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Writerly Ways
May. 4th, 2014 02:53 pmIt's been a while since I've had time to do one of these and this one is a bit of an angry rant. Last week this came across the author list I'm on for Dreamspinner Press and was brought to our attention by one of the gay male authors. This reviewer basically claims women have NO business writing gay stories
You'll note he's supposedly reviewing a self-pubbed book by another gay male author in our house but he spends the first part of the review running DSP and women authors into the ground. We can't know what it's like to be a gay man? Okay maybe but that's why this is called fiction.
It doesn't take much to go all Reductio ad absurdum on this guy's ass. By his own argument, Oscar Wilde would never have written a thing. In fact, why is Stephen King writing stories about teen aged girls? Why is any man ANYWHERE writing women at all? They don't have ovaries and a crampy uterus. How would they know what it's like to be ridiculously emotional and bloated? Or the embarrassment of when you lean over the table and your boobs are cutting ruts in the icing on your cake.
By his argument, I would be relegated to writing single white female. I can't write about motherhood. I've never had a child. I can't write any diversity of character because I'm not that ethnic group. All women authors could only write women. Men only write men and all of literary creation grinds to a halt.
Yet another of the gay males on my list (yes, DSP is NOT all women in spite of what the reviewer claims) had a beautiful rebuttal to this (but since that wasn't made public, I won't link to it) But basically he credited women's interest in the genre for saving it from oblivion.
Do we always get it right? No, of course not. Some even do it down-right bad. That's what research is for. The more ridiculous part of this is he has given great reviews to the lady authors from DSP. If you look at his blog, half the books reviewed are by women but now he's calling us liars and cheats. Interesting, no? By his own admission some did it so well he didn't know they were women. HOW can they possibly be doing it wrong then?
I've seen this exact argument being made against Caucasian authors trying to write minorities. One was made recently by an Asian author (I know I read it either on Goodreads or Bookpage but I couldn't find it when I looked earlier). We shouldn't be writing it because we don't understand the culture. Certainly there is that same grain of truth but we can research. On one hand we're being slapped in the face if we don't write diverse characters and getting kicked in the gut when we do. Reductio ad absurdum applies here too. We'd be locked into very rigid class, culture, ethnic, religious boxes never to get out. (however do see #weneeddiversebooks for a push for more diversity in our libraries, our book stores and our writing)
Of course women always get hit the hardest when it comes to the whole 'they have NO BUSINESS stinking up our genre' thing. Case in point Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter which is a backlash against these idiots. Lately so many forums are going on and on how women destroy SF/Fantasy/Horror/Mystery and we should just go write het romances and chick lit and LEAVE THE BOY STUFF ALONE.
Lightspeed got so many donations they're doing a SF, Horror and Fantasy anthologies celebrating women authors. It's a wonderful thing. And think of it this way, one of the very first SF stories ever written was Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. Last I looked, she was a woman. Mystery genre has even less of a leg to stand on. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham & Dorthoy L. Sayers, all wrote in the 20s and 30s all but creating the damn genre.
earlier this year (or maybe late last year) I read an article on women authors not being read hardly at all with claims that it's like 15-25% of most people's reading list. I went back 6 years. I've always been over 50% female (I do wonder if that was a tad exaggerated to make a point) but the one thing that came out of that was the #readwomen2014 hash tag on twitter. They've been my most viewed tweets. So if you want to help women get noticed use that and tweet your favorites.
So ends my rant. I know not all men feel this way. I'm betting that most don't (or at least I would like to believe so). I've spent my life in science/medicine careers being told women have no business doing it. I didn't listen then and I'll be damned if I listen now. I know some of you saw the pared down version of this on FB. I'm no less angry now than then.
yearly count -
Everything else was on hold for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fmabigbang (which I need to edit) and Love's Landscape and If Two of Them Are Dead I hope to resume my writing/editing schedule now.
You'll note he's supposedly reviewing a self-pubbed book by another gay male author in our house but he spends the first part of the review running DSP and women authors into the ground. We can't know what it's like to be a gay man? Okay maybe but that's why this is called fiction.
It doesn't take much to go all Reductio ad absurdum on this guy's ass. By his own argument, Oscar Wilde would never have written a thing. In fact, why is Stephen King writing stories about teen aged girls? Why is any man ANYWHERE writing women at all? They don't have ovaries and a crampy uterus. How would they know what it's like to be ridiculously emotional and bloated? Or the embarrassment of when you lean over the table and your boobs are cutting ruts in the icing on your cake.
By his argument, I would be relegated to writing single white female. I can't write about motherhood. I've never had a child. I can't write any diversity of character because I'm not that ethnic group. All women authors could only write women. Men only write men and all of literary creation grinds to a halt.
Yet another of the gay males on my list (yes, DSP is NOT all women in spite of what the reviewer claims) had a beautiful rebuttal to this (but since that wasn't made public, I won't link to it) But basically he credited women's interest in the genre for saving it from oblivion.
Do we always get it right? No, of course not. Some even do it down-right bad. That's what research is for. The more ridiculous part of this is he has given great reviews to the lady authors from DSP. If you look at his blog, half the books reviewed are by women but now he's calling us liars and cheats. Interesting, no? By his own admission some did it so well he didn't know they were women. HOW can they possibly be doing it wrong then?
I've seen this exact argument being made against Caucasian authors trying to write minorities. One was made recently by an Asian author (I know I read it either on Goodreads or Bookpage but I couldn't find it when I looked earlier). We shouldn't be writing it because we don't understand the culture. Certainly there is that same grain of truth but we can research. On one hand we're being slapped in the face if we don't write diverse characters and getting kicked in the gut when we do. Reductio ad absurdum applies here too. We'd be locked into very rigid class, culture, ethnic, religious boxes never to get out. (however do see #weneeddiversebooks for a push for more diversity in our libraries, our book stores and our writing)
Of course women always get hit the hardest when it comes to the whole 'they have NO BUSINESS stinking up our genre' thing. Case in point Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter which is a backlash against these idiots. Lately so many forums are going on and on how women destroy SF/Fantasy/Horror/Mystery and we should just go write het romances and chick lit and LEAVE THE BOY STUFF ALONE.
Lightspeed got so many donations they're doing a SF, Horror and Fantasy anthologies celebrating women authors. It's a wonderful thing. And think of it this way, one of the very first SF stories ever written was Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. Last I looked, she was a woman. Mystery genre has even less of a leg to stand on. Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham & Dorthoy L. Sayers, all wrote in the 20s and 30s all but creating the damn genre.
earlier this year (or maybe late last year) I read an article on women authors not being read hardly at all with claims that it's like 15-25% of most people's reading list. I went back 6 years. I've always been over 50% female (I do wonder if that was a tad exaggerated to make a point) but the one thing that came out of that was the #readwomen2014 hash tag on twitter. They've been my most viewed tweets. So if you want to help women get noticed use that and tweet your favorites.
So ends my rant. I know not all men feel this way. I'm betting that most don't (or at least I would like to believe so). I've spent my life in science/medicine careers being told women have no business doing it. I didn't listen then and I'll be damned if I listen now. I know some of you saw the pared down version of this on FB. I'm no less angry now than then.
yearly count -
Everything else was on hold for
fmabigbang (which I need to edit) and Love's Landscape and If Two of Them Are Dead I hope to resume my writing/editing schedule now.
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