New York Times Book Review: No winning for losing for any sexiness from male authors

Submitted by fibtastic on Tue, 2010-01-05 20:25

Check out Katie Roiphie's piece in the NYT Book Review comparing/contrasting the Roth/Updike/Mailer generation of writers with the Eggers/Wallace/Kunkel generation. Her conclusion? The former are assholes while the latter are sissies, either way they're "sexist". There are even nice pink graphs to prove it! Excerpt:

'The same crusading feminist critics who objected to Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress (Mailer called these critics “the ladies with their fierce ideas.”) But the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is Franzen’s description of one of his female characters in “The Corrections”: “Denise at 32 was still beautiful.” To the esteemed ladies of the movement I would suggest this is not how our great male novelists would write in the feminist utopia.

The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life.'

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Comments

It seems so quaint. I pretty much stopped years ago. I have no interest at all in reading sex scenes written by anyone. Maybe it's the short-attention-span associated with Gen-X (and Gen-Y) at work here but really, why bother? The only sex scenes I am really interested in anyway are my own. :)

Well anywho, I guess it just shows to go ya: If someone is writing something sexy, for the average feminist, it cannot possibly be a "fair use" of the literary medium if by any chance the author is male. Anything a man writes is ipso facto sexist by feminist standards should he be addressing any topic related to the sexes. Hell, according to some of them I cannot write something entitled "Space-Time Dilation Representation in n-Space Models via Convex Allegoric Resonance Extrapolation Scaled to 3-D Model Spaces Using n-Order Nonhomogeneous Differential Equations" without simultaneously, in an allegorical sense, brutally "mind-raping" half the human population, both living and dead!

Ahem...

He who seeks to write any piece of literature in any way to satisfy people such as feminists is 1) wasting a perfectly good opportunity to write something worth reading (be it sexy or not) and 2) is unlikely to please any of the people any of the time who may have the misfortune to read it.

So my advice to "the new male authors of sexy romance works": Stop trying. Open with some outrageous, I-want-you-now-and-by-God-it-shall-be-done-bodice-ripping scene that would make the typical female sub (closet sub of course, because women are no longer allowed to be subs) fairly pass out right there in the Harlequin section, and just let the chips fall where they may. Then maybe, just maybe, you'd sell a few copies.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2010-01-05 21:18

I have read a few things by Updike, and I don't really see where he's sexist. As far as Mailer, he is one of my heroes, having used the term "woman racket" in an interview some years back.

-ax

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Submitted by axolotl on Fri, 2010-01-08 22:13