I have read Susan Faludi’s Backlash. It took me three tries, but I finally got through it, and only because I brought with me on my forty-minute subway commute each morning so that I would have no choice but to read it, and even then I kept sneaking longing glances at the books and newspapers of other straphangers, not to mention the oh-so-well-written laser surgery ads. I had the same problem with Gloria Steinem. I stood in line for forty-five minutes to get my copies of Revolution From Within signed, and I gave my mom a copy for Mother’s Day one year and kept the other for myself, and every time I saw it on my “To Read” shelf, moldering away unread next to a bunch of other books I felt I “should” read, I felt guilty, but I had a feeling that I’d get more enjoyment out of a racing form. Sure enough, like Faludi, Steinem had to compete with Dr. Zizmor’s amazing fruit-peel acne cure for my attention on the train (at least I entertained my fellow passengers by rolling my eyes and muttering “give me a break, Gloria” at various squishy assertions of Steinem’s – for instance, when she remarked that learning historical names and dates marginalizes women’s ways of learning). I read these books because, as a woman, I felt obligated to find out what they contained – a totally wrongheaded reason to read anything, I see now, and an example of the very lockstep mentality that tends to define “feminist writings,” not least the penchant to insert the qualifying phrase “as a woman” into every declarative sentence. Steinem’s brand of feminist proselytizing strongly implies that women haven’t achieved all they could, or should, in various fields because the so-called phallocentric standards by which our society measures achievement don’t recognize women’s strengths. In other words, by and large, women can’t succeed on their own, so we should change our collective definition of “success” to fit what women can do – a sadly condescending idea to run across in a book ostensibly devoted to women’s self-esteem, and one that I have absolutely no use for.

I have little use for most of the things in our culture that define themselves as “for women” or “gynocentric” or what have you. Take the Lifetime Channel as a particularly cloying example – “television for women”? What does that mean, exactly? On a practical level, it means hour after hour of watching Nancy McKeon get pounded by the male co-star du jour, but it seems to me that if a woman has a television set, and she turns it on to watch a show – presto, television for women. It also seems to me that, if the female acts on the Lilith Fair tour wanted to get themselves a billing with one of the big rock tours, said female acts would play rock music. I like folk music as much as the next girl, but Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls do not belong at OzzFest, and they know it as well as anyone. I grew up thinking that, if a woman wanted respect, she had to do what she did well – not just “she rocks pretty hard, for a chick,” but “she rocks,” period – and she had to earn that respect as an artist (or an engineer or an executive or whatever), and not as a female artist or a female engineer or a female executive, and if anyone tried to get in her way because she had ovaries, she retained the right to crack some heads, but otherwise she should just concentrate on doing her thing.

The women writers that I like best don’t necessarily confine themselves to the female experience or identify themselves primarily as women writers, and even if they do, I can live with it, because the writers do their jobs so well. These writers tell compelling stories about recognizably human heroines, characters who resonate with me, not just because of my experiences as a woman (darn that pesky phrase) but because of my experiences as a person. I read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school, at the time when a young woman first begins to realize that the rest of the world makes certain assumptions about her based on her gender, and I became properly enraged by the misogynist dystopia Margaret Atwood presented, and then I began methodically reading everything else Atwood had ever written. When I got to Cat’s Eye, I wondered if Atwood had read my diary as research; she delivered a note-perfect rendition of the way little girls bully each other, that peculiar intimidation that has almost nothing to do with leveraging superior physical strength and almost everything to do with finding and exploiting emotional insecurities. All of Atwood’s writing, about men or women or children or grown-ups, reflects the trying nature of the average day and the absurd imperfections of loved ones.

Susanna Moore has a similar knack for portraying the frustration caused by other people. Her characters get themselves into ugly situations, look around and wonder how they got there, and then shrug and get themselves in a little deeper just to see where things lead, and I always look forward to finding out what happens to them next even as I cringe and say to the page, “Oh, don’t do that,” probably because I’ve gotten myself into more than a few stupid predicaments by rationalizing that they’ll make good stories someday. In The Cut got a decent amount of press when it came out for its graphic depiction of sex, but to her credit, Moore nails the sex scenes to the wall (and they actually belong in the story). Moore nails all the scenes to the wall, in fact, eroticizing danger while acknowledging the clichÈs built into such a story. The protagonist knows she should run in the other direction, but she can’t help herself, and anyone who ever got herself tangled up with a “bad boy” will empathize. In an earlier book, The Whiteness Of Bones, the heroine, Mamie, suffers from a similar sense of dislocation, seeming to let her life lead her instead of the other way around; she lives in the shadow of her fearless sister Claire, but not unhappily. The same passiveness that infuriates me so much in Joyce Carol Oates’s writing becomes sympathetic in Moore’s writing.

A friend sent me Jen Banbury’s Like A Hole In The Head because, like the heroine, I worked in a bookstore at the time. I liked the parts about rare books, but I especially liked the heroine, because she reminded me of me – she drinks too much once in a while, she gets her knickers in a twist about boys that don’t merit a second glance, and she sticks her nose in where it doesn’t belong. Part mystery, part day-in-the-life, the book chronicles the adventures of Jill, whom the book jacket describes as “a part-time bookseller and a full-time wise-ass.” Need I say more? I liked Bridget Jones’s Diary for the same reasons. The happy ending I could have done without, but Bridget’s alternating periods of delirium and depression, punctuated by self-destructive bouts of smoking and chocolate, sounded awfully familiar. And I’ve read Tama Janowitz’s account of the resident freaks in Slaves Of New York about a hundred times, and while Eleanor’s resigned grousing about her boyfriend still gives me a giggle (not to mention “You And The Boss,” a short-fiction classic that I suggest you read with all due haste, if only for the line about Springsteen restoring to New Jersey its glory as a proud state), I relate to it on the good-grief-why-the-hell-do-I-live-in-New-York-City level, too.

I read the authors above – and Lillian Hellman, and E. Annie Proulx, and Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion, even though Didion’s writing usually makes me want to crawl into bed and drink martinis until I feel less discouraged by other human beings – because they write really well, not because I feel some sort of misguided need to support the sisterhood. Most of them have a few piquant things to say about life as lived in a bra, or about men, but only incidentally, and I admire them as writers first and women second. These writers, and the women they write about, do their own thing and don’t think the world owes them a favor, and I don’t want to minimize Gloria Steinem’s accomplishments, but I’d rather read Bust than Ms. any day of the week.

Stay tuned for The Canon According To Tomato Nation

Wing Chun has a few things to say about Lilith Fair.

Another “give me a break, Gloria” moment.

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