I’ve had a tab open to this post by Jim C Hines on Girly Books and gender stereotyping all week, pretty sure that I wanted to say something about it, but not sure what.

I understand his bafflement at male readers being hesitant to pick up his new books, the ones with girls on the cover. I remember the almost physical blow I felt the first time an acquaintance told me to my face that he wasn’t going to read my books because he didn’t read anything with female protagonists. (ten years later I’m still going, seriously? Seriously?)

Looking at Hines’ covers, which are gorgeous, it occurs to me how unusual they are in the fantasy genre. Having a female character on the cover, even a female and no male character, is not that unusual – but three women, with no man in sight? I can’t think of another fantasy cover ever that has had such a composition.

Fantasy fiction is not short of female characters, even memorable and important female characters, but it’s hard to escape the fact that so many of the sourceworks, the deeply respected historical texts that helped to form people’s idea of fantasy fiction, tend to place female characters in a vacuum.

From fairy tales through the pulp stories and Tolkien to the epic fantasies of the 1980′s – whether women are crunchy protagonists and point-of-view characters or cardboard love-interests and prizes, what they most have in common is feminine isolation. The princess’s most important relationship is with her potential prince, and her value is often calculated on how well she gets along with male characters. Often this is well meaning – an awesome female character stands out very effectively when surrounded by blokes. Also her awesomeness is often created by an unflattering contrast with other women – she is special, they are drips.

(I do this too, I’m horrified to realise, most of my female relationships in novels are based on conflict, and the best friendships represented are male-female)

These traditions bleed through to modern storytelling, and I can think of so few examples of fantasy fiction which has an emphasis on family or friendship relationships or even teamwork between women. I have to admit, when I first heard about Hines’ Stepsister Scheme my first thoughts were very cynical, that the idea of fairy tale princesses ganging up together and kicking arse/fighting crime was a bit of an old cliche. But thinking about it again – no, it isn’t. It’s horribly original. There just aren’t that many fantasy stories out there that are predominantly about women – and women plural, not just one really great woman.
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One of the cool things I will remember about the blogosphere in 2009 was the amazing response to the TripleJ Hottest 100 of all time, as people across Australia responded to the gaping (and for many of us, quite shocking) lack of female representation in that list by celebrating women’s music. The conversation that spanned across so many blogs and Twitter accounts was layered and fascinating, and went a long way to making up for some of the more jawdropping kneejerk reactions/excuses for so many people not voting in female artists (women’s voices are higher… men are more likely to write/perform those epic songs…)

An uncomfortable theme that was raised in various circles was that women’s art is still seen as less, and that when forced to think about it, people can come up with a long list of justifications why this is so, because ‘actually I’ve been socialised to think that male=better/stronger/wiser’ is often a hard thing to admit, let alone come to terms with. One list that did have a substantial proportion of women was the “songs I am embarrassed to admit I like.”

Which brings me to Amanda Palmer, singing a song about Lady Gaga and herself and Madonna, apparently the final act of an ongoing debate with Neil Gaiman. It seems to belong to that conversation from several months ago – or maybe it’s the beginning of a new conversation. In any case, it’s a very cool song, not least because of the circumstances under which it was created. If you’re not already following Amanda’s blog (her posts are, this one notwithstanding, loooong and hard to navigate at times), she is definitely an artist to watch for the ways in which she experiments with form, social media and the changing face of technology and the internet. She’s basically the rock chick version of Cory Doctorow (ha, okay, someone has to get those two on a stage together if it hasn’t already happened), and its her willingness to throw herself, unrehearsed, into her art; her willingness to get messy, screw up & show her knickers (both metaphorically and literally) in various public forums that make her such a compelling figure.

I love the fact that Neil and Amanda have basically become the Posh and Becks of the lit/rock music world.

Nnedi Okorafor talks about the Princess and the Frog – it’s a pretty positive review overall, and she addresses the racially/culturally problematic aspects of the story. Raeli’s been looking forward to this movie for more than six months (it’s out on Boxing Day here!), so I was relieved to hear that it actually isn’t total crap, and that Princess Tiana (whom she is already completely in love with) sounds pretty cool. Nnedi’s commentary on voodoo and how it’s handled in the film was particularly interesting to me, and it sounds like there are parallels there to how Disney presented the Greek gods & myths in Hercules through a ‘default Christian’ lens.

