Living with XY Chromosomes

11011131516

Comments

  • BroJames wrote: »
    I don’t think anyone suggested that UK SFF was dominated by male authors. The point being made as the extent to which it may or may not be run by women given their role as editors and publicists.

    The fact that about 40% of authors are female foes tend to suggest it is no longer the case that women authors are no longer largely excluded by publishers.

    As for knowing whether a character is true to life, while it may be broadly true that a person of one gender is ill-places to judge the verisimilitude of a character of another gender it is too much of a generalisation to be applied to any individual person. And if we take that line with gender what then are we to say about race, sexuality, class or historical or national background?

    I'd say it's true there too, maybe more so. There is no way I, as a white guy,can know wht it's like to be a black woman, even in my own town. How it feels, what fears she has, what she expects when she walks out the door every morning. I just can't. As such if I need to write a black female character, I am either going to need a hell of a lot of help from black women, or just bag it altogether. And if a lot of women readers find women characters in sci-fi books written by men to be thin or unbelievable, then I am sure as hell in no position to gainsay them.
  • Some critics (and authors) can't tell "well-drawn" from a hole in the ground, regardless of backgrounds. Some can. But should we take this tangent elsewhere?
    Why? It is directly related to gender.
  • BroJames wrote: »
    I don’t think anyone suggested that UK SFF was dominated by male authors. The point being made as the extent to which it may or may not be run by women given their role as editors and publicists.

    The fact that about 40% of authors are female foes tend to suggest it is no longer the case that women authors are no longer largely excluded by publishers.

    As for knowing whether a character is true to life, while it may be broadly true that a person of one gender is ill-places to judge the verisimilitude of a character of another gender it is too much of a generalisation to be applied to any individual person. And if we take that line with gender what then are we to say about race, sexuality, class or historical or national background?

    Where is the point at which the critic’s own social or cultural background prevents them assessing whether a character is well-drawn or not?
    White people will have difficulty in writing black people if blackness* is a feature of the character. Same with gender, etc. That is not to say people cannot write across those boundaries or even that they cannot do it well. Just that there are things difficult to understand if one has not experienced it.
    On SOF we have a decidedly lefty and self-described inclusionary membership. And yet, we have white people who do not get the black experience and men who do not get the female experience. Why would would authors be any different?
    Again, not that it is impossible, but that it is difficult.

    * There is a difference between a character who just happens to be female or black and one with whom that is a feature.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin
    edited February 2020
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    Never said male authors don't put females into their books.
    The implication is there, that women "are accessories to the male characters". Where the protagonists are women, they are not likely to be accessories. They are, in fact the protagonists.
    Never said men cannot write convincing female characters. Just that they often don't. I'd argue that in sci-fi and fantasy, the bulk of female characters are poorly written and under-written. That some men can manage to do so doesn't change this.
    No, it does change it. It changes it from a question of gender to a question of art. Women can also write good male characters. I'm not traducing their gender because some proportion of them can't.

    Yes, I'm aware Campbell was a sexist dick. He's been dead for 50 years. SFF has moved on. I've worked in the industry for over 10 years as a professional, and many of my peers (many of my idols, in fact) are women. Who, on the related question, are by your lights better to be trusted as to judge whether a female character is well written. They would tell me (and any other male author - it's a small pond, and we tend to know each other) if I or anyone else fucked it up.

    You are prejudiced in this. Taking the figures for the first quarter of 2019, women dominate spec fic YA (close to 90%) and urban fantasy/paranormal romance (some 60-70%) but there's no "but what about the men" from you. In adult fantasy, women are 55%. In adult sf, women are 35%. Taken as a whole, women authors accounted for 60% of all sff.

    Add to this, the dominance of women in publishing (all areas of publishing, not just sff), and I'm struggling to see anything in what you say that I recognise.

