• 80 Books No Woman Should Read

    Rebecca Solnit Tries to Kill a Zombie

    November 18, 2015 
    409


    A few years ago, Esquire put together a list that keeps rising from the dead like a zombie to haunt the Internet. It embodies the whole mission of that magazine so far as I can tell. The magazine’s monthly instructions are not aimed at me, so I know the magazine mostly by the taglines and tarted-up ladies on on its cover. But I did just read Esquire’s list of “The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read” when it popped up on my Facebook feed. The list is a reminder that the magazine is for men, and that if many young people now disavow the “binaries” of gender, they are revolting against much more established people building up gender like an Iron Curtain across humanity. Of course, “women’s magazines” like Cosmopolitan have provided decades of equally troubling instructions on how to be a woman. Maybe it says a lot about the fragility of gender that instructions on being the two main ones have been issued monthly for so long.

    Should men read different books than women? In this list they shouldn’t even read books by women, except for one by Flannery O’Connor among 79 books by men. The author annotates A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories with a quote: “She would of been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Shoot her. Which goes nicely with the comment for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “Because it’s all about the titty.” In other words, books are instructions, you read them to be a man, and that’s why men need their own list. And what is a man? The comment on Jack London’s Call of the Wild tells us “A book about dogs is equally a book about men.” Bitches be crazy men, I guess.

    Scanning the list, which is full of all the manliest books ever, lots of war books, only one book by an out gay man, I was reminded that though it’s hard to be a woman it’s harder in many ways to be a man, that gender that’s supposed to be incessantly defended and demonstrated through acts of manliness. I looked at that list and all unbidden the thought arose, no wonder there are so many mass murders. Which are the extreme expression of being a man when the job is framed this way, though happily many men have more graceful, empathic ways of being in the world.

    The list made me think there should be another, with some of the same books, called 80 Books No Woman Should Read, though of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. Or they’re instructions in the version of masculinity that means being unkind and unaware, that set of values that expands out into violence at home, in war, and by economic means. Let me prove that I’m not a misandrist by starting with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because any book Paul Ryan loves that much bears some responsibility for the misery he’s dying to create.

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    Speaking of instructions on women as nonpersons, when I first read On the Road (which isn’t on this list, though The Dharma Bums is), I realized that the book assumed you identified with the protagonist who is so convinced he’s sensitive and deep even as he leaves the young Latina farmworker he got involved with to whatever trouble he’s created. It assumes that you do not identify with the woman herself, who is not on the road and not treated very much like anything other than a discardable depository. Of course I identified with her, as I did with Lolita (and Lolita, that masterpiece of Humbert Humbert’s failure of empathy, is on the Esquire list with a coy description). I forgave Kerouac eventually, just as I forgave Jim Harrison his lecherousness on the page, because they have redeeming qualities. And there’s a wholesome midwesterness about his lechery, unlike Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller’s.

    Of course all three are on the Esquire list. As Dayna Tortorici said, “I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever.” Writer Emily Gould described Bellow, Roth, Updike, Mailer as the “midcentury misogynists” a few years back, and it’s a handy term for those four guys on the Esquire list.

    Ernest Hemingway is also in my no-read zone, because if you get the model for your art from Gertrude Stein you shouldn’t be a homophobic antisemitic misognynist, and because shooting large animals should never be equated with masculinity. The gun-penis-death thing is so sad as well as ugly. And because the terse, repressed prose style is, in his hands, mannered and pretentious and sentimental. Manly sentimental is the worst kind of sentimental, because it’s deluded about itself in a way that, say, honestly emotional Dickens never was.

    Also, the way Hemingway said shit about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s penis size was pathetic and kind of transparent, back when Fitzgerald was a far more successful writer. He’s still far better too, with sentences as supple as silk where Hemingway is Tonka toys, and with a shapeshifter’s empathy for Daisy Buchanan and Nicole Diver as well as his male characters. (Tender Is the Night can be read as, among other things, an investigation of the far-reaching consequences of incest and child abuse.)

    Norman Mailer and William Burroughs would go high up on my no-list, because there are so many writers we can read who didn’t stab or shoot their wives (and because one writer everyone should read, Luc Sante, wrote an astonishingly good piece about Burroughs’s appalling gender politics 30 years ago that was a big influence on me). All those novels by men that seem to believe that size is everything, the 900-page monsters that, had a woman written them, would be called overweight and told to go on a diet. All those prurient books about violent crimes against women, especially the Black Dahlia murder case, which is a horrible reminder of how much violence against women is eroticized by some men, for other men, and how it makes women internalize the hatred. As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.”

    The 468-page biography of Bill Cosby that came out just before more than 50 women accused Cosby of sexual assault and attempted sexual assault, a book that reportedly glossed over all the earlier allegations. Though that book doesn’t need my opprobrium; the publisher stated last year, “There is no plan for releasing a paperback edition, or for issuing a revised version of the book.” Also, I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him, except for his recurrent attacks on Jennifer Weiner in interviews.

    There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book. And that list would have you learn about women from James M. Cain and Philip Roth, who just aren’t the experts you should go to, not when the great oeuvres of Doris Lessing and Louise Erdrich and Elena Ferrante exist. I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, Li Young Lee, Gary Snyder, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender.

     


    Rebecca Solnit
    Rebecca Solnit
    San Francisco writer, historian, and activist, Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books about geography, community, art, politics, hope, and feminism and the author, most recently of The Mother of All Questions and (with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and a cast of thousands) of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. She is a contributing editor to Harper’s, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column (founded in 1851).
    http://rebeccasolnit.net









    • Nolo

      Thank you for this. It’s easy to dismiss Esquire as irrelevant but when you remember that it’s still an influencer with a lot of money behind it and a lot of money to gain, a rebuttal is valuable for educating the David Foster Wallace-worshipping hordes of “intellectual” men. And women, of course.

    • bellafigura1

      What a topic. It’s the dismantling of everything, so long overdue, isn’t it? In some sad way, exhilarating.There is so much to be written and re-written, in a different voice. Just sold my debut novel, what a fight to explain (politely of course, pace Jennifer Lawrence) how “women’s fiction” does my book a disservice.

      • Doubting Thomas

        Congrats and good luck with the book!

    • Rafael Castilho Monteiro

      oh, feminists, always telling women what to do. its like a more annoying and dickless version of a man.

      • Beth

        No, it’s really not. You, however, fit the description to a T.

      • SarahBJones

        *sob*

        I keep reading these articles and they prescribe what I need to do in my life because I’m just a helpless woman I just accept whatever is told to me on lithub blogs.

    • Barnaby Jones

      I don’t think people reading Esquire give a shit about Barry Lopez and licking tree bark while reading Gary Snyder’s poetry. It’s doucebags trying to figure out which deodorant works best. Or how to shave without getting razor burn. Or how to order whisky at a bar with confidence.

      Their list is kinda perfect for their readership.

      • Duncan

        You think those (which deodorant, how to shave, etc.) aren’t useful things to know? Your casual dismissiveness is interesting.

        • Nigglym

          Well it’s all about priorities really isn’t it?

      • Doubting Thomas

        1. exfoliate first. brush the lather on (the brush makes your bristles stand up); rinse the razor in very cold water to keep the edge. moisturize after shaving.
        2. “Bourbon, neat.”

    • If I didn’t take Esquire at their word when they said—and keep saying—that I should be wearing a $3,000 wristwatch and driving a car that costs six figures, I’m sure not going to acquiesce to their Reading List of Manliness.

    • This is brilliant, and wickedly funny. After I read it I looked for the byline: Rebecca Solnit, of course it’s brilliant. Thanks for this.

      • MikeT-NYC

        “Brilliant?” Several of the “sentences” above don’t even have verbs. If Solnit’s books are anything like this article, they’ll go on my “writers not worth bothering with” list.

        • Geo X

          OH NOES! Not “MikeT-NYC”‘s dreaded “writers not worth bothering with” list!

      • Greg Stueve

        I linked to this essay because it was written by Rebecca Solnit. She is, as you say, brilliant.

    • Nick Black

      Really? One pronoun (and that at second hand) is sufficient to write off Flannery O’Connor? Good God. We’re sunk.

      • Eric Scoles

        I agree. They should instead of written her off for her gratuitous vicciousness, and pandering to the human love of slowing down for particularly bad car crashes.

        • Cere

          *have, not of – “They should instead HAVE written her off…”

          *viciousness

          Impossible to take seriously anyone who uses “of” where it should be “have”. Honestly.

          • Eric Scoles

            Unless of course they’re Flannery O’Connor. And of course, one should never try that sort of thing unless one is Flannery O’Connor. Or Mark Twain. Or Russell Hoban. Or possibly John Gardner. But certainly not if one has not yet been established in the canon as more than mortal. Only then should one be taken seriously after so egregiously flaunting one’s stylistic sins.

          • SarahBJones

            I’m not sure your level of pretense is useful in the conversation. Honestly.

      • Persia

        I thought that was mostly a dig at what Esquire chose to highlight.

    • someone

      Reading books you disagree with is really important to do, just maybe buy them used or check them out from the library.

    • Virginia Woolf sucks. Read Olivia Manning.

    • Eric Scoles

      I just started paging through the list. holy crap — there are so many more descriptions you could have quoted. I think the list must have been composed by channeling Jack Nicholson’s character from _Carnal Knowledge_.

    • cocopop133

      You’ve got a mass of womanhood waiting for that list, Rebecca.

    • HeinzTheBaron

      I’ll take this piece in the spirit I assume it was meant: as a kind of saucy rejoinder to the Esquire piece, which I didn’t read but assume was dumb, as much of Esquire is.

      However, a couple of points are in order: I think it’s contestable that Hemingway got “the model for his art” from Gertrude Stein. But even if he did, and even if we agree that it is misogynistic, antisemitic, and homophobic, he wouldn’t have been varying too far from Stein herself. Stein was enormously complicated, and besides being a queer Jewish woman, she also had complex ideas about masculinity and femininity that would not easily pass these days – for instance, the idea that great art was essentially masculine. Like many of the modernists in her circle, she flirted intellectually with xenophobia, fascism, and racial purity.

      We should also, as ever, be careful to separate the personal views of a person from the content of their work. This isn’t always easy, but throwing around epithets, even in the spirit of contrariness, isn’t going to make it any easier.

      Great books are great partly because of their complexity, not because they offer us simple pointers on one or another aspect of ourselves. The project of the Esquire piece, which is basically in keeping with Esquire as manufacturing male insecurity, is odious. But that fact shouldn’t be used to cast guilt by association on the books on their list.

      • TamLin

        Yes, a book and its author are not one and the same.

        But Hemingway’s books are *also* sexist and homophobic, so the criticism stands. You may like them anyway–and it’s not a knock against your character if you do–but let’s not play make believe about them.

      • Lesbian Jewish woman. The word is “lesbian”. When it’s a man the word is “gay”. “Queer” is a slur, no matter how many stupid little college freshmen who learned a few big words try to convince us otherwise.

        Also, I do manage some separation of the personal views of people from the content of their work but I am doing it less and less anymore because a lot of those people are still alive and if I ignore their views and buy their work then I’m thanking them for possessing odious viewpoints. Not interested. Not when there’s so much other work out there to enjoy.

        • Blurbwhore

          I’m queer. And you have no right to label anyone else, or to call their choice of self-label stupid. However Gertrude Stein wants to identify herself is fine by me. The world, the queer world too, has moved past your pathetic binarisation and heavily gendered views. I don’t need more rules of who I can be or what I can call myself from a fascist like you.

          • Duncan

            We don’t know how Gertrude Stein chose to “identify” herself, except perhaps that she identified herself as “Baby” and her wife Alice Toklas as “Lovey.”

        • Heather

          I am also queer. It’s not a slur. And not that it’s any of your business, but I’m also nowhere close to a college freshman.
          There’s no point in calling people stupid.

    • EdwardChampion

      Given the crude flippancy of the original list, with its “should of” instead of “should have” and its treatment of readers (never mind what gender, but the masculine emphasis has been reasonably remonstrated against here and elsewhere) as reductionist cocker spaniels who can only bark back hot takes that are on the level of “Ooga! Fire! Meat! Football! Cool! Because sometimes you’re skimming a book and not really feeling it” I’d say that a reasonably wry flippancy is an apposite response to Esquire’s balderdash.

    • Notmyrealname23

      This is the silliest article I’ve read in a long time as well as one of the saddest. The idea that anybody is saying what someone (especially 50% of the population) should or shouldn’t read (despite the author’s rather weak and seemingly insincere caveat) is against one of the basic ideas of what literature should be about – ie: challenging your beliefs and points of view while creating stories filled with interesting stories and/or great writing. I am a big fan of Henry Miller and his writing while being able to still to recognize his misogyny as troubling. I am able to keep both an understanding of Burroughs’s horrible behavior and his gift for prose separate while not taking either for granted. So they were misogynists. I don’t hear people saying we shouldn’t read H.P. Lovecraft (racist) or Aldous Huxley (proponent of Eugenics). And if they did I would make the same point. Just to say you should read this or not this is to limit what people are exposed to and so limit their enjoyment or even understanding of the literary medium. This kind of argument speaks towards a rather troubling new trend among the new left towards groupthink and censorship which was traditionally the territory of the old right. Truly disappointing. You can do better than this! I would say read everything! Read Dan Brown. Read Bukowski. Read Hitler. Read the authors that mentioned in this article. Read them all! Because otherwise you are not getting a full picture of what’s out their and you are putting a ceiling on learning and possibly enjoyment.

      • m@

        “This is the silliest article I’ve read in a long time as well as one of the saddest and laziest.”

        May I suggest a quick perusal of Elite Daily, then?

      • Elenita

        oh dear. Why do men love commenting on articles written by feminists? You never have anything useful to say.

        So much typing…so few jars being opened. Sad.

        • Notmyrealname23

          Why do women like yourself take any bit of criticism and deflect it to make it about the man’s sex as opposed to dealing with the meat of the critique? It’s a nice way of avoiding defending your points isn’t it?

          • Jenna Katz

            It might just be that your argument lacks any meat and an understanding of the article itself. If you bothered to take time to read what the article is saying not what you think it says then you’d realize why your argument doesn’t belong here. There is no need to counter the points you didn’t make, and your opinion doesn’t add anything to the discussion.

            • Notmyrealname23

              I love that ‘discussion’ now means agreeing and slamming anyone who doesn’t agree. Make the issue personal and contingent on gender and then you don’t have to deal with what is being said. Please explain to me what I didn’t understand so that you can enlighten my stupid little man brain. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. All you say is that my argument didn’t have substance and that’s enough. You can say that to anyone and feel superior but it doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t think what I am saying is worth responding to then WHY ARE YOU RESPONDING?

