After centuries of being told by men what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is garbage, what is important and what is trivial, women have decided to fight against this with a form of writing that can best be summarised as “Ack! Men!” The latest entry in this medium is an Electric Lit essay called Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me, where a woman who was told by several men that she might enjoy the Infinite Jest author’s work explains that no, she does not enjoy it and this is interesting because, you know, Ack! Men!

This would not even merit a response – except that so many people assumed that it did. Women on social media responded with their own Ack! Men! chorus and some men, so delightfully oblivious, chimed in with things along the lines of: “Infinite Jest is actually a really important book and if you read it you would understand.” That obliviousness does indeed make one want to yell ACK! out the window and into the night, but hopefully we can find something else to say.

This conversation is not about David Foster Wallace at all, of course. Not all men like the notoriously long-winded, cerebral writer. And some women do like him, and I assume they have their reasons. His allure escapes me, personally. His “This is water” commencement address always seemed as if he just figured out he should at least try to be a decent, compassionate person and wanted some sort of award for that, and reading the ultimately heartless and intellectually empty Infinite Jest was the biggest waste of a summer I ever spent.

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And that’s the point. Taste is subjective. It is built from our personal experiences, our values, what we have read and watched and listened to all through our lives, and even stuff such as gender, race, nationality, and so on. Taste is political. Most of us would prefer our art to simply reinforce, rather than challenge, our worldview, so we tend to read writers who share our backgrounds, our values and so on. We create little artistic bubbles and don’t question them nearly enough.

For a very long time, the literary gatekeepers pretended their taste was objective, not subjective. And because the traits of those gatekeepers, who were not just white men but Ivy League-educated, upper-middle-class white men located in cultural centres like New York and London, were predictably consistent, they often reached consensus. These are the books that are important. No really, just these ones. Those other writers are “minor”.

What they deemed important were mostly books that reinforced their worldview, that were also written by Ivy League-educated, upper middle-class white men; men like David Foster Wallace. Or Jonathan Franzen or Philip Roth, or any of the other writers whose importance we’ve all had explained and explained until we wanted to scream Ack! into a pillow.

But a lot of us do this. Right now I’m reading Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language, and I love it. But I understand that one of the reasons I love it is because it makes me feel clever for getting the jokes. It references and sends up French structuralists and post-structuralists, makes jokes about gender studies and analytical philosophy, name-drops figures like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and others whom I have already read.

So is that it, then? We should all just read the stuff that fits our bubbles and forget the rest? But shouldn’t art do the opposite? Shouldn’t it make us curious about other worldviews, other demographics, other ideas and ways of living? Shouldn’t it be expansive and disruptive, rather than reinforcing?

Yes, of course. But that only works if we drop our obliviousness and understand our subjectivity. If we understand why we want to think of other worldviews as marginal. Not to join in the “Ack! Men!” chorus, but clearly this work should start with them. Especially the ones who like David Foster Wallace.