  • Doc Tor wrote: »
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    Never said male authors don't put females into their books.
    The implication is there, that women "are accessories to the male characters". Where the protagonists are women, they are not likely to be accessories. They are, in fact the protagonists.
    You are seeing what is not there. And just as with male characters, simply because the protagonist is female doesn't mean it is well written.
    Doc Tor wrote: »
    Never said men cannot write convincing female characters. Just that they often don't. I'd argue that in sci-fi and fantasy, the bulk of female characters are poorly written and under-written. That some men can manage to do so doesn't change this.
    No, it does change it. It changes it from a question of gender to a question of art. Women can also write good male characters. I'm not traducing their gender because some proportion of them can't.
    Women live in a man's world, so have a bit of an advantage. Again, I am not saying that men cannot write women well, but that they often don't.
    Doc Tor wrote: »
    Yes, I'm aware Campbell was a sexist dick. He's been dead for 50 years. SFF has moved on. I've worked in the industry for over 10 years as a professional, and many of my peers (many of my idols, in fact) are women. Who, on the related question, are by your lights better to be trusted as to judge whether a female character is well written. They would tell me (and any other male author - it's a small pond, and we tend to know each other) if I or anyone else fucked it up.
    Campell's influence is not as dead as he is. The Sad Puppies illustrate this, and the Hugo reaction also illustrates that positive changes have been made.
    Doc Tor wrote: »
    You are prejudiced in this. Taking the figures for the first quarter of 2019, women dominate spec fic YA (close to 90%) and urban fantasy/paranormal romance (some 60-70%) but there's no "but what about the men" from you. In adult fantasy, women are 55%. In adult sf, women are 35%. Taken as a whole, women authors accounted for 60% of all sff.

    Add to this, the dominance of women in publishing (all areas of publishing, not just sff), and I'm struggling to see anything in what you say that I recognise.
    You include urban fantasy paranormal romance which is more romance than fantasy (and the romance bit has traditionally been female dominant anyway) but exclude horror which often contains straight sci-fi and fantasy. If you include all speculative fiction, the balance is 37% female and 63% male.

    Historical, epic or high fantasy 33% 67%
    Urban fantasy or paranormal romance 57% 43%
    Horror 17% 83%
    Science fiction 22% 78%
    Young adult fiction 68% 32%
    Other or unclassifiable 27% 73%
    Overall 37% 63%
    So, other than YA and getting jiggy with ghosts, pretty much still male dominated.

    As far as the romance genres, I am not a fan. There are undoubtedly good authors in it, but I think the genre in general does women a disservice.
  • lilbuddha wrote: »
    Some critics (and authors) can't tell "well-drawn" from a hole in the ground, regardless of backgrounds. Some can. But should we take this tangent elsewhere?
    Why? It is directly related to gender.

    Because we are not in a general gender issues thread, but in the "living with XY chromosomes" thread, and folks may not want it derailed. Let's let the guys speak on this one.
  • A guy started it and related it to XY chromosomes.
  • Is it not yet clear that a bunch of men calling each other out for their problems as men, and one or more women calling men out for their problems as men, are two completely different things? Is this that fucking hard to understand?
  • lilbuddha wrote: »
    A guy started it and related it to XY chromosomes.
    Nope. A guy, in response to a hostly request to take the Dune tangent elsewhere, said:
    (Err...obsessive interest in / knowledge of the minutiae of SF, and possession of XY Chromosomes, might not always be regarded as tangential :smile: )

    ((That's a joke, before someone sends me to the Styx :smiley: ))
    Note: “ obsessive interest in / knowledge of the minutiae of SF” might not be tangential to “possession of XY Chromosomes.” And note: “That’s a joke.”

    Quoting that, you went to:
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    One of the contenders for first science fiction novel, and certainly one of the most enduring, was written by a woman. Women authors have largely been excluded by publishers, leading to fewer female readers.
    Culture, rather than chromosomes, drive the disparity.

    Then pretty soon after that, we got;
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    As Gwai says, female characters written by men rarely accurately represent women. Women, my male authors in general, but it feels even more so in sci-fi, are accessories to the male characters. Or motivations, rarely are they characters in and of themselves.
    Because men largely excluded women from participating, many men feel sci-fi is theirs. Hence the antipathy towards women becoming involved in it.

    So no, a guy didn’t start it. And sorry, but it comes across as just another “here’s the problem with men” from you. It’s tiresome.

  • A lot of things are clear here, but I doubt we'd agree what they are. Dune: rulz or sux?, socks getting lost; yeah, I guess compared to those, discussing how gender affects literature is kinda silly.
  • lilbuddha wrote: »
    A lot of things are clear here, but I doubt we'd agree what they are. Dune: rulz or sux?, socks getting lost; yeah, I guess compared to those, discussing how gender affects literature is kinda silly.
    But this isn’t a thread about how gender affects literature. This is a thread about being male—from the very serious aspects of that to the lighthearted.

