As I browsed the University of Texas Press’s fall catalogue, a title jumped out at me: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel (October 15). When I read the blurb, I became incensed. It was a biography of John Williams, the author of Stoner, the unlikeliest bestseller of the 2000s. Stoner was originally published in 1965 and reissued by NYRB Classics in 2006, and then re-reissued in 2015 in a lavish hardback edition. It was reviewed and lauded widely. In the New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein called it “a perfect novel.”

Stoner is not a perfect novel. It’s not even a particularly well-written novel. You’ve probably read a hundred books like it. It is a methodical, hagiographic piece of fiction about a college professor, a man who plods passively through his life and takes joy only in literature.

William Stoner is born on a farm. He goes to college, becomes a professor at that college, takes a wife, has a child, undergoes professional difficulties, and dies. This is a terrific way to write a novel—to do a character study of a small, mediocre life. But Williams’s mediocrity blurs with Stoner’s until they both lose the reader’s interest. And one or both of them has a frightening carelessness toward women. Stoner repeatedly indulges in marital rape, saying that when his wife shifts against him in her sleep, “he moved upon her.” His wife, in response, “turn[s] her head sideways in a familiar gesture and bur[ies] it in her pillow, enduring violation,” so there is no mistaking these encounters as consensual. Dickstein’s review didn’t mention that. But then, Stoner is aimed toward Dickstein, and not toward me.  

There’s a reason a book like Stoner was re-issued, and a biography like The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel was published.  The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male. This may be occurring almost involuntarily on the part of the editors and critics. In Stoner, a male critic might not notice that Stoner’s wife is relegated to the stereotypes of frigid bitch, and later, crazy bitch. A critic without a disability might not notice that the central villains of the book are both disabled, and that the motives for their villainy are otherwise unexplained. A white critic might not notice that there are no educated people of color in the book at all. He might perceive only that Williams’s quiet, scholarly hero does his duty and loves his literature, despite the schemers who endeavor to ruin him—never noticing the common thread among those schemers.

So, of course Stoner is not a perfect novel. There’s no such thing, but if there were, it definitely wouldn’t sympathize with marital rape or demonize characters who are not cisgendered, fully abled white men. To state the obvious, no novel can be all-inclusive. Committee art is rarely of good quality. But a novel that actively shuts out readers because of their gender or skin color? The time for celebrating a novel like that, for glorifying it to the point of biographizing its author, should be long over.

The most elevated cultural conversations favor writing that is traditionally male, subjectively male, overtly male.
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Yet it still happens. Charles J. Shields, who has also written biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, has done a valorous job with Williams in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. But he cannot disguise what’s at the heart of Stoner and what seems to have been at the heart of its author: misogyny, and mediocrity. A recollection of Williams: “He was one of those who felt…that the world is closing in on them, with all these ‘women and minorities’…[taking] the place that they were raised to think is rightfully theirs.”

As a scholar, Williams’s work was backward-looking (despite writing in the fertile 1960s, he had no interest in poetry beyond the time of William Carlos Williams), derivative, and inadequate; a rejecting editor wrote to Williams, “You are overstepping your evidence by about ten thousand miles.” In 1963 Williams caused a minor scandal by plagiarizing Yvor Winters. Shields treats it as delicately as possible. “Williams’ students did know of their professor’s proclivity for borrowing…He had taken shortcuts since the beginning of his teaching career…piggybacking on Alan Swallow’s Wyatt dissertation for his own…compiling a poetry anthology incorporating Winters’ scholarship.”

In the critical segment of his writer’s life, Williams is so unimaginative that he must plagiarize. Meanwhile, as a poet and fiction author, he struggles to find an agent, to find publication, to find a job, to find funding. He often expresses frustration that he can’t seem to get ahead as a writer. Shields tiptoes around it, but the fact is, Williams’s books just aren’t that good. On his first novel, a rejection letter reads, “To us it seems a shame that a writer of Mr. William’s [sic] obvious capabilities and potentialities should have spent so much time delineating a character who is basically not worth it.” Dutton’s feedback: “Unfortunately, we think that…this manuscript is just too long and too pretentious.”

