About men and women

I recently discovered this decade-old list of the greatest British novels, which is more interesting than most of its type for a couple of reasons. First, the critics who voted in the poll are all outside the UK, which may or may not explain some notable omissions (Elizabeth Gaskell, Martin Amis, John le Carre, Beryl Bainbridge, for example). But even more significant, of the top 10 books, six are by female authors, and Jane Austen – who would almost certainly have been at or near the top of a poll of UK critics – doesn’t figure among them, with Pride and Prejudice in 11th place. 

Yet that top 10, and indeed much of the list, adheres very much to the Eng Lit canon. No reactionary curmudgeon is going to grumble that George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or the Brontës were only crowbarred in there to appease the feminists. Even today it would be entirely plausible to concoct a Top 10 of painting or classical music and have it populated solely by the dreaded Dead White Men. An appearance by Artemisia Gentileschi or Lili Boulanger would provoke accusations of tokenism, of DEI. But Charlotte Brontë? Well of course she’s earned a place alongside Dickens. The canon says so. And the obvious question is, why is the literary canon, in English at least, so open to gender equality, when the other arts resist it? And we could also ask whether the resources and publicity chucked at, say, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, might more profitably be offered to female painters or composers.

And then I find this pair of lists, which shows the films that have the biggest disparity when it comes to votes cast by male and female users of IMDb. Now, some of these are what you might expect. Women favour Frozen, The Notebook and (here we go again) Pride and Prejudice. Men lean to Raging Bull and Platoon. But that’s not all. All the female-favoured films are in English and in colour; the vast majority were made after 2000. The male films are at once considerably more diverse in terms of where and when they come from, and at the same time include far more (Seven Samurai, M, Paths of Glory, Lawrence of Arabia, etc) that would show up on any self-respecting film studies syllabus. Do men have better taste? Or are women simply more honest about what they like? 

PS: Belatedly, the six British authors namechecked by Donald Trump at his recent state visit. Now obviously he didn’t choose those writers (Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Orwell, Lewis, Kipling) and I’d be astonished if he’d read a book by any of them, or indeed by anyone, ever. But was the fact that they’re all male a clumsy oversight by his scriptwriters, or a conscious assertion of his tiresome machismo?