The Plot Sickens

To focus on misogyny is to obscure American Psycho’s scope, to ignore that the book is an uncompromising, unapologetic vortex of misanthropy and nihilism. Its narrator expresses disgust, contempt, anxiety and fear towards women, gay people, art students, Jewish people, the non-WASP, the homeless, the poor – anyone, in fact, who differs even by a small degree (a marginally more impressive business card, a better restaurant table) from the ideal which Bateman forces himself to emulate and sustain. Men in the novel are portrayed as unsympathetically as women, and dispatched as dispassionately – so why is it the torture and death of women that seems to abide with the reader?

Chip Kidd’s cover redesign for Picador, 2011

Like all satire, the book exaggerates and burlesques that which already exists. The book’s scenes of torture and murder were, apparently, all based on Ellis’ reading of real life cases and criminology textbooks, not whimsically called into being by him. So American Psycho on one level is an uncensored, unsanitised exposé of what has already been done to women without any incitement or instruction from its author. Neither does Ellis’ writing give the impression that violence against women is in any way attractive. The impression it does give, to me at least, is that violence against women is horrifying, viscerally disgusting, and the preserve of fucked-up, nightmarish individuals who are increasingly prevalent during a stage of socio-economic development which encourages selfishness and greed over empathy, and whose actions are increasingly ignored or disbelieved within the same environment. His work is a mirror, not a manifesto or an instruction manual. To posit it as something qualitatively worse either than crimes actually committed against women throughout history, or to the presentation of sexualised violence or serial killing in almost any other area of the entertainment world, seems dubious.

It’s worth noting too how the deaths of Bateman’s victims are affected by their socio-economic background. Having decided against the murder of his date Patricia – a minor character so boringly materialistic that I’m fully on board with the theory that takes her to be Patrick’s imaginary female persona – Bateman reflects on whether it’s ‘her family’s wealth [that] protects her tonight’. In contrast, the vagrants and call girls he kills are already economic casualties, considered disposable even before they become casualties of violence. No character from society’s lower strata appears to be missed; it is only Paul Owen, Patrick’s peer and rival, whose disappearance is considered deserving enough to warrant a police investigation. The crude and blatant contrast between Bateman’s lifestyle and that of his victims – their disparity in wealth, and therefore in power, is explicitly fetishized in more than one encounter – which calls attention to the issue of why the victims of such killers are so often sex workers, or homeless, or transient, both male and female:

“Within police culture… we know that if a prostitute goes missing and is reported as missing, that they won’t be given the same priority as other people would get… [sex workers are not] valued enough in our culture for the police to take it seriously.”

– David Wilson, Howard League for Penal Reform

– again intertwining a socio-economic indictment with a proto-feminist impulse.

The Plot Thickens

Redesign for Picador’s 40th anniversary (Neil Lang)

One could argue incessantly about whether the book itself is misogynistic, or edifying, or indeed readable, but a
more productive debate centres on whether one can like art that one also acknowledges as problematic. When reading Anwyn Crawford’s excellent critique of the treatment of women in the lyrics and prose of that other aging enfant terrible, Nick Cave, I wasn’t convinced by all of her analysis – Cave’s work at least in its earlier phases seems, like Ellis, preoccupied with morbidly examining a pathologised masculinity rather than valorising it – but the most substantial point I drew from the ensuing debate was that the issue may be less such works themselves and more their involvement in the mainstreaming, acceptance and excusing of problematic attitudes. The gynophobic aspects of these works are made respectable by being cloaked as edgy or transgressive, when they merely dramatise the violence and inequality that already exists. Although I still contend that the violence in Ellis’ writing is not there as intentional titillation, as long as there are those for whom such things are lived experience, rather than escapist fantasy or performance material, then there will be a correspondingly visceral response to their artistic portrayal.

Although readers who read for prurient or puerile pleasure are hardly something for which writers can bargain or legislate, questions can be asked about the cachet Ellis manages to retain in the world of Guardian profiles and Soho salons, when other works of equally politicised and equally slapstick splatterpunk – Dennis Cooper, say, or Stewart Home, or even The SCUM Manifesto – languish in the ‘cult fiction’ gutter. Helen Zahavi’s brilliant Dirty Weekend, a novel published the same year as American Psycho, explores similar themes but blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator. There are marked stylistic differences, sure – Zahavi uses lyrical prose to distance or distract the reader from the trauma and gore she describes, whereas Ellis more or less rubs the reader’s face in it – and the violence of Zahavi’s protagonist is entirely reactive: she wishes only to be left alone and when she is not, she strikes out and strikes upwards. Dirty Weekend, despite receiving polarised reviews on publication, has had nothing like the long-term vilification heaped upon American Psycho, but by the same token has received far less enduring acclaim or even attention.

