In the News--Gender Wars?

Today, The New Yorker published an interesting profile on Jennifer Weiner ("Written Off"), describing her as "an unlikely feminist enforcer" for taking issue with offenses such as the lack of coverage of women authors in The New York Times, which stats do prove exhibits a bias in reviewing women as they absolutely do review far more men. Not one to sit quietly in the corner and recoil when called strident for speaking her mind, Ms. Weiner has developed a platform and voice speaking on the challenges of being a female author and calling out inequalities; as such she has found herself publicly at odds with the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Jeff Eugenides, referring to the review-love Franzen receives from The New York Times as "Franzenfreude" and spoofing a promotional campaign for Eugenides' novel The Marriage Plot. So while Weiner may have found herself in the position of "unlikely feminist enforcer" perhaps accidentally given the ease and immediacy through which social media allows one to respond to doings in the book world, she certainly relishes it and perhaps rightly so.

What I find most interesting about this gender war is that much like spot gloss lamination and endpapers, book details in-house book people often spend hours pondering, no one south of the Hudson River really cares. Now, this doesn't mean that if asked or if after having readThe New Yorker article or the sundry of other articles on this issue that the regular consumer wouldn't have an opinion, but the average consumer and the average reader of Jennifer Weiner's novels isn't thinking about how much coverage Weiner gets in The New York Times versus Jonathan Franzen (these authors probably don't even attract the same reader) and clearly the lack of coverage in The New York Times hasn't hurt Jennifer Weiner's bottom line in the least.

No, this gender war is largely an insular, publishing insider quandary. The fact is that The New York Times should be held to the fire and the hiring of Pamela Paul and the changes we've thus far seen at the Times, for which Jennifer Weiner can certainly be credited, needed to happen and were indeed overdue (says a publishing insider). So Brava Jennifer Weiner! But the reader doesn't care and isn't particularly invested in this fight. And because the reader isn't involved in this conversation, the concern of gender wars in literature largely amounts to a bunch of Twitter disputes where writers of note oddly fight over review ink. This is not to belittle the idea that women are not recognized in the ways that men are, but ultimately, I don't think what's actually happening is a gender war. What really seems to be happening is a war over what is deemed literary versus what is deemed commercial; and the idea that some people's work is somehow considered more worthy literature than others.  I don't know that that is strictly about whether the author is male or female.

And the fact that Jennifer Weiner also finds herself at odds with female writers such as Meg Wolitzer shows the bias is far deeper than men versus women. But it's the idea that there is a hierarchy to literature and that too many making publishing decisions, whether that decision is to publish a book or to review a book, pride ourselves in being literary snobs. Why? Because we have forgotten about the reader.

If the reader were kept more at the forefront of the conversation and the decision making process on what books get published and reviewed, we'd all likely stop being so surprised when books like 50 Shades of Grey become a runaway hit. And the problem of who and what gets reviewed at the Times wouldn't be such a talking point. Millions of readers like to read Jennifer Weiner's books. She's absolutely laughing all the way to the bank. I respect her voice on what the challenges are in being a woman author in an industry where male egos abound and are favored. But I don't think she's fighting a woman's war in the purest sense. And to use Sheryl Sandberg's vernacular, I don't think it's quite a "lean in" situation as I think any man writing "boy lit" would have the same challenges in being taken seriously at the Times, at least the Times of old, before the arrival of Pamela Paul.

I think what's also at work is this idea that we publishing snobs must somehow protect literature, protect its integrity and see that it's valued. But who are we protecting it from? Who are we ensuring values it? Oh, yes, the reader. But what this really looks like is gatekeepers--gatekeepers at the Times, gatekeepers at the publishing houses--telling the reader what they should be reading and thus what they should value and thus what literature has value and by not reviewing a certain author's work, even to negatively review it, by not acknowledging it at all, we tacitly determine it not to be literature, certainly not literature with a capital L and therefore not worthy. And yes, that can then get distilled down to the publishing industry being dismissive of women--either the author or subject matter--but I am not convinced that a woman reviewer/editor/gatekeeper will always give another woman's book a fair shake if she too is a traditional publishing snob looking only for literature with a capital L. Commercial Women's Fiction is a label that doesn't scream capital L literature, purposely so. That doesn't mean that it isn't and that it isn't important. Jennifer Weiner's books are important to so many for varied reasons. She reaches people. And that should be just as recognized by outlets like the Times. Not because she's a woman, but because she's a writer doing her job with a capital J.