At the bottom of my Wikipedia page is a tag that identifies me as an “American women novelist.” If I were a man, the tag would read “American male novelist.” My gender should have nothing to do with my career, and yet there it sits, tied to my profession, as if the male novelists and I work in inherently different fields.

But one could easily make a cynical argument that we do.

Studies have shown women’s books are priced lower than men’s, women’s fiction is reviewed less often, and published less frequently in literary journals. Even books about women are less likely to win prizes than ones about men. The fields that men and women run through are different indeed: one of them has a lot more rough spots and potholes.

Over the past few months, as I’ve been looking at large text corpora, I often found myself thinking about gender inequality in the writing world. I wanted to collect banned books by men and women for a machine learning project (I planned to train two text-generating models on the different corpora and place them in conversation), but while banned texts by men are fairly easy to find in the public domain, banned texts by women proved much harder to come by.

As I searched for banned texts on Project Gutenberg, which hosts over 58,000 texts that can be downloaded free of charge, I began to wonder how many of the books—banned or not—were by women. One estimate came from Wikidata, where information found on Wikipedia pages—such as a person’s name, gender, or occupation—is stored in a way that’s machine readable. I found about twelve thousand people (writers, editors, illustrators, translators) who contributed to the corpus.

In this subset, men outnumber women by over 5 to 1. Although gender is not binary, I look at the number of men and women because this is the information available, or estimable, using name-based gender prediction tools.

I’d come to Project Gutenberg to find banned books for my bots, but I started to wonder what they would learn about writing if they were trained on this entire corpus. I have read a number of studies that identify patterns in language that are associated with one gender or another.

Researchers from Aalto and Helsinki Universities compared fiction by men and women in the British National Corpus and found that men use first-person plural (we, us) while women use second-person (you and your) more frequently. Men overuse certain nouns (e.g., ‘man’), women certain verbs (e.g., ‘thought’) and intensifiers (e.g., ‘much’ or ‘very’). The researchers note that such differences might be due to the gender of the intended audience, not the author, but this distinction quickly becomes murky.

What makes a book appropriate for one gender or another? When only the girls were invited to author Shannon Hale’s presentation—a teacher later told Hale, “the administration only gave permission to the middle-school girls to leave class for your assembly”, she noted:

“I talk about books and writing, reading, rejections and moving through them, how to come up with story ideas. But because I’m a woman, because some of my books have pictures of girls on the cover, because some of my books have ‘princess’ in the title, I’m stamped as ‘for girls only.’ However, the male writers who have boys on their covers speak to the entire school.”

If the language we use reflects what is expected of us—or if women’s books are only expected to be read by women—the fact that certain words are more commonly used by one gender or another strikes me as a symptom of systemic bias.

Like when I ran several of the essays I’ve written about technology through two different gender prediction systems and was identified as male by both. I suspect there is an imbalance in the training corpus and that I was called a man because the system had learned from the work it knew that men use words and phrases like “machine learning” and “biased data.”

What makes a book *appropriate* for one gender or another?
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I found over two million words of what I called “banned man” literature just by following the links from a single list of banned books. After poking around for a few hours, I collected around 800,000 words of banned woman literature from the public domain. I’d wanted at least a million words for each bot. I decided to revise my original machine learning plan and look at contemporary work instead.

I turned to Smashwords, where some books are sold and others may be freely downloaded, depending on the author’s wishes. On this site, the gender-related glut and shortages were opposite the ones I encountered on Project Gutenberg. I noticed far more women than men offering their one-hundred-thousand-word novels for free.

At this point, however, my interest in gender and language had eclipsed my interest in bot chatter. I was reading papers about statistical tests to determine which differences in word usage are significant and wondering things like how I could get my hands on a really big corpus. This is how I came across the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words from 220,225 texts collected between the years of 1990 and 2017.

I found this corpus dazzling, not just because I discovered my own work in it, but because when I opened the list of included writers and began to scroll through the names of fiction authors (who represent just a subset of the work), I was struck—in a positive way. Was the corpus as gender balanced as it appeared? I wrote to Professor Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, who maintains the corpus, and asked.

“Actually, the ‘balance’ just refers to the overall balance between the ‘macro-genres’ (spoken, fiction, etc) in COCA. As far as gender balance in fiction, I’ve never really designed the corpus to do that,” he said. He pointed me to the work of Doug Biber and Jesse Egbert, who have written about how to make a corpus representative—which is not a simple matter.

I appreciated Professor Davies’s candor, but was left with my question and a long list of fiction authors. I ran the first names through a gender predictor and the estimated ratio of women to men was fairly even. Men contribute more science fiction, women more of what is labelled as “juvenile work.” But I was frustrated by the uncertainty of the estimates.

