More thoughts on writing, gender and statistics

Here's a thing I've just noticed about this week's copy for the column of short book reviews I'm currently writing for the Sydney Morning Herald (what I'm writing, this week, I mean -- won't be published till early Feb).

It's something I think to check from time to time and I'm glad to say that even when I'm not doing it consciously I usually manage, over the course of four book reviews, to mix up genre, gender and nationality pretty evenly. The literary editor does the first cull of the books that come in for review and sends me more than I need, and then I choose from them.

(I'm always startled to realise how many people think reviewers choose their own books, at least for hard-copy publications. Books for review, and reviewers for them, are chosen by the literary editor, though reviewers will often make a pitch to review this or that book.)

Mostly when people are counting statistics about whether men or women are getting more coverage, they don't look any further than the numbers. This week's copy features three women writers and one man. With four books to review per week, the most frequent gender ratio in my own columns (as I say, not often deliberately: frankly I'm proud of having internalised this to the point where I usually don't even think about it) is 2:2. Sometimes, as this week, it's 3:1, one way or the other. Very rarely is it 4:0 but when it is, again, the all-male and all-female weeks are pretty equal in terms of numbers.

Recently I compared stats with a fellow writer of multiple short reviews per week, over a period of months, and was astounded to see that of 88 books I'd reviewed in that time, 45 were by women and 43 by men. Not chosen deliberately; the cards just fell that way.

However.

Part of my job is to select a Pick of the Week, which gets twice as long a review as the others. It's usually pretty easy to do, especially in a weak week. Sometimes a book just leaps out at you; other times it's a tossup between two, or even more. Usually I pick the one that has the largest number of positive things to be said about it, which would seem to guarantee that the largest number of people won't feel as though they have been misled if they ever get round to reading the book.

This week, I happened to notice that the Pick of the Week is the only book out of the four that was written by a man. It's a clear winner, though the others are fine and none of them is downright bad -- although this isn't always the case. I have no problems with this choice at all.

But if I looked at my column for, say, four weeks in a row, or over a period of six months, and noticed that I had reviewed more women writers than men but that the men's books were consistently being featured as Pick of the Week, I would. I would have a problem with it, and with myself. There'd be some ferocious self-interrogation going on. But it's not a thing that the raw stats would pick up.

South Australian Labor: same old same old

Memo to Premier Mike Rann and the Labor Party of South Australia:

1) If you want things to change, you have to change things.

2) Slightly more than half the voters of South Australia are women. Only slightly, but in the two-party preferred system, 'slightly' might as well be the whole enchilada.

In today's news that the SA Treasurer and Deputy Premier Kevin Foley has resigned after a series of unfortunate incidents, here in alphabetical order are the names of those affected by these changes: those who have been promoted, or reshuffled, or are struggling to hang on to their current portfolios and positions.

Bernie
Jack
Jay
John
Kevin
Michael
Mike
Paul
Tom

This situation didn't happen overnight. Much of it is the behind-the-scenes doing of a second Tom, whose attitude to women is well known. And while the recruiting of one token high-profile woman (as part of a wider strategy of nobbling charismatic Adelaide outliers so they'll be inside the tent) and then keeping her in cotton wool may not have worked out so well, that's no reason not to have another go.

I could understand it if, in the wake of the scandal last year over the Premier's long-ago fling with a pneumatic blonde waitress whose husband subsequently, at a public dinner, beat him about the head and shoulders with a rolled-up wine magazine (and oh my, that's a pure Adelaide detail I'll never get sick of), Rann had decided to simply cut his losses with women voters, knowing that's ground he will never make up. But hey, if ever there were an occasion for whipping up a bumper sticker saying I HAVE A VAGINA, AND I VOTE, now would be the time. Except that I'm sure it's been done.

Lots of luck in 2014, dudes.

Yes, we know

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm quite a fan of Crikey reporter Bernard Keane and am enjoying his weekday reports in Crikey's special extra early-morning campaign newsletter. And I am an even bigger fan of George Megalogenis, one of the few grown-up journalists this country seems to have left.

However.

Here's Keane is this morning:

The impact of the Latham “intervention” on the weekend is yet to be played out, but I suspect George Megalogenis was right in suggesting yesterday [Keane doesn't say where] that there appears to be a pattern of men trying to undermine our first female prime minister.

Keane says this as though it were a new thought: as though Megalogenis had made some startling new discovery.

Female journalists and bloggers have been saying it ever since the day Gillard became Prime Minister. We have offered all sorts of evidence in support of the observation. And for the most part we have been ignored, if not squashed, mocked and derided, by blokes in online conversations about it (not all blokes, but enough of them to stifle conversation on the topic), whenever we so much as stuck our heads above the parapet and hinted that there might be a bit of it going about.

