I keep thinking back to this piece written last week by Meaghan O’Connell about the types of questions women are asked about their work. The assumption that they care, or should care, what their parents and children think about their work. That all women’s choices are threaded to their relationships, and that they do not and cannot exist outside of the expectations others have for them. This is, of course, presented in contrast to what men experience.
We don’t ask male artists to consider the consequences of their work, we don’t reframe them as fathers or boyfriends or sons. We don’t keep trying to pull them back down to earth, to admonish them, the way we do women. We not only give them the benefit of the doubt — assuming they’ve done their own calculus as to how much is worth what, whom they’re willing to betray or embarrass or make uncomfortable and why — we operate as if their work is worth all that.
That personal calculus is something I realize I hadn’t even assumed men did. I just thought they were above it, or somehow preemptively forgiven for using their personal lives and relationships in their writing. It’s yet another way the patriarchy has snuck up on me.
The whole piece has me thinking of defaults, and whose experience is the one to aspire to. Typically, the answer is the white, straight, cis male experience. They get all the stuff. Everyone else compares their experience to that, thinking that if we could all be treated that way, things would be markedly better. And they would probably! But I’m also interested in, instead of stopping asking women these questions, asking them of more men. Making the default the experience those men don’t get.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say my family and friends are very important to me. I am human and have formed bonds with other humans, and I value them! Rarely do I make a decision without considering how it would affect those I care about, whether it’s whether or not to write about a certain experience or invite someone to a party or decide I have no social energy even though I’m wracked with guilt that at all points there is someone I haven’t seen in too long.
Men have to feel this way too, right? I have to think they do, but also that we do not encourage them to the same way. And they may be conditioned not to care. The question, of a man, “what does your father think about this?” just doesn’t feel weighted enough. Men should be asked these questions, but would they cut them the same way? Or would they know to say “who cares?” and move on?
I think about, also, how it is only women who have been concerned for me. I know on a professional scale there are men who assume women don’t want job promotions because they want to have kids, or other ridiculous things, but on a personal level I’ve never been asked by a male friend or family member if I’m worried about what people will think. It’s the women who worry if I’m revealing too much, if I’ve thought of my relationships or my future. Maybe it’s because they care. And maybe they care because they’ve been taught to.
I know my husband thinks about these things because we have these conversations. (Sometimes more than I’m actually willing to entertain them. Other people’s inner journeys, amirite?)
I don’t know how common it is, though. I don’t know if many? most? some? few? men have these thoughts and don’t express them as openly, or if this just isn’t part of the mental math.
I know we’ve had this conversation a ton in this here lovely comments section, about all those “women, act more like men at work and you’ll get ahead!” And many of us have said, ugh no, being polite and saying “please” or “sorry to bother you” and doing the cleaning and planning the parties are valuable things that men oughta be doing too.
which gets me thinking about this piece in the context of writing as a job…are women writers expected to think more about these things because we picture them as doing the “softer” writing of exploring relationship and family stuff? or conversely do we think of men’s writing as more professional – he can’t be expected to stop to tidy the metaphorical kitchen because his work is so valuable? this book was just so important, it doesn’t matter if he hurt his dad’s feelings with that one scene?
Like Jaya, it had never really occurred to me that men might stop to think about the impact of their writing on their personal lives. Regardless of whether or not that’s the case, if a lot of people think/fail to think that way, I wonder if it’s just that we don’t assume men meant anything by it? Like, if a woman upsets her partner, it’s because she thought about it consciously decided to do so (which makes her a big meanie), but if a man upsets his partner, we just assume he never thought it might be a problem. So the people he offends don’t really have the right to be hurt, because it wasn’t intentional.
Men being allowed that level of obliviousness is probably tied to some nonsense about their thoughts being on a higher plane than human relationships, but?
And if a woman’s hurtful action was unintentional, it’s still not okay because women SHOULD be carefully considering other people’s feelings at all times. Men aren’t expected to bother.
I think ideas about “women’s writing” vs. “men’s writing” definitely come into play. At least in fiction, I think women are way more likely to have to insist that their books ARE fictional, not veiled confessionals, and I see way more male writers defended on the grounds that, y’know, you can’t assume the author is a misogynist just because every one of his male characters is, and everyone of his female “characters” exists to be insulted and/or fucked by the protagonist.
