The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is Blogging While Female Really So "Perilous"?

On the occasion of a zillion geeks descending on Austin for SXSW, the Austin Chronicle considers the so-called "perils of being a female blogger." According to the article, while the blogosphere is rife with chicks everywhere you click, the "professional blogging sphere" raises the question: "Where are all the women?" From the ranks of the purportedly underrepresented, Mediabistro's Rebecca Fox and the Daily Beast's Rachel Sklar step forward to helm a SXSW panel: "Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?"

To wit: "For professional female bloggers, writing online can get painfully personal—and so can the criticism. Oversharing, sex-blogging, fameballs, Tumblettes, Jezebelism—why is it (still) so difficult to be a woman online?" Who's to blame for making lady bloggers online lives so miserable? The patriarchy and Christianity, of course! Or, as Fox puts it, "keeping your mouth shut has long been tantamount to being 'good,' and the virgin/whore complex is alive and well both online and off." In the end, they conclude, it's (gasp) "dangerous to be a female blogger."

Dangerous to blog if you have a vagina? Blogging while female a "bloodsport"? "There are endless examples of female bloggers coming under the knife for being bitches or media whores, while male bloggers' gender is either ignored or heralded," the Chronicle's Sofia Resnick writes. Really? If there was ever an equal opportunity attack forum, the Internet is it. Mostly upper-middle class, well-educated, by-and-large Caucasian women who seek to publish their words on the Web get what everyone else gets online: a free, uncensored platform with a roving pack of readers who have the right to say whatever they want as part of the "conversation." Get over yourselves, and get on with it, ladies.

Why I Don't Yawn When I Talk About Women Writers

E.J., it was actually W.H. Auden who wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen," and the line you cite is perhaps one of the misinterpreted and misquoted lines of our time. Auden, I believe, meant the opposite of what you imply in your post; he was, in fact, arguing that literature (including poetry) is crucial to our self-conception as humans, as cultures. That is, it is influential, even if few of us can say that reading a novel has, say, gotten us a job or stopped a country from going to war. The line you quoted is from his elegy for W.B. Yeats, and the rest of the stanza is quite relevant to our discussion:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

That is, a poem is a "way of happening," something that survives by being read and absorbed by the culture.

Another poetic quote came to my mind while reading your post: Marianne Moore, who famously wrote "I, too, dislike it." She was talking about poetry, but I thought of it in relationship to our discussion. Yes, like you, I'm not crazy about the discussion of Why Aren't There as Many Great Female Novelists, etc. But I don't think I can just yawn either. "Best-of" lists may be the province of geeks, but I think it's important to keep asking whether women writers get short shrift. Because even if prize-giving and list-making is highly subjective, prizes and honors help give you the financial freedom to write (either directly, by handing out $$$ or, indirectly, by helping you get a good job with a low teaching load). Call me selfish, but I'll be pissed if in my poetic career I have to do twice the work as my male peers to get half the salary and concurrent freedom.

I guess that means I should be all for your idea of a special prize for female writers—except that it bugs me that women might still need to be considered separate but equal. Why not just equal?

Women and the Quest to Write the Great American Novel

Noreen, Nina, and Bonnie were discussing the vexed question of why so few women have produced what might be called “the great American novel,” and I want to jump in belatedly. Maybe the problem is, as Laura Miller suggested, that that few (white) women take on "big novels." But the reasons behind this are complicated. First, until recently, most women didn't have the social and economic wherewithal to make a life for themselves as artistic writers; read the big new Elaine Showalter history of American women's writing, A Jury of Her Peers, and you’ll be struck by how many of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women" were writing to support themselves and their families—which is different from writing to fulfill ambition. Second, Noreen, I think you’re right to suggest that the way we define "ambition" in the novel skews toward a, well, masculinist project—a bias toward the big and sprawling novel, an adventurous quest novel, rather than anything that can be defined as "domestic." (I touched on this indirectly on a piece praising the “small novel.”) Third, it’s been hard for female novelists to persuade critics of the seriousness of their endeavor.

But I think we do have some great American novels by women. Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, in my mind, is not just a good novel, but one of the most important novels of the latter half of the 20th century. It's the first female quest novel of any real stature. And, paradoxically, it is also a domestic novel. It's just that the heroine chooses to break free of the routinized monotony of "housekeeping" in order to be a itinerant, a traveler. The novel is profound on its own terms. But it's also a powerful critique about how we think about the novel in America. By no means is Housekeeping an explicitly "feminist novel," and yet on a certainly level it's the most feminist novel I can think of: one that decisively complicates some very tired gender categories.

Her Great American Novel

"Why Can't a Woman Write the Great American Novel?" Others here have weighed in already on why the literary canon seems to be lacking when it comes to Great American Novels written by women. What struck me about Laura Miller's essay was the same line Noreen pulled out:

Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.

Male authors also fetishize writing the Great American Novel. Somehow, I get the sense Miller finds all this male ambition problematic. Is it? Or is there a serious lack of female writers who aspire to write the Great American Novel? That, I find, would be problematic.

Women, Writing, and Work

... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.

Writing While Female

Meghan, I, too, felt Rebecca Traister's "The Great Girl Gross-Out" raises more questions than it answers. Moe Tkacik's tampon-gone-missing tale, Tracie Egan's female ejaculation chronicles, Miranda Purves' post-childbirth sex life—they're all a strange mix of the need to confess, the desire to shock, and the want of page-views. I don't think any of this "gross-out girl" writing is particularly feminist, postfeminist, or whatever else kind of feminist, nor do I think it is without import or solely designed to garner attention. It strikes me as copycat fratire—the boneheaded hijinks of Tucker Max meets the Farrelly brothers. How about: chicktire. Boys can sleep around? We can too! Boys can do gross-out stuff! We can too! Freud: "The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology." Taking the metaphor literally, they've located the dark continent between their legs and, scrutinizing it in public, presume themselves investigators of female sexuality by way of taking a trip up the river of their vaginal canals.

