Sunday, July 10, 2011

The old Men Vs. Women debate.

That same old subject came up on AW yet again (Why do more men win awards in literary and most genres of genre fiction than women?) I don't recommend you read more than the first post in the thread. It's long, and mostly full of angry female writers shrieking at other writers (non-angry female and male). This, along with the correct way of dealing with writer's block, seem to be the perennial topics on AW.

The last time I got an overload of the weird backward logic so many women use to spur their anger over the discrepancy in who wins awards, MacAllister freaked out at me and started deleting my posts. So I just stay out of those threads now, because my opinion isn't popular, and I am too outspoken and confident a debater to meekly back down and go with the status quo when I don't believe it's right.

This makes me rather unpopular among certain female writers on AW, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because aren't we all supposed to be in favor of confident, bold female writers who will stand up to anybody if they perceive a wrong? I guess you're only supposed to stand up against wrongs committed by people with penises. Huh.

Anyway, early on in the thread a writer named Lydia Netzer weighed in with her opinion, one I was astonished to read. Didn't she know that you're not supposed to admit on AW that maybe women just aren't as good (yet) at writing award-winning literary fiction? Apparently not. The thread quickly devolved into the predictable rigmarole, with some posters going so far as to compare her to notorious dickwad misogynist V. S. Naipaul. Nice, people. Really nice.

I thought Lydia's point was spot on target, and that her blog post on the subject was incredibly well thought out and helpful in gaining insight into why the discrepancy between the genders (or sexes, really, since we probably don't know the psychological genders of most writers) exists. Unlike the whole AW thread, you should read Lydia's post. Then read my response to her post here, after the jump.



Yeah, it's another long one, guys.

So what do I think about the discrepancy in sex of award-winning writers? I agree with Lydia entirely, but I have a few clarifications I wish to make to explain my own opinion and I have some thoughts to add to Lydia's already well-stated thoughts.

I do think there are a lot of women out there writing on themes that are culturally relevant. I do think that motherhood as a theme, approached in the right way, can be very relevant to everybody, male and female, and can be just as important a book as one about war or abiding friendship or family dynamics or childhood or whatever.

In my experience as a reader, though, not that many female writers are writing in ways that reach out to lots of male readers. That doesn't mean they can't write about motherhood or "women's" themes. Men will read those books if men can connect to them. They will. Contrary to the prevailing opinion in the industry and on forums like AW, most readers, including men, will read any good book as long as they can identify it as a good book. Identifying it as something they might like to read before they even buy it (or decide to review it) is the key.

By the way, let me point out that there are also plenty of male writers writing on "men's" themes in a way that doesn't reach out to female readers. The male writers who win awards are the ones who make their books so accessible and so universal in emotion -- not theme or conflict or plot, but emotion -- that everybody "gets" them. Because in the end, humans are humans, regardless of gender, and we are all able to "get" the best stories, no matter what they're about on the surface.

I mean, have you READ Oscar Wao? Tomcat In Love? Anything by Ishiguro? Who cares that the characters are (mostly) male? What draws you in is the clarity and depth of feeling. The accessibility. The overarching truth. And truth is still truth, whether it's told from a male POV or a female POV, or from a genderless POV.

Now back to that "identifying a good book before you buy it" dilemma.

Personally, I think it's not female writers at fault for not reaching a broader audience, nor is it an inherently sexist industry. But it is an inherently flawed industry. It's an industry that blindly compartmentalizes fiction into easy-to-sell categories. Woman wrote it, deals with sexuality, includes a hint of humor? Chick-lit. Woman wrote it, has a woman MC, heavy theme? "Women's Fiction." Young main character? Young Adult.

When you can segment fiction onto discrete shelves in stores or lists on Amazon, it probably tends to sell better. But being identified by a specific label also makes a book seem less appealing to reviewers, who want to read A GOOD BOOK, not a "women's novel" or a "men's adventure" or a "legal thriller" or a "YA romance."

