cranky
catvalente has written a heartbreaking essay about sexism in geek and science fiction/fantasy culture. You should read it, because it is relevant. Also because it is heartbreaking and true. Having been one of those female fantasy authors threatened with sexual violence because I dared to own cats who came from a breeder, and not a shelter, I can testify that things get really ugly, really fast, on Captain Internet.And so...
Last weekend at Emerald City, I saw a sign that infuriated me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It was a big banner on the front of a self-published* author's booth, reading, "Finally, a book for BOYS that the GIRLS will enjoy reading, too!"
Oh. You mean unlike 90% of the well-regarded "classic" science fiction, fantasy, and young adult genre novels out there? And 98% of the horror? And 99% of the military science fiction? And, let's face it, the majority of anything that's not a romance, a story about princesses, or a horse book? As a girl who grew up reading Bradbury, King, Wyndham, Anthony, Asprin, Piper, Foster, Knight, Shakespeare, Poe, De Lint, Baum, superhero comics, and horror comics, I cry thee foul.
And no, this is not a case of me carefully editing out the female authors of my childhood. After wracking my brain, the only ones I could come up with who even managed to compete for my affections—who were writing stories with girls, rather than girl stories, and were thus worth reading in my twelve-year-old estimation—were McCaffrey, Kagan, Tiptree (who wrote as a man), Pini (whose writing still gets credited to her husband by about half the people I talk to), Jones, Duane, and McKinley.
I discovered more female authors as I got older. Emma Bull. Pamela Dean. Jody Lynn Nye. Women who were writing stories with girls, not girl stories; women who were building the foundations of a new genre, filled with interesting, clever, intuitive characters who yes, sometimes happened to have the same plumbing I did. And sometimes they didn't, and that was okay, too. But—and this is where we loop back to the beginning—it didn't matter. If I wanted to read, I needed to read books about boys. Books that were probably intended by their authors as being for boys. If I wanted to enjoy reading, I needed to enjoy books for boys.
If this has changed at all, that change has happened in the last eight to ten years, beginning with the publication of Twilight. People were writing books for girls before that, but there's always a trigger event, and Bella Swan making millions of dollars for her author (and publisher) was the trigger for a veritable flood of "girl books" hitting the shelves. These were books with female leads, with women on the covers, with a stronger romance subplot than had necessarily been required in YA before people figured out that hey, girls read, and maybe some of them will read more if you offer them female characters to read about.
Since then, the number of "girl books" has exploded, and while some of them are girl stories, some of them are also stories with girls. Some of these books are romances. Some of them are not. Some of them are medical thrillers, adventures, war stories, epic fantasies, distopian futures, cyberpunk, steampunk, mythpunk, modern day, anything you can think of. Because they are stories. And yet somehow, the fact that they have girls on the cover makes them not worth reading. The fact that the main characters have to squat when they pee makes them untenable to half the population. The fact that their authors grew up being told that real science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure starred men doing manly things in a manly way, and yet grew up to write books about women doing the same things, does not prove that literature can be a gender neutral experience where story matters more than anything else; it proves that we need more books for BOYS that GIRLS will enjoy, too. It means that the girls keep on coming second, that we keep being the deviation, and not the norm.
I do dislike the fact that right now, sexy girls pout at me from the covers of almost every book in the YA section, because I know that culturally, we discourage boys from reading those books, and damn, they are missing out. But I also dislike the fact that I'm expected to be totally a-okay with teenage girls reading books covered in muscular men with giant guns, while sneering at teenage boys reading books with thoughtful-looking women on the covers. We say "don't judge a book by its cover" like it's a Commandment, and then we turn around and tell boys not to read books with girls on them, or books with pink on them, or anything that doesn't look macho enough.
If I could read Little Fuzzy, you can read Partials. If I could read Myth Adventures, you can read The Chemical Garden. There will always be some stories that appeal to us more than others, but when we start saying "this book is for BOYS but don't worry, GIRLS can read it, too" vs. "icky GIRL BOOK is ICKY and NOT FOR BOYS," we create a division in our literature that doesn't need to be there, and frankly, upsets me.
Let's all just read the books we want to read, regardless of covers or the gender of the main characters, okay? Because otherwise, we're missing out on a lot of really great stories. And that would be a shame.
(*This is relevant only because it implies no editorial oversight. If I were to try using a slogan like this, my editors, and my agent, would politely make me stop.)
April 10 2012, 10:10:56 UTC 5 years ago Edited: April 10 2012, 10:16:32 UTC
Well, there're two things going on there. First, teenagers of either gender tend to view even the mildest criticism of a Thing They Like as a direct personal attack and respond accordingly. And given that for every single reasonable, mildly voiced, and logical argument they've seen there are at least five "this is stupid and you're stupid for liking it" posts that are actual direct personal attacks, defensiveness is pretty much a given. But second, the critic and the fangirl are not actually discussing the same Edward. I could pore over the text and pull out examples of behavior that, in real life, should rightly put Edward on some offender lists and render him ineligible to come within 100 yards of a school or public park. But the Edward living in the fangirl's head wouldn't dream of, say, breaking into and disabling her car. For any reason. The fangirl read the book, and didn't skip that chapter, but that behavior doesn't match her vision of what an ideal boyfriend would be like so she mentally edits it out of "her" Edward. Maybe he still does the sleep-watching thing, but because he's at the mercy of the fangirl's narrative, she knows that he would never take advantage of the situation and feels safe to think of that as romantic behavior.
By the way, one in four women in the United States will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lives. You're implying that they're not "smarter than that." Not cool.
I worded that badly. The point I was trying to make is that I don't believe that the vast majority of women view an object of fantasy as anything other than that, or try to recreate the fantasy in real life.
Let me try an example that's less charged. Back when I was in the Twilight age demographic, pretty much every single girl in the world swore that she was going to marry a New Kid On the Block. Allowing for lack of Internet, the fandom was just as large, vocal, and basically batshit insane as the Twilight fandom. We're talking writing lists of children's names, picking out china patterns at the mall, the works. I had two friends who didn't speak to each other for a month because they dared to Like the same New Kid, and neither would "give him" to the other. They only made up because the rest of our circle eventually refused to play the "tell her I said that..." game anymore.
Obviously, we all had about the same chance of New Kid wedded bliss as we would have had trying to marry a fictional sparklepire. But we didn't all run out and try to make the fantasy real by dating musicians or guys who had to keep a separate hair gel budget either. The fantasy was over there and the reality was that Tony from first year algebra was actually kinda cute. And the fantasy really never intruded on reality, it just quietly faded into nostalgia.
Am I saying that there are no young women anywhere trying desperately to find a real-life Edward of their very own? No. I am not that naive. And I sincerely hope that they don't wind up in a terrible situation. Statistically a quarter of all Twilight fans will, you're right about that. But so will a quarter of all Star Trek fans, and a quarter of all Toby fans. And in all likelihood, the abuse will have nothing to do with fandoms or fiction.
I just don't see tangible evidence that Twilight warrants the kind of panic I've seen over it.