I'm more interested in Meghan's question: "Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting [the] female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect?" Perhaps "modest" isn't exactly what we're looking for here; maybe not "neutral" either. Can writing about the female body go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?

Looking around, it's hard to come up with examples of writing that does so, frankly. Marguerite Duras? Hélène Cixous? Molly Bloom? Addie Bundren has a great line in As I Lay Dying: "I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a ----- and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse." The place where Faulkner "writes" what Addie "is" is a blank space on the page. Écriture féminine it ain't (or is it?), but the place where the words aren't may speak more to the totality of womanhood than any gross-out girl's words could ever hope to reveal about their writer's darkest places.

Whatever Will Be, Will Be

Oh, Bonnie, thanks for that inspiring and wise post. With a job I love, a child that is a serious contender for the title of world's greatest kid (I know every parent thinks that, but hey, one of us has to be right, right?), not to mention a partner so devoted, hardworking, and cute that I recently compared him to Wall-E, I know I have precious little to bitch about. (Not that that's ever stopped me before.) The story of your years as a single-mom private investigator in D.C. is riveting (have you pitched this to Showtime yet?), and that vision of happily-ever-after—you and your honey pursuing your writing on separate floors, with occasional YMCA breaks—is something to aspire to. (Oh, and thanks for calling me "thirtysomething." Heh.)

And Samantha, because you solicited our thoughts on what to say to a daughter daydreaming about a financial Prince Charming: Though I'm sure it is likely happen at some point, I would be horrified. This is why I plan to keep her away as long as possible from Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid—pretty much any Disney movie or other heterosexual rescue fantasy. Can't she have a few years of imagining her life in some way unbound by those narratives?

My grandmother used to sing my siblings and me a song, "Que Sera Sera" (it's the song sung by Doris Day to her son at the creepy climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much.) The lyrics of the first verse go like this: "When I was just a little girl/ I asked my mother, what will I be?/ Will I be pretty, will I be rich?/ Here's what she said to me ..." Now, since I'm put off by the the values espoused in those lines, I sing it to my daughter like this: "Will I be happy/Will I be strong?" I know my doctored version won't keep the princess fantasies at bay forever, but whatever will be will be.

How Work-Life Balance Is Like the George Bush Center for Intelligence (Oxymorons R Us)

Sugar Pie in the Sky

Jessica, I want to know: What are these fabulous, creative, part-time jobs that we would all be enjoying if only our putative sugar parents would subsidize us? Is there a job, freelance or no, that offers "lucrative assignments and continued relevance" (not to mention a dental plan) and that doesn't entail longer hours of work than anyone with a child (or anyone who wants a rich personal life outside of work) can possibly spare? I fear that Dahlia's stark assessment of the reality of working motherhood is soberingly true: If you dedicate yourself to excelling in your field, you will daily find yourself enacting scenarios from the Harry Chapin ballad "Cat's in the Cradle," that AM-radio classic in which a busy father misses out on his son's childhood because ... oh, don't make me describe that song, I'll start weeping. I talked about this a bit in Slate's Movie Club yesterday when I described my daughter yelling "Don't work!" as I hustle off to yet another movie screening at 6 p.m. To be a working mother is to be told daily by everyone, including an authority as irrefutable as your own 2-year-old, that you're doing it all wrong. And they're all, in some way, right—but what's the alternative? Is there any middle ground between "Cat's in the Cradle" and sitting home smoking Djarums on someone else's dime?

It seems to me that what Jessica's asking for—and it's a completely legitimate thing for the next generation of women to want—isn't so much a wealthy suitor as a restructuring of the American workplace, not to mention the American educational system. Why marry Thurston Howell III to ensure your kid a spot in private school when there's a good public school down the block? Maybe Barack Obama will be our Prince Charming. But with the economy in the shape it's in, he ain't gonna be anybody's sugar daddy.

All Day Long I'd Biddy Biddy Bum ...

I agree with June. Except it’s not that I suspect that all journalists secretly fantasize about becoming freelancers (two words: dental plan). I just suspect that every working woman secretly fantasizes about marrying someone with boatloads of money. Not because, as Jessica suggests, we all secretly dream of princess-hood. No, I think it’s because the myth of work-life balance has been so thoroughly demolished at this point that any rational woman understands it’s not to be had.

Sarah Palin? Bad mom for refusing to defer her career for her kids. Caroline Kennedy? Bad senator for refusing to defer caring for her kids to pursue her career. Only way out? Marry someone so rich, you can work and take care of your kids at the same time! I’m not sure that opposing such a strategy makes you a retro-feminist, Hanna. I just think that given the sheer impossibility of balancing work and kids, a young woman isn’t totally insane to dream of a corner office and a nanny.

All Writers Are Whores

Or so said Harold Robbins. And I agree. Twelve years in the freelance game—sometimes making a lot of money, sometimes making very little money—oh, what I wouldn't do for a sugar daddy. Freelancing is a tough, lonely business. The idea of a man lining my pockets with enough cash to not have to worry about the rest and focus on the writing sounds like a small slice of writerly heaven to me.

Walter Benjamin: "For you ask all too timidly: 'Either all women are prostitutes or no women are?' No: 'Either all people are prostitutes or no one is.' Well, choose your own answer. But I say: We all are. Or should be."

I'd venture if the stigma was lesser, there'd be more male writers out there riding the sugar-mommy train. Too bad feminist rhetoric doesn't pay my bills.