But I suppose that for some people, nothing's really real until a bloke says it.

Miles Franklin and the Mystery of Talent, or, Don't Mention the War

Because I am supposed to be a grown-up, and because I made a promise, I'm not buying into the question of the literary stag night 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award all-male shortlist beyond offering the odd brief neutral fact in other people's comments threads, and observing here, because I really cannot help myself, that if what spokesjudge Morag Fraser says is true and the judges did not realise what they had done until their shortlist was already set in stone, then the gender-blindness we thought we had diagnosed and exposed by about 1985 is actually still as bad as it ever was, even at these upper levels of cultural and intellectual endeavour.

But otherwise the howling restraint is making my ears bleed, so here by way of self-distraction is a little material on a related question: not what makes a good book, but what makes a good writer, since they are frequently not the same thing. Being a good writer is a non-negotiable condition of producing a good book, but by no means guarantees it.

I've read three books since Tuesday. All of them have been the author's first book of fiction: An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, and John the Revelator by Peter Murphy. Here in that order is a sample from each, demonstrating that when somebody's a good writer it does actually leap off the page at you and grab you round the neck, and that writing talent lies as much in the quality of pre-verbal observation as it does in what ends up on the page.

Jennet loved her husband, she liked and she disliked him, and she hated him as well.

She thinks that merely by being forceful and independent she can make a decent life, but that just isn't true -- life is tended and weeded and watered, is created out of effort, and is made from other materials than oneself.

Rows of stalls and tables laden with cheap jewellery, gimcrack stuff, necklaces and rings and charms and amulets and stones. Caravans with signs in the windows advertising Tarot and palm and crystal-ball readings. I counted my money and went up the steps to one of the caravans and knocked on the open door. A woman in a baggy jumper and a pair of sweatpants was watching a portable television blaring some sort of game show. She turned the sound down and waved a hand at an armchair beside a flimsy table.
'Fiver for your palm, tenner for the cards,' she said.
I gave her a tenner. She donned a pair of glasses and took my hand and pulled my fingers apart and peered at the lines. Her head jerked up. She stared at my face.
'Out,' she said.
'What?'
'Out.' She pushed the tenner across the table. 'And take your money with you.'
I stood and stammered, but she reached for the sweeping brush. I backed out the doorway and stumbled down the steps and into the night. The door slammed and the blinds came down. The funfair whirled around me.

Penis envy alive and well: who knew?

In today's Age there is an account by sports writer Greg Baum of the terrific tennis match last night between teenage rocket Caroline Wozniacki, the eleventh seed in the Australian Open at only 18, and Jelena Dokic, of the tragic and dramatic history thus far. The article will be read on and offline by tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of people.

I watched the whole match and it was full-on, played with great pace and power but also featuring a lot of the delicate touch and mixed-up play that players such as Hingis and Henin won all their Grand Slam trophies with.

Greg Baum's take?

The match was a beauty, a slugfest, played at take-no-prisoners tempo, worthy of the men's draw.

Now if slugging and imprisoning are your favourite things then yes of course the men's draw will be your cup of tea, along with rugby, ice hockey, heavyweight boxing, the AFL in melee mode, and gladiators v. lions and bears. If not, if you prefer different aspects of the game of tennis -- precision, skill, quick thinking -- then perhaps you won't think to make evaluative gender comparisons but will rather take each kind of spectacle, and each kind of player, of whatever gender, on her or his own particular merits.

The match was indeed worthy of international competition at the highest level. It was worthy, at its very best moments, of past greats like Navratilova and Court. But is 'worthy of the men's draw' really the highest compliment you can think of? Give me a break, Greg Baum. Shift your great fat lazy paradigm.

Don't like what they're saying? Hack them to death with sharp objects!

I love blogging. I do. But as someone who's been reading blogs of various stripes for over four years now and therefore knows more than she used to about the depths of misogyny and hatred that can be plumbed when women speak fearlessly of what they know, I have to say that this surprises me less than it would have in 2005.

Quadrant and Wimminz: Lies, damned lies, and statistics

In the wake of the Windschuttle hoax there's been a lot of discussion around the online traps, in the course of which I observed as part of an argument about something else that Quadrant was not a particularly woman-friendly space.

Along with other people who have been familiar with Quadrant for decades, I should have though this observation on a par with 'The sky is blue' or '2+2=4', but of course there was angry reaction from the sorts of people one expects to react angrily to any mention of gender whatever, a phenomenon fascinating in itself.

One of these people worked himself up into such a monumental tis-was that one would think he had been personally insulted, though he has no visible connection with Quadrant apart from reading it. So much so, in fact, that he could have done (as we all so often could in life) with a gentle reminder that this was not all about him.

