Emily Gould, of former Gawker fame and current proprietress of Emily Magazine, has written an article on More Intelligent Life entitled “What Are Women Fighting About?“ Before I even get to the meat of it, allow me to remark that though the title may not be Gould’s own fault, woe betide the editor who ever decides to christen one of my pieces in this incredibly condescending way. But hell! On with the catfight, ladies!
Gould’s ostensible thesis is that women writers ought to be nicer to each other. She can’t bear, she says, “the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn’t project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood.” I’d tend to agree with her in principle. Because we’re so often fighting over the scraps that the powers that be have left behind, we can get a little vicious with each other about who deserves the scraps, which is really just a distraction from the fact that we ought to have our own chairs at the feasting table. (And an equal number of them, natch.)
Gould would be easier to sympathize with, however, on the point, had she not just spent a couple of paragraphs ripping on a recent novel (A Fortunate Age, by Joanna Smith Rakoff, which I have not read). Her statement about female critics seems meant as a retraction, but her critique does go into considerable detail about the novel’s “accumulation of petty accuracies to paper over a false big picture.” Ouch!
But then we get to what I suspect was Gould’s real point – Salon‘s lead feminist critic, Rebecca Traister, is the paradigmatic example of the criticism Gould can’t bear:
One of them, an online “feminist” columnist, once wrote a supposed defense of “women’s voices” that dismissed something I’d written because the photos that accompanied the essay were of me lying (rather unprovocatively, to my mind) in bed. She’d said that the question wasn’t why my voice was being heard–the implied answer being, presumably, my bed-lying ways–but why others weren’t, “in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women’s writing voices.”
Aha! So let’s review Traister’s piece. You can read Gould’s essay in the NYT at the link above if you have not read it already. I suspect what Gould didn’t like was this sentence of Traister’s:
The cheesecakey cover shot advertised Gould’s first-person story, an 8,000-word exploration of what Gould “gained — and lost” by divulging details of her romantic and sexual life on the Internet. The very readable piece had the voyeuristic feel of a precocious, neurotic teen’s diaristic musings; it was all crushy and naive, with ample reference to breakup sex and therapy and panic attacks.
This is the only direct address of the merits of Gould’s piece that Traister makes. But here is what Traister also said:
There is a storied history of bright women writers (many of whom are mentioned in a New York Observer article this week), from generational confessionalists like Joyce Maynard and Elizabeth Wurtzel to cultural critics like Katie Roiphe to novelists like Lucinda Rosenfeld and Marisha Pessl, who have been raised up as media darlings, photographed in appealing poses or in titillating features, and then ripped apart by critics (including, on more than one occasion, me).
[...]
But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould’s — or to a cultural phenomenon like “SATC” — only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.
Is this the criticism Gould’s referring to? Because I believe that under any reading this has absolutely nothing to do with Gould herself, and if anything, is making a point that runs parallel with Gould’s – our delight at tearing women down is the problem, and it is what is keeping certain women’s voices to be heard.
But Gould is too wrapped up in the fact that Traister didn’t like her piece to notice this. Gould then offers certain half-thought “solutions” that raise more issues than she seems to realize. For example, quoth Gould:
Is this a real cause for concern? Is there really limited space for women’s writing voices? Some people, myself included, have pointed out that there is unlimited internet real estate available to anyone with the modicum of pioneering spirit necessary for staking out a URL. The opportunity for women’s writing to reach a wide audience online is limitless, at least in theory.
I don’t know Gould, but I have occasionally enjoyed her writing and loved her when she was at Gawker. However, if this is her idea of trenchant social analysis – just write a blog, anyone’ll listen! – I’m not sure her skill with words is going to get her very far. There are, in fact, hundred upon hundreds of websites out there written by women of all kinds. But Gould’s is the only one in recent memory that actually managed to land her a lead article in the NYT magazine. I don’t see anyone offering that kind of deal to the writers of most of the blogs you see linked to in our blogroll or in our posts, and in many cases – Fugitivus comes most quickly to mind – those people write with the same kind of lyricism and quality that Gould does. And what is Gould’s account for that? It can’t be her dismissive suggestion that they lack the “pioneering spirit” necessary to get their voices out there.