Ask Daphne (a blog I’ve never heard of) discusses the question of how to refer to race/colour in fictional characters without making a big deal about it, with a guest appearance by Maureen Johnson. Maureen’s main issue is about the way that expectations of the reader can conflict with an author’s intentions – the discomfort of throwing readers out of the story by making a big deal out of racial characteristics of some characters and not others vs. the problem of readers automatically assuming all the characters are white. Much though it would be nice to have a simple answer to this issue, there isn’t one, and Maureen acknowledges this, while also doing a good job of discussing the complexities.

Diana Peterfreund picks up on the topic and explores it further, looking at the ways in which author’s carefully constructed descriptions can still conflict with reader expectations, and this is in fact one time when the potential response of the reader *is* something that an author may need to address ahead of time. In particular she talks about Giovanni, the love interest in her latest novel Rampant, who is black. I have to admit I’m one of those readers who assumed that blonde Astrid’s POV descriptions of G as having dark skin and dark curly hair meant that he was Mediterranean-white. “Dark” after all is a very subjective word. It’s easy to see how people of different ethnicities can disappear in fiction, without a visual frame of reference, especially if colour is not directly relevant to the plot or character arcs.

The whole issue of reader expectation is fascinating to me. I have some very firm expectations that I take with me into books and perhaps because I have always been such a fast reader (cough, I miss stuff a lot) it does affect how I read and think of a book. Sometimes I have such a clear image of a character that I can’t change it once the text contradicts it – I just ignore. In the Falco books, which I have been reading in my teens, I became convinced very early on that Helena was blonde. The only possible reason for this is that the first time he meets a ‘Helena Justina’ it is her blonde cousin using her name. But I developed a very firm image of blonde, acerbic Helena in my head and no matter how many times the author (or Falco himself, or the cover art) tells me how dark and serious-looking she is (as most women of Ancient Rome *would* be), my brain shrieks ‘blonde’ at me.

POV can be a good tool for expressing description in a personable, interesting way, especially first person POV, but you’re then stuck with the issue of how to describe your actual POV character. Which is fine if they’re vain, but if they’re someone whose image of themselves conflicts with how others see them, it becomes an absolute minefield. Unless you’re willing to have them look in the mirror and comment on what they see which is Bad Writing, Bad Writing. I recently had the experience of trying to edit a first person book where I had a very clear image of how the POV character looked, but struggled to express that through her voice, because she was the kind of person who didn’t know how cute she was – and also one whose main characteristics were style and personality. Her self-deprecating humour about herself meant that some readers were confused.

How much do you need to know about how a first person character looks? Isn’t their relationship to their body/clothing taste/other people/hair more interesting than a photographic description? Do you need to know what colour a character’s hair is, or how wide her hips are? Are your expectations different in this with male vs. female characters?

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Melander sent me a link to this story about a Canadian academic criticising Thomas the Tank Engine for being too conservative and under-representing women. (heh I don’t know why people send me this stuff either, let’s move on, shall we?)

The article is divided between the opinions of Professor Shauna Wilson, who has an interesting take on some of the more problematic elements of the tv show and some of the messages it presents to children, including a lack of female characters (and a tendency for those few examples to be bossy or know-it alls), an an overall conservative ideology. She also mentions some of the positive messages that the show carries.

The part of the story I think is most important is that she was inspired to carry out this study after watching Thomas with her child. One of the side-effects of being an educated person (ie someone trained to examine texts with a critical eye) raising a child is that you notice this stuff. You find yourself looking in horror as some of the shows or books that your children love, and quietly pushing those dvds behind others that you feel more comfortable about.

Rather than find someone actually associated with the show to respond to the themes Professor Wilson raises, the article quotes a (female) co-founder of the Campaign Against Political Correctness in the UK, disregarding Wilson’s findings as “nonsense.”

Here’s the thing, though: the Thomas the Tank Engine books were originally written in the 1940′s, by a vicar. Of course they represent a conservative mindset! It’s also hardly surprising that their representation of women ranges from meagre to borderline offensive. But there’s a big difference between reading books to your children which you know are from another time, and having them adapted for the TV in shiny colourful ways.

