Tor.com, a site that so egregiously banned from commenting one of the most popular minority authors in the field today (yours truly) for posting about actual on topic space opera during their #SpaceOperaWeek instead of playing their identity politics garbage, is back at it again.
Today their writer urges a QUOTA on what you read based on demographic breakdowns.
He doesn’t look at the industry overall, which I did the legwork for him and it shows that in science fiction and fantasy, publishers are preferring women to publish already, despite being only genre that’s even remotely got males working or reading in it (the others skew so far to women it’s absurd), it marks the only place men can read something geared toward them. But instead, he speaks of his own reading habits, in which he, as a man, preferred reading male authors.
The rest of the article goes on about how shameful he felt about it. Self-flagellating for a congratulations from the predominately female-controlled industry. Maybe it’ll get his books published. I guess that’s a marketing strategy.
I posit that he could do something shocking: read what he likes and not care what the demographic breakdown is.
It’s totally normal for men to like books by men and actually this type of nonsense is why men are shamed into not reading at all, and as we know the real problem in literacy is men on average stop reading at an early age in our society. It’s because there’s so little content geared toward them and it’s been that way for decades.
Here’s the hard truth:
Men and women are different and therefore write differently.
I know. It’s shocking. We’re told we’re not allowed to say this. That men can be women, women can be men. There’s no difference. But that’s a lie. There is a huge difference in or biologies and therefore psychologies. The books written by women will on average end up different than men as a result.
And it makes sense that every other genre, which is mostly filled with women readers and has mostly women writers. But Sci-Fi implementing that same quota base, as an action-adventure oriented genre, has caused sales to tank as, like many other industries taken over by SJWs, they told their own readers to buzz off — and continue to do so.
Male writers don’t get big publishers looking at them at all anymore. The odds are terrifying as I proved earlier this year. And so the sales have gone to self-publishing and indie. In some ways i shouldn’t warn a bigoted company like Tor about this by posting on it, lest they actually catch on and start to do something about their decline, but it’s sad to watch a man fall into this trap of apologizing to women he’s never wronged.
It’s okay to be male.
A sport that’s always been male-oriented is baseball. Check out my male-written Gravity Of The Game novella, which was compared by a reader to early Heinlein and is being talked about for Hugo nominations. You can read it here.
I was an exhibitor at Phoenix Comicon Fanfest last weekend. At the writers’ table where I sat, I was one of two men in a group of six. I certainly didn’t have a problem with any of the writers there — I’m sure they’re all talented and everyone was very friendly — but if we’re talking quotas, it should have been 3 and 3, right?
“Male writers don’t get big publishers looking at them at all anymore. “
Not exactly true, we don’t get more attention than we deserve. Things have changed for the better for EVERYONE, but it sucks to lose privilege, even if the privilege was undeserved
This is only true if you assume females are objectively better writers. I reject this assumption.
Ryan,
Please take your “Stupid Privilege” elsewhere. It might be contagious.
Shhhhh.
It’s true that making an effort to broaden your horizons can be a good thing – it’s easy to get into a rut of reading the same authors, genres, etc, and miss out on something you might actually enjoy. But quotas, no. It’s okay to like what you like.
I always think it’s funny how no one complains about the romance genre, which is MUCH more female-dominated (in terms of both authors and readers), than SFF has ever been male-dominated.
Oh yeah. You definitely have to take a female pen name or androgynous if you’re a male writing romance. There’s no way to do it.
Yeeep. When they start lecturing romance readers/reviewers about how they don’t read enough male authors, and start bemoaning the fact that male authors are hugely under-represented in that genre, they can get back to me.
What would actually happen if someone actually did that? Ha, easy, they’d be yelled at for “invading female spaces” and “cultural appropriation of women’s literature.”
I like reading about male protags doing male protag things, and I do not like romance. Most of the time (not always, because there’s, well, me), these stories are written by men. So, what, I’m supposed to feel bad because my reading preferences don’t line up with some writer demographic?
Whatever, dudes.
We had a visiting professor at seminary once. He, in a session not private, asked me about the minority writers I was reading in my studies. I replied, “I never care about that. I don’t read the ‘about the author’ section except to see where they did their studies.”
He tried to shame me in front of the rest of the class. One of them, a close friend, said, “Frank, you remember so-and-so?”
“Yeah.”
“Minority. Latin America.”
“Really. As I said, I don’t care about that. Show me how he handles the text. Can he work Hebrew in the Old Testament or Greek for the New? Philosophy, if he’s a systematician. Latin for Church History.”
The visitor continued his shaming. “The blind voice of the bigoted majority. So oblivious to the struggles of his fellow Christians, he doesn’t notice their struggle.” Most of the rest of the class looked away from him.
I sat there getting a head start on my I-Don’t-Care stare.
Oh FFS. Where do I begin?
As with most things, context is important here. The author of the blog post wasn’t speaking as a casual reader, but as a book reviewer, someone whose job it is to read as widely as they can in the field, so as to, as accurately as they can, separate the wheat from the chaff and recommend good books to people. If you want to only read male authors, that’s fine. That’s your choice. But you’re not a paid book reviewer, he is. It would do us all some good as readers, as writers, and as human beings sharing this planet, to read more women, more people of color. But then that would eliminate and teach out of us the very misogyny and xenophobia you espouse, wouldn’t it? My bad.
Second of course, and as usual, is your presumption. You’re not “one of the most popular minority authors in the field today” unless a majority of people who aren’t you–and preferably not a bunch of women-hating douchebags–say you are. It doesn’t count if you say it. And if you want to be that thing, you have to earn it, not troll your betters on Twitter.
Also, your reasoning is flawed. You see everything as an either-or scenario. Either only men write SF and Fantasy, or only women. When in truth it has been both for a very long time (though largely skewed toward males for a very long time, no matter what your flawed and pathetic excuse for an expose’ tried to “prove”. And swinging back a little the other way does nothing to take away from what males have made of the field.
When you are accustomed to privilege, equality looks like oppression.