In sum, Stoner is a minor novel by a minor writer. I don’t begrudge its wide readership (people can enjoy whatever they want); I begrudge its elevation, when it is so plainly and seriously flawed, to the point that a single review by a male critic has titled Williams’s biography. The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.

A scan of the NYRB Classics list shows that male names outstrip female names; the same editors who chose to put two editions of Stoner into print within ten years choose mostly men from the annals of out-of-print literature to reissue and promote. Yet the poet Ai, who won a National Book Award, a Guggenheim, and an NEA grant, requires a Kickstarter to come back into print. The Second Shelf, a quarterly publication and online bookstore devoted to out-of-print women’s writing, also needed a Kickstarter to fill the gap NYRB Classics perpetuates. Passing, by Nella Larsen, is obscure (ranked at 10,000 in Amazon sales at this writing), while Invisible Man flourishes (ranked at 1,000).

Twice as many male authors get translated as women; only two houses that commonly publish translated books published more women authors than men in 2017. And just one publisher, AmazonCrossing (!), accounts for 20% of the women published in translation. VIDA continues to shout across the gender gap in publishing for short stories, essays, and particularly criticism—check out the stats for the London Review of Books and, surprise!, the NYRB. As those statistics demonstrate, women writers are reviewed less, and women critics are offered fewer opportunities to review.

The preposterous, rapturous praise, leveled unequally toward mediocre men like Williams, is the problem.
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Stoner is perfect in one respect: as an example of the heights to which a mediocre white male writer can soar when given proper cheerleading. Williams has netted a biography and lasting fame because of the men in publishing and criticism clustered around him, rooting for him. Compare him to Clarice Lispector, a contemporary, who was exponentially more prolific and acclaimed during her lifetime. It took a 2009 biography to push her work into wider acknowledgment in the US, instead of the acknowledgment engendering the biography. Or compare him to Anaïs Nin, whose work is remembered as supplemental to Henry Miller’s, whose extraordinary diary has been published by smaller and smaller presses as interest in her has waned, whose objectively fascinating life has been biographized only once. Or compare him to Grace Metalious, author of Peyton Place. She wrote bestselling, salacious melodramas that tapped the repressive sexuality of her era and is barely critically studied at all.

Stoner is also excellent as a standard against which every female writer should push. Per Shields, “Williams could build his fiction around thought warring with feeling, which creates tension, and to suggest that emotions are ineffable, beyond characters’ reach.” This sense pervades Stoner, that emotions are foreign and impossible. I think this struggle was Williams’s, that he found it difficult to enter the weak and confusing realm of emotion and nurture (his own children barely appear in Shields’s biography), the realm in which women stereotypically belong. I imagine that Williams would have found a book like My Brilliant Friend as intolerable as I find Stoner, as there is no place for him in it.

Women are half (or more) of the reading public, and yet books like Stoner are what’s thrust upon us—books in which we will never find ourselves, books whose authors were rightly buried under the weight of their own mediocrity. Books and authors whose obsolescence, whose extinction, are overdue.

“I’m not a feminist because I don’t hate men.”

“I don’t need feminism. I actually like cooking for my husband.”

I used to agree with a lot of statements like this. I thought feminists were only doing harm to themselves and others, and I proudly proclaimed that I was not a feminist.

What changed my mind was learning that a lot of what I thought feminists believed was false — including the idea that gender oppression only affects women. Some of it was just myth, things that anti-feminists said feminists believed. Some of it was taking the words of one or two feminists and assuming they spoke for the whole.

Nobody can speak for all of feminism, including me — and I especially can’t speak for how a/gender minorities besides cis women experience feminism. But I did learn over time, through getting to know more people who identified as feminists, that the things I thought were basic and fundamental to feminism were exaggerations, or belonged only to some more fringe groups.

One of the biggest misconceptions about feminism is that it’s a movement for women, by women, and made up of women in opposition of men. In truth, not only should feminism should benefit everyone, as it works to dismantle all systems of oppression, but it shouldn’t be based on this binary gender thinking in the first place. Not only men and women exist, and they’re not opposites in a binary.

