Monday, June 15, 2009 - Posts
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Do women novelists work in "miniature"? This was the question posed by the cover piece in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. The piece was a review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women,
a novel that offers a canny fictional portrait of how women's rights
have (and have not) evolved over time. In the book (which I haven't
read in full yet) Walbert tries to summarize women's history by
dramatizing it. At the opening of the piece, the review's author, Leah
Hager Cohen, restates Virginia Woolf's famous quote about how we see
men and women's novels differently: “This is an important book, the
critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant
book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”
Ahh, I thought. Hager Cohen is going to take on the old dichotomies and
demolish them! And she's going to do so in the Book Review itself, one of the few literary edifices that still shapes people's careers—and itself sometimes reflects these same old fallacious assumptions. She is going to create a revolution from within!
Alas, no. In fact, this review is a prime example of what I'll now
call literary Stockholm Syndrome, in which women reviewers and writers
all too eagerly embrace the sexist—and hell, yes, let's call it what it
is—terms by which women's writing is still evaluated. An example: ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
If you're wondering why there isn't reliable polling data to help
settle the question of whether the Iranian election was a farce, the Washington Post offers all sorts of (contradictory) opinions:
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty argue that reliable polling is possible, that they did it, and that the results were strongly in Ahmadinejad's favor. But Jon Cohen points out
that their poll was completed in May, before the contest got really
heated, and that even then more than half of the respondents said they
hadn't made up their mind yet (so the 2:1 number Ballen and Doherty
cite was only among people who had decided who they were voting for).
Meanwhile, Mehdi Khalaji says ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
TV images of street protests following Iran’s disputed election offer
perhaps the strongest argument against U.S. interference as a tool for
democratization. The footage
shows vibrant, vigorous dissent of a kind not seen in Iran since the
revolution: protesters moving through the streets like a human wave,
ignoring the batons of riot police and shouting their support for
opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the loser according to official tallies
that give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Whether the
election was rigged, whether the protesters succeed in reversing the
results, they have already won a huge victory by disrupting on their own the political status quo in a nation that Anne Applebaum rightly calls “a classic example of managed democracy.” This is the kind of organic democratic movement that is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Nora Roberts has written
182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new
romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million
copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline
in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I
should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with
Nora Roberts.
There are clear sociological motivations for reading Roberts (one in
five readers is reading romance; Roberts is the Goliath of romance; she
sold 17 million books last year, almost all, one assumes to American women), but Collins makes the case ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan: After watching Steven Soderbergh's call-girl movie, The Girlfriend Experience,
starring adult film star Sasha Grey, you ask: "Can Sasha Grey really
liberate herself—and other women—through porn?" My answer? Um, no?
But first things first. I thought the movie was great. I liked it
more than most, who, like you, found it to be relatively cold and
distant. (Although, frankly, I'm not sure how much you liked it or
didn't? Anyway.) I thought it was an intriguing, sometimes sweet,
occasionally disturbing, and frequently funny peek behind the curtain
at the business of sex. I thought his gently mocking, sympathetic
portrayal of the men who pay for it was pretty spot on. I think he
didn't quite "get" Grey, or her character. It's hard to understand what
it's like to sell sex for a living, especially if the seller is a
woman, and the voyeur is a man. Penises have a tendency to get in the
way.
Like you, I guess I see Grey as more of a self-constructed body politic than, well, genuine. But that's sort of the nature of ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer,
killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested
for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American
Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the
Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:
"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal
immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for
terrorists, and that is what they are.”
It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration
activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work
as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the
Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.”
Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so
pervasively, that it has now become ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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