I have been sitting on this for a couple days and attempting to find some way to relate it to The Dudez, but I simply can’t. Nevertheless, it is so idiotic I feel the need to share it with everyone, so you guys will just have to suck it up and hear about how sexism hurts ladies for a while.
In short: the New York Times wants to know why women don’t like science fiction, except for A Wrinkle In Time. Apparently I was hallucinating Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr., Elizabeth Bear, Ursula K. Le Guin, Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, Connie Willis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Atwood, K. A. Applegate, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lois McMaster Bujold, C. J. Cherryh, Pat Cadigan, Mary Shelley, and Margaret Cavendish. I must have a very good imagination.
Yes, I definitely double-checked, and this is an article from 2012, not from 1952.
This article includes sentences like:
Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women, according to a 2010 study by the Codex Group, a consulting firm to the publishing industry. And while a sizable portion of men continue to read science fiction throughout their lives, women don’t. Thirty-two percent of adult male book buyers are science-fiction fans compared with only 12 percent of women.
The New York Times needs to meet my friend Confounding Variables. Women tend to read more than men do; the average woman reads almost twice as many books as the average man. Twelve percent of female readers is more substantial than twelve percent of male readers would be. Not only that, they tend to read more widely– a woman reading science fiction does not, outside of the New York Times, incite comment, but a man reading romance novels definitely does (our old friend femmephobia strikes again). Having a larger percentage of a smaller pie is not exceptional.
When Joanna Russ, one of the few successful female science-fiction writers, died last year, her obituary in The New York Times referred to her as a writer who helped “deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen – women.”
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Oh, Joanna, we’ve had our disagreements now and then (The Female Man: needs less feminism, more weirdass woman-only utopias), but you deserve more than that. You may have been called “she,” but you weren’t a godsdamned Vulcan. Seriously, who the hell thought it was a good idea to call women “alien creatures” in the obituary of one of the most noted feminist science fiction writers of all time?
But it is Meg, a girl who combines both the ordinary and the extraordinary, who overcomes the book’s villain – an evil disembodied brain called IT – with the power of a simple human emotion, love.
Perhaps it is this softer element that distinguishes “Wrinkle” from its rocketry and light-saber brethren.
Is it too much to ask that, before pontificating about science fiction for America’s paper of record, people should be required to read some of it?
But I am glad to know that science fiction has never had anything to say about simple human emotions like love. We don’t have Firefly, which is all about freedom and healing and, most of all, family. We don’t have Octavia Butler’s Kindred, with its harrowing exploration of slavery and how it twists love and what people do to survive it. We don’t have Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which is all about the love between Genly and Estraven. Star Trek talks about the importance of love so much it gets tedious.
You can’t even fucking say Lightsaber Stories aren’t about love, because the climactic moment of Star Wars is where Luke redeems Darth Vader through the power of love. Did this person even bother to watch to the end of the movie?
What is it then that makes girls averse to science fiction? Could it be the pronounced boyness of the covers – the same signal that deters girls from switching to Superman after their Betty and Veronica days have passed?
Yes. The reason girls don’t read science fiction is because the covers are too boyish. Obviously. Why didn’t I think of that before?
I dunno, man, I’ve read some science fiction with some incredibly embarrassing covers– I used to put my copy of Stranger in a Strange Land flat on the desk so no one could see the naked people on it. I still like science fiction. I think that the reason girls tend to read science fiction less than guys can be summed up in “girls think that science fiction is icky boy stuff, partially due to articles like this one” and “a whole lot of science fiction, especially earlier stuff, has really awful and regressive gender politics and/or no female characters who don’t giggle at all.”
Some might say the dystopic fantasy, apocalyptic tales and paranormal romance so popular with today’s teenage girls are actually couched “girl-friendly” variants of science fiction.
Well, yes, New York Times, if you define all the science-fiction that girls like as not science fiction, of course girls are not going to like science fiction. But even beyond that, it is now time for an exploration of what The New York Times thinks is not science fiction!
Kindly note all the girly covers.
superglucose: “So now modern sci-fi will become Twilight… in SPACE!”
Now I really want Twilight to have enough cheapo movie sequels tacked on to reach Twilight In Space!