          • I’d call this troll a sealion, but he’s not polite enough.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Who are the trolls here? Everything I said is met with personal insults yet I never said anything personal about anyone else here. Your bullying tactics are quaint but ultimately a waste of everybody’s time.

        • Finn

          As a man who has recently commented on an article written by a feminist, I feel fairly confident I’m in a good position to answer this question…

          While I can’t speak for any other Commenting Males, I made my long-winded comment in the spirit of discussion about issues I am trying to better understand and hope that those who disagree with me will show me why I am wrong instead of dismissing anything I have to say on account of my maleness.

        • Elin Grimes

          Yah… no.

          1. Stop perpetuating the pathetic idea that men cannot be feminists. Of course they can, that’s EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT! Men and women should both be interested in human rights / equality.

          2. Stop the double standard and hypocrisy. Men are “not allowed” to have an opinion because women are often “not allowed” to have an opinion? Grow up. If one is wrong, so is the other. But turns out individuals are individual not gender stereotypes – which as a feminist you really ought to know by now.

          3. Sexism? Really? PATHETIC. You don’t fight sexism with sexism. It might be tempting to get angry and try and give men a taste of medicine that helps them understand what women experience frequently – but that’s actually not how it works. Dividing and further widening the gap between men and women, and pretending that we are sooo different and one gender is sooo much better than the other… is becoming what you hate, instead. It’s doing exactly what you CLAIM you are against.

          Methinks you are confused. Are you a feminist, or a sexist? Because you’re trying to be both and that is not possible.

          • Notmyrealname23

            Ad hominem attacks are a tactic frequently used on the internet and it is rare for those people to be called out because it is far easier to simply insult and pile on and people feel embarrassed to fight back for some reason. I think its important to fight back. Thank you for standing up for reasonable debate!

          • Elenita

            1. Men CAN’T be feminists. That’s a fact, not a “pathetic idea”. Feminism is a movement by women and for women. Men can be “allies”, but most of them are not interested in Feminism because most of them are not interested in a equal society. That’s the TRUTH that a lot of women refuse to understand. Men only support what is convenient for them. Do you think that if men didn’t like inequality we would be living in an unequal world? Wake up. I DON’T WANT MEN TO BE FEMINISTS. Speak for yourself.

            2. Men are allowed to have an opinion. They always have an opinion and they always think their opinions are relevant, They are always sharing their opinions, specially on feminist articles. All I’m saying is that their opinions are usually useless, irrelevant and stupid. I will invalidate their opinions as long as they keep proving to be part of the problem and not part of the solution.

            3. Sexism? Because of a harmless joke? Where is your sense of humor? Tasting your own medicine is an educational process but a joke is nothing compared to what women would have to do to make men taste their own medicine.

            Stop spreading misinformation with your subservient attitude.

            • Elin Grimes

              You are part of the problem.
              You are sexist. That’s part of the problem.
              You are giving feminists a bad name. That’s part of the problem.
              You are why some people want to distance themselves from the feminist label. That’s part of the problem.
              You apparently, bizarrely, ludicrously “don’t want” men to be feminists. That’s so absurd that I can only assume your intent is to cut off your nose to spite your face. Either that or you’re just an idiot.

              I believe in gender equality. That’s not subservience, that’s feminism, you can’t change the definition to suit your misandrist preferences. It is a defined term.

              “feminism
              noun: feminism
              the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.”

              Note how it doesn’t say “In order to artificially increase the status of women, we must try to belittle and put down men”. Note how it doesn’t say “In order to increase women’s rights, we must attempt to promote superiority of women to men”. That’s on you – don’t mix up your own hypocrisy with the Feminist Movement.

              To answer your questions: I know plenty of men who are feminists and many who pro-actively do more than probably you even do for feminism. Speak for yourself. And my sense of humour is right where I left it. For example I just lolled at the irony of your statement.

              Sexist joke
              Called out
              “Just a joke love, can’t you take a joke?”

              Heh, becoming what you hate sure must be an experience for you right? Have fun experiencing imperious female chauvinism.

              Gender equality and the destruction of gender stereotypes allows us all to be human again. It benefits men and women and the two sides of the coin are so profoundly linked, it simply isn’t possible to break through one without breaking through the other. In order to break the idea that childcare is a woman’s job (by default) we must also break through the notion that it’s NOT a man’s job, that men aren’t good at it, or are all paedophiles, or can’t be trusted to look after children, or can’t do anything “feminine” because feminine activities are “inferior” in some way. Two sides of the same coin.

              Alas it’s not convenient to your worldview to think that 3 billion men don’t fit into the same cookie cutter mould of “Women oppressing baddies” and 3 billion women don’t fit into the “Noble struggling goodies” concept. The world is a little less childish than that. Gender stereotyping wasn’t forged in a comic book, it’s a systematic complex problem with multiple layers that damages both genders profoundly.

              You’re bitter. I get that. I also get that you’re not a feminist. You don’t even understand the word.
              What you are, is part of the problem.

            • Elenita

              See, the man who wrote a very patronizing, stupid and useless comment here is agreeing with you. That’s what I’m talking about. You wrote a comment to defend him… Men don’t need you to defend them, dear. They are fine. You are the type of “feminist” that men like. You are the wrong type of feminist.

              I love when “feminists” like you tell me I’m not a feminist because I refuse to be passive and subservient. The two or three men that you think are feminists don’t represent men in general. Most men want to keep women down. I will not wait until they change their minds. Wake up.

            • Notmyrealname23

              It’s this type of militant fascist thinking that turns people off to feminism in the first place. I am not an anti-feminist as you rudely assume. You are as mentioned earlier, a sexist, and therefore due as little respect as any male sexist would be. Btw, I am not sure how you propose to make the sexes equal by maligning half of them. I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

            • Stephen Robinson

              If the extreme views of a “militant fascist” is enough to “turn people of feminism” then I don’t think that they were all that committed to feminism. It’s sort of like how one bad encounter with a black person can “turn off” whites on racial equality.

            • Elin Grimes

              First the sexist jokes, now the patronising “dear” – can you not see that you are exactly what you claim to be fighting against?

              Allow me to spell out the obvious for you.

              If I defend someone under attack and call out your bullshit, that does not make me “subservient” to them. I’m not oppressed right now- the only one patronising me and being a sexist asshole around here… is you. You as in, actually YOU. Defending someone doesn’t make me subservient to them, what it makes me, is *not an arsehole*. Something you ought to try sometime if possible. Do you actually consider that not taking a contrary position is being “subservient” ? (I mean, gimme a break). That explains a lot about your nonsensical bigotry here.

              Secondly, what I’m actually defending is the name of Feminism which you are busy dragging through the mud. You are actively putting people off the feminist movement with your ignorant and hateful attitude. You don’t understand feminism at all because you can’t see the wood for the trees – blinkered, spiteful vision. It’s sad. But I care less about your tragic “issues” and more about how much you feed into harmful stereotypes.
              Because you are exactly the wrong kind of “feminist”. You misunderstand it to the most precise degree that it is frequently attacked. This is the problem:

              You are not a feminist. What you are, is anti-men. You seem to think that’s the same thing.

              This is like thinking that being pro-LGBT is the same as being anti-straight people, going around attacking heterosexuals to try and big up LGBT. Or thinking that in order to fight for race equality, you need to enslave or persecute white people in the US, or higher up castes of India.
              Your ignorance is a huge discredit and disservice to feminism. So it’s feminism that I’m defending because you need to get the hell out of this movement until you understand what it is actually about. Right now you’re just damaging it.

              Note how you didn’t argue against a single point I made- you’re just flailing like an angry teen in a huff (perhaps that’s exactly what you are, I don’t know). Newsflash: Feminism is not here to deal with your anti-man problems. You
              can’t redefine feminism to fit your own personal insecurities and
              childish hostilities.

              Fact is anti-man is a different movement. Go over to where you belong, Feminism does not want you.

              Your behaviour is so troll-like I almost imagine you are a deliberate troll from an anti-feminism league to discredit feminism. But then again, as they say, “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence” – or in this case, sheer ignorance.

              You’re wrong. And you will have to deal with that and re-evaluate what gender equality means, if you wish to continue alleging that you support it. Hard to admit you’re wrong I know. But it’s time to grow up.

            • Elenita

              You are defending an anti feminist man in the name of Feminism.

              You are stupid. You are incredibly stupid. If all feminists were like you women would still be treated like cattle.

              Good bye, dear.

            • Elin Grimes

              “You are stupid. You are incredibly stupid.”

              And you have nothing because you know I’m right 🙂

              If everyone were like you we would live in a society of sexists and inequality – in other words, we’d go back several hundred years and renege on centuries of progress. Ironic, no?

              Good bye kiddo – you will learn one day for sure. There’s time for you yet, to grow and stop your anti-feminist anti-equality misguided ways. Sooner the better, you can do it. Just try. Thinking helps. Try that.

            • Zuzanna Smith

              No one thinks you’re right, oh wait, men do! Congratulations handmaiden.

            • mattmark

              Your comments are relevant, cogently reasoned and, alas, as you can see, totally ineffective. You’re broadcasting good stuff, but the receptors simply aren’t there. As Schopenhauer pointed out, once you get past a certain point you have to consider acknowledging that you’re no longer dealing with someone else’s reason but his/her will–Elenita WILL not understand you.

              By all means keep trying, though. Not everyone will remain resolutely unpersuaded, and for what it’s worth you have my endorsement.

            • Inlands

              Oh my God, you’re the worst.

            • Zuzanna Smith

              I agree with everything you say Elenita, women like Elin want to look good to men, they have a need to be accepted and so they prefer to throw other women under the bus rather than to say NO to men. They’d rather not be seen as harsh or unfeminine or accept the truth that most men are fine with women being seen as lesser beings. Hang in there sister;)

            • Elenita

              Thank you very much, Zuzanna!

            • Notmyrealname23

              Very illuminating comments. Misandry is alive and well.

            • ex-hater

              Sorry for all the cursing going on here. I have zero intention of attacking you like some others have.
              But I do want to write in this in all honesty: I believe and identify with the feminist movement. I see women and men both as fellow humans and I don’t see what sense it makes to ban either ‘group’ from anything. Sure, I admit that I haven’t been through a lot of what women go through and it would be arrogant and patronising to pretend that I do. I can only try to imagine, but I can never speak for anyone else. But I DO see repulsive sexist behaviour that personally disgusts and hurts me.
              I want gender equality. And being equal, I want everybody from all gender identities to be able to subscribe to the movement they support.
              For this reason I hope that you may understand that I see myself as a feminist also. Let’s direct our anger and frustration wisely and point it not at each other, but use it to fight sexist a-holes (male AND female) together.

              wishing you all the best..!

          • Zuzanna Smith

            Men can’t be feminists, they can only be allies. Why? Because men can never understand what it’s like to be a woman, a girl, a female, etc., regardless of what so-called progressives tell you.

            • V_Triol

              I think you caught the delusion from Elenita. It’s catching, apparently, hope you get rid of it soon.

        • Steven Schmidt

          Something useful:
          Sci-fi: Nancy Kress, C.J Cherryh, Alice(aka Andre) Norton, Alice Sheldon(aka James Tiptree), Johanna Russ(essays, too)
          Poetry: Rae Armantrout, Rita Dove

      • Fish Fast

        “Truly disappointing. You can do better than this! I would say read everything!”

        So, I guess you didn’t read the part of the article where she said she thinks everyone should read anything they want but that she’s performing an exercise, writing in the spirit in which the Esquire piece was written. Also, out of curiosity, do you make a point of leaving condescendingly huffy criticisms on the Esquire list and other bits of idiocy like it, or do you only pop in to say it makes no sense when a woman is stomping on your toys?

        • Notmyrealname23

          I did read that part and I mentioned it in my comment. I don’t buy it. I didn’t comment on the Esquire list because they never said what you ‘shouldn’t’ read. That is my problem with this article. It is telling people NOT to read certain things which I find troubling. I would’ve made the same argument had the article been written by a man and had been about what men shouldn’t read.

          • SarahBJones

            You’ve missed the point entirely.

            • Notmyrealname23

              I didn’t miss the point. I just think the author is not being sincere and her various points of critique point to that. It’s called subtext.

            • It’s not that your “points” are irrelevant, it’s that you don’t have any because, you have, indeed, totally and utterly missed Solnit’s point.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Are you still talking about this?

            • SarahBJones

              I’m 100% sure you’re not the one who gets to decide whether someone is being sincere or not. She’s written a new article, you may want to read it.

              And person, I have not insulted you, nor tried to shut you up. Are you really so fragile that a bit of disagreement scares you into a corner? Really.

            • Romantic Placebo

              You know, the easiest way of avoidiing listening to someone is to claim they aren’t “authentic” to you

              Think about that. Then think about how many people seem to think they’re authentic and get something out of the message.

      • Heina Dadabhoy

        tl;dr “For full life enjoyment and education, read a bunch of men I’ve decided you should read.”

        • Notmyrealname23

          That was not my point and if you did bother to read what I wrote you’d understand that. Come on is this the level of constructive dialog ‘literary people’ have sunken to? TLDR? Really??

          • Heina Dadabhoy

            Yet you ordered us to read three men, one of whom writes trashy pop lit, to open our minds. Okay.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Wow you really missed the point! I was mentioning three people whose writing is often looked at as bad for different reasons and suggesting (not ordering which would be against the whole point of my argument) that you read things you normally wouldn’t in order to expand your knowledge of the written word. Find out WHY people consider Dan Brown good or bad. Find out WHY Bukowski isn’t an overrated poet or why some people love him. Find out WHY Mein Kampf changed history. Don’t just take what some lit critic or me or anyone else says for granted and actually see for yourself. What are you so afraid of?

            • Heina Dadabhoy

              I’ve read all those authors. I’ll take you seriously when you advise people to expand their minds by reading authors who aren’t as widely-consumed.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Just more confirmation that you missed my point.

            • Heina Dadabhoy

              Right back atcha, kiddo.

            • Notmyrealname23

              haha well this was a useless exchange.

      • It’s so funny how some people cry censorship without actually knowing what it means. Solnit is not the government, and her reading recommendations aren’t violating anyone’s First Amendment. Try again, oh freeze-peach crusader.

        • Notmyrealname23

          If you read what I say more closely you’ll see I didn’t say that she was censoring but that it points to a trend towards censorship on the left – trying to get professors fired for their beliefs or pushing for others to be barred from speaking on campus for example. I am also noticing an interesting trend of name calling by people who claim to be on the side of sensitivity. Every response to my comment that critiqued the authors written work not her person has been met with personal insults. What is that about?