From my point of view, Thomas is an irrelevance – Raeli hardly ever watches it, and it’s one of those shows that makes her want to turn off the tv. She recognises I think that it’s not made with her in mind. But just because it’s a ‘boys show’ doesn’t let the makers off the hook. Because the thing about boys shows is that boys watch them. Which gives them a great opportunity to show by example that the line between boys and girls is not so clear cut as they might assume, rather than reinforcing tired and unnecessary assumptions about gender.

It’s scary how much of the product put out for kids these days is starkly gendered. It’s getting worse, and it gets everywhere.

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This article from Politics Daily caught my eye (tweeted by @robinwasserman) yesterday.  Lizzie Skurnick discusses the consistent way that literary awards lists are dominated by male authors.  As some of you know, this one’s a pet topic of mine.  Skurnick’s article particularly interests me because she cuts right past the idea that this is a deliberate exclusion of women by the patriarchy (the straw argument that most people argue against when this topic comes up – “I’m not sexist, we didn’t consider gender at ALL, so there,” etc.) and deals instead with the rather more troubling idea that our culture is so geared towards calling “books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric,” that we don’t even realise we are doing it.  And that the ‘we’ in question can as easily encompass women readers/jurists/reviewers as men.

I’ve been arguing this for a while.  We’re past the point where anyone can actively stand up and say “well women’s work is inferior” without looking like a complete arse, so instead we get “it’s all a matter of taste and I just happen to like these books that just happen to be written by men.”

“But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”

Skurnick is against affirmative action as a solution.  I go back and forth about the idea.  I understand the arguments against it.  Whether we’re talking about editors selecting stories to publish, or jurors deciding which books are best, the idea of giving someone “an unfair advantage” doesn’t seem right.  Many people are understandably offended by the idea of being asked to reassess what they think of as “good” or “the best” or even “stuff I like.”  Demanding some kind of quota system (as was proposed and promptly squashed) for the Hugo’s this year) is threatening because it asks people to reassess their notions of quality.  But it is also an important question to consider, because it asks people to reassess their notions of quality.

Until it is universally recognised that having one gender consistently recognised as “better” than the other is an actual problem, we need to keep returning to this conversation.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in the description of language used to assess male v. female authored works.  The use of the word ‘ambitious’ is particularly telling – where men are being consistently honoured for books that try and fail to achieve something great, and women are being penalised for writing books that are, you know, good.  But ‘unambitious’.  She may be talking about the literary world, but there are parallels in spec fic – in the dismissal of urban fantasy as some stupid vampire-shagging genre that only women like, in the way that women can never write SF “hard” enough to count as the real thing, in tables of contents that just happen to contain all male authors (not because of sexism, cos the editor is so non-sexist that they don’t even think about gender when they choose stories, isn’t that awesome?) and in a reviewing culture that prioritises books (ambitious or otherwise) which are written by men.

I also see parallels to recent discussions by  sarahreesbrennan, Justine Larbalestier and others on how even male characters can get away with so much more than female characters, who are judged more harshly for their flaws and for being too perfect.  Hell, I see parallels in the way it’s so hard to find coverage of women’s sport because “people aren’t interested” (how can we be interested if there’s no coverage?”) and as touched on in the previous post, how “girls don’t game” so it’s fine to ignore/not ask what they want from games.

The problem is not, for the most part, the sexism that people know they are perpetuating.  It’s all the other kinds.  And this is why the internet reacts by piling on when, for instance, a new anthology appears which presents the totally-gender-neutral-concept that mindblowing SF can only be written by men.  Once your eyes are opened to the hidden, unintentional inequalities, it’s hard not to see them everywhere.  Because they really are everywhere.  Still.

PS: other people have commented on Twitter etc. about the headdesky nature of the comments to that article. I was pleased I had not risked sanity points by looking at them.  This time around, I accidentally read some and omfg. The 78 yr old man who proclaims that women can’t write as well as men because they only write books of interest to other women – thus they sell more despite being not as good.  And not having as many words in their sentences.   Also he’s not a chauvenist (sic) cos he has three successful daughters.  WITHOUT IRONY, PEOPLE.  HE SAYS THIS WITHOUT IRONY.

PPS: Must – stop – reading – comments – before – stupid – rubs off on me – gah.