Then, in the course of a discussion with a far more reasonable chap whose interest is in statistics rather than in defending Quadrant, I discovered that Quadrant does in fact publish more poems and fiction by women than I would have expected, although the same names recur again and again even within single issues, and I retracted accordingly. The reasonable statistics chap used a comparison with Meanjin to make his point, saying that in the respective current issues of Meanjin and Quadrant there were more poems by women in the latter than in the former, which was true.

In the course of this exercise I spent a bit of time at the home pages of the respective magazines, and it gave me an idea: each mag has a 'current issue' page listing all contributors, and it was reasonable to expect that other magazines would as well. So here are some numbers I gathered, as at last night, from the 'current issue' pages of Australian magazines -- monthly, quarterly, bi-annual -- that are partly or wholly literary in content.

In one or two cases there was one name on the page whose gender could not be determined by even the most assiduous Googling -- but no more than one, which is nowhere near enough to skew the order in which the mag titles appear here. Each contributor has been counted only once, though occasionally the same name appears twice or more. Let me repeat that these numbers are based on the contributor names listed in the magazines' own online home pages, on the evening of 12 January 2008 2009.

(*Sighs and reflects that one always does this at least once in the first week or two*.)

Please note that this does not claim to be an exhaustive list of magazines.

The numbers show the ratio MEN:WOMEN. I offer them in a spirit of scientific curiosity, without comment.


ISLAND MAGAZINE 1:2

HEAT MAGAZINE 11:13

SOUTHERLY 9:7

CORDITE POETRY REVIEW 17:13 [update]

OVERLAND 4:3

MEANJIN: 23:16

GRIFFITH REVIEW 3:2

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 9:5

THE MONTHLY 2:1

QUADRANT 13:4

Obscenity

We has it.



Found via Hoyden About Town.

This is just wrong in too many ways to count, but here are four to be going on with:

1) False advertising. A woman the size and shape of the one in the photo doesn't 'need' to wear this or any other torture garment. I am of an age to have spent the first year of my adolescence being forced to wear 'foundation garments' (then suddenly they invented pantyhose -- stockings had hitherto been kept up by girdles, and if you were over fourteen and left your legs bare you were a slut -- and the world changed overnight) so I know whereof I speak.

2) Allegedly to minimise 'figure faults' and maximise 'assets', this garment has a (porno)graphic subtext, not particularly sub, that fetishises the arse in a way that makes crotchless 'panties' look innocent, normal and sweet. I have my own ideas about where this growing arse/anal fetish is going. Between it and the various charming customs around the place -- mass abortion of female foetuses in countries where of course everybody wants a boy; large-scale rape of babies and toddlers in the belief that it will cure AIDS -- the global overpopulation problem is already well on the way to being sorted.

3) This 'body shaper' underwear craze is bringing back the quaint locutions of the 1950s, isn't that sweet? Do a quick prac crit / close reading / fisk of these corset manufacturers' advertising some time. 'Body shapers' = 'Your own uncorseted body has no shape, ew, men won't like it [*makes child-frightening bogeyman noises*], so put that self-esteem in the garbage right now and spend money instead.'

4) OK Girls, Break Through the Surface of the Primeval Slime or Die Trying department: this garment is a patriarchal instrument of torture. Do. Not. Wear. It. Or anything like it. Ever.

Those who don't understand (or don't want to understand) that 'patriarchal' can apply in a situation like this where women appear to be willingly doing these things to themselves are being literal-minded essentialists who don't understand what a patriarchal society is or how it works, and no correspondence will be entered into on this subject because I spent 17 years explaining it to fresh crops of newbie students every year and that is enough for a lifetime. In a nutshell: when you say 'Yes but women want to do this to themselves' I will reply 'Yes indeed, many of them do. Why is that, do you think?'

I know there are men out there who deliberately Google 'patriarchy' so they can turn up at strange blogs for the first time and argue the toss, and any such (instantly recognisable) comment will be binned. Go here if you genuinely want to understand this concept better than you do.

How To Erase Women and Perpetuate the Dominant Culture

There's a good article about the death of Australian backpacker Britt Lapthorne in today's online Age by Rod Curtis in Dubrovnik. Curtis went and talked to a goodly assortment of the citizens of that city and asked them what they thought and how they felt about Lapthorne's death.

The central point around which the piece revolves, the plank on which the whole article is (very well and thoughtfully) built, is that local opinion is very clearly divided along gender lines.

Men -- mostly young men -- think Lapthorne got drunk, went for a swim and drowned.

Women -- all kinds of women -- think she was raped and murdered.

And what headline has the online minion at the Age seen fit to give this clear, thoughtful, well-argued piece of writing?

Locals blame it on the booze.