Distinguished author-turned-online attention-seeking contrarian Joyce Carol Oates shared what has to be the weirdest take on the Titan submarine incident yet, bizarrely claiming that women just don’t get obsessed with history like men do.
Oates, who believes cis white men are being unfairly overlooked in the publishing industry due to all those dastardly leftists trying to hold the door open for everyone else to get a shot, didn’t just claim that women don’t get obsessed with history though. She also included a truly baffling list of the things she believes women do get obsessed with instead, including “kitties, doggies, clothes, gardening,” and of course, “men”. Because that’s it, isn’t it? Women don’t have serious academic interests. We only care about pretty things, cute things, and men. Men, meanwhile, obviously don’t care about any of those silly, frivolous, girl things. Not when they’re too busy studying important things like the history of all the ways human beings have murdered each other on a mass scale (you know, real history, the kind with tanks), risking their lives in bloody stupid ways, and just being too terribly masculine to care about their appearance or think about how much they love their dogs. Just guy stuff, you know?
Obviously—and it should go without saying but sadly doesn’t—men, women, and non-binary people can all enjoy and obsess over things in both categories. Because enjoying fashion, history, adorable fluffy creatures, and romance are all people things, not gendered things, and there’s nothing superior or inferior about any of them, despite the angry conservatives saying otherwise)
It’s not that Oates’s tweet is a particularly uncommon take online, we see a certain demographic of men opining about how women don’t care about “real history” all the time. But it’s definitely extremely weird to see coming from a woman, and one who’s a professor no less. Doesn’t she talk to her colleagues? Most history professors I know are actually women, most of my classmates in both undergrad and grad school were women, and I also know a lot of women who never formally studied history past high school but are still obsessed with their own specific niche period or subject area. Just take a quick scroll on Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find all sorts of women engaged in serious historical re-enactment, carefully crafting period-accurate clothing using historic techniques that they’ve researched for themselves, or devoting themselves to learning dead languages so they can translate or even create new works in it. But then maybe all this goes under “clothes” and “reading”, making them too girly to count as real history in Oates mind—who knows?”
Obviously, the replies to Oates’s tweet were flooded by women historians, women who just love history even though it’s not their career, and a fair amount of male allies and non-binary people thankfully weighing in to call out this terrible take. Which leads me to conclude that that’s actually why Oates made it in the first place. She’s made some increasingly problematic statements in recent years but she is actually a smart woman, and she had to know a take a bizarrely sexist as women don’t get obsessed with history was going to drive engagement with her account as everyone came in to tell her off. All that engagement’s going to boost her up in the Twitter algorithm, ensuring her other tweets end up on more people’s pages, drawing in potential new followers, or at the very least ensuring that we all continue paying attention to her. One might think someone of Oates’s literary stature would be beyond such basic engagement farming but it’s hard to find another explanation. And if that’s the case then, annoyingly, it’s worked.
Oates seems to have responded to the criticism by saying it comes from a lack of understanding on the critics’ part, accusing them of not reading the entire conversation her original tweet was a part of. According to Oates the type of obsession she’s talking about is dangerous, leading to fatal incidents like the Titan, and women don’t tend to fall prey to it when it comes to history. However, given her strange list of topics that she believes women do become equally obsessed with—do you think she knows Misery is fiction?—this context doesn’t actually make her stance any less sexist. It’s just that instead of saying women aren’t as interested in history as men are, she’s claiming they have two very different, suspiciously traditional gender-roll-esque lists of things they’ll completely abandon common sense to chase after. Which I think might actually be worse.
Beyond the blatant sexism, Oates’s take is also rooted in a complete misunderstanding of gendered risk-taking behavior and the factors that influence it. Men do statistically take a lot more risks than women and, unsurprisingly, it has nothing to do with the topics they’re interested in. There are a lot of variables at play, from socialization to hormones to neurology. Basically, it’s complicated, and has nothing to do with our feelings on history or “doggies” and “kitties”.
If anything, that the passengers onboard the Titan were billionaires has a lot more to do with it than any gender-driven obsessive behavior, because, as it turns out, being shielded from any consequences for an extended period of time tends to lead to poor risk assessment and an increase in high-risk activities. The super-wealthy have a warped sense of reality, which leads to them making poor choices, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. After all, that’s pretty much how the original tragedy of the Titanic happened in the first place.
Maybe Oates should consider that it’s actually access to colossal amounts of wealth that allows people to embark on these dangerous stunts in the first place, wealth which also distorts their sense of safety, letting them think it’s a good idea while everyone else can see that it isn’t. Wealth which by and large sits in the hands of men, not women. That seems a much more likely explanation than women just not getting into history in the same way, but hey, maybe I’ve spent so much time studying history my lady brain is overheated and I need to lay down with a case of the vapors.
(featured image: David Livingston/Getty Images/Bogdan Khmelnytskyi)
