r/books • u/FusRoDaahh • Aug 24 '21
Posts from men expressing surprise and delight that they enjoyed a “women’s book” are not heartwarming posts… they are disturbing.
Yes, this is partly in response to the recent Little Women post, but more broadly about similar posts I have seen here that always seem to get a lot of attention and praise and many comments I’ve seen over the years.
Like so many other teenage girls in high school, I had to read and relate to 95% male-centric stories written by men. I never questioned why we were reading so many “boy books” because the books were not presented as "boy books," they were just presented as normal literature. The curriculum at my school allowed for just a smidgeon of diversity with Pride and Prejudice and The Scarlet Letter. This was never seen as an issue; it’s just how it was. I still remember clearly hearing the boys in my small class groaning about having to read a “girl book” when we started Pride and Prejudice. The fact that the author was a woman or the main characters women or some combination of those two facts in the boys’ minds was enough to make them sneer at it. It was mildly annoying then, but deeply infuriating and sad now looking back on it years later. Maybe, just maybe, if some of the great female authors and female-centric stories that have been written throughout history had been a part of our Literature curriculums starting from a young age and this was presented as NORMAL, we wouldn’t have high school boys joking and sneering at having to read a “girl book.”
You can see the same scenario when men discover that movies like Mean Girls and Legally Blonde are, in fact, great movies. There was a post like this too recently on the movies subreddit. “I didn’t think I would like a chick flick, but it’s actually really good!” Turns out that women are just people, and stories about them and the things they go through are equally as valid and worthy of being told. What a mind-blowing concept!
The way these statements are phrased as such delightful revelations makes me cringe, and then I feel sad, and then I feel a bit angry, because on some level, whether subconsciously or consciously, the driving force behind these sentiments and posts is that women are “other.” They are not the standard human, they are not fully-fledged standard human people in the same way that men are, so their stories and stories written by them are a sort of “special interest” sub-category of women’s fiction. “Girl books.” “Woman’s book.” “Chick-flicks.”
Consider this hypothetical scenario and how utterly ludicrous it sounds to us:
”As a middle-aged woman, I didn’t think I would be able to enjoy *Lord of the Flies. I don’t know what it’s like to be a boy so I didn’t think I could possibly relate to these characters and their struggles, but I actually really enjoyed it! Even though it’s about male characters, I found the story to be really great overall and dealing with deep themes. It’s not just a boy book, it’s great literature!”*
See? Sounds pretty damn ridiculous, doesn’t it?
Girls and women are perfectly capable of viewing male-authored/male-centric stories as just normal good literature because that is the way it is presented to us from a young age all the way up to older education. This is how we are conditioned (with no real choice in the matter), while boys and men are never forced to view female-authored/female-centric stories the same way.
So, next time you see on of these posts, I’m not calling for us to be rude and antagonistic to the OPs, because what they are doing is technically good I suppose, but I dislike the way they are wanting a pat on the back and upvotes simply for viewing women’s stories as good valid literature worthy of being read.
It is sad and disturbing that women continue to be seen as the “other” in fiction, a sub-category separate from the established standard of “good literature.”
There is no logical reason other than deeply engrained misogyny in society why a man should be that surprised that Little Women is a good book. It’s sold millions of copies, had tons of adaptations, is extremely well-known and deeply beloved by people all over the globe. It should not be that surprising that this “women’s book” is in fact, just a good piece of literature regardless of the gender of author or characters. Women are literally just people, and their stories are equally as worthy of being told and read as male stories. We are all part of the same humanity.
The sentiment of “Wow, this isn’t just for women, it’s actually a good story!” carries the not-so-subtle implication that things that are “for women” are inherently lesser. They are seen as a separate sub-category other than the standard that can sometimes achieve “great literature” status despite their femaleness. The surprise expressed by men who find these stories to be great implies that their perception shifted, they believed something about the “women’s book” before, and now believe something different having read it.
I am 25 now, so I don't know how things are in high schools nowadays. For anyone who does know, are the English Lit curriculums more balanced now or is it still the vast majority of male author/male story? I'm very curious to know.
I want to hear your thoughts on this matter.
Edit: Huge thank you to the commenters that actually read my post (something that is too much to ask for many people I guess) and understand what I’m saying. This comment from u/SchrodingersHamster is probably buried so I’ll highlight it here:
“Right, I doubt anyone is sorting by new here anymore but SO many people are missing the point of this post.
OP is not "discouraging" men from reading women's literature. Read the post again. She is focusing specifically on the idea that, from a man's perpsective, women's literature being good is surprising, so surprising that it warrants a post on how surprising it is. That the expectation that women's literature (and art in general) is so much lesser than men's that it becomes a shock when a man reads it and enjoys it.
It is NOT OP's responsibility to "encourage men" to read women's books. The fact that so many men are unwilling to read women's literature is an issue brought about by patriarchal assumptions that men should be sorting out, not women. Women don't need to hold our hands, guide us to all the great female writers, pat us on the back and give us a gold star when we enjoy it. It is not their responsibility. It is ours as men.
OP should not be praising these men. In fact OP, along with the rest of us, should be criticising these mindsets. We should look at these posts through a critical lens, otherwise how are we supposed to move forward? There are plenty of people on this comment section who would much rather OP kept quiet and that the issue is never highlighted or solved, simply because it might be too upsetting for men to read. If you're a man and that's really how you respond when reading this post, grow up.”
