Storytellers make reality, says Katie
On the plane trip back from New York last week, I thumbed through the flight magazine for Delta. Whose face should pop out at me but the familiar visage of Katie Orenstein.
Katie is founder and director of the OpEd Project, which I’ve written about here. In the article, she’s in conversation with Catherine Hardwicke, director of the recently released movie Red Riding Hood. What is the connection between the two women? Katie is also a “folklorist,” the author of Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale.
Katie’s OpEd project was driven by her recognition of the lack of women’s voices on the editorial pages of America – about 85 percent of the columns are written by men. The under-representation of women, this time on literary pages, was recently explored over at Books Inq., following a discussion over at the Times Literary Supplement, following a Guardian story, following some Vida research. Actually, I was too busy writing against deadlines (largely for literary pages) to weigh in on the subject then, but I thought about Katie and her project.
She spoke about it a little in the article: “A very small section of the world tells most of the stories, and most of that section is very narrow: It’s mostly white, it’s mostly Western and overwhelmingly male.”
Hardwicke's sexy take on an old tale...
“That dramatically shapes the stories that we get. It doesn’t just shape the fairy tales that we get, it shapes the reality that we get, the important conversations of our age. It also affects whose brains we get to hear from. We are missing a huge percentage of the world’s brains and brainpower.”
She continues:
“You know, stories are how we assign meaning to our lives and to the world; we live in this universe, and what does it all mean? Stories are built to explain and also to inspire and to control a lot of what we see. … But the stories we tell are designed to do all of those things, and whoever tells them ends up writing history and shaping the way we see and understand the world, whether we are talking about mythology or journalism.”
I’ve been more interested lately in the stories we tell ourselves. Our history, our relationships, our successes and failures are told in different ways, in different moods, with different consequences — to limit us, make us smug, defeat our efforts, or prod us onwards. The humiliating high school prom becomes farce or tragedy in the retelling 30 years later. The fatal love becomes a crucible or a lifelong regret.
And how do we use our stories to subtly justify our choices? Where do we begin them? Where do they lead?
May 4th, 2011 at 10:07 am
[…] answer lies within the confines of tradition. Take a look at his m=1 Story Systems example. I’ve been experimenting in an n=1 fashion for quite a while now, but the idea of an m=1 […]
March 23rd, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Miss Orenstein, in her seemingly unending quest to further the voices of women, who from her quantitative perspective, don’t have enough of one, is bordering on being guilty of what she’s fighting against, a gender dominated vacuum. She exhibits the male quality that is, again according to her reasoning, responsible for that domination. I appreciate her fervor, but question the reasoning, and what I perceive as underlying anger toward a whole group, the majority of who, have no such desire to overbear. Could Miss Orenstein ever exhibit the violence toward men, that she implies about us toward her kind. The vibe I catch makes one feel the need to ponder such questions, uncomfortable as they may be to ponder, much less write down. Tell me Katie, who have you smacked down lately. The great Austin Powers shortly after punching his bosses mother in the jaw, stated it as closely to what I feel from her uncomfortable gist, “that’s a man baby.”