Well, Charnas at least has written science fiction, as far as I recall.

Ryman seems to be getting at the definition of a genre, but I wonder if it's really necessary to reach that far for an explanation. Technology and adventure are routinely and traditionally marked For Boys Only; why would it be a surprise that a genre that exists at the nexus of technology and adventure would be marked in the same way? One doesn't have to posit a patriarchal conspiracy, though that's always nice because it there were an actual Conspiracy it could be exposed and smashed, just the same, tired sexist cultural fabric that we deal with every day.

Part of the problem is that it's a fait accomplit argument, and that's highlighted by his archetypical example of Peter Pan. Peter Pan, of course, is fantasy; is fantasy as a genre really less about adventure and quest and not staying at home than is science fiction?

SF is driven by an underlying dream, and part of that dream is profoundly hostile to domesticity, which is traditionally assigned to women

yes --

It is hostile to staying at home on Earth.

yes --

It dreams, Peter Pan-like, of magic flights to a Neverneverland in the stars, full of pirates and mermaids and Indians.

also yes --

-- so reading along until this point, I am expecting him to say something like, and this is why SF, being a genre of such intrinsic interest to and fundamentally rooted in the experience and suppressed terrible longings of women for millenia, men make such an effort to hypercompensate and cut women out of their own natural territory -- or something. You could say that it's like the cook/chef thing: fantasy is a traditionally female craft that women do for survival and men appropriate for glory. I mean, that is not really what I think, but. But then!

It is largely a land of and for Boys.

and then I have no idea how he gets from there to here. I mean because following the logic as I understand it:

1. SF offers the wish-fulfilment of escaping from domesticity.
2. Women, historically, are the class trapped in domesticity, who have been legally, physically, practically barred from escaping it -- except, for the most part, in imagination.

3. ....therefore boys can more easily relate to the dream of leaving it behind?

This really seems to me to be backwardsed all to heck.

Home is what you escape and Mother is who you hate.

I shouldn't go on and on in your comments section so I will take the rest of my argument to my own lj, but I will note here that women have (and hate) Mothers too.

Sadly, Mr. Ryman left off another option: which is that (at least some of) the members of Worldcon who were voting weren't even interested in reading works by women, of any shade. This interpretation is supported at least in part by some of the comments in response to rachelmanija's post on the issue, and those over at Making Light.

The fact that the Hugos are not limited to science fiction, and covers works of fantasy and slipstream, appears to have been lost on the voters as well. (Well, except for His Majesty's Dragon, and I admit in my more cynical moments to wondering how many of the Hugo voters didn't pick that up until after the announcement that Peter Jackson had optioned the series, despite the rave reviews and excellent marketing.)

"Women love it too, perhaps because they also want to escape domesticity."

This is really strange. I mean, I love my little cottage and all, though perhaps that's different to the kind of domesticity he's thinking of, because neither I nor my house belong to anyone else (except the mortgage company, lol!). But I don't read sf and fantasy because I'm *running away* from something. It feels more like I'm running *towards*.

But what it is that I'm running towards varies according to the book that I'm reading at the time. The sf / fantasy books that I've been reading recently have all had female authors - Sarah Monette, Naomi Novik, Ellen Kushner (obviously :)!), and I have some Diana Wynne Jones and Le Guin to read next. I can promise him that there's no shortage of fantastic female authors out there! And I reject utterly his assumption that sf is male and fantasy is female - as vschanoes says, both are equally about "adventure and quest and not staying at home".

And, says who that you can't have domesticity in space? Three words: Lois McMaster Bujold...

"The answers will not fit onto the back of a postcard."

No? I have a one-word answer to his argument that would fit perfectly well... :)

I think I'll start with being offended by the claim that escapisms and science fiction is primarily a man's domain. Or maybe I didn't grow up reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Who knows. I always thought science fiction and fantasy were the domain of the geek/nerd/dork/isolated kid at the back of the class who everyone makes fun of - regardless of gender.

