Eileen Myles goes beyond the pie charts

Poet, novelist, and former Harriet blogger Eileen Myles has posted a thorough response to the recent VIDA count for The Awl, and while she says that the results are not surprising, she chalks it up not to misogynist editors, but to the persistence of patriarchy. As she says, a mother and a country love a son. But the more striking aspect of the piece is her claim that most interesting poetry today is being written by women, because, she argues “female reality” is qualitatively different from “male reality,” insofar as it represents life that’s not bound up by dominant norms:

Female reality is not better. But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive so female reality always contains male and female. That seems interesting as hell so at the very least I think it’s a lot more interesting than a monotonous male reality. Which seems just sort of staid and old. Tapped out. Female reality (and this goes for all the “other” realities as well—queer, black, trans—everyone else) is more interesting because it is wider, more representative of humanity—it’s definitely more stylistically various because of all it has to carry and show. After all, style is practical. You do different things because you are different. Women are different. Maybe not the women who routinely get invited to take part in the men’s monolith. They are another item. But women as a class are different. That’s how I dispense with the quality question.

What's interesting here is the broader implication: is it possible that "female reality" is inassimilable to "male reality"—that there won't be an equal number of women published in the "male monolith" until the male monolith ceases to exist?