The names are not always parsed correctly, the prediction just a guess, and I couldn’t see the women working under men’s names—people like George Madden Martin, Max du Veuzit, Lucas Malet, and Henry Handel Richardson, to name just a few. The irony that women, writing under men’s name to be heard, can so easily escape a search for female writers made me melancholy. I wanted to know who was in this corpus. I decided to try matching the names to biographical records in Wikidata again.

Using Wikidata via a tool called OpenRefine I could match just under half of the subset of five thousand names I tried. Not all of the names matched the correct person. For example, Elizabeth Evans—who is the author of six books and the recipient of an NEA fellowship—does not have a Wikipedia page, but she was matched to another person with the same name. As I was interested only in gender, I accepted this match—it seemed reasonably likely that the gender would be correct. Of the matched names, forty percent belonged to women.

I abandoned this line of inquiry, but I was left with my questions: Who is included in our corpora? Who is not? Whose voice am I hearing? What story does it tell? For the English Wikipedia, according to the estimates I’ve seen, over 80% of the contributors are male. The story there—our history—is disproportionately about men, and the biographies of men outnumber those of women significantly (the latest estimate I’ve seen shows just under 18% of the biographies are of women). I suspect the 40/60 imbalance in my COCA gender estimate belongs more to Wikipedia than COCA, but I know nothing more than that I observed it.

In the case of Project Gutenberg, the work is primarily by male authors and any patterns in the language that belong to men are magnified by this imbalance. If male authors use the word “man” more often than female authors do—as the researchers noted in their study of the British National Corpus—having five times more male than female authors gives that word an even greater prominence.

For the English Wikipedia, over 80% of the contributors are male.
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I think about how imbalances in our corpora magnify bias, not just in subject matter (stories about male characters or biographies of men), but in the words we see and choose. The technologies we are using to generate text—from auto-replies to articles—are learning the patterns in the set of texts we give them. And these technologies, in turn, are not only writing for all of us, but imposing the patterns they’ve learned. Not all people who write (or read) about technology are men, but the story the artificial intelligence knows, based on the words and the associations made from its training corpus, says otherwise.

I would love if my gender weren’t tied to my work, or diagnosed and misdiagnosed by technologies that reflect the biases I work against every day. I am a woman. I am a writer. The 1500 words I’ve written here won’t swing the gender balance in any large corpus, but I’m putting them out into the world, and I hope they will be counted.

So, you are a woman with literary aspirations. You want to write the Great American Novel or work your way into the elite halls of publishing. You believe all you need is talent, hard work, and a little bit of luck.

You are wrong.

Publishing is a snake pit filled with venomous but charming creatures in rumpled suits. This handy guide* will help you spot the cons, the fakes, and the shady characters you’ll encounter on your journey. You can’t avoid them all, but knowledge is power.

1. The Pig in a Poke. A trite and common gambit. A man of middling talent is given a seven-figure advance and major marketing support for his debut novel. The plot is a blatant rip-off of a previously published novel from a female author. When she points this out, he pokes her in the eye. The literati cheer.
2. The Pyramid Scheme. A few powerful white male editors at major publishing houses buddy up with a handful of white male agents representing a boatload of white male writers. The writers get publishing deals, the agents get rich, the editors get richer and everyone agrees it’s a shame that so few women or people of color are published, but what can they do about it?
3. The Shell Game. Three upmarket, suspense fiction books featuring unreliable (drunk) female narrators top the bestseller list. The authors use pseudonyms like B.F. Warren and L.M. James. Your challenge? To find the one female-driven narrative written by an actual woman. (Spoiler: there is no actual woman.)
4. The Sting. A writer and low-level publishing house employee lies about his credentials, his experience, and his history to blaze his way to a high paying job and a lucrative book contract. When it looks like he might be caught, he invents a health crisis and a series of family tragedies as a diversion. Even when everyone discovers he’s a liar, nothing bad happens to him and he remains wealthy by literary standards. It stings.
5. The Counterfeit. A man writes a memoir chronicling his drug addiction. Oprah tells everyone to buy his book. When the book is exposed as fabricated claptrap, he goes on Oprah for the second time to cry literary crocodile tears. He writes more books, which somehow get published, and he makes a bunch of money, and no one believes he is sorry that he lied to Oprah.
6. The Bait and Switch. A literary maven appears on the scene in your town. She shows up at parties. She hosts literary fundraisers. She offers to read your manuscript, to introduce you to her agent, to get your book into the hands of powerful people if you’ll just donate to this very worthy cause she has invented or put down a deposit on a writing retreat in Italy that is never going to happen. She is a fierce woman with pink hair and cool glasses, so you trust her. She’s not like all the men who’ve lied and scammed their way into your literary heart. Except, of course, she is.
7. The Charm Offensive. A somewhat famous and critically acclaimed author teaches at literary festivals across the country. He says your writing has real potential. He offers to meet with you about your manuscript. But when you meet, he is drunk and his hand keeps drifting to your knee and you understand that the only thing of yours he’s ever read or will ever read is your name-tag, which is conveniently located right above your breasts.
8. The Slow Burn. An awards committee announces its longlist and brags that it’s the most diverse group of writers in the history of the award. Articles are written about the extraordinary inclusiveness of the list. The committee is praised for its open mindedness. The shortlist contains three white men and one woman of color. A man wins.
9. The Spitball. You work at a major publishing house and your boss calls you in to spitball some ideas for marketing the Summer releases. You give him all your best thoughts in a carefully prepared and meticulously researched report. He thanks you and then presents your ideas as his own at the next editor’s meeting. (Just kidding, he doesn’t actually thank you.)
10. The Upchuck. You are in a writing workshop with five men, all of whom insist you could learn a lot by reading the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. You vomit.

