Paige Williams has been creating Xtranormal satire computer-voice videos for journalists. I’ve only watched a couple (there are ten, I think) but the ones I’ve watched are quite funny, in an inside-baseball, narrative-journalism-is-my-thing kind of way, which is appropriate because Williams is both a teacher and writer of really great narrative journalism. The lastest, uploaded this afternoon, has a stick figure guy talking to a stick figue woman and it begins like this:
Man: Why is everybody freaking out about women editors?
Woman: Define freaking out.
Man: Well, it was all over Twitter last night. If I had a nickel for every WomenEditorsWeLove hashtag, I could buy myself some new hair.
The video is four minutes long, and, I suspect, loosely mimics a conversation or several conversations Williams has had with men about gender discrimination in journalism, Amy Wallace’s WomenEdsWeLove hashtag conversation, and the Port Magazine cover featuring six prominent male editors that inspired Wallace’s hashtag.
“The cover photo featured six editors,” the female stick figure says. “All men. As if magazines are made entirely by penis magic.”
At the risk of being over serious, Williams began to lose me there. Not because the line didn’t make me laugh, and not because that ridiculous Port cover didn’t deserve to be mocked. But because “as if magazines are made entirely by penis magic,” meant that the video might not be a good-faith discussion about #WomenEdsWeLove, and gender, and that it would instead be a caricature of sexism, played up for dramatic effect. I’m not interested in that.
Here is why: even though nobody, not even the oldest, smelliest misogynist in the nicest corner office at Conde Nast thinks that magazines are made by penis magic, some probably do believe that women are not essential to the creation of great magazines. (Fewer now, I imagine, because of women like Williams and Wallace, who have made that kind of noxiousness less acceptable.) And those men ought to be mocked and ridiculed, and it’s probably not worth having serious conversations with them. But my guess is that the sexism that exists in publishing, the kind that’s more troubling in practice, happens on a slightly lower rung of awfulness: it’s those guys who just don’t really feel like the number of women working as editors is unacceptably low, and that if more women wanted bylines, they could just write better pitches. This sexism is smug and oblivious, but because it’s smug and oblivious, I don’t think it reacts well to snark. It reacts something like this, also from Williams’s clip:
Woman: Does this conversation make you uncomfortable?
Man: Very. I never know the right thing to say. Either way, I feel like you’re furious at me.
Woman: Being vocal isn’t the same as being furious. We rarely know how to handle it anymore either. If we say too much, we are shrill. If we say nothing, we are weak. If we give up, we hate ourselves.
Man: I’d like to go now.
Woman: If we keep mentioning it, we are aggressive.
Man: I guess maybe sometimes it’s not the fact that you mention it, it’s how you mention it.
Woman: I am so sorry that our desire for equal consideration irritates you.
This is where the discussion about women and men in publishing has stalled for me. Women are frustrated not only by the sexism they see, but also by the reaction they get when they talk about it: Men, either out of callousness or confusion, ignore or dismiss the concerns. And so the natural response is more snark. (“I’m so sorry that our desire for equal consideration irritates you”; “As if magazines are made entirely by penis magic.”) Snark is good—I use it and enjoy it like anyone—but it’s less good when it’s comes from frustration.
So in this conversation, the bigger one about journalism and gender, I wish for more earnestness. (That is a terrifically uncomfortable thing for me to wish for.) The minute the decision is made to be snarky, the genuine conversation about how well-meaning men should respond to allegations of sexism is really hard to have. And at least personally, this is a conversation that I want to have: I don’t think that women writers and editors are inferior, and I’m horrified that even so, through my own ignorance or ineptitude, I might ever have made life harder for another journalist because she is a woman. Even just by not responding correctly to a legitimate complaint. If I’ve ever done that, as much as I hope I haven’t, I’m sorry, I feel terrible.
Snark can (and, since I’ve not written about this until now, does) pre-empt that reaction. It can feel as if an assumption has already been made that of course I’ve made life harder for another journalist because she’s a woman. And listen, lord knows I’ve made life hard for plenty of people, journalists and otherwise, just by being me, but it’s not axiomatic to me that because I’m a man I’m also sexist. I’m pretty sure Williams doesn’t think that it is, but it would be good to hear that in the video, explicitly, which I think is the same argument she’s advancing when she says that men were mostly silent throughout #WomenEdsWeLove. Even if they agree, it’s no good. (And I realize it’s possible that some of you will read this and think, “Who cares how he feels? This isn’t about him.” I think that’s exactly the wrong response. It’s really hard for an argument that lacks empathy to be a good argument.)
Why am I writing this, though? What’s the conversation I want to have? Partly, I struggle because a lot of women who write about feminism and gender do it from a normative perspective, almost as activists. It’s hard to be normative and open to ambiguity, and obviously I find ambiguity essential to good writing. Much in the same way that I read Glenn Greenwald on the NSA or Bill McKibben on global warming at arm’s length, I wonder if I should read Ann Friedman at arm’s length on feminism. That’s despite deeply (even passionately) agreeing with Greenwald, McKibben, and Friedman, and it’s a challenge for me as a reader. And the complementary challenge, if you’re committed to journalism and not activism, is to report and write with as much empathy as possible for the people you disagree with, and I think that empathy is sometimes missing in this corner of the internet.
I also want to make sure to remember that life is vastly different from one male journalist to the next. We are not all bros. Some men have parents who are well-connected journalists, some have money, some have an easy time climbing the career ladder, even when they hate it, because they know it’ll work out in the long run. Some have pieces of those things, or none of them. But I don’t think journalism is easy for anyone, really, men or women. It’s hard, frustrating, and uncertain. Which means that relatively speaking, even though I’m worried that it’s easier for men than for women in the aggregate, I’m mostly worried that it’s not easier for me. I would love, like Williams, to have written for the New Yorker, and to have a steady job at a prestigious university. Which I’m thinking about now because as I write this, I’m eating semi-sweet chocolate chips neatly piled on a plastic prescription-drug-benefit card that I won’t ever use, because I couldn’t handle working in an office at a prestigious university, and I recently quit my job. That is a gender-neutral stress. Maybe you can empathize. Another day in the life, right?