In “The Naked and the Conflicted,” Kaitie Roiphe stakes her claim as one of the brightest minds of the 19th century by arguing that feminism unsexes men. Her subject: Great American Male Novelists. Unlike Roth, Mailer, Updike and Bellow, says Roiphe, the girlie men of contemporary literature are sexual failures, and feminist scolds made them that way. Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen—their protagonists are cuddly, passive, ambivalent, “sweet.”
“Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation,” she writes,” [they have] an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with convoluted, post-feminist second guessing.”
Never mind that in the post AIDS, STD-plagued, post-feminist era, sex is more complicated than it was in Mailer’s day (when typically only one party’s sexual satisfaction was of consequence). To illustrate Mailer’s thrillingly violent virility, Roiphe offers this gem: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” The line may constitute great literature, but that doesn’t make the sex good. (And it can only be considered progress that these days one first asks a lady if she wants to be wounded, trapped, and silenced in bed.)
No one expects more from Roiphe, the Ann Coulter of the literati, who made her name as a date-rape denier and disdains “the feminists” (some superannuated army of Andrea Dworkins she believes control vast numbers of impressionable minds). Her personal essay about new motherhood in Slate last August, for example, asked, “Why Won’t Feminists Admit the Pleasure of Infants?” without so much as identifying the kill-joys against whom she defined her own post-natal pleasure.
But you might expect more from The New York Times. How is it that the last stand-alone book review section in the country can spare three full pages for this retro-rumination? (Great American male novelists? Still a conversation?) The essay is poorly argued (Roiphe traces the problem to the 1970 book Sexual Politics, in which Kate Millett takes the literary lions of her day to task for their sexism, which doesn’t explain who sissified today’s men of letters), and it’s biased: her contemporary authors are all middle class straight whites who hardly represent the scope of quality literature by American men. A more timely essay might have asked how women authors approach sex now that they have an equal shot at greatness.
But do they?
During the same week The Book Review was celebrating male conquest and consummation, The Washington Post ran author Julianna Baggott’s essay revealing that Publisher’s Weekly’s top ten books of 2009 featured only men, Amazon.com’ s Best Books of 2009 put just four women in the top twenty, and in the last 30 years, only 11 Pulitzer Prizes have gone to women.
“I wish I were scandalized, or at least surprised,” wrote Baggett. But she was ahead of the curve: she kick-started her career by taking a pen name and passing as a man, and promptly got herself shortlisted on a pick list, next to Bill Clinton and David Sedaris. Last month, business blogger James Chartrand (Men With Pens) came out as a woman, saying that by writing as a man, she had doubled and sometimes tripled her fees, thereby climbing out of freelance purgatory.
I notice that even The Guardian’s famously fun Bad Sex Award for fiction favors men: in its 17-year history, just two women have won—not, presumably, because women write better sex scenes; more likely, they just aren’t in the competition.
Baggott, a professor at the Florida State University, wrote that this year’s lists “forced me to explain to my students — the next generation of writers — that the men in the class have double if not five times the chance of this kind of recognition.” That goes for the bad along with the good.
Tags: ann coulter, bad sex award, julianna baggott, kate millett, katie roiphe, norman mailer