* This is not in any way a comprehensive guide. Proceed at your own risk.

Are you looking to share your articulate and well-researched musings on Mesopotamian dinosaurs, the politics of denim, the unexpected relationship between neo-conservatism and feminism, adolescent self-discovery, unlikely animal friendships, sploshing, the plight of restorative justice told through a graphic novel, the sordid history of the salt trade, racial disparity in the criminal justice system, the latest congressional health care death match . . . or anything in between?

Are you a maker? A photographer? A director? A hang-gliding genderqueer rapper? We want your stories, your inspirations, your dogged research and epiphanic insight.

The Establishment is looking to unearth overlooked stories, produce original reporting, and provide a platform for voices that have been marginalized by the mainstream media. And yes, we want your humor, wit, and good old-fashioned satire, too. We publish originally reported features, interviews, long-form journalism, personal essays, and multimedia of all shapes, sizes, and creeds.

The Nitty Gritty

We pay $125 for feature stories, op-eds, and personal essays (800–1,500 words), and $500 for a select few long-form investigative pieces that involve original reporting and at least five interviews (3,000 words). All multimedia submissions are paid for on a case-by-case basis, but we pay everyone an egalitarian rate for every contribution they make.

How to pitch:

• To submit a pitch, email us at getestablished@theestablishment.co, including the word “pitch” in the subject line. If the pitch is time-sensitive, please note this in the subject line as well, with the words “Time Sensitive.”
• Your pitch should be 2–4 paragraphs in length and as specific as possible. Please include when applicable:
• A thesis
• The historical or cultural context of the piece you’re looking to write
• Why your proposed piece is important
• Existing research you’re looking to draw from
• Potential interview subjects
• Relevant information on a news hook
• Expected word length
• You’re also welcome to submit full-length, previously unpublished articles. When submitting, please include information on the piece in the body of the email.
• If you’ve never written for us, include three links to previously published work. Do not send us zip files or Dropbox links — we won’t open them. We of course love publishing first-time writers, but in these cases, any example of writing is appreciated.
• We aim to respond to pitches within two weeks. If you do not hear back in this timeframe, we’ve decided not to move forward with your story. We do read all the pitches we receive — honest! — but due to volume, we’re unable to respond to each one.

Other valuable intel:

1. Our audience is international and we gladly accept pitches from writers around the world. Hyperlocal news, however, is not typically relevant for us.
2. We love pitches that feature original reporting and research. Personal essays are also in our wheelhouse, but please make sure these will resonate not just with those who know you, but with a diverse readership — take us from the “I” to the universal.
3. Be as clear and specific as possible in your pitches. Thorough/compelling pitches let us know that the final product will likely be the same.
4. We are a women-funded-and-run company, but that certainly doesn’t mean we don’t accept pitches from cis men. If you’re pitching us, check out our website to get a feel for what we publish.
5. We are open to publishing previously published works; rates vary depending on the situation.

This story originally appeared on Narratively, a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories — get thee to more amazing tales on the new face of adoptive parents, a series on paperless people, and clandestine love.

Marley Dias, who is 12, arrives in New York’s Fashion District wheeling a suitcase filled with blazers, sneakers, and ten pairs of eyeglasses. She’s traveled in a town car from her home in New Jersey to be photographed for a publication that is presenting her with an award in November, which will debut this winter. She’s wearing a translucent pink plastic pair of glasses, Converse, a three-quarter-length baseball tee, and cut-off jeans.

