great editorial for Time by Jessica Winter. And I love the snub of Franzen:
Case No. 5: Novelist Jonathan FranzenThe Recap: His much-discussed recent New Yorker essay argued that novelist Edith Wharton is an unsympathetic figure due to her wealth, conservative political views and the fact that she “wasn’t pretty.” (She “might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”) Her unprettiness, according to Franzen, contributed to the sexual dysfunction of her marriage, while her success as a writer caused her husband’s mental illness and underscored her antipathy toward her own sex—her friendships with writers of similar stature such as Henry James and André Gide, Franzen says, showed that “she wanted to be with the men and to talk about the things men talked about.”
What We Learned: Plain girls aren’t good in bed; female success is a brain-eating virus; a (female) writer forging relationships with other (male) writers is a form of penis envy; Jonathan Franzen might not think you’re pretty.
So, Are Women People? Not quite—they’re objects with certain people-like traits.