Maybe I'm just bitter that I'm stuck in lab at 8pm with at least an hour's more work to do while my fiance is at home making dinner.

I'm also not thrilled with the line "Women get to be guys now."

Maybe I'll be less offended and more coherent later.

First time commenting--but having become a mad fan of your work (and Delia's) (and collabs) (so much so that I've sent a proposal on it off to Mythcon), I was thrilled to see you all have LJs.

We seem to have reverted to type.

My first response to this statement is the punchline of a joke about the Lone Ranger I learned as a child: "What do you mean 'we,' white man?"

Seriously--I heard his talk at the recent ICFA and am surprised/shocked to see this sort of commentary (the limiting of sf to, what space opera?, the casual equation of women with some stereotyped view of domesticity--I want to assign him not only all of Joanna Russ' fictions but her essays--but hasn't he read them????) from him.

Roger Zelazny won the award for AMBER -- so the Hugos are not limited solely to techie-"hard"--sf, and I can sit in my room full of bookshelves and list many women publishing in sf/f and related fantastic genres--growing every years (and I've been reading sf since my father introduced me to ANALOG in the sixties).

I do not believe the problem is 'fundamental' to the SF tradition.

I do believe that it may be fundamental to many participants of the SF culture (mostly but not all of them males)....

I think what confuses me about Mr. Ryman's post is that he seems to be defending the absence of traditionally-female thematic material in sf/f ("the guys and guy-like girls don't want to read that stuff") -- which is a fair conversation to have, only...not the initial point?

Because if Ryman is willing to say that These days women's place in fantasy is not as Wendy. Women get to be guys now. They have a place in the SF dream, most usually toting guns or swords. I guess it's fun for women to shoot people , and men certainly feel more at home with women who act like the rest of their buddies ... then he still hasn't answered the question of why those gun-toting anti-Wendys aren't on the ballot.

I think the answer is simpler than all this stuff about The Dream, and creepier. Women writers frequently write about women, and in this genre, as well as in mainstream fiction, writing a book about a woman makes your book chick stuff, not serious fiction. Novik (whose books I love) is nominated for a book about two guy friends going to war, so it's legit fiction. Had either of those characters been a woman, would it have been received the same way, or would it have been automatically boxed up as some kind of for-teenage-girls-only silly dragon fluff, even if it had been word for word the same novel?

Women have adventures in girl books; men have adventures in literature. I don't think the mindset is unique to this genre.

I think a lot of the comments "disagreeing" with Geoff Ryman aren't, really. We're all saying a lot of the same things in different ways.

When I read what Geoff was saying, I put it together in my mind as this:

Science fiction was originally written for boys.
In the 1970s, sf was maturing and the field was receptive to what women were bringing into it.
Now, those different concerns are being marginalized, and the women who are the most successful are those writing the boys'-adventures-type stuff.

Those are generalizations, and you can cite plenty of exceptions, but they seem overall pretty true to me.

(The "Home and Mother" thing is that men can easily write stories in which Home and Mother are irrelevant; women, whether embracing or rejecting them, at least are willing to deal with them. Again, not to put words in Geoff's mouth, but that's how I read what he said.)

A lot of this is still that women are far more likely to read novels by men than men are to read novels by women. The fact that this is not necessarily true in our community disguises the fact that it's true outside of it. I'm male, and have had people comment that whatever book I happen to be carrying around is liable to be by a woman. Why would I be reading that?

Hmmm, in my book that's what we call "misogyny"... women and men getting rewarded for valuing things coded "male" and hating on things coded "female". As soon as a bunch of women start doing the thing coded male, the rules change, something else is "really masculine" or "really literature" or "hard sf" or whatever. The rules change but the misogyny persists.

This list was not the product of a momentary lapse by an individual, or a bad boss who has reverted to type.

