Bidisha is another women who is tired.
On Despair
http://bidisha-online.blogspot.com/2010 ... spair.html
I am wondering when exactly I lost my faith. Maybe it was the night I discovered a friend of mine, an artist I’d worshipped for his talent, integrity, politics and productiveness, was a total Tiger Woods, a pathological cheat, liar and backstabber, an abusive man. I saw that it made no difference to his outer success: abusing women is not serious enough to make other men turn away from you. Maybe it was when I was introduced to a big cheese management guy and watched as he stepped back and slowly looked me up and down like a piece of meat. Or when, at a party, another boss came up, looked deep in my eyes and hissed, “You’re trading on your appearance. You’re trading on it.” It’s weird because believe me, when it comes to beauty, there ain’t nothing to see here.
Or maybe I lost faith when I realised I’ve been repeating myself forever, for nothing. Six months ago I wrote an article entitled Tired of Being The Token Woman, about the erasure of women from cultural life. It sparked a round of events and activism among women, as well as some hilariously defensive chits from the perpetrators. The editors of everything from Roman Artifact Review to Nosepickers’ Weekly wrote in to give their excuses and do some victim blaming.
They ought not to have fretted. The article made no difference. The act of typing it soaked up my nervous energy but changed nothing. I can’t be bothered to give any more statistics. Okay, just some quickies: at the Waterstones on New Row in Covent Garden are two tables labelled Books We Can’t Put Down. A fortnight ago one table had 42 authors, of whom 4 were women. The other had 45 authors, of whom 4 were women. There was a wall display of Philosophical Fiction featuring novels by 21 different men and 0 women. The big Waterstones on Piccadilly’s even worse.
Let’s scroll back. Since the beginning of 2008 I’ve conducted author interviews with 49 men and only 23 women. In the Evening Standard’s summer reading round-up on 2nd July David Sexton recommended 16 books by men and only 5 by women. In June, the World Literature Weekend organised by the London Review Bookshop: 26 writers, of which only 4 were women. Of those, 2 were faithful translators of men’s work and one was talking about her late, ‘great’ writer father. This year’s Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction – a genre utterly dominated by brilliant women – shortlisted two women and five men. The Dolman prize for travel writing shortlisted one woman.
I have been working for nearly twenty years and have made no difference to anything. It is difficult to describe the sheer alienation one feels to participate in – even to chair and moderate – a discussion about arts, politics, culture, the world, in which no woman or her achievements is mentioned once, by anyone, at any time. I can’t keep sitting in a studio feeding flattering questions to a guy who’s written an average book and is busy namechecking 20 other ‘great’ men, while a female producer and female PR gape like groupies and ten works of actual genius by women fester in the bin. It is difficult to describe the surge of pain as one mentions a woman, any woman, in any context, only to see one’s companion automatically roll their eyes, then wait their way through the rest of the anecdote. It is devastating to begin pitching an item about an excellent book/play/film, “It’s about this woman who....” and see that your boss has already lost interest. Should you complain outright, there is always a moment when they look at you with open dislike and you realise you will never work for them again, and that part of your career is over.
read the rest at http://bidisha-online.blogspot.com/2010 ... spair.html
