My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

I just watched a video about portrayals of masculinity in Disney movies.

I had a number of problems with the video. Not because I think that it makes inaccurate statements — I agree, at the very least, that Disney movies almost always privilege certain male body types and make statements about what is “masculine” that usually are about physical prowess and violence (I’m not sure I would agree that modern Disney movies encourage young men to think of women as sources of pleasure or servants, which is the video’s third and weakest point).

Unfortunately, the video chooses some exceedingly poor examples to make its point. It largely seems to rest on the character of Gaston, the hyper-masculinized villain of “Beauty and the Beast.” While Gaston is certainly presented as a “manly man,” he is by nature parodic. No one leaves “Beauty and the Beast” thinking that Gaston is the hero. When they sing about Gaston’s physical size, strength, and abundance of chest hair, the song is purposely ridiculous and over-the-top. His pursuit of Beauty is obviously “boorish, brainless!” — as Belle complains in a song. The Beast, who certainly does not come across as “effeminate” or “un-manly,” has a relationship with Beauty that centers around genuinely healthy and friendly activities: feeding birds, reading books. When the Beast turns into the prince, he is nowhere near as barrel-chested and stereotypical as Gaston.

On the other hand, the video has a point. Even if the prince isn’t as barrel-chested as Gaston, he’s still pretty dang barrel-chested. Although Gaston’s belligerence is bad, the Beast still can’t run from battle: he only comes into his own when he finally fights the bad guy for the girl. To skip to another movie, despite the fact that Mulan successfully pretends to be a boy and completes all the tests of physical prowess necessary, the fact remains that boys are being told that in order to be male, you have to have physical power. If Mulan had failed the tests of her strength, they’d know she was a girl. Even if the scenario empowers young women by telling them that they can do anything a man can do, it still labels the quality of physical strength as “masculine.” And as for falling in love? “Beauty and the Beast” is a rarity in that it allows the protagonists time to get to know each other and perhaps actually forge friendships rather than simply going goo-gah at first sight.

And of course, even these caveats are more complex than my initial analysis allows. The story of “Mulan” requires her to pass physical tests: one could argue that strength is a quality of soldiers, not men. This argument would be stronger if Disney more frequently presented admirable men with different physical appearances and interests. As for “Beauty and the Beast,” Belle also has to prove that she isn’t a coward: perhaps she isn’t forced to physically fight Gaston, but she bravely tries to convince the villagers not to attack the Beast’s castle: speaking to a riled-up mob requires its own type of courage. When the villagers reach the castle, the female servants are portrayed as playing just as large a role in the defense of their home as the men. And let’s not forget that the Beast attempts to convince Gaston not to fight. Only when he’s attacked does he resort to physical violence.

Are there problems with the Disney movies? Sure. They’re racist in varying degrees, certainly white-centric, promote certain body types above others, and are unfailingly hetero. But I don’t think that the situation is quite as dire as the video makes it out to be, or at least, not in the particular examples it cites.

On the topic of fairy tales, though, the best fairy tale you’ve never read: the ballad of Tam Lin. Why have you never read it? Because it’s about an unwed mother standing up to her family’s expectations and setting off on an adventure to save her baby-daddy. No, really. And this is a very old, traditional story — but it’s nearly impossible to Bowlderize, so you’ve probably never heard of it.

My excellent friend Friar Yid has a terrific skewering of Pat Boone’s latest sexist and moronic column on WorldNetDaily. (I won’t link directly to either of those since I don’t want to be seen raising idiots’ Google rankings—if you care, you can find links and lengthy excerpts on the Friar’s blog.) In a nutshell, the erstwhile rock singer Boone claims that strong women only exist by contrast with men who are weaker than usual:

Consider the women, in our day, who have become the heads of state in India, Pakistan, Israel and Great Britain. Question: Is it likely that these very accomplished and brilliant women would have attained these positions if there had been men in evidence who seemed equally or perhaps even better qualified? … Don’t get all defensive, ladies; hear me out. I’m praising and complimenting you here. Thank God for you!