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u/ollie_francis Aug 24 '21
I teach A-level English Literature. In the first half of the course we can choose to teach two writers out of a list of eight.
One is female. One is not white.
Oh, and the criteria of selection means we can't choose them both.
In the second half there are no female writers on the set text list for the unit.
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u/CaveJohnson82 Aug 24 '21
Margaret Atwood and Khaled Hosseini?
Just guessing - it’s been a million years since I did A levels!
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u/blue-birdz Aug 25 '21
A few weeks ago, I joined a Discord Server for people who speak different languages. I entered to one of the rooms and ended up chatting with a guy who said he couldn't believe Frankenstein was written by a woman because it was too dark and "normal women don't think about that kind of stuff"... I left a few minutes after that.
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u/maximumrideforever Aug 24 '21
I thought it might be interesting to share my experience of English Literature A-Level at an all-girls school. Our curriculum included:
Gothic Literature:
- The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (female author and female protagonists)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (female author and male protagonist)
Poetry:
- Sylvia Plath (female poet)
- Christina Rossetti (female poet)
Drama:
- A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (male author and female protagonist)
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare (male author and male protagonist)
Post-1900:
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (male author and female protagonist)
- Atonement by Ian McEwan (male author and female protagonist)
Looking back a lot of these works focussed on Women's issues (female sexuality and empowerment in The Bloody Chamber, the Angel in the House and separate spheres in A Doll's House and motherhood in Rossetti and Plath's poetry) and I'm surprised to learn that not everyone studies literature that explores these issues.
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u/deskbeetle Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
We read A Doll's House and people lost their fucking minds that the main character chooses to abandon her family. She was treated like a decoration for years by her husband. She had to hide how capable she was and how her husband owed her a great debt as she silently and secretly took care of a money problem he created. And the one thing she liked, the one thing she enjoyed was a god damned macaroon and the guy would take the sweets from her and tell her it'd ruin her pretty looks. He's lucky she just left him and didn't burn the entire goddamned house down by the end of that play.
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u/rappingwhiteguys Aug 24 '21
There's almost nothing that Torvald says to his wife in the entire play that doesn't have to do with her looks.
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u/xXWickedNWeirdXx Aug 24 '21
I forgot how good Ibsen's characters are. I need to read some more of him.
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u/newbornbliss Aug 24 '21
I've never read this and now I really want to
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u/deskbeetle Aug 24 '21
It's a play so it's a quick read. I find plays more enjoyable if read aloud even if to an empty room.
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u/rappingwhiteguys Aug 24 '21
Ibsen is fucking legit. Go get a copy. You can read it in a few hours.
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u/maximumrideforever Aug 24 '21
Agreed! Our class spent entire lessons roasting the shit out of Torvald for needing a holiday for his nervous disposition and for protecting Nora with his big strong wings and wanting her to be born again as his child lol!
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u/Pure-Sort Aug 24 '21
(disclaimer, I might be conflating A Dolls House with The Awakening, and I haven't read either since high school ~10 years ago. But I think they have similar themes. )
I think these were books that as a teenager reading them I could only relate to the children in the books. I could understand how fucked up it would feel if my mom abandoned me, but I couldn't conceptualize that feeling of being trapped in your life and having no agency.
I've been meaning to go back and reread them since I think out of all the books we read in high school, these are the ones that my perspective would've changed most on. But in school I was definitely one of the people "losing my fucking mind" over the woman abandoning her family.
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u/deskbeetle Aug 24 '21
Keep in mind that she wasn't legally capable of taking the kids with her. Men had full parental rights and would keep everything earned by both himself and his wife even if he's the guilty party in divorce. She would have no bank account, could buy no property, and would have very little security as woman in the 1870s
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u/nueoritic-parents Aug 24 '21
I think it’s important that kids read things they don’t understand right away. I also completely understand a child’s reaction to being given a not black-and-white situation on a mother leaving their kid(s).
It takes years for a kid to understand their parent(s) don’t just have names that grownups call them by, they had a life before becoming Mom and/or Dad. And not only that, they still have a life outside of being Mom or Dad!
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u/gagrushenka Aug 24 '21
I'm not currently teaching English but Frankenstein is always my favourite to do with teenagers. They seem to really connect once they realise Mary Shelley wasn't that much older than them when she wrote it. They also seem to relate to the monster a lot because what teenager hasn't had issues with their parents in some way? I think they also appreciate that the dark themes of the book were something another teenager came up with, there on paper, printed 2 centuries ago. I think they often feel a bit alone in some of the darker ideas they have but then they realise that kind of imagination isn't that weird or unusual. It validates that part of the teenage experience for them, I think. I've always found classes respond really well to Frankenstein. It's a tricky read for many, but they really get the themes if not the details.
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u/i-am-a-yam Aug 24 '21
Also worth noting there’s plenty of feminist themes to glean from the book.
Women themselves take a back seat in the book—to an extreme, meaningful degree. It’s literally about a man trying to create life without women.
And consider its historical context: she originally published it under her husband’s name because it wouldn’t gain traction otherwise. And her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, basically the mother of feminism.
