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“Funny Women” submissions don’t read themselves. Most of the time Assistant Regional Funny Woman Katie Burgess reads them (she wrote the infinitely funny “How to Read a Poem,” anthologized in Oxford University Press’s Humor: A Reader for Writers, and has since gone on to read slush).
...moreWhen The Bennington Review re-launched this past April after thirty years, its first issue packed a table of contents studded with prize-winning authors and exciting emerging voices. This week, to our good fortune, the biannual print publication has made several of its pieces available online, among them new short fiction from Iranian-American writer Porochista Khakpour, author of the acclaimed novels The Last Illusion and Sons and Other Flammable Objects.
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For Lit Hub, book designer Jennifer Heuer reflects on sexism in publishing and analyzes “chick-lit” book covers that rely on gender stereotypes to target female readers:
...moreThe bigger discussion is the genre itself: light-weight novels aimed at a female audience is a symptom of sexism in publishing.
Women writing about women is popular right now in the publishing world—like Emma Cline, who recently released The Girls. USA Today runs through the many books about women, by women. But despite the rising popularity of these authors and the prominence of women within the publishing industry, top jobs are still held by men.
...moreSupposedly “unlikable” female characters are often the most complex, humanly flawed, and interesting ones—yet many readers are perturbed by such representations of women. In an excerpt from her collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley muses on the reasons why female protagonists are uniquely expected to be likable:
...moreWhen you find yourself reading about a gun-slinging, whisky-drinking, Mad Max apocalypse hero who you’d love if it was a guy but find profoundly uncomfortable to read about when you learn it’s a woman, take a step back and ask why that is.
Is it possible to separate Knausgaard the author from Knausgaard the protagonist? At the New Republic, Tess Crain asks this question, taking a look at the series from a woman’s point of view. By her estimation, Volume 5, just out in English, explains some of Knausgaard’s problematic views on women by framing him as “a man of God”:
...more…what makes My Struggle so upsetting to a female reader is also exactly what may redeem it: Sex and souls are separate.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of mansplaining, but just in case you’re not, here are some examples of ways to clarify that you’re not being patronizing. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
...moreA new academic study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior has found that young women who read and enjoy Fifty Shades of Gray are more likely to hold sexist attitudes:
...moreThe researchers found that those who had completed at least the first book in the trilogy had “stronger ambivalent, hostile, and benevolent sexist attitudes than those who did not read books in the trilogy”.
Taking a different stance on the men-only book clubs that have everyone rolling their eyes, Slate’s L.V. Anderson argues that feminists should applaud men embracing an activity that has been so coded as feminine—and eagerly await the day when men do not feel like they have to declare their masculinity in order to do so:
...moreMen who deliberately take time to discuss literature with other men are subverting and challenging gender norms, no matter how jokily macho their book club names might be.
Gay Talese, well-known for being a pioneer of the New Journalism along with writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote, apparently couldn’t name any woman writer who’d inspired him when asked at a recent Boston University event. Amy Littlefield, a journalist in the audience, said:
...moreAnd then there was a pause and he said, “None.
For the Guardian, Lynette Lounsbury shares her adolescent experience reading the beat writers and coming to realize that there was little “space” for women in the beatnik world:
...moreI read more Kerouac, The Dharma Bums my favourite, and then I read Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs.
In 1983 six Hollywood filmmakers sued Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures for practices that discriminated against women. Their story was recently profiled in Pacific Standard by Rachel Syme and these six women, known as the Original Six, will be hosting an AMA on Reddit today from 1-3pm ET.
...moreWe need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide behind the idea of descriptivist lexicography
Over at the New Yorker, Nora Caplan-Bricker compiles stories of problematic dictionary definitions and ultimately calls for dictionaries to reexamine their construction and eliminate sexist definitions.
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Bad news from the free-Internet fight is also good news in the war on Google.
A bit of sexist schadenfreude.
Are psychologists who study morality evil?
Want to make things really scary? Here’s how to do it.
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