When it comes to the magazine business, why is Harper's so bizarre about women writers?

February 23, 2007

I do not like the new editor of Harper's magazine and he does not like me, something we have made clear to each other via e-mail.

He does not like me because I am an angry female subscriber.

I do not like him because he does not like angry female subscribers.

I also dislike him because he is a Tennessee-educated insular boor who has made this well-intentioned American magazine even more boring than it used to be, which is a trick and a half. Read it nowadays and sink into an ennui with knobs on. My other problem with Roger D. Hodge is that he's not an inch as bright as former editor Lewis Lapham. If Hodge had another brain, he'd have just the one. Plus, his magazine radiates misogyny. Only an editor with a mission to fail would be so insulting to the women who are a third of his subscribers.

Women writers have for years been vanishing from American magazines (pleasingly, this is less true of Canadian magazines). It's odd to flip through a magazine passing itself off as general interest and see only male bylines. I don't like single-sex publications, especially when they pretend to be otherwise, as Harper's does. Single-sex institutions seem retrograde and creepy in 2007, like Grade 9 gym class, or women's book clubs that end in bickering, or pale sweaty men not eying each other's genitals in the locker room.

Women like men who like women. Men like women who like men. Unfortunately, fair-minded people don't run the world.

Last year, an American website, www.WomenTK.com, began tracking the ratio of male to female writers in Harper's, The Atlantic, The NYT Magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Arguably, the ratio should be more or less one to one because that's what life is like. As it turned out:

• Vanity Fair 2.7:1.
• The New Yorker 4.1:1.
• The Atlantic 3.6:1.
• Harper's 6.9:1 (118 male bylines, only 17 female). Fully six of its 12 issues from September '05 to August '06 had one or no female writers.

The numbers, as Ruth Davis Konigsberg of WomenTK writes, prove Ursula K. Le Guin's remark that "when women speak more than 30 per cent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation."

Blogger Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives.com wrote scathingly in 2002 (so no change there then) of the catastrophically single-sex New Yorker. He then reported that women and men had reacted in different ways. Women wrote to thank him for noticing what they had seen for years. Men became angry and defensive. "Hey, The Atlantic is just as bad!" they'd say. There were other excuses. Shouldn't it come down to the best writing, male editors would ask. Yes, wrote Johnson, but why should 80% of the best writing be male?

Weirdly, five years later, Hodge says the same thing. When I emailed him this week to ask him how the March issue of Harper's came to be all-male, he said a number of things in response to my "intemperate" letter. (What nonsense. My letter positively seethed and rightly so.) "In fairness," he wrote, "you have to admit that the days when Harper's would go months without a female contributor have been over for a long time." Hodge is utterly wrong, as the figures show.

He then described how he edits. "I had plenty of pieces by women on hand, in various states in the editorial process, but most of them didn't quite fit together thematically. I did have one originally scheduled for the March issue but we had to hold it for one reason or another, completely unrelated to the fact that she can give birth."

What an extraordinary way to describe the postponement — purely by chance — of all extant pieces by prominent, professional women writers, and then make a weird reference to childbirth. I don't know if this last writer unfortunate enough to have Hodge for an editor is fertile. I guess he takes notice of things like that in his freelancers.

And then we come to the crucial bit. "You don't read Harper's because of the sex or race or the regional background or ethnicity of the contributors." That's what women are to Hodge. We are a minority group, even though we are half the human population. The fact that we make most household purchasing decisions or that more women read magazines than men means nothing. Just another pushy interest group of three billion.

Thanks to the internet, magazines have to work harder for readers now. I read Salon.com daily and I adore New York Magazine's online Daily Intelligencer for its wit and slouching, self-ridiculing attitude. Harper's I feel sorry for, but that's because I loved it for so long.

Never buy things out of pity. I say this knowing I will continue to buy things out of pity.

Decades ago, Harper's was great. But then so was Rolling Stone and so were a lot of things that are now a lurking pale shadow. Now it is humorless and unrelentingly grim. It's an Ambien, a rock dropping in the water without ripples, a dead hand.

But the magazine sends pleading letters about the lack of intelligent commentary in a pop culture world, so I subscribe for three more years, and then I discover that the editor does not like me and my type. You know, the birth-givers.

Then the PR person at Harper's helpfully e-mails me its circulation figures, which are astounding and sad. This supposedly influential magazine sells 231,000 copies (including to a substantial group of Canadian readers) in a nation of 300 million people. It reaches only .076% of the U.S. population. Hodge doesn't mind alienating female readers because the magazine, owned by the MacArthur Foundation, doesn't have to scramble for profit anyway.

For once I do see the purpose and power of "market forces." If it weren't for the owners, Harper's would go under.

I'm a woman. I wouldn't miss it and apparently, they wouldn't miss me. Was that intemperate of me to say?