This is not meant as a boast, but I have close to 2,000 books in my personal collection. They range from novels to collections of poetry and essays to plays to biographies to volumes on history, art, culture, politics, sports, reference and everything in between.

So last night while bored I decided to get a handle on all of my books and better organize them, as there are random stacks of books spread out all over my apartment causing what can best be described as utterly unmanageable clutter.

While I was organizing the books by subject category, a startling truth revealed itself to me. It turns out that of the nearly 2,000 books in my collection, only a handful (literally 5 books) were authored by women.

Until that epiphany, I had never been consciously aware that I’ve been reading male authors more or less exclusively. And right now, thinking about it, I’m still not sure what it means. I don’t consider myself a sexist and I’m sure my sister, mother, and fiancee would agree. So WTF?

Perhaps this means that I am a “literary” sexist, if such a thing exists. Perhaps not. Perhaps it just means that I am subconsciously drawn more to the male voice, as its more familiar to me and I can relate to it more. Perhaps it means that the types of books I like to read are, more often than not, penned by male writers. I really don’t know. All I know is that with the exception of 5 books, I’ve spent the last 15 years or so reading male authors exclusively.

The ones I recall seeing last night are:

The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore
Jane Leavy’s biography of Sandy Koufax
Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”
Mary McKay Maynard’s “My Faraway Home” (A book I edited)
Tracey McFarlane-Mirande’s “Championship Swimming” (Also edited by yours truly)

To take this a step further, a cursory look through my record collection reveals a similar bias. With the exception of a few Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin records, my collection is 100% male.

So, fellas. Am I alone in this? And ladies, do you find the opposite bias in your own collections?

Please share your experiences and opinions below.

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And I can't actually count the number of books that I have, although I have about 1000 - 1200 shelved in an organized way. None of my paperbacks are shelved.

But yeah, my books are predominantly by men. Not as skewed as you, but I'll guess 80 - 85% at least are by men.

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As far as I can tell, there are fewer great female writers than there are great male writers.

That said, of course, two of the books that I love beyond all reason are first novels by women.

I think it's worth being aware of and consciously seeking out writing by women in order to expand your own world view. It's like, I also seek out books by gay writers and writers who are bringing their race and/or culture to the writing table with them, because it's really in literature that we have the ability to take a look deep inside the mind of someone very different from ourselves.

>As far as I can tell, there are fewer great female writers
>than there are great male writers.

Why do you think this is? Is this about the way we are all socialized and asked to fit within specific gender roles? Or is there something else to this entirely.

My experience is that male writers are better able to appeal to a universal sensibility while female writers find it difficult to step outside of their gender. This is especially true when it comes to female poets.

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Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

>My experience is that male writers are better able to appeal
>to a universal sensibility while female writers find it
>difficult to step outside of their gender.

Is that because the things we generally think of as "universal sensibilities" are in fact defined by males?

My opinion is that male writers are more easily able to adopt a genderless voice than female writers are. For me, it's a rare occurrence that I read something by a female writer and am not made overtly aware of the writer's gender. It just seems that gender is the central element of the identity of most female writers.

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Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

I TOTALLY disagree with you. The "genderless" voice is a male voice.

When you look at whether male writers can credibly write from a femle POV, and whether female writers can credibly write from a male POV, women win hands down. Hands fuckin DOWN, man.

I was all set to say something namby pamby about where we are in the world of social formation and cultural constructs, but when you raise the "genderless voice" issue, you get my hackles up, lol.

>The "genderless" voice is a
>male voice.

OOOOOHHHH this shit is so true. Preach, sister.

>When you look at whether male writers can credibly write from
>a femle POV, and whether female writers can credibly write
>from a male POV, women win hands down. Hands fuckin DOWN,
>man.

Again, Janey spits hot fiyah (tee hee). Men often cannot write women characters for shit, and certainly can't do a "female POV".

Somebody needs to have a good little sit down with Tom Wolfe on the subject.

--Maurice

>Again, Janey spits hot fiyah (tee hee). Men often cannot
>write women characters for shit, and certainly can't do a
>"female POV".
>
>Somebody needs to have a good little sit down with Tom Wolfe
>on the subject.

And don't anyone get cute and claim Roger Too White from A Man In Full, because Wolfe just needed to recycle his white male dialogue for him, it's not the same.

they wrote from a male POV and usually portrayed a damaged masculinity
rather than pretending that masculinity was the 'neutral voice'

which is more sexist?

:)

As a child I read all that Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume shit. But for whatever reason as an adult I'm not checking for the feminine voice.

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Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

right?

I'm sure I've read more than five books by women, but not much more than that. Most of the female penned literature I've read has been poetry, plays and short stories that were assigned for classes though.
I made a conscious effort to listen to female music a couple years back. Despite liking most of it I've fallen back to mostly male stuff.

Helen de FUCKIN Witt!

I just made a big book order too. The only non-comic or photography book was Bignick's.
Next month.

