I have gone back and forth several times over the last few days on whether or not it would be worth addressing Adam Plunkett’s New Yorker.com review of poet Patricia Lockwood’s latest book here. I don’t write much on topical issues to begin with, there have been plenty of more noteworthy stories about women’s issues in the public eye over the last week or so, and it’s not exactly hurting her career any.
Also, if I am being perfectly honest, I didn’t want to seem mean by criticizing a man twice in public. I have since overcome this reluctance.
And yet! It is such a perfect illustration of Joanna Russ’ How To Suppress Women’s Writing that I think it merits mentioning, if only as a cautionary example for all you future New Yorker (dot com) reviewers out there. (Have you forgotten her main points? Let us revisit them briefly here. How many points do you think Plunkett’s review scores? By my count, he nets at least six out of eleven, but I’m open to a recount.)
Prohibitions Prevent women from access to the basic tools for writing.
Bad Faith Unconsciously create social systems that ignore or devalue women’s writing.
Denial of Agency Deny that a woman wrote it.
Pollution of Agency Show that their art is immodest, not actually art, or shouldn’t have been written about.
The Double Standard of Content Claim that one set of experiences is considered more valuable than another.
False Categorizing Incorrectly categorize women artists as the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or lovers of male artists.
Isolation Create a myth of isolated achievement that claims that only one work or short series of poems is considered great.
Anomalousness Assert that the woman in question is eccentric or atypical.
Lack of Models Reinforce a male author dominance in literary canons in order to cut off women writers’ inspiration and role models.
Responses Force women to deny their female identity in order to be taken seriously.
Aesthetics Popularize aesthetic works that contain demeaning roles and characterizations of women.
Let us dive in. Have you your frilliest bathing cap, your most aerodynamic goggles? Splendid. It starts off as a straightforward enough introduction to her work — she’s a poet, she’s popular on Twitter, she writes about things like “riding down the neck of a brontosaurus until I come.” And then he starts to worry about her. She’s successful — but is she too successful? Did she achieve success in the wrong way? Is she laughing at me? Do her fans like her work too much? Will Success Spoil Tricia Lockwood?
It’s commonplace to say that Lockwood fits uncannily well on social media, especially on Twitter, but I worry that she fits herself to it. I don’t mean that I think that she tries to, only that the constant reinforcement can hardly be without its temptations, especially for someone who wrote for years without expecting anyone to read her. (The rewards are real: she raised ten thousand dollars for her husband’s medical bills just by asking people for help.) I also don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but, rather, that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes—in short, rhetoric. Her crowd claps loudly at jokes, especially provocative ones, and the lowest common denominator feels provoked to respond, begetting further jokes at their expense.
It is very difficult, it seems, for male reviewers not to take a vested personal interest in the well-being of their female subjects.
The implication, of course, is that writing poetry that nobody reads is a good thing and writing poetry that lots of people read is a bad thing, a suspect thing, a dumb thing, particularly if you are a woman. I understand the appeal of the contrarian position — I didn’t think Jennifer Lawrence made a very good Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past; I too know what it is like to square your shoulders against the crowd — but this isn’t a critique of her actual work, it’s a hypothetical concern about Lockwood’s future ability to write without regard for either criticism or praise.
A lot of people on Twitter like her work. Fine. Suggesting that she will let this go to her head, let it sully or diminish her talent, and furthermore that this will happen to her without her knowledge (“I don’t think that she tries to, only that the constant reinforcement can hardly be without its temptations”) is condescending and infantilizing. Try though she might, poor backwoods nymph Patricia Lockwood will be overwhelmed by her innate feminine desire to please and give the crowd what it roars for: more sexts.
I don’t even know what to say about this: “I don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but rather that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes — in short, rhetoric.” Go ahead and replace “Twitter” with “poetry” in that last sentence and tell me if the meaning changes any for you.
Can we stop and acknowledge that short, pithy phrases have existed before Twitter and will exist after Twitter is gone? There is of course a particular style of rhetoric that Twitter has popularized, but Twitter did not invent it and Twitter is not a necessary function of its existence.
It’s striking how much Lockwood’s new book reads as though it were written for an audience different from that of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” which was composed in obscurity and is rather obscure and abstract.
She was better before she was successful; I liked her before she was cool; she has written a second book that is not identical to her first. Got it.