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this (except with great humor and brilliance, as is Friar Yid’s wont) except for the fact that lots of people take crap like this seriously and those of us with an ounce of sense are left to flail our arms wildly and wonder: What the hell?

Commence wild arm-flailing on the count of three. Ready? One…

This article in the NYTimes is an infuriating example of exactly what to do to discourage women from caring about technology.

Ms. Duarte represents a growing number of women who are embracing consumer electronics just as the technologies are reaching out to embrace them. Behind this quiet revolution are engineers and designers who are bringing a more feminine sensibility to products historically shaped by masculine tastes, habits and requirements.

Only a few years ago, feminizing a consumer electronic product meant little more than creating a pink or pastel version of the same black or silvery item coveted by men. And, some retailers note, that kind of marketing still goes on. But feminizing technology is more about a product’s fundamentals, often expressed in its ease of use.

Where does this persistent belief that technology needs to be “feminized” in order to be successfully marketed to women come from? I’m not entirely familiar with the marketing data that makes manufacturers so obsessed with gender, but surely there’s a little merit to the idea that if you update a product’s features and design so that it’s easier and more efficient to use, the resulting increase in sales has less to do with women preferring “simpler” technology than better product design. Ghettoizing women by making special technology products “for her” will never be the right way to “encourage” women to use computers, if we need encouragement at all.

Luddites abound in both genders. I work in tech support at my college, and see equal numbers of male and female techno-terrified professors. Among students, there are rather fewer who are unfamiliar with the technology in use around them, but an equal number of men and women ask for help formatting their papers and printing out homework assignments. Granted, this is evidence from personal experience, never a statistical source to be trusted absolutely— but what is it that so convinces people that women are afraid of technology?

I do remember hearing from friends— and occasionally teachers— during elementary and high school that it was “weird” for me to be interested in computers, or to play online games.^[1] When I was in fifth grade, we first got a computer powerful enough to connect to the internet (a Mac G3). I excitedly told my teacher all about how neat the new computer was one day while walking with our class to the school buses, only to hear her reply, “I’m really not all that interested in your new computer— I’d rather hear about your craft projects.”

I hope we don’t still so emphatically tell girls that computers aren’t interesting or appropriate for them. Indeed, evidence points to girls being just as interested in technology and the internet as boys— take another article from yesterday’s NYTimes, for example. Some online playgrounds for kids are as much as 96% female now, belying the tired old tripe that girls “just aren’t as interested” in computers.

This may seem trivial to producers of technology products, software, and web apps whose work isn’t directly linked to the “interactive online doll” movement. Yet these programs are creating interest among girls in computers and the web, and ensuring that children who grow up in the middle class in this generation will be technologically literate.^[2] When women are making half of all technology purchases in twenty years, it won’t be because manufacturers have finally hit on the right shade of pink with the perfect glitter-coated single-button interface for every gadget and software app, it’ll be because technology is central to work, play, and every aspect of life for the new generation.

Manufacturers should be making the user interface changes described in the NYTimes’ piece— smart televisions that turn on when a DVD is inserted into an attached player, or gadgets whose size doesn’t overwhelm their usefulness, or consumer electronics that interface easily with everyone’s laptop are wonderful additions to the plethora of technological devices available today. They’re great additions because they’re designed well and appeal to a variety of consumers, though, not because women are any more likely to be the Luddites adopting them than men. Instead of “feminizing” technology by making it “simpler” for women, we should be simplifying technology with the goal of making it easier for everyone to use, and ensuring that girls and boys alike grow up interested in tech.

Edited To Add: Today (6/12/07) I came across an excellent blog post at Shrub.com tangentially related to this article. Go read it, and the rest of the Shrub blog.

[1] I was an avid player of MUDs in middle and high school, particularly the RPI variety. Someday I’ll get around to writing a post about how gender seems to play out in many MUD environments. Back to where you were.

