Last week, Tehani (@editormum) and Kirstyn (@fearofemeralds) started tweeting about the gender balance of the recent Guardian article, “The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction“. We discussed it with some other people at the time, but I wanted to note down some of my thoughts & responses to the article, as well as the discussion.

Thought the First: I totally love that people spot this stuff now and call it to Galactic Suburbia’s attention rather than the other way around. In many cases, they parse it so we don’t have to.

Thought the Second: I totally ran my eye down the page and thought: Okay, not many women are having their work nominated here, but it does look at least like they asked lots of women their opinions. My informal survey made me think the genders of authors asked to contribute was roughly even.

Just as the conversation started getting interesting, I thought I’d better check the numbers, and before I had even got halfway down the page, Kirstyn got in ahead of me:

@fearofemeralds
Best SF? Authors asked:16M/8F; Authors rec’d: 20M/4F. Only 1 M author rec’s book by F (and yes, it was Le Guin’s LHD): http://bit.ly/k5fH73

So that’s some more interesting things. Half as many women as men were included in the article as providing recommendations – and that was enough for me, an active and switched-on feminist hobbyist-Table of Contents-critical-appraiser (no, it doesn’t all fit on a business card) to think it was roughly even. When I saw what the real numbers were, I wanted to throw a cup of tea over myself.

Kirstyn presented the information that there were 16 men and 8 women surveyed, and yet 20 male authors were recommended, and only 4 women. She noted that only one male author recommended a book by a woman, and that it was Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.

The Twitter conversation got a bit muddled at that point and I want to reiterate that none of us rolling our eyes meant anything derogatory at all to Ursula Le Guin, to that book (which is an acknowledged Great Work of the science fiction field) or to Kim Stanley Robinson, who chose it as his pick. It was an awesome choice, and he deserves kudos for remembering that women write science fiction too.

The reason there was eye-rolling is a carryover from many discussions we’ve (i.e. Galactic Suburbia and Friends) had about similar lists over the last year (The SF Signal MindMeld has been a common source for these) and more, which has brought up the anecdotal evidence that, when asked to recommend Great or Important or Best SF books, men are far more likely to produce lists of all male works, while women’s lists tend to be more gender balanced. In a large majority of cases where men do recommend a work by a woman, it seems to be Ursula Le Guin and particularly The Left Hand of Darkness.

I’m not saying, I repeat, that this is always the case. But it’s a common pattern, and one that interests me greatly. Why that book, in particular? Apart from it being awesome, which is a perfectly valid reason, why is that the science fiction book by a woman which seems to most often get remembered and recommended by men? More to the point, why are so many others consistently forgotten, unless the actual theme of the question specifies that we’re talking about women’s work?

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Episode 29 is up and it’s a doozy! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.

Then, if you can, come join us at Swancon on Easter Sunday for the live recording of EPISODE FREAKING THIRTY!

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EPISODE 29

In which we rant about feminist issues and gender disparity (are you shocked?), Alisa proclaims the death of bookstores and publishing, we look at branding and internet dramah, plus a million zillion award shortlists, TANSY BEING A TIPTREE JUDGE, a Swancon preview, and… um. It’s a bit long. But full of crunchy Galactic Suburbian goodness.

News

Diana Wynne Jones passed away, many people said good things about her on the internet

Shaun Tan wins the Astrid Lindgren Award
Guardian coverage; Shaun’s personal take on the award

Carol Emshwiller’s 90th birthday celebrations

25 A&R franchises in Australia go indie
(apologies original link vanished)

Strange Horizons – dealing with the low numbers of female reviewers
Original post, counting up numbers of female reviewers and women’s books reviewed in SF markets

The Age on the poor numbers of women’s work being reviewed (in the literary “mainstream”)
and coverage of a panel on the gender disparity, again in literary mainstream

Prometheus Awards nominees, from the Libertarian Futurist Society:

Running Press, Tricia Telep and Jessica Verday

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2011/04/essay-clarifying-issue-of-wicked-pretty.html

http://blog.outeralliance.org/archives/791

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20110404/46703-the-misinformation-age-what-happens-when-a-headline-goes-viral.html

TANSY BECOMES A TIPTREE JUDGE!!