Maybe it’s just Ellis’ pre-existing status as wunderkind author of Less Than Zero that elevates his subsequent work. Or it might be the very obviousness of his traditionalist politics – American Psycho has more than a bit in common with something like Last Exit to Brooklyn, a cult novel of 1964 which also enlists depictions of depravity and sexual violence in the service of what can look an awful lot like proscriptive neo-puritanism. Is there more mainstream space for works which reproduce existing social structures and power relations, which, even if they challenge their existence, do so through the evidently ambiguous strategies of grotesque exaggeration or reductio ad ridiculum rather than direct disruption? For all its horrified laughter at the state we’re in, American Psycho isn’t in the business of imagining alternatives to it.

Marshall Arisman’s cover for Vintage Books’ UK edition

I read the book as a deeply moral – disappointingly puritan, if you like – anti-capitalist and even vaguely feminist tract. American Psycho is a house built with the tools of the master: it is, just like 1980s capitalism, crass, lurid, vulgar, heavy-handed and unapologetic. It bludgeons home its basic homily, that consumerism fails to make us happy or to lend meaning to our lives, with all the subtle and delicate artistry of a Reagan speech. But beyond this, in 2012 it’s undeniable that the values and trends the book castigated two decades back have only become more deeply entrenched. Does the book’s earnest, and still depressingly relevant, indictment of capitalism and consumerism excuse its scenes of rape, torture and murder? Maybe not, but I think those who criticise the book on these grounds, like those who called for its suppression and boycott twenty years ago, end up alienating a potential if problematic ally.

Nightmares on Wall Street

It’s hard to take seriously much that Ellis says, about either this book in particular or his work in general. A lot of his public pronouncements deal in Dylanesque obfuscation, or deliberate outrage-baiting – his Twitter account alone is a masterclass in trolling – which makes it both absurd and unfortunate that his work is so often perceived as deadly serious and condemned on the same grounds. His explanations of the origins of American Psycho, though, have the ring of sincerity, and place the book in opposition to the impact of 1980s society and culture on the individual male:

‘the book is, need I even say this, a criticism of a certain kind of masculinity and a certain kind of white male, heterosexual, capitalist, yuppie scumbag behavior.’

– Bret Easton Ellis, 2011

‘Whenever I am asked to talk American Psycho, I have to remember why I was writing it at the time and what it meant to me. A lot of it had to do with my frustration with having to become an adult and what it meant to be an adult male in American society. I didn’t want to be one, because all it was about was status. Consumerist success was really the embodiment of what it meant to be a cool guy.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2011

‘[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2010

Fay Weldon, one of very few women to positively review the novel, did so while emphasising its anti-capitalist aspects. Elizabeth Young, too, identified Patrick Bateman as not a character but a cipher indicating the nihilism and emptiness of yuppie culture and identity.

Bateman is of course capitalism’s dirty little secret – the madman in the attic. His sociopathy is mirrored in the socio-economic inequality and political insincerity around him. In his world, the atomised and alienated dealings of colleagues, friends and lovers are highlighted through contrast with the visceral intimacy of murder, and Ellis’ stylistic trick of detailing frenzied sex and violence in flat and clinically dispassionate prose does not disguise that as a form of human encounter it carries more weight than Bateman’s ritualised interactions with colleagues or his sexless and loveless interactions with girlfriends. His narration frequently betrays a yearning for consummation, contact and engagement in the midst of the desperate aching loneliness, the longing for meaning (even Bateman’s violence is purposeless and arbitrary) which permeates the book. In a society so unsustainably alienating and unequal that the centre plainly cannot hold, we see how badly things can fall apart.

Psycho Drama

Accused of having written ‘a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women’, Ellis found himself subject to boycotts, hate mail, death threats and violent revenge fantasies, on the basis that he had clearly written this book as either wish-fulfillment or glamorised incitement. Detractors of the book and author on these grounds display a puzzling inability to distinguish between creator and creation, which as a first principle is utterly bizarre – where is it written that characters must necessarily be extensions of an approving creator?

The novel contains a few dozen pages in amongst four hundred or so on the torture and dismemberment of women – and of men – though their impact is disproportionate. These scenes – often ludicrous, often grotesque to the point of comedy – are presented as a logical extension of the lack of empathy and mindless, numb urge to consume that characterise the world in which they take place. They don’t seem written in order to arouse any more than the determinedly un-erotic, sterile sex scenes do, or the interminable deconstructions of clothes, cosmetics and Huey Lewis’ back catalogue. The book gradually reaches a point where reading about all three feels indistinguishable in its horrific, unrelenting tedium.

