My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters
The author's 2002 book about her career as a war photographer was titled "Shutterbabe"—against her wishes. Illustration by Milton Glaser Incorporated.
My latest novel was just long-listed
for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize. I cried when I heard. Then I Googled it. Here are a few things I learned: it was founded in response to the 1991 Booker Prize, whose nominees were all men; it is frequently modified by the adjective "prestigious"; and it is controversial. Why do we need a separate prize for women, ask the columnists, year after year, in one form or another, following the announcement of the nominees.
"The Orange Prize is a sexist con-trick" posited a prize-winning male novelist in 2008. "The past is gone," he wrote. "Get over it."
The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won't linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed "gone." It's a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.
What I will do, however, is open my kimono and make it personal, though I've been warned not to do this. It's career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they'll smear you. But never mind. I'm too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969—when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes—that the personal is political.
So. Let's rewind and take a look at my so-called post-feminist life in arts and letters.
Born in 1966, I came of age at the dawn of a revolution. The past was gone; we would move on and get over it! Except getting over it, as it turns out, takes more than an ashcan full of bras and access to the pill. It takes years—decades even. My whole life, in fact, and still counting. Nixon signed Title IX in 1972, when I was 6, but only the girls born many years after me got to reap its rewards. Who knows? Instead of a novelist, I might have become a really short, nebbishy soccer player.
Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I'm advised not to press charges. "They'll smear you," I'm told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don't want to be smeared. I've got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists', not the victim's—I'll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I'd been braver. I decide to Google my rapist's name, something I've never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He's successful. He's married—to a woman who recently spoke on a "Lean In" panel with Sheryl Sandberg.
Because life's like that.
Let's head on over to 1989. I'm a 23-year-old war photographer, on the eve of my first professional exhibit at the inaugural Visa Pour l'Image Perpignan photo festival. I share this honor with photojournalism heavyweights Sebastião Salgado and Jim Nachtwey. They and all the other men—except the identical Turnley twins, who are paired for obvious reasons—are given solo exhibits. I share mine with another female on the slate that year, Alexandra Avakian. Ours is called "Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front," which translates as "The Two Women on the Front Lines." Of the twenty-six photographers featured in that first festival, we are the sole women.
It's now 1998. I am the mother of two young children. I am my family's primary breadwinner, working full time as a producer at NBC. I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one. Returning to work after my second maternity leave (which left my family broke, as it was unpaid), despite my specialty in international news I am assigned three stories in rapid succession: "Putting Your Kids to Bed"; "Fussy Babies"; "Picky Eaters." I am one of the few mother-of-small-children producers on the show, but there are plenty of father-of-small-children producers in our ranks. I punt the "Picky Eaters" story and take a leave of absence to try my hand at my first passion, writing, which my (male) freshman expository writing professor had once dissuaded me from attempting, though I'd previously been a young columnist for Seventeen.
It's 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I'm thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I've been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word "whore," since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book's title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least "girl," as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word "babe" in it.
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I'm told I have no say in the matter. The cover that the publisher designs has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it's usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover. Thankfully, I win this one, agreeing to shoot the cover photo myself, gratis. When my publicist tries to pitch the book to NPR's Terry Gross, a producer tells him that Terry likes the "Shutter" part of the title but not the "babe" part.
It's now 2001. After two years of painstaking work to produce the book—having never written one before or attended grad school, I had to learn on the job—nearly every review refers to me as a stay-at-home mom. One such article is entitled "Battlefield Barbie," which calls me a "soccer-mom-in-training." I look nothing like Barbie. My kids don't play soccer. The general consensus is that the book is good, but I suck. The character assassinations are intense. Talk asks if I'm worried I'll be labeled a slut. I object to both the word and the question; the journalist prints them anyway. Brill's Content and The Women's Review of Books insinuate that I brought on my own rape and various other crimes that I experienced at the hands of men—armed robbery, a knockout blow to the skull from a crack addict. Salon resorts to slut-shaming and libel. New York thinks I'm an insult to feminism for having left a promising career behind.
My book is a bestseller, gets taught in journalism schools. I haven't left anything behind, I think; I've started something new. (Years later, the Internet, reality TV and citizen journalists with smartphones will decimate both of my former professions anyway, forcing many of my ex-colleagues to scramble both for work and for new ways of working.) A proponent of "leaning in" before it ever became a topic for panels with my rapist's wife, I write to the publications who called me a slutty Barbie stay-at-home mom and/or an insult to feminism, not to ask for a public retraction, but to request privately—privately! I don't want to get smeared—that they carefully reconsider how they're reviewing women. "Would you call a male author a stay-at-home dad?" I ask, among other rhetorical questions.