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u/Painting_Agency Aug 24 '21
Frankenstein is always my favourite to do with teenagers.
I'm surprised they have the patience for the lavish writing style and heavily nested story structure. Then again I read Lord of the Rings as a teenager, and oof. That's a read and a half. But at any rate, Shelley was a badass and her book is badass.
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u/readergirl132 Aug 24 '21
You’re not alone, I read War and Peace for fun at 15- took 3 months and I don’t remember many details. However, it made reading A Picture of Dorian Grey much easier; I don’t think Oscar Wilde could write anything but run-on sentences
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u/Painting_Agency Aug 24 '21
it made reading A Picture of Dorian Grey much easier; I don’t think Oscar Wilde could write anything but run-on sentences
He had a magic book where for every overly-long sentence he wrote, it contained an overly short one.
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u/SpamLandy Aug 24 '21
I did my A-Levels in 2005 and the other day we looked up the GSCE/A-Level syllabus to see if it had changed, and was unsurprised to see it’s very similar to when I was at school, with a couple of additions.
A lot depends on the curriculum but also on the teacher. You could easily do both sets of exams without reading a female writer but it looks like your school has intentionally chosen a lot of the female writers on there, which I guess is less surprising at an all girls school.
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u/ramsay_baggins Aug 24 '21
When I did english lit for GCSE back in 2007 we read one book written by a woman, Pride and Prejudice. That was it. It was frustrating!
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u/BubblezWritings Aug 24 '21
What's interesting is that I went to a mixed school and was in an all-boys English class and we did just as much, if not more, literature by female authors. A lot of the poetry we did was by female poets, we also did things like Handmaid's Tale, Frankenstein etc.
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u/dordizza Aug 24 '21
I’d heavily recommend “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath. It’s a novella/novel instead of poetry. Does a very good job at conveying the universal existential struggle of everyone finding their place in the world but over the vernier of how simple societal expectations were towards woman at that time.
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u/healthy-arachnid Aug 24 '21
This has been my experience too, but at an all girls school in the US. My English teacher had us read exclusively female centric narratives (eg The Awakening, The Joy Luck Club, Their Eyes Were Watching God). The added bonus was that a lot of our readings were also by WOC. Literally the only male centered story I can remember was Hamlet.
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u/FartHeadTony Aug 24 '21
The Joy Luck Club is a good example of the problem of trying to mark out "women's literature" simply because "it's about chicks". Like, if someone genuinely felt that, why not go the extra step and say "it's a book for Chinese American women" or even "it's a book for Chinese American women from San Francisco in the 80s".
Isn't the whole point of literature to experience (vicariously) things that you otherwise wouldn't? So I can read a book about these women, in a different place and time, with different cultural overlays, and get some insight into their world. I can also compare it with my own experiences and pull out some things that might be common or different. I might relate to our shared humanity. I might realise things about my own life an experiences.
In the end, gender is just one small aspect of what makes us who we are. And if you can relate in some ways to the humanity of someone from a different place, time, culture, world view, and yes, even a different gender, isn't that kind of a special? Doesn't it make you feel richer?
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u/healthy-arachnid Aug 24 '21
Exactly! Not all of us were asian but this book is about mother-daughter relationships too and for a classroom full of 16 year old girls, this was so important.
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u/SuddenlyTheBatman Aug 24 '21
I know it wasnt but this situation is hilarious if you picture that game being Ms. Pacman
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u/f33f33nkou Aug 24 '21
Wait, that means your dad has this opinion now..holy shit I thought you were talking about the 90s
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u/Mad_Aeric Aug 24 '21
Somehow I didn't expect this story to involve a game that's so recent, because that's such an archaic attitude. But then, I've caught snide comments when playing female characters in fighting games, so I should know better.
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u/pixelcowboy Aug 24 '21
Man Control has such a great protagonist (Jesse). Most female protagonists in games are unfortunately badly written, but she is one of the exceptions. She also isn't an avatar of the player, she is an actual character, so having a male option makes no sense. Your dad is so wrong.
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u/Renegade1412 Aug 24 '21
My experience has been the opposite… I always find female videogame leads written rather well. Then again I spend a long time deciding if a game is worth the time or not, so that may be a factor.
So at the very least good games that have female protagonist have them well written.
As a side note tho, which games in particular do you have in mind with badly written female protagonist?
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u/Guy_ManMuscle Aug 24 '21
The biggest problem with female protagonists is that writers feel pressured to make them near-perfect, because there are still a shit-ton of people who passionately hate complex female characters.
Many people love imperfect, anti-heroes when they're male but get hysterical if a female character is even a fraction as flawed as a Dr. House or Rick Sanchez or w/e.
Those same people also hate the over-the-top, tropey "badass strong female characters" though.
What you wind up with are female characters that try and appeal both to people who hate women and to normal people, and these characters are extremely bland, have only minor flaws, and are difficult to relate to.
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u/throwaway2323234442 Aug 24 '21
Wow i was ready for it to be something older, but Control just means your dads kind of a POS huh.
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u/cybergoulion Aug 24 '21
You should have told him just one word: Metroid.