But a lot of the ways in which anti-feminists conceptualize feminism is based on this untruth about women versus men. And in order to address those specific misconceptions, I’m going to speak from that place. Non-binary people may recognize themselves in these experiences as well, but those experiences (especially insofar as erasure is concerned) are unique, and I’m not qualified to speak on them.

I’m not here to say that all women should call themselves feminist. There are good reasons not to, including the ways feminism has failed to be intersectional and meet the needs of people of color, trans and gender non-confirming people, and others.

But if you are anti-feminist and agree with some of the quotes that I started this article with, I’d ask you to read on and consider that the truth about feminism might be more complicated.

‘Feminists are just playing the victim’

“Sure, sexism used to be a problem. But now women have reached equality: We can vote, we have the same access to jobs and education as men, we’re allowed to dress how we want, and are considered equal partners in relationships. Western feminists are just whining, nit-picking, and enjoying feeling victimized instead of appreciating the freedoms we have.”

There’s a lot of truth in this argument: Women have come a long way, baby.

As a woman, I’d rather live here and now than almost any other point in history. And I’m not denying the struggles that many girls and women around the world face, or claiming that mine are equal to theirs.

But it’s not true to say that sexism is dead. We may have slain the giant dragon of institutional sexism, which insisted that women fill an inferior role in the world, but there is still a hornet’s nest of sexist culture that lives on.

And while I’d rather be stung by a dozen hornets than be eaten by a dragon, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a right to complain about the stings.

When I’m in a professional meeting with men, I often have to fight to get my voice heard — and if I talk as much or as confidently as the men do, I may get labeled “bossy” or “shrill.” When I leave the house, strangers feel free to comment on my body, which makes me feel unsafe and exposed. Men I meet tend to evaluate me first as a sexual object, and only second (or never) as a competent or interesting human.

These things make a difference.

They don’t make it impossible for me to have a good job, to go about my day, and to have the kinds of relationships I want, but they do make it harder. Any one thing by itself would be no big deal, but in time they add up.

Just like you can brush off one hornet sting, but if you got stung every day, multiple times a day, all over your body, you might start to get really, really bothered by it.

Now, when I talk about the ways sexism hurts me, I’m not whining or making things up. I don’t think of myself as a victim, and I don’t actually enjoy complaining. I’m also not saying I’m not glad I have the freedom to vote, to apply for any job I want, and to be viewed as a full legal human.

I’m just saying that I’m still hurt by sexism, and that I want the world to be better for myself and other women.

‘Feminism says women are weak’

“Women may have a few obstacles that men don’t, but feminism actually insults women by acting like they’re not able to overcome those obstacles. It encourages women to be sensitive and thin-skinned instead of being tough and going after their goals. Women don’t need feminism. We’re strong enough to succeed on our own.”

It’s true that some women are capable of overcoming every obstacle that sexism puts in their way. We have women heading up corporations, pioneering scientific discoveries, and this past election, a woman came incredibly close to being elected the next president of the United States.

Powerful, successful women like Oprah Winfrey, Sally Ride, and Melinda Gates prove that women can do anything men can, even with the added burden of institutional sexism.

But the strength of these women, while I admire and celebrate it, shows off a part of the problem.

Women can achieve just about every success men can, but they have to be stronger, tougher, and usually more qualified than their male counterparts. They need to be thick-skinned enough to shrug off harassment. They need to walk a fine line of being assertive without being judged “bossy” or “bitchy.”

Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, for the last several years, between 20 and 25 have been women — around 4–4.5%. Those 20+ women are impressive, and their achievement shouldn’t be underrated, but that percentage is discouraging.

Less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women: If that doesn’t show that sexism is still making it harder for women to reach the top of their field, what does it show? I simply don’t believe that men are, on average, 19 times better at corporate leadership skills than women.

Similarly, many women in scientific fields have talked about the barriers that keep them from advancing, and often that keep them from staying in the field at all.

Sexual harassment is a huge problem in the academic world, and causes many women to leave promising careers because they can’t handle the dehumanization, and because their work is taken less seriously than their sexual potential. Many women stay in STEM fields anyway, and achieve great things, but many other women, just as capable, have to leave.