          • greatjob

            This is all such convoluted territory (totally, as you say, bordering on ‘groupthink’). I find some relief in what you’re saying. I have respect for Solnit. I’ve also found some of her writing unbearably white. She cites Thoreau in ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ as if he were a legit wayfaring wanderer. But hey, that’s the kind of troubling critical territory that’s got us so mired in the first place.
            Henry Miller totally opened my mind, I’m glad of it, and yet it’s hard to re-read because of the complete absence of respect for women. Hemingway’s writing rules, so too does Fitzgerald’s, Franzen is boring and hateful (toward life, not women), and that’s not just because he’s contextualized so fiercely that we read someone’s personal statements about him before we read his books.

            This article, like many, fails to dismiss Esquire’s classist nature, which I think is its worst offense, and one thing we don’t seem to discuss enough lately in comparison to thoughts on gender. In a discourse simply on lit, let’s read it all, and yes, let’s include McCullers, Lessing, Woolf et al (let’s include the writers without gender binary focus, and of races completely excluded here as well). But class discrimination is equally or often more paralyzing than my feeling marginalized as a female (and God how far we could go in measuring its presence in great novels).

            Also, concerning a previous comment, I keep seeing D.F. Wallace’s writing dismissed as sort of an intro for male white “intellectualism” (their quotes, not mine). I hate that! His writing is excellent, the real thing, and dare I say I feel it’s hated for being a mix of cryptic and “hyped,” about the latter of which he was terrified.

      • risa

        Here’s the issue with your argument: we CAN’T read everything. There simply is not enough time in the world to read everything, even if you’re independently wealthy. We are forced to pick and choose the things that will give us either a) the best education about the world or b) the best entertainment experience – and if one can combine that, so much the better. Thus, I’d say OMG NO DON’T READ DAN BROWN ARE YOU CRAZY LEAVE THE LAZY WRITING ALONE. 😉

        It doesn’t help that the default list of “must-reads” in Western countries is always lushly populated with white male authors who write few positive female role models beyond the generous mother figure (*glares at Steinbeck*). If one reads too much content that presents as default a static and colonial characterization of both male and female, it runs a groove through the empathy center of the brain and makes it a thousandfold harder for the needle to run from one side of the song list to the other.

        Therefore, since we must pick and choose, choosing Fitzgerald over Hemingway makes SO much sense. It also makes sense to make fun of a list which includes a book about black people owning slaves well above Ellison’s Invisible Man or Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X. Additionally, while I truly love Bukowski, I know from everything I’ve seen on the internet that if a woman wrote a book called “Men” that described the disgusting aspects of men she knows, the Menternet would be in an uproar about it and there would be mass death threats a la Gamergate.

        (By the way, many people are proponents of Not Reading Lovecraft, since there are many authors who have taken his mythology and done amazing things with it. You’re simply not noticing them. Lovecraft wasn’t even a particularly good writer, IMO. Plus Huxley has been called out a number of times, and it’s rarely mentioned that Huxley stole dramatically from Zamyatin’s ‘We,’ which is honestly a better version but OHNORUSSIAN.)

        • Notmyrealname23

          I am so happy that thoughtful and serious people are finally responding to my critique. Of course we can’t read everything, I’m being hyperbolic to make a point but I was trying to emphasize that you should not be afraid to read anything just because some critic says you shouldn’t. Make your mind up for yourself.

          I actually agree that the canon is limited and that more authors should be included from minority and female perspectives but I also believe that what’s there already is valuable and shouldn’t necessarily be discarded just because it makes people uncomfortable or jars with our liberal 21st century values and worldview.

          Again the Lovecraft and Huxley examples were all I could think of for those categories so that’s the best I could do for the time being. My overarching argument is that they should still be read if even only to understand why they are seen as problematic writers. Thanks for your interesting responses!

          • risa

            You’re welcome! I think you didn’t get all the aspects of my point, which is basically that articles which amount to “here I am, and I have read books X, Y, and Z and here is my take on them” are *extremely* valuable to someone who has to choose wisely and not be random. Anyone can choose to ignore or not as the case may be, but choosing wisely simply cannot happen *without* these kinds of critiques. They just can’t. So this is a good article, and allows someone to compare/contrast between this and many other critical articles.

            So of course, I’m not saying anything should be discarded – some people would find Fitzgerald’s classism offensive compared to Hemingway’s more prosaic presentation, for instance – but saying an article like this is silly is underestimating the lack of alternate critical thought about the vast canon of white maleness.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Point taken.

      • Chava Kiyomi Chavous

        I totally agree

    • Notmyrealname23

      Also, I am tired of being told to think there is anything inherently wrong with masculinity. In a world where we are told all shades of gender are legitimate, why has masculinity somehow become a bad word – equated only with misogynists and dude-bros? I understand that masculinity has traditionally been the dominant pov in the arts and media but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is inherently bad.

      • Hunter

        Merely having a male perspective isn’t what defines “masculinity” – it’s a much more complicated (and restrictive) set of stereotypes. In America, this half of the gender binary is constructed of tropes that are designed to benefit oneself while harming others. See: Suppression of emotion, violence / aggression, homophobia, male possessiveness / control of women, rape, patriarchy in general, etc.

        • Notmyrealname23

          For someone who claims that masculinity is complicated, that is an extremely simplistic and one-sided view of masculinity. Who says your definition of masculinity is definitive? To say that masculinity is an idea that merely serves the goal of harming others and then to attribute to it only negative stereotypes is hardly fair. It’s not an either or proposition that if you are proud of your masculinity you are somehow a selfish, unthinking, unfeeling barbarian. If I were to ascribe only negative traits to femininity I would rightly be called a sexist. Also, the idea that masculinity is a constructed identity goes against very basic biology which involves testotero

          • Hunter

            I agree completely—our ideas of masculinity and femininity are both inherently sexist. I think maybe you are confusing the idea of being male with being masculine, and these are not the same thing. Masculine and feminine describe ways of behaving, not any inherent characteristics (biological or otherwise). Femaleness and maleness are adjectives describing biological sex, and do include associated physical characteristics.

            Here’s how wikipedia defines masculine: “a set of attributes, behaviors and roles generally associated with boys and men.” Depending on what society you are raised in, there are different gender tropes “generally associated” with men vs. women (I listed some of these above). And yet there are people born with male bodies that identify more with femininity, and vice versa. Speak with any transgender person, and they can fully flesh out this concept.

            It is not inherently wrong to celebrate maleness or a male perspective (or female for that matter); the problem is pressuring people to behave in certain ways simply because of their assigned sex. I didn’t mean to imply that the “goal” of masculinity was harm; I meant the design of gender roles benefits the “in group” (at the expense of those on the outside of this group), and this goes the same for femininity. [However, because the balance of legal/financial power in Western society was long tilted heavily towards men, the traits we still associate with masculinity also encompass elements of this power, which inherently prioritizes the self over overs.]

            If a person is perceived as male but doesn’t identify with the attributes encompassed by “masculinity”, they will receive much social (and internal) pressure to conform. This pressure typically ranges from gentle teasing by friends to violent murder by strangers. The Esquire piece mocked by this author is just one example of the many ways that men are pressured to be “masculine.” Certainly not everyone changes themselves to fit the stereotype—as you’ve noted, each human has masculine and feminine characteristics—but nobody who takes part in a larger community with this gender binary is immune to the pressure to be one or the other.

            To return to the initial topic: The inherent problem is not with being male or female or identifying with certain characteristics that fall into the category of “masc” or “fem”, the problem is with a restrictive two-gender binary of behaviors, where those who step outside their proscribed stereotypes are physically and emotionally harmed for doing so. People should be proud of their positive personality traits, whether or not they are “masculine” or “feminine.”

            *I will also add, as a queer person, the public celebration of masculinity by gay men is often rooted in homophobia, and the idea that “masculine men”—also sometimes called “straight acting”—are better or more valuable than feminine or homosexual ones. Just because you are gay doesn’t mean you can’t be homophobic, even if it is subconscious. Apologies for the length of this response. 😉

            • SarahBJones

              Oh, snap.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Your snark is adorable Sarah.

            • Notmyrealname23

              Good and interesting points. And thanks for being civil in your disagreement unlike some (see below).

            • Hunter

              Of course, and you as well!

            • risa

              Ditto that.

      • m@

        “In a world where we are told all shades of gender are legitimate, why has masculinity somehow become a bad word – equated only with misogynists and dude-bros?”

        Ironically, it’s because books that celebrate those false stereotypes are on lists like this.

      • Don’t feed the misogynist troll.

        • Notmyrealname23

          Insults and more snarky insults. This just shows you have no real point to make only schoolyard bullying tactics.

          • SarahBJones

            You make no genuine contribution, here. You tell everyone who doesn’t make the KIND of comment you demand that they are not saying the right thing. You entirely mis-read the author’s jab at Esquire’s absurd article, which she reads in relation to magazines such as Cosmopolitan, to make a well-informed but ultimately satirical (not serious) suggestion about “what not to read.” You take her suggestions seriously, and therefore elide the serious critique held w/in her article at an attempt to discredit her via a side-door attack. Weak-sauce, mate.

            • Notmyrealname23

              1. If you don’t believe that what I’m saying is relevant to the conversation then why are you engaging me at all?

              2. I think you are giving too much credit to the satirical angle. That appears to be only part of what the author is doing.

              3. I am not demanding anything but I don’t think that personal insults lead to a constructive dialog.

              4. If you don’t like what I’m saying in my comments may I politely suggest (not demand) that you stop reading them?

      • risa

        If actual book and other media purchasers believed that both were equally valuable, there would not be a whole genre called “women’s fiction.” Thus, we fight to show that “men’s fiction” can be equalled by the so-called “women’s fiction.” Because, I mean, REALLY? Discarding a whole genre as “chick lit?”

        And to make it crystal clear, I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing – I’m saying that’s what a really large chunk of humanity has done to our amazing literary canon, both male and female, and it’s something to fight against. Wanna join us?

    • Bryan F. Irrera

      Re: “She would of been a good woman… ”

      would’ve or would have. The improper use of “of” in this phrase (and I know you are quoting someone, but this should have been pointed out) is one of my pet peeves.

      • MrSokar

        I think that quote just enforces the high standard of Esquire right there. Not to mention following with “if it had been somebody there..”.

      • A typo, perhaps. “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

      • michaeljorangemikelowrey

        It’s not meant to be grammatical; it’s dialogue in one of the many Southern dialects. Your regional bias is showing. (See Mark Twain’s explanatory preface to Huck Finn.)

      • Ben

        And people who make this kind of comment are one of my pet peeves. But is that going to stop you? I doubt it.

    • danasta

      Hemingway is not one of my favorites but if we’re talking sentences and writing (and not goring animals for sport), Death in the Afternoon is miles ahead of any fluff Fitzgerald ever wrote.

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    • Ondi Lingenfelter

      Decades ago, I felt alienated by a high school lit curriculum that was all about the male journey. I found my own way, but it was lonely. It’s nice having company. And now I know I don’t have to feel like an uncultured fool or poor sport for feeling excluded by my high school guy friends during their Kerouac/Burroughs/Bukowski phase, for being ticked off by Hemingway, and for being bored to tears by Franzen and the rest of the doorstopper crowd. My favorite quotation: “a book without women is often said to be about humanity but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book.” Yes, yes, and yes again.Thank you, Rebecca Solnit!

      • Chase Miller

        Nowadays elementary school teachers are sexist against boys reading! And they make them only read books by men…it is unfortunate

        • Duncan

          “Nowadays”?

          • Chase Miller

            at the present time, in contrast with the past.

        • Susie Cue

          “Nowadays” is a lovely compound Middle English word, like “nonetheless”, “heretofore”, etc. I am pleased it is still in use.

    • SLB

      I respectfully disagree with some of Rebecca Solnit’s comments in this article, as I would disagree with the Esquire list. There are books that are good to read because they are considered classics, are spectacularly well written, about timeless things, and speak to humanity. Some will be reflective of an older style of being, when people didn’t generally question the patriarchal order, for example. But I think the reader can make up his or her own mind about what to take and what to discard from any book read. Solnit’s article is useful for reminding us that there are views expressed in novels that should be taken with a pinch of salt, or even rejected outright. The key for me is to read widely and be aware that not all books will fit my world view.

      • mileywollstonecraft

        Thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking.

      • Heather

        I’m pretty sure when she says “books no woman should ever read” it’s tongue-in-cheek. I believe she even says so in the essay.
        She’s definitely not espousing that people not read books that don’t fit one’s own worldview. She’s saying that women do this all the time, and that men don’t, and aren’t required to. I felt that was generally clear.
        She’s saying Hey, maybe men should start trying to read outside their comfort zone. And also this: that some books men love are not worthy of the praise heaped upon them. That this lionization of male writers doesn’t mean those writers are worth reading.

    • Mjolnir2010

      Papa Hemingway could have easily seduced the authoress of this article. Heh.

    • On Hemingway, I would note that his treatment of Pilar, the female revolutionary in For Whom the Bell Tolls, would probably interest you. She is a central character and probably could qualify an early feminist icon if she were real. The point being that an author can simultaneously write a character like Pilar, but also devise a character like Helen from Snows of Kilimanjaro – someone you might characterize as a ‘prop.’ But in the context of the Snows, Helen IS a prop to the main character as he faces the immensity of death. Wildly different female characters, but both are valid characterizations of the truth in their contexts. The truth remains true, even when it is ugly.

      • risa

        I thought Pilar was written quite horribly, since there was SUCH a fixation on her ugliness or not. If you’re going for that kind of thing, Wilkie Collins did it SO much better in The Woman In White.

    • mhann24

      There’s nothing at all wrong with Flannery O’Connor; it’s a shame that Esquire recontextualized what is actually an excellent line from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in such an offensive way. The line is uttered by a serial killer but is essentially O’Connor’s comment on the old lady, who is well-meaning but an utter fool, a classist and a racist. The old lady is meant to symbolize the old South, and the story aims to obliterate it and any lingering romantic notions about it. On a sidenote, the twentieth century’s best southern writer was Carson McCullers (and she is my favorite writer–period). She deserves to be on your “hero shelf” and is the most underrated American writer.

      • Heather Harrison

        Carson McCullers– YES.

      • Greensleeves

        you’re absolutely right about Flannery’s Grandma character….you can’t take the line out of context…

        • To be fair, the grandma could have been a good woman. She’d have been a good woman if there’d been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.

          • storypeddler

            LOL. Indeed.

      • Kathryn Pynch

        I actually avoid most women writers during the last decade.

        Having looked at the list I was quite surprised to find only five I haven’t read and fifty-one that I own.

        I’ve read seven of the females listed but am surprised not to see several female writers I do read.

