

The Feminization of Science Fiction (and Fantasy) - hershiser
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2009/10/19/the-feminization-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy/

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dkarl
For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their
ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful
sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi
books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and
manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic
means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that
flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are
getting in on the act -- is this bad news?

Five reasons why it isn't:

1\. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie _Banlieue 13_ ,
which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it
because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a
"big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it
should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.)

2\. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new
thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me
crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against
people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls
and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean
that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of
loserdom.

3\. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it
wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated
by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that
novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything
else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become
superstars.

4\. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi
genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The
stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and
arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out
to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for
stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm
much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously
about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone-
deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a
history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened
long ago.

5\. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to
mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very
big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions
of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of
"feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi
ultimately means more _good_ "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety
of good sci-fi for _everybody_ to read.

------
frig
That's a funny site:

 _Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American
men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a
cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are
consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us._

(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or
not?)

Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a
complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate
the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop
watching it!"

Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-
er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry
about what the natterers were nattering about.

I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic
interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining
experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring;
videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that
experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic
books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.

Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along
with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity
tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).

Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult
military situation and _you_ have to fight your way out; success is not
guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.

Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances
would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-
equivalent basket of books?

I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-
fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so
on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of
buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between
elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and
basketball teams).

For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest
of the gap.

The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and
corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than
men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this _isn't_ a claim
about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now
in higher-paying jobs than men).

There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or
ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior
compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as
present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have
lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as
providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes
against their favor.

I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting
as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here
nor there.

A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in
terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not
like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century
is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but
this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a
serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.

EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was
that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage
ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other
responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for
entertainment.

There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at
stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have _lots_ of time in
that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly
forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for
historians interested in the trash culture of the time.

As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for
trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce
(less time spent at home).

The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding
of two bias-inducing dynamics:

\- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history
media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go
way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)

\- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve
leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that
throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the
average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which
are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800
were classics)

The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been
moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is
actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an
80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the
norm today.

I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames
stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything
a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point
putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not
that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy
that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.

If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should
be your first stop; she's also a _markedly_ better writer than whiskey, who
writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.

~~~
hvs
Yeah, I don't think past generations of men worried about whether the _books_
their sons were reading were manly enough. If there is one thing that has been
considered traditionally "feminine" (rightly or wrongly) it's _reading_.

The only thing to say to this author is, "dude, grow a pair."

------
timhill
Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would
be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the
sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article
is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female
gay alliance for control of the media.

From the article: Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at
least) about as attractive as a “fabulous” Broadway show followed by a viewing
of all three of the “High School the Musical” movies. In fact, the more “gay”
Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent
it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap’s popularity stem from
the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not “questionable” the
way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and
find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well
that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men
(average joes) “gay” they’d break their fingers pushing it. The chief
objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but
the most Alpha of men.

This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who
like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article
he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as
bad.

As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to
support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar
Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my
experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male
audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.

~~~
gaius
The Spearhead is one of those bonkers "PUA" sites. Ironically in _The Game_
they go out wearing feather boas...

None of my male friends like the new Dr Who, but that's 'cos we're all old
geezers who grew up in the days when Dr Who, you know, actually visited alien
planets and travelled through time and stuff, instead of just hanging around
on a housing estate in Wales trying to get laid. It's like _Eastenders_ now.

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roc
I don't know about _the fiction_ , but anything that might marginalize
critics(?) like this one is an improvement.

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noonespecial
Wait now; there were a bunch of girls at comic-con and the guys were
_complaining_?!

~~~
Herring
Twilight is that bad, apparently.

~~~
noonespecial
Still, it strikes me in the same way as "Carrie Fisher totally ruined that
scene in _Return of the Jedi_ prancing around in that gold bikini" might sound
at a Star Wars gathering...

------
olefoo
I don't think it's just women who are responsible for the rise of Extruded
Fantasy Product.

------
CWuestefeld
In a sentence, the OP is nuts.

The traits that it notes as the hallmark of feminine writing are really the
signs of SF's maturation as a real literary form. The old days of pulp and
space operas were, as noted, generally male-centered. They were almost
entirely plot-driven, with tissue-thin characters.

Today's SF is a legitimate vehicle for the exploration not only of new worlds,
but of philosophy and the human condition. This isn't because of females, but
because the genre as a whole -- coming from writers of both genders -- have
learned how to really create characters, and that lets us really explore their
humanity.

For example, Orson Scott Card's second series of _Ender_ novels all retell the
same story, just from the perspective of different characters (male and
female). What could emphasize characters and their relationships more, and de-
emphasize the plot itself, than this? (and yes, Card is male). Indeed, it
seems to me that most of the SF I've read recently is like this to some
extent, like the work of Robert Charles Wilson.

To the extent that being able to address the hard questions is a good thing
(and I think it is), this is very good for science fiction.

And BTW, _Frankenstein_ is not horror, it's proper science fiction. Its theme
deals with man's apparent mastery of nature, and how that becomes his folly.
(More properly, horror should be considered a sub-genre of fantasy.)

And conversely, _The Hobbit_ and _Conan_ are _not_ science fiction, they are
fantasy, in that they deal with man (or halfling, I suppose) at the mercy of
forces beyond his comprehension, trying to make sense of those forces. Indeed,
Tolkein's work is THE canonical fantasy.

------
omouse
The "Big Idea" science fiction was never really about the technology. It's
always been about the social implications and about exploring current
situations but in a different way.

WTF, feminizing means nothing in that context.

------
psygnisfive
Sexist, homophobic. I'm surprised he didn't also include some comment on how
"Adama's a spic when before he was white this is a catastrophy!". I'll take my
captains latino, my fighter pilots chicks, and my immortal secret agents
omnisexual, thanks.

Bigotted asshole.

------
sp332
Pretend the con is Starfleet - full of weird people, with various degrees of
alienness to you. Different groups have different cultural and emotional
development. Try to understand them and get along with them, you'll be a
better person for it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
There is a value to having like minded people gather together without too many
distractions. I've got nothing against soccer players, but I'd still prefer
that Lisp NYC not be overrun by hordes of them.

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lsc
yawn. dude confuses introvert/extrovert dichotomy with male/female dichotomy,
complains about trashy pop-culture.

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hvs
This dude seems to have some issues with his sexuality.

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ilyak
I read quite a few female writers and they're good and relevant. Bujold would
be an obvious example, and much more local authors.

I'm going to visit a fantasy/role playing convention in two weeks, and I think
female participants would account for more than half visitors.

------
guitarjunkie
Why don't we just throw up some Council of Conservative Citizens links as
well. Perhaps a link to Stormfront?

~~~
guitarjunkie
That would be a joke people. Spearhead is about as bigoted and ugly as you can
get without broaching open hateful language.