Feminism doesn’t say that women are weak: It just says that, to succeed in any given field, women shouldn’t have to be so much stronger than the men they’re working with.

‘Feminists hate men’

“Feminists treat men like they’re the enemy: They say all men are rapists and misogynists, just trying to keep women down. Feminists aren’t content with gender equality. They want to put women in power and oppress men, just like women used to be oppressed.”

I admit that I often feel frustrated with “men” in the abstract these days. Having been harassed, belittled, and taken advantage of by so many men, I am a little wary when meeting a man I don’t know.

However, there are also a lot of men I love, respect, and trust. I don’t hate “men,” as such — I hate toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is the set of rules and expectations we have for male behavior — including how men are supposed to treat and think about women. Toxic masculinity is what tells men it’s not okay to cry, and it is okay to catcall women. Toxic masculinity is what tells a man that his worth is in gaining power over others, and that it is shameful to have a woman beat him at anything.

Toxic masculinity hurts men.

Men are pressured to be high achievers and always competing with each other, which creates stress. The expectation that they will always appear powerful and in control makes it hard for men to ask for help. They’re shamed and ridiculed for stepping outside the bounds of “acceptable” masculine behavior.

All of this makes it harder for men to get through the world.

Feminists don’t want to destroy or oppress men: They want to destroy toxic masculinity, to let people of all genders see how damaging it is to all of us.

‘Feminism means rejecting traditional gender roles’

“Feminism is for women who want careers, who don’t like makeup and shopping, who want to be the boss in their relationships. Women who like being homemakers, being traditionally feminine, and having their partners take the lead don’t need feminism — and feminism often looks down on those women.”

It’s true that feminist movements tend to be headed by people who don’t feel the status quo suits them. It’s also true that some feminists look down on conventional ways of being feminine — and that’s a problem.

There’s a thing we call “femmephobia,” which is the attitude that anything traditionally associated with women is inferior.

It’s the reason keeping up a home and taking care of children isn’t viewed as a “real job.” It’s the reason books, movies, and music that tend to be enjoyed more by women are seen as fluff.

People all over the gender and political spectrums can fall into femmephobia. Sometimes feminists do a good job of questioning why “girl stuff” is considered less valuable and worthwhile, and sometimes we fall into the trap of looking down on it.

What’s important to me, as a feminist, is not steering clear of traditional femininity. It’s getting rid of the assumption that women should be feminine and men should be masculine.

There are definitely some people that do fit very comfortably into the roles their culture put them in, and that’s great for them! Obviously, there are also plenty of people who don’t.

Housekeeping and childrearing are skills just like any other, and some people — of any gender — find that work interesting and rewarding (I’m one of them!).

I want to see a world where those skills are considered valuable for anyone who wants to pursue them. I also want to see a world where makeup, fashion, and beauty are respected as the arts they are.

Even submissive or “follower” relationship roles, which might seem at first glance to be obviously an inferior position, aren’t necessarily so. Many people feel happiest and most comfortable playing first mate to someone else’s captain, and doing that well is a relationship skill all its own.

I’d like to see a world where people are free to find the balance of leader/follower dynamics that work best for them, whatever their gender.

Feminism isn’t about flipping the script of gender roles, where women are powerful and in charge and men are submissive. Feminism is about increasing the freedom we all have to find the roles that fit us best.

Changing my view of what feminism meant was a little scary for me — it was comforting to tell myself that women had achieved equality, and that any issues I might experience with sexism were just isolated, one-off events.

Eventually it became clear to me that that just wasn’t true. All the little moments of sexism I experienced were connected, and other women faced more intense and constant discrimination that came from the same source.

We still had a steeper hill to climb than men — and while I didn’t want to believe that at first, in the end, I found it a source of strength.

I don’t like or agree with every feminist, but I find strength in the fact that we have experienced some of the same struggles, and are still working and succeeding. When I get tired and frustrated, there’s a whole community of other feminists to support and encourage me.

Most importantly, I find strength in knowing we’re committed to making the world a better, easier place for each other and the women that come after us.