    • Jacob Russell

      Well, a river rarely rises above it’s source. So I suppose in some ways this article, since it’s a response to something not worth responding to (were the readers on this page ever in fear of being influenced by Equire?), was bound to have problems. I have a hard time with the notion that I should choose what I read based around who I do and do not agree with. I occasionally read books for their moral instruction but that is only one of many reasons. Mostly I’m looking for books that have a stylistic quality that makes me think about what writing can be in new ways. One of my favorite writers, L.F. Celine, was by most accounts a sexist and anti-Semite… not to mention a great humanitarian who used his skill as a Dr. for countless poor people across France and Europe. There’s major complications there. Most of his views are completely appalling to me but I read him anyway and that’s because I don’t have to let books (or any media) decide how I think or who I am. When the author describes reading Post Office and feeling shame… all I can think is that you must be reading for reasons that I simply have no relation to and will most likely never share. I don’t need a library full of books to reinforce who I am. I prefer if they challenge me on occasion, encourage me on other occasions and perhaps just entertain on still further occasions. The whole notion that there is but one reason to read is complete alien to me. As a result this article comes across as being just as silly as the Esquire one sounds. It feels reactionary and not satirical. I also find that the criticisms of someone like Hemingway in this article are entirely politically motivated. Isn’t it just a little coincidental that the person you’re closer to politically also is a better writer of prose and the person you don’t like politically is worse.. on every occasion? There seems to be a lack of even attempting some level of objectivity here. I realize it’s impossible to do completely but we don’t have to give up on trying entirely. There’s a lot that feels disingenuous as a result of that mentality permeating every aspect of this article.

      • Bellanova

        all I can think is that you must be reading for reasons that I simply have no relation to and will most likely never share. I don’t need a library full of books to reinforce who I am.

        Indeed.

        That, in short, is the beauty of the privilege, which ensures that you will (most likely) never find yourself in a position of “naturally” assumed inferiority because of something as fundamental as your gender; prone to the crassest, most vulgar exploitation and abuse; and seen forever as an object to be exploited so, or, at best, the eternal other.

        This is what Solnit’s piece (and others by her on the subject) speaks about: the sickening neglect and denigration of the women’s experience, in literature as in life; its relegation to the status of accessory — at best — to men.

        If you are a protagonist of your own life, a position “naturally” supported by the social order around you as well as the literature that reflects it, you will indeed not “need a library of books to reinforce” it — but you will also not notice that your whole library, and beyond, does reinforce it anyway.

        But if you see no protagonists like you, in life and literature, you may, with time, become acutely aware of that absence, sensitized to the inequality it reflects, and appreciative of the attempts to rectify it, in literature as in life. You may even become reactionary — appropriately so.

        • Jacob Russell

          I’m only just reading this now. It’s exactly what I would expect. The typical modern version of ivory tower privilege talk – a speech written thousands of times around the internet. I think we’ve all heard it before. But something interesting struck me as I read through it and re-read my own post (which I had forgotten about) – I’m talking about myself, my tastes. I constantly bring it back to me. Your post isn’t about your tastes at all. You reveal nothing about yourself. A great tactic because then you have nothing to answer for, it’s risk free. Your post is talking entirely about the collective as you attempt to make choices for other people – you never actually talk about yourself at all. You make guesses about who I am and who others are and what they would/should choose based on those things. That’s not good or bad necessarily, but I do find it odd.

          • Bellanova

            That you do not see anything revealing of myself is a problem of your careless and/or unimaginative reading, I’m afraid, for I have revealed plenty. Perhaps if you weren’t so firmly ensconced in your own head — talking about yourself, your tastes, and constantly bringing it back to yourself — you’d notice something of others for a change, particularly things that are in plain sight. Like the sadness over being invisible, or the pain of being objectified, for example.

            I am not making guesses about who you are. You are telling me, us, who you are in that comment and all and any other ones you make. You, like every one of us, may be anonymous online, but you, like every one of us, are transparent.

            • Misha Ratkevich

              “That, in short, is the beauty of the privilege”

              Person has not revealed who they are in the previous comments (could be black transgender, for all you know), you assume them to be privileged.

              I never thought that’s how logic works.

            • Bellanova

              Person’s comment history, among so many other things, is an open book. (Pun unintended.)

            • Misha Ratkevich

              Are there any open statements of who this person is in their comments?

              If no, you’re just being presumptuous. If such presumptions held any water, there would not be female anti-suffragists, yet there were. Google some history.

            • Jacob Russell

              There is no sign that you are ‘invisible’ there is not a single comment in that first post about who you are… you simply spend the time trying to teach me things you assume I do not know (or haven’t heard). I can’t even know if you are a woman or not, cis or not… I could assume things, but that would be irresponsible. You don’t reveal yourself. Everything in that post could have been written by a cis gendered white male. There are signs.. it’s true, but if you’ve been around the net long enough (or even people in general) it’s pretty obvious that those signs don’t necessarily mean anything. I could have written the exact same post. In fact I’ve written similar ones in the past. My reading isn’t unimaginative (you have no idea what I’ve imagined – how could you) if anything it is too imaginative because based on my reading you could have any number of identities. At no point do you say what you’re own opinion is. In fact most of the post is you talking about me for some reason. I notice plenty about others but I’m not so presumptuous as to assume those things are necessarily true. Especially not based on a single internet post. Really getting to know someone takes years.

              The ‘sadness of being invisible’ or the ‘pain of being objectified’ is not clear from what you wrote at all. At no point do you reveal yourself – which in all honesty is all you can offer. You say that I ‘keep bringing it back to myself’ – that’s because I’m being honest and open. I cannot know you, I cannot know this writer anymore than what’s on the screen. The rest is all guess work. So I bring it back to what I know and how I feel. I actually believe that anecdotal evidence is some of the best evidence and individual can ever get because it is the total sum of what you can know. Everything else requires too much trust.

              See, I allow for your truths to be true for you – although you’ve openly said nothing about that – you expect me to infer, which I think is unfair to both of us.

              People are not transparent. You can live with someone for ten years and still learn about them, human beings are far more complex than you are allowing for and far more difficult to label than you seem to be suggesting.

    • Tsk

      It’s just embarrassing that Solnit can’t even spell Flannery O’Connor’s name right. This is like something by a passive-aggressive undergrad.

      • SarahBJones

        You are using a mis-typed name in an article as a way to discredit it?

        Pot, kettle, black.

        • Notmyrealname23

          You’re bad at this.

          • SarahBJones

            Aw look at you finding my posts to put me down. Looks like you were threatened! Shiver me timbers.

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    • Elenita

      Great article! Thank you!

    • Martine

      excellent, thank you

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    • espen_joergensen

      This is the biggest, polarizing piece of shit I have ever read. Its just, i don’t know, wrong? While reading your article, I got more and more convinced that it was going to culminate with your coming out of the closest and revealing yourself, finally, after 50 years of suppression from the patriarchy, as a lesbian. To even suggest that Bukowski was a misogynist, based on one of his pro/an-tagonist, is simply not a healthy look upon literature. You are the one assuming that all the books you don’t like, which seems to be written by masculine misogynists (AND THATS WHAT I CALL TRANSPARENT!), are instructions.. Well, to me, you are the one that expresses a form of normative and instructive view upon literature. Simply as fuck, you suggest that Roth, Bellow, Updike are all misogynist, as if this word only is all that is necessary to describe three of americas greatest postwar writers, whom also done a huge, huge job for a very particular group in the US. To say Roth and Bellow are misogynists because Portnoy and Henderson talks shit about their wife is locking literature, and I take here the liberty to quote you, “down into your gender.” And the part with Burroughs (who is not a very interesting writer in my opinion) and Mailer? I mean? That must be a joke! I know it must be!

      I agree that Woolf, O´Connor, Lessing, Rilke, A. Rich, are amazing writers. But you need to relax your feminism a bit, seriously, take it easy: Esquire just made a reading list for men, and as you very well claims yourself, this has been done by a thousand women magazines before and no one ever complained then; and you know why? Because it doesn’t fucking matter! It can be summoned down to this; Liberty of speech, you should be allowed to write anything, including a whole book, a trilogy for that matter, about how big fat and ugly the women of the world can be if that is your truly opinion. The rest is up to the reader. This kind of writing only increases the polarization between the sexes, and way, way more the a reading list from Esquire.

      • SarahBJones

        A female author writes a satirical and punchy piece.

        Male commenter gets offended and riled up.

        Male commenter tells female author to “calm down.”

        I can’t even begin with the irony here.

    • Taran Wanderer

      I appreciate that the writer of this piece gave a list of authors she actually does like at the end. For a while there it felt like she was just bagging on the big names for the fun of it.

      But this thing where she tossed Jonathan Franzen in there and took a cheap shot at his “recurrent attacks” on Jennifer Weiner is an obtuse and unfair take on the situation. Weiner has discovered that, in attacking Franzen, she gets a lot of press, so she does it relentlessly. All Franzen has ever had to say about her was that he didn’t want to be a Twitter marketer like she is (totally fair…her relentless goading of him happens on Twitter) and that he hasn’t read her books because no one whose opinion he cares about has suggested that he does (an answer he gave when an interviewer asked him, ‘Have you read anything by Jennifer Weiner?’)

      • D.r. Haves

        I was bothered by this throw-in as well. She hasn’t read anything of Franzen (who’s been in the literary spotlight for more than a decade) because of a recent spat with another writer?

    • stewart

      But Ms. Solnit, why are we stooping to even address Esquire? It’s like arguing that an Adam Sandler movie should be more philosophical. Is your aim to persuade the editors to elevate their magazine; to persuade society to somehow destroy the magazine; or to inform us that the magazine isn’t progressive? Your essay won’t do anything about the first and third options (because #1 won’t happen and #3 is already accomplished.) If you want to destroy Esquire, I wish you the best of luck.

    • Notmyrealname23

      Then I will restate what I said in the very next sentence: “And if they did I would make the same point.”

      • dez_dono

        “People don’t do the thing.”
        “No, they do. A lot. Almost without exception.”
        ” WELL THEY’RE ALL WRONG.”
        Oh internet.

        • Notmyrealname23

          Oy you people are exhausting to talk to but you are very good at nitpicking and missing points.

    • stewart

      Why are we stooping to address…Esquire? That’s like arguing that an Adam Sandler movie should be more philosophical. Is your purpose to persuade editors to elevate the magazine? To persuade society to destroy the magazine? Or to inform us the magazine is bad? Only the second one is not a waste of time, but I can’t really tell what you’re trying to do.

    • thebrutalkremlin

      . Stupid prattling nonsense.

    • terists

      I once read a book that was written from the point of view of someone who was not me, and I was so disgusted I hurled the book* across the room and swore I would never read again. I mean, reading words on a page is one thing, but expecting me to empathize with a character who has traits and beliefs and values that are different from my own is like, wow just wow, problematic much??? I don’t read books to be oppressed like that, thank you very much.

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    • Bzzzxx

      I don’t think you have to be a woman to get sick of the male striving on most of these lists. You know how Mailer would call the novel, “the Bitch” – as in “taming the Bitch?” There’s something about biting off more than you can chew that leads these guys to think of conquest.

      I don’t care if Burroughs shot his wife; I’m not a prosecutor. I’m not particularly interested in good art by good people. But there’s perpetual obsession by the Great Ones with marking territory, leaving a mark, mortality of the person vs. the phony immortality of the artist. It’s such a snooze. There are some of my all-time favorites on the Esquire list: “Angle of Repose”, “Brothers Karamazov”, but it’s mostly about taming the Bitch, which to me is about the most boring subject matter around.

      • Bzzzxx

        The dumbest entry by the way is the one for “Sophie’s Choice”. “It’s not about Sophie, it’s about Stingo.” In other words, the fact that it’s not about the interesting Polish woman who has to make a horrific choice, and is living in perplexing circumstances. It’s about the boring writer dude who gets to lose his virginity to the hot Polish chick! Apparently that’s what makes that book the best.

      • Doubting Thomas

        You’re probably right, but holy smokes, you should see the best-seller list from 1960. There were legends still publishing. The competition was crazy. You probably had to work yourself up as a writer just to keep from losing heart.

    • Notmyrealname23

      Thank you Beth! I’m glad to see civilized disagreement is still possible.

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    • sometimes i wonder if critics don’t understand the idea that people can both be brilliant writers and horrible human beings at the same time.

      not liking an author’s work simply because you don’t like him personally is not a valid reason for dismissing important work.

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    • Bobby Dee

      I liked when she forgave Jim Harrison for his wholesome midwestern lecherousness but wouldn’t forgive Bukowksi and Henry Miller for their misogynistic lecherousness. Now if a woman tosses me a disapproving look when she catches me reading one of Harrison’s novels in public, I can say that Solnit approves. As for the unforgiven Bukowski and Miller, I will just cover their novels with the book jacket of Fifty Shades of Grey and everything should be all right.

    • risa

      Who thinks she’s ugly and is always trying to prove to men that she’s good enough inside.

    • soccerteesandplaydoh

      Please add to this list; John Updike. Tom Robbins. John Fowles. John Barth. Kingsley Amis. William Butler Yeats.

    • energy decisions

      Esquire and Cosmo share the same publisher, Hearst, which explains why they would be equally troubling.

      • mattmark

        This is capitalism, yes? ‘We can make money from both sides of any argument.’

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    • Elin Grimes

      This is the best comment here. Thank you Beth and 100% agree.

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    • Cat Mando

      Just had a look at the list out of interest and was pleasantly surprised to see so many men commenting on just how misogynistic it is; for example:

      ‘John Flanigan · Mannes College of Music
      Unless I counted wrong, i only saw one book written by a woman. I guess if you had a list of books written before 1950 you could claim a biased publishing world was the cause and this list only reflected the biases of the time. But there are books on this list written just a few years ago, so i blame the people who put this awful list together for being the ones who are mysogonist. No excuse.’

      Good stuff 🙂

      • 5bells

        Thank you for sharing; that kind of comment can make all the difference

      • Some guys are getting a clue. Maybe in another 20 years things will actually start getting better.

        • Blurbwhore

          Your comments are a misandrist cloud of negativity on this thread. Every one of them I’ve read has some man-bashing and a part of the comment which belittles someone or another. I hope all your pain is lifted from you, you seem like you need that.

          • Duncan

            I don’t Dana’s comments as misandrist, just intellectually lazy. But then so is kneejerk whining about misandry.

          • Zuzanna Smith

            Oh boo hoo a man got his feelings hurt, let’s everyone cry because that is just unacceptable.

            • Blurbwhore

              I think you misunderstand my intention with that comment. Both of my sentences were unemotional statements in fact and in no way suggest my feelings were hurt (i’m a “man” how can I have feelings anyway?). All of this weird man/woman stuff is anathema to me and gender is an invention of the people who believe themselves to privileged by believing they’re male. I’m pretty sure your first-world privilege is completely invisible to you.

