Suppose you read this from a professor of literature:
I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.
Bolds are mine.
What would your reaction be? If you were told that this was said in 2013 and is actually happening in Canada, where the person speaking there, David Gilmour, teaches short stories at the University of Toronto.
My reaction was an odd one. The usual pain in always being regarded as the other, the usual notice of the idea that something like "real guy-guys" is a valid literary genre to teach, and the usual observation that this is a Catch-22 problem for women writers, because they cannot become "serious heterosexual guys" in David Gilmour's world and therefore can never become writers worth covering. Except for Virginia Woolf, the usual honorary gentleman.
Gilmour's principles are at least partly gender-essentialist. More precisely, he likes great literature which approaches pornography, and that's why he likes Henry Miller whose books are pretty much built on misogyny, I think:
I teach Tropic of Cancer to the first-year class. They’re shocked out of their pants. No one teaches it except for me. Sometimes their parents actually question me about it, they say, Listen, this is really outrageous. I say, well, it’s a piece of literature that’s been around for 60 years. It’s got something going for it.
There’s an even dirtier one that I teach, by Philip Roth, called The Dying Animal. I save it ’til the very end of the year because by that point they’ve got fairly strong stomachs, and they’re far more sophisticated than they are in the beginning. So they can understand the differences between pornography and great literature. There are men eating menstrual pads, and by the time my students get to that they’re ready.