Now, obviously the industry uses this heavy-handed, narrow compartmentalization because it's working for them. And yes, as a reader it can be a lot easier to find precisely what you're looking for when the entire world of books is neatly categorized and placed on the shelf and coded with "You Might Also Like..." But it also makes it a lot harder to find what you're not looking for -- the book you stumble upon just because of its intriguing title or its beautiful cover while browsing stacks an stacks of spine-out novels. I don't know about you, but I've found some of my favorite books that way, by accident, while browsing. Who the hell browses equally through all the various sections of the modern book store? And who clicks at random on Amazon to get the same effect?

I think if the industry already had the same compartmentalizing/marketing fractures for men's fiction as they do for women's fiction, suddenly the discrepancy would vanish, because authors like Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, who deal with themes of male aggression and the darkness of being male would find themselves in a category roughly equivalent to "Chick-lit," while the authors like Douglas Coupland and Tim O'Brien, who deal with themes of the depth of the male emotional world and how men relate to the people they love would find themselves in a category roughly equivalent to "Women's Fiction."

If male writers faced the same kind of strong marketing corralling that female writers face, all that would be left outside any category would be those authors who write on themes less easy to categorize. And I feel confident that there would be an even split between male and female writers among the Indescribables. Suddenly, women would be winning roughly as many literary awards as men, although the pool of potential winners would be significantly smaller.

As it is now, female writers' work is carefully scrutinized for its potential to fit into marketing blocks, because those blocks exist. So a big chunk of the women writing about themes which might appeal to a broader number of people (not only men, but also to women who don't often browse the Women's Fiction and Chick-Lit categories) are filtered out of the running.

We are left with the dumping ground for male writers -- the difficult-to-describe hinterland of "Literary Fiction," which I have already tried to express my thoughts on elsewhere. You have a statistically overbalanced proportion of male writers there not because "men's themes" (whatever those are) are more important, but because there's nowhere else to put them. Yes, female writers are there, too, but only if their writing is too broad for the convenience of categorization.

So why are women being categorized by the industry? Because women buy more books. It makes sense from a business perspective to bias your marketing toward the surest crowd of customers. If men read more books, and especially more fiction, the Flying Dutchman of literary fiction would have a much less testosteroney crew.

As I've already ranted about where it pertains to YA, I think this over-categorization of the industry is, ultimately, a bad and stupid thing. It is making it harder for people to find good books, and I like to pretend like I write good books, so I am not in favor of an industry which restricts my potential audience. It's making readers less adventurous by allowing them to stay camped out beside their favorite shelf in Barnes & Noble, where they can find an endless parade of comfortably homogeneous black-jacketed teen vampire novels, or chick-lit novels with pastel covers, or books set in Tudor England. Yay. All those books can be fun, and it sure is nice for the industry to keep a constant stream of reliable cash coming in. But maybe those readers would also really love a well-written story found on another shelf. How are they do find it, when shopping for books is too convenient?

All that being said, Lydia still makes a good point. "Women's themes" like motherhood and sisterhood and how a woman relates to her community or to war or to anything else can be just as culturally relevant as "men's themes" of fatherhood, brotherhood, etc. If those "women's themes" are written in a broadly accessible way.

You can have one book about a woman's biological clock ticking away, and it may feature a Prince Charming potential daddy and a demanding job with quirky co-workers and the potential mother-to-be pulling out her hair over wine and chocolate with her BFF, trying to figure out how to juggle her life. You can have another book about a woman's biological clock ticking away, and it may feature a man she loves who is just too much like her absent father who was an alcoholic anyway, and the potential mother-to-be becoming increasingly more confused and emotionally raw as she tries to figure out how to reconcile her attraction to a man who might not be good for her, and whether to bring the child she desperately wants into the world with another bad daddy like the one she had.

Guess which approach to the same subject is more culturally significant? Guess which one is more likely to be nominated for a major award?


Some really fun but culturally insignificant categories are populated mostly by women. "Quirky" sex tales. Shopping-and-wedding-planning beach reads. Vampires. Reimaginings and sexed-up sequels of Austen's works. Fun, if that's your thing. And fun is valuable. Fun has an important place in our lives. Fun is not something that's going to win the Pulitzer.

