Nobel laureate, Sir V. S. Naipul, made news last week when he unabashedly opined that no female author was equal to him, and that female writers, collectively, wrote badly. “Women writers are different,” he claimed, because of their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world.”
I envisioned, the moment I read this, indignation—palpable and manic like a hemmed in frog—bouncing off countless women’s skins. I saw these women pounding their keyboards, writing irascible comments on blogs, web sites, twitter, facebook, or anywhere else they could spew their outrage against the revolting statements made by this “abominable” man.
Indeed, nearly every online newspaper that covered this story was inundated with furious, passionate comments, mostly from women. To these women, it didn’t matter that they themselves weren’t writers; they felt personally insulted, regardless. And added to the pain of the insult itself was the anger that the criticism was unjustified. One only had to read the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood (to name just a smattering of modern day female fiction writers) to know how absurdly baseless Naipul’s remarks are.
