I have had occasion recently to review my own book of short stories, Revolutionary Baby. Someone asked if it could be serialised on a literary/writing platform currently gaining popularity. There are still readers who like old-fashioned stories reflecting life in a pre-digital pre-influencer pre-Trumpian world, dwindling though this number might be. In this process I received some rather surprising feedback: my stories were accused of “man-bashing”. I was taken aback. As far as I was aware, I write from an ordinary female viewpoint which any woman of my era would share.
None of my male characters are vicious or evil or deliberately cruel. They certainly are not violent or criminal or sadistic, unlike a high percentage of those who now occupy our fictional arena, thank you Bret Easton Ellis. If they display unkindness, self-obsession, lack of awareness or a failure to understand the women they are involved with, this is nothing remarkable. They, too, are creatures of their time. I feel fond of all of my male characters, in different ways, but I want to convey the impact that their often thoughtless behaviour can have on the women in my stories. In some cases they hardly connect with women at all and mainly hurt themselves.
This led me to ponder the fragmentation now occurring in literary and even more so popular fiction. Many literary women of my acquaintance, most of whom would describe themselves as feminists, make a point of not reading books written by men. The question of the gender identity of the author, and ditto of the audience, has become a sore point among many commentators online, in literary magazines, in articles on book prizes and awards. There seems to be emerging a kind of gender-ghetto mentality where each identity is writing for others who share it. The striking emergence of queer fiction is an example. Some of the most interesting writing is coming from authors inhabiting a distinctively queer identity world. Is everyone reading this? Or mainly others similarly self-identified? It seems women writers are mainly read by other women. What is actually going on here? Does anybody know? Is anyone keeping track of these questions?
