So I was reading the New Yorker profile on Sarah Silverman (not a pop-culture post! I promise!), in which Dana Goodyear opens its meditation on women in the industry with this line:
“Comedy is probably the last remaining branch of the arts whose suitability for women is still openly discussed.”
I’m sure there are plenty of women who could come up with examples besides standup–Ginmar, most notably.
I take art classes whenever I can fit them in. These openings are mainly restricted to evenings and weekends, which means I get a lot of continuing-education classmates: middle-aged people and retirees who want a new and interesting hobby. Maybe they’re just starting, maybe they’ve painted all their lives, and maybe they even attended art school at some point. It’s gratifying to paint with them. They love what they’re doing entirely for its own sake, and a lot of them have incredible patience. They’ve had decades to experiment with techniques and media. A lot of them are women–the stereotype of the old-lady watercolorist holds a kernel of truth, although there are certainly men in these classes.
Listening to them is a little bit like listening to my mom tell stories about what it was like to apply to grad school programs in the mid-sixties.
My last painting teacher told me that he abolished class critiques (we all take turns putting up work; everyone else takes turns telling us what they think; in night classes it’s mostly, “That persimmon looks kind of lonely all the way over there by himself…”) because a lot of the women would drop out rather than participate in them. He encountered women in his classes whose hands would shake whenever they picked up a paintbrush. All of them art-school dropouts, and all of them terrified of painting.
And he recalled art school as he experienced it, and completely understood why. It wasn’t just a boys’ club. It was the Citadel. The guys in the class would band together and completely savage the work of any female students. The professors–virtually all male–would most likely join in. The women would not be part of a pack at any point during the class critiques; they’d be alone, alone, alone, shut down as artists and shouted down as evaluators. And as he remembered it, the criticism that flooded over them was almost always more vicious and less constructive than what the men heard. A lot of these women would leave in one way or another; if they kept creating and attending, they would not draw primary support from that place.
Fast forward thirty years, and he’s teaching them watercolor.
I think his solution is not such a bad one. His students can still receive advice from him and from other students; he’s just opted out of the all-against-one format of the critiques, which can be overwhelming. And I’m glad that he understands the problem itself, and doesn’t dismiss their fear as trivial or stupid.
Although the women in my classes are perfectly functional painters, I do encounter a great deal more reflexive self-deprecation from them than from the guys. Since night classes are very relaxed, and since watercolor tends to involve intermissions while you wait for your last layer to dry, it’s common to wander around and look at everyone’s work.
When I compliment any given woman, the response is usually some variation on, “Thanks, but it’s not very good.” Since I started passing consistently, the response has started to include, “Yours is much better.” When I compliment any given guy, the response is usually some variation on, “Thanks! I’ve been experimenting with blah on the blah blah blah. I’m really happy with it too. This blah technique on the blah blah is frustrating.”
The guys are also much more likely to walk around and offer advice, sometimes more so than the professor: “You should try blah with the blah.” Or, “I like this, but it’s sort of blah over in the blah area.”
And during the critiques, when we have them, the women are much more likely to respond to any suggestion, no matter how stupid, extreme, or labor-intensive, with, “Yes, you’re right. I should try that.” The guys, on the other hand, tend to respond with either, “Nah,” or, “I already tried that, and it didn’t work.” They have a more durable sense of artistic self, and a much clearer idea of what they’re doing. The class is there to serve them. It’s enviable.
Some of my teachers have encouraged this dynamic. There’s a particular kind of male art professor. He’s progessive, kind, generous with his time and his advice, and entirely respectful towards every one of the women in his class…but. He loves the idea of himself as a mentor, and would very much like to forget that he’s teaching an afternoon class at a cultural center to a cohort who will spend the break talking about the cheese counter at Whole Foods. He talks constantly about the famous artists he’s known and the squalid New York apartments in which he’s lived; he rhapsodizes about the Impressionists and the time he spent in Paris. If he can, he will tell you what lavender in Provence really looks like (purple), and what Louise Nevelson is like in person (weird).
And he’s got himself a protegee who is always, always, always a guy. That guy is a personal friend. That guy talks to him before class and after class. That guy is going somewhere, even when he really isn’t. That guy receives the highest praise, even though that guy usually isn’t much better than the other students. That guy is an artist. The women next to him are just little old ladies with paint sets.