Dias’s publicist hugs her and steps back like a mother surveying her daughter who’s just come back from college, commenting on how tall Dias has grown. The publicist introduces Dias around to the camera crew, who has been toying with the placement of stacks of books against a stark white backdrop. There’s a lot of chatter at once as the makeup artist and stylist size up Dias and lead her into the dressing room for privacy. The windowsill is lined with clip-on bows and jeweled hair accessories. Tomboy suits hang off the clothing racks. There’s a suggestion that Dias wrap her hair into pigtails, and then some discussion about whether that will look too childish. Dias sits in the dressing chair. As the makeup artist begins dabbing the brush in the liquid foundation, the publicist interjects to say she doesn’t want Dias to wear too much makeup. She should look her age.

Her mother, Janice Johnson Dias, who is the president of the small non-profit GrassROOTS Community Foundation, asked Dias over breakfast one morning what she had learned over the year. Johnson Dias likes to pose the question, “What happens when you see your own problem? What are you going to do to solve it?” Dias, then only 11, said she wanted to attempt to collect one thousand books that featured black girls as the main character. She had been reading stories in school, like Where the Red Fern Grows, that featured “boys and their dogs” and couldn’t relate to these protagonists. In November of 2015, Dias, then in sixth grade, launched a campaign called #1000BlackGirlBooks.

“I thought that was a very big problem,” she says of being assigned books that featured mainly white men and boys, “because kids don’t experience the same thing.”

Kathleen Horning, the director of Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which documents the number of books by and about people of color, found in 2013 that of the 650 young adult fiction books it tracked that year about humans, only 36 featured people of color as the main character, about five percent of the total. Two years later in 2015, the organization found eight percent of children’s books featured African Americans as main characters, less than one percent Native American, three percent Asian Pacific, and over 73 percent white characters. Twelve percent featured “animals, trucks, etc.” which shows there were more kids’ books being published about inanimate objects than about people of color.

Several organizations are trying to address the disparity, including Writing in the Margins, which mentors emerging writers and We Need Diverse Books, which advocates for change in the publishing industry. Its co-founder Dhonielle Clayton, who was a librarian for six years, said she wouldn’t have been able to fill one shelf of books that featured children of color as the main characters. One student, a girl of color, asked Dhonielle to pick out a book for her about a witch, one who looked like she did, and Clayton couldn’t find one.

“We’re looking at stereotyping and erasure as a form of censure in children’s books. You can see how children’s books are a form of programming in this country,” she says.

“It’s exhausting to talk to people who are ignorant and don’t get it,” Clayton continues, speaking about the lack of diversity within publishing houses, as well as in the books they put out — where a 2015 survey by Lee and Low Books showed that 79 percent of people in the industry were white and only four percent black. “You give up, you hit roadblocks, people think you’re trying to dispossess them. Diversity is not about replacing. It’s about enhancing and adding. The pie is not going to be gobbled up by one group.”

Twelve days from Dias’s scheduled deadline to collect her 1,000 books, which was set for the end of January 2016, she had only received 200 books, which she planned to donate to a school in St. Mary, Jamaica, where her mother is from. But the campaign grabbed the attention of the local FOX news station, Good Day Philadelphia — where she was interviewed wearing lime-green sunglasses — and afterward, the media and press requests began pouring in. Shortly after, she appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show as her parents proudly beamed from the audience.

The campaign blew up from there, turning Dias into a sought-after mini celebrity. Later that year, the Poughkeepsie School Districted paid her $6,500 to give an hour-long speech to staff and a workshop to fifty students.

“The first time I saw her on T.V., I cried,” says Sonia Fergus, the mother of Dias’s childhood friend, who accompanied her to the photo shoot. “Most people don’t get to do what they love and she’s getting to do that.”

Almost two years since the campaign began, Dias has now gathered over 10,000 books, and about 2,000 unique titles with donations from places like Barnes & Noble. She sent the donations to schools and social service organizations across the United States and Jamaica. Last summer, she was asked to create a zine for Elle.com, which was a big deal for her because her life goal is to become a magazine editor. She interviewed Hillary Clinton, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Misty Copeland, who she’s a “huge fan” of and says she models her life after the ballet dancer’s “grace and elegance.” Her first book will be published by Scholastic early next year, which Dias describes as guide for girls over ten that shows how they can change the world “in their own way that’s not just in a soup kitchen.”

Dias wants to keep working on issues of diversity and literacy, hoping one day to perhaps host or produce a show and empower other kids to speak out.

Johnson Dias says her daughter is not afraid to stand up for others, like helping friends who are challenged by schoolwork. Though much of her job requires being in the spotlight, she doesn’t like to draw attention to herself. When she first noticed the lack of diverse books in her school, she kept mum and didn’t appeal to her teachers. However, Dias’s new role has matured her beyond what many young teenagers experience.

“She has changed. I think she’s more serious with the social responsibility. It’s no longer about her and she’s carrying that weight more than I as her mother would have liked,” she says.

