It’s not ‘complicated’, it’s sexism
March’s London Review of Books featured no fiction reviews and only 11 per cent of non-fiction reviews by women.
Sadly, March 2013 wasn’t a bad month; it wasn’t a blip or an anomaly or one of those months where they simply forgot women can be as talented and culturally relevant as men.
In 2012, the gender split at the The London Review of Books (LRB) was just as egregious.
Of an annual total of 276 published reviews, 66 were written by women.
There were 74 female authors deemed worthy of reviewing in 2012, a figure dwarfed by the 203 male authors afforded scrutiny and prominence.
Although these stats rankle, placed against just about every other sphere of arts, culture and the media, such female underrepresentation is unsurprising, if not expected.
Expected, not accepted.
And so it was that, inspired by the Guardian’s recent infographic “The Gender Balance of UK Literary Culture’ and informed by her own experiences as a subscriber, author Kathryn Heyman emailed the LRB to express her concerns.
In a searing exchange, reproduced on her blog, Heyman informed the publication that she had deliberately neglected to renew her subscription because ‘based on the tedious regularity with which you ignore female writers and female reviewers, I have to assume that my lady-money is not welcome in the man-cave of the LRB’.
Heyman concluded her email with this entreaty: ‘If at some point you choose to step into the terrifying world of gender equality, do let us know’.
‘Paul’ of the LRB responded to Heyman’s witty excoriation in terms so blandly evasive he seemed to disprove the theory implicit in his employer’s publishing practices: that women don’t write as well, or have as much of worth to say, as men.
Paul suggested the reasons for the underrepresentation of women were ‘complicated; actually, as complicated as it gets….despite the distress it causes us…the efforts we’ve made to change the situation have so far been unsuccessful”.
This response was depressingly reminiscent of the Today programme, whose assertion that they were unable to find any female experts to discuss breast cancer was swiftly countered and led to the creation of the expert database, The Women’s Room.
Similarly, what amounted to a linguistic shrug of the shoulders from the LRB, led Kathryn Heyman and others to consider just how hard the publication was trying to redress its cavernous gender disparity and whether its ‘complicated’ reasons for this disparity held any weight.
The LRB’s defence, such as it was, seemed to hinge on a fallacy: that ‘more men actively seek to be published’.
A moot point when the journal goes on to admit to Heyman that ‘the vast majority of pieces that we carry are commissioned by the editors’.
The suggestion that more men seek to be published, and aggressively pitch their work, is a regular facet of the conversations and arguments concerning representation in literary journals.
The argument that men get on in life and are better represented by virtue of the fact they are emboldened to come right out and ask for it is essentialising nonsense. This ‘masculine overconfidence’ – pitching reviews, asking for pay rises and snaffling all the promotions – is presumably taking place while women are tittering behind their fans and squeaking ‘I couldn’t possibly’.
The LRB seem fully on board with the excuse that women’s innate meekness is to blame for their underrepresentation, tweeting to some vocal detractors ‘why not email us your writing samples? Men do all the time’.
Sure they do. That’s definitely the only reason you regularly ignore half the population.
It’s obviously nothing to do with systemic sexism and the privileging of masculinity.
And even if women did start emailing writing samples in their thousands, the LRB would still continue, presumably, to commission most of its articles.
Which brings us back round nicely to the role of the LRB.
As Danielle Pafunda of Vida explains ‘historically, an editor’s job has been to actively engage writers, to search out the new, bring the under-acknowledged into the light’.
Surely then, the logic goes, the LRB just need to commission more women. They’re not actually hard to find.
Indeed, Heyman gave the journal a good starting point when she published a list of ‘eminent, established [female] writers and academics’ which was, by her own admission, ‘incomplete’ and ‘drawn together from a five minute conversation’.
For Books’ Sake also waded in, emailing the LRB with offers of assistance in finding these elusive female writers, while making the astute point that ‘to us, the issue doesn’t seem that complicated at all. We feature women writers on a daily basis, unpaid, alongside our full-time jobs. Surely LRB, with all its influence and resources, should be able to do the same?’
This statement, perhaps more than anything, exposes the half-heartedness of the LRB’s alleged commitment to the issue of gender equality.
It seems as if the English Literature students’ vision of the whisky-soaked, middle class, university educated and hugely masculine literary ‘establishment’ has not changed all that much.
These types of writers are all still here, writing novels, winning awards, representing the ‘art’ of fiction.
Yet although women write and read the majority of fiction, female writing is much less likely to be canonised, to be reviewed and to be celebrated.
And, actually, it matters little how many women novelists and reviewers there are if women are not publicised or treated with rigour and as capable of producing culturally relevant discourse.
Until this happens, and while the horribly gendered and diminishing marketing of female writers as some kind of ‘genre’ such as ‘chick-lit’ or ‘aga saga’ remains, credence will continue to be given to the lie that only men can write well, and write importantly.
Writer and critic Bidisha called the erasure and obfuscation of women from public life in this manner ‘cultural femicide’.
She’s right, so please stop waving Hilary Mantel in our faces as if the anomaly is enough to placate us.
Perhaps Paul and the LRB need a binder, or at least someone more practised in defending the indefensible.
‘essentialising nonsense’ = love it.
You hear the same argument covering sexist violence in the home – its complicated. And i guess it is, trying to look like society supports equal human status and opportunity for females … When in fact it doesnt. V complicated …
What a well written – and informative – article.
Very well written article and point excellently argued.
I’ve been following this LRB story with interest. I’ve met the publisher of the LRB (Nicholas Spice) at several private functions, and once stood within earshot when he was asked very directly why the LRB publishes so few women. His reply was brutally simple: “Mary-Kay doesn’t like women.”
It was a response that hinted there wasn’t much he could do about it. Which is really the problem here. Mary-Kay Wilmers is the magazine’s editor. She also owns it, which is an unpalatable proposition for any magazine. She funds the entire operation and doesn’t have to answer to anybody. Even in the days when the LRB took an Arts Council grant, it still didn’t really have to answer to anybody because VIDA didn’t exist in those days.
So financial support won’t be withdrawn, the male contributors who write for it are unlikely to desert the product, the opprobrium that has been kicked up will settle until next year when VIDA publishes its annual update revealing the exact same situation, and nothing will change.
The LRB isn’t the only guilty title, but it is the only title run and owned by a woman who has the intelligence and wherewithal to change the situation but seemingly refuses to do so. A large contingent of female writers found in its pages come from the small magazine n+1, which was co-founded by Christian Lorentzen, currently a senior editor at the LRB. Is it possible that without the effort of this one editor, the LRB’s gender policy would be in a far worse state?
Thank you for your comments everyone, much appreciated.
LindyHop, I found your comment very illuminating. I was aware of Mary-Kay Wilmers’ editorship of the LRB but did not know she had full ownership. I had read of her allegedly speaking of female critics’ tendency to be ‘a bit jargony or a bit breathless’ and was hoping it had been taken out of context.
Maybe the set-up at LRB of which you speak was the ‘complicated’ nature of things alluded to by Paul. It certainly seems more perplexing, if not more ‘complicated’, than it first appeared to me.