[2] The growing disparity in technological literacy between the “middle” class and those in poverty is a troubling one, and further disadvantages those already held back from full economic success. However, the problems of technology and poverty— and the accompanying issue of technological literacy and race— is a can of worms for a different post. Back to where you were.

One place to start with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work Rhetoric and Ethics: The Politics of Biblical Studies is at the beginning. In her preface to the text, she defines a number of key terms to her project as well as her goal to “re-envision biblical studies as a theory and practice of justice” (Schüssler Fiorenza ix). Among the definitions present I find two to be particularly important to my understanding both of the direction forward within the discipline and of one of the largest hurdles along the way: ‘kyriarchy/kyriocentric’ and ‘wo/men’ (and ‘wo/man’ by extension). (Although I find problems in Schüssler Fiorenza’s use of ‘wo/men’ particularly, and ‘kyriarchy’ infrequently, it should be noted that I not only find ‘kyriarchy’ as a concept to be extremely useful, but Schüssler Fiorenza’s word ‘scientistic’ as well. It perfectly articulates the use of “scientific” modes of thinking within the institutionalization and production of knowledge that Michel Foucault identifies as an apparatus of power; combined with ‘kyriarchy,’ ’scientistic’ provides us with some simplistic vocabulary that otherwise is lacking in Foucault’s explanation of these processes.) Schüssler Fiorenza identifies her view of each term clearly; ‘kyriarchy’ is meant to “underscore . . . that domination is not simply a matter of patriarchal, gender-based dualism, but of . . . [the interstructures] of domination . . . such as racism, poverty, heterosexism and colonialism” (ix), while wo/men addresses the “instability of the term” (ix) and is intended for usage “in an inclusive way” (ix) that “is often equivalent to ‘people’” (ix). Since I, too, feel that we overlook the promise that biblical/religious studies holds as a transformative force in questioning present and past kyriarchal practices and ideologies, I am also on board with the heurminutical/epistemic shift that she proposes – to “reclaim the public space of the ekklesia as the arena of biblical and religious studies” (11).

But who are we fighting for ‘radical equality’ for? Who are we including in (excluding from) the fruits of this re-visioning and restructuring of the academic-religious contexts and methods within which and through which we read the Bible/religious texts? To more fully understand the “silencing, marginalization, and exploitation” (8) that Schüssler Fiorenza herself engages in, we must bring her discussion of ‘kyriarchy’ and ‘wo/men’ under closer scrutiny, as well as Schüssler Fiorenza’s later discussion of Galatians 3:28.

Initially, Schüssler Fiorenza hits on one of the most powerful features of her newly designed/introduced analytic. The neologism kyriarchy-kyriocentrism can allow the critical deconstruction of Western binaries (5) in a way that avoids the common pitfall of many other methods of articulating power dynamics, which “unwittingly re-inscribe [existing binaries/dualisms] through [their] cultural gender analysis” (5). She goes on to add: “it allows one to understand gender not just as an ideological concept but as an ever-shifting position and social formation constituted by structures of domination and networks of power” (5; emphasis added). Despite this great start, however, she quickly becomes imbricated in the very system that she attempts to overthrow with development of the term ‘kyriarchy;’ her inculsivity breaks down as she outlines what ‘wo/men’ means (to her). While kyriarchy represents a “broader range of oppressions” (5) in their interlocking structural context, ‘wo/men’ is utilized “as inclusive of men, s/he as inclusive of he, and fe/male as inclusive of male . . . seek[ing] to signify that the term wo/men has a meaning equivalent to that of people” (6). Here lies the crux of the problem. Weren’t we attempting to subvert existing binaries and dualisms (specifically those of gender) with the use of kyriarchy? Didn’t Schüssler Fiorenza herself recognize that gender should in essence be a ‘moving target,’ fluid and unstable in part to make it an inclusive concept?