Before the four-hour long photo shoot begins, Dias’s makes sure she eats eats lunch. A caterer has delivered salmon, kale salad, and an assortment of cookies. Dias is still hungry for the fish after it’s gone so the publicist slices off a piece of hers and puts it on Dias’s plate. As she eats, Dias takes out her cellphone and starts scrolling through her Instagram page to show off her school friends, who she says are so diverse, they’re like the United Nations.

“Only ten percent of people are left-handed,” she says, changing the topic with a fact she repeats later for the camera crew.

Her first outfit change is a plaid navy jacket under a white collared shirt, pants, white high-top Converse and clear eyeglasses. She’s decided to try the pigtails. They’re secured with little bows.

She sits cross-legged on the floor against the color-coordinated stacks of books, switching between making silly faces and pretending to read. The photographer sits bare-footed a few feet away, directing Dias where to sit, when to stand and how to pose.

As the campaign snowballed, Johnson Dias expected her daughter’s grades to dip, but Dias continued to qualify for honors classes.

“I think there are moments when she likes this and moments when she dislikes it,” Johnson Dias says about her daughter. “It’s uncomfortable when it interrupts her being a kid.”

Dias echoes that sentiment. She doesn’t always like to dress up and prefers not to stay out late. She gets to travel now and meet influential people, but she can’t see her friends all the time and has missed some school. She acknowledges that being in the public eye means her freedom is limited compared to other kids.

“People like to think of me as an author or a personality,” she says during the shoot. “But childhood is a very special time in your life and you never get that back.”

But she’s forging ahead with the pursuit as a means to pave the way for other kids.

“I want to actually change the system we live in,” she says.

Read more great tales over at Narratively.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a cartoonish president and a platoon of ignorant lemmings marching in lockstep across red states provide the perfect sunset-hued filter to enhance the already very golden self-image of liberals from San Francisco to New York City.

Not only did they vote for a Black man to be President — twice — but they alsowatched Moonlight, and donned safety pins as self-appointed guardians of the nation.

That’s why there was a gasp of collective, artisanal horror when Nicole Wright, a scholar of Jane Austen — the author who perfected the sharp, snide critique of society’s buffoons (we’re looking at you, Mrs. Bennet) — wrote that Austen’s work has been co-opted by the so called ‘alt-right’ who view her writing as a manifestation of the ideal (read: white) society, sexuality, and culture.

As Wright observed:

“… Austen as an avatar of a superior bygone era is linked not only with fantasies of female retreat from the sexual whirl, but also with calls for white separatism…[where] the world of Austen’s novels is extolled as a prototype for the ‘racial dictatorship’ of tomorrow.”

It’s easy to feel self-righteous when faced with this shallow reading of Austen’s novels. It is the same kind of smugness that caused many white liberals to dismiss Trump’s ascension to the presidency. Indeed, in a related piece published by the New York Times, Elaine Bander, a retired professor and a former officer of the Jane Austen Society of North America, proclaims, “All the Janeites I know are rational, compassionate, liberal-minded people.” As if simply by reading Austen, one is inoculated against illiberalism.

“This notion that ‘great’ literature and art can somehow defeat systemic injustice is a problem because of the notion of ‘great’ art,” adds writer and racial justice advocate Nakia Jackson. “What’s considered ‘high’ culture is rooted in multiple forms of systemic oppression.”

The truth is, the white power structure that created the conditions that brought Trump into power includes Hollywood, the Literary Establishment, the media, and academia, as well as the liberals and conservatives who were shaped by these institutions. With their erasure, indifference, or unconscious disregard of the lives or loves of people of color, they are complicit in the propagation of Jane Austen as a tool of white supremacists, and, indeed, of propagating white supremacy itself.

The Essential Resistance Reading List
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This July marks 200 years since Jane Austen’s death, and her work remains more popular than ever — her books continue to be taught in high school and university campuses across the world and her seminal work, Pride and Prejudice, has sold over 20 million copies. Austen’s books have spawned a number of film adaptations from actresses Alicia Silverstone and Kiera Knightley in Clueless and Pride and Prejudice respectively, as well as modern literature reinterpretations by authors Curtis Sittenfeld, Joanna Trollope, and Alexander McCall Smith. Although centuries removed from the gowns and balls of rural England, none of these movies or books conceive of a world where the themes of Austen’s books center the lives and loves of people of color.

Aside from some diverse casting in the films Bride and Prejudice and Clueless, English-language cinema regularly dredges up an Austen or other hidebound period piece with all-white casts, focused on all-white problems. Yet, Austenesque social morés still apply to huge, thriving communities of color in multiethnic and multiracial America and Europe, and around the globe. Although modern readers reduce her work to light romances, “[Austen] reveal[ed] her beliefs, not just about domestic life and relationships, but about the wider political and social issues of the day,” writes Oxford Professor of Classics and English Literature, Helena Kelly.