Even the zany comic sexuality, unsettling as it can be, is never more nuanced than the brutish, broish caricature she tweets about and that tweets back at her. In “The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love,” for instance, the hornet is sexual aggression incarnate: “Oh he want to sting her…. The air he breathes is filled/with flying cheerleader parts.” It’s easier to laugh at what he represents—“astonishing abs,” sports, machismo—than to feel his sexual frustration and anger. “Revealing Nature Photographs,” a poem transposing onto nature the ways we objectify women, ends with a repulsive invitation: “Nature turned you down in high school. / Now you can come in her eye.” This is addressed to a man but written for people to laugh at him, even if the poem doesn’t evoke Nature well enough to think of her as any sort of woman, let alone one whom you repressed your anger toward. But the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.
The emphasis here is mine, because I want to make sure that everyone is clear on the fact that New Yorker (dot com) reviewer Adam Plunkett is concerned that poet Patricia Lockwood is not taking the hypothetical sexual desires of a fictional bee seriously enough. She is laughing at a man — an imaginary man, an imaginary male bee — instead of empathizing with his anger and his sexual desires. And that’s the problem with Patricia Lockwood.
I find it heartbreakingly sad that the idea of a successful female poet whose work is read and enjoyed by many is a problem, that a woman who isn’t being constantly scrutinized and denigrated on Twitter is worrisome.
As if the problem with most women writers is that we don’t get enough criticism.
This is not to say that women writers should not be critiqued (“So what are you saying? We shouldn’t, like, even review women’s work? What do you want, to just hold hands and sing Kumbaya together in a field?”), simply that publicly worrying that a woman writer does not take men’s desires seriously enough and might be too popular on the Internet does not a reasoned critique of her body of work make.
This is all worth saying because Lockwood is so clearly capable of real emotional depth, even on Twitter. In fact, “Rape Joke,” her best poem, a poem that went viral, probably wouldn’t have been written if Twitter hadn’t been around.
The woman is overrated. The woman has produced only one really great work of art. The woman owes her best work to something else. The woman can’t even really take credit for her one really great work of art. That credit goes to Twitter, which is already diminishing the value of her work, which used to be good but maybe isn’t now.
The world is full of rape jokes, but there can be only one “Rape Joke.” Still, I hope that Lockwood follows its example, if not in its self-doubt than at least in its not having its ideas settled from line one. This would presumably make her more open to the emotional lives of the men she mocks, which of course would help her to mock them if she chooses to. But her talent for humor extends beyond mockery, and I wish she’d bring to all her humorous poetry the same openness she brings to “Rape Joke,” the same ability to compel as she repels. If the poems strike cultural nerves, all the better, but there are probably too few of them for her to find them reliably. And she shouldn’t have to depend on what Twitter likes, anyway. Her followers will read her regardless.
“When she writes about rape, I like her best.” When she’s not making fun of men — because she’s talking about her rape — then she’s a real artist. She should write about rape more, but she probably won’t be able to reach that level of success again.
In an unrelated matter, there have been three recent high-profile reviews of Lockwood’s work in Slate, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. None of the reviewers have been women.
Tags: advice, hypothetical bee libidos, let’s be clear it wasn’t in the print edition, patricia lockwood, poetry, sexism, the new yorker, women’s work
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Oh my god, literally all of these things have been used to discount the video games that women make. ALL OF THEM.
We could also use this metric to talk about fanfiction, because ladies write it and it subverts capitalism.
Which is why it’s great.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard at least one man whose work was being ficced compare fanfiction to rape.
Fascinating how that works. *facepalm*
Oh cool, I think I just exploded with rage.
Yes. Same for romance novels. The genre’s 90%+ written by women.
:: thunderous applause, whiskey-based drinks, and fresh-cut flowers ::
The line that jumped out at me from this profile — and by “jumped out at me,” I mean “made me laugh out loud at his blithe self-assurance” — was “This would presumably make her more open to the emotional lives of the men she mocks…”
DUDE. We live with you. We live under you, some of us literally but almost all of us figuratively. Women already know the emotional, social, personal, psychological lives of men as intimately as we need to. We don’t need to knuckle under more. We don’t need to be your mirrors more. We don’t need more sympathy for you, more understanding of you, more openness to you. WE KNOW YOU. We need to hear our own voices. Patricia Lockwood is HER OWN VOICE, and by speaking with her own voice, she helps me speak with mine.
Like, when we hurt their feelings (as Patricia Lockwood has apparently hurt his), it’s because we don’t understand how complicated and stressful it is to be a man. If we did, we would obviously use our feminine empathy to avoid doing anything that would distress the poor delicate creatures.
