Grudge of the Week—The Male Genius™, Part II
Writer and cultural critic Claire Dederer’s Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do With The Art Of Monstrous Men?" indirectly addressed the Male Genius. The piece was written by a woman, not about a woman. She is trapped behind the glow of a laptop. She is me, writing about the Male Genius instead of the women who have contributed to society with their enduring works of art.
Dederer quoted Jenny Offil’s definition of an art monster, a person—a man—who forsakes basic responsibilities in the home and the world. “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things,” Offil wrote in her novel Dept. of Speculation. She reminds us that “Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”
Rebecca Solnit pushed back on Dederer’s thesis and Offil’s observation, objecting to the very idea of the art monster in an essay for Literary Hub. “Selfishness is not particular to artists—or to men, and there is no shortage of examples of selfish women. Maybe there’s a special kind of Bohemian-dude selfishness, which the idea of the genius—the person who is more special and important than others—encourages.”
It is true that the Male Genius does not exclusively forgo life’s rinse and repeat cycles, from his laundry to his children. But we hear oh-so-little about women and their own aspirations. Solnit writes about the labor lawyer in her friend group and the single mom in her family. Both work demanding hours to feed and clothe their children. But Solnit doesn’t mention their art, if any.
As I cite Dederer, Offil, and Solnit, I’m aware that they’re all fellow white women. If the Male Genius depends on women to be seen, however diminished, and not heard, he relegates Black, Latina, Indigenous, Asian, migrant, queer, disabled, and trans women and non-binary people to be unseen and unheard.
And his reach extends beyond art to professional partnerships, movement activism, and any other public-facing, often identity-defining work. History remembers the Male Genius, not the women—whether intimate partners, colleagues, or both—who worked alongside him in equal or greater measure.
Coretta Scott King is far more than Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow. “My mother wasn’t a prop. She was a peace advocate before she met my father and was instrumental in him speaking out against the Vietnam War,” Bernice King tweeted about her parents.
In 1986, Coretta Scott King wrote a 10-page letter opposing then-U.S. attorney Jeff Sessions’ ultimately failed federal judicial nomination under President Ronald Reagan. In 2017, I covered Senate Democrats’ confirmation fight against their Republican colleague Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cut off Sen. Elizabeth Warren from reading Scott King’s 31-year-old, precedent-setting letter.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” McConnell said.
“Nevertheless, she persisted” mugs and T-shirts soon proliferated. But the Etsy and Amazon merch did not provide additional context about the rebuke to Scott King as much as Warren. What became a white feminist rallying cry dimmed the spotlight on her Black female genius.
It’s not just fascism that cannot flourish without assistance from white women. It’s the Male Genius. It’s the sanitized, elementary school version of the federal holiday honoring King, who didn’t ask for the title in life and received it in death at the expense of his wife’s legacy.
The Male Genius who confirms society’s inflated sense of his worth is the most dangerous Male Genius of them all. He can get away with much more than sloughing off chores on the woman of the house. The more powerful he is, the more he can abuse his power.
Journalist Tina Vásquez’s father and California public school taught her Chicano labor movement leader César Chávez’s name, but not Dolores Huerta’s, she wrote in an essay for Prism. Chávez allegedly raped Huerta in the decades of sexual misconduct that included repeated accusations of molesting young girls, the daughters of his loyal organizers, according to a March 2026 New York Times investigation.
“It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Esmeralda Lopez, against whom Chávez retaliated for rejecting his sexual proposition on a work trip, told the Times. “The movement—that’s the hero.”
The “hero” isn’t the Male Genius. It’s the hidden people, the women, his legacy subsumes. In Chávez’s case, that overshadowed crowd includes his wife, Helen Fabela Chávez, according to historian Margaret Rose in a 1990 article for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Helen contributed essential office support in the earliest days of the couple’s labor activism, “but usually she worked at home in the evenings, after her domestic chores were done and the children were asleep.” Later, Helen would join the picket lines “along with other Chicanas and Mexicanas and their children.”
“Given the existing sexual division of labor in the union and in society, few women are able or willing to relegate their personal lives or families to a secondary position in order to pursue union organizing. Thus, the more common form of female participation, à la Helen Chávez, remains ‘invisible’—unrecognized and unappreciated by union members as well as historians,” Rose wrote.
The Venn diagram of the Male Genius and the abuser overlap in a redemption narrative that rarely, if ever, engages in amends or restorative justice outside the carceral state.
Joss Whedon, once heralded as a feminist icon for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” is trying to make a comeback after allegations of abusive on-set behavior toward then-pregnant actor Charisma Carpenter and Black actor Ray Fisher.
Whedon also used his feminism as a cloak to have multiple extramarital affairs, his gaslit ex-wife, Kai Cole, wrote in a 2017 guest essay for The Wrap. A 2022 Vulture article, reported and written by Lila Shapiro, described many of his romantic relationships as exploitative or toxic.
The workplace misconduct, sexual assault allegations, and power imbalances of #MeToo privileged the Male Genius over his accuser(s). The first and last questions always asked about what would happen to his career and his family.
Writer Kater Gordon shared an Emmy with "Mad Men" creator and show-runner Matthew Weiner but hasn't worked in Hollywood since he fired her, a year after he allegedly told her she owed it to him to let him see her naked. “My real passion is making sure that my kids come of age in an environment in which they know what is right and wrong and that they stand up for other people," Gordon told The Information in an interview. So she founded a nonprofit, Modern Alliance, to end workplace sexual harassment. It's since folded.
In the end, the Male Genius operates with impunity. He is Risen.
Louis C.K. can “jerk off” in front of female colleagues and return to the stage to joke about it. Aziz Ansari can pressure a young woman into sex on what the Internet debated as a “bad date” and continue touring with a new set about “extreme wokeness.”
And I can't forget that Netflix paid Dave Chappelle a reported $60 million to verbally shit on trans people before recently claiming that Republicans “weaponized…what I was doing.”
“Yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever dared to work for free for male geniuses with zero boundaries?” writer Elissa Bassist asked in an essay for the Substack publication First Person Singular.
If impunity is the fruit of the Male Genius, it’s rotten. I don’t want to eat it, or cultivate it. I do not need to be a genius of any sort. I want my caregiving to be as valued as my writing. My ideas feel sharper now that I’m a parent and specifically, a mother. I’m sick of the Male Genius. When will we stop genuflecting at His feet?