Jane Austen amplified the voices and issues of the women of her time and social milieu — she wrote candidly and bitingly about reputation and social standing; women’s issues related to sex, power, and wealth; and familial and marital relationships. Austen cared about substantive issues and also wielded a sharp, amused sense of social absurdities.

Why ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Isn’t Really A Win For Diverse Representation
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At the heart of these adaptations — and their inability to capture the ways that Austen’s writings could easily reflect the lived reality of a diverse spectrum of modern Austen fans — lies a failure of the white imagination. When institutions from primary school onward amplify white-centered stories and histories as the only “great” art, it becomes easier to imagine zombies in an Austen landscape before people of color can be inserted therein. When non-white voices and stories are erased — or, worse, in their rare depictions, consistently presented as less than, negative, or one-dimensional — white people are rendered incapable of imagining people of color as fully human, complex, and equal to themselves, living lives just as rich as (if not richer than) the white experience.

This racial myopia from liberal institutions — which fundamentally limits Austen’s universal themes — serves as a direct line to the so-called alt-right claiming Austen from themselves.

“We constantly forget that racism is not the product of ignorance,” says G. Willow Wilson, author of the Hugo Award-winning comic book series Ms Marvel for Marvel comics. “It is the product of education. If the system is racist, being educated within it will produce racists, whether they have GEDs or PhDs.”

It’s at this point that someone usually brings up “historical accuracy.” Yet, somehow, historical accuracy never limits roles for white actors. If so, we’d never have been subjected to films where white people don black- or yellow-face; to white women performing roles originally written as Asian characters (Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson in Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell, respectively); or to white people populating ancient Egypt or China (Christian Bale and an all white cast in Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gerard Butler and a nearly all white cast in Gods of Egypt, or Matt Damon starring in The Great Wall).

You get the point.

Somehow, historical accuracy never limits roles for white actors.
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Instead of another all white cast (or zombies), wouldn’t it be far more interesting to see Austen’s work from fresh perspectives? What if matchmaking Emma was re-imagined as a meddling Nigerian-American aunty in the Atlanta suburbs, or if the impoverishment of a patriarch’s widow and daughters in Sense and Sensibility were seen from the perspective of a Lebanese-American family whose ancestors arrived in Dearborn, Michigan almost 140 years ago?

What if Elizabeth Bennet was a Black Latina from Brooklyn being courted by a smooth young Pakistani American Muslima from Queens with the dynamics of love, family, race, sexuality, and religion unfolding from there? Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, is a delicious look at what Austenesque themes can look like in a vivid, modern, non-white setting. One need only to look to the popularity of Hamilton to put to rest concerns over “profitability” or “relatability” when featuring a cast of people of color. (Although we do acknowledge the critique of Lin Miranda’s neoliberal re-imagining of the American Rebellion.)

We read and adapt great literature less for historical accuracy and more for cultural accuracy and emotional resonance — to learn more about ourselves, each other, and our current cultural and political moment. By sharing stories about people whose religion, culture, race, or ethnicity are unlike our own, we have the opportunity to recognize our shared universal human experiences. There are still so many stories to be told and connections to be made that reflect the increasingly diverse nature of our society.

Denying the living, breathing nature of Jane Austen’s work is to harken back to an imaginary “pure” era, an observation not lost on the alt-right. As Professor Wright noted, “[b]y comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cozy England of Austen…the alt-right normalizes itself in the eyes of ordinary people…[and] nudge[s] readers who happen upon alt-right sites to think that perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks.”

Perpetuating the white status quo through Austen’s work — and refusing to use it as a vehicle to further our society’s discourse — simply echoes the great rallying cry of white nationalists and white supremacists from President 45 to Hollywood.

Pride and prejudice, indeed.

Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi are Jane Austen fans and editors of two groundbreaking anthologies, Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women and Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy. Their podcast for Muslim girl nerds, Get Lit, InshAllah debuts this summer.

By Laura Beans

When Janine, a young woman from the Republic of Gilead, testifies to being gang-raped at 14 and forced to have a subsequent abortion, an accusing finger raises its ghostly visage. “But whose fault was it?” demands Aunt Helena, a self-righteous authority figure in charge of indoctrinating the Handmaids. “Her fault, her fault, her fault,” a chorus of women responds. “Who led them on?” Aunt Helena prompts again, and the chorus resounds: “She did. She did. She did.”

I describe of course, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which sets its now-iconic stage in the fundamentalist Christian, gender segregated, and class-obsessed Republic of Gilead.

Gilead is a fictional, faraway land tucked into the cockles of our bleakest imaginings, but it’s also a chilling blueprint, a kind of literary prophecy for the not-so-future state of women in America here and now, in the land we call brave and free.

