Feminists Love Mutilated Women?
Yesterday, the English Observer belatedly picked up an article written for the September issue of Standpoint magazine by Jessica Mann, a reviewer who covers crime fiction for the Literary Review. In it, Mann criticizes the genre for revelling in the brutalization of women, and writes that “however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me.”
I sympathize with Mann—I can’t stomach much mutilation, and I wouldn’t want my job to be wading in dismembered female bodies. Judging by the response in the blogosphere, though, you’d think this was kinda like Marlon Brando refusing his Oscar or Jonathan Franzen turning down Oprah. But the problem of crimes against women in crime fiction has been often noted: here’s a rundown of some of the more sickening passages you’ll find in today’s popular offerings.
The debate, however, is not just about female mutilation—it’s about terminology. First, it’s about the “F” word. Mann writes:
The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women.
In a 2007 piece in the Guardian, Julie Bendel asked why women love to write and read about other women being brutalized:
Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder…. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite.
I understand Mann’s and Bindel’s basic premise—that women who care about women shouldn’t, in a logical sense, like to write or read about violence against women—but they both seem to ignore that women can be part of an “anti-feminist backlash,” that men can be feminists, that feminism means different things to different people, that it might have very little to do with what is going on here. When a headline on a Web site geared toward women asks “Feminist or Misogynist?” in a (thoughtful) consideration of Stieg Larsson’s “Girl” trilogy, is that helpful or merely polarizing? Must we choose?
The “F” word is not alone. There’s another word commonly thrown around in this discussion that really seems to turn people’s heads upside down: the “L” word. In 2007, Ian Rankin caused a stir when he quipped, “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”
I suppose it is terribly interesting—if one’s logic follows the proposition “If L then F,” and if you are quite certain what each variable signifies. The popular media was pretty certain: it badgered Val McDermid, a lesbian, for a response (which the Times Online ran with the headline “Revenge of the Bloodthirsty Lesbians”). She called it “arrant rubbish,” and said, “I’ll tell you what pisses me off more than almost anything: when people say, ‘As a woman, how do you feel about writing on violence?’ Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, ‘As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?’ ”
McDermid keeps it real: this debate is about men and women, and mostly about women, a “demographic” that contains multitudes, that is comprised of individuals who may resist any label, even that of “woman.” So it’s a debate about humans, and it turns on the question “Are Women Human?” Not when they are being lumped into unhelpful categories so that they can be lazily scrutinized by the press.