The chapters in which sexual violence occurs are also, helpfully, almost all headed ‘Girls’, so you are able to avoid reading them – or I guess, according to how your tastes run, to read them in isolation and dispense with the rest of the book. I got through these scenes gingerly on my first read, treating it as a kind of endurance test, but tend to skip them on subsequent reads as they aren’t the reasons I revisit the book. I read American Psycho in the same semi-masochistic spirit in which I watch, for instance, Chris Morris’ and Charlie Brooker’s hipster-eviscerating Nathan Barley, a work also bleakly amusing, also received with disbelief and criticism of its gratuitousness, and also concerned with the consequences of elevating surface over meaning, although its slack-jawed, skinny-jeaned targets were more symptom than cause – and arguably Ellis had already been there, done that, too, with 1998’s Glamorama. I read American Psycho like I’d read any work which explored capitalism, consumerism and their messy, distasteful effects, from Voyage au bout de la nuit to The Hunger Games. (But not de Sade. Sometimes life’s just too short.)

Finally, if perhaps most obviously, it takes some effort to read Ellis’ presentation of Bateman’s attitude or actions as approving. Unlike, say, Thomas Harris depicting Hannibal Lecter, or the creators of Dexter, he gives his anti-hero little in the way of charisma or appeal. Mary Harron’s film of the novel, produced a decade after it when the stardust of the 1980s had settled somewhat, arguably does more than the book to establish Ellis’ unreliable narrator as a slick and stylish seducer rather than a pathetic interchangeable fantasist. Despite the subversive nature of Harron’s direction, Christian Bale’s tour-de-force performance renders Bateman far more compelling than his written incarnation, who is overtly racist, misogynistic and homophobic as well as dim, snobbish, superficial, chronically insecure, socially awkward, a hopeless conversationalist, and tediously obsessed with material goods. If it weren’t for the fact that almost every other character displays exactly the same character traits, it’s conceivable that the novel’s Bateman could make his dates expire of boredom without any need to break out the pneumatic nail-gun.

It’s interesting too that the film’s elevation of Bateman is bound up with its objectification of him, particularly via its concentration on his character’s proto–metrosexual aspects, but that’s a whole other essay.

• Catch the second part of this post here

Published in New York by the Knickerbocker Press

I mean, just look at it. Look harder! It’s all lavender and embossing and gold leaf and a looking-glass (wonderfully implying ‘it could be YOU’). It’s an absolutely sodding gorgeous book: rough uncut paper edges on two sides, gold leaf on the top, strange red-and-black printing on the pages which reminds me a little of the Kelmscott Press facsimile I own (made by William Morris. The most beautiful books since illuminated manuscripts. OHMIGOD read his Chaucer… *cough* Excuse me, I seem to have bibliophiled all over the place).

On closer inspection, The Spinster Book is basically a dating/courtship guide, which very much assumes that one should never, ever attempt to talk to the opposite gender like a normal human being. Indeed, it even seems to suggest that too many friendships with men put a woman in the ‘friend zone’ forever:

“To one distinct class of women men tell their troubles and the other class sees that they have plenty to tell. It is better to be in the second category than in the first.”

It’s a bit like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, but due to being 111 years out of date it’s even more laughable. (And I absolutely love dated dating advice anyway.)

The chapter titles are a treat in themselves:

• Notes on Men
• Concerning Women
• The Philosophy of Love
• The Lost Art of Courtship
• The Natural History of Proposals
• Love Letters: Old and New
• An Inquiry into Marriage
• The Physiology of Vanity
• Widowers and Widows
• The Consolations of Spinsterhood

(… note that even in 1901 courtship was considered a ‘lost art’. When precisely were the good old days, anyway?)

“There is nothing in the world so harmless and as utterly joyous as man’s conceit. The woman who will not pander to it is ungracious indeed. Man’s interest in himself is purely altruistic and springs from an unselfish desire to please.”

– Chapter 1, Notes on Men

Why I am I still unmarried? Enquiring minds want to know

Buh. Duh…. whu? A man being self-centred is actually selfless, because he’s only doing it to be adorable. So lighten up and adore him some more, regardless of how conceited he is? Can… can I get an irony check on this?

My instinct when dealing with writing from the past (rightly or wrongly) is to assume the chance of satire is reduced the longer ago the text comes from (Jonathan Swift, forgive me). However, for most of The Spinster Book, I’m realising a grain of salt is the way forward. This book does appear, at times, to be Jane Austen-wry, and puts forward some things with a fanciful glibness:

“After the door of a woman’s heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it. A storm is apt to displace the brick, however – and there is a heavy spring in the door. Woe to the masculine finger that is in the way!”

– Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

But at the same time, it treads the difficult line of mocking some concepts whilst also giving some advice very seriously. I mean, come on, we’re playing for keeps. ‘Do you want to be a spinster? No? Then listen up. No talking at the back. It could be you. It could be YOOOU.’

