I spend too much time reading stuff that was written before America was invented.

As for feminist criticism and The Canon–Elaine Showalter edited an awesome anthology called Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, Theory that is really wonderful, and lots of the essays in the first part of the book deal with canon formation. Bring a pencil because you’ll be underlining and dog-ear-ing pages all over the place all “fuck yeah!” and “ahhh makes so much sense!!!!!” It’s excellent.

I’m really interested in the canon. I study Shakespeare, but am a feminist (shocker, eh?), and so studying the most canonical English writer with an interest in revising the whole canon is always interesting. But sometimes I’m like, well, this is all from the 80s and early 90s, I guess it’s kind of over, etc etc. But my partner came home with the syllabus from the World Civ 102 class he’s TAing this semester–not a single woman writer on the list, not a single lecture devoted or dealing with women at all. It’s like, were women just not a part of civilization, you stupid asshole professor who is now totally dead to me? Apparently not. Mr. Cimorene got an earful about it. Also several suggestions of what he should do for the week he lectures and gets to choose the assignment. I did suggest he look at Dworkin’s “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” or selections from Intercourse, but he shockingly said no. Which I suppose I expected. But he’s at least considering doing Gloria Steinem’s piece on being a playboy bunny (surely the kids will pay attention!). He’ll probably do something on the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women from the 30s to the 70s, though. Which is good, but how depressing is it that this dudely professor didn’t think that any women were important from Columbus to today? For reference, they’re doing selections from Columbus’s diary, the transcripts to the Final Solution meetings, the American Constitution, something from the Black Panthers. Interesting, but really–no women? At all?

Sorry that got kind of off topic. I’ve been steaming on that one for a while.

Maybe feminism has made it more acceptable for men to write about sex and emotions where they are not the alpha-male conquerors because they don’t need to be in that role anymore.

It’s more accepted that men can be/are sensitive and tender in the bedroom and outside it. That they want to share the experience with their partner. That it’s OK for him to want to cuddle (gasp!) with his partner. So of course writing today would reflect this change.

If anything, I think feminism would have made discussion of sex much less risque and more common. Men should be able to write about sex more often and more honestly under today’s conditions. Maybe we’re just over reading about sex in books that are not inherently sex-oriented. How necessary are graphic depictions of sex in books about family interactions, murders, tennis, etc.? When does knowing who was on top really matter? Now that sex scenes aren’t shocking and/or special, they’re probably just unneeded.

Amen, sister. Especially as so much of that discourse devolves into “Let me Mansplain the sexual experience to you ladeez.” Because apparently though we participate in the act, we won’t truly understand it without a detailed, entirely self-centered recap from the male p.o.v.

And yes, the just-so story is way too much. My suspicion is that that had a lot to do with word count, and she seemed to want to quote from different people a lot. (Though in general she did not appear to have actually read many of the books she quoted.)

As for the alternative… well, I guess I’m willing to come right out with it and say that I’m okay with not hearing about sex from straight men for awhile unless they have something useful to say about it. I’m okay with them feeling reticent and ashamed to talk about it if their reason is, as some are claiming, that the introduction of other perspectives on sex has made them feel like their contribution to that particular strain of the discourse isn’t as valuable. Because if the only way they can think of to write about sex is this sort of prurient cashew-banana garbage – and their complete silence on other modes of description seems to suggest they can’t think of another way – than I shall learn to live with their silence for awhile.

However, my boyfriend and I watched Brief Interviews with Hideous Men the other day. I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is. But, in the movie version at least, I found it interesting that a movie essentially about the ways in which men dehumanize and use women for their own purposes had a female protagonist with no character development, who was used as a mouthpiece for DFW?/John Krasinski. I couldn’t decide if that was extremely clever meta-commentary or the writer(s) being hoisted on their own petards.

*Except that I know Jonathan Franzen is a pretentious shit. He’s an alum of my school and came back when the theater department put on his translation of Spring Awakening (the German play that the musical was based on) and he gave a talk and he was soooooo into himself. And his translation was incredibly boring and also into itself. Blurgh.

The far stranger thing is that it’s an entirely speculative claim. She could, at least in theory, have actually asked these guys about their writing, couldn’t she have? Or at least found some interviews, or something. Just because she can construct a just-so story from A to B doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how it happened. (And, then again, there has been A LOT said about this without any of it suggesting an alternative. Right? Because even if they’d rather not write the same sex scenes as Updike et al, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to write despairingly or tentatively about sex.)

I don’t know that I’d call any of these men overly concerned with the “terrible ways men have treated women.” I think maybe it’s in the background, but I don’t know that that’s what’s informing their sexual reticence.

I’ve read a little Bellow (in high school, when I didn’t understand it), some Updike and a little Roth, and I found the latter two tiresome and repulsive. Roth I found to be not just a woman-hater but an anti-semitic Jew as well, always an attractive combination. They were both so utterly uninterested in the pieces of meat they happened to be putting their all-important penises into that it was a demoralizing and depressing experience to read them. They didn’t take joy in the sexual experience; they were triumphant, the way someone might be if they won a boxing match. It wasn’t a mutual experience at all. And, yeah, a female writer may just want to express the woman’s experience, but I haven’t read much in which a woman character has sex with a collection of body parts rather than a human being.

I had a long chat with our mid-20′s son about this. He’s read more of the younger writers Roiphe listed than I have-I’ve read a little Lethem and Foer and all of Chabon. Our son said that he found the writing of that group to be disturbing because of its very sexual unsureness. According to him, they express sexual guilt and fearfulness because of their awareness of the terrible ways men have treated women. It’s not any less solipsistic necessarily, just not as sexually combative.

I have to say that I missed that, but it may be that I took it as so reasonable and natural that it didn’t grab my attention the way it should have. In any case, I’d rather read men who know that their gender has a lot to change than to read penises with pens.