“How Women See How Male Authors See Them”
“The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedly they want to nail women.
My colleague Talia Lavin has the receipts, and posted them in an invaluable Twitter feed. In “The Professor of Desire,” Philip Roth’s narrator doesn’t just pant over the object of his blazon; he must also punish her for arousing him. “I even become somewhat suspicious and critical of her serene, womanly beauty,” he says. “Or rather, of the regard in which she seems to hold her eyes, her nose, her throat, her breasts, her hips, her legs.” Another maddening hallmark of the horndog wordsmith is prose that takes conspicuous notice of a female character’s physical imperfections. This is done with an aura of self-satisfaction, as if the protagonist deserves credit simply for bestowing his descriptive prowess upon a person of less than conventional loveliness…
We draw toward the glow of the fires that our heroes have kindled to keep us out.”
Ugh, since reading this I keep noticing this problem in books. Like, I found some characters annoying before, they made me slightly uncomfortable but it didn’t rise all the way to consciousness. Now I can’t take them seriously.
Like, the descriptions of women in The Goldfinch? His Dad’s girlfriend? His mom? The book was written by a woman but, in the style of the Great American Novel, all women are symbols of the main (male) character’s desires and anxieties. I have been struggling through the second half of this book and finally gave myself permission to not bother with it anymore.
Related: “IF WOMEN WROTE MEN THE WAY MEN WRITE WOMEN” (hilarious); “They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist”; “This is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us to Be Human”