    If you want to start a thread on how gender affects literature, by all means start one.

  • Doc Tor wrote: »
    Well, now. UK SFF is mostly run by women. I have had three out of thirteen novels edited by men. Most SFF editors are women. Most SFF publicists are women.

    Of the last SFF books I've read:
    Jeff Vandemeer - Annihilation. Narrator is female, all 4 protagonists were female.
    Matt Hill - Zero Bomb. 3 protagonists, each taking a third of the book. 1 male, 2 female.
    Simon Jimenez - The Vanished Birds. 2 protagonists, both female.
    Danny Tobey - The God Game. 4 protagonists, 3 male and 1 female

    Currently reading: SE Moorhead - Witness X. Female protagonist. (Author is a woman)

    Respectfully, I contend that you are working off false assumptions. Especially and including that men can't write convincing female characters.

    I wonder if the assumption relates to books written around the mid-20th century. I remember reading the "of Gor" series, and for 12 year old or so me, that was pretty much porn. That might be an outlier, I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me if these days, many more women are writing and publishing great stuff in this field.
  • Nick Tamen wrote: »
    If you want to start a thread on how gender affects literature, by all means start one.

    I’d be interested. It’s been an interesting tangent. My guess is that @lilbuddha’s criticisms of the industry are valid in retrospect (though I’m sure more can always be done), but by the sounds of @Doc Tor’s more contemporary firsthand experience, a lot has changed since then. I have to say, I don’t read much SFF any more, but newer stuff I have doesn’t suffer from the same stereotypes as it used to. In fact, thinking, what I’ve read has pretty much been mostly female protagonists written by men, or male protagonists written by women. Which is nice.

    @mark_in_manchester’s comment might have been made in jest, but it’s good to challenge the stereotype that only men like SFF.
  • I've just started Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I'm expecting the protagonist to be a well-drawn, well-realized woman. I'll report back if it seems phony (although being male I can't know what it's like to be female from the inside). So far it's been scene-setting.
  • If we're talking about classic SF, might it be true to say that very few characters of either sex were well drawn? Many stories were exploring an interesting idea, and the characters were puppets to enable that?
  • Yes, that. The idea that Asimov, Clarke etc, could write characters (at least at the start) is problematic at best.

    Some could, out of the box - Bradbury for one, but he was always more lyrical than the hard problem-solving sf as promoted by Campbell. There have always been parallel strands in sff. There still are (which is why it's a mistake to separate 'hard sf' from paranormal romance and YA spec fic). And these things tend to be reader, not writer driven. Once a book is published, there's no control over who buys it...
  • GwaiGwai Epiphanies Host
    edited February 2020
    I have started a thread because I want to continue this and I think it's very Epiphanal, but I can't keep being obnoxious on a board I host. Please join me there.
  • Nick Tamen wrote: »
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    A lot of things are clear here, but I doubt we'd agree what they are. Dune: rulz or sux?, socks getting lost; yeah, I guess compared to those, discussing how gender affects literature is kinda silly.
    But this isn’t a thread about how gender affects literature. This is a thread about being male—from the very serious aspects of that to the lighthearted.

    If you want to start a thread on how gender affects literature, by all means start one.
    The thread* is about living with XY chromosomes. Exploring what that means, and this includes the Sci-fi tangent, is on target. Lost socks, yeah, I guess only blokes lose socks and have hobbies.

  • lilbuddha wrote: »
    The thread* is about living with XY chromosomes. Exploring what that means, and this includes the Sci-fi tangent, is on target. Lost socks, yeah, I guess only blokes lose socks and have hobbies.

    You're doing it again. This thread isn't about "things only blokes experience" but "things as experienced by blokes." Sniping by women doesn't really contribute ANYTHING to the conversation.
  • mousethief wrote: »
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    The thread* is about living with XY chromosomes. Exploring what that means, and this includes the Sci-fi tangent, is on target. Lost socks, yeah, I guess only blokes lose socks and have hobbies.

    You're doing it again. This thread isn't about "things only blokes experience" but "things as experienced by blokes." Sniping by women doesn't really contribute ANYTHING to the conversation.

    Thanks @mousethief

    I continue to struggle to understand lilbuddas on going difficulty/opposition to a discussion of male experience.
  • LouiseLouise Epiphanies Host
    edited February 2020
    Hosting
    My apologies we've been short of hosts and I've been very busy IRL.