This article originally appeared on Everyday Feminism and is republished here with permission.

What does harmlessness mean? I believe it means more about answering a question I haven’t explicitly asked.

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By July Westhale

When I was in the third grade, I got stabbed in the forehead with a pencil.

I was recently recounting this story to a group of coworkers while we were on a work trip to Vegas, since the last time I’d been in Vegas in any real and exciting way was when I was 7. The details of that trip are blurry — though I remember we stayed at that castle place, I thought Merlin was a sham, and I electrocuted myself on an outlet by trying to show off my resilience to a disinterested cousin — but the clearest memory was this: Vegas, in 1993, still had coins for the slot machines. They were thick, and hefty. They had slightly ridged edges. They probably felt, to adults, much more like money and promise than the slide cards of today (though the slide cards of today require less cognitive activity, and therefore, make the process of gambling effortless).

But for me, the slot machine coins were currency of another kind: status.

Remember 1993? Fresh Prince, Walkmans, the Barbie Liberation Organization, Steely Dan, the “What is Love” Jim Carrey remix (also, Jim Carrey), Groundhog Day, and, of course, pogs.

Pogs were hot shit at my elementary school, and maybe yours, too, if you are a peer of mine or just a hella cool retro-loving elementary-school kid. And slot machine coins? These were the most perfect goddamn slammers.

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation

So when I returned from Vegas, I was a puffed-up peacock with my pog collection, which had risen in stock dramatically from its pre-coin glory. And my first day back, I’d carefully set it in the basket under my desk next to my lunchbox — only to discover it was gone by the time recess rolled around.

It was this asshole, Sam. He sat behind me, and regularly wrote “July sucks pickles” in pencil on his desk in the thick graphite of repetition. When I confronted him about the pogs thievery, he immediately picked up his pencil (the same pencil of pickle infamy) and stabbed me in the forehead with it.

I don’t much remember the aftermath. What I do remember is that it was the first time I’d learned to be afraid of the unpredictability of boys who’d had their power challenged. I still have a small scar on my forehead, a little space where forehead used to be. It’s nearly imperceptible, but still there.

On the more recent Vegas trip, the one I went on for work, I’d been eating alone at a place on the Strip I’d always wanted to try. Three men at the bar were cruising me, a fact I’d noticed the moment they’d walked in. I had chosen to ignore them. However, as I was finishing my meal, one of them approached me.

It was the first time I’d learned to be afraid of the unpredictability of boys who’d had their power challenged.

“Hey there,” he said. I straightened my back and positioned my body into a diplomatic brick wall. “My buddies and I noticed you’re dining alone, such a pretty girl.” He motioned toward his friends who were smiling from the bar. They raised their martinis. “We are just so bored, and it’s my birthday” — I rolled my eyes internally — “and, well, we are harmless. Let us buy you dessert.”

I didn’t. A few days later, while back home in Oakland, I got a message from an old coworker, a man who’d hired me to work as a ghostwriter for a publishing company, then had been subsequently laid off from his job. I still work there; he doesn’t. It’s awkward. He sent me a message saying that he was moving back East — he and his wife were splitting up, and he was really a mess. Could I meet up for a drink before he left town?

I was ready to immediately respond with a soothing “yes” — after all, I’ve been there, and man, does a drink with an understanding friend help — when his next message came through:

“BTW, I’m planning on flirting with you shamelessly. But don’t worry, I’m harmless.”

Support Diverse Journalism — Become A Member Of The Establishment

A few days later, my partner and I were on our way to see Maya Rudolph and her Prince cover band, Princess. Starving and hungover from a party we’d been to the night before, we stopped at a mediocre pizza place in the Mission district of San Francisco for a slice. The lights were too bright, and the smell of grease made me feel caged-in and ill, so I sat down at a spacious booth while my partner ordered. Almost immediately, a man came into the pizzeria and sat down next to me in the booth, forcing me to move quickly around the rest of the horseshoe to scramble out of it.

I was thinking, “Why do men always think it’s cool to sit so goddamn close to me,” when he simultaneously hissed out a “I just need pussy. I swear to god if bitches keep treating me like this I’m going to fucking kill someone.”