Aurealis Awards: www.aurealisawards.com/finalists2010.pdf
Ditmars: http://2011.swancon.com.au/2011/03/natcon-fifty-ditmar-awards/
Tin Ducks: http://2011.swancon.com.au/tin-duck-awards/
Chronos Awards: http://arcadiagt5.livejournal.com/362522.html

Livejournal not so live this week – AK has existential crisis about blogging & identity.

Feedback
Aishwarya, Kaia, Adam

Competition winners!

Swancon Preview
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Our live panel is 9:30 am on the Easter Sunday, bring coffee!

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

I ordered the DVD of Doctor Who: Battlefield recently in a wave of nostalgia about the late Nicholas Courtney. His ‘I just do the best I can’ speech had been a big part of many reminiscence post about the Brigadier as an iconic character, and it was ages since I’d seen the story. It was one of my favourites when I was a teenager, and forms part of one of my favourite Doctor Who eras: the Seventh Doctor and Ace.

So the other night, when my honey was away for work and the kids were in bed and no one was being wrong on the internet, I settled down with some sewing to watch it. I was a bit worried that the suck fairy might have visited since I last inhaled this one, especially as I have heard so much fan dismissal of it as a story, but my worried were unfounded.

Battlefield is AWESOME.

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Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed an outburst of vague but delirious joy a couple of days ago. I can now reveal why it was so!

I have been invited to join this year’s Tiptree Award jury. I think anyone who has been following my blog for any amount of time would realise how much this means to me! Certainly anyone who, ahem, listened to the most recent Galactic Suburbia would be in absolutely no doubt (for those keeping score, I was invited between the recording of that podcast and the uploading, how’s that for coincidence?)

So yes. I am delighted to join Karen Meisner, James Davis Nicoll, Nisi Shawl, and Lynne M Thomas for many long and crunchy conversations about gender this year. Hooray!

The title from this post is quoted from one of the comments in the threads over at Bitch Magazine – which I think is the best evidence I can give that it’s not all hysteria and piling-on. There’s some marvellous discussion and some really thoughtful posts over there, even if it’s slowly being lost among the noise as more and more people join the conversation.

It’s always disappointing when you’re in the middle of a conversation that to you seems quite robust and interesting, and the people around you suddenly start complaining that it’s too noisy, and asking questions like ‘why is this even important?’ and ‘why are you so angry?’ It reminds me of how many people dismissed RaceFail as a lot of people shouting at each other and getting everything wrong on both sides, and that it hadn’t achieved anything, while the group of people who had been all inspired and had their brains turned inside out and were making exciting plans to make the world better all blinked and went, “Excuse me?”

Conversations, sometimes, are noisy. Especially for those who came in late. So for those of you who did, here are some of the blog responses to the Bitch Magazine Thing.

In short: a magazine recommended some books. A couple of these books raised red flags with commenters – I believe roughly one commenter per book, though we were told there were also some emails. Three books were removed from the recommendation list for not being feminist enough, different reasons each time. And the internet went crazy.

Except it didn’t go that crazy. A lot of things were said, and many of those things were very important. It’s not about censorship, entirely, though that word is being flung around a lot (mostly by people who are saying ‘it’s not actually censorship’). But it is about the misrepresentation of books, about taking a single scene or excerpt and placing a really powerful and negative interpretation on that scene. No books have been banned, and yet, as Maureen Johnson pointed out, this is exactly HOW books get banned. This is the process, and the mindset that lets that happen.

