Some of you may have noticed that VP candidate Paul Ryan is taking a lot of media flak for his ill-fitting suits. I think that’s great. Not because I’m promoting eye-for-eye equal opportunity objectification of men to avenge the sexism women in the public eye endure, but because image matters and analyzing image is what I do. I appreciate watching others do it well.
Here is an article about Paul Ryan’s big, floppy suits. Funny. This is a terrific article by Isabel Wilkinson in The Daily Beast about the fit of Ryan’s clothes. The quotes are an education in and of themselves.
Getty Images.
Ours is a legitimate inquiry here, Pigeons. That’s why I was so sorry to see Sarah Sentilles curry sympathy in her recent article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, “The Pen Is Mightier: Sexist Responses to Women Writing About Religion” by reducing my thoughtful critique of her author photo for A Church of Her Own to a petty take-down of her plunging neckline and “too trendy necklace.” Here is what Sentilles writes in entirety,
One blogger dedicated an entire post about my second book, A Church Of Her Own, to analyzing my author photo
.
Yes, I dedicated an entire post because this blog is dedicated entirely to issues of image and presentation.
My neckline was too plunging, she wrote, my necklace too trendy.
My full article is here. I find it ironic and disingenous for a woman writing about sexist responses to women’s work to willfully misrepresent and diminish the work of another woman writer in order to make her point. Anyone reading her article would assume that my remarks were made within the context of a literary review. But that’s not what I write about, and if Ms. Sentilles wanted to critique my blog she should have put it in an accurate context.
Sentilles’ article is here. I am sorry to say that I find it poorly argued (her main point is that we should read women authors because they suffer sexist reviews, or their works are ignored or underrepresented by literary critics — her appraisal of literary merit seems to begin and end with, “if it was written by a woman, it has merit. If you don’t see the merit, you’re sexist”), defensive and petulant in tone. I do not think interjections of “Ha!” belong in a scholarly journal, which is the editor’s poor choice, but I do find it fascinating that my reading of Ms. Sentilles’ image as someone who is not sure of her boundaries and authority as a religious voice was so consistent with this article.
Yes, Paul Ryan’s suits look too baggy. Now on to the more important part for me. I read both what you wrote originally about Sarah Sentilles and her rebuttal of sorts. I kept wondering what her point was. I believe that you are correct…she wants women to read more female authors so that they get more ‘clicks’ so to speak through more book sales. It did seem to be a bit rambling and could have been more concise. Well, that’s my opinion for what it is worth. She did seem to forget that you focus on what we should wear as professional women who are out and about in a sometimes hostile world.
I think Ryan’s aw-shucks look is intentional.
Now that I’ve sat with this a little bit….I wonder, even though he works-out almost obsessively, whether Paul Ryan truly feels comfortable in his body. There is no excuse for his pants to look like that on him.
Was he a fat kid growing up? Because his clothes exhibit classic fat-kid-gets-skinny-but-still-sees-fat-kid-in-the-mirror syndrome.
That’s it for now.
I’m with the Rev. Dr. on this one. I think he deliberately does it so that he looks like a basically harmless kid instead of what he really is – a machismo filled threat to women and men who care about them.
Thanks for the pointer to the Sarah Sentilles article, which caused me to look back at my own review of her first book. ( http://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Sarah%20Sentillesk)
I don’t think I called her stupid, but I stand by my implication that she was naive, and a little foolish, at the time in her life she was writing about; I think I’d have said the same about a man who told the same story. She tells us that, after school and before the ordination process gathered steam, she got into a parish where Ministry was needed, and tried to give them Theology instead; and then was surprised when they resisted. Theology and Ministry have their areas of overlap, or so I hope, but they are surely distinguishable. Was it not a little foolish to be surprised and resentful when the good folks at St. Anne’s by the Soccer Fields wanted less talk about Jacques Derrida, and more about who’s bringing the coffee cake, and what we’re going to do about Mrs. Hooper’s broken hip? I’m not saying she’s not smart, but even now, she doesn’t quite hear how she sounds.
And with all due respect to Mary Daly and other genuine heroes of feminist theology, I think Sentilles makes her present case foolishly as well. If the problem is people not reading women writers Because They Are Women, how much of an advance is it to read them Because They Are Women? It’s a temporary expedient at best.
Dorothy Sayers, Marilynne Robinson, Anne Lamott, Kathleen Norris, Nora Gallagher, Winifred Gallagher, and Kate Braestrup all write as women, because they are women, but I’d say they steer clear of writing as Women. In the promo piece you responded to, how absurd was it to call Sentilles’ work ‘the first real portrait of what it’s like to lead as a woman of faith today,’ as though Barbara Brown Taylor had never published a word? Or V. Weinstein, for that matter?
Oh well–perhaps there are definitions at work that I don’t know anything about. Cheers, all.
[Thank you for this. Much appreciated. – PB]