I think Janey made some valid points about there being more great books by men than women, and that will be reflected in your book list. 5 of 2000 books is fucking ridiculous, though. that's 99.75% male.

Do you want any recommendations?

Rick

I read all that Austen shit in college, though.

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Did I mention that I met Kareem?: http://tinylink.com/?UCNMKdNWLA

Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

i guess this is kind of silly, because you are obviously way better read than me.

anyway, here goes:

jhumpa lahiri, interpreter of maladies, the namesake
arundhati roy, and non-fiction work
ayn rand, atlas shrugged

wow, these seem painfully obvious as i type them, but they're the best i can do off the dome.

rick

n/m

Jane Smiley, esp. her books that relate to horses -- A Thousand Acres and what the hell is the other one.

But um TONI MORRISON? Mr. Jenkins needs to read The Bluest Eye at LEAST, lol.

It didn't do much for me. Neither did Joy Kogawa's "Obasan" or Jamaica Kincaid's "Annie John", which I also had to read in college.

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Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

The Bluest Eye is good too, if you're pressed for time. I wasn't that impressed by Beloved.

Have you read Zadie Smith yet? The Autograph Man is sub-par, but White Teeth and On Beauty are both great, imo.

but lahiri is cool.

and I haven't inflicted Rand on myself yet, pretty sure I'll really dislike it, though I should still do it at some point. Haven't read Lahiri's novel either, but her short story collection was quite good.

Julie Orringer
How to Breathe Underwater.

Like a punch in the stomach. whew!

that reminds me, the best female short story/novella writer I've read so far is Katharine Anne Porter, "Noon Wine" is the shit.

i don't like roy's fiction either. it's funny, i meant to type any, not and, but it changes the whole meaning of my statement.

i don't like roy's fiction either. it's funny, i meant to type any, not and, but it changes the whole meaning of my statement.

why dont you like ayn rand? atlas shrugged blew me away. i dont agree with her that much, but i loved reading her make her point.

rick

far from girly.

and she can really write male characters. Just read parker's back.
Her complete short stories are really cheap too.

I think the only reason it hit the Bestseller list is because Leavy hinted at Koufax being gay.

Oh, how controversy sells books!

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Did I mention that I met Kareem?: http://tinylink.com/?UCNMKdNWLA

Hot to Trotsky: http://www.regeneratedheadpiece.com

which isn't always the case when you're talking about sports books, but I thought it was so insubstantial, I almost couldn't believe it was an actual book.

luckily for me I don't collect books like I do CDs, so the difference isn't quite as stark. And I have made good strides in at least reading (and enjoying) female authors, female musicians are a lot more difficult for me to appreciate, I find.

sadly she's the only female writer that I've read extensively

i read male authors mostly but then i also (almost) only read dead authors and as we know women were deprived of most of the conditions a writer finds necessary or the opportunities conducive to becoming an author... a room of one's own and so on

anyway i refuse to be held hostage for what i read, because it's all good.... i mean i could read exclusively male authors from the 1880s and count myself a king of infinite space

as for music - lol what can you do? even those females you did mention, men had a massive part in creating their music. the problem is beyond the scope of an individual consumer

i realized that a long time ago when people would ask me to list my favorite authors.
the list would be all women, so someone would ask, "well, what about *insert black male author here*?" and i would scrunch up my nose and say, "i guess."

with the exception of walter mosley and white boy shuffle guy, most of the black male authors whose books i have were b/c i had to read them for school.

and the only books i have by whites are romance novels and vampire/science fiction stuff. the fluff.

so i'm a literary sexist-racist, i think.

***********************
"is indiana jones here?... i just heard a pussy whip." low2b

I lean towards male writers, directors, and musicians. Most of my CDs are by guys. Pretty much all movies I own are about men. The books I own are about men.

This post definitely raises an interesting question about how gender plays into how we relate to different works of art.

*camps out*

On the one hand, I like to broaden my horizons, and the fact that my tastes for all types of art skew so heavily male raises some unpleasant questions. On the other, I don't like to politicize how I spend my free time so heavily that I have difficulty enjoying the art that I really enjoy (or spend a lot of time with artistic works that I don't especially enjoy, just to feel better about my innate gender biases). And beyond just that, some of the art by women that I try just for the sake of being less biased towards men, I would probably enjoy more if I came upon it organically, instead of trying to make myself "eat my vegetables", so to speak. Luckily there are enough women writers at this point who I do enjoy that I feel okay about my taste in books, even if I do tend to go 80/20. Music and movies, I don't even think about much right now, it would be a truly mammoth undertaking (and how many female non-romantic comedy directors are there, anyway?)

when you look at what he reads, of COURSE he's going to lean very heavily toward male writers. The current stuff he reads is all non-fiction sports stuff, and what he reads for pleasure is from an era in which women had a bitch of a time getting published. For every woman who was published prior to oh, I don't know, say, 1970, there were about a hundred to a thousand men published.

Most of my books by women are from college courses. Plath, Stevie Smith, Lorrie Moore, Ann Charters.




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