With the silent implication that this is what we are for, obviously: to dole out healing sympathy and sweetness to men, to support them in their work and in the toweringly difficult task of BEING MEN, and maybe if we have any time left over, we can scurry off to make art, so long as it sufficiently takes their feelings into consideration.
But don’t make too much art! Don’t get too popular! That’s bad for women to do.
No one lies like Plunkett
Rolls his eyes like Plunkett
Misinterprets the word “empathize” like Plunkett…
The word empathy (in a mansplaining context) is making me rage rage rage right now, so combine that with this jackass’s “review” and I’m pretty much in the “set him on fire and be done with him” camp.
Being a man is so haaaaaaaaaaard, this girl made fun of me on the internet onceeeeeee, not all mennnnnnn, ugh shut up you whiny little bee man. DRONES ARE ONLY GOOD FOR WORKING AND DYING.
But he so graciously allows her the choice to continue to mock them, after she has completely considered all of their many feelings. He is just trying to help her mock them better, because her current mockery of men is just not up to his lofty nuanced standards.
So, yes, everything you just said, so very much.
“Whither the brawling, heroic bee mockers of yore? Whence shall we receive the like of Frank O’Hara’s satiric apiculture, each and every hexagonal stanza dripping with the lambent nectar of understanding? Who shall ever josh bees like Cheever?
“Whomsoever it be, no Twitterer he, I daresay.”
but also… until I read the review I had no idea that ~mocking men~ could have been construed as her aim in writing poems! The idea that the sexts series is some grand misandrist project of skewering male desire, rather than rising from the cultural world that we all, male and female and otherwise, live in — it absolutely had not occurred to me! What is this weird manchild paranoia that assumes that Lockwood’s poetry must necessarily all be an attack on men and male sexuality and masculinity? Why does it not occur to this dude that maybe, just maybe, it isn’t about him?
Yes, good point: his entire approach presumes that the Lockwood’s oeuvre is About Men, as opposed to being About Women, or About Herself, or About Life. He’s unwittingly exposing how thoroughly his worldview revolves around himself, which is to say around men’s experiences.
If I wrote a hilarious account of my experience of being stalked by lions, it would be a very odd reviewer indeed who worried that I was not sufficiently taking the viewpoint of the lions into account.
NOT ALL BEE MEN.
I would like to nominate this for the next Toast t-shirt slogan.
I hereby give The Toast permission to make a NOT ALL BEE MEN t-shirt. Hopefully the proceeds can be used to set up poetry writing workshops for sexually frustrated man bees.
Think of the bees! Right now they can only express themselves through dance!
You made a poem. http://atlas.csd.net/~cantelow/cgi-bin/poem_com3….
“We don’t need to be your mirrors more. We don’t need more sympathy for you, more understanding of you, more openness to you. WE KNOW YOU. We need to hear our own voices.”
THIS.
Lol. So funny how only women are expected to be martyrs and self-sacrificing when he would never suggest that a man not sell or receive compensation for his work.
*racks brains trying to remember the last time I read a review where someone took a male writer to task for not being sufficiently “open to the emotional lives” of women*
*racks brains some more*
…I got nothin’.
Oh my godddd.
“It’s easier to laugh at what he represents—“astonishing abs,” sports, machismo—than to feel his sexual frustration and anger.” That just means, he’s mad she made fun of a male BEE in a poem? Right? That’s what he means? We cannot poke fun at men in writing.
Okay. Okaaaay.
I’m just really glad you wrote this.
Also, if I am being perfectly honest, I didn’t want to seem mean by criticizing a man twice in public. I have since overcome this reluctance.
I smiled so big at this that I had to put my laptop aside for a second. What did I even do with myself and my utter disdain for men before The Toast?
FOR REAL.
We finally have a place where we belong! 😀
It’s like coming home.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/3f2cd38d6c06553043a9a0…
If I’m reading that right, Mallory has skewered Adam Plunkett before. Can anyone point me to where?
I know she did on her Twitter account, not sure if anywhere else as well.
::slow clap::
The picture chosen to accompany the review does even more to cement the anomalousness point.
Perfect example of entitled dude liberal types.
They’ll mock, harass, insult and concern-troll women all the time, but as soon as a woman gets successful and laughs a little at men it’s dreadful.
This guy should stop thinking his opinion has worth, when he’s clearly so intellectually dishonest.
He seems to think that female artists are ‘better’ when they are not rewarded for their talent and skill and hard work, that even when writing about themselves and their own feelings and experiences that those should be centred on men as much as possible.
Which – here’s a clue, kiddo – nothing I write will ever be for you or any man. If men read it and like it I won’t turn away the money, but I am writing for women, and about women.