So here we are, typing our brains out, defending books, because that is what we do. If Bitch Magazine had chosen not to recommend a few books that would have been fine, but because they recommended the books and then took that recommendation away, their reasons for doing so take on this huge weight, and it’s distressing to see that people will in fact walk away from the conversation believing that Tender Morsels is a book about rape as revenge (hint: it’s not) and Sisters Red is a book about rape culture (I haven’t read it, though I plan to, but many people have been distressed by this characterisation of the book as there is no rape in it) and Living Dead Girl as “torture porn” (again, I haven’t read it, but several commenters were very upset by this characterisation of the book).

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I have gathered some links of blog posts on the matter by a variety of smart people! It really is worth going back to read the comments on the original Bitch list because there are some marvellous ones – Penni Russon, Paolo Bacigalupi wrote two of my favourites, but there are also some excellent contributions from writers, readers, librarians and rape survivors. On the other hand, they are past 200 posts now and some of them are on the flaily or the ‘what are you all on about’ side, so I understand people choosing to give that a miss. [worth noting for those of you who take a deep breath before reading comments that they allow anonymous commenting and there isn't a lot of moderation going on, though they are trying their best to jump in when threads turn antagonistic or abusive]

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Bitch Magazine posted a list of 100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader, which is a great thing, and it’s a fantastic list featuring a lot of really good books, and quite a bit of speculative fiction. The list included Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan, which you might recall I think is a really good book. So, hooray!

Except that, in response to a single commenter on their list who objected to the use of “rape as vengeance” in a scene in the book, the people behind the Bitch list reread the book and decided to remove it from the list, along with two others that had received complaints.

Several authors and readers, including Margo herself, have objected to this over Twitter. Some tweets have included:

@margolanagan Can’t quite believe this, but Bitch Magazine appear to have caved in and REMOVED TM from their 100 books list. http://tinyurl.com/4jx2qgd

@sarahockler: Your job is not to protect us from literature. Help us discover it. Engage us in conversation & debate. #bitchplease #speakloudly

(PS: the hashtag is awesome, guys, until you click it and realise how many people use the same hashtag WITHOUT IRONY. Ick.)

Scott Westerfeld, Maureen Johnson, Justine Larbalestier and Diana Peterfreund have all requested that their books be removed from the list, in protest to the removal of Tender Morsels.

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I’ve actually got to the point where it BUGS ME if I like a book and for one reason or another, don’t get around to reviewing it on my blog. Sometimes I don’t have time, or I can’t figure out what to say, or what I have to say is too big, or I just read too many awesome books in the one fortnight and some get lost along the way. Or I talked about it on Galactic Suburbia and lost impetus to write my thoughts down. There are also the books that I feel odd or uncomfortable about reviewing, because they’re written by friends (weirdly sometimes I do feel okay about doing this and sometimes not, and it has nothing to do with the degree of friendship) or because there’s some other perceived conflict of interest – there are some TPP books where I have contributed more editorial input than others, and of course there are anthologies in which a story of my own appears.

And there are the ones I just forgot about at the time. And the ones I finished really close to the end of the year, when all my blogging mojo was directed at Ace and the baseball bat.

Part of me wants to go, “REALLY? You REALLY can’t let it go? You’re going to actually feel guilty about not reviewing a small handful of awesome books that people probably know about anyway, rather than feeling proud about the zillions you have reviewed?”

To which I reply, “Okay, you’re obviously a part of me that does not know me very well AT ALL.”

Here then is a super post of a bunch of books I meant to review in 2010 but didn’t, so I can move on into 2011 with a clear conscience. Or something.

Russell T Davies & Benjamin Cook, The Writer’s Tale: the Final Chapter
I very much resented having to buy this book a second time, even if the extra amount added to the paperback was totally worth the price. I now have TWO copies on my shelves, and who’s going to want my hardback of the first half? It was, sadly, completely worth it. A fascinating behind the scenes look at the creative genius (and it has to be said, creative flukitude) of Russell T Davies, it’s a very candid correspondence and one of the best books I’ve ever read as far as capturing what it’s like to be a writer. All writerly spouses should read it, regardless of their interest or lack thereof in Doctor Who!

Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal
A fascinating, crunchy examination of the history of fan culture, which happens to have an awful lot in it about women, attitudes to women, feminism, and attitudes to feminism. Awesome stuff.

Clayton Hickman (ed), The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who
One of two very well-chosen Christmas presents I bought myself! I’ve never bothered with the annuals or any of the tie in books about New Who, because they seem to mostly be aimed at kids – this was totally aimed at kids, but luckily the kids in question were mostly TWELVE YEAR OLD ME so I enjoyed it very much as a lazy Christmas read. Far closer to a Doctor Who Magazine Special than some boring old annual, this was full of cool bits and pieces, Moffatt quotes, cast interviews, making of features, and extras. The Brian Aldiss story was a bit of boring old tripe that didn’t capture the character voices at all, but the rest of the book was tip-top. My favourite bit was the collection of Churchill diary entries with mentions of all the Doctors who have crossed his path over his lifetime, which was genuinely funny and sweet.

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(via Blue Milk)

So, this one gets me where I live. The overly gendered toy market and the advertising that goes along with it is a constant frustration for me, as a mother of two girls. We’re not just talking about pink or blue packaging here. There is a huge divide between the products created for girls and those for boys, and this vid shows something about how confronting that can be for parents who actively think about this stuff.

Boys, in Toydepartmentworld, get to be warriors or builders. Even the building toys that are mostly directed at them are often quite violent in the story that goes along with them, or the advertising associated with them. Girls, meanwhile, get to be sparkly princesses or shopping queens.

The ads targeted at children are gross parodies of the gendered advertising aimed at men and women. The whole thing seems designed to create the four wheel drive and fashion magazine purchases of the future. Which, of course, it is.

The vid quite rightly points out that pushing these kind of tight, limited gender boxes on children at such an early age can have quite awful and far-reaching consequences. At a time when they are learning how to be human and how to find their place in society, a time when everything they learn gets soaked into their consciousness like a sponge, two of the biggest messages they are internalising is that boys must be strong, violent and controlling, and that girls must be pretty, glamorous and domestic.

It’s not just advertising. Of course it’s not just advertising. Our children are absolutely complicit in this rigid stereotyping of genders. I feel at times like de-brainwashing Raeli from the ideas about gender she and her friends come up with in the playground is a full time job. It’s like they spend their entire lunch break sitting around and wilfully constructing the most limited and small minded social constructs for themselves.

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Not so long ago, I wrote a post about my disappointment in the recent Stephanie Plum release, and cited the media reports about the money Janet Evanovich had been paid to move from St Martin’s Press. I sort of feel now that I should make a retraction, or at least a follow up, in response to this interview with Janet where she says that the media misreported the amount she was paid, and represented her unfairly as “demanding.” The quote I used in the title is I think a very accurate statement about how successful women are perceived in the media.

She also makes it clear that her main reason for moving publishers had nothing to do with money (unsurprisingly she is quite well off) and more to do with creative direction: “I think they did a fabulous job for me, but we had some differences about moving forward, about the projects that I felt very strongly about in the future, and that really was not so much a matter of money, it was a matter of a vision. I just had a slightly different vision than St. Martin’s. So, I just felt like maybe I needed a change, maybe I needed some new ideas. Sometimes you are the new girl on the block, and there is just a lot of enthusiasm and there’s a lot of energy. You all of a sudden have this rush to do something fabulous.”

That kinda sounds to me like the issue was Janet wanting to write something other than more and more and more Stephanie Plum… and while I personally have never enjoyed her non-Plum books as much, there can be nothing worse for an author than that expectation that you keep doing your cash cow successful series at the expense of growing and developing and trying new things. Her intentions to hook up with co-writers to help boost other careers is kind of an interesting thing, too – and probably something that would help her kick herself out of the rut she might be in. I see other authors doing this – Jenny Crusie for one, though I think she mostly does it with close friends – but have rarely heard one talking about their motives for doing so openly.