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    • Michelle

      Fantastic piece, Rebecca. You continue to inspire my feminism, and do so with beautifully written prose. Thanks for being a role model of the female writer extraordinaire.

      • J. Jones

        Gross.

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    • Nirmalya Kajuri

      Very well said. The curiosity as well as generosity to engage with alien viewpoints is very refreshing to see, there’s too little of in the interwebs.

    • Richard Huja

      This is bizarre :-)))

    • Elenita

      No, they can’t.

      • Elin Grimes

        Of course they can. But here’s what CANNOT be: a sexist feminist. It’s an oxymoron. And you are right there, putting the ‘moron’ into oxymoron kiddo.

        How about we just lay down the facts.

        You can either believe in gender equality, OR you can be a sexist.
        You can’t be both.

        You can either be anti-men (you), OR you can be a feminist (me). You cannot be both.

        It’s simply not possible.

        It’s like someone saying “I’m totally against racism, but those Indians are so inferior to everyone else…” – it just doesn’t work that way. You literally CANNOT be both racist, and against racism.

        You literally cannot be a sexist, and against sexism. You *literally* cannot be anti-men, AND be a feminist.

        It’s impossible. Notwithstanding your attempt at Double Think: you CANNOT be anti-men, AND be a feminist.

        It is not possible. Fact.

        Now, this is one of those things that you cannot have an opinion about. It’s a bit like having an opinion on whether the sun exists. The sun is a fact.

        There is no room for opining about that. Having an opinion that the sun does not exist, does not change reality.

        Similarly – having the opinion that you somehow qualify as a feminist despite being a raging sexist does not change the reality that that simply is not possible. Get real. It’s just not possible.

        Either you think sexism is wrong, and you’re a feminist, OR like you – you are totally ok with sexism (against men) and have this enormous hypocritical chip on your shoulder that makes you think somehow that you may be sexist to men but they may not be sexist to you. It just don’t work that way kiddo. It really doesn’t. That’s what started the problem off in the first place: people thinking that the genders were not equal. Don’t be a fool.
        Now obviously you have some serious issues to battle. You hate men, you are anti-men, ok I’m sorry that you live with that, genuinely I am – but the place for that is in therapy, not as part of the feminist movement. You are not a feminist until you have dealt with your personal issues. Go talk to and seek help from a professional and then come back to Feminism when you understand what it’s about and can fully appreciate and understand the nature of the word “Equality”.

        Please do us all a favour and most of all yourself a favour: stop lying to yourself and spreading lies about what feminism is. You don’t understand it, and you’re embarrassing all of the rest of us.

        That is my final word on the subject: rage away to the ether for all I care if you insist on not heeding my free advice and factual information. Those facts remain in place whether you choose to listen or not. So no point discussing further. Good luck with your life man-hater, sort out those issues before they destroy you, and I hope you one day become a Feminist.

        • Elenita

          yawn

          Your facts are not facts and your naivety will be your downfall.

          Good luck. You will need it.

          • Elin Grimes

            You pretending they are not facts doesn’t change them being facts. Nothing you can do about it. Not that you are trying. Not a single, even attempted coherent argument from you? I expected so much more given your dog-with-a-bone trolling efforts.

            Get Therapy. Grow Up. Join Feminism and get back to me 🙂 This “incredibly stupid” feminist has a masters in computer science and a brain that I’m not afraid to use. You probably have one in there too actually – you ought to at least try? Good luck!

            • Elenita

              I’m already a feminist and there are a lot of feminists that would agree with me. There is nothing you can do about it, dear.

              You have a masters but you still are a naive silly girl who have a lot to learn.

              If you really want to learn about Feminism I can give you some references. 🙂

            • Elin Grimes

              Oh hun, lol 🙂 You’re so pathetic it’s cute.

            • CelestialWolf

              And, this is why I’m not a feminist. Women like you. I am a woman. I work in a 90%+ male field. Your line of thought however, utterly and completely disgusts me. I have no interest in ever supporting a sexist fool like you, and if all the feminists you know agree with you? The problem in fact then, isn’t you. You’re right. It’s feminism itself. It stands opposed to true equality, and wants the abject subjugation of men. Down with it!

            • Elenita

              Oh dear. Women like you are not welcome in the feminist movement. Stay away.

            • CelestialWolf

              Stay away? Hell no. I’ll be fighting you and your ilk every way I can. Pissing on an entire gender is sexism, and I’ll fight it on all sides. Every way I can. I won’t be leaving your movement to wreck things unopposed dear.

            • Zuzanna Smith

              The only gender in the history of humanity to ever be pissed on is the female gender. No man has ever been not tolerated, punished, hated, despised, mocked, objectified, dehumanized for simply being a man. You are pathetic and a danger and shame to other women.

    • murph21

      Oh boy, Only read what makes you feel good about yourself or confirms you own thoughts and values, huh? I’m sorry Ms. Solnit has cankles but that shouldn;t preclude her,,,or anyone else… from reading Hemingway or Bukowski.

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    • Joyce M Guillén

      You make a strong point, but the problem is that it is always women who are forced to read and try to understand the “ailen” perspective while said perspective is normalized for men. This has been what the literary canon is all about. It’s time for men to try to empathize with women as well.

      Intelligent curious men should want to read books by female authors as well and not just romanticize the hard masculinity and female objectification that some of these authors perpetuate.

      • Nullifidian

        But it’s probably the case that any man intelligent and curious enough to find his way to women’s writing is probably going to treat this Esquire article as a joke rather than a serious source for literary recommendations. It doesn’t just verge on self-parody, but joyously leaps into the chasm.

        • Sooooo why would we want to discuss literature with men who *weren’t* intelligent and curious enough? The point stands.

          • Nullifidian

            I have no idea what you thought you were responding to, but it clearly has nothing to do with my comment, so why did you reply to it?

        • Duncan

          “… any man intelligent and curious enough to find his way to women’s writing…” Ah, here lies the problem, I think. Most men *aren’t* intelligent and curious enough to find their way to women’s writing. It’s easy to dismiss Esquire, but more respectable organs of literary whatever (e.g., The New York Times, The New York Review of Books) are also biased (to put it nicely) in favor of male writers and against female ones. This has been discussed at great length lately. If the Esquire article leaps joyously into the chasm of self-parody, it’s the self-mockery of a very serious feature of the supposedly more serious and intelligent literati. Sort of like the males who complacently call themselves Male Chauvinist Pigs, or the the bigots who proudly call themselves Politically Incorrect. The joking is meant to divert attention from the deeper, tenaciously held stupidity.

          • Nullifidian

            Most men *aren’t* intelligent and curious enough to find their way to women’s writing.

            I’d like to see the numbers on this. Frankly, most people’s reading is genre writing, and many genres (not just romance, either) have major women writers. To take a genre I’m interested in, look at mystery writing. Almost all of the major interwar and WWII era British and Commonwealth mystery writers were women (Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc.). Somewhat earlier in the century and in the U. S., you also had Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart, who continued to publish into the mid-20th century. These days there’s J. D. Robb, Patricia Cornwell, Stephanie Barron, Tess Gerritsen, Sue Grafton, Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, etc., etc., etc. I’d say chances are that many men who read end up reading books by women. Even in areas considered to be male-dominated like SFF, you have Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula le Guin, Margaret Atwood (whether she wants to admit her work to this genre, some of it fits), Octavia Butler, etc., etc., etc. Some men might not even know they’re reading women’s writing (e.g. James Tiptree, Jr.).

            But that’s not your focus is, as you reveal with your mentions of New York Times and the New York Review of Books. What you’re looking for is not any sort of reading, but what I call “status reading”. The complaints about the under-representation of women in major media reviews is a complaint that you can’t consume status with your books because the establishment arbiters of taste haven’t considered your favorite women authors and found them Worthy with a capital-W. But writing is a hell of a lot more than what the NYT and NYRB domesticates. In all honesty, I think that even if you achieved gender parity in reviews from establishment sources, it would do virtually nothing for the literary world. Certain women writers would get the boost of a favorable review (or the career damage of a bad one), but the overall nature of the beast would remain because the reviewers would simply highlight the same easily domesticated fiction they’ve consistently preferred. The underlying ideological and commercial choice wouldn’t change.

      • badphairy

        Ugh, I’ll read stuff by men, but I’m not about to have to talk to men about all of them as well, since there is no concomitant directive for men to read books by women and discuss them with women.

        • Hayus

          So you have an issue with men and books.

      • storypeddler

        If I can make one point—one that I’m sure to get lambasted for, but who cares—why does ANY group feel like they have the right to tell any other group what they could/should/must/must not read? The old complaint by men that men want to do stuff and women want to talk about stuff isn’t all stereotype. Maybe men just want to read about other men doing what they consider manly things and not have to deconstruct everything. Maybe some of us don’t WANT to talk about every single thing we enjoy and figure out how it makes us feel and why, ad nauseum. Geez, why do so many women have to take all the pleasure out of everything we do and then curse us as misogynists when we complain about it? Lots of men like talking and reading about sex and violence and sports and drinking and if those things make you sad or uncomfortable, then by all means, don’t participate. Just don’t insist we stop talking about them. And stop trying to force us to feel guilty when we don’t want to act less masculine. And if you don’t agree with what we consider masculine or manly, that’s fine too—but stop telling us we are wrong and just move on to a man who better fits what you are looking for. No woman is forced to read anything she doesn’t want to. If you hate Hemingway and think he is sexist, then for crying out loud, don’t read him! But don’t insist that I stop reading him too in some show of cross-gender support for your position. Because I won’t. And you are wrong to ask me to. Seriously, you know why so many men dislike feminists? It’s because so many feminists make themselves so dis-likable. You don’t get men to empathize with you or your argument by telling them they are neanderthals or unsophisticated if they don’t. If you truly want men to listen, make your point and then let men decide what they think. Don’t tell them what to think. Don’t tell them how to think. Because even if (and I say IF) you are right, most men won’t hear your words for all the estrogen dripping off your voice. Now—let the name-calling begin…

    • Idoru Esther Petru

      Sounds like lots of my favourite books…i always disliked pussies.

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    • Chava Kiyomi Chavous

      I agree I feel feminism seeks to suck the intellectual joy of life out of everything. I love bukowski for his lecherousness. He’s a character himself. A sad lonely ugly guy who felt rejection from women. But that’s what makes his art pure and raw.

    • Phil James

      Thanks for this article, Rebecca. The headline will probably throw a lot of people off but I commend you for not descending into petty bromides spawned from clickbait websites.

      Here’s the one contention I would make. As a testosterone-fueled teenage idiot, I identified with the canon for being testosterone-fueled teenage idiots. But many of these authors tackled mental health long before it became a public health issue. Alcoholism and depression not only consumed but removed many on that list from existence. Hemingway was a capital A asshole, but I don’t think he wrote The Sun Also Rises to sell Whisky and oak-scented cologne.

      You write beautifully that “These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender.” Many people I know have identified with the authors you dismiss because they address the sadness and disease so many of us succumb to. I just want to ask if your empathy extends to them, too, or if you think the rotten aspects of their character should dismiss the good they’ve done.

    • JS

      It should be noted, as well, that Fitzgerald cribbed _Tender is the Night_ directly from his wife, Zelda. So, you know, that’s there.

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    • Drgulla

      Your point is well taken, but I only have so much time and can only tolerate so much self-abnegation. For years I’ve read Hemingway, Bukowski, Roth, Kerouac and wondered what was wrong with me. On the Road, which I read in high school along with most of my friends, just made me so angry for precisely the reasons Solnit describes here. I identified with that longing to take off and be free, but it was clear that this was a boys-only journey. All of these writers remind me of the Little Rascals’ “He Man Woman Haters Club.” So yes, we should all read widely, and read some things that make us uncomfortable. I’m not suggesting that we are too delicate to bear being offended, but a book is a commitment, and I prefer to curl up with a story that acknowledges my existence.

      • Michael Fairney

        so it really just comes down, as always, to the girls feeling left out of the party? Well, then make your own party and stop ruining it for the men. You’re dragging us down, as always.

        • Drgulla

          You poor, sad little man. All a woman has to do it express her opinion and he’s been dragged down and his party is ruined. How difficult it must be for you.

    • tmatthew338

      I think that the idea is that people like The Sun Also Rises less because it’s about men being men (which it’s not…) but because it’s about unrequited love and everyone in it, Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn, are all searching and failing to find a romantic ideal. Because it’s after the first World War and everyone just wants to find someone that can give them meaning, and some of them are punished for that search (that’s why it’s tragic?) because romantic high ideals cannot exist reasonably following the war that left countless dead. Hemingway’s an often very good author that’s been co-opted by his “image”.

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    • Steven Churchill

      I found this piece an interesting riposte to the Esquire list. The main issue I have with Solnit’s perspective is that I feel like there is a continual conflation of *reading* a particular work, with being negatively *influenced* by the gender politics in a particular work, or the gendered worldview of a particular author. So, while I don’t disagree that authors such as Hemingway, Mailer, Burroughs et. al. wrote about women, sex, and gender in ways that are often very problematic (to say the least), I don’t think that this means that we should not read them, just in case we absorb their problematic views about gender, or just in case we find these views offensive. Surely, an intelligent reader will be capable of maintaining a critical distance between the problematic views of an author on gender (or anything else, for that matter) on the one hand, and the literary qualities of a given work on the other – which may, after all, still be excellent, in spite of certain troubling views.

      I just don’t think that there’s this absolute causal relation between reading a book, and then taking on the attitudes or views espoused in it. Solnit seems (to me, at least) to be saying that books have such a powerful hold over their readers that they should keep away from certain ones altogether, lest they find themselves “corrupted” by the views on women (or masculinity, for that matter). Aren’t we readers, rather than passive absorbers?

    • DrSnake

      Can I loan you a stake or a silver bullet or whatever it takes to kill zombies like this? Great column.

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    • What about the Bible? That book may just as well be the mother of all misogyny.

    • You may want to add The Allure of Nymphets – at least for older women.

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    • MikeT-NYC

      No clue what this means. What I meant is that a person who can’t write grammatically correct sentences (or doesn’t care enough to bother) is one whose other work I’m not going to read.

      I realize, of course, that most writers don’t use correct grammar in imaginative literature — Joyce alone has thousands of examples of sentence fragments. But the writing above was a nonfiction essay, in which the author was trying to make a reasoned argument about which books women should read or not read. Sloppy grammar in something like that indicates sloppy thinking.

