I asked someone if a woman could be successful in the alt lit world if she weren’t attractive:
“Yes but she would have to write like the boys. She would have to write in a style that men find “worthy,” e.g. high level of abstract thought, aggressive or nihilistic view of society/life, “hard” exterior image, masculine.
She couldn’t write feminine or sexy material.”
And I’ve been thinking about feminine image in relation to
authorship and ~feminist things and my own self image. If I consider the women alt lit writers I’m
aware of (I’m kind of new at this, my apologies,) generally speaking they are
all conventionally attractive by which I mean thin and feminine looking. And I think about Sylvia Plath, because every
conversation I’ve had about Sylvia Plath (I was an English major, ok?) at some point
involves a comment about how pretty she was.
And I think about young Didion.
And how Emily Dickinson only had one picture taken of herself ever and she hated that picture because
she thought she looked ugly. And as much
as all of this is kind of “well, duh” I think it’s still worth pointing out.
Because even though I identify as feminist, there are
certain knee-jerk reactions that I don’t know if I will ever not have. Recently I went to an open mic and a
conventionally unattractive woman (overweight, not particularly feminine) read
a poem about a sexual experience and my immediate reaction was aversion (closely
followed by shame for having felt that way and I AM A BAD FEMINIST.) In fact, I was so distracted by my mixture of
aversion and shame that I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not the poem
was “good.” I am so not proud of
this. But these things happen, and if
they’re not discussed, they’ll just keep happening. So.
Last year I participated in a poetry marathon in Milwaukee
with three other women I went to school with (all conventionally attractive,
btw) and I found the looks of the other participants I didn’t know kind of
surprising. Generally speaking, they all
looked like regular Wisconsin people. Some
were downright rural, others suburban casual, a few academic looking ones. I guess for some reason I thought that
Poet-Wisconsinites would look vastly different from the townies surrounding my
college campus. They didn’t. These poets were real people. One older woman
(mid-sixties, maybe) read a kind of lengthy pastoral-ish poem, about a young snake
charmer. As the poem progressed, some
subtle word choices and imagery made me think “tee hee, unintentional sexuality” By the end of the poem however,
I realized (along with everyone else in the room I think) that all of the
sexual imagery was, in fact, intentional and I looked at this older woman with
some kind of awe because she was old
and wearing a cardigan. And I had specifically not chosen to read
anything sexual at this poetry marathon because there were going to be old
ladies in cardigans there.
Getting back to the quotation at the top of this post, there’s
this feeling or belief that only sexy
people can write sexy poetry. Or rather,
readers only want to read sexy poetry by sexy poets. And I think I want to specify that further to sexy
female poets, because Bukowski. I would love
for unattractive women to be able to write sexy things and “make it” in alt lit
like it’s nbd. But I’m skeptical. Personally I’m not sure I’d be able to “put
myself out there” if I didn’t fit certain qualifications for being conventionally
attractive. (Look, I know it’s not cool to think you’re attractive
sometimes and now you’re probably all like ~lol w/e you’re conceited and hideous~) At least, I don’t think I would be able to
put any kind of sexy writing “out there.”
So in addition to “unattractive” women having difficulty being accepted
into the community, there is probably also a fairly huge intimidation factor.
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