The University of East Anglia has just announced the line up for its Autumn Literary Festival. And guess what?
Yep – Seven men, and just two women:
Here’s the list: Wilbur Smith; Gail Jones; David Lodge; Evan Davis; Richard Dawkins; Jeffrey Eugenides; Antony Beevor; Antonia Fraser, and Alan Hollinghurst.
Obviously I’ll be going to hear what Dawkins has to say. Or then again, maybe not.
Anyway, speaking of the disproportionate attention paid to/representation of men in the media, blokeosphere, cyber/digital world, literary world, the whole wide fucking world and universe – I know I’m a bit late with this, but did anyone go to this very important training seminar earlier this year: How to Deal With Bloggers? Featuring (wait for it) an all male cast of very very important and influential political bloggers: Iain Dale; Harry Cole; Laurence Durnan; Phil Hendren; Sunny Hundal, and Shane Greer…
Too Much To Say For Myself 
One of the things I find interestin is that these marginalisations are often in the highbrow world. The reviewtocrats and the commentalists, cementing their right to tell the rest of us what to think with a mix of sell-out sychophancy and gatekeeping. In part of my world, riddled with predation as it is, access is far less circumscribed based on any demography. But you guard your own borders. Feel victimised? Defend your rights. Inappropriate contact? Smack that hand. Witness hate? Call it out. It’s the ettiquette of institutionalised experts that militates against true representation on panels of agenda-setters. I’d prefer to aspire to alternatives than membership of collegiate cabals.
And yet girls outperformed the boys yet again in the latest GCSE results. One might just suppose that males have been artificially big-noting how much smarter they are supposed to be for all these years?
Or maybe men are just more existentially driven — practically all male mammals are ‘showier’ and more flamboyant in action than their female counterpart. That doesn’t make women less intelligent, but simply less driven to draw such attention to self in public arena.
We are different, that much is obvious. Even our blood chemistry demonstrates that 🙂
I would guess the lineup was determined by who is available. Or am I being naive?
Ben Jones, I can’t believe you’d fall for that one. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Male dominated is male dominated. It’s deliberate, and it’s consistent. Don’t be conned.
That’s terrible … there should be an equal number of men and women on the nine person line up.
And if we did it by male math — it would be 5 men and 4 women to make up the equal panel 🙂
I was thinking of 4 males, 4 females and one of transgender.
And I’d bet the male dominated establishment would put a MtF on the panel… because even born men in dresses outrank born women. BTW, I have never in my life seen men get explosively angry over zero representation of women on panel discussions. They never see the rank injustice of this, and never put their careers on the line to change it. Men just sit there and keep the patriarchal machine going. I’d say reparations are in order, and for the next 100 years we have all women panels everywhere.