sexism
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The Pie Lady’s Manifesto
During the first meeting with the man who would become my cookbook editor, I said “I’m not going to write another sweet little book about pie.”
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A Year of Women Writers
Although plenty of critics and academics have done a wonderful job reinterpreting what it means to be “the canon,” there are still many readers in the US who, consciously or subconsciously, believe that men have contributed most of what we…
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A Book Review Column That Isn’t All About White Men
As VIDA’s annual stats have made very clear, most publications favor male writers reviewing books by other male writers. Our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has also talked about the lack of representation of writers of color in many publications.…
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What’s Sexist and What’s Not
Novelist Jennifer Weiner has long been an outspoken critic of literary sexism, vocally demanding respect for herself and other female authors and pushing back against stodgy heavyweights like Jonathan Franzen. But how much dismissal of Weiner can be attributed to…
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Children’s Books Still Dominated by White Boys
We’ve blogged before about the issue of representation in children’s and young-adult literature. This post by Soraya Chemaly looks at the numbers and finds that kid-lit books feature twice as many male protagonists as female ones (three times as many…
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Literary Geniuses Say Some Not-So-Genius Things
In “honor” of David Gilmour’s comments to a Hazlitt interviewer about how he refused to teach books by female authors, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean rounded up some other literary men’s contributions to the field of misogyny. From Hemingway blaming all men’s…
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Rest in Peace, Patriarchy
Yesterday, Slate announced the death of the patriarchy at the age of several thousand years. The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel has honored the dearly departed, which will be mourned by civilizations across the globe, by compiling a list of “39 Things We’ll Miss About…
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“Hunting Deer at the Spa”
“Do you feel pressure to have children before it’s too late?” “There aren’t a lot of photos out there of you. Is there a reason for that?” Read these and other questions that have been posed to female authors—but at…
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NYRB Joins LRB in Hole, Helps Keep Digging
As we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a number of publications. The New York Review of Books‘ ratio has…
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The Slut-Shaming of Anthony Weiner
What would it look like to slut shame a middle-aged, heterosexual man?
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Pay No Attention to the Sexism Behind the Curtain
At a relatively slim 3700 words, Moira Weigel’s and Mal Ahern’s essay “Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child,” sparked by less-than-enlightened political text Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, manages a comprehensive indictment of misogyny in all the…
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LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women.…