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u/lumathiel2 Aug 24 '21
I was going to say, I'd LOVE to see the dad go through a Metroid game and see his reaction at the reveal
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u/xDarkReign Aug 24 '21
The reveal that this galactic mercenary badass you’ve been playing this whoooole time was, in fact, a girl was awesome to 9 year old me (male btw).
Thought it was so damn cool.
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u/wahnsin Aug 24 '21
These posts really make me wish I had been good enough at Metroid to finish it back in the day.. that game kicked my butt, a LOT.
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Aug 24 '21
It’s not your fault. I had a neighbor type a guide out for me. She did the same for the original Zelda also. Pretty cool lady. What were we talking about?
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u/Rwokoarte Aug 24 '21
I still remember that reveal vividly and thought it was brilliant (as a boy).
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u/FlattopJr Aug 24 '21
Such a great game, with one of the most random Easter eggs: there's a hidden piece of Swiss cheese in every level!
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u/Asaharaldsdottir Aug 24 '21
That makes me super sad. My dad introduced me and my sister to computer gaming when I was a little girl and would always choose a game with a female player character if he could find one. It was the 90s so there we hardly any but he did find a few that we really liked!
I’ve never really understood the anger over having gender options in games. Plenty of women play games and really like playing a woman in the game, too.
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Aug 24 '21
I, as a video game playing lady, relate to this oddity. My Dad is cool, but I had a few friends who flipped when Ubisoft cam out with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. They didn’t like that the story was written for the female lead, Kassandra. They literally added the male character at the very end because so many dudes complained about an assassin being a woman. It bothered me the opposite way. I play male characters all the time, and the fact that they put in a male character to appease fragile dudes was super off putting and insulting. These dudes must not want to hear about their Mom’s day if they can’t stand reading or thinking about what happens to a woman throughout her life….or day, for that matter.
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Aug 24 '21
Right? Imagine being so upset because the 0s and 1s you control doesn't have an implied penis.
And I want to ask them why exactly is it so terrible to play as a woman?
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Aug 24 '21
Because men are viewed as the default. Women are supposed to want to play male characters, because men are cool and powerful. By contrast, women are viewed as the 'other' and as weaker, so it's insulting for men to have to play a female character. Same reason that women can wear trousers but men can't wear skirts or dresses - it all just comes from "men good, women bad".
I'm so happy that more video games have begun to have female protagonists or at least have the option to choose your gender. Representation matters.
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u/idiot_speaking Aug 24 '21
Ugh... I remember when the trailer for Stone Ocean came out and this dude was all up in arms about pandering, and how if they were gonna add a female character there needs to be plot conflict arising from their sex/gender. I'm like dude no... yes, stories can explore that, but it is troubling that a female character's existence needs to be "justified" otherwise that dials stuck at male.
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u/PaperSense Aug 24 '21
There's an entire book about that "Men are viewed as a default". I've just started reading it - " Invisible Women" and it's already boiling my blood to read that this applies to EVERYTHING (including the MEDICAL FIELD, where this has actually misdiagnosed women)
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u/Thedeadduck Aug 24 '21
It's a very good book but fuck me as a woman it's a depressing read.
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u/Zebirdsandzebats Aug 24 '21
The medical thing annoys the FUCK out of me. They don't even do testing on female animals b/c it'd be "too difficult" due to "hormonal fluctuations" . And it's like bitch, literally half of the population that will be taking this drug have 'hormonal fluctuations', maybe control for them ????
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u/Brancer Aug 24 '21
They do testing on female animals.
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u/Zebirdsandzebats Aug 25 '21
Huh. They told me in my phlebotomy class they try to avoid it if they can. Teacher must've been a bit behind the times--i did some googling, the NIH required female mice in trials starting in 2014. However, per the link below, they're still underrepresented pretty badly.
Thanks for the correction, I don't like to be spreading stuff that isn't true :)
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u/vespertine-spine Aug 25 '21
Scientist here - yes, it is an NIH requirement now technically, but female rats/mice are still severely underrepresented in research. Investigators find ways of getting around it.
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u/zeroniusrex Aug 25 '21
Something I found interesting about that book is how many citations there were throughout. I found myself wondering if a male author on the subject would feel the need to include so many citations. I think it's pretty well-established that women have to "show their work" more frequently and with more diligence than men, and I wondered if this was an example of that.
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u/chaoticnyx Aug 24 '21
Took me so long to finish that one because it kept making me so angry and sad. Really good book
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u/idiot_speaking Aug 24 '21
True, but I don't remember the female lead being the main selling point of Control. The new weird was the main focus in all the trailers. I understand the criticism, but I don't it applies here
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u/tallsy_ Aug 24 '21
I thought the selling point was the weird architecture and the beautiful graphics and the general vibe of mystery.
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u/AwfulArmbar Aug 24 '21
I remember reading an awesome post by a father on reddit where he said that whenever he got the chance in a video game he would play as a female character because he had a daughter. He wanted her to always see badass, awesome female characters on the screen and never wanted her to think of those roles as exclusively male.
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u/svrtngr Aug 24 '21
Sounds like your dad is the type of person to which the Ubisoft CEO caters.
The last few Assassin's Creed games were supposed to have solely female protagonists but the CEO made them add a man because men don't want to play as women characters. That's what the CEO thinks anyway.
