Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

268 WHO STOLE FEMINISM?respectable. They looked for new authors who shared their views ofwhat a respectable romance should be, and they tried to change thebooks being written by the established, successful authors they inherited.The first target of these reforming editors was what hascome to be known in the trade as the alpha male. 36Ms. Krentz lists several more "targets," among them "the aggressiveseduction of the heroine by the hero" and the convention that the heroineis a virgin. The young editors' failure was "resounding." 37Their exhortationsto change had little effect on the more established writers. Nor didthey succeed in their aim of getting new writers to introduce a new andpopular genre of "politically correct romances . . . featuring sensitive, unaggressiveheroes and sexually experienced, right-thinking heroines in'modern' stories dealing with trendy issues. . . . Across the board, fromseries romance to single title release, it is the writers who have steadfastlyresisted the efforts to reform the genre whose books consistently outsellall others." 38Sales are the true gauge of public preference; in the last analysis, it wasthe readers' resistance to the "right-thinking" heroines and heros thatcaused the zealous editors to unbend and retreat.The effort to impose feminist rectitude sometimes surfaces in less popularliterary genres. The Israeli poet Gershom Gorenberg, who had submittedseveral poems to Marge Piercy, poetry editor of Tikkun magazine,received a letter from her that read: "I found your work witty and original,and I am taking parts of [it] for . . . Tikkun. I have to say I am not fond ofthe way you write about women, but I have left out those parts. When Iblot out those parts, I like what you are doing." 39Gorenberg's first impulse was to search his poetry for the "criminalstanzas," although he could find nothing in his writing that struck him assexist: "And then I realize that the inquisitor is succeeding admirably:The very vagueness of the charge has driven me to search for my sins,incriminate myself, confess." 40Gorenberg saw that the blotting had larger implications and describedit in an op-ed column for the New York Times. It was published alongwith a rebuttal by Piercy. Piercy was indignant: "1 try to pick the bestwork that comes through the mailbox—and the best has to consider theimplications of the language used and the sensitivities of many groups,including women. Why would I publish work that degrades me?" 41Piercy defends a censorship that she herself has never been subjectedto. We may imagine her outrage if an editor had tried to blot out any partof her novel Women on the Edge of Time for its treatment of traditional