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.
I feel that the entire character of the review changes, and becomes a hilarious parody, when you get to the punchline at the end. Adam Plunkett is exactly the assistant literary editor of The New Republic.
I read this piece yesterday and spent a good few minutes while reading trying to decide if it was a dead-on satire.
Oh my god, those last two sentences! “And she shouldn’t have to depend on what Twitter likes, anyway. Her followers will read her regardless.” Like, I wish that Patricia Lockwood wouldn’t cater her opinions to please Twitter, the most popular girl in school! I wish she would be her own unique, me-pleasing self and please me instead.
See, I thought he was assistant literary editor of The New Beepublic, cause otherwise who gives a fuck about bee feelings?
“the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point” …. sounds like an endorsement to me!
Is it too late to put it on the dust cover?
Yeah, all he’s accomplished is make me want to buy and read this book, so, well done!
It made me really uncomfortable when he talked about laughing at parts of “Rape Joke.” For me, the whole point of that poem was that its humor was impossible to laugh at.
It really explains a lot about the level the dude handwringing about her failing to express sufficient compassion for horniness appreciates her poetry on.
“This is addressed to a man but written for people to laugh at him. [. . . ] But the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.”
This was enough to convince me to buy this magical tome of misandry. Also “subleties of men’s desires” is possibly the most hilarious phrase ever written.
GOD FORBID WE IGNORE THE SUBTLETIES OF MEN’S DESIRES BECAUSE NO ONE HAS EVER ADDRESSED THAT EVER.
The intricate and beautiful subtleties of raging bee boner, lost on this twitter-wrecked poetess.
Lord knows there’s a shortage of writing about men’s desires!
[trying to make a dick joke about “shortage” and “men’s desires” but a) I’m not clever enough and b) that’s probably not the sort of subtlety that poor ignored plunkett wants/deserves, huh?]
I’m not sure any of Hemingway’s heroes/anti-heroes would up for it.
Can we stop and acknowledge that short, pithy phrases have existed before Twitter and will exist after Twitter is gone?
Sure. From Oscar Wilde, it’s epigrammatic, or it’s precisely witty, or it’s concise and incisive. When Patricia Lockwood crafts precise, intense, clever phrases, it’s shallow and self-limiting. Suuuuuuuure, Plunkett. Sure.
That Dorothy Parker, the garbage one-line wisecracker of the early twentieth century would surely have become categorized as just a harridan poster child for therapy should she have been born in our era. It is a shame for all men that her achievements have been solidified by the patina of a vintage frame, that we cannot dismiss her more thoroughly. However it is perhaps some comfort that at least other women were not able to egg her on, the cost of stamps and long distance telephoning being prohibitive in her days.
I throw up in my mouth a little every I see that last paragraph of the review which manages to say the poem about rape is great and then in the next breath exhort her to be “more open to the emotional lives of the men she mocks.”
Which men? The rapist?
Cool story bro.
You’ve just reminded me of a guy who was trolling the hairpin when they posted that poem, asking us to please consider things from the rapist’s point of view, and how maybe he was doing it because he was abused himself. Like, aside from that being garbage, it’s not her job to consider the rapist’s point of view, she’s writing a poem about her feelings and experience!
Then this review goes and does basically the same thing. Why can’t we write about women’s point of view without men complaining that we’re not considering their point of view? Men’s experiences are the subject of enough literature already guys! It’s so telling how upset some men get when it’s the other way round and men are the ones being ‘looked at’.
“I don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but rather that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes — in short, rhetoric.”
I’ve read this sentence a dozen times now and I’m still not sure what the hell it’s trying to say? Twitter is bad for writers because it rewards… good writing?
I think he’s trying to use ‘rhetoric’ dismissively to express style over substance, which would sting a whole hell of a lot more if his one subsequent attempt at reading a poem he found profound wasn’t HURR RAPE FUNNAY… OR IS IT??
…. OR IS IT???
Really though, he’s still not sure.
Yeah, I suspect he *does* mean that Twitter is stupid. Or that he doesn’t realize that “rhetoric” is a completely meaningless word.
I think he’s trying to claim that twitter prizes rhetoric over emotional and narrative complexity. Which is sort of true.
Because it isn’t about those things.
And, at it’s best, it trains writers to be concise and make the most of every word, which is what we’re supposed to strive for.