There’s also a lingering assumption throughout this book that both parties are playing a pretty nasty game of chess:

“He who would win a woman must challenge her admiration, prove himself worthy of her regard, appeal to her sympathy – and then wound her. She is never wholly his until she realises that he has the power to make her miserable as well as to make her happy, and that love is an infinite capacity for suffering.”

– Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

(Also: lucky girl. Jesus.)

A lot of the book has this kind of masochistic, ‘love is pain’ tone throughout – sometimes in understandable ways and sometimes completely out of the blue. Advice, advice, advice… misery and masochism sneak attack! For example, the final sentence of the ‘love letters’ chapter is “So the old love letters bring happiness after all – like the smile which sometimes rests upon the faces of the dead.”

So, yes, I was unsure what to make of this tone. Then our lovely editor Googled the author, Myrtle Reed, and some more information fell into place. By all accounts, Reed was well-known and admired in her own time. She was the author of some thirty books, which included cookbooks (published under the name Olive Green) and novels under her real name – the best known of which is probably Lavender and Old Lace.

Quick Bio:

1874: Born
1899: First novel published (she continued to publish at least one a year, sometimes more)
1901: The Spinster Book was published when she was 27
1906: Married James Sydney McCullough, a penpal, at the unusually late age of 32
1911: Died of a deliberate overdose of sleeping pills/powders aged 37.

Her suicide note, addressed to her maid, stated “If my husband had been as good and kind to me and as considerate as you, I would not be going where I am”. Horrible and sad, but also increasingly eerie from an author whose most famous epigram is this:

“The only way to test a man is to marry him. If you live, it’s a mushroom. If you die, it’s a toadstool.”

– Threads of Gray and Gold (pub. 1913)

No one on the outside knew of anything bad within their marriage. Indeed, according to Annie, Myrtle Reed’s maid, she “had never heard Mrs McCullough [née Reed] quarrel with her husband during the four years she had been at their home.” It’s useless to guess what lay behind it, or how much was a depressive tendency (which certainly seems to show in The Spinster Book), how much was a bad relationship and how much was a clearly intelligent and ambitious woman feeling desperate and trapped in a society which didn’t have many roles for women.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It started with a brilliant charity shop find which had me so hyped I that was reading passages aloud to my flatmate on the tube until he pretended he didn’t know me… and it’s ended with a bit of a reality-check, I suppose.

Although she never states in as many words that she herself is a spinster, Reed was writing the book at age 27 – five years past a woman’s usual marrying age. By the standards of her time, she was now a spinster, and was presumably preparing herself for the future. The advice I saw as laughable – that being a spinster isn’t so bad as a woman might yet find herself a nice widower – was, perhaps, Myrtle Reed’s actual hope.

The chapter ‘The Consolations of Spinsterhood’ does mention “the dazzling allurements offered by various “careers” which bring fame and perhaps fortune”, but it quickly goes on to show just how little consolation Reed considers these to be:

“The universal testimony of the great, that fame itself is barren … it is love for which she hungers, rather than fame…. If she were not free to continue the work that she loved, she would feel no deprivation.”

Although she was a successful and prolific novelist in her own time, the stigma of spinsterhood would have seemed to erode the achievements she had rightfully earned. Reed implies heavily in The Spinster Book that she would have traded it all in for a husband. Except that when she did eventually marry, that clearly didn’t make her happy either.

As much as I love mocking dating advice (old and new) for any hint of gendered assumptions, Myrtle Reed didn’t ‘opt in’ to play by those rules. In 1901 there wasn’t an ‘opt out’. And shame on me for finding the topic so hilariously trivial in the first place. Check your 21st century privilege, Hannah. If I’d lived in a time and a society where marriage was my home, my job, my finances, my legal rights and my love life all rolled into one – you bet your arse I’d agonise over it. I’d probably buy a few books on the topic too. For every snide, ironic, 21st century reader, there were probably dozens of contemporary readers poring over this book’s advice and worrying about their futures. I, on the other hand, have freedom and choices and don’t have to play nasty games to secure a man to secure my future stability – but you don’t have to go back even half as far as Reed’s time to find women who did have to work within this crapshoot of a system. Whilst artefacts like The Spinster Book make interesting time-pieces, we should never forget that many of us who stumble across it now are the lucky ones – and that our privilege is incredibly rare.

And I guess that’s one of the main reasons why I’m a feminist in the first place.

• The full text of The Spinster Book is available on Project Gutenberg.

I think it’s BRILLIANT.

Sarah C lent me How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran’s recent feminism handbook/memoir, and I expected to like it. I follow Moran on twitter where she’s always deeply funny, and I thought this would be an enjoyable read even if it’s just her personal take on the issues. What surprised me is how incredibly effective the book is – and how it does some things which are amazing from a male point of view.

