It’s a man’s world out there.
A world of wannabe Hemingways and aspiring Gonzos. A world where a man can pretty much write whatever he wants as long as he has the balls to back it up and female writers can’t, even if they had balls the size of antarctica. Why? Let’s think about it for a while.
Some of the most successful writers and journalists throughout history have been men. Mainly because traditionally journalism (and to a certain extent writing) is a very male industry. It used to be a boys club filled with fuck-ups and alcoholics who spent a lot of their time finding (or making up stories) in the local bar.
It’s taken a while for women to break into the industry. Now they’re everywhere, clutching good grades from good universities, ambitiously grabbing every opportunity out there. But still competing in a biased environment.
In the end writing is all about confidence and believing in your own voice. Men with big egos are usually an accepted part of the media landscape, women with big egos get branded as bitches and will find a lot of obstacles in their way.
That’s why there needs to be more bitches in journalism. More women who dare to write what they think and never apologize, more women who dare to be mean if they have to, funny if they want to and completely nuts if that’s the way they are. There haven’t been any major shifts in journalistic writing for a while. Maybe the new Hunter S will be a woman?
There are and have been a lot of awesome female writers out there. And a lot of the times they’ve had a lot shit thrown at them. Here are a few you should check out.
For a long time she was only known as Ernest Hemingway’s girlfriend. But actually she’s one of the first female war correspondents and worked well up into her seventies covering conflicts all over the world. Her reportages from the second world war are among the best out there.
She traveled to Spain during the civil war with just a rucksack on her back and stayed when the bombs started falling over Madrid. For a long time she never really got any credit for what she was doing, even when her writing was better than her boyfriend’s.
Åsne is one of the more famous female journalists out there at the moment. In her early 30s the Norwegian started covering the war in Kosovo and Chechnya. At first she stuck to traditional reporting, then her huge break came with her novel The Bookseller of Kabul. For it Åsne spent three months living with a family in Kabul and writing about the experience. After becoming an international bestseller the book started getting criticized.
The bookseller Åsne had lived with accused her of libel and defamation and eventually went on to write his own book about the events. Other (male) journalists started accusing Åsne of having made up the story. She stuck by her book and it’s still selling well. Åsne has also received heaps of criticism for her war reporting from Iraq, which according to some male journalists was too soft and focused on human issues.
Sarah Lacy is one of the more well-known female tech writers out there. She’s written a book called Once Your Lucky, Twice Your Good about web 2.0, she also writes a bi-weekly column for BusinessWeek and regularly contributes to TechCrunch. However, she's also known for the "incident" at 2008 SXSWi festival where she interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and things went badly wrong. The crowd turned on Lacy and as an interviewer you really don’t want that to happening to you.
If you Google Sarah a there’s plenty of results just discussing the interview. Something is definitely wrong if a year on, that’s still what people remember her for. She gave this response after the interview and does what anyone used to taking a lot of bullshit would do and never acknowledged that anything had gone wrong, sort of like Gordon Brown. Sarah is probably the only person that knows if the incident had any real impact on her career.
However you can’t help but wonder if the reactions would have been different if a male journalist conducted the same kind of interview.
Image via Beta500