Gender and Writing

What is this silo? and what is going against the grain? is it tribbles?

You ever read the notes at the back of a poetry collection, and go, wait a flipping-doodle minute, this, epigraphs and thanks, it’s all guys.

Or if the collection is by a woman, hey, these are all women. Or if it’s by someone queer, all queer. Or someone old, all oldies. And so on, split down the demographics.

Does one’s sub-community of writers have all the gender spectrum or just people that look like you?

At the Chelsea author’s market day, at the next table was Sean Silcoff. He had a stream of well-wishers. His book is being made into a movie. He and I witnessed buyer after buyer explain that they were buying his tech story book about the Blueberry for {her husband, her son, her husband, her uncle}. At one point he mused to himself, why don’t women read it themselves?

That there is a salient question. Dang me, I’m guilty as the aggregate. I had already texted Brian to ask if he wanted to read it. We might read it together but. *shudder* Did I just do a “womanly thing”?

Do we confine ourselves? Do I confine myself to our nation of lanes? Do I get alienated and lost when a male boss couches his speech in sports metaphors. Did a male student once slam down his hands on the desk when I used a nylons metaphor for grammar declaring, there’s not just women here. He walked out and never came back.

Our suffrage is new. We may look like we take equal space at the table but it’s ubiquitous to give more weight when men speak. i heard this dubbed “hepeat”. When a guy repeats what a woman on board said, there’s uptake. Lower income for same work is still the deal. Less uptake of complaints, medical or legal for women. Go to a reading and a woman reads and more women in the audience. Go to a male reading and there are more males in the audience. It doesn’t always happen but, uh,  go team?

I was at a wedding shower a few years ago and of the 13 women there, 10 remarked on bot being able to properly be a woman. A couple said they detest make-up, another couple never wore skirts. Uncomfortable with girlish things, heels, nails, babies, sitting correctly. It wasn’t distinctively a butch room. Not super-femme but not distinctly not. How can you be born female but not associate yourself with your assigned gender portfolio of likes and abilities and yet perform gender so much that no one would say, androgynous or male. What a curious thing.

Why do I have a licence and do about 1% of the driving with my male partner does the bulk. What’s that about?  What’s at play? Individual choice? Or is it gender? Some unconscious rule? If it were only us, it’s nothing, except that anecdotally I watch people. If females are alone, they drive. If they are with a male partner, he drives. Toxic masculinity makes males be the driver even if “it makes no difference”? Where am I letting the defaults drive me?

I’ll re-ask what I asked in 2020, Do more men than women have drivers licenses? A car game is counting who drives. Probably upwards of 90% cars are single driver but where there are at least 2 adult occupants, so far it’s 138: 31, drivers who present as male to drivers who present as female.

Aggregate numbers

Within hours of highway 800km per week for months

patterns emerge, dissolve, shift, become undeniable.

When vehicles have at least 2 adults aboard

the guy drives. Some data is lost to windshield glare,

at a glance ambiguous or androgynous genders.

And that itself s muddy imposed expectations

I pitstop at Tim Hortons and whole teams of

baseball caps munch and sip but I’m the only one

with boobsy twins and a hat.

What I want to see is gender to not be such a thing. I do. I want men to wear make up and skirts as neutrally as jeans, to be able to show off legs, or wear a burqa too. Why is gender? What is dismissal on the basis of gender? What is with that straight black woman killed because some turd thought she looked too masculine and must be transgender. That’s not gender and writing but hatred is writ large on the wall of this nuthouse society.

What is “female writing”? Are there patterns? Old ideas said: myths, madness, stories, with emotions and adjectives. Colouring outside the lines. Oblique and non-linear. Is that female nature or misogyny?

Females as heart and masculine as mind. Men = logic and form and containment. Or is that Vulcan training? Or squashing your son’s spirit? It’s one of those, pretty sure.

Each person should be not a half but a whole, not closed off to half the species, half the options for the species.

I forget some people take gender seriously. I have found it difficult to not see it as playacting rather than something internalized until it is intrinsic, inextricable. But perplexing. When I dress femme I expect to be called out as being goofy and not pulling off drag well enough.

Is female a sub-culture, like a dialect when we also know the linga franca of male?  Is it like how we can relate to the hero role when 90% of people on screen are LOTR male and the majority routinely fail the Bechdel test? When there is a female she is a pawn or Buffy with little in between. It’s improving, since the 70s-90s but still kinda sad.

Are female poets household names in Canada in literary households? 15 Canadian poets lists: Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Rupi Kaur, Elisabeth Brooks, Susanna Moodie, Carol Shields, Lisa Robertson, Heather O'Neill, Dionne Brand, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Michaels, Joy Kogawa, Anne Hébert, Billene Seyoum Woldeyes and Susan Musgrave.

Are males more of household names in the same households? 5 best Canadian poets are again all dead white males: Charles G. D. Roberts, Robert W. Service, Archibald Lampman, William Henry Drummond and Wilson MacDonald.

Wikipedia has a list of male or female poems, each 200 pages long. Most web pages just say “poets” but Poemtopia list “poets” but 8/10 are male and of those only Margaret Atwood and George Elliott Clarke are still alive. So far we conclude from the Venn diagram taht poets are dead or else Maggie.

Top 5 Contemporary poets according to Marie A. Ungar are these: Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, Warsan Shire, Richard Siken and Maggie Nelson. Hmmmm. A Maggie again.

What about 7 Contemporary Poets that are Changing the Literary World? According to Gianna Valdez, mostly women: Ocean Vuong, Dorothea Lasky, Eileen Myles, Richard Siken, Louise Glück, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith.

According to Emily Torres at the Good Trade, Top 10 female poets that inspire: Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, Rupi Kaur, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, and Lucille Clifton. Only one Canadian, Rupi Kaur, made the American list.

Is there any pattern among all these women in style, content or form? I don’t se it.

How do you compare clout poet-to-poet? Reach of widespread impact? Precision of narrow deep reach? Awards, sales, reviews, amount of mentoring, mainstream recognition?

I ask because I want to know, not rhetorically inform you.

I have more questions than answers but by questioning we may see newer better questions.

How do we break down our automatic obedience and compliance with gender lanes? With reading people with matching genitals? Do we write in the manner when we follow gender patterns because we are affected by the same pressures, for time, for money, for energy, for sexism, for playing roles. Stepping out of expectations makes some people keenly uncomfortable, on an unexamined level, angry. Maybe jealous. If they put so much energy that they could better use elsewhere to conform, no one should get a free pass. That means they are not tribe, not us, so are outside the fold. Consequences.

But there are so many billion people and many online. Community doesn’t have to outside by old patterns. There can be enough “weirdos” to create a self-contained, self-perpetuation tide of new norms.

New poetry for a new society. New people remaking themselves and consequently their poetry and community to think and perceive in new ways. Isn’t that what all we writers want, in one domain or another?

Thanks for your time.

Btw, guess I should be looking at you, ladies, last chance to buy a bunch of my poetry titles. I'm running low in the 3-5 copies of other titles.