Last night I watched Margaret Cho's "Revolution" for the first time. (A must-see along with "I'm the One that I Want"). She does a piece about confronting a fellow driver in L.A. whose car boasts a bumper sticker proclaiming, "This car was made with tools not chopsticks." Margaret pulls up alongside the other car and just screams at the driver. "Aaaaaaaah!" The scream goes on and on, until, Margaret says, the other driver was forced to take a left turn against the light just to get away from her.
"I don't want to rise above," says Margaret. "I want to sink down to their level."
This is by way of introduction to how I'm feeling this morning reading the list of winners for this year's Pulitzer Prizes in Letters, Drama, and Music. Being of the literary ilk, I look forward to such announcements. But, AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH, there are 0, zero, zilch, no, none, zippo female artists, writers, poets in the winning roster. NONE. In fact, only one woman even made it into the finalist list, Ellen Bryant Voight in poetry (Go Ellen!)
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!
You'd think my namesake, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, had never picked up pens OVER 200 YEARS AGO!
This sort of heinous and obvious sexism in a supposedly post-feminist world does not inspire me to rise above. It makes me want to sink down to their level and found women-only Pulitzer, National Book Award, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, Nobel Prize, etc., and give out awards until we've honored so many women that we have at long last given MORE awards to women than men. I'm sure this will take us until the year 2500. Or perhaps 3000. Then and only then will we consider giving men any awards, and then, only if they write about topics of interest to and/or involving women.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment