Shagouti

Some nights even filling up the kettle and setting an empty mug out for my morning tea felt hard. But I was always thankful for it in the morning.

Other nights, one thing would lead to another, and I’d wake up in a clean house with everything ready to go.

And, on a rare few nights, the one thing that I could do to make my morning easier was going straight to bed and allowing myself to rest.

when i was a kid, i would have to tiptoe around his anger issues often, sometimes running quietly past his work table until he got his own place completely separate from our family, locked away for days. every so often he would start screaming in the car and trying to hit me or my brother for talking too loud while my mom attempted to calm him down as he swerved on the road. and now he, smiling, helps me with car insurance.

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.

i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.

but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’

even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before

society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them. 

In past centuries, this centralization of the male narrative to the exclusion of female perspectives was a critical part of a feedback loop that caused prominent male thinkers and writers to speculate that women simply didn’t have an inner world or narrative, or even that women left alone without a man in the room had nothing to say to each other (I’ll pull out my sources if you guys need me to but you’ll have to give me time to sift through my old course work).

Even if logically these arguments are easily struck down today, the intuitive thinking that “people different from myself (most frequently white cis male) don’t have as rich an inner life as I do because I’ve never encountered it”. In practice, that knee-jerk, illogical, gut-response thinking informs our actions and worldview more than even easy logic unless we have the self-awareness to challenge it. That’s how our brains are built. And people who think this way frequently never will meaningfully learn from these narratives because the media that expresses those lived experiences is beneath their notice or “not for them”.

This is why so many of the books being removed from school curricula in the US are so damn vital. A more complete understanding of the human world and the people that surround us REQUIRES hearing all these voices, even when the stories are brutal or uncomfortable or go against our upbringing. My world is richer and truer for having read Beloved by Toni Morrison, and Howl by Alan Ginsburg, and Night by Eli Wiesel, books outside my comfort zone that I would likely have never picked up had it not been for a responsible high school and college.

This. This is the purpose of literature.

And the thing is, that male-centered (or white-centered, or cishet-centered) narrative default can actually mess with women’s (or other minoritized groups’) ability to read women-centered (or otherwise identity-centered) works. When you grow up having boys centralized in all the genres you like, it becomes the default in your head. When all the baby dolls at the store are white, a small child will come to prefer them. When heterosexual romance is the only plot on offer, you struggle more for not personally loving within that framework. As I approach my thirtieth year on this planet, I’m still trying to undo this early training.

For sharing:

But now I see that even though gender is made up, it is very much the system we live in. As long as we are placing people into categories there will be people who don't belong in the category they are placed in.

Sports are made up. Holidays are made up. Gender is made up. None of these things exist in the same way that a tree or gravity exists, and they don’t need to be treated like immutable laws of reality. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter to us! The community and joy that the World Cup brings to people is real and meaningful. The euphoria that playing with and exploring gender presentation brings to people is real and meaningful.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

... have... have we considered that perhaps the average reader just, like, knows what they like in a book? I mean... first sentences are famous for establishing things like *checks notes*... genre, tone, POV, pacing, character, voice, uhhh... writing style...

The average reader is putting your book down because they discovered it's in first person (or not in first person). The average reader put your book down because they wanted a cozy read, or they're sick of cozy reads, or romance, or grimdark, or assassin princesses, or vampires, or or or. The average reader put your book down because they just didn't like your writing style—no, not because it was boring... they just, get this, didn't like it.

The average critical reader put your book down because it had six grammatical mistakes in the first two sentences.

The average reader will read quite a ways if the premise intrigues them, they like the genre, the writing style doesn't get on their nerves, and the characters pop off the page. In fact, they'll probably read the whole book, so long as it delivers on its plot promises and doesn't drag in the middle section.

And this flower, we tell children, if you let it bud and bloom and age from sun-yellow flower to moon-white seed, you can then pluck it and blow its seeds away to make a wish.

As they shouted out with glee,

"Unholy Drink Cloaca