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[faustus]

Is the books world short-changing its bright young women?

Do men have an unfair advantage in our literary prize shortlists?

A variation on why don't women write books with big ideas (to which the answer is, I suspect, if they do it doesn't get counted as a big idea) which also then takes in why don't women present big documentaries?

What was the last female fronted documentary - leaving aside Cash in the Attic, Car Boot Challenge and whatever the Channel 4 sex show was called? These clearly don't stand up there with Schama, Winston, Starkey, Ferguson etc. Those art programmes with a nun and Victoria Wood on empire is the best I can do. But authored documentaries? Even when Paglia and Greer are doing stuff, it tends to be one off.

On the short list issue, I confess to a certain amount of "Well Zadie Smith gets everywhere" - but there's the old line about swallows and summers, and I got there by thinking "That Brick Lane woman, whatsername", although I was thinking about Zadie Smith despite going via a book by Monica Ali (Ali Smith was the mental jump).

The writer suggests that we don't like pushy women so they don't get onto shortlists. Or to do documentaries.

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Bettany Hughes has a respectable career in producing intelligent historical documentaries, that she both writes and presents. There is a tendency for reviewers to focus on what she looks like rather than what she says, and she probably isn't treated as having the gravitas of Schama or Starkey, but what she does is, in my view, as good.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

I was going to say I remember a female historian on C4, but her name had escaped me...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

So she's the Michael Wood or John Rohmer. Three women is clearly not enough.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that feminism is a pretty Big Idea.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Indeed - and I invoked Klein, Faludi, Greer, Russ, Millett, Carter, Woolf, Wollstonecraft, Rowbottom, Paglia, Rubin, Dworkin, Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter, Jardine. One commenter on the earlier Grauniad piece said:

economic trends":

Naomi Klein:
The Shock Doctrine

Barbara Kingsolver
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Naomi Wolf
Give Me Liberty

Note that all three of these rank higher on the list than Gladwell's banal "Tipping Point", Yet, bizarrely, none of them are mentioned in this posting. It took me 2 75 seconds to click on the NYT and glean them from the bestseller list.

I could go further, and give a much longer list of former bestsellers by women in the same category. And noteworthy non-bestsellers by women in the same category.

But then, I'd be doing Ms. Flood's research for her. The research she should have done before posting this kind of lightweight drivel.

Suggested topic for Ms. Flood's next posting: "Articles asking "Where Are The Big Books / Scientific Discoveries / Major Works of Art or Scholarship By Women" Always Seem To Be Written By People Who Missed Out On The Past 2,000 Years Of Human History As Well As Today's Newspapers - Why?"

The author of the piece, Flood, comments:

The reason I thought it might be a bit of a push to include someone like Naomi Klein in this bracket is precisely because I felt she was too heavyweight, gets into her topics in much greater depth, etc.

Men think they've done a big ideas book, but in fact it's just a good size?

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Ah I see. So when she asked "why don't women write books with big ideas?", what she meant was "why don't women write books that appear to be about big ideas but are in fact devoid of intellectual content?" To which the answer, presumably, is that they've got better things to do.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Only when you can be a loud but empty vessel will you be taken seriously (although frankly a couple on my list would qualify on those grounds).

Or men lie about how big they are whilst women keep quiet about having one at all. (I have been teaching too much Cixous and Kristeva this week).

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

So what the eff is a big idea again?

*confuddled*

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

What was the last female fronted documentary
Stella Duffy on trying to write a Mills and Boon on BBC4 last week was the last one I saw.

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

More documentaries

Something very interesting on C4 a few weeks ago about vaginas. And what about Jane Trey's documentaries Painted Babies, the one about American fathers who want to keep their daughters pure that was on C4 the other week.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Are these not one offs though? Not to take away from the quality of them, but when we have weeks of Schama on the history of Britain and America, Starkey prattling on about monarchs, Kevin McLeod leaping around Castleford, Fergusson telling us how the empire was a good thing, Dawkins tutting about god, repeatedly, Waldemar Januszczak being entertaining on sculpture, a 45 minute one-off seems slim pickings.

I would blame the commissioners not the presenters, of course

[kayxh.livejournal.com]

Yer right, they are all one offs.

It also strikes me that they are about female things: 'bits', beauty contests, romantic novels.

But overall how much female-fronted tv is there. All that comes to mind at the moment are various cooking shows and Property Ladder. See light and fluffy again. Our brains can't handle the big stuff.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Clothes and furniture and food - to steal a phrase from (I believe it was) John Updike (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/26/john-updike).

A sort-of exception was Prescott: Social Class and Me - which was a two-parter by Amanda Blue. (Checks his list of suppression tactics: But it wasn't very good.) It should have been big stuff but kept being fluffy.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

While media commissioning editors are probably not looking for middle-aged, greyhaired, and not notably stylish* female historian/archivists to front their programmes, I suspect that they're also not looking for someone who is going to resist their tendency to tell things in nice neat sound-bitey stories and go 'It's All More Complicated' at every opportunity.

*I just don't see a woman with the general sartorial presence of the late great Roy Porter (bless 'im)** making it onto the small screen anytime in the near future.

**The 'been sleeping rough on the Embankment' look for which RP was famous.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I'd let out a most considerable hoot if I heard that Channel 4 had given you a six part series on, say, Victorian sex and sexuality, or even on making bread rolls. But there's a definite double standard.

It struck me over the last couple of weeks in discussing female comedians in class that we were making comments on physical appearance (Jo Brand, Kathy Burke, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman) than we wouldn't if we were talking about male comedians. (I hope it's something that I've been aware of for rather longer, but it foreably struck me this week)

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, oursin on the telly! And I could jump up and down and go, "I know her! I know her!" in true fangirly fashion.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

There is an area of documentary programme where women do seem to be more prominent. The wildlife programme, with the likes of Charlotte Uhlenbroek, Saba Douglas-Hamilton, Kate Humble, and the woman who does the free-diving whose name I forget. Coast also featured Alice Roberts and Miranda Krestolnikoff quite a bit.
It's lighter, popular stuff rather than heavyweight rathere than the Schama type authore documentary though.