I’ll tell you what my suspicion is. My suspicion is that the vast majority of women actually tend to suffer from more than the condition of being women. My suspicion is that they aren’t white, they aren’t conventionally “beautiful,” they didn’t go to expensive colleges, and they don’t live in mythical, writerly New York. All of these are subjects that the powers that be (the kyriarchy, but hell) have deemed to be acceptable and interesting in women. But none of these race/class issues are addressed by Gould’s piece. And why aren’t they? Well, it’s uncharitable to say so, but one imagines they aren’t addressed because they don’t actually get Gould out from under Traister’s criticism, which does, in the end, seem to be her primary concern. After all, witness her weak-sauce suggestion of how we can all improve:
It is tempting to feel resentful when we don’t see ourselves or our stories or our ideals reflected in the prevailing narratives of femaleness. Luckily, there is an alternative: instead of simply criticising other women’s stories, we can take it upon ourselves to make sure that our own stories get told. Creating something takes a lot more effort than writing a bad review or a dismissive blog post. But if we don’t make that effort, if instead we keep insisting that a mere handful of female writers are qualified to speak for us, we’ll miss out on the larger truths that are to be found somewhere in the chorus.
Look, I know Gould was probably pretty wounded by the reaction to her NYT article. Any sane, self-respecting person would be. But there’s something really wrong with the suggestion that crafting a well-deserved criticism about structural problems (like the fact that the mainstream media tends to fetishize certain kinds of women) should take a backseat to… well, to be honest I’m not sure what here other than criticism of women like herself. Because Gould seems to want a larger chorus, and she seems to be invested in ensuring that one appears. But she is not offering that support here; she demanding silence from the women who too just want more of us to be handed the microphone. And women insisting on other women’s silence is not, in the end, what I think she ought to be fighting for.
I think there are a lot of interesting questions to be raised about so-called “women’s writing” – what it is, why literary quality has so often been defined against the male viewpoint, what kind of content has been marginalized by sweeping it under the rug of “chick lit,” why it would be the job of women’s writing to model “womanhood” at all, what kinds of challenges writing by women could provide to our conventional modes of seeing and imagining. Gould, unfortunately, is not asking any of them in this piece.
But my argument is emphatically NOT “just write a blog, anyone’ll listen!”, “Pilgrim Soul.” Via this piece I retracted this sentiment, which I’d expressed earlier, and admitted that yes, there *is* limited space allotted to women’s writing in mainstream, paying print publications: “Of course, the preponderance of bylines in the most august–and the most high-paying–magazines and newspapers are still male. But as those dinosaurs fade into obscurity, the scales will naturally shift in women’s favour. Unless, of course, they won’t. It’s just possible that they won’t.”
Another part of the essay that you might have missed: “Creating something takes a lot more effort than writing a bad review or a dismissive blog post.” Good luck eventually doing so; you certainly haven’t here.
Emily – Well, you return to the sentiment at the end when you seem to suggest that women pull themselves up by the bootstraps and be contributors instead of haters.
Your quoted retraction seemed to me quite qualified. I see a lot of male bylines in n+1, for example, which is hardly written by “dinosaurs.” I think we just disagree on how much structure is against this gradual drift towards equality. Nevermind that merely incorporating a voice like yours (and I should say, mine – my background is not dissimilar to what I know of yours) wouldn’t quite get us there.
I also quote the portion you say I’ve missed. I’m not going to claim the above is a masterpiece; but as I point out above (and you don’t respond to) your criticism of Traister was pretty dismissive too. It seemed to me your piece didn’t address the larger questions it ought to have because you were focussed on your view of her piece, which, I think, you mischaracterize not just a little bit.
As for the scare quotes ’round my name, I have to blog anonymously for reasons related to my day job. But thanks for “asking”?
I didn’t intend for my essay to be a definitive last word on this topic. If you’d like to investigate the areas I left unexplored, that would be welcome. But I’m not sure what you hope to accomplish by saying things like “if this is her idea of trenchant social analysis – just write a blog, anyone’ll listen! – I’m not sure her skill with words is going to get her very far.” I understand why you think there’s something to be gained by writing so snidely about me, or anyone, but I assure you that there’s more to be lost.