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ feels like a chilling blueprint for the future state of women in America.
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Is Gilead so different than say, Steubenville, Ohio in 2013, when two high school football players were convicted of raping a young girl while she was unconscious at a party? After posting images and videos of their unconscionable acts on several social media platforms, the young men were arrested, and the small town — and the nation writ large — quickly became polarized. Some allegations placed the blame squarely on the young woman’s shoulders, touting the antiquated, if classic, allegation that “she was asking for it.” Meanwhile TV anchors and hosts lamented the fact that these star athletes’ futures were ruined, and the victim was ostracized by her community. She even received death threats for speaking out about the horrors wrought on her unconscious body.

It was a case study in victim blaming.

A similarly horrific narrative — one that, again, reads like pulp fiction — played out more recently in the case of Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner, who, though convicted on three counts of felony sexual assault for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, received a prison sentence of only six months. The judge who sentenced him was worried a longer sentence would have “a severe impact” on Turner and his future; he ended up only serving three.

Turner’s victim, as in Steubenville, was excoriated — both by the public and even in court by Turner’s lawyer — for her choices to party and consume alcohol as if she, too, were to blame for her own assault. The role of the female victims in sexual assault cases is almost always raised as if some deviation from the idealized female standard are conscionable grounds for such attacks.

Deviation from the idealized female standard are offered as conscionable grounds for sexual assault.
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In Turner’s case, the fact that he had consumed too much alcohol in collegiate overzealousness was excuse enough for the judge to more-than-justify his conduct, but for his female victim — who did the exact same thing — her intoxication served as an indictment of her character. It was in fact, such a potent indictment that the judge dismissed questions about consent.

America’s rape culture is a stark and ubiquitous double-standard, revealing an insidious extension of our patriarchal society. When women are posited as “asking for it” — shouldered with the responsibility of vigilantly countering an ever-present bodily threat — and men are universally excused for predatory violent behavior on the bastardized gender notion that “boys will be boys,” we render our society no better than the sadistic dystopia Atwood envisioned more than 30 years ago.

Gileadian government reigns with a heavy hand; it is a totalitarian Christian theocracy which predicates its power on the systematic subjugation of women. In an era of dwindling birth rates and impotence from infertility among whites due to environmental pollution and STDs, women’s rank within the female sphere is based solely on their fertility.

The worst-off among them — the “Handmaids” — are women who have become a potent commodity; they serve no purpose but to reproduce in a world that caters to the whims of men. Stripped of all autonomy, the Handmaids are “owned” by a Commander and his Wife and are required to pass on their children to the couple for the “greater good” of future generations. In addition to being glorified sex slaves, Handmaids are often forbidden to read, write, or speak to the men of Gilead. In fact, their names themselves are synonymous with subordination; all Handmaids carry the literal prefix “Of-,” proclaiming them property of the Commanders they belong to — Ofwarren, Ofglen, Offred.

Atwood went to great lengths to explain that The Handmaid’s Tale was not science fiction but speculative fiction; it was imperative to her that readers understood she believed this world could come to pass.

“This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions. I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. The society in The Handmaid’s Tale is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated. The early Puritans came to America not for religious freedom, as we were taught in grade school, but to set up a society that would be a theocracy (like Iran) ruled by religious leaders, and monolithic, that is, a society that would not tolerate dissent within itself.”

The novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression — it also exists for social examination.
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While certain progress toward gender equality has undoubtedly been made — everything from women being allowed to fight in ground combat to the continued advocacy for equal pay to women being more likely than men to earn college degrees — the current state of American womanhood remains a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation.

Look no further than the current election cycle to see the sort of misogynistic tropes that led Atwood all the way to Gilead. Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — throughout her 40-year career — has endured blatant discrimination and sexist contempt, reminding us that regardless of power and stature, women will be openly disrespected. It’s arguable that with said power, the discrimination only becomes more pointed; women in power feel like a fundamental threat to our very fabric of our society.

When former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made her “feminist pronouncement” in support of Clinton’s run, she admonished the younger generation, saying,“There is a special place in hell for women who do not support other women.” She was instantly met by angry, disheartened young women appalled by her accusation that they should blindly support a candidate on the sole basis of her gender; she subsequently published a mea culpa on the New York Times.

And so it goes.

The setting for Atwood’s now cultishly cited book is a dark but not distant reality — in truth it is but a shadow of our own world. Perhaps that’s why it’s sold millions of copies, been adapted into plays, film, and an opera. The modern classic will make its debut as a Hulu series next year.

Atwood emphasized again in The Guardian in 2012 that she wanted her novel take aim at our own society; The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t designed to be an an alternative reality, but a parallel to our own, rooted in the very Puritanical foundation America is built upon.

