Hawley and Jenn Zukowski-Boughn. And although I value all of my writing teachers throughout the years, the one I cherish the most is Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

I am full of women’s voices. I have worked for more women than men. I have worked with more women than men. I have had little choice but to listen to women. So, although there may be some men out there who choose to ignore women, I believe they are a minority and I resent such a blanket accusation from Ms. Miller that men aren’t interested in what women have to say.

As I said in my previous post on this topic, I don’t think my situation is that unique among writers, editors, and readers younger than 40. We men 40 and younger have spent our lives watching the rise of women to the point now where more women go to college than men, more women finish college than men. More women get advanced degrees than men. More women are becoming the primary breadwinners for their families while men’s earning potential decreases and their unemployment numbers go up. More women start small businesses than me. To me, that means that by the time the Baby Boomers have been flushed out of the workforce, the economic Patriarchy that those boomers grew up with and fought against through their adulthood will be dead. That doesn’t mean there won’t be other vestiges of patriarchy, like Male Privilege, nor does it mean there won’t be a division of labor in families based upon gender. What it means is that the physical and economic world will finally be dominated by women.

Happy ladies? Let’s go for another long walk.

This also means that the physical world will finally reflect our internal, mystical, mythological, and biological world. Patriarchy, although very real in the day-to-day lives of people for many generations, is a well maintained, nearly impenetrable illusion. Men only rule the world at the pleasure of Women. From Mother Nature to your Mother in the kitchen, the world is feminine and governed my feminine power. In mythology, it is the tangible, physical world that is given the feminine aspect, and it is the unreachable and distant sky that is given the masculine aspect: Mother Earth, Father Sky. It is out of the womb of the earth that our species was born just as it is out of the womb of women that we as individuals are born. It takes a massive dose of testosterone to turn a fetus male, and if that dose isn’t high enough or never comes, that fetus will (or try to) default to its base setting of female.

Masculinity, maleness, is a fragile, and risky business engaged in as defiance of the feminine,and, at times, it is much more difficult to define. More importantly, whether the feminists like this suggestion or not, the social factors that make up manhood depends upon what women find acceptable. For the hundredth time now I’m going to quote Rebecca Walker from her introduction to her anthology What Makes A Man:

 “If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who ‘just so happens’ to be a good provider.”

If women didn’t reward men who take charge, men wouldn’t take charge. If women didn’t reward men who command attention in a room, men wouldn’t command attention in a room.

So, the VIDA Count is useful in that it serves to help identify where the old Patriarchs might still be hiding out so that behavior modification can begin. Now, if there is a male editor out there who rejects women writers out of hand, yeah, stop submitting to him, and encourage your male writer friends to stop submitting to him. But be careful, a lack of women writers in a magazine doesn’t always mean the editor is a chauvinist, and not every magazine that has an imbalance of male to female writers is the lair of a hold-out patriarchal dragon that needs to be slain. I’m pro-woman, even if I’d never call myself a feminist. I can’t watch “A League of the Their Own” and NOT cry at the end; I think women should be playing baseball with the men instead of softball by themselves. However, my magazine is still male heavy, even though I have published every woman who submitted (except for the one who wrote rhymed free verse poetry because I hate rhymed free verse whether it’s written by man, woman or purple martian space dog). And at least one of those women I published I had to coax into submitting.

I’m not so sure the gap between the number of women and men getting published has anything to do with a preponderance of close-minded male editors. Also, if I’m not mistaken, aren’t the majority of agents and editors women? The VIDA stats, and Ms. Millers’ ancedotal quiz of readers, do show that women are more omnivorous readers. I can’t argue with that, but doesn’t that then suggest that the problem of this gender gap in publishing is not, in fact, the result of men ignoring women, but of women ignoring women?

If fewer men read, and fewer men are in the publishing industry as the gatekeepers, then the industry is heavily controlled by these omnivorous women readers. And the question then becomes why aren’t women publishing more women? It can’t be because they don’t want to listen to women’s voices. It can’t be because women editors are self-destructively chauvinistic. I think it seriously has to do with literary publishers and editors simply seeing more manuscripts from men than they do from women. This leads me to a couple of very interesting questions;

1) Why do men appear to publish so much, but read so little?
2) Why do women appear to read so much, but publish so little.
3) If a publisher makes an effort to balance the press’s list along gender lines, how many worthy male writers are rejected and how many unworthy female writers are accepted?

I don’t believe that any publisher would publish a poorly written book by a woman over a well written book by a man just to achieve gender parity. What I mean to suggest by that last question is this: I believe that of the women writers who do submit their manuscripts for publication, as a group, submit more publishable manuscripts. Men, who submit more manuscripts than women, have a higher ratio of piss-poor manuscripts. It’s like buying oranges: buy 5 oranges from a small grower at the farmers market, and you’ll get 5 good oranges. Buy 10 oranges from the grocery store and chances are only 5 out of 10 will be any good.

I think there are, essentially, two things going on here:

1) Women are like the Democratic Party. Among women there has always been and will always be a plurality, a multitude of voices wrestling with each other and they will fight amongst each other as readily as they’ll fight against men and patriarchy (or even in defense of patriarchy). Some sing “Stand by Your Man” some will sing “I Will Survive” and some will sing “32 Flavors” and some will sing “Bitch”. It is widely accepted as public wisdom that the answer to the old Freudian question “What do women want?” is as varied as women themselves and that each woman is a unique and empowered individual. Men, on the other hand, are seen in the world as roughly interchangeable parts, universally interested in the same three or four things, even if they’re gay: Sex, Sports, expensive toys, and competition - and anything that seems to be an anomaly is merely a ploy for sex. which leads me to the second thing that might be going on when men get literary work published more frequently.

2) Men, when they write literary works, are giving voice to a silence that most men never break. They are dropping the armor as it were, and revealing something our society tells us they are incapable of: empathy, intuition, revelry at beauty, a nuanced understanding of human nature, and it does two things - it piques women’s curiosity at there being a male inner life that is equally as rich as women’s, but not easily accessed if all we see of men is the athlete, or video gamer, or bar hoping lounge lizard. It also provides a silent reassurance to male readers that they aren’t alone and that they aren’t the domestically bumbling, sex obsessed, brutes mass media seems to always tell us we are.

I don’t want to suggest that women don’t have a rich inner life. Part of the post Feminine Mystique era is the acknowledgement of women’s internal lives and how those lives were suffocated by patriarchy. Consequently, so much of our culture now acknowledges women’s inner lives and the important of those inner lives to their personal fulfillment. What I’m getting at here is this idea, part sociological and part biological, that the outsider feeling that often drives people to write might be short circuited by women’s empowerment. That, in turn, narrows the pool of possible women writers to those who have the right kind of lesions on their temporal lobes (see The Midnight Disease studies show that writers tend to have similar brain lesions to temporal lobe epileptics who often suffer from logorrhea).

That is, of course wild speculation, but I think you see where I’m going, especially if you throw in women’s multitasking obsession.

Unfortunately, the side effect of all that women’s inner life coming to the foreground, was to assume that because men had dominated society their inner lives were not at odds with their external lives - that they were, in fact, the same. But I would argue that alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, and abuse are all the result of men struggling to suppress (or accept and justify in the case of artists) their inner lives. This is why so many of them turn to the self-expression of writing - and why so many of them submit so frequently.

In other words, I believe that verbal self-expression among women is common, therefore the urge to engage in the act of writing stories and trying to publish them is weak. I believe that verbal self-expression among men is uncommon and therefore, the urge to do it and try to make it available to the world to be seen is strong.