Exactly! Rhetoric isn’t synonymous with “laziness” or “advertising language” or whatever he’s trying to get at; it is one of the seven classical liberal arts! For Twitter to encourage good rhetoric hardly seems like a problem; if he thinks it encourages bad rhetoric then he should have said so; if it just encourages people to engage in rhetoric, generally, then that fact seems entirely neutral.
Yes. Also, “If the poems strike cultural nerves, all the better, but there are probably too few of them for her to find them reliably.”
a) this is an absolutely terrible sentence, Plunkett.
b) striking cultural nerves is . . . a bad thing in writing? or, like, some kind of distracting sleight of hand rather than something central and crucial to what makes “good” or “powerful” writing good or powerful? also, hasn’t Lockwood’s consistent “finding them” (assuming the second “them” in that sentence is the cultural nerves, that is) show that she . . . is good at it? and can do so reliably?
c) wtf “too few nerves”? seriously you’ve completely lost control of whatever you were intending to do with this sentence.
(the only relevant response to this post is b), but I just couldn’t ignore the other points because fuck that guy)
I’m reminded of a quote where G. K. Chesterton notes that people often dismiss writers as “talking for effect”, and responds “What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?”
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
I read the whole of Plunkett’s review praying it would turn out to be a brilliant satire by Charlotte Shane. I live in hope that they will all – all the reviews with that febrile subtext, *write about me or write about nothing* – turn out to have been by her. Please.
But the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.
here’s the thing: he gets it. he GETS what patricia lockwood is putting down- mocking hypersexuality, hypermasculinity, “bro culture”, all that shit that all of us, all people, suffocate in every day.
but rather than acknowledge that it’s a REAL THING, and that laughing at this behavior might be the first step to deflating it, he actually goes for not all men. not all men!!! after the fucking #yesallwomen firestorm still raging, he pulls out NOT ALL MEN, IN EARNEST. not all men are such brutish animalistic thugs, patricia lockwood!! some men contain multitudes! oh, do they. do they. could you show me some LITERATURE ON THIS SUBJECT? LAST I CHECKED, IT WAS THE ENTIRE WESTERN CANON, BUT ONE CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL. WE MAY OVERLOOK A SENSITIVE CREATURE SUCH AS YOURSELF WHEN CURATING THE MISANDRIST LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA.
it’s not even ‘not all men’ it’s that she’s failed to adequately plumb the depths of the inner lives of those sext bros and so fails to evoke and lend profundity to his own highschool revenge-boner bukkake fantasies in her horny bee poem. because she tried to make Twitter happy, rather than him alone and nobody else (?)
sext bros too contain multitudes (of boners)
it’s so true- god, did she even consider that he was a bro once too
#notallbros
MISANDRIST LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, please.
I would like the newsletter, the T shirt, the slogan mug, the motivational poster, the music festival. EVERYTHING.
I have an MLIS. If you want to make this happen, you have my steel.
Oh god, my life would be complete, there would be no higher level of joy.
AND MY AXE.
I was just about to write this exact comment. Word for word. (Struck a particular chord since I am at this very moment engaged in writing a text-based adventure game about a misandrist cabal in a library.)
Which you will of course share with us at the first possible opportunity, right??
OBVIOUSLY! (There are some small sneak previews on my twitter (@missellabell) if you are in the mood for furious rants about the serious lack of fiercely intelligent patriarchy-and-wild-raven-fighting Victorian women in video games…)
“LAST I CHECKED, IT WAS THE ENTIRE WESTERN CANON, BUT ONE CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL. ”
You are perfect.
Oh my God, I think I just peed a little. This comment is a masterpiece.
Great comment on the original article:
Finkledish_Dumbdragon
You nailed it, bro.
“… and the lowest common denominator feels provoked to respond, begetting further jokes at their expense.”
Whoops, that’s you.
you know, the real ‘rape joke’ here is that a poetry reviewer liked the ‘Rape Joke’ best, when it was the ‘Rape Joke’ that initially predicted that it would be ‘asking for it[self] to become the only thing people remember about you.’ Is she laughing at you? Probably. I know I am.
nailed it. thank you.
Concern Trolling: The Review
Can I take a sidebar to discuss how stylistically terrible the phrase “was composed in obscurity and is rather obscure and abstract” is?
Less tortured ways to express “I liked her before she got popular”? What are you, some kind of Twitterer?
You make me so happy. In my soul.
You know, for a critic, he’s pretty shit at coherently saying what he means.
Maybe he mistakes long words and confusing sentences for being erudite.
He’s got a pretty small goddamn vocabulary to start getting snotty about that
Looks like he considers using four times as many words as necessary to be the same thing as long and considered thought, which would explain why he’s so mad at Twitter.