“I made a rule for myself. I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the ‘Christian’ tradition, itself.”

The Handmaid’s Tale’ is parallel to our own reality, rooted in America’s own Puritanical foundation.
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The Ayes Have It

With no male accountability, the women of Gilead are held liable for the downfall of society — it’s a neo-Adam and Eve tale that posits women as the hybrid of a villain and a child; they are to be punished, controlled, and protected. Protection of course is not manifested by a freedom to choose, but by stripping away choice altogether.

For the women in Gilead, the options are few, and Handmaid-ship can seem far superior to a future in The Colonies, labor camp-style detention centers meant for infertile women (“the Unwomen”), so many accept their mandated fate for fear of a worse one. The brainwashing is powerful and omnipresent — many women believe themselves to be the problem; they believe they need protection from their own selves.

While Gilead’s methodology — obstructive bonnets designed to prohibit women from seeing as well as being seen — is a far cry from the hyper-sexualized, ideal female body proffered to modern young women, the hefty prison of scripted womanhood is almost identical.

The Long Arm Of The Law

In addition to Atwood’s harrowing vision of societally-sanctioned misogyny, her visions of xenophobia and jingoism ring eerily familiar as well. She writes:

“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on. . .”

It is the compliance of the masses that perpetuates and sanctions the government’s control. The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary one that reminds us of the danger of apathy, of resigning ourselves to the erosion of our liberties. “There were marches, of course, a lot of women and some men. But they were smaller than you might have thought. I guess people were scared. And when it was known that the police, or the army, of whoever they were, would open fire almost as soon as any of the marches even started, the marches stopped.”

It is the compliance of the masses that perpetuates and sanctions government control.
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And with millions of the U.S. population — including the Republican Presidential nominee himself, who calls for a ban on Muslims entering the country — perpetuating anti-Islamic attitudes and continuous, unwarranted attacks on Muslim-Americans, modern-day America could be this imagined past, a time of casual racism teetering on the brink of authoritarianism and blind indoctrination in the name of Greatness.

The Body Politic

There has been an almost constant effort to scale back people’s rights to obtain abortions. Even 40 years after the Supreme Court affirmed women discretion over their own bodies, legal challenges as well as gory, propaganda campaigns — such as the series of videos released by the Center for Medical Progress alleging that Planned Parenthood profited off the fetal tissue obtained during abortions — have sought to undermine theoretically protected health services. Even though investigations carried out by nearly a dozen states proved the accusations false, lawmakers and other special interest parties jump on the Planned Parenthood crusade, resulting in defunding action in numerous states.

And this is to say nothing of the numerous studies which proven time and again that safe access to abortion is not only a basic human right, but beneficial to mental health.

In many ways, the utter absence of bodily autonomy in Gilead is not far off. Echoes of its warnings can be heard all around us from dangerous individuals like Robert Lewis Dear, who believe themselves to be “warriors for the babies,” to the politicians who refuse people abortions even when the babies born to them will be severely deformed.

The Gileadians really only have themselves to blame, however; they acquiesced to gradual, societal shifts until eventually, their Constitution was suspended and the democratic government ousted.

“What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, we all hope?” Offred wonders in The Handmaid’s Tale. “Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to full term.”

Instead of seeming further from the truth, the novel’s warnings only seem to echo louder in recent years. Atwood’s analysis of her own twisted kingdom headily describes our own reality here in America; we proffer a rhetoric of freedom even as we strip our people of rights, jail the innocent, violently invade other countries, clandestinely collect private data, and feverishly support an openly bigoted real estate tycoon as a viable leader for our nation:

“Gilead has utopian idealism flowing through its veins, coupled with a high-minded principle, its ever-present shadow, sublegal opportunism, and the propensity of the powerful to indulge in behind-the-scenes sensual delights forbidden to everyone else. But such locked-door escapades must remain hidden, for the regime floats as its raison d’être the notion that it is improving the conditions of life, both physical and moral; and like all such regimes, it depends on its true believers.”

America proffers a rhetoric of freedom even as we feverishly support a blatant bigot as our leader.
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The epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale takes readers to an academic symposium held by the Gileadian Research Association centuries in the perceived future, where a scholar on the period is giving a lecture on the authenticity of the preceding pages — now one of the few relics left of that darkly misogynistic time. The unnamed professor’s ends his lecture with, “Are there any questions?” reminding us that we’ve just borne witness to how easily our collective ennui could render us monstrous.

Atwood doesn’t leave us with instructions of how to avoid such a fate, but she does leave us with fear; we must fight against oppression or else succumb to its weight and our burial beneath it.

This article was produced in collaboration with The Alignist — a site dedicated to bringing works of literature into conversation with current events.