I think about this so much. The majority of writing about how women navigate the world vs how men do either imply or outright state that the correct way to do things is the male way. Be more aggressive, care less about what other people think, don’t be afraid to be rude to get ahead, etc.
It seems like it does women and men a disservice. Often I think the world would be a better place if we taught men to be more like women instead of the focus on the other way around.
Yes, yes. As I’ve noted in comments here many times, we know what the world looks like when the Western male ideal is the dominant social norm. And yet people keep going, “if only more women spoke over others, disregarded the feelings of others, and doggedly pursued their own self-advancement (in a very specific, corporate-defined sense of ‘advancement’), that would surely solve all our problems!”
Oh yes. I am a fairly softspoken and polite person, and I’ve seen a ton of advice that’s like “Nobody gets anywhere by being polite! If you’re nice, everyone will just walk all over you!” And while the world may unfortunately work that way sometimes, I think it’s pretty obvious that the person who is in the wrong in that kind of situation is the one who’s walking all over someone else. I try to be thoughtful and courteous because it’s the right thing to do and I really do think that the world runs more smoothly when people are pleasant to each other. Not because I’m a weak little woman who doesn’t really have any ambitions in life.
Plus, in addition to the altruistic, moral imperative for politeness, depending on your career, courtesy and thoughtfulness are literally marketable job skills. If you’re pleasant, people enjoy working with you. If people enjoy working with you, you get better feedback and better opportunities. (I’d like it if business-oriented articles focused on “it’s the right thing to do” more often, but even if they’re blatantly ignoring their moral compasses when advising people, politeness and deference tangibly help your job! But no, let’s write another article criticizing how women use “just.”)
I feel like I have this thought process all the time–maybe I’ve been trained to be a certain way, to care more about what my loved ones think of me, but why should I have to be the one to change? Why can’t we share the emotional labor and the worry work instead of aspiring to care less? That doesn’t seem like much of a goal… I don’t think it makes me inferior for worrying what my family thinks of me, I think it is an expression of my love for them–and I think I am learning, as I grow as a person, to balance my love of them with my love of myself and my personal goals. But I have known so many men who just don’t care, and their lives may be easier, but only because the women in their world make it so, often by making a million excuses for him. Obviously this is just my experience, etc. etc. But it is a common, frustrating tension in my life, feeling like I am being pushed toward conforming to a more typically masculine ideal if I want to be successful, and knowing my life will be harder if I don’t, but not wanting to be less myself, including all my traditionally-considered feminine qualities.
This has got to be something men think about. I was about to type a comment using Karl Ove Knausgard as an example of a guy who wrote about domestic matters in excruciating detail and got lionized instead of criticized for it … but I just checked my work and he’s apparently talked about his books causing family strife and it being a Faustian bargain to use his life in his work.
But at the same time, there seems to be a lot more free-form anxiety about women doing this, as there is about everything women do. Maybe it’s a side effect of not being the white male standard, so that everything an individual woman does is taken as representative of women as a whole and thus worthy of moral panic, whereas everything an individual man does is just something an individual man does.
This!!
My husband and I just had a conversation about something similar to this — power dynamics and the appearance of objectivity (specifically WRT movies that STILL IN 2016 CAST WHITE PEOPLE AS ACTUAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE OF COLOR FFS). It’s ultimately really frustrating to try to talk to people about, because it’s so subtle and pervasive and frankly not a lot of folks have the patience for a subtle conversation.
Do we need to ask less of women or more of men?
A+ deployment of this gif (and the statement it makes of course)
I’d say the full body of shit that women have to put up with that men don’t can be sorted into a number of different categories, and how a specific thing should ideally be addressed depends on which category it falls under. Judgment for individual life choices that don’t substantively affect anyone else? Nobody should have to deal with that. Accountability for ignoring basic hygiene and grooming practices (I am still thinking about/shuddering at today’s Prudie livechat)? EVERYBODY SHOULD HAVE TO DEAL WITH THAT.
I’d estimate that men need to get around 80% more shit and women about 10% less.