    Lil Buddha you are causing problems on this thread and need to stop derailing it and fighting with the other posters as to what it's about and what's on topic. That is not your call. That is a host call.

    This thread is about male experience and identity, of course female experience can feed into that but not in a deliberately fighty way and not in a way that derails the thread. If you want to fight over something or discuss female experience at length then please start a new thread on the issue

    I'm not happy with either of the SF tangents because though there's a great discussion to be had about gender and SF it belongs on its own thread. Please move to Gwai's thread or if that doesn't cover your particular angle on SF, please start another thread.

    A reminder to others that the Hell board exists and that at the point where you have decided another poster is the problem and want to discuss their behaviour rather than the topic in hand you should head to the hell board to do so. Please take personal conflicts with Lil Buddha to Hell and stop them here.

    Thanks
    Louise
    Epiphanies Host

    Hosting off




  • ThunderBunkThunderBunk Shipmate
    edited February 2020
    Cis-gendered male is a gender identity. Arguably, it is treated as the default. Anyone who doesn't like that is, to my mind, well advised to promote its examination for what it is, for its particular characteristics and the way in which it interacts with the rest of a person's identity and with other people's gender identity, precisely in order to dethrone it from being the default. The only way to dethrone it is to put it firmly among its peers and discuss its particularities.
  • Can I commend people to listen to footballer Ian Wright's Desert Island Discs from last week? Not a dry eye in the house here.

    (apologies if the link is regionally locked)
  • It's been said before, but I struggle with asking for help. The Ship is great because, not only are there special threads so I can discuss things with others who've been through the same, but I don't know Shipmates. Telling anonymous people that I'm having a rough time is so much easier than saying this to folk who know me. While I'm sure there are women who experience this, it seems a very masculine response to me.
  • I took you up on that - me and the eldest daughter don't know anything about football, but we enjoyed it. The bit about the teacher was especially moving / challenging, for this man (me) who used to teach.
  • It's been said before, but I struggle with asking for help. The Ship is great because, not only are there special threads so I can discuss things with others who've been through the same, but I don't know Shipmates. Telling anonymous people that I'm having a rough time is so much easier than saying this to folk who know me. While I'm sure there are women who experience this, it seems a very masculine response to me.

    I have an aversion to elicting emotional responses. Whether that's due to my own embarrassment, or not wanting to embarrass others, I don't know.

    Sometimes I think I'm a stranger to myself.
  • Doc Tor wrote: »
    It's been said before, but I struggle with asking for help. The Ship is great because, not only are there special threads so I can discuss things with others who've been through the same, but I don't know Shipmates. Telling anonymous people that I'm having a rough time is so much easier than saying this to folk who know me. While I'm sure there are women who experience this, it seems a very masculine response to me.

    I have an aversion to elicting emotional responses. Whether that's due to my own embarrassment, or not wanting to embarrass others, I don't know.

    Sometimes I think I'm a stranger to myself.

    There are times I wonder if you're me, @Doc Tor, posting under a different name and forgetting I've done so....
  • You two are weird. I emote all over the place. I'm an over-disclosing sympathy-addict. I've always sort of been this way, but I really came into my own after going to Gamblers Anonymous. (see what I did there?)
  • It has struck me that, for those who enjoy this, meeting to practise martial arts should still be possible. After all, you don't shake hands, do you?
  • Dave WDave W Shipmate
    If you can practice while maintaining a distance of at least 2 meters at all times, perhaps...
  • Surely T'ai Chi is the only martial arts related activity that can be practiced six feet apart? This feels so much like something else entirely (from which I am also rudely indefinitely cut off, but that is a different matter).
  • Covid-19 can stay airborne for longer than the typical session. Being in an enclosed space with sweating people breathing heavy doesn’t seem to be the smartest thing.
    Even outside would be iffy
  • RooKRooK Admin Emeritus
    Just to be clear: @Robert Armin, did you really mean to suggest that a virus would not bother transmitting between humans because they're doing martial arts, as long as they avoided shaking hands?
  • No, I was attempting to make people laugh, to raise their spirits at this trying time. It seems I've failed. Maybe I should go to the Oppression thread....
  • RooKRooK Admin Emeritus
    Got it. It's exactly the kind of joke that works in person, through the flow of conversation, but get's lost in the disjointed nature of online discussion. Which I've only very slowly learned over the course of decades...