Of course, cis male points of view aren’t automatically important in feminism (with some arguing that they have no place in it at all). When it comes to deciding what women want their future to be, and what they feel is harmful or unacceptable to that, men don’t really need to be part of the process. And most male feminists that I know understand that.

However, when it comes to implementing feminism against the status quo of patriarchal bullshit, when women are fighting for their rights from one direction it helps if men are on board too. If men feel threatened by coming changes, they’re more likely to do the kind of heinous, disgusting, and frequently violent things that we see thrown back at women who challenge anything the patriarchy is currently comfortable with.

Which is why I think that Caitlin Moran’s book should be compulsory reading for boys.

Photo of Caitlin Moran by Chris Floyd, which won August's "Portrait of the month" at the National Portrait Gallery. Source: http://www.npg.org.uk/

Moran does two things which are absolutely crucial. She actively calls bullshit on the many forms of misogyny which have somehow become acceptable in society, and then she laughs at them.

Calling bullshit is not a small thing. It takes incredible strength to say “no” to Hollywood, magazines, posters, tv and the expectations of your friends, family, colleagues and boss. By being brutally honest about becoming a woman – periods, body hair, boobs, everything about a teenager’s brain – she humanises it and makes it possible to go against expectations. Of COURSE the idea that every single woman needs a Brazilian shave by default is stupid bullshit. Step back a moment and compare it to real life as she does, and it becomes easy to laugh… and more importantly to finish laughing and shout HELL NO.

Boys will read this. They want to know what girls think, and what the changes happening to girls’ bodies and minds are actually like. The book is full of comedy but also danger, which keeps it exciting and holds your attention. I’m always going on about how pop culture is great because it engages people and slips messages past them while they’re having fun – this does exactly that, really well.

Importantly, when talking to the male side of the equation, it also demystifies. Male readers can look at the stupidity of some conventions, see what the reality is for women and it will become easier for them to realise where the bullshit lies.

Moran speaks directly to men in the book as well as women. After telling female readers to say the words “I am a feminist” out loud, possibly while standing on a chair (“Say it. SAY IT. SAY IT NOW! Because if you can’t, you’re basically bending over saying ‘Kick my arse and take my vote, please, the patriarchy.’“) she adds this:

“And do not think you shouldn’t be standing on that chair, shouting ‘I AM A FEMINIST!’ if you are a boy. A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution. A male feminist should ABSOLUTELY be on the chair – so we ladies may all toast you, in champagne, before coveting your body wildly.”

Note to men: this is relatively true. Identifying as a feminist in actions as well as words (unless you’re a lying weasel who is just doing it to get into their knickers) will by itself put you quite far into the “not a raging asshole” category. That’s hot. I’m just saying.

I agree with Sarah on the minor disappointments. The author’s use of “retard” on page 5 really jars and stands out, just plain doesn’t work, and isn’t okay. Where Sarah found it limiting that the events are focused only on Moran’s personal experiences, though, I didn’t think this mattered as much to the message. Where Caitlin says she doesn’t feel that the word “boobs” really describes any part of her body (and “breasts” is worse), I know some women who feel comfortable with that word – but her final decision doesn’t seem as crucial as long as the reader is made aware that girls face the situation of having to find the right words for themselves. Making everyone ask themselves the question means the answer she chooses almost doesn’t matter.

There are plenty of universal truths in there. The chapter where she reveals how the word “fat” has basically become weaponised to a greater degree than previous nuclear-level playground insults, and gives examples, all rings totally true. The stories of her 16-year-old self veer between amusing and devastating, but it just helps the reader identify with the general problem. Hell, it made *me* identify with it, when my 16-year-old self was dangerously underweight, gangly, six-foot and male.

And that’s the secret. The reason I’m excited about this book is that it’s the first one I think will be hugely effective, to women but especially to the average man. There are many modes of communication which just don’t work: language is important, but I think we can frequently become so removed from daily discourse in our attempts to avoid discriminatory words that we lose the audience entirely. Caitlin Moran will change male attitudes a million times more powerfully than, say, a paper by feminist academics which would only be read by feminist academics, containing newly invented language that boys barely understand and have not been convinced they need.

You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, “And are the *men* doing this, as well?” If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as “some total fucking bullshit”.

How to be a woman engages the reader with great humour and truth, says things of interest, and is entertaining enough to do the pop-culture stealth-feminism thing. The early reaction from feminists was “This is an important book!”, but the opinions then swayed back and forth a bit afterwards. I think “important” is precisely the right word, because it’s going to work.

Teenage boys! Want to know about teenage girls? Read this book. Men! Want to read something that’s genuinely hilarious and interesting, even if you don’t ‘do’ feminism? Read this book. It’s angry without being exclusionary, very funny, very honest, and has a real shot at inspiring a new generation to become feminists.