COME OUT OF YOUR OWN VAGINA, POETESS, I CAN’T SEE YOUR WORK FROM HERE
OH MY GOD yes, what the hell editor could in good conscience let two forms of “obscure” in five words slide? This is what a byline at the New Yorker (dot com) gets you.
Had I been grading his paper, this tortured phrasing would have gotten the red pen
OMG pinning this down to the imagined slight of an “imaginary” male bee is absolutely brilliant. For most practical purposes the male bee is statistically irrelevant if not completely imaginary. They do no work. They can’t sting. Even their genetic function is limited to a dance and a five-second pop. Maybe the subtleties of this transient freak of the hive’s desire could be appreciated and even pitied, but in the eye of nature there’s no time for that. He’s statistically imaginary and nature has next to no imagination. He leaves, like in a wilder Ursula LeGuin story, no literature behind — only criticism.
And the eye of the poet has to be even less forgiving than nature’s because bee “imagination” stings when it hits. Thank you for turning me on to her — I was ignorant before.
JESUS CHRIST HOW IS THIS STILL A THING. I am full of rage.
Everything about this review made me angry/disgusted, but maybe particularly infuriating was his reading of “Rape Joke”? I find his claim that he appreciated the poem on a deep level to be absurd given that his response is, “I want both to laugh with her and not to help her laugh it off.”
“Rape Joke” moved me on a visceral level, and any gloss I try to put in words seems laughably inadequate, but his words are… worse than inadequate. I thought it would be impossible to read the poem without feeling a pit in your stomach, like something curdled there, some cruel cousin of what the beginnings of belly laughter feels like, but that precludes the possibility of laughter entirely. Something that feels like if you did try to laugh you would throw up instead.
But perhaps the “subtleties of male desire” are so immersing that they make it impossible for the reviewer to experience anything else?
Thank you for this comment, because it made me go find and read “Rape Joke,” which I hadn’t read before. Plunkett’s analysis struck me as almost certainly wrong even without having read it, but I had underestimated just how wrong.
Christ, this piece is totally entirely incredible.
I want a T-shirt that says “The subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.” Or an embroidery sampler.
in needlepoint. perfect.
*standing fucking ovation*
But for real JLaw was all wrong for Mystique.
RIGHT
like she’s not BAD, she’s a GOOD actress, she just doesn’t have MYSTIQUE running inside her veins!!! IT SHOULDA BEEN EVE GREENNNNNNNN
holy crap that’s literally who I was gonna say too
This is why “The Toast” needs to regularly publish reviews (by women about women’s work) maybe under the title (or tag) “This Doesn’t Suck”. Because a look at most reviews of books, music and films around would give one the impression that the people who create this work are men (the reviewers are men too) and the few works around by women… well, they could use some improvement. There’s an incredible amount of great work by women out there right now, but a lot of it is ignored or really condescendingly reviewed.
YES!!!!
Totally agree. I had this thought when I read the article on Tama Janowitz (Mallory, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know! But I went to the school library afterward and got slaves of new york)! I would LOVE to see the Toast become a center for high-quality reviews of work by women.
For one thing, I just like the recommendations, stuff that my other sites wouldn’t point me toward, and as other people have pointed out in these comments, the perspectives of outsiders that are so valuable to read. The Toast as a place for that would be great. This is what I like about Emily Books.
For another, it would give some kind of signal boost (in the case of Lockwood, unneeded, but I’m imagining in the future) to the writer.
And – this is a bit of an inchoate thought, forgive me – but it would start discussion. It would be a place for a community of people who share knowledge of particular writers (the ones reviewed by the Toast) to talk to each other about the books and have common ground in the text and to know there is a community. It seems to me this kind of network externality is part of what keeps Hemingway and Mailer and McCarthy so prestigious.
A LOT of thoughtful reviews of women’s work – current, past, republished, any and all and everything – would be the best thing I can imagine becoming a regular and common part of the Toast. A counter-balance to NYRB, NYT, LARB, LRB, et al.
This, this, yes!
Well, I definitely went and bought her book just now.
Between this and the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter this weekend was all about Mallory convincing me to spite-spend on excellent things.
Did that guy even fucking read “Rape Joke”? Because he’s sort of exemplifying one of the lines from it:
“The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.”
I was just about to make that exact comment
So I went and skimmed this guy’s most recent review of poems by a dude, on New Republic, to see if he would do any better. And it appears that his default method of analysing a poem is as follows:
1. Assume that it’s a joke.
2. Be upset or confused that it isn’t funny.
Why is he being paid to do this?