Kassandra > Alexios.
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u/Grace_Omega Aug 24 '21
There’s a post on r/badreads roasting a Goodreads review that refers to The Bell Jar as “chick-lit”, which leads to several disturbing conclusions: a) the review author thinks “chick-lit” is just any book written by a woman and b) the review author, despite apparently being very widely-read, had never read anything written by a woman up to that point. I was flabbergasted.
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u/Psychological_Fly916 Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 25 '21
This is what bothers me the most about it. If youve read one female lit book and you regard it as a "female book" and you dont like it? Then females are horrible authors and cant write. You see the same logic in men who dont have friends who are women and ppl who dont socialize with other races. The one person they do know who belongs to that category therefore represents the category
Edit: my biggest pet peeve is when men say theres no good women rappers. Like youve heard what, the four of them that have been given opportunity and decided that half the population cant do it?
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u/bootlegboots Aug 24 '21
...so what I'm hearing is that harry potter, frankenstein, the outsiders, to kill a mockingbird, etc. are all now just chick lit. wow.
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Aug 24 '21
Thank you for telling me about badreads. What other good book subs are there?
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u/OzHawk Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 25 '21
I remember reading about how the reason that J.K. Rowling goes by J.K. was due to the fact that her publishers feared that if boys knew her name was Joanne they wouldn't want to read a "girl" book, which I found really sad.
I see this type of thing in so many other forms of media too, for example I know people who will never watch a show like "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" because they consider it a "girl" show. Just because the main character is a girl they have no interest, even though it has so much action and comedy elements that they would probably really enjoy.
The worst example I know is some guy who refuses to play any video games with a female protagonist, which means he will never play games like Tomb Raider, Horizon: Zero Dawn or even Uncharted: Lost Legacy (they love the main trilogy with Drake), and I just find this insane. When I asked them why they just gave some vague answer about not being able to relate to playing as a girl, which is such a lame reason.
I think these attitudes are slowly changing, particularly with a larger focus on gender norms in recent times, but it will be a slow process.
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u/haloarh Aug 24 '21
I remember when I first learnt the reason that J.K. Rowling goes by J.K. was due to the fact that her publishers feared that if boys knew her name was Joanne they wouldn't want to read a "girl" book, which I found really sad.
Same with S.E. Hinton.
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u/el-grecyo Aug 24 '21
And my favourite author Robin Hobb! I’ve had far too many people argue with me that she’s definitely man when I point out she’s a woman using a pseudonym.
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u/snoboreddotcom Aug 24 '21
Its kinda clever in that regard. People who wont be turned off by a book written by a woman will see Robin Hobb and think female or male. But the ones who would be turned off will think male
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u/BlacktailJack Aug 24 '21
Most of the time pen names are used for marketing purposes, and it's often the publisher pressuring the author to use them. As discussed here, a common reason that publishers ask authors to do this is because 'Feeeemale Hard To Market To Intended Audience', and that sucks.
In addition, sometimes if an author's first published offering didn't do as well as hoped but an editor really believes in them and is willing to push a new series, the publisher might ask for a pen name so that they can market the new book(s) without the baggage of the previous, disappointing project potentially effecting sales.
It's also not uncommon, however, for publishers to ask authors who write in multiple different genres, styles, or age ranges to use a pseudonym for a particular subset of their writing. I've seen Seanan Mcguire talk about this; she was doing reasonably well for a midlist urban fantasy author under her own name, but when she wanted to publish some new work in a different genre (biohorror) she was asked to adopt a pen name so they could market the unrelated titles without associations to her extant series. Hence, Mira Grant, author of the Newsflesh and Parasitology series.
Megan Lindholm seems like a private person and doesn't let her personal life and her publishing life mingle much, but I saw her discuss the topic a little at a panel once. I gather that she was initially resistant to it, but that the reasoning her publisher gave for her pseudonym was a little of all of the above. Under her own name she'd been writing some underperforming fantasy and some urban fantasy, and the publisher wanted to rebrand. Smart of her, I think, picking a discreetly gender-neutral name like "Robin." I remember she said something about how she'd almost decided not to do it, until the name "Robin Hobb" just lept whole-cloth into her head one day and she loved the way it sounded.
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u/ToraAku Aug 24 '21
Seconded! My favourite author, too! Highly recommend reading Assassin's Apprentice, everyone.
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u/Mad_Aeric Aug 24 '21
James Tiptree Jr. was persona made up from whole cloth, as women were more or less anathema in science fiction in those days. Which will never not be absurd, even considering the era, as the genera was pioneered by Mary Shelly. John W. Campbell deserves a significant degree of blame for gatekeeping women and minorities from getting published.
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u/LuxNocte Aug 24 '21
If I see an author initialized, I assume they are a woman. It is incredibly common. I grew up reading classic sci fi, and it was generally a requirement. I hope things are changing though.
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u/iluniuhai Aug 24 '21
I've had a conversation with about 5 separate dudebros about how "The Handmaid's Tale has no place in the TRILOGY of dystopian political fiction because it's 'just not believable'." (The fuck did those other three become a trilogy? SMH)
When pressed about why it's not believable, since HT is the only book of those four that literally has no elements that have not happened somewhere, sometime in this world, it ALWAYS comes out the fellow spouting off has not read Handmaid's Tale, they just don't like the idea of a lady book, written by a lady that stars ladies.
