Lately I have felt an old discomfort rising again. There was a time when I felt many a gendered slight. I know I’m not slighted in many walks of life, but being a woman makes you the target of slights the world over. It had been some time though, since I had felt it so sharply.
In the history of our civilised evolution there have been leaps forward and stumbles back, and our current time feels uncomfortably familiar enough to declare a whip-lash inducing move into reverse.
Alarm bells and poetry
This is not to say there haven’t been problems or changes all along, but for me the wake-up call came recently during a discussion about poetry. I am a complete novice when it comes to poetry.
I studied it at school - I had to.
I studied it at university - I felt I ought too.
I tried reading it in my twenties - I wanted to.
But all the way through I have struggled to understand and really grapple with it. Nonetheless, others in my acquaintance are more immersed and, recently, with a couple of male acquaintances of that persuasion, the topic of Poet Laureate vs Professor of Poetry arose.
It was suggested that the former is the ‘people’s poet’ while the latter is the ‘poet’s poet’. This might be true, or it might be the highest form of intellectual snobbery. I don’t know. What I do know is, when I asked if there had been a female Professor of Poetry, as there had been Laureate, I was met with a quiet pause and a mumble to the negative.
I said, surely there must be good lady poets out there. I don’t know them because I don’t know poetry, but surely they exist. The response was that a lot of modern female poets are performance poets, and they’re not very good. It’s all a bit… immediate.
I did my own research. It turns out the current Professor of Poetry is a woman: Alice Oswald. She is highly respected and seen as the heir-apparent to Ted Hughes. And in an interview with The Guardian on winning the role, it was reported:
Oswald now promises to create a stir of a quite different kind, focusing on spoken poetry… Poetry is “an ancient memory system”, Oswald continued, that “asks to be heard out loud or at least read in the manner of a musical score”
Interesting.
Later that night
Topics moved on, as did the evening, as did the drinking. Later we returned to poetry. Or rather, they did. And they read out some favourites. I don’t know how or why, but “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht came out. (This is a response poem to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”.) And another alarm bell rang.
I didn’t say anything. I don’t know poetry; maybe I had misunderstood the point. Again, I did some research and found that Hecht himself says in his selected letters,
On the basis both of the poem and its title I have been accused of sexism, though when I wrote the poem I intended only to bring a spirit of levity and informality to the relations between men and women in the persons of Arnold’s poem.
That is the case with so much sexism though, isn’t it? Death by a thousand paper cuts. Little things, that weren’t meant that way. And yet that is what they meant.
And I began to hear a ringing in my ears: the echoing defenders of the male experience; the male intellectual point of view. The women brought in, but still without a voice, and degraded in the process. Or simply forgotten.
It sat with me for a week, niggling and poking me in the ribs. I felt restless and irritated. I couldn’t stop returning to it. And that’s when I knew something had shifted.
His tale as old as time
I am feeling angry and aggrieved in a way that I haven’t for a long time. I have come to feel, once again, tired of the male voice and the male experience dominating culture, intellectual debate and the societal ripples created by that dominance.
Reading the weekend paper I see stories about the snubbing of women at the Oscars; about a man sentenced to prison for violent threats against a female MP; about a male doctor sentenced for sexually assaulting female patients.
Toxic and persistent masculinity is on the rise again. Already dominant, it’s now beginning to shout over everyone else - to insist on the narrative as they see it - like Adam Sandler’s character in Uncut Gems. Deluded but insistent, violent and attention grabbing.
And while I can and do speak up, when I do, I am met with cries of “careful'“ or “I won’t say anymore” or “I’m not going to win here”. False fear of feminism or wrong footing that really just acts to shut down any discussion or debate: another silencer of women’s point of view.
Are we not allowed to have our story too?
Getting a word in
I don’t know why it’s now. Perhaps it’s only now for me. Or maybe it has taken time for the ripples of the rise of populism and the election to the White House of someone so dismissive of women to fully infiltrate the mainstream, the everyday.
Those looking for permission to backlash once again were given it, and over time that confidence has grown; the art and culture those people consume and create has shifted with that confidence; and the sphere of conversation has grown increasingly monotone.
These stories; what is told in, and about, culture; what is reported on and listened to - it all matters so much more than I can express. Viv Albertine writes in Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy.
Exclude, hurt and destroy. That sums it up so wonderfully. Take away our language, our story and that is what happens. Albertine says this as a conclusion to a story about her time as a mature student:
Whenever I get a free period, I set off to the college library and work systematically through the Dewey system, taking each book off the shelf one by one and adding, in black biro, ‘/she’ and ‘/woman’ to every ‘he’ and ‘man’…I do it with righteous indignation; there is hardly one book in the whole library that doesn’t use only the generic male pronoun. As if only men think and feel and discover and read.
Of course every experience is important, even the white, male (and often middle-aged) experience. But that one has been told so many times, so loudly and so singularly from one point of view.
Other stories are being told (as they have been for a long time), and, importantly, are being seen and heard much more too. But they remain far from dominant. They are being shouted down by an increasing rallying cry that must be silenced. The white male experience matters, but it needs to be mellowed, muted and take a back seat for a while.