{"id":619,"date":"2006-08-14T06:06:14","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T11:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=619"},"modified":"2020-01-03T10:37:13","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T15:37:13","slug":"reading-through-feminist-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/reading-through-feminist-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading through feminist eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, when I first caught wind<\/a> of the This is Chick Lit<\/em><\/a> vs. This is Not Chick Lit<\/em> <\/a>controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.<\/p>\n

What Elizabeth Merrick’s<\/a> anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).<\/p>\n

And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.<\/p>\n

So what does Merrick want for her writers?<\/p>\n

Money?<\/p>\n

According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything<\/em> by Russell Ash<\/a> (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls<\/em>, by Jacqueline Susann<\/a>, comes in at #9.<\/p>\n

Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em><\/a>, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds<\/em><\/a>, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place<\/em><\/a>, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind<\/em><\/a>). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.<\/p>\n

According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here<\/a> suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:<\/p>\n

The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages<\/em> editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben<\/a> or Scott Turow<\/a>. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa<\/a>, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.<\/p>\n

Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)<\/p>\n

That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?<\/p>\n

Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?<\/p>\n

Recognition?<\/p>\n

I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.<\/p>\n

So what?<\/p>\n

A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.<\/p>\n

That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol<\/p>\n

So what?<\/p>\n

So what?<\/p>\n

And who are you writing for, btw?<\/p>\n

Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List,<\/a> for what that’s worth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[384,299,302,1465,1244,241],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing","tag-books","tag-chick-lit","tag-literary-fiction","tag-popular-fiction","tag-snarkling-reading-list","tag-writing-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6038,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions\/6038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}