Women's writing

So long as we hear about "women's writing" but not about "men's writing" — because the latter is assumed to be the norm — the balance is not just. The same signal of privilege and prejudice is reflected in the common use of the word feminism and the almost total absence of its natural counterpart, masculinism. I long for the day when neither word is necessary.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. Le Guin

I have long argued that to patronize is to discriminate. We all tend to patronize those we sense are in some way inferior — the very young, the very old, the infirm, etc. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, as in the case of veterans whom we honor for their service or our bosses whom we honor because they can fire us. But even this is a kind of discrimination, a setting apart of certain people.

The current administration in Washington seems committed to patronizing certain groups of Americans. What I find interesting is that most members of these groups seem to like being patronized.

The late Ursula K. Le Guin was smarter than that, as the above quotation from the very first page of Words Are My Matter reveals. As long as her books were lumped into "women's writing" instead of just writing in general, and as long as she was compared only with other female writers and not all writers, she sensed she was being patronized in its most negative sense.

Not being a female writer of fiction as Le Guin was, I am probably not as sensitive as she was to the discrimination that still exists in the literary world. Even so I have always avoided collections of stories by female writers and anthologies of writing exclusively by women. I have never wanted such books on my shelves. Nor did I ever review such books when they were sent as review copies. Yet I have countless books by women on those shelves and have reviewed countless books by women, not because they were written by women but because they are books that interest me and that I consider worth reading and reviewing, such as Le Guin's.