Women in SFF

Tor.com recently sent out their weekly email with its attendant blogs, stories and news.  And Liz Bourke wrote an interesting column and interview following a piece I did not read.  There seem to be several points to her post, and the one previous, which I will first sum up.

1) There is a bias against female SFF writers
2) There are fewer new female SFF than male authors each year because of it
3) There is a bias amongst reviewers that indicates the same
4) Does it matter?

I wanted to add my own two cents here.  I'm going to make a little list.

My feelings:

1. If I am guilty of reviewer's bias, it is certainly not a conscious one.  Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less of a bias. 
2. I certainly am guilty of reader's bias.
3. I like central male characters, a bias that has nothing to do with the sex of the author, but my own preconceptions about viewpoint have, in ignorance, played to that point.
4. Publishers have to play to their audiences.
5. Yes, it matters, and yes we should at least make the occasional effort to expand our horizons.

1. To start, that there is a bias amongst reviewers clearly holds with me as well.  I have reviewed only Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey, and Azure Bonds, by Kate Novak and Jeff Grub.  Both of which are at least twenty years old.  So, keep in mind, I don't review "new" titles.  My reviews are long-winded, seldom read, and I have no particular following to keep up with.  When I find a book particularly bad or good, or thought provoking, I write a review.  If I have time.  Publishers don't send me books hot off the presses (please do publishers! I've been using the friggin' Library for the past six months!) The selection process is random at best, and stilted, heavily leaning to books already in my collection at worst.  So I don't have the same kind of operators that Stefan Raets, or Renay, neither of whom I had ever heard of before today.  As all three of the bloggers, Raets, Bourke and Renay point out, the fact that I'm not consciously choosing titles according to author sex is still a bias, and a grievous one.

2.  I had to think, in my history, what else have I read by female fantasists?  Certainly almost the entirety of Margaret Weis's collection.  Raistlin Majere is certainly one of my favorite fantasy characters of all time, and he was her creation.  Recently, I read Robin Hobb's series, Assassin and Magic Ship, and Fool, or whatever the three series are called together.  And, I just found out that C.S. Friedman was a female, and I loved her Coldfire Trilogy.  All three of these women wrote incredibly strong, very detailed, and very interesting male central characters.  Did I think them less genuine because of that?  Not at all.  I was impressed by Robin Hobb's epic, but I confess, it wasn't my cup of tea.  I don't know if that had anything to do with the sex of the author.  It was a problem, or question of the theme.  I just left feeling somehow disastisfied.  I also read some C.J. Cheryh back in the 90s.  That's about it.  As I confessed years ago, I typically pick out books by the covers.  So if the publisher laid out for a good bookcover, and the book was at least four-hundred pages... there was a pretty good shot I'd try it. 

3.  Even though I quite like Jim Butcher's Furies series, I find the parts with Amara and her husband Bernard saccharine to the point of distaste.  I am a man, and the story has to appeal, find common ground with me.  I know a number of people who hated Rand al'Thor and the Ta'veren Trio, but his story always had a great deal of appeal to me.  Particularly as the 'nice' boy began to fade, and rage began to consume him in the ladder half of the series.  And I've spoken to some female fandom who find all three of them, Rand, Mat and Perrin inherently boring.  Still given what I pointed out above at the capacity of female authors to write excellent male characters, I suppose this bias really must end.

4.  I had this conversation with a female anthropology professor (not my wife) once, regarding the sexualization of female body parts in comic book characters.  And she showed me this image:

It is a pretty funny image, but she looked thoughtful when I told her that most of the readership of comic books are men, and that they wouldn't sell much if their characters all had bubble butts like this!  I also said, to say that male characters aren't over sexualized is ridiculous.  They don't frequently have gratuitous butt shots like those above, sure, but they all have tight abs, large shoulders, strong chins, cheekbones, large packages, and let's not forget, tight asses.  Interestingly, that's not to sell to women.  That is to play to men's insecurities about our own bodies.  I told her that if she were to look at any of the comicbooks from the eighties, their pages are filled with ads for muscle enlargement, how to get women, etc.  Their consumers were skinny, weak white dudes, and that was why you saw covers like this!  Still though, if you don't know about the HawkEye Initiative, check this out.

 

To apply that to fantasy authors, I honestly don't know what the breakdown is.  I was told about five years ago that men are reading less and less.  That was true then, of the overall market.  But SFF is a genre, and can the same be said?  If the majority of the consumer market is male, than publishers and reviewers choosing titles that best reflect their clients needs, is pretty if not fair, than standard practice.  I have lately seen more women than men reading in the genre, but that might also be a product of a completely different bias.  I didn't have the courage to be seen reading a fantasy book all through Highschool.  I kept them in my bag, and went off to secluded corners of the library to read them.  I frequently had my books stolen and ripped up.  I even had to chase them through the cafeteria from time to time because it just wasn't cool.  I'm not sure women and girls had to face the same bias in fantasy, though they certainly had to face a number of other ones.

5.  None of that matters.  The critics are right.  An effort must be made, it is simply the right thing to do.  I have three library books in my possession right now, all male authors.  But my next review, I promise will be by a female author.