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I’m not interested in a literary fiction versus genre argument, because that argument is basically dead and lovingly illustrated by Edan Lepucki: literary fiction is a genre with its own rules and conventions just like any other genre. The overly-long title and adultery are litfic’s version of the YA love-triangle and chosen-one narrative.

But what I do want to do is use this example to talk about cis straight white guyness. For a long time, genre was genre and literary fiction was literature. It was the sort of neutral category. Hell, it basically is. Go to a bookstore. There’s the literature section, which takes up much of the store, and mystery and scifi and whatnot have their own little sections. But it’s changing. Surely but slowly, those lines are blurring and good. And all the better that we continue to define literary fiction as its own genre.

The problem that’s been bouncing around my head lately is how that’s a great analogy for what’s going on with social justice movements and discussions of privilege. For a long, long time now, we’ve had the privilege of our society treating us a neutral, as normal. Cis, straight, white, maleness is the literary fiction of culture. We’re just literature. Everyone else has been relegated to the sides of the store.

But now, people are actually starting to have conversations (and really, have been having these conversations for a long ass time, but some of us are just finally starting to listen) about the privilege we get from not being “genre.” Just as Lepucki outlined the conventions of litfic, the conventions of cis, straight, white, maleness are starting to be defined, outlined, discussed. And so far, the results have not been pretty.

Sure, there’s been some good rib-tickles, like Stuff White People Like, and we laugh. HAHA, I *do* like camping and Moleskines! But when men as a group are discussed, suddenly we have #notallmen belittling women’s lived experiences. We get GamerGaters doxxing and sending death and rape threats to women gamers, developers, and journalists. When discussing the very real danger black people face just leaving their houses, white people have to hedge the criticism of institutional racism with #alllivesmatter.

purpose (1)There’s a part in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions where Kilgore Trout goes into the bathroom and someone has written on the stall door, “What is the purpose of life?” And Trout writes underneath, “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator if the Universe, you fool.” Which has always invoked to me that I should be mindful about what I’m telling the Creator of the Universe. Because we are defining ourselves and the kind of world we live in every day with every decision. Every word, every action, every stupid, insensitive tweet, defines the Universe and tells the next humans in line what kind of a culture we have here.

So when I see cis people being shitty to the non-cis or gamer dudes threatening women, or white people shitting on black people for daring to speak out about how our culture has been shitting on them, I can’t help but think, “What the fuck are you doing? What are you telling the Universe?” Really? At a time when being white, being straight, being a man, is finally being defined in and of itself, and not generally accepted as neutral or normal, this, THIS is how you’re choosing to define yourself?

Listen up: we are not neutral anymore. We don’t get the best placement in the bookstore anymore. We’re sharing with genre now, and it’s about goddamn time. We were never special except by our own often violent insistence. Culture is renovating, redefining and we can help or we can see what’s left when all is said and done. Because if we don’t start defining ourselves now, in a positive way, in a way that doesn’t reinforce the imbalanced status quo, we’ll be left with the scraps.

So If you don’t want “white” to be synonymous with “racist” then do something to stop racism and stop making excuses for it. If you don’t want “male” to be synonymous with “sexism” then stop being sexist and stop making excuses for sexism. If you don’t want “straight” to be synonymous with “homophobic”. . . then start sharing your shelf space.

A few days ago K.T. Bradford wrote a piece for xojane challenging her readers to not read white, straight, cis male authors for a year, following a similar thread of such challenges to expand the diversity of voices in our reading lives.

Because traditional, mainstream publishing (and hell, even smaller-scale publishing as well) is heavily skewed toward the very demographic Bradford is asking us to avoid.

But I keep seeing people making the argument that the demographics of the writers shouldn’t matter, that we should merely judge the writing by the merits of the writing itself, that we’re “obsessing about authors” and  how it’s “pretty juvenile” to make “arbitrary assumptions about authorship.”

At first glance, I can see merit in this sort of divorce of the author from the text. It makes sense, right. Of course you can judge a book without its cover, without its context. After all, literary criticism has been doing that for years, the whole “death of the author” movement.

However, as Adam Shapiro points out,

“The school of literary criticism that emphasizes the text alone as something that can be assess as a thing itself independent of the identities of either the author or the readers emerged as a specific movement largely among White Male Americans, largely from the South. It was a self-conscious effort to make the qualities of literature typically found in [mostly] white [mostly] Southern [mostly] male authors into the “objective” standard against which something like the “quality of the text” can be judged.

There are problems that arise with not seeing works of literature as products of the cultures that create them. But there’s the additional problem that claims that there are objective standards to judge the quality of literature can only work if one sees their own culture as a universal standard.”

It’s the literary wing of the invisible knapsack of privilege in which the first privilege is to be able to be unaware or ignorant of your privilege. In the case of using the death of the author in this way, it’s deliberately turning a blind eye.

And personally, I’m more concerned that if someone is reading primarily texts from one tiny spectrum of human experience, in this case, white male straight cis, we’re missing out on a huge swath of what its like to live on this planet, millions of different approaches toward the questions that literature concerns itself with. And primarily, most people are reading—and the publishing industry is primarily concerned with—that one tiny spectrum of human experience.

I continue to think of it in terms of empathy. Study after study has shown that reading literature increases empathy in its readers. When we live lives through other people’s words, we see them as individuals, which makes othering, that very important step in dehumanizing our fellow people, all the more difficult.

Because othering is what leads to discrimination, war, and that whole host of human ugliness that shames us as a species. Think of what John Hersey’s New Yorker article about Hiroshima did to humanize the victims and contextualize what it meant use such a weapon, or how the media bringing the up-close-and-personal ugliness of wartime Vietnam into our living rooms brought that war to an earlier close, or how Daryl Davis is converting KKK members merely by talking to them.

Because it’s this power of narrative that drives empathy—to get downright cliché about it—it’s the other man’s shoes thing. And all Bradford is saying is that we’ve all, consciously or not, been walking around primarily in one pair of shoes for a really really long time, and maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to wear a different pair for a while, to try another path. Just try it.

It won’t hurt anyone if some people choose to concentrate on perspectives they may not usually read, voices not often trumpeted by the status quo publishing industry. And I’m saying this as a straight, white cis male author early in his career who needs as many people as possible to read his work. I should be the first at the regressive picket line arguing about how authorship demographics shouldn’t matter. But I’m not, because it hurts no one. There are plenty of voices, plenty of readers. And such challenges may just help some people who prior to this, only read from a narrow spectrum of the human experience, which frankly, isn’t healthy for us, as individuals or as a species.