I recently put up my Best of the Year short story list up at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. (Alisa, Ben, Alex and Sarah have all put their lists up too) This also meant that I got to deal with my annual ‘is it okay that most of the stories I like are by women, and does that make me a hypocrite?’ qualms.

I have, on occasion, been rather scathing of Best Of lists, shortlists, and collected works which skew towards celebrating the work of male authors over and above the work of female authors. I frequently challenge the idea that “taste” matters in these cases. I do continue to believe that it is a problem when the majority of people who tell us where to find the best fiction of year have “taste” that skews towards the male. Because it ceases to become a matter of personal taste and starts to be a matter of politics when the pattern is so wide, so all-encompassing that it is considered the default.

My cards on the table: I skew towards the celebration of the female. This isn’t a political decision on my part. I don’t set out to ’see’ the value of women’s art over that of the male. I just do. I was raised by a very feminist single mother who made sure that I was exposed to female artists and themes. I was very aware from a very young age about how this stuff works – how themes preferred by female artists are often treated differently to those preferred by men. I saw my mother and other women at the Art School (especially the very male-oriented Sculpture Department) risk failing grades for making art about motherhood. So there is that political edge there, and it has informed the construction of my personal taste, in that I was never taught to not value women’s art.

When I make a list of stuff I liked, it’s exactly that. Stuff I liked. And generally speaking, when it comes to short stories, I come up roughly 75% stuff I liked by women, and 25% by men. My lists with novels skewer much higher, because unlike short fiction, I often self-select male authors out of the equation. Male writers have to be very, very good and come recommended by people I trust for me to spend time on them. My current tally for 2009 is 12 – 2 non fiction, 4 fiction and 6 anthologies written, edited or co-edited by men. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Though it is out of a total of books read of 108…

I’m okay with my reading choices. I read for several reasons: enjoyment, to increase awareness of what’s going on currently in the fields of literature I’m most interested in (children’s, YA, fantasy, some crime, some SF), to educate myself about the classics, and to find good books to recommend to others. The aspects of my current reading I feel most guilty about lately are: not reading enough classics (particularly those by female authors) and not reading enough “grown up books” (YA tastes so gooood). Not reading enough books by men doesn’t actually bother me at all.

The main reason it doesn’t bother me? I’ve been there, and done that. If my Mum taught me to see women’s art, my Dad taught me to read men’s books. The majority of adult novels I read from ages 10-15 were informed by his personal taste, and while he did introduce me to Sara Paretsky (whom I loved) and Sue Grafton (whom I hated), the majority of authors he slid in my general direction were by male authors. Walter Tevis, Dick Francis, Robert B Parker. Then there was school and college and university, where I had to take specialist ‘women author’ courses to get more than a 60-40 or 80-20 balance of male to female authors. Dickens, Trollope, Hardy. Then there was my fantasy reading, which brought me some amazing (and of course mediocre) work by female authors, but so much moooore by men. Ditto for science fiction, only more so. By the time I found the amazing Women of Wonder compliations by Pamela Sargent, I had already made my way through Asimov’s, Heinlein, Herbert… Et cetera. Many et ceteras.

Women are taught to read men’s books from an early age. We’re told that girls will read books about boys and boys just won’t read books about girls… and we buy into that. Women learn to read the world through male eyes very early on, because so many stories just don’t make sense without at least being able to fake and understanding of that point of view.

I read a lot of books. You may have noticed this. Before I started having babies, I averaged 200 novels a year. Back in my teens I think it was more but the numbers are skewed because of the sheer weight of re-reads. I read everything, across the board, and still found myself with too many books to read. These days I only have 100 or so precious reading slots per year, and most of them are filled with quick-fixes of favourite authors, escapism, and books that just plain make me feel happy that they exist.

I’ve still never read novels by Joanna Russ, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, Anne Bronte, Zora Neale Hurston, Daphne Du Maurier, Vita Sackville-West and Octavia Butler. I have so much catching up to do.

When I do read more evenly across genders, as I do for short fiction (though I do tend to reach for the YA female-heavy anthologies first, and I haven’t been able to bear opening an Analog in two years or more) the numbers bear witness over and over to the fact that, statistically, I prefer works by women. I believe this would be the case even if I had read all those stories without bylines – it’s about content, not the name of the author – though I have no way to prove that’s the case. I’m sure there are occasions when I have given a story a little more time and attention, or a bit more of a chance to prove itself, with a female byline, but for the most part it comes down to content.

I don’t want to get bogged down here in trying to explain the difference of female-authored content vs. male. Obviously women, like men, write such a variety of stories and in such a variety of styles that there is no such thing as ‘women’s fiction’ or ‘men’s fiction’ and I would be in very shaky ground if I tried to define either of those things. You can say stuff like ’soft science vs hard science’ or ‘emotional vs rational’ but I think any attempt to make definitions like that are just screaming out to be debunked. I’ve seen people analyse such phrases and point out that ’soft science fiction’ often can be translated as ’science fiction written by a woman’ and that people are just more likely to notice the people in women’s fiction and the action/plot in men’s because that is what they expect to see. I think there’s a good case for that.

In any case, given my history, when reading for pleasure it makes complete sense to me that, given a choice between two works, of potential equal interest (if there were such a thing, which there is not) I reach for the female authored work first.

And while I don’t deliberately construct ‘best of’ lists that are skewed towards celebrating women, the fact that my lists always turn out that way is a big reason why I continue to read publicly – reviewing books and stories whenever I can, and participating in projects such as Last Short Story. There are so many tastemakers in the world (both male and female) who skew male in their preferences, often without even realising that they do so, and we have a long way to go (we have barely even started) before the balance of power shifts enough that an extra reader-reviewer who skews female would be unnecessary.

Sure, I could work harder to read an exactly even number of men and women, but I don’t feel that’s a necessary or even desirable thing for me to do. You can’t fight an imbalance of power by aiming for middle ground, unless everyone’s doing it. The only way to balance out a seesaw is to have heavy weights at both ends. I don’t consider myself a heavyweight as a reviewer, but despite my annual qualms (am I a hypocrite? if so, am I okay with that?), I remain very comfortable with which end of the seesaw I am sitting on.

For the record: books written or edited by men that I have read this year and loved are The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Horn by Peter M Ball, Worldshaker by Richard Harland, My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kruger, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, Eclipse 3 by Jonathan Strahan (ed), and Booklife by Jeff VanderMeer. Hopefully after reading this post you realise what a huge compliment that is. When it comes to male-authored books, I am very hard to please.

Tags: feminism, last short story, literary classics, reading, YA