Meghan O’Rourke (who has problems the presumably unrelated P.J. doesn’t) writes:
Before the advent of blind auditions, fewer than 5 percent of the players in major American symphonies were women. But after blind auditions began to be held, the percentage of female players soared almost tenfold.
(…)
It’s really, really hard to write a book. It takes a lot of time and solitude. In my experience, women are not as good at insisting they need that time and solitude.
(I wonder how many female writers have, like me, sometimes wished they were a man so everyone—family, friends, partners—would understand a little better when they go in the room and shut the door for weeks on end.)
Are male novelists given cred for fetishizing comic books and Star Wars, one acquaintance recently asked, while female writers hide away their girlhood preoccupations with Anne of Green Gables and palominos? (…)When a female colleague and I were trying to come up with a list of candidates to interview for Open Book, a Slate V interview series with writers, our first list was almost entirely male. (Interestingly, no male writer turned us definitively down, but several female writers did, at least one on the grounds that it was too stressful to be on camera.)
There’s the provocative female writer who was asked if she had an eating disorder because she is naturally skinny, and whom reporters badgered for information about the number of men she’d slept with. (…)
There’s the author who sent out a proposal about John Lennon and learned that editors worried readers might not believe a woman could write with authority about a musician.