Top marks, Moran.

On the surface of it, I am this book’s target audience. I passed my test recently (send plaudits and flowers to the usual address), and was immediately filled with the urge to run out and buy a car. Not a simple, sensible car that can lug my marshalling gear from racetrack to racetrack, or even a smart, neat little city runabout to get me to meetings on time. No, I wanted a swooping, curving, monstrously beautiful beast of an Alfa 4C. It’s not even out yet. They’re only making a handful of them, and they’ve probably all already been sold. I wouldn’t be able to afford the deposit, let alone the monthly repayments, let alone the insurance, let alone keeping it fed and watered on UK oil prices. It’s not a car, it’s petrolhead pornography.

Couple the above unnatural lust with a penchant for heels and pearls, and surely I would jump for joy at a book with a back cover featuring a girl in a miniskirt and thigh-high purple boots bending over a car? Why, add a tasteful hair accessory or two and it could even be me!

Anyway, the pertinent point is that I did indeed read it (albeit borrowed from the library rather than sending my hard-earned cash to the pink publisher). Not just little bits. The whole damn thing, cover to cover. And I hate to say it, but I think the writer has been stitched up.

I’ve read Maria McCarthy’s columns in the Telegraph, and went in, despite the cover, expecting much the same: sensible journalism with an eye to problems faced by female drivers. It’s… not that. It’s actually rather like  – and when I say ‘like’, I mean ‘this is what I reckon happened’ – someone took McCarthy’s manuscript, looked at the proposed cover, and said, “this should have more ‘girlie’ things in it.” And then picked up the editing pen and wrote in said girlie things, whether they made sense or not.

For example, McCarthy opens her chapter on car insurance thus:

Sorting out car insurance can be a bewildering experience for many of us.

Except she doesn’t. What actually opens the chapter, in full, is:

As far as disagreeable but necessary obligations go, sorting out your car insurance is right up there with filling in tax returns, going for gynaecological check-ups or visiting dreary in-laws. But as with all these experiences, the best approach is just to grit your teeth, remind yourself that it’ll be over soon and plan a nice treat for afterwards.
Sorting out car insurance can be a bewildering experience for many of us.

Yes, that’s right. It reads like someone went back in and added in an additional, wholly unnecessary introductory paragraph. It doesn’t stop there. On choosing a new garage:

It’s a bit like trying out a new hairdresser – you’d probably go in for a trim or maybe a few highlights first and check out the way the hairdresser worked before asking to have your waist-length chestnut hair transformed into a blonde urchin cut.

On using car magazines to research a car before buying:

Unlike Autotrader, which feels like something your dad might read, What Car? is an attractive glossy that’s easy to flick through when you’re having your highlights done.

On washing your car:

If you want to experience the Middle England lifestyle to the full then you’ll hand-wash your car every Sunday morning. If you want to live out your boyfriend’s fantasy then you’ll do it wearing your bikini while he watches, nursing a cold beer.

And this from a writer who recently wrote about the benefit of PassPlus courses for older female drivers returning to the road after a separation or bereavement.

Or is it? Because the thing is, I’m not convinced the above extracts of pink vomit are actually McCarthy at all. Maybe, at a stretch, it’s McCarthy under duress; McCarthy with a metaphorical editorial gun to her head to make the book more appealing to young women browsing in Waterstones. Certainly the ridiculous inserts drop off mid-way through the book, and by the time you’re on Chapter 8 (presumably having shelled out the £7.99) with a car in your driveway and insurance to secure, they’re largely gone.

The question is, why on earth are they there in the first place? The book is screamingly successful, rated 10,102 in Amazon (which is pretty impressive for a specialist manual). Once you get past the purple passages it’s also – whisper it – really rather good. It has typical labour rates in major cities in the UK. It has suggested insurers if you want to be added to someone else’ insurance and still rack up a no-claims. It has helpful suggestions on how to avoid being ripped off when buying a used car. All of these things are useful for any novice, and I was making notes whilst reading. No wonder it has garnered such glowing reviews!

And yet… click on the Amazon page. Go on, I’ll wait. Click on it and scroll down to Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, and tell me that at first glance you didn’t think they were showing you little girls’ toys. The Pink Car Wash Kit. The Pink Fluffy Furry Dice. The Pink Toolbox.

I have a strong feeling that if Maria McCarthy is ever presented with any of these items and told to change a tyre, the pink wrench from the pink toolbox will disintegrate the first time it is used. The pink car wash kit will be useless in actually washing a car, unless used when wearing a bikini, and the pink fluffy furry dice will distract her from safely driving her lovely new Alfa 4C and she will plough it into the back of a horsebox on the M4, whereupon everyone passing will tut and say under his breath, “bloody lady drivers.”