Assumes fact not in evidence.
He may be writing reviews for the exposure (i.e. volunteer).
In his case, that could be rephrased as ‘to expose himself’ and boy howdy, did he ever.
Wow, that review makes clear that Plunkett maybe needs to start over with what poetry is and does. (Also, Dean Young is goodamn awesome.) This phrase in particular is… telling in the context of the Lockwood piece: “The poem turns his distraction and diffuseness into an anxious affection too absorbed by his wife to even describe how he feels.” Because how odd that a love poem be about the beloved!
New Republic as a whole is sorta like the thoughts version of that old story about how James Thurber got talked out of taking drawing lessons by his editors, ’cause if he learned anything he might become a third-rate artist, and those are a dime a dozen.
Thank you for taking one for the team and going into deep cover. This is fascinating.
Looking forward to more articles under the “hypothetical bee libidos” tag!
‘“When she writes about rape, I like her best.” When she’s not making fun of men — because she’s talking about her rape — then she’s a real artist.’
This kind of sentiment that needs to be called out far more often.
I would just like to point out the excellent comment left around the time that Mallory was originally taking this review down on Twitter, for its incisiveness and utter disregard for the subtleties of men’s desires:
“redarremercer4 days ago
God, you’re a peevish piece of shit”
One of the things that makes me sad about the patriarchy is that lots of bros be missing out on the incredible richness of the minority world viewpoint. One thing that gets me through a big old steaming pile of sexism is the niche joys of woman culture, places like this that are just filled with a glee and wit and layers and nuance that grows out of an outsider’s viewpoint.
For instance my boyfriend gets the jokes on this site on the balance, but there are references and pleasures that are completely blocked to him because he doesn’t even have the context. I once read or heard someone saying that it’s just nearly impossible for a straight white guy to get camp, because camp is subversive and they can’t necessarily access it, and I think that’s a joy that’s hard to explain, that glee that comes out of picking up the unwanted trash, turning it into a subtle art and then running completely away with it.
This of course is a generalization but there are women topics that don’t really come up when men are in the room, or even women we don’t trust to be in our camp, but if you are alone with your tribe I don’t know a single guy who could hold a candle to the straight out raunch and breathless hilarity of women talking to other women.
And that’s what’s cool about what I see going on right this second. That women are pushing through bit by bit, making things like Broad City or the Rape Joke Poem or all things Mallory and Nicole, and it’s finally filtering up to men a tiny bit. But our language is a secret code nested inside their language and they have never had to learn it, so a lot of dudes just shout right over it, “I don’t get it! It sucks! Why don’t you talk about men?!”
Yes! I was just thinking about this. The way men are so fascinated by what women must be like without them, but because they can’t imagine a space not accessible by their gaze they always reinsert it (like the Toast piece about women in Western Art getting out of bathtubs). Women, on the other hand, know what men are like without them because culture shows it to them all the time.
“One thing that gets me through a big old steaming pile of sexism is the niche joys of woman culture, places like this that are just filled with a glee and wit and layers and nuance that grows out of an outsider’s viewpoint.”
Yes, this. All the funny and incisive people I’ve read lately have been women (with the exception of Te-Nehisi Coates).
I don’t discount that a rich middle class straight white dude can be funny or gleeful or subversive, or even that a dude can’t hop into our sphere willingly, but I think it’s a lot harder for them to come into our spaces and even get it at all. They won’t necessarily have sought out women resources or resources from people of color, or resources from gay men, they won’t necessarily be able to understand how to shut up and learn in those scenarios, or let the joke play out without steering it back to safe waters/ usual dude topics. If you are outside the default bubble, then usually (but definitely not always), you can also extend empathy to other groups outside the sphere more easily.
But with all this generalization comes a lot of caveat- for instance there are plenty of women who really have no interest in this stuff and help build “The Man” too (The Hey Ladies girls come to mind as a classic illustration). And bros have being a geek, the only problem is it’s still usually written with a dude focus and still doesn’t let the fun people into play and make it weirder.
Anyway, that’s what the review read like to me. Here’s a woman doing something interesting and weird, and this guy has literally no tools to get it. He’s like, “I can’t read this! Its not written to be read by me!”
This is an excellent comment and says some things I’ve been feeling and trying to put into words for a long time.
…I think maybe you mean hypothetical li-bee-dos am I right AHAHAHAHA!
