"

If men discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if men are going to judge a book by it’s cover, or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance and women writers can’t fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed.

This is where we should start focusing this conversation—how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

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Beyond the Measure of Men, Roxane Gay

This Interview With the Women of "Community" Will Make You Feel Better (Until You Remember That This Is Maybe the Last Season, At Which Point You Will Feel Worse): →

Ganz: In Episode 308, we had that thing about Shirley not wanting to get the “sassy note.” You had said to me that that had happened to you once.

Brown: Female friends that are in my tribe, black girls, we all have stories about that. We find interesting ways to make [directors] tell us to be sassy because they know that it’s racist. I say, “Can you show me how to do that?” They don’t want to do a black version of sassy, so then they move on.

Brie: You could say the same thing too about Danny [Pudi] and Abed. I mean you know Danny’s played four or five Sanjays.

Brown: It’s ridiculous.

Brie: Even still he’ll get called in for auditions and they’ll be like, “Can you do the accent?” We get to do different things in every episode, and it’s not just about gender or race. It’s about having well-rounded characters and a wide range of adventures so that we’re just never playing the same thing.

Brown: That’s what’s great about the show in general. Around [the study-room] table, you have a racist, a feminist, a black chick. There are all different types of people here, but we all keep coming back to the table.

"To be honest, I felt hysterical: that Victorian word for the tantrums of unstable estrogen-addled women, but that I know actually describes a rage forcibly contained, the hot burn of the involuntary tears, the snap in your composure when you are told for the millionth time that what you feel or think or say or do does not matter. I thought that complex, nuanced, funny, difficult, despicably lovable characters were the emblem of a good writer, not evidence of the insecure woman thieving our sympathies through sneaky writer-succubus tricks. And yet one hundred and fifty years after Edith Wharton wrote a number of canonical, excellent books, some rich white straight dude gets paid—what does the New Yorker pay for that kind of piece, like ten grand?—gets paid like ten grand to come to the riveting, breathtaking conclusion that she might be human, and maybe even A Writer, like him?"

Meg Clark at The Rejectionist on the whole Edith Wharton/That Guy debacle.

I am really behind on my New Yorkers (cool thing to say) and so I haven’t read the piece in question yet. The piece is by That Guy I’ve mentioned here probably too much already, whose name I will not write again for fear he has a Google Alert set up and will misinterpret my intense dislike for him as breathless preoccupation. Needless to say, it is crazy as balls to bring up the physical appearance of a writer in your critical analysis of said writer, but it happens to women all the time. If you want to argue that it happens to all writers, find me a New Yorker article written by a lady in which she points out that Mark Twain could have been way hotter, and I will renounce feminism as a way of life (no, I won’t, but you could still try to find an article like that). 

Anyway, if you’re reading this blog, you probably already know this shit is disgusting, so go read Clark’s response because it’s exhilarating.

View high resolution

Like I said, he gets me.

"My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander. My old boss never understood why I did not take this as a compliment. After all, Lisbeth Salander is hot. ‘Not that you’re a sociopath!’ she would say. ‘Just, you know, you’re thin, and you have so many tattoos. And your clothes.’ If I remember correctly—it’s been a long time, since I read the Lisbeth Salander book—Lisbeth Salander only has one tattoo, a dragon, placed in a becoming manner upon her bony shoulder. Lisbeth Salander definitely does not have a stick-and-poke banner (empty) from the night she drank a fifth of Wild Turkey with her friend Matt and decided to commemorate the occasion, or a procession of wobbly broken hearts up the inside of her calf from the time she let her friend’s ex-junkie lover practice on her with his new tattoo gun. Lisbeth Salander does not have her dead cat’s name inside a heart over her hip, or a flight of shorebirds winging their way from her knees to her hipbones—the first tattoo I paid real money for, and the best tattoo I have ever seen, if I do say so myself. Stick and poke banners: not sexy. At all. Believe me. It’s tiny, at least. My old boss used to compare me to Lisbeth Salander, and then she would make me go get her coffee. Small latte, not too hot, two sugars. Look at me: I still remember."

“Eleven Thoughts About Lisbeth Salander,” by The Rejectionist