There's just no excuse.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.
– Jacqueline Susann, after reading Portnoy’s Complaint

Last week was a busy week in the book world. Sainsburys found itself anointed Bookseller of the Year to the chagrin of actual booksellers, the beleaguered Waterstones chain was saved from the asset-stripping abyss, and the Man Booker International Prize went to the veteran novelist Philip Roth. The last of these events made the biggest splash in the mainstream press, due to the consequent resignation in protest from the judging panel of Carmen Callil, the redoubtable founder of Virago Press, who – cue shock, horror, and the frantic ordering by booksellers of Roth’s backlist – disparaged Roth as a writer and disputed his worthiness to win.

“Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”
– Carmen Callil: Why I quit the Man Booker International panel

The criticism traditionally levelled at the Roth canon is that it mines a deep seam of misogyny. Although Callil was quick to quash any conjecture that her decision to dish Roth was influenced by feminist considerations, emphasising rather her concerns over awarding the prize to yet another North American novelist, this didn’t prevent the Telegraph reporting the affair under the headline ‘Feminist Judge Resigns…’, nor the majority of reports stressing her feminist credentials – or taint, perhaps – as head of Virago. Although Callil argues that her objections to Roth transcend his portrayal of women, much of the subsequent debate centred on the misogynist-or-not nature of Roth’s writing. Several female authors appear for the prosecution towards the end of this piece, while Linda Grant and Karen Stabiner have previously argued for a more nuanced perspective.

What interested me about the whole farrago, apart from the unbecoming glee with which several respondents leapt upon Callil’s admittedly oddly graphic description of her reaction to Roth’s writing (‘[He] goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.‘), was how quickly comments to many of the pieces above dived into questions of whether Roth, with his ‘priapic’ preoccupations and thematic concentration on the ups and downs of male sexuality, was just too ‘male’ a writer for Callil’s tastes and, by extension, for those of female readers as a whole. Robert McCrum in the Observer wrote of Callil:

Her expertise is as an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s. It’s hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth’s lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual (American) man.

Female readers, and especially those with feminist sensibilities, so the argument seems to run, cannot be expected to appreciate or enjoy writing by men which concentrates on the male experience. Any criticisms they might raise of such writing, based on personal evaluations of its quality, technique, or aesthetic appeal, rather than its content, can therefore be instantly dismissed because, well, you were never going to like it anyway, were you. It’s not for you. Apart from anything else, this assertion is unsound: the articles above and elsewhere illustrate that many women do enjoy and appreciate writing by Roth and his contentious ilk – Updike, Amis, Easton Ellis – and it is no less the case that many male readers really don’t. Like the comparable myths about male and female approaches to music and music writing, the suggestion that writers, and readers, can be neatly divided on the basis of gender, and their responses to art explained away accordingly, is as bizarre and unhelpful as it is frustratingly persistent.

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine

Very quietly, in April, a study was published that found that in American children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, female characters were under-represented by a ratio of 1.6:1. Not much happened. Then, at the beginning of this month, the Guardian wrote it up, and the Daily Mail tried their best to misrepresent it, failing to note the criteria used, representing the research as if it had been conducted in the UK, and generally being, well, a bit Daily Mail about the whole thing.

Two things then happened. The lovely lovely Daily Mail comments section went mad with people declaring (presumably based on the many years of research that each of them had done) that the results were clearly rubbish and anyway a bit of sexism never did me any harm now get in the kitchen and put my tea on. The Guardian‘s commenters largely ignored the piece, or said ‘no shit, Sherlock’ and went back to what they were doing before. So far, so par for the course.

But this lack of inquisitive attention is wrong for two reasons: first, this is a massive undertaking, so, y’know, kudos; secondly, these findings are Important. Important enough to use a capital ‘I’: at a time when children are developing their own gender identities, their literature both represents and defines what is expected of them. We need to know what those expectations are; the expectations that come not from our own choice of books for our children, but from what the literary establishment deems ‘good’ award winners are – rightly or wrongly – arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of acceptability. So when a study comes along that pays particular attention to, amongst other things, a century-worth of Caldecott Medal winners, we should be sitting up and taking notice.

Children’s books, and books in general, are not here-today-gone-tomorrow entities; they persist. In short, voices from both the distant and recent past are telling our children that women are simply not as important as men.

I’m not going to blather on about why it’s important for the message of gender of equality to be strong in the cradle and the classroom, nor why the repression of female characters in children’s fiction reinforces patriarchal gender systems, because if you’re over at BadRep you probably already know (and if you don’t, plenty has been written on the subject before).

I am going to blather on about why on earth this disparity between the genders hasn’t changed very much in a century.