+

We seem to have reverted to type.

=

You're the bad boss, boss.

My excuse is that I was so delighted to be on the ballot myself, and delighted for good writers like Charlie Stross, Michael Swanwick and others who are also on the ballot.

Why does he need to say this? Is he trying to implicate us as having sour grapes for noticing?

And wow--how he defends away the misogyny of all this in favor of asserting some fundamental exclusion of women in sf, when we have always been at the heart of sf. And women sf writers being all about domesticity--wtf? No, hon, it's not the genre doing the excluding--its the men, pure and simple. I can't believe he has the gall to write this to a woman writer.

Picking up on bits and pieces about the difference between material that could be called sf/f, and material that is explicitly published and marketed as sf/f, I'm thinking of the fact that something approaching 50% of the science fiction and fantasy that I currently read is being published and marketed outside of the traditional fantasy and science fiction categories. My impression as a reader has been that a lot of the stories I'm interested in following are showing up in young adult works, or are shelved in the Romance, Horror, Mystery, and (catch-all) Literary Fiction sections of bookstores. Maybe part of the absence of women in the Hugo nominees reflects the fact that a lot of fine (in many cases, NYT bestselling) female writers of works that could fall within the sf/f genre have chosen to play in a different sandbox, as it were? I'm not sure whether the main reasons that they've made those choices are in response to sexism within the field, or to market pressures, or in response to the choice of women readers who enjoy seeing sf/f ideas explored but are unwilling to think of themselves as sf/f readers?

I must say that the whole discussion leaves me with a major, "So what? It just didn't happen this year. Next year might be nothing BUT women and what would that say? Well, nothing, as far as I'm concerned."

Each year is different and it's how things fall out. One year may be a total balance, next year weighted one way or the other. I see it as random, chaos, without meaning, other than some people got around to reading more current stuff than I ever shall. I think I might be caught up to 2000.

I compare this to the Oscars. Some years there are few or no black actors nominated and there is a hew and cry in the press that Hollywood and Oscars hates and ignores black actors. I see this this hue and cry this year, but it could happen next year. Does Hollywood suddenly swing wildly back and forth? No, it's just how the voting pans out.

It's not as if women have NEVER in the history were nominated or won Hugos. Maybe it was an off year. Maybe next year will be a better year for women writers or black writers or Hispanic writers, in Hugo terms. What is nominated in any given year has no more meaning to the awards or genre as a whole than if names were pulled out of a hat, no matter what the award is.

I suspect this will not be a popular view, but I don't see ANY single award as being somehow significant above the history of a genre.

Women get to be guys now.

why don't we change this to "women get to be people now."

Actually, I didn't read Ryman's comments as saying this is what SF SHOULD be doing--or that women should be trying to be men. Instead, I read this as a complaint & observation of "this is what the mainstream, majority, mostly male reader" consciously or subconsciously perceives SF to be. I believe he was shocked to see the overwhelming preponderance of male writers on the Hugo ballot, and was trying to find some reason for it. As a very, very compact history of the genre, I tend to agree with him. Of course, there's an even deeper & more disturbing issue at work here, because there are a number of women SF writers working today who aren't actively *subverting* the dominant cultural norms expressed by the "majority" (yes, yes, it's incorrect to generalize so broadly, but what can one expect when one attempts to pin anything down to a quick definition?) view of science fiction--and why aren't more of them on the ballot? Many of the women writers cited above are actually using the genre in subversive ways--and what does it say, when one realizes that these writers are not on the ballot at all? I think it tends to support Ryman's argument that a subconscious prejudice exists in the minds of the "majority" audience.

And remember, his comments were couched in the form of a quick personal letter--not intended as an exhaustive article. I would think that more women reading them would start looking at the unquestioned cultural assumptions he's pointing out. Don't get angry at him for noticing--he's pointing them out not to support them, but so that we can get rid of them. I was actually very impressed with his ICFA speech, despite the "factual glitches." I found it very insightful.

