By K. A. Laity
Because women don't write anything important, right?
Shocking revelations this week—or at least that's how it was presented. WNEP in Snyder Country, Pennsylvania ran a story with the deliberately provocative headline, "Parents: English Teacher Writes Racy Novels" as a way to manufacture controversy. Like the Simpsons' Helen Lovejoy shrieking, "Won't somebody please think of the children?" the local news station began their "news" story with the following slut-shaming gasp:
A series of racy romance novels by an author named Judy Mays are a little too racy for some parents in our area, especially now that they have discovered the woman known as Judy Mays is teaching their children.
You can hear the ominous chords that accompany such a declaration as "the woman known as" which has the familiar ring of a true crime show. And how did those parents "discover" this fact? By having the news station contact them and tell them so? The rhetoric of this piece makes plain their attempt to shame the author with insinuations and comments like, "A photograph of Buranich matches a YouTube interview in which she talks about her novels." At the top of the piece appears her teacher photo next to a slightly blurry screen capture from the video. One parent said, "The evidence is clear...I think she needs to make a decision as to what she wants to do. Either be a school teacher or author."
Evidence? What crime is she supposed to have committed? Writing and publishing books—who'd have imagined an English teacher might write books?! Shock, horror. Are all other teachers also required to abstain from having or mentioning sex? It might be dismissed as Puritanism gone mad in a cultural backwater, but it's part of a larger phenomenon.
Feminist scholar and author Joanna Russ, who just passed away this week, wrote an insightful study How to Suppress Women's Writing. In it she suggests that outright prohibition would never work because that only spurs rebellion, but if you want to suppress women's (or any other "undesirable" group's) literature, the thing to do is "develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works."
This is precisely what's being done to Judy Mays. It's the same kind of phenomenon that Jennifer Weiner tried to highlight with the "Franzenfreude" meme and the same thing that makes sure that self-promoting blowhard males get more attention than anyone else (including males who find it unappealing to be self-promoting blow-hards). It's why the mere mention of the romance genre provokes snickers (unless you're Nicholas Sparks who does not write romance novels) and why films that have women as the main attraction are dismissed as "chick flicks" while Movies Without Women are just called movies.
Joanna Russ, why did you leave us so soon?
K. A. Laity writes so much that she had to create some pseudonyms to keep her colleagues from thoughts of murder. A tenured medievalist at a small liberal arts college, she mostly tries to find ways to avoid meetings in order to write more . Find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter where she shamelessly self-promotes albeit in a dignified and tasteful manner.