A critic answers his own critics

A few weeks ago, I wrote  about Rick Moody's hyperbolic criticism of Taylor Swift for The Rumpus. This, I'm sure, costs me feminist points (which, I should mention, I already cashed in proclaiming my love for Jonathan Franzen, so you can take what I'm saying with a huge grain of salt), but I agree with him. Maybe his "rhetorical flourishes" (his words) were a little over the top, but I, too, find Swift's music insipid and heavily reliant on timeworn stereotypes about men and women. I could say the same things about most pop music. (To be fair, I could also say the same things about a lot of rock, hip-hop, and R&B, too.) And while a lot of people like it, and it "makes them feel good," this is not an assessment  of artistic merit. I don't know when it became anathema to suggest that not all art is created equally. (And it's still completely fair to question the structures in place that assign value to a particular piece while questioning its worth artistically.)

Yes, I did think the "marrying up" comment was pretty misogynistic, and a little illogical. (Don't celebrities usually marry laterally?) But overall, I thought the vitriol leveled at him in the comment section was disproportionate to what he actually said about Taylor Swift, and I have a real visceral reaction to someone being told to "go die," no matter how problematic, misguided, or just plain wrong they are. And as someone closer to Moody's age than Swift's, the "LOL, you're old" direction some of the discussion took bothered me, too. (Granted, this may be transference on my part -- I am now at that age where I'm constantly reminded that I am one of "the olds.")

So I was pleased to see that Rick Moody answered his critics . Then I read it, and wish he hadn't. First of all, the tenor was incredibly defensive. Yeah, sure, he's defending himself, so of course it is, but what he wrote was almost a textbook example of what happens when a man -- particularly one who considers himself, if not explicitly feminist, than sympathetic to the cause -- gets called out. This, in particular, made me cringe:

"First, it is alleged that I am a misogynist for the “marrying up” line, with the particular charge being that I wouldn’t say this about a male artist. I would, however, say this about a male artist, so let me correct that misperception now: Larry Fortensky married up, David Gest married up, Tim McGraw married up. And even the president of the United States has admitted to “marrying up,” I believe, in referring to himself. There has also recently been a Redbook article on the subject of “marrying up.” In fact, there’s even a sociological term for this, hypergamy, and the interesting thing about hypergamy, according to one study, is that it’s evenly distributed between the sexes."

This is not the way to answer one's critics when they suggest that your opinion might be rooted in misogyny: "I do the same thing to men, therefore, I can't be sexist." That doesn't change the fact that the system doesn't work the same way for women as it does for men. I've said this time and time again: just look at any critic's best-of list, and then look at the top-selling albums for that week. It's easy to see whose music is considered art, and whose is commerce.