      • Alan Hope

        A person who writes, “a person who can’t write grammatically correct sentences (or doesn’t care enough to bother) is one whose other work I’m not going to read” previously wrote, “If the writing in Solnit’s books are anything like the writing in this article, they’ll go on my “writers not worth bothering with” list.” If the writing … are anything like the writing …. So you’ll be ignoring yourself in future, then.

      • S.

        It’s a good thing your grammar is so excellent. Otherwise people might not take your criticism of this article very seriously.

      • Marge Gunderson

        Says this guy.

      • 5bells

        I’d guess the point of that comment was that many of us can appreciate a well-crafted sentence, with or without a verb – and you have a very limited view of literature/writing. Each of Solnit’s sentences might not be considered technically correct for a high-school assignment, but I’m confident she would meet those standards easily, if she had any reason to do so. More importantly, though, why would she care whether you’ll be reading her books?

      • Yes. It’s an essay, not a textbook–certainly not a grammar textbook. She is writing as if speaking to her audience. Do you always speak in full sentences? If you say yes, I’ll call you a liar.

        And we already got your underlying message that you can’t be f?!ked listening to what a woman has to say, written or spoken. That at least is abundantly clear. So go away, little man. No one cares.

        • qusdis

          “And we already got your underlying message that you can’t be f?!ked listening to what a woman has to say, written or spoken. That at least is abundantly clear.” How did you get that from what the OP wrote? I realize he had a beef against sentence fragments, but I fail to see where you get to the vast overgeneralization about “what a woman has to say, written or spoken.” Much less how that is “abundantly clear.”

      • yowsa

        I for one would love to know where we can acquire the Platonic rules of grammar Mike clearly knows, so that we might be able to sensibly argue about noun and verb agreement (like Scholastic monks in a medieval monastery) and denounce the relativism of the run-on sentence, as it dashes itself against the strong and steady countenance of truth.

      • pazuzu

        Yet your first sentence is missing a subject. We should, by your logic, dismiss you on that basis as well

      • mattmark

        “Sloppy grammar in something like that indicates sloppy thinking.”

        It would be interesting to know from what unstated major premise this conclusion follows. As someone who has taught logic, I can assure you it follows from none of the categorical conjunctions that masquerade themselves as ‘thinking’ in your post.

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    • Jonathan Tuffin

      Where’s the fucking list?

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    • Nullifidian

      If John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow are the “apex” of writing, then I think the Phoenicians took a wrong turn when they invented the alphabet. And I say that as someone who likes (some of) Roth’s novels, but can still recognize that any literary landscape where he sits at the apex is going to be an incredibly impoverished one.

      Part of the problem comes from your belief that there is such a thing as “the canon”. There isn’t. Even excluding considerations of identity politics and sticking to the male Westerner side of the “canon”, tastes change and certain writers never are admitted for reasons other than quality. None of the Silver Age of Russian writers (Sologub, Garshin, Kuprin, Merezhkovsky, etc.) are read outside of the Slavic countries, with the exceptions of Chekhov and Gogol, despite the excellence of their writing. Having admitted a few token Slavs into the canon, they slammed the door shut before any more could sneak through. Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed was considered canonical by Dr. Charles Eliot, who included it in the Harvard Classics, but these days you can’t find anybody outside of Italy who has read it (ditto Lampedusa’s The Leopard). Even with authors who remain “canonical”, the content of the “canon” changes. For example, Homer’s Iliad was once the bane of schoolboys, but now you’re more likely to find yourself assigned the Odyssey—if you read Homer at all—as the latter has generated other literary works (Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, etc.) and the Iliad lacks the psychological appeal and character development given to Odysseus. And nobody reads Vergil’s Aeneid these days in high school, period, though it used to be more popular than either of Homer’s works. To say nothing of other writers from classical antiquity like Thucydides, Cicero, Tacitus, etc.

      To speak of “the canon” is to speak of nothing but whatever literary fashions prevailed when you went to high school. I doubt very much that you could make a coherent case for why the current “canon” (or what was the “canon” when you were in high school) is objectively better than the “canon” as it existed as little as 50 or 100 years earlier.

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    • Meteor Youkolalee

      I think its a bit funny she mentions Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Recently their was a news story about a guy who decided to pay all his employees like 70k a month.
      Then I heard a couple weeks ago he was renting out his house and was living in the garage to make ends meet and a bunch of his best employees had quit and some of his clients had left.
      It was like a story straight out of atlas shrugged.

    • Meteor Youkolalee

      I think you are correct that men get something out of certain material that women just don’t understand. I would say maybe the reverse is also true so my question is… what is it women are getting out of 50 shades of grey? Guys are getting that women really have a secret longing for a strong man and the desire for regular punishment. I’d like to know whats so fascinating to women.

      • 50 shades is porn.That’s all. Some women just want to read something to put them in the mood. Trashy sexy novels have been popular with women for decades.

        • They’re a better experience than looking at visual porn (stills or videos)–not because we aren’t visually oriented, because that myth is just ridiculous, but because we identify too much with the women being gonzo’d all over by nasty troll-men who damage their bodies and choke them and call them horrible names.

          To say that the sexuality-aid market underserves women is a gigantic understatement. So it’s a good thing someone’s writing books.

          • Duncan

            This is kind of intriguing. Do Dana and Lindsay have any evidence for your claims about why women read the Gray books, or are you just speculating wildly, or universalizing from your own reactions, or unconsciously adopting traditional sexist lines? I wish I could be as confident about what I get from the books I enjoy (let alone what others get from the books they like) as you seem to be.

            • Bellanova

              It is not too farfetched to speculate that women consume porn — 50 Shades, in this case — for similar, if not the same reasons men do: to seek sexual titillation, fantasy (often forbidden) fulfillment, and release. 50 Shades does not belong on the list of books women should read any more than a literary equivalent of “Debbie Does Dallas” would on a list for men.

      • DeeWriteful

        Guys shouldn’t extrapolate anything about ‘what women want’ based on a grossly substandard work of fiction that was bought by some women. Because that would be fucking ludicrous.

        • Duncan

          Your point would be stronger if those books hadn’t been so wildly popular. It’s not just “some” women who bought and read them. That’s the kind of move usually made by apologists for sexism, and it’s not valid when they do it either.

          Which doesn’t mean I think all women loved the Gray series or that extrapolate anything about those who did love it. You should remember, though, that feminist scholars have been grappling with this question for decades now, often because they felt uneasy about their fascination with books (Gothics and romance novels mostly) that seemed so un-feminist.

          • haily27

            50 Shades (and most romance novels that I’ve read) is like GTA games — it’s pure escapist nonsense meant to evoke a fantasy. Kind of like kinky porn, actually. Of which there is a lot, and which caters mostly to men. 50 Shades at least pretends to cater primarily to women.

            Enjoying 50 Shades doesn’t mean a woman wants a real Big Strong Man, any more than enjoying GTA means a man wants to shoot up the entire city for the lulz. It’s just for fun.

            I think 50 Shades is popular with older women who are feeling let down in the bedroom and just can’t get into porn due to their upbringing, and due to the perceived “immoral” or “degrading” qualities of porn. A book doesn’t actually hurt anyone after all. And this book was marketed as socially “permitted”, and there’s a whole generation (or 3) of women who were raised (and possibly married into) an atmosphere where so few sexual outlets are socially permitted, that they will jump on literally anything titillating regardless of whether it REALLY satisfies their particular fantasies. Even if little things about it bother them, as a female reader– A LOT of “little” things bother me about many books I read. You just get used to it. Sometimes it’s bad enough you can’t read the book, other times you just ignore it. I bet there’s plenty of women who gloss over the creepiness inherent in 50 Shades to get to the parts they’re into.

            The same women who read 50 Shades probably read romance “novels” for the “love story” and just forget to mention the 30 torrid sex scenes such novels contain. 50 Shades is nothing new, it’s just a little more gimp suits than bodices.

            It’s nothing new that women are sexual creatures who have kinky fantasies just like men do. What’s new is that women are slowly beginning to own up to kinky fantasies that men have taken for granted since kinky porn became a thing.

        • Maphilindo

          50 shades sold 40 million copies worldwide, so your definition of some women includes a whole lot of women.

          • DeeWriteful

            You realise how many women there actually ARE, don’t you?

            • Maphilindo

              You realize how few books are sold, right?

            • DeeWriteful

              Are you genuinely trying to argue that the success of that book means something about what women want? Does that mean the success of Lolita proves somehow that men want to rape 12 year olds?

        • Michael Fairney

          some women? lol , it sold 100 million copies . that’s a lot of some.

          • DeeWriteful

            I guess all I can do is direct you to the same answer I gave Maphilindo a week before you trotted in with your silliness…

        • radioactive badger

          Speaking of grossly sub-standard literature, I’m trying to figure why even some of my most liberal female friends fucking love Atlas Shrugs.

      • Heather

        “women just don’t understand.”
        The lament of privileged white dudes everywhere.

        • Duncan

          Well, no; because it’s a lament of women everywhere too, about men. See, for example, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s great “The Mermaid and the Minotaur” for an exploration of the attitude.

        • Meteor Youkolalee

          I didn’t know that many white dudes were such avid readers.

      • pull_rank

        I don’t think anyone — male or female — has ever suggested including 50 Shades of Grey in the literary canon. I doubt it’s ever appeared (or ever will) on a list of books anyone ‘should’ read.

      • I suspect most of the women who bought into 50 Shades of Grey have never been in a BDSM relationship in their lives, but it sounds deliciously naughty and they love having something new to fantasize about. The reality tends to be banal and boring for most people and kinky for a relative few but still subject to a lot of rules and regulations that would leave most “vanilla” women scratching their heads in confusion.

        Also the culture conditions us to think being ravished against our will sounds like a good idea. It doesn’t help that when some guy DOES get hold of us against our will, and we realize it’s not fun after all, and we complain to the authorities, like as not the case goes absolutely nowhere.

        • doctorhawkes

          I imagine there are plenty of people who are happy to take advantage of those rare moments when society deems it “normal” to dabble in porn, like when couples would go to the cinema to watch The Devil in Miss Jones. It would be foolish to judge anyone for it.

    • Very good points here in this comment. One thing I would caution women on is reading present day maleness into books written even just twenty years ago. We’ve come a long way, us guys, as have women. I shudder every time Jonathan Franzen vs. Jennifer Weiner is mentioned. That dude don’t represent male writers.

      • After the Sad Puppies scandal in the SF writers’ community, I’m afraid I must disagree with you. Let’s be careful not to extrapolate our personal views or personal experiences to everyone on the planet–in this case assuming that because you’re exceptional other guys must also be exceptional. Most of them aren’t, that’s why it’s called “exceptional”. The few who are make an excellent relief valve for all the full-sized little boys who refuse to treat women as human beings. You’re the reason we don’t slaughter you all in your beds, or at least castrate you and send you to camps. I’m joking, but not by much.

        • I’m sorry. I had to look up the Sad Puppies scandal. What a crock of weirdness that was. Pathetic. But I stand by my statement. Male writers really have come a long way over the last few decades. I have immense reverence for guys like Anthony Doerr, Roberto Bolano, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, and John Green for how they operate in the field of emotion and how they depict men struggling to understand women they respect and love. I personally wouldn’t say that the actions of those Sad Puppies idiots should taint the entire male sector of the writing world. Us guys will always have our issues (as will women, I might add), but we’ve come a long way from the days of Lolita and Portnoy. Indeed, I think the telling of stories about men in the last century was often male hero fantasies, even with anti-heroes. These days, even when people have a hard time with sexism and racism in stories, there is still more balance and more honesty about the male experience than there used to be. The instructions for behavior that Rebecca is talking about are more refined and liberating.

          On a personal note, let me just say that I know so many men who love and respect their wives and girl friends more than anything else in their lives. Every well-adjusted male I know wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that the woman in their life is smarter and better than them.

          The assholes and losers we encounter don’t have many friends, and are often psychologically impaired in one way or another. Those guys get the press. And those guys make themselves known in the public world. Most of us have learned to have nothing to do with them. That’s why they invented the word asshole, as well as other choice expressions.

          • freshfromflorida

            I know you mean well, but I feel like I have to point out that in: “I know so many men who love and respect their wives and girl friends more than anything else in their lives,” you have mistakenly called women, things.

      • Duncan

        I know you mean well, but I disagree. If it were only about a few unrepresentative and dated authors, you’d have a point, but the problem isn’t so much Jonathan Franzen as the literary establishment (and publishing industry) that lionizes him and tries to ignore female writers. There have always been less sexist male writers, so the existence of some now doesn’t prove change; maybe you don’t know about them because you didn’t hear about them in lit class.

        Also, I notice that you didn’t name male writers you think do represent male writers; care to name a couple, so we can know who these paragons are? And I am suspicious when some male tries to assure me that men are different than they were in ancient times. I don’t see that among younger men. There is evidence of improvement, but that’s not radical change, and I’m not sure how far it goes. In terms of literature, I don’t see much change in younger male writers either, though I see more in younger female ones.

        • Unless I misunderstand you, I did list a number of writers I think of as doing a much better job defining a more open emotional state than writers from the last century, especially the ones Rebecca Solnit was warning women away from. See my list above. Not sure what you’re after. And, of course, there have always been stories that define the male experience in, as you said, a less sexist way.

          I also just read a wonderful, sweet story by Davy Rothbart and another by William Wei that was kind of sad, but touching. Both were 1st Person Male, but were emotionally honest and real in how I know normal guys see women. I should add George Saunders to this list too. There are many more, of course.

          I think the point of Solnit’s essay was the problem of books people consider “good” or important that depict women (and men) in a very limited and negative way. “I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. Or they’re instructions in the version of masculinity that means being unkind and unaware, that set of values that expands out into violence at home, in war, and by economic means.”

          I can’t disagree with that when we’re talking about mid-century misogynists, or even Burroughs and Kerouac. Hemingway had his issues, too, of course, as did Fitzgerald and Mailer. One could argue as well that Barry Hannah and Ray Carver and Larry Brown and Robert Stone and Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson can be criticized in the same vein.

          Solnit lists the heroes on her shelf. I pretty much agreed with all of them. It was interesting that so many were poets. Made me wonder where she’d put Ginsberg or Galway Kinnell.

          You note there is evidence of improvement but not radical change. I don’t think I ever said anything other than the fact that I we’ve come a long way. We have. I wonder if some of Hemingway or Norman Mailer’s work would ever get through a slush pile these days. Certainly Lolita would only be self-publishable.

          All that said, I do want to note that my biggest problem with male writers of the past — and some still writing today (like Franzen) is not so much their sexuality or their so-called sexist way of seeing women as their openness to others and their awareness of other people’s emotional needs and opinions. What used to be lacking in so many books was a lack of confidence and a natural humility, something I know most men feel — though some still manage to think they’re supposed to shield themselves (and the world) from such insecurity with bravado and other forms of behavior that, yes, may be “instructions” they somehow managed to find somewhere.