Remember: just because there are a lot of women writing and reading SF now doesn't mean they are being recognized or given equal respect. Just look at what happened to Connie Willis at the Hugo Awards last year!

There are still so many conscious and unconscious prejudices about women writers in SF--both by the "general audience" (you wouldn't believe the number of "geek boy" SF fans I know who truly believe that women can't write good SF--despite the numerous examples handed to them) and even among editors (to a milder extent). Now, I sit on the gender fence--having been born to one gender but identifying as the other. So I'm not saying I'm offended personally by the following--though I think it highlights a disturbing sociological fact. When I send in a cover letter without gender identifiers to an editor I've not previously worked with, I often get "Mr. C. A. Gardner" as a return salutation. If that isn't proof of an internal and unconscious gender bias, I don't know what is.

I'd say that anyone who doubts that these problems exist in SF today ought to explore some of the articles over at http://www.broaduniverse.org/. There are all kinds of statistics showing the number of women writing SF versus the number picked up by major publishers, reprinted, or honored in the field.

LeGuin raises some intriguing discussion of men and women (in Tehanu, I think it is).

What I think it boils down to in fiction is motivation. Many of the motivations in the more improbable varieties of fiction prerequire obsessiveness, foolishness, restlessness, and/or a minimum of close ties to people. ("He is weaker for every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town?" As Emerson said about acting singly in Self-Reliance.) Which characteristics I think are more found together in men. Often not to our credit, but it does make for action, however foolish, inconsiderate or malignant it turns out to be.

Why are most of the main characters in Swordspoint men? If you don't mind my asking.

I can't help but wonder if any of y'all who are getting so upset about Ryman's comments have read The Child Garden. Whatever it sounds like he's saying, to you, I don't think that's what he means, because he wrote that book.

There are some people's thoughts and a look at another 'sample' of work here:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?newpost=1&topic=11003#lastmsg

There's a secondhand bookshop I often go to, and I was having a discussion a while back with the woman who works there. We were talking about men's attitudes to books by women. She had noticed that many male customers were reluctant to buy books by women, though others certainly didn't have the same problem. There was also a survey done and I think it was published in Mslexia magazine, a UK publication, where it was reported that men tend to buy books by men, while women buy books by either sex. If this is true, does it suggest that men tend to have preconceived notions about what women's novels contain? There have also been articles in Mslexia about reviewing, and how (heterosexual) male critics tend to review books by straight males, while women and gay male critics review books by both.

In a discussion on a UK speculative fiction website, there was a strand on women writers and a former editor said that when he brought out an all-woman issue of his publication, it didn't sell. I went through about 12 back issues of a popular UK mag and analysed the number of female writers and the number of male writers, and then compared the stories for narrative gender. There were far more stories by men than by women, and the stories that were published by women tended to be written from a male perspective (character). I mentioned this to the editor of the magazine in passing, and he got seriously annoyed with me. I did two units of statistics at uni so I knew my facts and figures, but I didn't bother to press him on it further. I could tell he'd become deaf to the subject.

Sorry about the long response. You just got me thinking. I've actually stumbled across you at IA. I posted ages ago on the Glasgow Style Artists and you replied.

idecyan linked me over here, and I have to admit, I'm completely gobsmacked.

SF is driven by an underlying dream, and part of that dream is profoundly hostile to domesticity, which is traditionally assigned to women. It is hostile to staying at home on Earth. It dreams, Peter Pan-like, of magic flights to a Neverneverland in the stars, full of pirates and mermaids and Indians.

All of that is fine... and then:

It is largely a land of and for Boys.

...and I'm sitting there making little squeaky noises in the back of my throat. That's an outrageous, stupid, silly thing to say.

And I say it as someone who likes Geoff Ryman... but now I'm not sure he likes me!

Jane Carnall
janecarnall.greatestjournal.com