It seems that while Schüssler Fiorenza recognizes the constructed nature of gender as a method of categorization, she fails to see it in practice; there are men and there are women walking around in the world, comprising the overarching category ‘people,’ but gender-variance lacks physical form – and hence, the need to be included in her linguistic representation of ‘people’ (where have all the gender-variant people gone?). She falls into a similar trap when discussion Galatians 3:28. Verses 26-28 read:

“For you are all children of God / For as many as were baptized into Christ / have put on Christ / There is [valid] neither Jew nor Greek / There is neither slave nor free / There is no male and female / For you are all one” (154).

In reading this formulation, it is highly conceivable to interpret the Galatians 3:26-28 baptismal formula as rejecting all structures of domination. Thus the kyriocentric language of Galatians would here be translated, according to Schüssler Fiorenza, to mean: “neither Jewish nor Greek wo/men, neither slave nor freeborn wo/men, neither husband and wife” (156). If we assume that Krister Stendahl is correct in suggesting that Galatians 3:28 is an allusion to Genesis 1:27 and procreation/marriage rather than to the myth of the primordial androgyne, this would at least seem a slightly more logical translation. However, given Schüssler Fiorenza’s awareness of “language as a form of power” (ix) and her understanding of this passage as subverting all structures of domination, how is the use of the gendered ‘husband and wife’ justified? Here again, it is only in a world where gender-variance is not actually included in the physical world of ‘all people’ that ‘husband and wife’ works as synonymous for the breakdown of all “biological gender divisions” (155) through baptism. Language does function as a form of power, and for Schüssler Fiorenza’s neologism ‘kyriarchy’ to truly work in the way that she earlier outlines, it is necessary for us not only to understand that the gender-variance present in the term ‘kyriarchy’ must be carried out to its fullest extent in the language we use, but that not doing so also does violence to those subjects we disembody.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Rhetoric and Ethics: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

I hit puberty late. I had my first kiss when I was sixteen, and before I was seventeen and had a boyfriend for the first time, I had basically no sexual contact with guys ever. I guess at some level I was somewhat aware that I am an attractive person, but I never really got hit on until maybe a couple years ago (with the exception of shady Mexican lawn-men who whistle at anything that moves).  The concept of being an attractive woman and getting differential treatment for it has been a concept that has just recently been something I have become aware of, and the concept that I can even be a sexual person is even newer.   I am (for the most part) confident in myself, in my choices, in my, but I as I have gotten older I have become rather aware that people (or more specifically men) find me attractive and this is part of how other people perceive me, part of my social identity.

I guess, just ever since I got to college, I have gotten very aware that who I am physically (a small, cute, high voiced female) and the fact that I am a very openly sexual person have a lot of social ramifications.  So then, my gut reaction is to consciously try to be perceived as very intelligent and competent–to take hard classes and do a bunch of extracurriculars and be well read and do reactor…  I mean all these things are good, right?  But the problem, despite the fact that I genuinely want to do all these things, they become part of what I need to feel like, as I person, I can justify myself.  Like, the more of a sexual person I am, the more I also need to have these qualities that are not typically associated with a very sexualized woman object.  The more it becomes an obligation—the more pressure there is to be beautiful AND intelligent AND talented AND witty.  I even wondered if maybe that’s part of why I am a science major; it’s not stereotypically feminine (okay, well biology is kind of “girl science”, but biochem isn’t as much).

I mean, to an extent to even be a women and get noticed at all, you have to be at least aware of your appearance.  I remember my high school English teacher said he was watching the news with his wife and a woman senator came on, and his wife’s first reaction was, “oh man, she has horrible hair!”  Now, his wife is quite educated; she’s a journalist for Reuters (probably more successful than my quasi-burnt out character of an English teacher), but still, her gut reaction when she saw a woman senator was not to remark on what her policy was, but to harp on her hair.