    Mind you, there is an underlying disparity between how funny I think I am and how funny everybody else says they think I am. I suspect they're lying, because they're just jealous.
  • I feel your pain brother. My wit intimidates them, so they ignore it. ("They" may vary over time.)
  • The lad is going through all his kata each day..
  • Kata, wikipedia tells me, is a detailed choreographed pattern of movements made to be practiced alone. This makes me wonder whether "the lad" is a euphemism.
  • RooKRooK Admin Emeritus
    Kata are often taught to children as part of martial arts training, to apply repetition to the key movements.
  • To children? The year I tried karate it was nothing but kata!
  • AIUI, kata are common to many or most martial arts, and are not directed just at children. For most people doing Tai Chi, "the form" as it's called is all there is; few progress to push-hands; fewer still to actual sparring.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    mousethief wrote: »
    For most people doing Tai Chi, "the form" as it's called is all there is.

    I could wish that it were. Taoist T'ai Chi is hot on Foundation Exercises (you can tell I'm not) which are specific movements which recur a lot in the set.

    Our classes are suspended pro tem. Attendance is usually between 20 and 30 which, with spacing (which you need in any case if you're not to collide with the next person during Repulse Monkey) fills up the average church hall. But like any meeting there's the grouping and chatting, so it would be impossible to maintain social distancing at all times.

  • Men are twice as likely to die of covid19 than women.

    In some countries the gender disparity is more pronounced.

    This despite the majority of care givers and health care staff being female.
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    I knew men were more likely, but I didn't realise the disparity was that great. Be careful out there.
  • MaryLouiseMaryLouise Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    asher wrote: »
    Men are twice as likely to die of covid19 than women.

    In some countries the gender disparity is more pronounced.

    This despite the majority of care givers and health care staff being female.

    This is puzzling, asher. I was reading about the 1918-'20 pandemic (Spanish flu) yesterday and most scientists still have no idea why it attacked so many young people -- more than half of those who died were aged between 20 and 40 years of age.
  • I think there is a theory that it is to do with over stimulating the immune system, so old and v young people may have a less high functioning immune system - but healthy young adults have a very strong immune system, so if it turns against them it’s more dangerous.
  • So why are men more likely to die from this? Is it something to do with our immune systems?
  • On More or Less (radio 4 stats program) they said mortality rates for covid correlate almost exactly with your yearly mortality risk. So if one develops covid today, your risk of dying in the next - say - two weeks, would be the same as your risk of dying over the next twelve months. (If you are mildly ill and recover your risk of dying in the next 12 months will not have gone away - hence excess deaths.)

    Men generally don’t live as long, tend to live more risky lifestyles - so presumably might be more like to have other chronic issues that make them more at risk, perhaps ?
  • Men generally don’t live as long, tend to live more risky lifestyles - so presumably might be more like to have other chronic issues that make them more at risk, perhaps ?

    The suggestion that I saw was that in China, men have a much higher rate of smoking than women. I'm not sure to what extent this applies to other affected countries.
    MaryLouise wrote: »
    I was reading about the 1918-'20 pandemic (Spanish flu) yesterday and most scientists still have no idea why it attacked so many young people -- more than half of those who died were aged between 20 and 40 years of age.
    I think there is a theory that it is to do with over stimulating the immune system, so old and v young people may have a less high functioning immune system - but healthy young adults have a very strong immune system, so if it turns against them it’s more dangerous.

    Another theory that I've seen is that the 1918 flu strain was related to one that had been circulating some decades earlier, so older people would have had some immunity as a result of exposure to that when they were younger. I don't know how strong the evidence for this is, but I think I read it somewhere respectable, so if it's speculation it's probably intelligent speculation.


  • DoublethinkDoublethink Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    They have isolated the strain of flu that caused the 1917/18 outbreak, it was a form H1N1 virus related to the 2009 swine flu. I saw a thread on twitter from Andy Burnham the ex-health Secretary, and he said that whilst he was in office they’d effectively had a near miss. I recall the government buying an eye watering amount of Tamiflu vaccine against a returning outbreak.

    If you think about mers, and sars too - these things happen with depressing regularity, I suppose we were lucky to have a hundred year gap between outbreaks on this scale. (I don’t mean to minimise mers, sars or Ebola - thousands died, but this is just another order of magnitude.)
This discussion has been closed.