Why are so many women writing this kind of thing, instead of insightful examinations of the human condition? I said near the beginning of this behemoth post that many female writers aren't writing in a way that reaches both male and female readers. Why?

For some women, it's because they genuinely want to write the fun stuff. Great! Awesome! Write it! Fun is fun!

For other women, it's because they want to have a writing career, and agents and editors in service to a dramatically fractured and partitioned, over-marketed industry are pushing them to write something more commercial, something easier to label, easier to package, easier to sell. I know. It happened to me when I was encouraged to drastically alter my novel to fit it neatly into the YA category. I said no. Not everybody does.

Books that win literary awards and critical acclaim are books that touch our hearts and our minds in real, lasting ways. Male or female writers can do that. Male or female characters can do that. Male or female perspective can do that. If you want to win awards, write books that matter to our culture. If you're a woman writing fiction, and your goal is to write literary work that reaches a broad audience and that wins major awards, STICK TO YOUR GUNS. Don't let your work be compartmentalized and marketed to a narrow readership. Find the right agent who will help you achieve that goal. Don't become a victim of the industry fracture.

If you just want to entertain your fans (which is a perfectly reasonable and admirable goal), then write books that are just fun to read, but for god's sake, quit your fucking bitching about how you don't win awards. If you're not writing books with the real potential to win awards, then acting all astonished and indignant and being insulting toward men won't change a thing.

FINIS.

11 comments:

  1. Great post. Great ideas. I particularly like your battle cry. There's something to be said for putting your head down and writing a kickass book, rather than trying to figure out if someone will like it or not because you're a girl.

    The other thing is... when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, feminism JUST happened. Fifty years in from second wave feminism, we can't expect women to be uniformly up to speed in terms of creating superior literary work, and we can't expect "the establishment" to be completely acclimatized to what superior work looks like coming from a woman.

    Sidenote: I am a major Nabokov fan too!

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  2. My mom and I were just talking about how recent the feminism movement was a couple of weeks ago. I didn't know that my grandmother (along with another woman in the suit) was the first woman to successfully sue over sex discrimination in Washington State. Also, when my grandma got divorced the judge didn't grant her any alimony because he deemed her so attractive that she'd find another husband quickly. Wow. Really?! My grandma is still alive! It's not like we're talking about somebody who lived long ago! And for the record, she never remarried.

    Nabokov rules!!

    I read the description of SHINE, SHINE, SHINE from Publisher's Lunch posted on your blog. It sounds awesome! I can't wait to read it.

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  3. wInteresting post. I guess I'm generally on the side of the whiny women, though (as you will have seen through my posts on said thread). I don't like the way that female writers ho debate this are apparently 'bleating', 'whiny' or here - 'shrieking'.

    In many cases, I actually think your vantage point and theirs are a lot more similar than you might think. They're not just wailing and whining. They want to look at *why* too - they're just coming at it from a slightly different angle.

    You think women's books are potentially just not that good; they think women's books are being overlooked. I think there's a middle-ground somewhere.

    I agree that marketing is potentially a problem - and then many women try (or have to?) to fit those marketing slots of 'chick-lit' or 'women's fic' or whatever and perhaps it doesn't leave a lot of room for 'awesome, culturally relevant fic'.

    At the same time, I think women are a lot more prepared to see universal truth in a man's work than vice versa - that's the unconscious bias people are talking about.

    You disagree, but I don't personally agree that we're 'shrieking' about it.

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  4. As I believe I stated in that thread, I couldn't care less whether a man or a woman wrote a book. If it's good, I'll read it.

    That being said, I think there's a definite difference between women writers and "women's themes", the key difference being there isn't a lot of gripping plot waiting to happen in most of them. It's far easier to churn forward with a wild plot when you're out doing "manly" things like saving the world.