So, let us return to the statistics. Since the early 1970s, studies have repeatedly found girls and women to be under-represented in children’s fiction, and this latest one is no different. It finds that in central roles male characters have a representation of 57 percent, and female characters only 31 percent. Significantly, it notes that “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent”. You can get a free PDF of the whole study, by Janice McCabe, Emily Fairchild, and others from universities in Florida and Indiana, here or read the abstract here.

Not only are there fewer female characters in books in the first place, but “reader response research suggests that as children read books with male characters, their preferences for male characters are reinforced, and they will continue reaching for books that feature boys, men, and male animals”. This disparity of gender representation is made even more significant when we learn that boys redefine female protagonists with whom they identify as secondary characters¹ and recast secondary male characters as central when retelling the same stories². Educators, too, make a distinction between the genders when choosing appropriate literature for their classes, opting for stories with male protagonists more frequently than female even when their self-reported politics would suggest they do otherwise. ³

It is worth mentioning at this stage that the numerical representation of the genders and the stereotypicality of the behaviours those genders present are separate issues, and while the latter is fascinating in all sorts of ways, it is a large enough arena of study to warrant a separate post.

Children’s literature is particularly sensitive to sociopolitical forces. It’s probably not surprising, then, that this study finds spikes in the parity of gender representations coinciding with the second – and third – waves of feminism, so the books published in the 1930s-1960s show less gender parity than those published before and after, and more equal representation of the genders in books published after 1970.

Take this graph – Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters across the full set of 5,618 books the study analysed, spanning a century from 1900-2000:

These peaks and troughs in the equality of gender representation paint a worrying picture. When the feminist movement is active, female and male characters do move towards a parity of representation. But when feminism goes off the boil, so does gender equality.

What does this mean for the futures of feminism? Are we destined to keep pushing the message, safe in the knowledge that it will be quickly unlearned if we stop? We cannot rest on our laurels. The third wave feminist movement has, arguably, made feminism more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. But history teaches us that we need to take the waves out of feminism, to keep working, to question inequality whenever we see it mindful that old habits die hard.

“Ending discrimination”, says Kat Banyard in her book The Equality Illusion, “will require a no less than a total transformation of society at every level: international, national, local and individual.” Our children’s books are an indication of this, and a litmus test by which progress can be measured.

You can find more musings on various aspects of kid lit over at my blog TreasuryIslands, including an ongoing series on feminism for beginners with heaps of recommendations. Meanwhile, here are a few of my fabulous feminist favourites.

Totally awesome feminist children’s books:

Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, translated by Chantal Wright
Isabella doesn’t like being a princess. She doesn’t like being waited on, she doesn’t like smiling all day and she doesn’t like her pretty frocks. She’s had enough. Throwing her crown into a pond, she awaits her punishment from the king, but when he sends her to live in a pigsty, the results are far from what he expected…

Captain Abdul’s Pirate School by Colin McNaughton

Pickles is a pupil at pirate school. A reluctant student, Pickles learns how to talk like a pirate, make cannon balls, fight and get up to all the mischief expected of a pirate at sea. Leading a mutiny against the teachers, Pickles shows bravery, cunning and compassion.

Only on the last of the book’s 32 pages is Pickles revealed to be a girl named Maisie.

Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Dr Mairi Hedderwick

With a little help from her dungaree-wearing, tractor-driving granny, Katie Morag delivers the mixed up post on the Scottish island where she lives. She’s a great young heroine with a seriously badass gran.

Give Us The Vote! by Sue Reid

Based on the true story of Dora Thewlis, 16-year-old suffragette. A Yorkshire mill worker, Thewlis took part in a mission to break into the Houses of Parliament in early 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned, a move which found her on the front page of the tabloids nicknamed ‘the baby suffragette’. Part of the My True Story series, Give Us the Vote! is an excellent lesson in first wave feminism.

Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.

Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

1. a finding by Elizabeth Segel, whose 1986 work is referenced in the study.
2. Bronwyn Davies noted this in her 2003 book Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender, and it’s also referenced.
3. Deborah A. Garrahy’s 2001 study “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior” is worth a look for more on this, in The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 81-94.

tags: not just for titles and authors!

Clicky here to see the explosive tag cloud on Amazon for a pseudo-science book about “the private activities of millions of men and women around the world”.¹

I like that a selection of predominantly internet-based feminist thought (can haz meme plz?) is being used to kick up a righteous fuss over what is by all accounts a pile of terrible tosh not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a great example of theory-into-action: the fact that tagging is used on Amazon to  organise and categorise books means that these tags help users identify and avoid anti-feminist writing.

My personal favourites in the tag cloud include mansplaining, gender essentialism, and transphobia.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

1. *One of many exciting non-facts on the back cover alone. Rather than data gathered from actual people, they used “a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads”. By the same “methodology” I would have concluded that planet earth was dominated by cats with funny captions and spambots for viagra.