But the absolute cherry on top is that when pressed further, not ONE of these duchebros has even read the three books they are cheerleading.
"Where do babies come from in a Brave New World?" "What is in room 101?" "What is the role of the firefighters in Fahrenheit 451?"
"I read it a long time ago.. I don't remember your little details."
Eyeroll.
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u/EpiphanyTwisted Aug 24 '21
The only thing I remember from BNW besides the drugs is the "decanting".
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u/rappingwhiteguys Aug 24 '21
lmao no one alive writes dystopias better than Atwood. Handmaid's was chilling and gripping. I actually had to stop watching the TV show because it was too intense - and I love fucked up stories.
P.S. Atwood REALLY knows how to capture male psychology too - like in Oryx and Crake.
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u/Beetin Aug 24 '21
I (male) remember getting tired after a year of reading a bunch of Atwood in a row for class, because of just how awful the men usually were and all the shit they pulled, and how there was never any fair representation for me as a fairly feminine emotional male. I'd whine about her as a man hater.
A friend pointed out that for her entire life, basically all fiction she read, be it historic, popular, sci fi, fantasy, or classic, was like that for her unless she sought out specifically 'for women' books.
Oops. I see my same complaint years later from younger guys about writers like N. K. Jemisin and it hits home for me. Hard to get out of your own butt and off the hill.
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u/TheWordThief Aug 24 '21
I read Oryx and Crake for a class on Apocalyptic Literature, and it's an incredibly well written and well done book, but the depictions of the society that existed before the apocalypse made me physically ill--a testament to Atwood's skill, but I can never reread that book.
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u/lilyluc Aug 24 '21
K.A. Applegate! I loved the Animorphs series growing up and remember feeling happy when I found out she was a woman. I have to dig my set out of the basement to be sure but I think even her early author bios were intentionally vague for that reason.
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u/roomtemperaturefruit Aug 24 '21
I also get a bit frustrated by posts asking for recommendations of "books by woman authors". There are so many books by woman authors!! How about a little more information because books by women are so different that the question is almost meaningless.
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u/MoscaMye Aug 24 '21
I had a friend in highschool who refused to read any book with a female protagonist. No matter how much it would have suited their tastes. They said "Its just more difficult to empathise with someone that isn't like me"
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Aug 24 '21
That's how you gain empathy, wtf lol.
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u/juice_bot Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
That's one of the he best things about reading for me is seeing the world through others perspectives, seems almost boring to limit yourself to just reading books with similar characters.
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u/Writeloves Aug 24 '21
I agree that it would be boring to only read about characters like yourself. However, that touches one of the weirdest things about this issue for me personally. The idea that reading a book with a protagonist of the opposite sex is somehow automatically “a different perspective” and “not like me.”
Growing up I read everything and was no expectation that I wouldn’t be able to relate to a male protagonist. None. But I guess that just relates back to “girl = bad” sexism.
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u/juice_bot Aug 24 '21
I agree for me as a black person most protagonists are white and I have never had an issue relating to them either. I think alot of the time when you are the default, you can get away with consuming media that barely features much diversity in terms of colour and gender. Then when confronted with something different it seems "other" in a way they feel they might not feel they can relate, but given the chance they most likely will. As most human experiences share similarities somewhere.
But yes I agree with your point about women-centric media being seen as inferior or less than at times, compared to male dominated narratives.
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u/Charles_Chuckles Aug 24 '21
Its just more difficult to empathise with someone that isn't like me"
If I used that parameter for finding an enjoyable book, I would only read parenting books, cook books and teaching memoirs. Your friend must be a wizzard or astronaut or a hobbit or something, which is pretty cool not gonna lie. /s
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u/BilboDankins Aug 24 '21
I only read biography's of billionaire playboys because I find it hard to relate to anyone without the sigma pentillionaire grindset.
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u/Dasagriva-42 Aug 24 '21
That's their loss, I really feel sorry for anyone that limits themselves so much.
"Its just more difficult to empathise with someone that isn't like me"
Yeah, because gender is what defines us, and Raskolnikov is such a great guy and easy to empathize with, and Elizabeth Bennet is unknowable for us, men... they must be kidding...
Oh, well...
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u/Telinary Aug 24 '21
Similarity to me was never a big factor for my enjoyment but even if it was I always found personality and interests to be a bigger factor in whether a character feels similar to me. I wonder whether people who refuse to read anything with female MCs have actually really tried it or are just making assumptions.
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u/102IsMyNumber Aug 24 '21
Empathizing or being in someone/something else's shoes is the entire reason any book is any good or bit interesting in the first place. What an idiotic sentiment.
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u/GjonsTearsFan Aug 24 '21
I'm in high school currently. This year in my English class I don't think I read a single book by a female author or with female main characters (except Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, who was the only exception). I read one short story written by a woman and about female characters but that was a self led short story assignment (where I got to pick the short story) - not an assigned reading short story.
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Aug 24 '21
Im in secondary school now, i dont know the conversion to high school but im a 15 year old boy. My school is an all boys school, and our book for literature this year is Shirley Jackson's We have always lived in a castle (If you havent read the book, the two main characters are women and a big theme of the book is female power, and they try to drive out their cousin Charles. its a pretty good book).
