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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

[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*