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  5. Mistri, I know my post was very long but I don't think you actually read it and just skimmed it instead. Because this:

    "You think women's books are potentially just not that good; they think women's books are being overlooked. I think there's a middle-ground somewhere."

    is inaccurate. I DO think that women's books are just as good, potentially and actually. And as for everybody wondering WHY they're being overlooked, I posited a reason in my long blog post. I will try to summarize it here:

    In the industry, "literary fiction" has become a dumping ground for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. Publishers will work very hard to market any book that MIGHT fit into any category or genre other than lit fic as anything other than lit fic so that it can be more easily shopped. With the advent of the Women's Fiction label, a good chunk of the great books written by women are being siphoned out of the Lit Fic pool and into a clearly labeled category, where they are no such strong candidates for major awards simply because they are not being sold as Lit Fic. Meanwhile, there is no corresponding category for male writers' works, so NUMERICALLY more men's books are available for these awards.

    Critical acclaim and award-winning has become a numbers game. If dramatically more men have books with the correct category label on them for these awards, then dramatically more men will win them.

    And yes, I think the women who write vampire novels and quirky shopping books are "shrieking" and being unfair and unreasonable when they piss and moan about their books not receiving the same critical acclaim as literary fiction. Those books wouldn't do as well critically or with major awards whether a man or a woman wrote them.

    Jonathan -- Literary awards and good reviews by major book critics, the kind that are always at the heart of the issue when this subject comes up, are seldom about wild plots or saving the world or explosions or KRAWWWW! KABLAMMMM!!! The themes tend to be more internal and the action less gripping and more sedate whether men or women wrote the books.

    As or "women's themes" not being gripping enough, you read my partial manuscript and said you couldn't put it down, and that you kept thinking about the character and her problem long after you'd stopped reading. I'd say Baptism for the Dead is nothing but "women's themes." So there must be times when women write about women's problems and those problems are still gripping, eh? ;)

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  6. First I have to apologise - I totally did skim your post, and you're right I did misread it.

    I still don't think the writers of vampire and shopping books are 'shrieking' though (at least I haven't seen them specifically complain about their own type of books being ignored), but we'll have to disagree on that :). I mean, my current WIP is an urban fantasy and I would never dream of complaining about being bypassed for an award for it. I think if women of lighter books are complaining on the topic, maybe they're doing so on behalf of the books/female authors they think are worthy?

    Much of the rest of my post was um, irrelevant considering I read you incorrectly.

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  7. "And yes, I think the women who write vampire novels and quirky shopping books are "shrieking" and being unfair and unreasonable when they piss and moan about their books not receiving the same critical acclaim as literary fiction. Those books wouldn't do as well critically or with major awards whether a man or a woman wrote them."

    I did not take that thread as women who write about vampires and shopping demanding THEIR books in THOSE genres be nominated for the awards being discussed. (Well, the fact that you assume that the women who were taking issue with the way awards are given out even write those kinds of books says a lot.) Mistri is correct, they are probably advocating on behalf of women like you who are apparently writing books that would qualify for the awards.

    Your use of the words like "bleating" and "shrieking" are sexist as well, when all people are doing are disagreeing with you.

    Interestingly enough, in that same comment you take issue with arguably lit fic being pushed into the women's fiction category, thereby removing them from consideration for awards. It's highly unlikely that that was the woman's choice to be put in a certain area of the bookstore. Nope, pretty sure those parts of the publishing industry are male dominated. It's like authors who write about black characters probably not asking their books to be shoved in the "African American Literature" section which likely takes them out of the running for awards and most customers' attention.

    So I'm confused as to why you're blaming women for writing certain things when apparently even if they wrote the "right" thing they'd still get shoved out of consideration due to sexism . . .? I think that was part of the point of the women you are apparently disagreeing with. Am I misunderstanding your argument?

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  8. "(Well, the fact that you assume that the women who were taking issue with the way awards are given out even write those kinds of books says a lot.)"

    REALLY?? I'm a woman and I write the kind of books that win the kind of awards we're discussing here. I "assume" that women who write light fiction freak out about this issue because I've seen it happen many, many times before, on AW and elsewhere. I admit I did not read every post in the 11-page thread to be certain that's what was going on.

    It is my experience that when people complain about this "issue" they are not writing in the category of literary fiction, and therefore are less aware of what is going on in literary fiction. The people, male and female, who are involved in lit fic tend not to see this as a sexism problem but as a numbers problem. (Tend. There are still people who do consider it a sexism problem, but the majority I've talked to think it's just because men outnumber women in lit fic.)