Dan Savage responded to Mallory’s tweets about that by blaming women for not demanding that men be less crap. O.O
We shouldn’t have to “demand” it. Men should just fucking grow up amd do it.
Ah, Dan Savage, never change. And by “never,” I mean “as soon as possible.”
Gosh, what a miserable human that man is.
I have had to do a bit of thinking about this in my relationship or sort of work the financial/professional inequities in my relationship. I am used to being a strong independent woman who was the breadwinner. But then I move in with my boyfriend who makes considerably more than me (healthcare vs. tech) and I have had to sort of re-order my thinking on a lot of things. So I am trying to reorganize my thinking of being an independent woman with the reality of being a semi-dependent woman.
Another piece of this is that the importance of women is often portrayed in terms of their relation to other people. I’ve seen several ads or PSAs, I forget against what but something like cat-calling, where the motivation is: this woman is someone’s mother, someone’s sister, daughter, wife, etc. Implicitly saying, this woman has value because of her relationship to another person, probably a man. So treat her with respect. The message is never: this woman is a person; treat her as such. Even people who claim to be progressive, or who are advocating for good and positive things, frequently fall into this trap.
I think that this contrast between men and women writers is, in part, another instance of this. The woman who is writing is not seen as an independent person, a Writer, but as a woman + attachments/obligations in the form of parents, children, spouse. Because she is in a sense partly constituted by these relationships, and is seen to gain her value from them, the effect of her actions on these other people is therefore a critique-able, relevant element to the discussion.
(Not in my opinion, but in the opinion of the people asking the ridiculous questions.)
It also reminds me of some of Virginia Woolf’s writing, about the importance of autonomy, and mental and physical space, for women who want to write. And the description I saw a while ago of Jane Austen’s writing desk, which was foldable, easily removed and took up little to no space.
Re: Jane Austen’s writing desk — it’s true that this says a lot about the place of women’s art in the long 18th century. But, from an alternate perspective, it means she could establish a small island of space for herself wherever she happened to be at the moment. “This is my corner, as established by the fact that I have put my desk here. You may have the space back in an hour.”
I tracked down the reference I’d seen, and lo and behold, it was a Toast article! http://the-toast.net/2016/01/07/the-real-mr-darcy…
I don’t disagree with you about her writing desk being her island; I do think it’s telling that her island was so small and impermanent.
Assigning value to people based on their relationships also happens to minorities – I recently read (wish I could remember where) a black man’s account of being viewed very differently by passerby when out in public with his family than when alone. Same underlying problem – this person has more value because of his relationships with other people than as an individual alone.
With regard to “women writers,” one of the early bits of press about (now Nobel laureate) Alice Munro’s work had the headline “Housewife finds time to write short stories.” It was the 60s, but still. Gaaah.
Thanks for pointing this out! Very true, and important to remember. Nothing is ever one-dimensional.
The larger problem is that men are seen in terms of their achievements (actual and potential) and their flaws judged in relation to those achievements, whereas women are typically judged by their worst mistake(s), and their achievements cut down to size in the light of that judgment.
“She wrote a great book–but her depictions of family have to be questioned since she was a terrible mother”, versus “He was not much of a father, beat his wives, and used to mail packages of excrement to reviewers he didn’t like, but his works speak for themselves.”
It’s not just true of artists. It’s true generally in the workplace. Women with even small personality flaws or occupational failures are made to suffer for it, while it’s just how that guy is, but gee he makes up for it in x ways.
This. Along with, “We must be able to separate the MAN from his ART!”
Out of curiosity, have you ever read How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ? It explores those kinds of double standards for writers in a really thorough, interesting, satisfyingly angry way (and it’s also funny as all get-out).
A long time ago. I should reread. I really think this is a life-wide phenomenon though.
That first paragraph of yours really got to me. It also reminded me of this part of an article I read yesterday via NPR:
“Another study, published earlier this year, found that both male and female undergraduates were more likely to explain a woman’s science-related setback than a man’s by appeal to factors about that person (e.g., “Lisa was ‘let go’ from her research assistant job because she messed up an experiment”). The reverse pattern was true for men’s setbacks — the undergraduates were more likely to explain them by appeal to factors about the situation (e.g., “Steve was ‘let go’ from his research assistant job because there were budget cuts”).” (Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/03/21/47123…
It feels like an overlap – that too often, women are being judged more personally than situationally, *and* are being judged by their mistakes more than their achievements. (And holy hell, have I internalized that one, I’m realizing.)