The problem with defining science fiction is that science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction are all so closely interlinked that it should really be one genre, because when TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE are used to SPECULATE about hypothetical possibilities, thereby creating a FANTASY WORLD, it’s kinda hard to separate it into a single genre. I would not define “Star Wars” as science fiction because there’s no science involved — blasters are substitutes for real guns (they wanted to avoid a rating that would impact their sales, so they used blasters instead of real guns to make the violence “fantastic”), and light… Read more »
Reblogged this on The Literary Cricket and commented:
Women don’t read science fiction, says the New York Times. …O RLY?
@ monkey: Oh, god, don’t get me started on TNG. It was supposed to be all sciencey, but they use the fricking Deus Ex Machina EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. There’s a reason for that. When you’ve got hour-long sci-fi episodes which have no significant story arcs and character development is largely in stasis in order to keep each episode self-contained, there’s a strong tendency to explore social themes in an original and highly dramatic way, and then suddenly OH CRAP DEADLINE EPISODE FILMS TOMORROW painted myself in a corner NO TIME FOR MAJOR REWRITE gaah let’s just have them decouple the… Read more »
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The difference between sci-fi and fantasy: when you want the heroes to break the rules of your imaginary world, do they concentrate really hard on their magic or adjust the tachyon beam?”
Oh, god, don’t get me started on TNG. It was supposed to be all sciencey, but they use the fricking Deus Ex Machina EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. At least Kirk solved some problems by getting his uniform torn and letting the stuntman beat up the lizard guy.
Hey, and The L, what have you written? I like to write as well, nothing published tho.
You know what I have to say to this author? This:
F**k Me, Ray Bradbury
(err… NSFW, if that’s not clear from the title…)
Man, Ozy you’re awesome for mentioning K. A. Applegate. She was my favorite author in middle school, I have every animorph book (except Alternamorphs #2, because I maintain that book’s existence is entirely due to Executive Meddling) and I’m saving them for if/when I ever have kids.
The difference between sci-fi and fantasy: when you want the heroes to break the rules of your imaginary world, do they concentrate really hard on their magic or adjust the tachyon beam?
They figure out that the world doesn’t really exist in the first place and never did. And yours neither!
PKD, always, for the win!
Good piece, Ozy. I have been hearing my whole life, that women don’t read SciFi. It just isn’t true. PS: Now I feel guilty for not writing an obit for Joanna Russ! How did I let that PASS? ARGHGH. (I am so sorry, Joanna!) I highly recommend her book Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Essays on Sex and Pornography… her essay on how romance novels are to women as porn is to men, is sheer brilliance. (She analyzes both and decides they are mirror images; its a dynamite essay.) http://www.amazon.com/Mommas-Trembling-Sisters-Puritans-Perverts/dp/0895941635 These are the essays that changed my mind… Read more »
I must have hallucinated that book review blog of mine. Silly me. (I decided against making it only female sci-fi/fantasy authors, though I kept the gender themes and a slim majority of the authors I follow closely happen to be female.) Sure, this article is genderfailtastic, but there’s a grand tradition of writing pretentious articles about sci-fi and fantasy without knowing a thing about it. I found one in the New Yorker a month or two back all about how Tolkien’s fantasy world was resurrected in that sniveling mess of derivative trash known as Eragon. Apparently all the genre is… Read more »
@MinuteEye-
If those ads aren’t there for guys, they should be. Because hot damn. Guys in eyeliner. Or mascara. Or both. Actually, mascara makes pretty good eyeliner, if applied correctly… provided the eyeliner was well done and not like something off an Alice Cooper album cover. Then it just gets everywhere, and I have to wash these sheets, damnit.
@coloradosal – “The level of stupidity here is astounding.” PLEASE tell me you are referring to the NYT article and not the commentariat? One would think that the shear number of female authors in the Spec. Fic. genre would be an indication of it’s readership. These writers didn’t appear in a vacuum. I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that the vast majority of spec. fic. writers were inspired to write because of something they read. Sure I would guess that at least a few woke up one day and said “hmm….what if…?” and started to write, but… Read more »
Sci-fi is one of my first loves. Asimov, Lexx (which has many love stories, BTW- Kai and Zev/Xev, robot head->Xev), Dune, Twilight Zone (which did include some sci-fi- some written by Serling, some adapted from others), Douglas Adams… actually, I think I have at LEAST one bookshelf entirely packed with sci-fi novels, and that’s after losing around 30 boxes of books in a move. And then I have my husbands’ collection. And okay, yeah, I like L’Engle too, but she’s a great author. ^_^ So suck it, NYT. Go find a nerd chick. We’re everywhere. We just weren’t noticed before… Read more »
@minuteye: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL I hope so! Eye make-up wearing geekboys = teh hotness!