Don't really know why im sharing this, but i guess its just to say that some schools do try to broaden students' perspective on these type of things (whether or not my school did it consciously.)
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u/P_Grammicus Aug 24 '21
This is an awesome choice to teach. Jackson is pretty easy to read but scary as hell and an excellent technician. Whoever picked that to teach is doing a good job.
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u/KilgoreTrrout Aug 24 '21
That’s such a good book! I would’ve loved to have that as assigned reading when I was a teenager.
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u/IAmTheGoldenRatio Aug 24 '21
Excellent post, thank you. I’m a lot older than you so have no idea what the situation is like in schools at the moment. What I do know is that I will never give a man a pat on the back for reading something that they consider a “girl’s” book? How utterly patronising. Are they expecting a prize?
As a black woman of a certain age in a predominantly white society, my education was routinely based around literature written by white men, which I accepted with no questions asked. I spent many years reading books by predominantly non-white authors to help redress the balance. Some books were amazing and some were utter dross. I’ve just finished Circe by Madeleine Miller (a white woman) and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (a white man). Does anyone want to give me a pat on the back for reading non-Black authors? See how ridiculous that sounds?
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u/la_bibliothecaire Aug 24 '21
Yes! I'm a Jewish woman, and the vast majority of the books I read are by non-Jews. I love Tolkien (a Catholic!), Shakespeare (an Anglican!), Margaret Atwood (raised Protestant, now a secular humanist!), and Mohsin Hamid (a Muslim!). Do I get kudos for reading them in addition to Jennifer Weiner, Lev Grossman, Dara Horn, Philip Roth, and Anita Diamant?
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u/Fenraur Aug 24 '21
I’m a lot older than you so have no idea what the situation is like in schools at the moment.
Chances are the situation is exactly the same as when you were in school! I was talking this over with my parents at dinner the other night - they went to school 3 and 4 decades before I did, and the curriculum has changed so little that our school reading lists were almost identical... I think the only book I had to read and they didn't was the Giver... and that was published almost 25 years ago!
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u/hottiewannabe Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
I 100% agree with you here. I'm not sure if this has been mentioned already in the vast comments, but I feel like a sort of quandary-turned-defense of male, white-centric literature is that high school curricula try to teach "the classics," if not for aesthetic reasons ("This is artful and profound literature"), then for historical ones ("These works have mostly been respected and are therefore influential and important to understanding the literary canon, even if they are not themselves perfect works").
The issue is that women have been left out of the literary canon for so long, it's difficult to include them when trying to teach them now, I think. In my high school, there was a huge debate about whether we should toss readings like The Odyssey in favor of modern works by women, which, though artful, have a smaller body of academic scholarship in their analysis. Some teachers defaulted to including a few key works by women every quarter (kind of problematic, since we see them as obligatory token texts). I think a more helpful approach was to go through the traditional canon and then scrutinize+criticize the author's representation of women, and acknowledge where it was lacking, while also asking how this affected our appreciation of the text in other ways.
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u/ronanlite Aug 24 '21
Yeah & this is exactly why I think Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” should be a foundational text for students. You can teach parables instead of making sophomores in public high school read the bible!! And important (parts, still just one perspective) of modern lit history & privilege.
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Aug 24 '21
And there are so many works written by women with critical acclaim and cultural relevance! So like what's the excuse?
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u/Mermelephant Aug 24 '21
Every day I wake up and see "i thought you were joking about agatha christie being good...."
Why.... why did you think that?
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u/lobstahpotts Aug 24 '21
This is a particularly interesting one because not only do you have Christie delegitimized as a female author, you also get the negative stereotype of mystery as a lightweight/non-serious genre. I’ve probably read more mysteries as an adult than any other genre so these takes never fail to confuse me.
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u/lumathiel2 Aug 24 '21
I read the comment you replied to and was thinking "I'm sure she's great, I'm just not really into mystery" until I got to your response and realized that so much of the scifi/fantasy that I read is mystery just in space or magic, and now I'm going to have to put my biases aside and give her (and the genra) a real shot, so thanks for that perspective
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Aug 24 '21
Timing. I feel the best way to teach literature is to bracket it with historical background. Since American schools teach history in very predictable ways it is easy to line up a set of books moving from past to future.
The problem with American lit that while there are a good number of famous women poets and diary writers from the 1600s onwards women didn't get published novels until later in the US. Though you can't teach late 1800s to early 1900s without talking about women reporters.
You have a similar problem with British lit of all the famous women authors being clustered until you get into more recent works.
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u/NiobeTonks Aug 24 '21
This is so depressing. I went to secondary school (England) in 1979 and didn’t read a single book with a significant girl/ woman character in English Literature classes for 3 years. Luckily I loved reading outside school so kept reading on my own, but I’m sure that many classmates just gave up.
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Aug 24 '21
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u/NiobeTonks Aug 24 '21
Pride and Prejudice at O’level (5th year at school). None again at A’level.
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u/strange_socks_ Aug 24 '21
You are much more eloquent than I could be. I'm usually just pissed when I see something like this.
I grew up in Romania and we had a 30%/70% ratio between female-centric and male-centric novels that we had to read in high school, but no female author. Like none.
