"The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedly they want to nail women.
My colleague Talia Lavin has the receipts, and posted them in an invaluable Twitter feed. In “The Professor of Desire,” Philip Roth’s narrator doesn’t just pant over the object of his blazon; he must also punish her for arousing him. “I even become somewhat suspicious and critical of her serene, womanly beauty,” he says. “Or rather, of the regard in which she seems to hold her eyes, her nose, her throat, her breasts, her hips, her legs.” Another maddening hallmark of the horndog wordsmith is prose that takes conspicuous notice of a female character’s physical imperfections. This is done with an aura of self-satisfaction, as if the protagonist deserves credit simply for bestowing his descriptive prowess upon a person of less than conventional loveliness...
We draw toward the glow of the fires that our heroes have kindled to keep us out."
Ugh, since reading this I keep noticing this problem in books. Like, I found some characters annoying before, they made me slightly uncomfortable but it didn't rise all the way to consciousness, now I can't take them seriously.
Like, the descriptions of women in the Goldfinch? His Dad's girlfriend?
FB: "Lavin’s thread distilled the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility. No one is fooled. No one thinks that Jonathan Franzen has tapped into some deep well of humanist perception when his twentysomething creation declares herself “the little squirrel that loves to fuck.” John Updike, you do not actually empathize with expectant mothers! The compressed brilliance of Lydia Kiesling’s phrase “the quick compensatory mind” contains seventy years of bowing to male sexual appetite as the de-facto measure of all things."
No comments:
Post a Comment