STOP WINNING THE INTERNET YOURE HOGGING ALL THE POINTS AND ALSO I SHOULD STOP SHOUTING and also this bullshit engineered gendering of sci-fi totally affects the menz because it means there are fewer womenz for straight menz to use sci-fi derived pickup lines on AND it means they don’t have enough awesome three dimensional female characters to fantasize about which is a TOTALLY VITAL ISSUE OF PRACTICAL SEXUAL ETHICS as I’m sure is obvious to you at this point. kthxbai.
Wow, one of my blogging buddies, Miss Anderson over at “The Libararian Who Didn’t Say Shhhh” would certain be gagging over this NYT nonsense. She just reviewed a Margaret Atwood YA book on her blog. She always has some SyFy on her reading lists. Many of my tweeting buddies in the U.K. go into cyberspacey ecstatsies over Anna Silk , now showing on this side of the Atlantic in the SyFy channel’s newest intro to U.S. soil, Monday nights at 9:00p.m.EST. WE ARE ALL FEMALES! It is only my senior citizen female friends who say they stay away from science… Read more »
I hate gender-based assumptions of genre readership, whether it’s “this gender doesn’t read this kind of book” or “this gender will always read this kind of book” (see: “men don’t read romance” and “women only read chick-lit”, both of which are common assumptions people make). I see it happen a lot in children’s / young adult literature circles: books with certain traits (usually either action/things going explode, things being gruesome, or a lack of ~romance~) get flagged as “boy-friendly”, as though boys, universally, like these things. This is especially weird for me as a librarian, as I know the goal… Read more »
I have to agree with Solo. I can’t get angry about the “girls don’t like science fiction” trope because it’s obviously asinine to anyone who pays any attention to anything. It’s like getting angry about the NY Times publishing an article about how since monkeys are still around obviously humans couldn’t have evolved from monkeys. My response is “ok so you don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s fine. It’s not important for you to know what you’re talking about. You go over there being ignorant, I’ll be over here… not doing that.” What gets me is that this is… Read more »
I didn’t realize girls were supposed to like Betty and Veronica. I thought their purpose was to titillate pubescent boys.
Oh, damn, my friends have been lying to me. Not sure *why* they’re so keen to get me to watch Firefly if they don’t like sci-fi, though.
Wow. The level of stupidity here is astounding. I know loads of women who read and watch sci-fi, along with a wide variety of other genres. We like comic books too, and not just Betty and Veronica (gag) but Superman, X-Men, Avengers, Bat-family, Green Arrow. Good grief.
I think the author of the article needs to go online and see just how much fan fiction women are writing about sci-fi characters. The amount of Star Trek fic out there is astounding. If we’re not sci-fi fans, why would we be so obsessed?
People keep telling me the ladies don’t like scifi, but everytime I watch a movie on the syfy channel there are mascara ads as far as the eye can see. Are eyeliner-loving geek boys that big of a demographic? It’s enough to make a person suspicious.
Of course it’s all about the men. Geek guys often complain that there aren’t enough geek girls. Men fantasize about a woman who shares his taste in science fiction instead of reading novels about shoe shopping and sexy paranormal bad boys.
Uh, hell-ooo? Sci-fi/sci-fan fuckin’ CREATOR here. Christ, who did the Codex Group poll? Even needing to ask the question as though it were even an issue is mind-bogglingly stupid.
The difference between sci-fi and fantasy: when you want the heroes to break the rules of your imaginary world, do they concentrate really hard on their magic or adjust the tachyon beam? As for women not reading sci-fi: I’m not a woman, but my mom raised my siblings and me on a steady diet of Star Trek and Asimov, and I got huge props for hunting down a mint Again, Dangerous Visions Part 1 for her Christmas present last year. This article would have been bullshit in the 70s. But then, fluff piece from the NYT: “my bourgie friends are… Read more »