There’s I think an unfair assumption with co-writing that it’s entirely a trade of famous name for leg/fingerwork, and that the no-name writer does all the work while the famous person just signal boosts the book by existing. More authors talking about the co-writing process and their methods and what they get out of it would help to get rid of that myth, I think. Also I just find co-writing a fascinating thing to read about because everyone does it differently!

One of my favourite fragments of the internet this week is an interview with Tricia Sullivan, one of those authors I’ve been meaning to get my hands on from her debut novel, though somehow I never have. The interview is fantastic and very inspiring – I very much sympathised with her thoughts on Racefail, and how the way she writes and thinks about her writing has been powerfully shifted thanks to her observation of that huge online discussion which is often mischaracterised as having “achieved nothing”. I was also very interested in Tricia’s discussion of the Clarke Award and gender balance, and how she now questions the (male-dominated) definitions of the genre:

Since having kids, my view of womanhood has changed considerably. I’m conscious of the fact that my concerns are different from classically ‘masculine’ concerns, and are inadequately handled by much of the SF that is out there by male authors. If I want SF that truly appeals to me, I have to hope for more women to come into the field. In the same way, we need more POC…well, really any POC would be nice, actually.

As with racism, I think sexism nowadays is often unconscious. People won’t say to themselves ‘I won’t try that book because it’s by a woman,’ but they will say, ‘I won’t try that book because I like the ones with x, y, and z in them and this book has got j and m.’ And how can you argue with that? People can and do read what they want to. But I think that if you are a white male and everything you read is written by a white male, then it might be worth asking yourself if you shouldn’t consider expanding your tastes somewhat. Some tastes are acquired, but you can’t acquire a taste for something that isn’t on the shelves.

It’s so refreshing to see someone discussing the “well women write less SF so obviously have less representation in SF awards” concept but rather than leaving it at that (so that the responsibility falls on the female authors who don’t write SF or not enough of it) actively talks about why this might be the case, and why, as SF publishing shrinks, it is the women who get squeezed out first.

This topic was picked up over at Torque Control, both the lack of female winners of the Clarke Award but also the minute number of female SF authors published in Britain, and why this might be happening. The discussion in the comments has become rather epic, and while I don’t agree with quite a few of the opinions expressed in said comments (you can probably guess which ones as you read through them) I think the conversation itself is important.

While I’m on a gender theme (heh, you know it’s so unusual around here) I also ran across an excellent post at Geek Feminism about the culture of hating female characters in geek/fan communities. This is a topic I have seen discussed in various places this year – Sarah Rees Brennan has been particularly vocal at the criticisms she receives about her heroine, Mae, as compared to the general response to her hero, Nick (hint: he behaves far more badly and is a million times sluttier, but she gets the vitriole for kissing more than one person, for expressing opinions, etc.)

The article is rather brilliant in the way it dissects the kind of violent and ugly fan response to Gwen from Torchwood and River Song from Doctor Who, and is particularly pointed in the way it compares qualities they share with the male leads of those TV shows, and the way those qualities attract far greater negative response when displayed by a woman. I hadn’t even realised how many similaries there were between Gwen and Captain Jack, though I have long been uncomfortable with the invective used against her character, and not only by the Jack/Ianto shippers, though there is a long tradition of misogyny from slash fans, who often view female lead characters as a threat to their preferred pairing. I remember that when I was hanging out on the edged of the Harry Potter fandom, the levels of hatred and vitriole pointed at Ginny, Hermione and Tonks was somewhat boggling, even before the epilogue came along.

(I have a theory that people are more likely to blame the perceived failings of female fictional characters on the characters themselves rather than the author/writers, and this is certainly a prevailing trend in many fandoms)

The article at Geek Feminism very cleverly addresses the glorification of loudly despising female characters, and the way this can actually have an effect in real life as well, in cultures where women often get to “play with the boys” by dumping on other members of their own gender. Also the frustrating double standard where female fictional characters are often simultaneously criticised for acting “like men” as well as acting “like women”.

Food for thought! And now I go to clean the house.