          As I write and think about the men I know and the young men I’ve mentored (and raised), I wonder if there’s something about the male ego that is just damned confusing. Each of us feels insecure and humble deep down inside, even freaking Norman Mailer. Each of us knows he’s always inches from coming off as a jerk or an asshole whenever we’re pushed into an emotional situation. It takes a lot of confidence to be able to relax and not let life make you feel so inadequate that you react like a dick. I don’t know, maybe it’s wisdom. Maybe guys need to read more poetry and stories by the likes of Joy Williams and Lucia Berlin. I’ve been reading both of these great American writers all year. I’ve also been reading a lot of Renata Adler over the past several years.

          The Franzen conundrum is such a can of worms for anyone to talk about. I’m not sure if the literary establishment anointed him so much as the media. A lot of folks have a number of problems with Franzen’s storytelling. I think if we want to talk about Great American Novelists we should probably start with Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo. Great American Writers (living) would include Joy Williams, Lydia Davis, and probably a dozen poets (male and female). There may be some screenwriters you could throw in as well…

          There’s no question, as I’ve already noted, that there are men out there who are A-1 Bonafide Assholes. And there’s no question, to me anyway, that everyone notices those guys. Being overly confident is part of being an asshole. Who is going to notice those guys over all of us who are reticent, insecure, calm, and think before we speak? Pretty much everyone.

          Who knows, too…since you need confidence to be a writer, and a huge ego (I’ll admit I do), maybe there’s a problem there that is hard to surmount. At first blush egoistic jerks may seem to be the most entertaining people in the room (or the slush pile). But hopefully those people are getting their rocks off more on Twitter and Facebook these days than signing contracts for novels.

          Whatever, let me just say this in closing: to write off men (and male writers — heterosexual ones in particular) as if they are the same as their fathers or grandfathers, would be a very sad frame of mind to have — and would be to ignore all the work their mothers and sisters and girl friends and wives have done helping make them better people.

          • Romantic Placebo

            fight club showed that male insecurity pretty nicely, but it’s also so much a part of our social and online worlds, of fearing not being adequate, or succeeding at things we feel we’re not meant to be good at.

            But Franzen points to the darkest way men fail, by concluding the game is rigged, and blaming women for not loving us enough instead of fighting to change the whole damn system. And despite not feeling he’s representative, I can assure you that sentiment is routinely trotted out whenever women start to try and focus on their issues.

      • Michael Fairney

        that is total BS. Franzen is great and as for this “weiner issue” the fact is that she bitched about him forever until he was forced to deal with her. i’,m quite sure he has no interest in her to begin with, but at a certain point he was forced to defend himself.

    • DeeWriteful

      For such a big long windbag comment, you realise you haven’t actually said anything, don’t you?

    • Virginia

      Never tell me I should not read something. Tell me what you think and then I’ll make my own decision thank you very much.

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    • Jim Beach

      Sin in many circles that it may be, I must confess Hemingway never really did that much for me as a writer. If I’m going to go for minimal and powerful prose, it would be for George Orwell. Unadorned, direct, straight and powerful sentences that were put together, brick by brick, into great works of art.

      Never read Lollita, perhaps I “should” but there I also don’t feel like I’m missing much.

      Ayn Rand should just be treated as pulp S&M fantasy, much like John Norman’s the “Gor” series. “Libertarians of Gor”.

      • radioactive badger

        It’s weird that Hemingway is consistently target number one but sexist, homophobic Nabokov gets a pass. But agreed with you on Orwell over Hemingway.

    • Stephen Robinson

      What especially bothers me about Esquire’s list is that it furthers the notion that “male books” are still literature, still classics. This is still a difficult anchor to shake off for non-male, non-white authors who wish to write about non-males and non-whites. I’ve seen it argued that “chick lit” is not such an offensive term because sci-fi/fantasy is a predominately male genre that isn’t held in high critical esteem. But the argument also equates Tolkien with Austen or even Wharton, which I think somewhat diminishes the female experience. I will never forget the guy in a writers group who dismissed Austen’s work as “women just sitting around waiting to get married.” I asked him if he thought GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS was just a “bunch of guys sitting around waiting to get fired.” He didn’t comprehend how, historically speaking, the stakes were equally high and relevant in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as GGR or DEATH OF A SALESMAN.

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    • Janis Rooks

      Suggestions are just that. Esquire has to sell magazines in a time when printed media is all but dead. Promoting a reading list, whether others agree with the title or contents of that list, is a great thing. If a man picks up a book on that list and reads it, literacy lives. If a woman finds a similar list with suggested women titles and reads one of the books, again this is a triumph. If you don’t like the suggestions on a list you find, look for another list or ask a friend for a suggestion. No one holds a gun to your head and forces you to read; none of us was coerced into reading this article. Read and decide for yourself, but read.

    • 5bells

      I appreciate your point, and we need people who can be diplomatic like you. But as many of us just don’t have the time and energy to burn on already-widely celebrated, misogynist lit, I disagree that we have an obligation there.

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    • It’s fascinating how Solnit has spent her whole life reading male writers and yet still has absolutely no understanding of the other half of the species.

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    • Michael Russo

      I can’t believe you got so much shit for this and the followup. People suck all over. I mean damn I related to Lolita and I’m a 37-year-old privileged hetero white male. Then again I love reading, not just for escape, but to put myself in the position of different people, genders, and cultures. As far as that goes “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin and “Trouble on Triton” by Samuel Delany are awesome.

      • haily27

        Cannot overemphasize how much “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin is an awesome book that everyone should read both as excellent sci-fi and as an exploration on gender relations. Broke my heart when I was in high school.

        • Steven Schmidt

          The ideas in “The Left Hand of Darkness” are great. The writing is ok, but “The Disposessed”, only 5 years later is so much better written.

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    • Angela

      Thank you for the link to the Arthur C. Danto essay. I’m really looking forward to digging in. This is a specific area of interest for me.

    • Deyonne T. Bryant

      Why aren’t there, at least, any black American or black African women writers on Rebecca Solnit’s list of “hero[ic]” writers that could “extend [her readers’] identities out into the world… as a great act of empathy…”? Dear, white American feminist critics, James Baldwin, despite his greatness, was not the Universal Black Writer.

      • Nullifidian

        Good point. In fact, there are no writers who are women of color on her list at all. Unless “Elena Ferrante” turns out to be one, as it’s the pen name of an unknown person, but she could just as easily be a man as well.

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    • will

      I see your point but I don’t think I need to eat a huge amount of shit in order to tell people who are never expected to eat shit how unpleasant it is to eat shit. I have dealt with sexism, erasure, the threat of violence for decades. I’m part of that huge percentage of women who have been raped. I don’t need to devote my precious time to consuming more of the messages that surround me in this culture in order to either understand my own oppression or to enable myself to educate my oppressors about their own bigoted habits. If a man is willing to hear how anti-female propaganda permeates our culture, I am well equipped to speak to that without enduring the likes of Philip Roth to legitimize my experience.

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    • William MacAdams

      I was happy to see someone take the Esquire list to task (I don’t like the list because there are too many mediocre books on it) but the author of the piece hasn’t done her research, i.e., Hemingway never made disparaging remarks about the size of Scott Fitzgerald’s penis. It was Zelda who made the remarks to Scott, who consulted Hemingway, who took Scott into a lavatory, had him whip it out, and pronounced Scott’s organ to be “average.”

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    • samurai novelist

      What a contemptible pile of garbage. This is an online virtual book-burning disguised as an essay. The author is an ideologue entrenched in very narrow views totally lacking in “empathy” she demands from others. No doubt it is aimed at the followers of the same doctrine as hers.

      • Sheena

        The fact that you can’t see the satire in this, that this ‘list’ is poking fun at the narrow esquire list; which includes only one type of person, and their narrative alone, is really telling. I wonder what doctrine it is that esquire readers follow?

        • J. Jones

          you missed the point…omg…

      • J. Jones

        y’ think?

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    • AGH

      Great article, but you might be overthinking it a little. Their list is intended to help lazy men validate their intelligence by reading certain books. Most women do not need that.

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    • Marina

      Why attack Dana on that point? It was Duncan who said “most men aren’t intelligent enough”, after all.

      • qusdis

        So your argument is essentially that Duncan started it? What is this, Kindergarten?

        Yeah I disagree with Duncan but Dana is (I assume) a woman who agrees with him. So of course I wanted to point out the silliness of this idea that men are not intelligent enough to understand books by or about women.

        Anyway, though, Joyce M. Guillén stated “it is always women who are forced to read and try to understand the ‘alien’ perspective while said perspective is normalized for men” which was definitely false for me in college. I was an English major and was routinely expected to read books not only by women but also involving themes and perspectives from the female standpoint. Sense and Sensibility; The Awakening; A Room of One’s Own; poetry by Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and so on. And even when we read works by men, I had several professors who made a point of questioning the stories and wondering what the students thought might be missing – from a female or (as in Heart of Darkness) non-Western perspective. And yet I still think Paradise Lost is one of the most amazing pieces of literature ever, and who knows if a woman could have written or even would have wanted to. Although I am far from being of British extraction, I feel a kind of admiration for John Milton as a man for having achieved that epic.

        Also, for what it’s worth, I hated Hemingway when I had to read him in high school and college. But I now wonder if I might read him differently now that I am an older man. Or maybe I’ll still hate his works. At the same time, I also hated The Joy Luck Club which I found clumsily written. Maybe I’m an exception in having been taught to read widely, but at least for me Joyce is way off target. I have found myself empathizing or identifying with things in the writing of both men and women but refuse to be scolded that I need to read more women just because, or that women’s writing will always necessarily elicit empathy. When you read a high enough quality of writing (real quality I mean not just lists based on received wisdom) you don’t see things “normalized” for men; you see things “normalized” for human experience.

        • Marina

          No, it is not kindergarten; I just found it interesting that you would attack Dana and not Duncan, who was the one who implied that most men were too stupid. Valid question, imo.

          I am happy to learn that you are so well-read of both male and female authors. I was raised by parents who had an extensive library of classics and great literary works, albeit mostly by men. I was raised reading the work of male authors, Hemingway included. I discovered women writers in my teens, when I began to buy my own books. I too am not a huge fan of The Joy Luck Club (personal taste), but I’m a huge fan of To Kill a Mockingbird and many other excellent books written by women. I’ve read all my life, so yes, I am aware of the “higher quality” available out there. I think both men and women should read both genders – there are a huge number of excellent books to choose from and reading to explore what the other half is thinking, feeling, experiencing, and what their lives are about is enriching and intriguing. I can read a misogynist writer’s work and dislike certain things he writes about, but I’d still want to know what goes on in his psyche and the psyche of his characters because it enlightens me. And isn’t that what books are about? To enlighten us and broaden our horizons?

          • qusdis

            ” I just found it interesting that you would attack Dana and not Duncan,” What do you mean by “interesting”? Sounds like a passive-aggressive way of insinuating that I have some bias against Dana for being a woman or in favor of Duncan for being a man.

            Neither is the case. I have no idea why Duncan would suggest that men are too stupid to discuss books with women. But clearly Dana was happy to suggest that women would not want to discuss books with men who are not (in her mind) intelligent. To suggest that one would gain nothing by discussing books with people one decides are not “intelligent” enough strikes me as really arrogant, so perhaps you should ponder that part of Dana’s statement more than you are “interested” in my reaction to it.

            • Marina

              There is nothing in the least “passive-aggressive” about my query. I am simply outright asking: “Why did you confront Dana and not Duncan?” Obviously, your lack of an answer, except to attempt to bully me further, says a lot about your position and viewpoint. I didn’t answer at once because you appear to be an obviously passive-aggressive misogynist yourself. And I’ve met too many like you. Zzzzz. Couldn’t really imagine wasting time “engaging”. Glad you read all those books, though.

          • mattmark

            Clearly, you have benefited from your reading. It’s always been a matter of indifference to me whether a book’s author is male or female. Provided a French existentialist novel is a good one, why would anyone ever care that it’s by Simone de Beauvoir instead of Albert Camus?

            That said, it’s wonderful to see how many truly first-rate female authors have emerged in recent years, from Ms. Solnit herself to Nicole Krauss, Rachel Cusk and Jenny Erpenbeck.

            • Marina

              I love many male writers. And I love female writers. I believe anyone who wants to benefit from the entire field of great writing will read both, and more. Thank you for your erudite words…

            • mattmark

              You’re welcome… and thank you. I must confess I find the notion of male vs. female ‘perspective’ problematic to begin with, in literature or anywhere else. But, then, I’ve never grasped identity politics either. I don’t think it’s possible to deduce the individual from the categories in which he/she can be classified–sexual, ethic, national, racial, and so on. Individuals are distinct, even within families that share all such classifications; and individual ‘perspectives,’ not categorical abstraction, are what one encounters in life and literature.

              I experienced no difficulty identifying with Elizabeth Bennet when I read Pride and Prejudice in high school; nor, much more recently, could I discern the least implausibility in Jennie Erdal’s male characters in her aptly named The Missing Shade of Blue. On the contrary, it’s unnerving to reflect on just how intimately and accurately she grasps male longings, fears and evasions. Either, like Hume, she has somehow inferred the ‘missing shade’… or men and women simply aren’t that different after all.

            • Marina

              I partially agree… perhaps men and women are indeed not that different after all; at least not as much as we’ve often thought. And yet… I happen to love the “difference”. When I read Updike and then read Atwood, the sense of bleakness may be the same, but it’s still from a very different perspective. And I love that and want that. I want to read and understand and grasp how this other portion of the world thinks, how they interpret some of the very same life events, how their upbringing within our world societies inform and influence them, how their biology informs them. I want to know how a transperson experiences and feels and relates to this thing called life as well (I loved Middlesex). I want to be transported into the world of men (as a woman), the world of women, who fascinate me, and I am hugely curious. That’s what excites me about reading… that I can step into another human being’s perspective and vicariously experience their feelings and thoughts through the characters in their books. The historical perspective, the geographical locations, the cultural influences are one part of this excitement with books, but the viewpoints of one gender vs another gender only adds to the enchantment and fascination for me. I would hate to see it all become just gender-less, as much as gender discrimination is an issue.

              I’m delighted, though, that you appreciate books by any gender. I find there are great writers who can “write” a gender not their own so unbelievably well that it almost defies all preconceived notions of the lack of understanding between the sexes. Flaubert comes to mind. You mentioned Erdal. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?!