It was audible throughout the whole shop. My partner, whom I’d found a way to hide behind at this point, heard it. The line cook heard it. And the man ringing up our order heard it. The man looking for pussy slunk out the door, glaring at me the whole time. As soon as he was gone, the cashier laughed.

“You have to know how to handle these crazy motherfuckers. Don’t act so scared. He was harmless.”

Why do men always think it’s cool to sit so goddamn close to me?

I live in a part of Oakland where I have been sexually harassed every single one of the 761 days I’ve lived there. I know this isn’t the case with many people, as was pointed out to me in a piece The Establishment recently published about the de-sexualization of disabled bodies. But men always have things to say to me, about my hips, my smile, what I should and shouldn’t be doing. And very often, they counter with “I’m harmless” as they move closer into my space, as if that is the magic word that lowers the drawbridge across the moat.

My partner, a communications professor (on the humanitarian/conflict resolution side, not media), plays devil’s advocate. “I think it’s in part that men are on edge about always being perceived as predatory.”

Rebecca Solnit’s book, Men Explain Things to Me, holds the theory that such interactions assume that women don’t know any better than what they are told by men — and I liberally take her theories here to say that men believe that their authority means more than a woman’s feelings of safety. Saying “harmless” makes it true — and so it was decreed. Or something.

The Shocking Connection Between Street Harassment And Street Lighting

But in The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, there’s a theory that predators are continuously stating truths in the form of non-truths — “I’m harmless” falling under that category. It’s a little bit like how you can learn a lot about red flags on a first date by really listening to the ways people talk about their past relationships (not to parallel these experiences, because different systems of social hierarchy and oppression are obviously at play).

So what does harmlessness mean? I believe it means more about answering a question I haven’t explicitly asked, except through body language, through primal fear, through the ways the world has taught me to be afraid of spontaneous violence against my person. I am never asking, I am never, ever asking for it.

I think my partner is talking about how current discourse around the predatory nature of men is presented in the media as an absolute — and for good reason, of course, because of rape culture and the systemic oppression of fetishized bodies. But I do believe that there is clearly more nuance. There are men who possess self-awareness enough to know that they’ve been told their whole lives that they are predators, and they perhaps have no idea how to navigate that (or don’t have the skill set to navigate that), except to preface every come-on with the statement that they are the exact opposite.

There’s a theory that predators are continuously stating truths in the form of non-truths.

What is missing, in these interactions, is this: When we talk about rape culture, or the sexualization of women/feminine bodies, we are talking about a problem that is systemic, not anecdotal. Recently, I was in a bar with a group of men who bristled visibly when I brought up street harassment, and how there was no such thing as a society that was inherently safe for women. As accustomed as I am to always being the “feminist killjoy” at the table/party/event, I’m constantly learning how to broach these subjects with grace and empathy, to try to take into consideration that the majority of those with privilege (including myself, in the arenas where I hold privilege) aren’t entirely aware that they possess it, nor how to be a proper ally.

The men I was in conversation with at the bar continued to bring the conversation back around to the fact (which I didn’t doubt even a little) that they, themselves, were good men. Harmless. This is another kind of harmless, of course, because these men were not using the word to preface a sexual advance towards me, only to try to show that their anecdotal experience meant that we were living in an era beyond sexism and rape culture. That women were, essentially, safe with them.

Because we could not seem to get the conversation back on track to a global perspective on systemic issues, I pounced on the opportunity to frame it in a way they could understand. One of the men had once shaved his head — an uncommon thing for him at the time and place when he’d done it. He talked about the ways in which people moved differently around him, how he had to think carefully about routes he walked home, places he frequented, people he talked to. Not only because he could be perceived as a threat, but also that he could be threatened for being different.

Love Poems To My Catcallers

“This isn’t exactly the same,” I said, “But try to channel your lived experience into empathizing with the concept that women face these kinds of decisions every single day.”

This seemed to work. Their task, we discussed, was to use their empathetic understanding to become better allies, and to open themselves up to being educated about fighting predatory behavior — which included participating in a kind of knowing that may be uncomfortable for them.

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