But David, don't you know the answer to that one by now?
It goes like this: men have dominated and suppressed women's artistic creativity since the stone age, and these gender-exclusive books, mags and sites are a type of "affirmative action", to help women catch up.
But I believe that women with guts and talent have always managed to have their say.
Look at Sappho, universally judged (as much by men as women) as one of the truly great poets of all time. Are you suggesting that she was a mere “token” woman poet, and all the subsequent Sapphos in our culture have been denied possession of paper and pencil, or had their work suppressed or destroyed by jealous men?
Sorry, it doesn’t wash.
Why was it possible for a woman such as Jane Austen to sneak out a few well-chosen words, while all of her would-be-poet sisters were suppressed? What nonsense.
Sure it was more difficult for a woman be a successful writer in earlier days – but no more difficult than it would have been in those times for a man to take up knitting or have a career as a midwife: it was not the cultural norm, simple as that. There is nothing more naïve than the current academic practice of critiquing the past with a postmodern eye, and seeing historical cultural norms as evidence of “repression”.
But to say that “the patriarchy” made it impossible in the past for a woman driven by genius or strong talent to find the necessary pen and paper is simply absurd. Are you suggesting that women were not even taught to read and write? Or that since they were denied a university education, poetry was impossible. University education has never been a sine qua non for poetry, even for men. A strong argument could be made for the opposite view (which I hold), that university is more likely to cripple a poet than make one. And if truly valuable work had been suppressed at the time, it would have found the light of day eventually. Why? because things of beauty are rarely expunged from existence by human beings – by men or women – purely on the basis of gender-expectation.
|