Sex, Lies and Mentoring: What’s a Woman to Do?

Writer Paisley Rekdal has a post on her blog about the problematic nature of finding mentors for young women here: http://paisleyrekdal.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-writing-mentors.html?spref=fb

I read it with interest, because I, too, as a young female, have been fairly cautious – maybe overly so – when talking with older male writers – always a bit suspicious, I’m afraid, of ulterior motives…but something about getting a little older, a little closer to forty, makes this all less of an issue, and of course being married to a big, scary-looking guy who’s pretty much around all the time helps, too. So I’m not quite as reflexively self-protective as I used to be.

And I have had good experiences with female professors, reaching to help out when and how they can, even if their time and resources tend to be more limited (as Paisley points out.)

But, how common is this female inability to accept mentoring? How many women writers has it hurt? Has it hurt me? What about you?

To make matters more complicated, when I read this post, I was watching the British movie “Tamara Drewe,” basic on the graphic-novel-based-on-the-Thomas-Hardy-Novel Far From The Madding Crowd. In it, the young female protagonist, in a pique because the guy she likes is with someone else when she happens to be free, beds the oozingly-creepy-older-male-writer – even though he’s married – and gratefully accepts his older-male-writer writing advice. Ick. I can’t help but have a visceral reaction, maybe because I’ve seen it too many times in real life. I mean, we ladies can get writing advice without doling out sex, right? Right? I was disappointed to see it in a (rare) movie about a female writer. (The philandering older male writer character, spoiler alert, bites it. Hardy was awfully hard on his philanderers, though he was famous for that activity himself.)

So what has your experience been with mentorship? Have you been overly cautious, or have you found mentors at all? I was thinking that for me, perhaps friends have been more important than mentors, because friends are the ones that stick with you through the bad times, encourage you when you’re down, help you write and send out in the day-to-day activity of being a writer. It also made me think about how I need to be willing to help others – I think of myself still as a struggling – what is that word…”emerging” writer…but I think I might be able to help more people if I made more of an effort. I’m happy to get a chance in the next week to lead a high school student workshop in Redmond (see more info here) but I would like to do even more of that kind of work.