Brief comments on the uproar over Publisher’s Weekly’s all-male Top 10 Books of 2009, posted at Meggy Wang and Jenny Zhang’s fashion blog Fashion for Writers. Quoting myself:
—Nov 25, 2009Not enough weight is being given to this acknowledgment that taste is subjective, and that list-making, as an unnuanced and inherently exclusionary form (not enough women! Not enough minorities! Not enough genre fiction! Not enough poetry! Not enough translations! Not enough small press! Not enough criticism! Not enough science writing!), is incredibly subjective. Those who are in charge of giving out the award aren’t under any obligation to dole it out in any way that anyone considers fair, and the writer of this article herself admits that “best” is deeply subjective, so I wonder why anyone should be so surprised that subjectivity would carry with it the deep gender bias that you can practically inhale whenever you open a window. Wherever it is that artistic taste emerges from, it sure isn’t the spirit of fairness.