Sometimes I wonder if working harder and being more and more intellectually focused really affects anything at all.  When it comes down to it, I still feel like what men appreciate about me is how I look, not who I am and this continually frustrates me.  I don’t mean to be cocky, and I completely realize that other problems are much much harder to deal with, but one really wins.   I mean, why should I need to justify myself? Why is necessary to be a complete perfectionist in order to be both attractive and sexual and an intellectual?  And as I write this out, it feels like such a generic, universal complaint…

A quick post, while I’m traveling:

I’ve now passed three separate chain bookstores in the Toronto airport which have, in their magazine stands, sections labeled “Women’s Interest”. One opposes this with “General Interest” (a particularly disconcerting dichotomy, as it implies that women are a separate subset from “people” rather than a part of it), and the other two with “Men’s Interest”, which is at least an understandable contrast to make. There are, after all, magazines intended explicitly for women– Women’s Day, etc– and magazines intended explicitly for men– GQ, etc. What boggles my mind is the fact that magazines like Wired, Laptop, and Car and Driver all wound up in the Men’s Interest section, while the Women’s Interest section included only magazines like Good Housekeeping, Martha, Lucky, and other cooking, shopping, or housekeeping-related magazines. I don’t think Wired; even has a disproportionately male audience– do bookstore employees really think that technology interests men so much more than women that they’re willing to risk alienating potential buyers? I feel like I should grab a copy just out of protest.

I came across a very interesting interview with Will Wright in Popular Science today, dealing with his upcoming game Spore. The game, which has gotten quite a bit of press during the development stages, has a fascinating concept— you manipulate an organism from the earliest stages of its evolutionary history to the highest levels of space-based civilization. In the middle of this otherwise-excellent interview, though, the following exchange appears:

The Sims experiences have appealed strongly to a female contingent, more so than pretty much anything else. Do you think this is going to have that same appeal, or is this a more masculine game? It felt that way to me.

When you look at the theme of it it at first might seem kind of science-y. But the approach we’ve taken is to be very playful with the entire universe. A good example of that is the creatures. And in fact we found that with The Sims even, what women especially seemed to enjoy was the creative aspects of it, being able to make things that were theirs, then being able to share them and build stories around them, et cetera. I think the creature editor just by itself is going to have a huge appeal to female players as an aesthetic artistic expression of what they want to do. The fact that they can make something very elaborate in the game and then show it to other people and trade it with everybody, and in fact trading it is like automatic now, whereas before you’d have to put it up on a web site and the other people would come and download it and put it in the right folder and all this, now it will just be totally automatic. And anybody else playing the game might come across the cool creature you made and be able to bookmark you, get more stuff from you and give you positive feedback about what you created. So I think Spore is going to feel like a much more elaborate creative palette than The Sims did, and it’s a matter of making the environment of creatures and evolution and traveling in space not seem off-putting or too science-y but make it feel like a very natural narrative environment, where I naturally want to tell a story in these worlds. Because I think the storytelling is the other important aspect. Once I make stuff in the game, I want to now use that stuff to basically play out a story, and then share that story with other people.

Right. Because we need to gender our video games, lest some poor man be feminized by a girly-game mistakenly chosen off the store shelves, or some woman become too butch from her experience with games meant for real men. And after all, everybody knows women avoid “science-y” stufff like the plague, so we better try to emphasize aesthetics instead and downplay any science content. Men like science and strategy, but women like aesthetics and community-building trading. Duh, kids.

Sarcasm aside, it’s incredibly frustrating to see this kind of thinking emphasized over and over again, even outside of the usual gaming community. Beyond the obvious insult in Wright’s implication that the game might seem too “science-y” for women^[1] and the ridiculous pandering to gender stereotypes, this encourages people to judge games based on their gendered qualities rather than any concrete aspect of gameplay and content.

Wright makes some interesting points— the sharing and storytelling aspects of The Sims were innovative new elements, and probably did draw new players or player demographics to the game, as did the game’s ability to be customized. It sounds like Spore will emphasize those possibilities— as well as the organic, open-ended gameplay that contributed so heavily to The Sims’s popularity— and draw even more players who might have been put off by more common RPG or FPS tropes in the gaming world. The creature-creation engine in Spore (which Wright has called “Maya for 10-year-olds”) sounds like a fantastic leap in in-game character design systems. Why do any of these elements need to be gendered, though?

