What Kate Did

To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”

.. To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”

.. These women were Millett’s collaborators and friends. Like Millett, they advocated for the abolishment of monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family. Firestone described a “sexual class system” in terms that much resembled Millett’s. She called pregnancy “barbaric,” lauded artificial reproduction, and imagined a utopia in which, children, like Eros, would move freely through the world.

.. What seems remarkable now is how seriously the cultural mainstream engaged with these revolutionary ideas—which isn’t to say approved of them. These women were reviewed widely, and often well.

.. Time ran five articles on the goals and organizing practices of the radical feminists.

.. Her application of Marxist theory to relations between the sexes particularly rankled for Howe, who saw his chance to remind Millett and her compatriots that true inequality took the form of class-based oppression. “Are the ladies of the Upper East Side of Manhattan simply ‘chattel’ in the way the wives of California grape pickers are,” he asked, “and if so, are they ‘chattels’ held by the same kinds of masters?”

.. “In some ways,” she writes, “it seems that we got the cultural change that feminism promised, without the concomitant political transformation.”

.. Still, it’s hard to imagine any work of literary scholarship—let alone a Ph.D. dissertation—landing its author on the cover of Time today.

Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read

Andrew Rhomberg wants to be the Billy Beane of the book world.

Mr. Beane used analytics to transform baseball, famously recounted in “Moneyball,” a book by Michael Lewis. Now Mr. Rhomberg wants to use data about people’s reading habits to radically reshape how publishers acquire, edit and market books.

.. While e-books retailers like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble can collect troves of data on their customers’ reading behavior, publishers and writers are still in the dark about what actually happens when readers pick up a book. Do most people devour it in a single sitting, or do half of readers give up after Chapter 2? Are women over 50 more likely to finish the book than young men? Which passages do they highlight, and which do they skip?

.. On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5 percent of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75 percent of readers.

.. Or what if readers skip around in your nonfiction book, a common way to read nonfiction? An editor might want to cut the chapters people are skipping, potentially erasing useful context.

Jane Eyre and the Invention of the Self

The now-ubiquitous selfie expresses in miniature the seismic conceptual shift that came about centuries ago, spurred in part by advances in printing technology and new ways of thinking in philosophy. It’s not that the self didn’t exist in pre-modern cultures: Rather, the emphasis the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century placed on personal will, conscience, and understanding—rather than tradition and authority—in matters of faith spilled over the bounds of religious experience into all of life. Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Brontë, born 200 years ago this year.

.. The broader cultural implications of the story—its insistence on the value of conscience and will—were such that one critic fretted some years after its publication that the “most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.”

.. The Reformation empowered believers to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves, rather than relying on the help of clergy; by extension, this seemed to give people permission to read and interpret their own interior world.

.. It is exactly this willingness—desire, even—to be “at war with the accepted order of things” that characterizes the modern self.

.. More disturbing to Brontë’s Victorian readers than the sheer sensuality of the story and Jane’s deep passion was “the heroine’s refusal to submit to her social destiny,” as the literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert explains. Indeed, one contemporary review complained, “It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength,” but the critic continues that “it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.” In presenting such a character, the reviewer worries, Brontë has “overthrown authority” and cultivated “rebellion.”