Wiscon-Related Thoughts pt 5
Jun. 11th, 2011 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ann_leckieV Women write different stories from men?
Do women write different stories, or do we see them as different like hearing their music as thinner or lesser? I don't know the answer. Certainly some women write different sorts of stories. Certainly many women's lives are very, very different from most men's. At Wiscon, in the bar, a male writer who had been the stay-at-home parent for his family said (I paraphrase), "I realized, things that were supposed to be how women are were really how it is when you're the person home with the kids all day." Yep. You get a very different view of the world like that.
Even if you don't stay home, women are expected to take up much of the work of housekeeping and childrearing, and to prioritize those things in a way men aren't expected to.
Someone who lives the life a woman leads, is maybe going to have a different set of concerns, a different project compelling her to write. And maybe she's sending out pears when the editors are really buying apples. But they say they want fruit! And the editor replies, "Yes, that's right, I only want the best fruit, and yours tasted niceish and all, but it just wasn't very good fruit." Meaning it wasn't an apple. Even though it was an awesome pear and pears are fruit, dammit!
Maybe. I'm not sure I totally believe that women's writing is essentially different from men's. And I've just finished reading a dismissal of women's writing on those very grounds.* But the argument can be made, that some women do, some women are writing very different stories from men, just because they're women.
But the stereotypical "feminine" concerns aren't really ones that don't affect men's lives, that they're not interested in. Romance? Kids? These are things that are, in fact, very important to most men I've met, and while they engage with those issues on somewhat different terms than women (less of a necessity to do the hands-on childrearing, less cultural pressure around marriage and romance as a source of identity and validation, etc.), relationships and children are, in fact, really, really important to a lot of men. Our cultural insistence that men just don't care about such things obscures this.
How much of "women write different things because they have different concerns" is down to knowing the author is a woman? How would men respond to stories ostensibly authored by a man that deal with "women's concerns"?
Yeah, we already know the answer to that question. And I could name several examples of stuff written by men who haven't turned out to actually be women that left me saying to myself, "Self, this is about the goopiest romance I ever read, and if a woman had written it, it would have a bodice-ripper cover and a title with "Passion" in it and be sneered at as trash, instead of the tasteful literary cover and the awards."
So, do women tend to write different sorts of stories, with different foci? Probably. But how different? Different enough to account for ToC imbalances? For women's invisibility in the history of SFF?
Can we swear that we are so completely unbiased that the (ostensible) gender of a given author has absolutely no effect on how we read their work? I really mean swear, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye swear? Even after pondering orchestra auditions? Even after reading that wiki article on James Tiptree Jr? Really?
Really?
And there's another can of worms there, too. Why is "stuff that concerns women" trivial and sentimental, but "stuff that concerns men" is important, universal, profound? Because that's the other half of the picture, isn't it. Because "stuff that concerns men" isn't really called that, it's just called "significant, important, universal." It's apples, and we're calling it fruit. And the pears--girls tend to produce pears, you know, but they're not really good fruit, they're something lesser. Oh, and that apple you're offering? Is really a pear, because you're a woman offering it, but that pear the guy next to you has, that's an apple. Why? Because it's ineluctably masculine, that's why.
*And notoriously, Jane Austen was trotted out and accused of a "sentimental" take on the world. This made me wonder if the gentleman in question had actually read anything by her. Just personally, I find Pride and Prejudice, for an example, to be fairly cynical. Eliza Bennet first consciously realizes she actually would be happy to marry Darcy when...she sees his ginormous honking estate and thinks, of all this I might have been mistress. "But..." argued a friend of mine who thought I had the wrong end of the stick, "you can see they're suited...developing relationship...etc....(long discussion incredibly compressed)" And sure, but we're also talking about a novel crammed with people marrying for financial considerations, and lots of overt discussion of the financial aspects of marriage and the importance of that to the lives of the characters. Surely Lizzy's first thought on seeing Pemberley isn't an accident. Nor is it the sign of a sentimental writer. But I suspect "sentimental" is Naipaul-speak for "girl cooties."
Part 1
Part 2 Slush
Part 3 Ann Likes Red
Part 4 Bias Is Inherent in the System
Part 5 Women Write Different Stories From Men?
