“Ban Men from Literary Readings”
“My qualm is neither a nitpick nor a call for revolution. But it exists. And it needs to be addressed. Too many literary readings are being both whitewashed and dick-washed by absurdly biased conversations. And the fault lies with the people in charge of these events, the moderators and authors conducting what should be thoughtful (and promotional) gatherings for their projects.
The Q&A session after a reading isn’t a contest. The act of putting your hand up is undeservedly maligned, anyway, and I don’t wish to stigmatize it further. The kid who raises their hand all the time in class, or so the stereotype goes, is desperate: to be heard, to be admired, to curry the teacher’s favor. So as not to be thought the stereotypical handraiser — not to be thought the person thinking me! me! pick me! — too many students just keep them in their laps.
This self-censoring behavior, once learned at school, seems to stay with young women and other groups outside the white-dude enclave well into adulthood. So, you just don’t see the young woman put her hand up when she’s got something to say. What if people were to think her dumb, or that she liked the sound of her own voice? What if unspecified humiliation were to take place? What if, indeed…
Bias in discussion at literary events is thus a professional problem, but one (very like sexual harassment, in fact) constantly written off as the cost of working with brilliant but badly socialized men."
Yessss. Can we also talk about how this happens in science? How there is always this group of older typically-white men who seem to have no shame, who seem to have way less of a filter because, even if they ask a stupid question, they don’t have to worry not only that they might not be called on next time, but that anyone who has the misfortune of looking like them won’t be called on either.
Also they’ve probably been told that they are intelligent and worthy of attention far too often.
Let’s talk about manspreading in academia.
