gender kerfuffle

[swan_tower]

"Kerfuffle" is such a great word.

I've said before that my usual mode of feminism is to wander blithely about doing whatever it is I feel like doing, happily oblivious to factors that are supposed to be oppressing me into not doing said thing. I won't claim it's the best mode in the world, but it works for me.

So apparently one of the things I've been oblivious to is a perception that F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for those not eyeball-deep in the field's jargon) is unfriendly to women writers and/or readers. As in, they publish substantially more men than women (a verifiable statistical fact), and perhaps publish fiction of a more "masculine" type (an evaluation that's being vigorously debated in many places). This all came to my attention through a pair of posts by Charlie Finlay.

The chain goes thusly: Fewer women send stories to F&SF than men. Fewer women are published in F&SF than men. (Side tangent on the chain: this may mean fewer women read F&SF than men.) This creates a perception that F&SF is not friendly to women. Therefore, fewer women send stories to F&SF than men.

Watch it go round and round.

Charlie's suggestion to fix this is to schedule a day (August 18th) for a hundred women to send stories to F&SF. I haven't waded through the morass of responses to his suggestion, but I did make a comment I decided I wanted to elaborate here, namely, that I have no particular interest in participating. Why? Because I send to F&SF all the time anyway. I have no fewer than thirty-four rejection half-sheets from them (some from JJA, some from GVG), and I'm expecting my thirty-fifth any day now. Some women may have given up on subbing there due to a perception that they aren't welcome, but I'm not one of them. I could send in a story that day, but I don't really see that it would constitute much of a message.

I'd be more interested if the campaign was to get a hundred women who have given up on sending stories there, or who never tried at all, to send something in. Reportedly both John and Gordon have said they would like to publish more women, but they don't get enough subs from them. Provided they're telling the truth (and I'm happy to grant them the benefit of that doubt), then we don't need to be sending a message to F&SF. We need to be sending a message to the women who are avoiding it. (And, perhaps, F&SF needs to send out a message of its own -- but that isn't in my control.) Bombarding F&SF, not with women as a blanket category, but with voices they haven't been hearing, strikes me as a more meaningful response to the situation.

One way or another, once "Selection" comes home, I'll be polishing something up and adding to their slush pile once again. If I've felt unwelcome there (i.e. those thirty-four rejections), I've attributed it to my lack of writing skill, not my gender.

Comments

[princess706.livejournal.com]

I prefer to think that women allow themselves to be discouraged.

But then, you know way more about this than I do. You study it more than I do. You focus on it more than I do.

Me, personally? I challenge anyone to discourage me from doing something I've set my mind to. Perhaps I'm fortunate that way.

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

I prefer to think that women allow themselves to be discouraged.

I'd agree; I'd guess that many do. And why is that? Is it because there's something "naturally" in women--in their spirit, in their biology--that makes them give up?

Of course not. It's learned behavior; it's gender training, which comes not from within women themselves, but from culture. It's a lot more complex than women as a class simply give up.

[moonvoyager.livejournal.com]

Plus, any minority that is discriminated against tends to internalize the negative perceptions, no matter how mild (think about how many women were actively opposed to women getting the right to vote in America, saying that they actually believed that women were incapable of making political decisions). This is one of the unfortunate truths that too many in the dominant class seem to ignore when they accept these internalized negative perceptions on the part of the minority in question as proof that nothing needs to be done to change a situation (well, if women themselves are saying/not doing whatever, then clearly...)

However, I don't believe that there's a one-to-one correlation between biology and the presence of socially perceived characteristics of femininity/masculinity. Clearly, there needs to be more acceptance of "feminine themes." But do these all come from female writers? There are many men who have won the Tiptree award. And then there are all the issues pertaining to the GLBT community. Gay men who write on themes/subjects that, while they involve male characters, might be characteristically seen as "feminine" subjects. Transgendered persons who write primarily from the POV of male characters because this is their chance to freely express the person they are inside...the person that those looking at a female body are not going to see. (I am a feminist. I'm also not the woman you see before you. I resent hearing, implictly or overtly, that by identifying with men and writing most frequently about male characters, let alone publishing under my initials, that I am "betraying my gender.")

I do lament the fact that there is an inherent bias that is all the more pernicious today because some advances have been made--enough that some people, even educated women, try to deny that bias still exists. Yet I also feel--perhaps more to the point--that people should be free to write across gender boundaries. To believe that women inherently write differently or about different themes than men is to privilege the same argument that would tell us that "women can't write good hard SF" because they are not naturally inclined toward science, etc.

I think there is definitely still a large and often unconscious bias in society against women...or at least in favor of men. (Samuel R. Delany, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, points out that if one looks at a crowd and perceives it to be roughly equal in numbers between men and women, an actual count will frequently reveal that women only make up 30% of the number--which seems to be what is happening in the sf/f/h publishing field--men are still the norm, so women stand out enough that even when they are only present at 30%, to the casual glance or perception of a male editor, it might seem that they were represented well enough.)

However, I suspect that the problem runs even deeper than biology to our fundamental binary value system. The feminine itself needs to be held in equal esteem as the masculine (if a clear-cut definition of feminine versus masculine truly exists--is that not biologically, sociologically, and historically based on the very limitations we would struggle against?).