The master had said, 'You are ugly people.' They had looked about themselves saw nothing to contradict the statement saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. 'It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. All of this is terribly uninteresting isn't it? This tradition of belittling the female voice which speaks of personal sexual gratification, love, marriage, and childbirth, of the tyranny of beauty that forces her to adhere desperately to some predetermined standard of physical perfection - the right angle to her cheekbones, the right slope to her nose, the right lushness to her eyelashes, the right curve to her hips, the right skin color to match her hair and her eyes. It is this spirited tolerance for continued ignorance and apathy that infuriates me so. He is only a minuscule part of the universal malady afflicting our collective psyche. It's not that particular guy I am mad at. In retrospect, when I dwell on the memory of this horrendous, very real conversation, I experience a crushing hopelessness. A wholly unabashed, flat out declaration made with the confident, self-righteous air of a reader who knows what good reading should consist of and, when it comes to that, exclude. Not even a half-hearted attempt at rescuing an uncomfortable situation. I didn't have the heart to ask him why a second time.Īnd there it sat between us, this knowledge of his disdain for women writers (for some hitherto unknown reason), like a breathing, venom-spitting, invisible monster quietly killing our conversation (thankfully!).

On prodding him for the reason behind his 'disinterest', he replied that 'books written by women just do not engage' him. Just a few days ago I happened to have a conversation with someone (quite a 'well-read' person too) who said quite casually, almost in an offhand manner, how he found books written by women 'uninteresting'.

The bluest eye pages