Worlds Apart

Worlds apart, two different cultures handled the same delicate question in recent days: What do you do if someone wants to pretend that you barely exist? Their approaches are instructive.

In the first instance author Norman Mailer was presiding over the International PEN Congress in New York. PEN is a writers’ organization that focuses on problems facing writers, like imprisonment and censorship. Some writers also wanted the group to face up to the virtual absence--invisibility, one called it--of women as honored guests and panelists. Their representation was “about the same as in the Oxford Book of Welsh Verse, which begins in the 11th Century. This is the 20th,” said Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood.

When author Betty Friedan asked Mailer why more women were not involved, she says that he laughed and replied, “Oh, who’s counting?” Later Mailer added: “Since the formulation of the panels is reasonably intellectual, there are not that many women . . . who are intellectuals first, poets and novelists second. More men are intellectuals first, so there was a certain natural tendency to pick more men than women.”

He said more, too, but you get the idea. In short, the intellectual exchange did not reach the highest plane. But Atwood, who heads the English-language branch of the Canadian organization, pledged that when PEN meets in Canada in two years the representation will be not only bilingual but also bisexual.

Thousands of miles away, the Iranian president was visiting Zimbabwe. A Shia Muslim fundamentalist, he does not believe in men and women mingling at social occasions. He refused to attend a state dinner planned in his honor in Harare unless the women invited, one of them a cabinet minister, were seated at the table farthest away from the head table. He had already refused to shake hands with two women government officials in a reception line.

The dinner went on without the guest of honor because the government of Zimbabwe refused to compromise on its principles that women are entitled “to an equal status and standing in every respect with their male counterparts.”

Two worlds, two answers. And more work to be done.