a painfully limited perspective to say straight white men shouldn’t be heard from; it’s also painfully limited for those white men to skip the part where they learn that their feelings, too, are tied up with history. Remember that male critic who told me, over dinner, that I really ought to judge Manhattan on its aesthetic merits? The idea that his own experience shaped his response never occurred to him. He left that to me, the former girl. His own subjectivity was entirely invisible to him; a ghost in the critical machine.
