Ayer le pregunté a un poeta veinteañero que quiénes eran sus poetas favoritos y él mencionó, entre otros, a Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cioran, Onetti. En su lista no había ninguna mujer. Y cuando le pregunté por las mujeres que había leído confesó que conocía a muy pocas.
Lo mismo me pasó a mí cuando empecé a escribir. Mis ídolos literarios eran todos hombres, hombres que había leído en la prepa y en la universidad a instancias de mis profesores y amigos.
Cuando les dije a mis maestros que me interesaba lo uncanny, me recomendaron a Poe, pero no a Amparo Dávila. Cuando les pedí recomendaciones a mis amantes de literatura erótica me mandaron a leer a Henry Miller, pero no a Anaïs Nin. Los que creen que Mariano Azuela escribió LA NOVELA de la Revolución, no han leído Cartucho de Nellie Campobello. Los que incluyen a Esquilo, Sófocles y Eurípides en el panteón de la literatura griega casi siempre olvidan a Safo.
Como dice Deidre Coyle en su brillante ensayo, desde niñas se nos educa para creer que las cosas que vale la pena admirar son las cosas que les gustan a los hombres. Si no estás en una posición de poder y quieres figurar en el mundo sólo hay una opción: identificar a los que ocupan el poder (los hombres) y amar su arte.
«It feels bad to read a book by a straight cis man about misogyny. It feels bad when this book contains some relatively graphic depictions of sexual assault. This is par for the course, when the course is reading books and the par is the Western canon. What feels worse is having this man’s work recommended to you, over and over, by men who have talked over you, talked down to you, coerced you into certain things, physically forced you into others, and devalued your opinion in ways too subtle to be worth explaining in an essay (as in the interviews, where the hideous men are the only characters we hear from). Either these Wallace-recommending men don’t realize that they’re the hideous men in question, or they think self-awareness is the best anyone could expect from them.»
«Obviously work by women about sexual assault has received critical acclaim and attention (Morrison, Oates, Walker, to name a few). But men rarely recommend those books to me (excepting my dad, who gave me Morrison novels when I was a teenager), and as far as I can tell, men are far less likely to idolize those authors, aspire to their cultural status, or blatantly copy their stylistic idiosyncrasies. More mundanely, I’ve never heard a woman express shock or horror on hearing that a man has never read Beloved. It wouldn’t occur to most women to recommend books by women to men the way men recommend books by men to women.»
«It is enraging to have a straight man tell me a story about straight men telling stories to a woman about straight men acting like shitheads. I understand that this is the point of the text. I know. I understand that maybe other men wouldn’t absorb the message unless it was being told to them by another, probably smarter and better educated man. But then why do men keep recommending his work to me?». Deidre Coyle
Germen 