De Gustibus

In the prelude to my last blog entry, I raised some questions about diversity and taste: how do we evaluate the equity of our personal taste? Does that question even make sense? How much of what we call our taste is malleable, the result of environment and choice, and how much is a product of some consistent inner quality of our selves?

These questions are important because public and systemic equity in art is personal taste writ large. Gallery owners, agents, editors, producers, and other industry gatekeepers make their decisions on who to fund and who to reject in part based on personal taste. Reviewers boost media through opinions based in part on taste, and art people like and recommend gets word-of-mouth advertising. Cumulative personal taste shapes the media landscape.

But what responsibility do individuals have? Can we change our tastes? Should we?

Two of the most common proposed actions suggest different but complementary approaches to the matter of cumulative taste.

First, there’s the push to diversify the gatekeepers. Art needs more Black editors, producers, agents, etc. Apart from being desirable in and of itself, a more diverse and inclusive industry, the argument goes, will necessarily open the doors to more diverse artists. The implicit argument is that right now, many Black authors have to jump the hurdle of appealing to the tastes of white editors before the industry will publish their work. This suggests that part of taste is connected to our life experience–artists and gatekeepers who share the experience of navigating a racist society and/or life within a particular community may develop synergetic tastes, or at least, are more likely to develop synergetic tastes than gatekeepers who don’t share those experiences.

Second, there’s the encouragement to read, review, and recommend Black authors, regardless of the reader’s racial identity. This aims to work within the existing power structure and afford Black artists the attention that white authors more often receive as a matter of course. School curricula include mostly white authors, supporters of this approach point out, and many “recommended” lists or major reviewers cover a disproportionate number of white authors. This leads to a vicious cycle: people haven’t heard of great Black authors, so people don’t read them, so people haven’t heard of them… etc.

This approach also implies that tastes can change with exposure. Sure, white reader, you didn’t seek out Black authors before because you were content with what you were already reading and assumed that was where your taste brought you. But if you try these books, you’ll like them.

These two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive–in fact, they can and should co-exist, in part because taste is a mix of both life experience and exposure. Some art can be most evocative for audiences with particular identities and/or lived experiences, and nobody has to beat themselves up if a particular piece of art doesn’t speak to them. But other art can speak across experience, and we can’t know which is which for each of us until, with humility, we seek out all of it.

So it seems pretty clear that large institutions, like major industry reviewers, libraries, and publishers, have responsibilities to ask themselves if they disproportionately favour writers who share the lived experiences of those in power at those institutions and, if so, work to remedy that. But what about individuals?

Platforms like Goodreads and review sections on retailers let everyone to have their say. Heck, I write a personal blog (no kidding!) where I like to pick apart what I like and what I don’t. And in social spaces like these, you’re allowed to post whatever you want about a book. You don’t like it because once the author wrote “moist” and you can’t stand that word? Zero stars. It’s objectively the worst book ever written but it made you smile on a bad day? Five stars and nominate for book of the year!

One of the reasons we tend to intuitively shy away from the idea that we can change our taste is that changes our taste feels too much like trying to deny our “honest” selves. Sometimes, I feel that way too.

But I think that’s a cop-out, and here’s why.

As a child, I avoided reading books about girls and women. I wasn’t doing it on purpose, at least at first: I was just choosing the books that appealed to me at the library or the bookstore. And, when I was a kid, most of the fantasy and mystery available to me was about and for boys.

When I read book-jacket descriptions and looked at art on the front cover, it felt like books about girls were just… not exciting to baby-me. They dealt with horses or babysitting or (shudder) social dilemmas. Even when girls were the main characters of the books I liked, I perceived them as subordinate to a special or interesting male character: Lucy and Susan were there to bring me to Edmund and Peter, Meg was there to bring me to Charles Wallace, Sophie was there to bring me to Howl and Calcifer.

By the time I was a teenager, society and I had teamed up to teach myself that books with all-female casts or that focussed on the experiences of women and girls were niche stories, less valid than “normal” ones–naturally, focussing on men and boys was just “normal,” not niche at all. When I wrote stories, my instinct was to write from a “standard” male viewpoint.

But as I grew, and as external circumstances pushed me to read and watch more media that I’d previously dismissed, I learned to understand why and how I’d arrived at these opinions. That Janeway wasn’t inherently less interesting than Kirk or Picard, but instead I’d been taught that female characters could be at best disappointing versions of male ones, so I hadn’t given her a chance. That woman and girls could also solve mysteries or have fantasy adventures (and men and boys could also yearn to ride horses, babysit, and negotiate social dilemmas; and non-binary or agender folks could do all these things too), and that the reason they so often didn’t was because the business-minded people at the top of the hierarchy were deciding what I liked based on their own preconceived notions of me and not who I really was. The preferences I’d thought were parts of me were instead the result of systemic sexism and internalized misogyny.

Once I understood this, my tastes changed–or rather, my changing tastes and new understanding built off each other. Some books about women and girls opened my eyes to the way the world could be; with new perspective, I better understood the patriarchal systems around me, and I sought out more books with people like me as protagonists, characters and plots that reaffirmed my personhood without forcing me to step into the shoes of a man or boy.

The reciprocal interaction between my tastes as a reader and my growing understanding and acceptance that my gender wasn’t lesser-than makes me hesitate to say that my tastes could never change. Because what if my tastes for stories are still just as affected by social biases on race as they were by social biases on gender? What if I’m not as into other stories because I, oblivious, don’t see now–as I, oblivious, didn’t see then–how internalized structures of power and prejudice shape my worldview?

Obviously, the emotional journey isn’t quite the same: it’s a little different to grow to love seeing one’s own humanity reflected in stories versus growing to love seeing the humanity of other people and communities there. But why not? I learned from a very young age to identify with straight, explicitly Christian, white men and boys, and my taste in stories still partially grows from that early indoctrination. Why on Earth should I assume that I naturally love stories from outside my own perspective only if they’re written from the viewpoint of that one exact demographic?

It may take a little more active learning to appreciate the types of stories I haven’t spent my whole life learning to understand, the same way I enjoy music or visual art better after someone who really loves and gets it teaches me more about it, or the way I start to like new genres after first getting a feel for their conventions and style. The best part is, that’s a win-win!

Even if it turns out that I’m just not into the kinds of stories that Black authors and filmmakers tell, I still benefit from learning more about others’ lives and experiences. Expanding my range of empathy and understanding–especially past boundaries I didn’t realize were there in the first place–makes me a better person. Buying books and/or increasing the demand for them at the library so those purchasing buy more copies and/or discussing them with others supports the artists. Reading new-to-me styles and voices helps me refine and define my own voice and understand what makes it unique to me.

And if it turns out that I am into many of these stories? Well, then I gain even more: all of the above plus a ton more favourite books.