            • mattmark

              I’m trying to think of any two worthwhile writers in my reading experience whose ‘perspectives’ significantly overlap (perhaps I can vicariously piggyback on your experience for this). I would expect differences between Updike and Atwood, just as I would expect differences between Aldous Huxley and Margaret Laurence. Where we part company, it appears, is in the supposition that Updike and Huxley can be convincingly masqueraded as representatives of a ‘portion of the world’ inaccessible, in its interpretations and thought processes, to Atwood and Laurence, and in turn excluded from an analogously sealed off portion in which characteristically Atwood/Laurence thinking reigns supreme. Such a categorical divide, which arbitrarily elevates one particular criterion (I’d call it ‘biological,’ but it’s a tiny subset even of that) above so many others equally crucial to the formation of ‘perspective,’ doesn’t strike me as a useful way of getting at the genuine differences between these four writers. Nor would I have the least idea what to count as evidence in support of such a thesis. Gender-specific differences in style? In subject matter? How could one go about demonstrating the primacy of these differences over national, racial, religious, ethnic, economic, social, philosophical, etc., textual differences… or for that matter over the differences between the sports and business sections of a newspaper, each featuring both male and female writers?

              Huxley called people ‘island universes’–‘when an individual dies, a universe dies’–a metaphor accessible to men and women alike. I grasp the notion that each consciousness is not only unique but inaccessible to others, and don’t doubt that you grasp it too; we are alone in our heads and can do no more than infer what might be in the heads of others. Is there really anything to be gained from erecting additional barriers between island universes that are hermetically sealed to begin with? On what ground could one possibly maintain that clumping island universes in binary groups–male/female, black/white, rich/poor, etc.–does anything to erode the isolation (‘splendid’ or otherwise) of any consciousness within a clump, or increase it between those outside it?

              I, too, wish to be transported. I want my inferences about others’ thoughts,
              feelings, aspirations and so on to be rooted in something substantive, and for this I’ve relied as much on literature as on personal interaction. But I’m skeptical that I’ve ever been transported into ‘the world of men,’ or of women, or into society, a historical era, marriage, childhood, the internet, or any other abstraction. I’m always conscious of confronting a specific individual’s particular way of looking at things. And although I’m a retired reference librarian (academic background in philosophy) who has read widely in many subject areas, I have yet to encounter a consciousness, in life or on the printed page, that doesn’t stand out as radically different from every other.

        • Joyce M Guillén

          I’m really glad to see your professors were very aware of all the different perspectives that different works of literature, both by male and female authors, can elicit, but unfortunately not everyone is an English major.

          I can see why in your personal experience you see my comment as inexact and you are right to feel that way to an extent, but normalizing something has to do with the collective and not the individual. In my personal experience, (as a Lit. student as well, but not in the States), professors have literally asked in class why is there such a fuss in reading female writers and that it shouldn’t be a requirement because we can find human experience in all these great writes like Joyce and Hemingway, Conrad, etc, and listen, that’s great and all, but maybe I don’t see my experience as a human in these books and my professors can’t see that.

          I absolutely love Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce because I had a fall out with religion at a young age and I could see Stephen’s inner struggle with yearning for knowledge as an insider vs. going with his true calling, but at the same time to see women through his eyes as dirty beings or naive creatures was really demeaning and I didn’t even notice it the first time I read it because I was so enamored with the idea that I was getting something universal from the book, but then these other ideas also become entrenched in our psyche as collective, even if we don’t really notice when it happens and talking about it can help, like you’d do in class, but not everyone reads for a class, many people (and many men) could read classics because a style magazine tells them it’ll make them better people or more intelligent people or more attractive and the lack of diversity in these lists is keeping men from reaching into a female perspective.

          So, my original comment was that, as a female constantly being bombarded with male perspectives and experiences, it might be high time for some men (I don’t mean you or men like you and maybe my mistake was generalizing to that extreme) to try to look at things from a female perspective or at least from a more diverse perspective.

          • qusdis

            Thanks for that comment. I certainly think this is an indefensible position that you quoted: “professors have literally asked in class why is there such a fuss in re ading female writers and that it shouldn’t be a requirement because we can find human experience in all these great writes like Joyce and Hemingway, Conrad, etc, ” I guess I have been out of college too long to realize that some educators say things like that.

            I agree with you on that point – and I do think a well-constructed educational syllabus (syllabus in the large, over the course of a high school and college education) is necessary. And I did not mean to suggest that reading requirements are not needed. On the contrary, I think it is only by reading books by all kinds of people can we really understand what we all share. I just didn’t like the tone of this article that the issue should be assessed by an article in Esquire. But I see what you mean that you as a woman saw that article slant as indicative of a larger attitude towards what some people think should be essential reading.

          • storypeddler

            You are right—but truth is, it doesn’t matter, for two reasons. (1) Those of us who are men AND open to other perspectives already read good literature by good writers totally irrespective of their gender, race, religion, etc. (2) Those men among us who are NOT open to other perspectives are not going to ever start reading that literature regardless of what anyone does. People make their reading choices the same way they make most other choices—based on life experiences, education, and cultural influences. All the logic and reason in the world aren’t likely to change those people who have decided what they believe and have closed their minds.

    • Philip Henderson

      I disagree. Women should actually read books by misogynistic male writers if women have something to learn from them, regarding technique and use of language–namely, using words as weapons. I am a black writer who has learned literary techniques from avowedly racist authors such as Celine and Knut Hamsun. Naturally, they didn’t teach me shit about being an African American–I did that on my own. One can learn from anyone and anything. The catch is not to get your identity mixed up with whomever you learn from.

      • mattmark

        Ms. Solnit explicitly makes this point herself (“I believe everyone should read anything they want”)… she’s simply having a bit of fun here.

        When I was selecting Area Studies books for the reference library where I worked, I bought books from North Korea and from right wing, nationalist presses in post-Iron Curtain Eastern Europe. They aren’t reliable history, but they reliably disclose the limitations of the sensibilities that authored them and will be indispensable for future researchers. Similarly, it is important that the views of Hemingway, Bellow, Mailer, etc., on women, which are there in black and white for any woman to read, not be neglected by women.

        P.S. I endorse both your open-mindedness and your taste. Hamsun and Celine are indeed extraordinary authors, and it would be a shame to have missed them for any reason.

    • Philip Henderson

      Fuck Ernest Hemingway, anyway. He was also a racist prick and on top of that, I got nothing out of his books.

    • Chase Miller

      What does that have to do with anything I said? I guess you’ve run out of legitimate things to say

    • mattmark

      Heroic Mike may be, but Ms. Solnit thinks rings around him. I’m skeptical he would win a grammatical or any other kind of engagement with her. 😉

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    • Marie Flanigan

      I got into a huge argument with a professor one time about what a jerk Jack Kerouac was when he wrote that scene about the Latina farmworker. I don’t think anyone had ever pointed out that there was a lot he could have done for her he just didn’t want to.

      • J. Jones

        That was not the point.

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    • Pat Blake

      Where is the list?

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    • Gary Masters

      I would read “Garden of Eden” before I make up my mind about Hemmingway.

    • Lakesidenan

      Yes, many thanks to Rebecca Solnit for Solnit-splaining 🙂 the men’s book list! And sharing her s/hero list, many of which I don’t know. After reading her essay a new thought occurred to me. So many cis-men I encounter imagine themselves in need of some kind of remediation due to their sexual identification. And they probably do, but not only in terms of reifying others. Rather, the male gender itself sorely needs reconstruction.

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    • CGW

      “There are good and great books on the Esquire list.”

      I think there are mostly good and great books on the list. I suspect that the aspect that is giving everyone the greatest heartburn is the ‘cute’ encapsulations of why the book should be read which are juvenile for all the books even the good and great ones.

      R. Solnet shouldn’t ride on the coattails of Esquire under the headline ’80 Books No Woman Should Read’ because that’s not her position. I have no interest in going down the list one by one, but I have seen worse reading lists from a literary point of view.

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    • radioactive badger

      For me Hemingway hasn’t been about masculinity (I think in the how to be a man thing Lee from East of Eden, David Copperfield or Alyosha Karamazov have been more important for me), but about mortality. You cannot get more problematic than Death in the Afternoon but there is still something necessary about spending time with these people who will almost certainly die in the ring with nothing in it for them but the respect of aficionados. So in between the accounts of past fighters there’s a meditation on learning how to accept mortality and how to die. In general there is very little literature about dealing with death directly, even though death is commonplace.

      I also think there’s a loss of respect of context for writers from that era, as if it was all Paris salons. These were people who lived through the most brutal war in human history and then not even a generation later were forced to fight an even worse one. In Hemingway’s books war did not ennoble the protagonists but crippled them (most famously through impotence), which is an important milestone in literature. Just as we have a greater appreciation of PTSD, there should also be a greater appreciation for survivor’s remorse in the literature of the time.

      The dick/gun/death triad is ultimately reflexive, and is indeed ugly and sad, but that was his world where he had to rework his ideas about morality because the strictures he grew up with couldn’t account for the guilt he was experiencing. (and sorry that this very off topic from my initial premise, but I also felt there’s a lot of willful misreading of Hemingway, and that people are more likely to take offense at some of his nastiness and turn a blind eye to some of his contemporaries. “Hemingway homophobia” has more than four times the number of google hits than “Nabokov homophobia” despite Nabokov’s being more persistent.)

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    • beyondculturewars

      I remember reading all these classic books and not feeling connected in any way. DH Lawrence–not mentioned in this article–was truly painful to read. I tried the women authors and still felt very disconnected to their experiences. That’s when I started reading biographies and autobiographies. Hearing women in their own words was so much better than in some prescribed, post modern structures. Oh, many years later I found Jane Austin, then Marge Piercy and Annie Dillard. Thank you, ladies.

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    • Cassertively

      So, just to be clear, an “80 books a woman shouldn’t read” list has yet to be composed?

    • storypeddler

      So—because they were men who wrote about topics lots of men were interested in and used a distinctly male stylistic approach, women should avoid, Hemingway, London, Mailer, Miller, Bukowski, Burroughs, etc? In spite of having published, this columnist clearly doesn’t get it either. To read something written in one culture or societal climate and attempt to apply the norms and beliefs of a much later culture is an exercise not only in futility but in foolishness. There were very few significant published black authors prior to the Harlem Renaissance, and almost none before the Civil War. Does that mean I should not read anything by any white writer prior to 1865 because it is likely tainted by racist opinions and values? That’s ridiculous.

      This writer quoted Jacqueline Rose as saying, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.” At the risk of being called a misogynist myself, this is exactly WHY a lot of male writers painted women as they did. If it is that easy to get you to feel contempt for yourself, then just maybe you truly are the weak, non-thinking individual the writer describes you as. Personally, I don’t buy that damaged line of thought for a second.

      This columnist dislikes Hemingway because he seems to work too hard to be “manly” but she likes Fitzgerald because he writes, in her words, “sentences supple as silk”. Pretty easy to see what drives her angst. If you like your male writers (and men in general) to be soft and supple, then by all means find that and be happy. But please stop screaming at those of us who prefer men who seem manlier than the woman they are with. This writer bemoans the fact that only one book on the list of men’s books to read was by an out gay man. I can tell you for a fact that has far less to do with the author’s sexual orientation and far more to do with his masculinity and his stylistic choices. This columnist just wants male writers to let go of most of their maleness before putting pen to paper—become more androgynous, in effect. It’s hard to know whether to laugh at her or get angry at her insolence. Honey (yes, condescension intended), if you don’t want to read about bullfighting or hunting or dog sleds in the Yukon or chewing tobacco or arm-wrestling contests, then don’t. And no, killing large animals doesn’t make you more of a man—but it also doesn’t make you any less of one. There’s a reason the NBA has a huge following while the WNBA struggles to remain relevant—and is propped up by the men’s game. There is a reason we DON’T have a women’s professional football league. The audience isn’t there.

      Any person can choose to live his or her life as he or she chooses, and we are each free to read, watch, and participate in whatever entertainment we fancy. But for a woman to try to tell all other women what novels by which men are unacceptable is the height of arrogance, and it clearly displays the angry feminism that makes men write the tawdrier lines about “ball-busting” women in the first place. I don’t want to read your crap that purports to help me get in touch with my more feminine side, and I would deeply appreciate it if you got a clue, stopped claiming to speak for women everywhere (some of whom actually DO like hunting, NASCAR, and manly men), and read what you like while letting everyone else do the same. You don’t speak for women. You speak only for yourself. This is crap masquerading as genuine criticism, and it is as bad as anything Hemingway, Steinbeck, or Miller ever wrote.

    • storypeddler

      And incidentally, regardless of what this blogger wishes, gender IS binary. Amazing thing how educated, reasonable people go on and on about the value of truth—until it is at odds with some favorite opinion they hold. Indeed, the truth WILL make you free—but frequently, it will first make you very uncomfortable.

      • J. Jones

        “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” — Flannery

    • Systems Analyst

      When I read the paragraph that starts, “Should men read different books than women? In this list they shouldn’t even read books by women, except for one…” I was SURE it was going to be Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. My brother-in-law is proud of himself for not wasting his time trying to read books by women anymore after he realized that he always hates them, with an exception, of course, for Ayn Rand, who he re-reads on every year or so.

    • Ingersolid

      No book worth reading was originally written in English.

      • J. Jones

        Vast numbers worth reading were originally written in English. Staggeringly so.

        • Ingersolid

          Then perhaps you can dedicate your efforts to getting cunts like Solnit to read them and leave men’s writings alone.

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    • floyd hall

      You don’t want to read Hemingway, you probably shouldn’t read.

    • Not My First Time At The Rodeo

      Oh Lord, is lit shaming a thing now?

      • J. Jones

        Apparently.

    • J. Jones

      This article is exactly what is wrong with the present culture — exactly what fuels the misplaced, ill-informed, sophomoric rage we see erupting from young “feminists” across every “academic”, social and private platform. Of course a majority of the books on this list should be read — by every serious scholar, male and female. The reasons to read and study these works and their authors is so vast, so historically and sociologically significant, it would not be worth the effort to list them. What a shame.

    • J. Jones

      But the truth is — there is something inherently brutish and carnal in the masculine DNA. Period. It is biology. The degree to which men are expected to deny that, or conform it, or tame it can be argued, intelligently. But the expectation that men should reject entirely that which is inherent in their gene code is disturbing — equally as disturbing as telling women that femininity, motherhood, child rearing, soft and more internal approaches to daily life, and most recently the public decry against breastfeeding…all of this, and all the attached cliches….that they too should also be entirely reformed, or entirely rejected… else we have an unequal “society”. Well, the hard truth is this line of argument and cultural mobbing, raping even, of the collective voice is going to backfire, likely in the worst way
      .

    • J. Jones

      Read whatever interests you Pete, do not take her opinion on it else you end up in Left field, with a very narrow understanding of literature, the world, history, sociology, male and female voices in literature, etc.






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