Earlier this year, the British writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh made bookmarks featuring 250 of her favorite women writers — from Angela Carter to Zadie Smith — and the Twitter hashtag #ReadWomen2014. She had been inspired by two male journalists who had decided to read more women this year to correct for their own biases. Walsh’s hashtag became a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers, consistently published and reviewed less often in major publications, according to VIDA, a literary organization that tallies gender disparity in bylines.
The proposal to read only (or mostly) women for a year to even the playing field is a good one, I think. But when I did it many years ago, I undertook it as a cure.
In 1988, at the age of 20, I stopped reading men and read only women for a period that lasted almost three years. At the time, I was a student at Wesleyan, taking a course on modernity, and how the mechanization of war changes the roles of men and women. We were reading Paul Fussell, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Marguerite Duras, Simone Weil and Christa Wolf.
This course was also something of an education in male privilege. The evidence, once it was pointed out to me, appeared everywhere — I felt like a character in a science fiction novel who discovers he’s living in a dystopia.
I inhabited a system in which any boy goes through life with a kind of automatic social promotion, able to take his turn first, answer first, eat first. His ideas are welcome, people smile at him, feed him, pay him well. When he is in trouble, he is usually helped first, or told there will be no consequences this time, and “this time” turns out to be every time. He is like a child raised in a bubble, but one who was well when he entered. It’s the bubble that makes him sick.
I was surrounded by men taught to speak over women and permitted to lash out aggressively after being challenged by women. Professors — even female professors — called on men first and privileged their ideas, even when they were bad ideas.
This became even more serious to me when I decided to become a writer. I didn’t want to read books written by men like this, and I didn’t want to be one of those men either.
The decision felt inevitable, once I made it. I had always read women more naturally: I could finish a Jean Rhys book in a day, but I wanted to throw Updike’s novels across the room.
I had always been ambivalent about the world of men: I didn’t understand them, rarely liked them and didn’t like the things asked of me to “be” a man. I was one of those boys who played with girls as a child, who preferred drawing women dressed in gowns, from photos in my mother’s issues of Harper’s Bazaar, to football. As I grew older, I discovered I desired men, which was confusing, given the part about not liking them.
I think women writers appealed to me because they acknowledged the struggles of women as well as those of men; as writers, they simply provided a fuller picture of the world. And what did I learn from them? I think of Becky Birtha’s “In the Life,” a very spare, yet emotionally rich short story of two black women trying to love each other. Birtha treated these women’s lives as ordinary. She wrote as if the reader would need no explanations and offered none — a radical act when depicting lesbians then and maybe even now.
From Marguerite Duras, I learned that fragmentation is a way of breaking something so that it can describe something the whole cannot. From Christa Wolf, that inserting yourself and the circumstances of your life into a myth can transform the myth and your sense of yourself. I learned the power of prosody from Toni Morrison. And from James Baldwin, I learned I could read men again. The wisdom I found in “The Fire Next Time” brought my experiment to its natural end: I was gay, I was a man, I needed to read men, the right men, after all.
But the strangest discovery I made during my experiment came when I told women about my project. Many said: “Oh, how funny. I almost never read women.”
Last year’s Pew research study into our reading habits shows that men, overall, read less than women, with college-educated black women reading the most of any group. So whenever #ReadWomen2014 floats by my sightline on Twitter, I think of how women are, and have been historically, the primary book buyers. The data suggests that, yes, men could and should read more, and read women. But we need to reach the women who don’t read women, as well. That strange bubble around a man isn’t created only by him — it’s created by everyone who, in ways large and small, keeps it in place.
#ReadWomen2014 is for everyone.
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