    "Your use of the words like "bleating" and "shrieking" are sexist as well, when all people are doing are disagreeing with you."

    Would you still consider those words sexist if I'd applied them to men? Ask yourself that.

    They are not merely disagreeing with me; they are misunderstanding a fundamental problem with the industry that affects EVERYBODY, male and female. Namely, the narrow categorization of fiction that has happened over the past 10 - 15 years. And every time I point it out, they stick their fingers in their ears and say "La la la la la, nope, can't be anything but sexism." That's childish.

    "It's highly unlikely that that was the woman's choice to be put in a certain area of the bookstore. Nope, pretty sure those parts of the publishing industry are male dominated."

    That is absolutely ridiculous. You're making a kneejerk assumption because you want to believe the industry is inherently SEXIST -- not flawed, not stupidly managed, but maliciously, intentionally SEXIST.

    If anything, the industry is sexist toward men in the area of category/genre narrowing. Where is the "Men's Fiction" category? Where are the books marketed solely toward men?

    Women buy more books, so it makes sense as a BUSINESS decision to market more specifically toward them. That's not a smart artistic decision or a smart cultural decision, but if you consider only the bottom line, which businesses do, it's a smart business decision.

    I am a skeptic by nature, and I need EVIDENCE -- real EVIDENCE -- before I'll believe a claim. If you think the industry is intentionally, maliciously anti-female -- an industry, I should add, that's dominated by women -- show me the evidence. "Men win more literary fiction awards" isn't evidence. Or at least it's merely a correlation, not a causation. I've already pointed out that the categorization of women's fiction and the dilution of the lit fic pool is just as much a correlation, so what evidence do you have for believing sexism over short-sighted marketing schemes? Show me. If the evidence is strong enough, I'll believe anything.

    I agree that writers don't ask for their books to be narrowly categorized, but that might well be because they're unaware it's happening. Raising awareness is the first step toward changing that.

    "So I'm confused as to why you're blaming women for writing certain things when apparently even if they wrote the "right" thing they'd still get shoved out of consideration due to sexism . . .? I think that was part of the point of the women you are apparently disagreeing with."

    NO. It is not SEXISM but a fundamental flaw in the industry that pigeonholes women writers and books with women characters into awards-inaccessible categories.

    "Am I misunderstanding your argument?"

    YES.

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  9. And by the way, I did not "blame" women for writing "lighter" fiction. I pointed out that people should write whatever they enjoy writing.

    Thanks for intentionally misreading my post, though.

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  10. First, I don't think you have to write about lit fic to know about or be interested in what's going on there.

    Second, re: "Would you still consider those words ["bleating" and "shrieking"] sexist if I'd applied them to men? Ask yourself that.

    The point is not that the words are inherently sexist, but that people very rarely apply them to men. You are using them in a sexist way. It's really interesting that you can't see that at all. To me that is 'la la la', fingers in ears.

    Also, men's fiction is basically all in general fiction. Much of what is in women's fiction could be considered 'literary' too - but either marketing teams decide women would be the core audience, or that men wouldn't read it in gen fic, so it gets marketed specifically towards women instead.

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  11. "Also, men's fiction is basically all in general fiction. Much of what is in women's fiction could be considered 'literary' too - but either marketing teams decide women would be the core audience, or that men wouldn't read it in gen fic, so it gets marketed specifically towards women instead. "

    And that's exactly the point I was making in my blog post. Whatever the reason for spinning it out into women's fiction, the end result is that it pulls those books out of the running for literary awards. It's not a fucking sexist conspiracy, and I'm sick of people insisting it is.

    As for how the words "bleating" and "shrieking" are used, maybe in BizarroUniverse they're only applied to women. I apply them to anybody who bleats or shrieks, and I've known plenty of men who bleat and shriek, and I call them on it when they do. It's really interesting that you can't see at all that people can and do apply any fucking word they want to use to anybody. Words themselves are not inherently sexist.

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