Dak
mentat
Setting aside the suspicious quality of this distinction, you're saying that men who write about themselves are also exempt? They somehow overcome the narcissism of... what, autobiographical writing?
I precisely said this wasn't the case in my last post. Even today, autobiographical writing, memoirs, and autobiographical fiction are as prevalent, if not more so, among male writers. Furthermore, women have been public writers since at least the eighteenth century.
Ok, some clarifications here. I already said males are not exempt here, merely do so less via the same venues. I am not talking about books in the last 20 years. I am talking about pieces in magazines, blogs, opinion pieces in newspapers/newspaper websites. Obviously these options weren't broadly available even to men (or women) prior to the 18th century.
Full length works such as autobiographies et al are likely more prevalent among men. While consisting significantly of subjective interpretations of proceedings, people who engage in doings which render an autobiography or memoir interesting engage in doings which are independently, intersubjectively evaluable, which act as a check on the significance. Not that this has any interrelation on the potential narcissistic factor, but we can have some counterbalancing information on the reality of what is reported.
This returns me to what I called the "suspicious quality" of your distinction. Neither Carrie Bradshaw (nor the author of Sex and the City, for that matter) were writing solely about themselves. And much to the same point, writers who write about "ideas and things" are always also writing about themselves.
Sure on both counts. The author of Sex and the City was writing about broadbased turn of the millennium bourgeoisie female narcissistic proclivities, which is why it was so popular. On the second point, Nietzsche already addressed this at least in reference to ideas in 19th century and earlier philosophers. But there is a difference in going "ahhaha my proverbial toilet isn't truly overflowing" and writing an article about the mechanical nature of a widget which is empirically replicable.
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