Hilary Mantel Wins the Booker! Again! By Writing about Men

I am genuinely excited by the fact that Hilary Mantel won her second Booker prize for Bring up the Bodies. It is a huge win for Feminism for a woman author to be taken seriously by the Patriarchy. But, like with Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar win for the Hurt Locker, Mantel has won one for writing a book about men. She won for out-penising the penises. Now, I haven't actually read either book, although I do own Wolf Hall, so I can't comment on the books themselves but this is a pattern well understood by feminists. Women are rewarded by the Patriarchy for two things: passing the patriarchal fuckability test or reinforcing patriarchal norms. In this case, Mantel has won for reinforcing the patriarchal approved norm for writing "literature", which as V.S Naipaul likes to tell people, needs to be written either by men or about men. Actually, Naipaul said that no woman author ever has wrote as well as he can, but I'm sure he'd be totally on the only-books-about-men-count-as-literature bandwagon.

Now, I'm not dissing Mantel's accomplishments, because she has done something I wouldn't have thought possible which is to win TWO Bookers. Hell, I'm frequently surprised by the inclusion of women on the list, never mind winning it. But, when do books about women get to be great literature? Why is that women, who write the most books and who buy the most books, are always under-represented in major literary prizes? As Alyssa Rosenberg writes, 

It would be nice to see more Booker-caliber female and male authors delve into the lives and brains of women, and to see the judges that decide what counts as leading literary fiction acknowledge more often that a woman's can be as grand a tapestry as a man's—and that domestic narratives are as worthy as chronicles of state.

It would be nice to see more men realising that the women writers and the lives of women are as worthy of attention as men's writing. We need to stop buying books written by men and about men. We need to start financially supporting women writers and especially those books written by women about women. 

Here are some of my recommendations of books written by women about women:

• Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
• Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees
• Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
• Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad
• Chimananda Ngozi Adachie's Purple Hibiscus
• Marilyn French's The Woman's Room