It’s not just offensive to gender these aspects of games— thus forcing gamers to deal with any attendant stereotypes— it’s also pretty stupid marketing practice. You’re sure to alienate someone by forcing a whole section of your gameplay into a gendered box, whether it’s those who thought they’d enjoy the gameplay but now are worried they’re the wrong gender for it, or those who are just irritated by the whole damn idea.

[1] And could he possibly make it any more insulting than by adding a diminutive “y” to the word? Back to where you were.

I’ve found another quote which supports my belief that we need, require, to establish some kind of a women’s history, one which more aptly and accurately speaks of women’s experience. Since this is, after all, a blog, I am entirely allowed to foist it upon the Dear Readers.

Women are different from men, both in the roles they have been assigned or have assumed historically and in their biological make-up. History, in short, affects them differently from men, just as they affect history differently. Their past cannot be subsumed under the history of men. What we need to recognize is not that women and men are the same — as certain political and polemical goals might suggest — but that they are different. For it is that difference that justifies, indeed requires, a history of women. (C.N. Degler, Is there a History of Women?, Oxford Inaugural Lecture, 14 March 1974)

I have often wondered whether this opinion of mine puts me too far into the binary-gender trap, whether in it lurks a continuing assumption that people will and do always fall into these two categories of “man” and “woman,” however culturally constructed they are. The idea that it does bothers me. But then I consider what he is saying. Women and men are not the same. They are two categories, like “servant” and “master,” which are largely socially constructed (I hold that I can perform masculine gender well enough to pass, despite my double X chromosomes, and therefore phenomenologically become a man; so as far as that goes I insist on sticking with “socially constructed” for gender). That does not mean that we cannot write a People’s History of This-And-Such — a Servant’s History of This-And-Such — a Woman’s History of This-And-Such. The fact that the category is socially constructed does not destroy it as a category, not historically and not today.

The fact is that people find the categories of “woman” and “man” comforting, on the whole. I often actively attempt to present as feminine. I like being thought of as feminine. I know how to behave that way, how to interact socially from a feminine perspective. I get discombobulated and uncomfortable when others treat me as more masculine than I think I am. So I continue to present a gender, despite my distrust of the gender binary. Most people do. And that means that a Woman’s History of Thus-And-So would actually be liberating, good for me and for everyone who doesn’t wish to firmly entrench themselves in the “masculine” camp, even those who choose not to perform gender as I do.

The gender binary got us here and damn it, it’s gonna be with us for a while. We might as well accept that.

Via American Prospect: Barry Gewen, preview editor for the New York Times Book Review, said that the reason there are so few women reviewers is that apparently women are unable to write for general audiences on certain topics—military history is one that Gewen gave, but I suspect there existed latent and unspoken others in his mind. The Harvard Crimson has an article about the lecture in which Gewen said this (it took place at Radcliffe). Money quote:

A longtime editor at The New York Times Book Review said yesterday that his publication isn’t “doing the outreach they should” in order to recruit more women and minorities to the staff.

But preview editor Barry Gewen, who gave a talk at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, said he didn’t want to pursue potential staffers strictly for diversity’s sake.

“Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish,” Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.

Gewen has since apologized for these unfortunate comments and described it as a “Larry Summers moment”. What is amazing me, however, is not that he said it at all, but that someone in his position might still be clinging, however tenuously, to the silly and outdated notion that particular people simply can’t reach general audiences because of their identities. Do men really have nothing to learn from a woman author? Or vice versa? Or white people from black authors? What is a “general audience” anyway?

Frequently, when this kind of disgraceful statement is made, there’s a lot of furious backpedaling and “I didn’t mean it” and “I was taken out of context”. If that happens in this case—as it seems to be doing—it will represent yet another instance of a man in a position of intellectual power trying to protect that power from the evil interlopers that are somehow Not Like Him. This is, of course, morally and ethically reprehensible. Write to the NYTRB and demand that they disassociate themselves from Gewen’s remarks. Or better yet—especially if you’re a woman—become a book reviewer and write about military history. I bet there’s a general audience out there who’d love to read your perspective. You could make millions!