There was a study back when I was in college indicating that students whose male professors didn’t make their office hours charitably assumed they must be off doing important work, whereas they thought their female professors were being irresponsible and unkind and resented them for not being there.
I wrote a lot as a teenager, and got a few things published in little journals and whatever, and I distinctly remember being like “I can’t be a writer because I can only write about my dad and I can’t imagine having a conversation with my dad about the things I feel about my dad (hurt, abandoned, etc)” and then I decided not to be a writer. Not that I would have been a great writer if I hadn’t made that choice, but maybe I would, and I will never know, because I made that choice at 17.
You can make the choice now to be a writer. Or are you already a writer? A writer is someone who writes. Are you writing? Keeping a journal is writing, for example.
You choose each day how to use your time. You can choose to use some of it to write. I believe you can still be a great writer. Or maybe you already are.
Robotneedslove, as a former teen writer who’s now a 23-year-old writer (and far from a pro) I encourage you to try again! Sometimes just being able to write something and share it with one person is all you need to jump-start that creative energy again. Also, you never have to show your work to your parents if you don’t want to 🙂
Mr Daki proudly presented his first novel to his mom (his dad died before he wrote it) and she’s spent the last 20 years asking him if there’s a mother in whatever he’s writing next.
She was Not Amused by the portrayal of the mother in that book. She’s also not over the time someone stopped her after Mass to ask a nosy question about her brother-in-law based on a character in one of Mr. Daki’s short stories.
On the other hand, people who know I write steamy romances, never mind actually read them, presume that Mr. Daki is a stud. I’m not saying he’s not, but the last thing I expected when I started to publish was for it to turn into a referendum on my husband’s bed skills. Every time he brags about my writing he gets pats on the back.
I’ve been thinking about this and about that “emotional labor” piece a lot because my students had to write a timed essay in response to something, and this year the article is this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014…
Basically the girl students succeed because they consistently rank higher in characteristics such as “conscientiousness” and “self regulation” and being aware of others while boy students do terrible at remembering to keep track of things and put in consistent effort while they thrive at competition and going in and acing a test cold or via cramming. I don’t know if this means there is a biological component to that emotional labor/work of keeping track of things that society has taken advantage of, or the socialization of this emotional labor starts reeeeeeeeally early.
I don’t know but the exec function requirements of school have gotten out of control. Teachers no longer collect homework: the kids (or really, their parents in K-2, if they’re lucky enough to have a parent who drops off at school and follows them up to the classroom) have to put the homework in the homework box. My younger daughter never remembers (crappy exec function runs in the family: possible ADD) and was penalized starting in first grade.
This is the longest piece ever but super relevant: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBR…
What is this from?–it is amazing!
That thread was in response to what Jess Zimmerman wrote here, for The Toast: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/
(Thanks, Natasha, for the PDF; I remember trying to work through the Metafilter discussion page and it was a great conversation, but a lot to process.)
This is the longest piece ever but super relevant: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBR…
That first paragraph of yours really got to me. It also reminded me of this part of an article I read yesterday via NPR:
"Another study, published earlier this year, found that both male and female undergraduates were more likely to explain a woman's science-related setback than a man's by appeal to factors about that person (e.g., "Lisa was 'let go' from her research assistant job because she messed up an experiment"). The reverse pattern was true for men's setbacks — the undergraduates were more likely to explain them by appeal to factors about the situation (e.g., "Steve was 'let go' from his research assistant job because there were budget cuts")." (Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/03/21/47123…
It feels like an overlap – that too often, women are being judged more personally than situationally, *and* are being judged by their mistakes more than their achievements. (And holy hell, have I internalized that one, I'm realizing.)
That thread was in response to what Jess Zimmerman wrote here, for The Toast: http://the-toast.net/2015/07/13/emotional-labor/
(Thanks, Natasha, for the PDF; I remember trying to work through the Metafilter discussion page and it was a great conversation, but a lot to process.)