(but seriously Mallory this kicks ass)
While leveling the playing field is necessary, one wonders if any criticism can be made by a man of a woman’s work, without it being imputed to sexism. The marketplace of ideas is a wide-open forum. Male writers have long known it is a world of nasty fisticuffs.
I can well imagine that a casual observer, if I had confided to him my qualms at the idea of being married to this girl, would have rasied his eyebrows and been at a loss to understand, for she was undeniably an eyeful, being slim, svelte, and beautifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings. But where the casual observer would have been making his bloomer was in overlooking that squashy soupiness of hers, that subtle air she had of being on the point of talking baby talk. She was the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband’s eyes, as he is crawling in to breafast with a morning head, and says, “Guess who?”
ILU
Well, for starters, one reviews the *work* instead of giving unsolicited and weirdly paternalistic career advice to the author.
Oh aye definitely, it’s MALE writers who suffer unfairly in the marketplace of ideas jesus christ
I suspect this gentleman wears a fedora.
Lockwood predicted Adam Plunkett: ” The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you. “
Here’s what I think about this issue…actually, you see,
*is rightfully pummeled about the head and torso until unconscious*
You there–you may stay.
edit: +2 for use of “rightfully pummeled”
I read the review, which seemed to be “Why is she getting famous writing poems when I’m not?” over and over again
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
Edited to be less giant.
Why were all the bees in that movie male? Worker bees are female.
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v455/grandvizier/Misapiarysmaller_zpsd7da4060.jpg">
Edited to be less giant.
"One thing that gets me through a big old steaming pile of sexism is the niche joys of woman culture, places like this that are just filled with a glee and wit and layers and nuance that grows out of an outsider's viewpoint."
Yes, this. All the funny and incisive people I've read lately have been women (with the exception of Te-Nehisi Coates).
“Even if the poem doesn’t evoke Nature well enough to think of her as any sort of woman, let alone one whom you repressed your anger toward”
Okay, I’d like to know how many women toward whom Adam Plunkett is NOT repressing his anger. I’d like to see those women file restraining orders.
Mallory, you are my spirit animal. I love you so so much. Thank you for cutting through the bullshit with such surgical precision and making me angry and making me laugh at the same time.
Wouldn’t be my choice.
This is an excellent comment and says some things I've been feeling and trying to put into words for a long time.
Brilliant! I love it! And the Joanna Russ references that I love too! Just one small thing. I haven’t read The Hornet Mascot so I may be mistaken. But a hornet is a WASP
tell adam
YES TO ALL OF THIS. Fuck every reviewer like that, there are _SO_MANY_ of them and it is *such* bullshit.
This is becoming a disturbing trend :https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/defense-romance-vol-2/
This reminds me a lot of why Dave Chappelle ended the Chappelle Show — he started to hear a different kind of laughing. People were missing his point, and they were laughing for the wrong thing. He had embedded such a sophisticated critique in his skits, about racism and oppression and the absurdities of pop culture, but he realized that people could consume his work without looking for or relating to the code that held it together.
This really makes me wonder what happens to subversive codes when they are placed in accessible media. I assume more and more straight white men will become fluent or at least feel fluent in the coded language of shows like Broad City. Adam Plunkett assumed that it was very fair game to interpret the deep coded language of Lockwood, that the embedded aims of the poetry would be visible to him, and that given that he could evaluate the poetry in accordance with that fluency — but as so gloriously discussed here, he kind of fell flat on his face. His reading of the "code" ended up being, ironically, oppressive. I think the discussion going on here helps reveal both how intensely meaningful code can be for people who share it — how incredibly liberating it can be to find and share that common language — and how clumsy and oppressive and awful popular criticism can be as an attempt to somehow isolate a work and unpack its inner workings in an authoritative way.
I’m so fucking tired of having to consider the sexual frustration and anger of men. Absolutely infuriating.
I wish she’d bring to all her humorous poetry the same openness she brings to “Rape Joke,”
Oy. Is this Aesthetics, Double Standard of Content, or the daily double? (Also, reminds me of how often mostly-male music reviewers praise women’s music for being open or “vulnerable”. fuuuu.)
I wish she’d bring to all her humorous poetry the same openness she brings to “Rape Joke,”
Oy. Is this Aesthetics, Double Standard of Content, or the daily double? (Also, reminds me of how often mostly-male music reviewers praise women's music for being open or "vulnerable". fuuuu.)
“Buzz buzz”, to quote a SCORNFUL MANLET
I am 81 years old. I thought men might start thinking women had brains way back in the 1940s when I first I started writing. I thought the fact that we could string two words together would stop surprising them. It never has.
Hot damn. Spot on.