A few weeks ago I was on my way out to the shops when I got a voice note from a friend detailing some very bad news she had received. I was thinking so much of her as I locked my flat and left my building that I barely registered I was outside. That is until a man walking across the street from me shouted a phrase I have heard more than a few times in my life: “Cheer up love, it might never happen.”
I have had my fair share of sexual remarks shouted at me in public. I have been flashed on public transport, and once, even on a visit to the pharmacy, when I was so deliriously ill it took me upwards of 10 seconds to register what exactly I was looking at.
Another time I fell asleep at an airport and woke up to discover a middle-aged man sitting beside my head, stroking my hair and whispering. I will always remember his giant, fleshy lips. I have many stories like this, and many more serious transgressions. Still, “cheer up love” is the one that makes me, in the moment, the most viscerally angry.
I am not arguing that this is an objective measure, or saying this is every other woman’s perspective too. (The expectation that each woman must speak, or try to speak, for every other woman is an absurd and ludicrous demand.) These are only my feelings, my whimsical woman’s feelings.
But I think I understand the disgust I feel at this statement: I hate the sense of entitlement contained within it, to police and control our internal lives. And I hate the palpable rage that our internal lives might contain anything beyond one-dimensional chipper enthusiasm, that our internal lives might, in fact, encompass the full range of human emotions: sadness, anger, angst, confusion, and so many other things we would struggle to describe to anyone else. The fury at the dim recognition that the plains of my private self may stretch far beyond what this stranger is able to comprehend. How dare I.
I think I felt even more angry about “cheer up love” than I usually would because we are in the midst of a backlash against women’s internal lives. Every week now, as sure as the sun rises, I seem to read another dreary and tiresome piece lamenting the terrible consequences of the publication of novels by young women and the dire cost of this to young men.
The authors of these pieces, themselves usually women, lump together a group of novels that have little to do with each other, other than being written by women, under a banner like “sad girl novels”. And then, rather than analyse or, God forbid, quote from the texts, they deliver a misogynistic sermon detailing their exhaustion with reading about women’s lives. One concluded on the phrase: “We are tired. Everyone’s tired of your turmoil.”
This tendency to write about novels primarily in terms of the identity of the author treats readers as idiots. Do people in general choose books because they like “men’s stories” or “women’s stories”? Or do they read a review to find out what the writing is like? And the context for all this is a period of about five years perhaps with a few more novels by young women than young men published each year. A tiny blip in the history of literature. Still, these pieces persist.
There is usually a cursory reference to the female novelists under attack being “privileged”, a term which seems conveniently elastic. The authors of these pieces are often private school and Oxbridge graduates themselves. (When I read them I tend to think: If you’re sick of bad writing by privileged women, why not stop yourself?) The sentence level writing in these pieces is deeply shoddy, as is the quality of analysis, if it even exists.
There are people who can empathise with women only if we cry, and who empathise so instinctively with a woman who is crying that they never bother to ascertain further details about what caused this. This too is a mechanism of gendered policing and control
Because the bar, if you are participating in misogyny, is always, always on the floor. Down in a deep, dank basement, really. One line in a recent one read: “Where craft is concerned [insert male authors] both excel” with no mention of what element of craft she was talking about. The writing? The characters? It would be far too much to ask for any textual evidence to support any of this either, of course.
It has been strange to read the eulogies to the wonderful Edna O’Brien in the context of this. Her work is celebrated for her brilliant writing, and for interrogating the intricacies of the lives of young women and breaking taboos in the process. But there can be a tendency to imply that the reactionary misogyny her early work was greeted with has dissolved completely.
Things have changed, but it’s a wild stretch to argue that derisive, dismissiveness towards women is a thing of the past. When attitudes towards women move forward we seem to forget that they can, and often do, slide back. There was a line in the New York Times remembering the critics who had dismissed O’Brien’s work as concerned with “the narrow world of the heart”. This would only be out of place in one of the “sad girl novels” pieces because the writing is better. The sentiment is exactly the same.
I read a wonderful novel recently by a young woman named Harriet Armstrong called To Rest Our Minds and Bodies. It will be published next year. It made me laugh a lot. And I screenshotted many sections from the PDF I was reading to send to other writer friends, because I knew they would be excited to read it too.
Her writing style is original and she writes frankly about sex and love and desire, like O’Brien did. It has something in common with my own novel and short stories, which Armstrong pointed out when she politely contacted me to ask for a blurb. She had come to a few events I have read at so we had met briefly before. (You would not believe how many requests I get for work help from men who do not show this courtesy.)
It reminded me too of some writers I love, like JD Salinger and Italo Svevo, although I doubt very much that she will be compared with them. I would bet her influences will be cited, instead, as a few other young women whose novels happen to be published around the same time as hers.
This made me angry too.
In fact, when I started reading Armstrong’s book my first thought was: what a brilliant book. My second was: I dread to think how this will get reviewed.
That man in the street? I shouted back at him: “Oh f**k off you stupid c**t.” And I know relaying my honest response like this will not endear me to certain readers. There are people who can empathise with women only if we cry, and who empathise so instinctively with a woman who is crying that they never bother to ascertain further details about what caused this. This too is a mechanism of gendered policing and control.
There is that one-dimensional emotional landscape again. Well, sometimes you simply feel you have had enough of playing along.
Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast. Her first novel Lazy City was published last year.