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Notes -
The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."
Just some scattered thoughts.
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
...
It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.
When there are more men writers it’s prima facie evidence of discrimination; when there are more women writers it’s because men suck.
This type of asymmetry is everywhere and it is always completely predictable how it will go from relative positions on the oppression hierarchy.
I've had similar thoughts when it comes to language. Is it sexist if a gendered language (like Spanish) treats the masculine as the default case, or e.g. that words like "mankind" is based on the masculine word? If it was the inverse, would people complain that the male had it's own superior "exceptional" category and the female was simply generic?
To avoid trying to draw conclusions from hypotheticals, do you have any examples of
If so, it would show that hand-wringing over masculine-default terms is who/whom / motivated complaining / isolated demand for rigor.
I can provide here.
In French we've had multiple waves of performative linguistic alterations of gender in many contradictory directions.
In my youth it used to be appropriate to refer to women in positions of power by using the masculine (Madame le Ministre) because to use a special word would imply women in those positions were different or lesser in dignity.
These days it's appropriate to use the feminine (Madame la Ministre) because to not feminize titles would imply that women were not worthy of such titles.
The paradox here of course is that properly speaking French has no masculine, only neutral and feminine, and this state of affairs can and has been twisted in all possible directions for linguistic novelty, from creating all new feminized titles where neutral titles existed (Autrice) to adding dots in the middle of words to signify explicit inclusion in the political sense (Auteur.ice).
All this forever in the service of the cause of women of course.
Though I might also have an interesting counterfactual. Because a very long time ago the switch to the grammatical rule that says groups of mixed gender are considered masculine (that is to say neutral) instead of of the last gender mentioned was done on political grounds because men were deemed of a greater station. Or so I've been taught.
Of course all that I've been taught of linguistics tells me this prescriptivism is nonsense and of those proposed fads only persist those that actually simplify use. But who can say?
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