Part 6 Fight for Your Right to Party
Part 7 Ending on Felicitous Seven
Do women write different stories, or do we see them as different like hearing their music as thinner or lesser? I don't know the answer. Certainly some women write different sorts of stories. Certainly many women's lives are very, very different from most men's. At Wiscon, in the bar, a male writer who had been the stay-at-home parent for his family said (I paraphrase), "I realized, things that were supposed to be how women are were really how it is when you're the person home with the kids all day." Yep. You get a very different view of the world like that.
Even if you don't stay home, women are expected to take up much of the work of housekeeping and childrearing, and to prioritize those things in a way men aren't expected to.
Someone who lives the life a woman leads, is maybe going to have a different set of concerns, a different project compelling her to write. And maybe she's sending out pears when the editors are really buying apples. But they say they want fruit! And the editor replies, "Yes, that's right, I only want the best fruit, and yours tasted niceish and all, but it just wasn't very good fruit." Meaning it wasn't an apple. Even though it was an awesome pear and pears are fruit, dammit!
Maybe. I'm not sure I totally believe that women's writing is essentially different from men's. And I've just finished reading a dismissal of women's writing on those very grounds.* But the argument can be made, that some women do, some women are writing very different stories from men, just because they're women.
But the stereotypical "feminine" concerns aren't really ones that don't affect men's lives, that they're not interested in. Romance? Kids? These are things that are, in fact, very important to most men I've met, and while they engage with those issues on somewhat different terms than women (less of a necessity to do the hands-on childrearing, less cultural pressure around marriage and romance as a source of identity and validation, etc.), relationships and children are, in fact, really, really important to a lot of men. Our cultural insistence that men just don't care about such things obscures this.
How much of "women write different things because they have different concerns" is down to knowing the author is a woman? How would men respond to stories ostensibly authored by a man that deal with "women's concerns"?
Yeah, we already know the answer to that question. And I could name several examples of stuff written by men who haven't turned out to actually be women that left me saying to myself, "Self, this is about the goopiest romance I ever read, and if a woman had written it, it would have a bodice-ripper cover and a title with "Passion" in it and be sneered at as trash, instead of the tasteful literary cover and the awards."
So, do women tend to write different sorts of stories, with different foci? Probably. But how different? Different enough to account for ToC imbalances? For women's invisibility in the history of SFF?
Can we swear that we are so completely unbiased that the (ostensible) gender of a given author has absolutely no effect on how we read their work? I really mean swear, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye swear? Even after pondering orchestra auditions? Even after reading that wiki article on James Tiptree Jr? Really?
Really?
And there's another can of worms there, too. Why is "stuff that concerns women" trivial and sentimental, but "stuff that concerns men" is important, universal, profound? Because that's the other half of the picture, isn't it. Because "stuff that concerns men" isn't really called that, it's just called "significant, important, universal." It's apples, and we're calling it fruit. And the pears--girls tend to produce pears, you know, but they're not really good fruit, they're something lesser. Oh, and that apple you're offering? Is really a pear, because you're a woman offering it, but that pear the guy next to you has, that's an apple. Why? Because it's ineluctably masculine, that's why.
*And notoriously, Jane Austen was trotted out and accused of a "sentimental" take on the world. This made me wonder if the gentleman in question had actually read anything by her. Just personally, I find Pride and Prejudice, for an example, to be fairly cynical. Eliza Bennet first consciously realizes she actually would be happy to marry Darcy when...she sees his ginormous honking estate and thinks, of all this I might have been mistress. "But..." argued a friend of mine who thought I had the wrong end of the stick, "you can see they're suited...developing relationship...etc....(long discussion incredibly compressed)" And sure, but we're also talking about a novel crammed with people marrying for financial considerations, and lots of overt discussion of the financial aspects of marriage and the importance of that to the lives of the characters. Surely Lizzy's first thought on seeing Pemberley isn't an accident. Nor is it the sign of a sentimental writer. But I suspect "sentimental" is Naipaul-speak for "girl cooties."
Part 1
Part 2 Slush
Part 3 Ann Likes Red
Part 4 Bias Is Inherent in the System
Part 5 Women Write Different Stories From Men?
Part 6 Fight for Your Right to Party
Part 7 Ending on Felicitous Seven