Book-Hot-Or-Not: More On The Sexual Politics Of Author Photos
LatestGawker readers will remember “book hot” author Marisha Pessl — according to a a recent VQR piece, even reviewers are now playing book-hot-or-not.
By “reviewers,” I mean Janet Maslin, who for some ungodly reason went to author Miriam Gershow’s RateMyProfessors.com page as part of her review of Gershow’s book, The Local News. The book revolves around an awkward high school girl named Lydia, and Maslin writes,
Ms. Gershow has been a teacher at the University of Oregon, where some students’ online ratings of her sound like a continuation of Lydia’s high school nightmare. Being regarded as neither popular nor hot seems to be territory that Ms. Gershow knows well, maybe in the classroom and certainly on the pages of her unusually credible and precise novel. But these real-life disadvantages become assets in giving “The Local News” its strong verisimilitude, even in its graceless touches.
“Shockingly,” comments Jacob Silverman of the Virginia Quarterly Review, “Maslin is saying that because college students’ online ratings of Gershow judge her unpopular and ‘not hot,’ that information is somehow both relevant for a book review and credible.” He rightly calls this “a lazy and shallow tactic for a reviewer to take,” but the truth is that Maslin’s lame foray into web-stalking is only a sillier version of the giant game of hot-or-not that female authors are constantly embroiled in.