Day: June 9, 2018

A book on sketchbooks, written by a man, contains artwork mostly by men. Not at all surprising. Call them “visual journals” and the author will much more likely be a woman, and the artists represented will be mostly women. Art is for men, but craft is for ladypeople. I’m reminded of a Joanna Newsom interview in which she said that men were harpists and women were harp players. We don’t let women play in male spaces (still!), but we also devalue the spaces where women are allowed to play.

(I may not even have noticed, except I started to wonder how many drawings of teen boy sexual fantasies there would be in the book. A lot. And all of them drawn by men, so I looked at the artist bios and did a quick tally of the genders: 31 men, 10 women, and one non-binary person.)