As to your idea of what distinguishes me from other the bloggers who you say are my equals, but who haven’t yet been rewarded by “the powers that be” — my conventional attractiveness, my whiteness, my education, the city I live in — please add to the list that I write under my own name. Your anonymity — got it, you have a convenient excuse! — shields you from your writing’s consequences, and consequences can be good or bad. I can’t help but think you’d write differently if you had to stand behind what you’ve written.
Well, Emily, you certainly have more experience in the arena of being snide to people on public blogs, so I take at face value your claim that there is more to be lost. So as to snideness: mea culpa. I write a minor feminist blog on the internet; I didn’t really think you’d even bother to respond to someone like me. As to what is gained, like a hundred people maybe read every post I write; we only have around 1000 visitors a day.
I’ll happily share my real name with you; I just can’t do it publicly on the internet right now because I have to keep my day job since, as you note, I have no current income from my subpar writing in this forum.
In any event, you wrote a blog post that tried to make systemic claims about women. I, again, take you at your word that it was not meant to be a “definitive last word.” But I don’t agree with your claims. So it’s not just a matter of investigating areas you don’t explore.
For example: I don’t agree that we are drifting towards the greater inclusion of female voices in most mainstream print. I don’t agree that criticisms like Traister’s are best described as critiques of you. I can’t help but feel you’ve personalized something that wasn’t personal. I get that you don’t agree, and hell, you certainly don’t have to.
I don’t know you, Emily, as I say in the above. But I think you’ve misdiagnosed the problem, and though I think you write beautifully, I think that caused you to miss the point. Are you seriously contending that the factors you list have nothing to do with why your work is recognized? Understand that I am not saying that you can’t write very well – you can. What I am saying is that you lack an account of how you came to be published when others did not. I assume you’d say you were published on your own merits, and fair enough, but again: the content of “merit” doesn’t strike me as politically neutral.
I didn’t intend for my essay to be a definitive last word on this topic.
But there’s a big difference between the definitive last word and directly addressing the main point of an essay with which you take issue. As PS has already pointed out, you have yet to address Traister’s main point, and instead mischaracterize it as a function of female pettiness.
And FWIW, I find it deeply ironic that your snarky dismissal of the economic reality behind blogging anonymously is a more perfect reflection of your privilege than anyone could ask for.
Again: I don’t actually say, or think, that we are “drifting towards the greater inclusion of female voices in most mainstream print.”
I’m not interested in having a comment war. I just wanted to set the record straight about this one thing and got tempted to preach on about some other pet peeves, like anonymity and pointless — as opposed to pointed — snideness. This was a mistake on my part! I’ll leave you guys to dissecting the ideas around this priveleged, expensively educated, “snarky” construct you’ve imagined, and take my real self out of this conversation.
Who’s having a comment war? People have presented substantive points which you apparently don’t feel you should have to answer, and you’ve instead rather ineffectively argued against “snideness” by employing it yourself.
I can’t say you’ve much reassured me that you weren’t overpersonalizing the issue!
Well, interesting. Just as a general rhetorical device, I find that signing off any retort post with “Good luck” or “Enjoy” makes one look immature — after all, Emily sought this site out, did she not?
Anyway, there are two major points being addressed in the original post: women-on-women dislike, and the lack of representation of all women in all lifestyles. There was also an added element, briefly alluded to, of sexism in the publishing industry. These elements are highly personalized, and so I really feel the author’s privilege did need to be addressed in the piece. If the only hardship you’ve come up against is being jealous of another female writer, you don’t have much hardship.
I have to say that the article really did feel like a backwardly formed way to get back at Traister’s non-criticism. It’s good that Emily has an audience with which she can act out her personal slights. I guess the rest of us will just have to go get a book published to get “our stories” (scare quotes!) out there.
*a w k w a r d*
“Creating something takes a lot more effort than writing a bad review or a dismissive blog post.”
This statement in particular sticks in my craw. The idea that the act of writing bad reviews (or good ones!) is not “creating something” smacks of either sour grapes or deliberate obfuscation. Criticism of art, written or otherwise, can extend our understanding of a piece and often expands conversation about message(s) put forth by an artist/writer and the criticized work. Which is why I presume Ms. Gould included her rectified book review in her essay; She was “creating something” in her review that required more effort than a mere plot summary of the book.