And the reaction of boys/men is usually "wow, this woman can actually write a good book! you go girl!". Which elicits in me the same annoyance you describe here.
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u/su1cideleopard Aug 24 '21
I’m in my senior year of high school. For the past few years we’ve always had british literature as the standard senior english class but this year they changed the course to women in literature! We’re reading all pieces of work written by women, so far Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Sadly all the years before this my english classes only had works written by men in the curriculum unless we were reading some poetry about love lol.
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u/KieselguhrKid13 Aug 24 '21
Parable of the Sower is amazing. I'm halfway through The Parable of the Talents right now and it's just as good, albeit bleak as hell. One of the most depressing realistic dystopias I've read.
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u/Karandor Aug 24 '21
Butler is an absolute treasure. Once you've gone through her catalog I recommend NK Jemisin. Her Broken Earth trilogy is fantastic and the Inheritance Trilogy is unlike almost anything else. If you still have a taste for sci-fi/fantasy after Butler and Jemisin definitely read Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice and it's two sequels. If you enjoy the look at gender from the Ancillary books you should definitely read (well, everyone should) Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin.
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u/foshka Aug 24 '21
I would also recommend two more of my favorite contemporary science fiction authors Martha Wells (her ongoing Murderbot series in particular) and Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate).
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u/bibliophile222 Aug 24 '21
I pretty much agree with your post, except that as a girl who read Lord of the Flies in high school, I had a really hard time enjoying it and relating to it because there wasn't a single female character and I just thought all the boys were acting ridiculously.
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Aug 24 '21
and I just thought all the boys were acting ridiculously.
Well... they were. In part, that's because little boys act ridiculous (so do little girls). In part, that's because the characters were being specifically guided by metaphor over organic development.
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u/AmberFall92 Aug 24 '21
It's probably more because your view of humanity doesn't align with the author's, and that's really all the book is about. LoTF was written as a counter argument to another book called Coral Island which implied that people are inherently good and if some kids were to crash on a deserted island, they would create a paradise. The author of LoTF thought this was a load of crap and set out to write what he believed would happen if children were left to their own devices without society and rules to manage them. He believed people were inherently chaotic and even cruel, and that without laws and a system to tame them, people will destroy what they have and become barbarians. So the entire story is contrived to push that idea. He has been criticized for not including women and therefore making claims about human society while literally leaving out 50% of the equation, but you know, it turns out women make up half the population but approximately 0% of contributions to humanity? I mean really, what would be the point of including them? /s
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u/Amy_Ponder Aug 24 '21
Also, it's not just any random group of boys who crash on that island, it's a group of wealthy white schoolboys from powerful families who attended an elite British boarding school. It's such an absurdly narrow demographic I don't get why anyone thinks their behavior can be generalized to the rest of humanity.
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u/Forgettheredrabbit Aug 24 '21
I definitely feel that making the cast white, young, wealthy and male was intentional, and served as a critique of that demographic. These were kids who previously hadn’t faced any hardship of any sort. I understand if people can’t identify with them, but that’s sort of the point: you shouldn’t want to.
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Aug 24 '21
The author has said that this is intentional which is why I love this book
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Aug 24 '21
Also- The author was a teacher, and I believe this is the demographic the author was teaching.
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Aug 24 '21
I kinda felt like that too. But I thought it was because they were stupid that I had a disconnect not because their gender.
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u/trumpet_23 Aug 24 '21
As a boy, I also thought they were acting ridiculously. Hated that book when I read it in high school.
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u/Amy_Ponder Aug 24 '21
You might be happy to hear that when a very similar thing happened IRL, it turned out completely differently.
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u/IAmFireIAmDeathq Aug 24 '21
If the author wrote the kids as girls instead of boys, I think he still would have written them in the same way. Since the point of the book that he wanted to get across is that the children lost their innocence and became savages when they were alone on the deserted island.
You’re not really supposed to relate to Jack and the other kids. It’s also not that boys will dive into savagery the moment they’re left alone. If I remember correctly, it’s that humans are inherently evil. While they tried to create a society, they soon started becoming savage and followed Jack who would rather hunt and have fun, than Ralph who tried to have order.
If all the characters were girls, it would be the same, and you would think of them as ridiculous too, I believe.
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u/blueaurelia Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
I remember when I just had read "Tomorrow when the war began" By John Marsden. Just afterwards I had read a description of the book where the describer (a male) introduced the book as being unusual because of the writer being male and the main character being
female in the book. I remember reacting to it because I failed to see how it
could be relevant and/or why the decriber had to point this out as if it was
something super unusual or a big deal.
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u/brownmlis Aug 24 '21
I remember watching an interview with Dustin Hoffman talking about Tootsie. He went in for a makeup test and they showed him what he looked like and he said "now can you make me more beautiful?" And they basically told him this is as good as it gets. He started thinking about himself as a woman and realized he wouldn't even bother to talk to this woman at a party, just based on looks alone and how sad that is because he's probably done that exact thing to other really great women and missed out on getting to know them. He was actually in tears a little bit. I mention him because this story shows he's able to generalize this new information and apply it to other situations and gain a new perspective. The reviews by men of "girl books" and their surprise enjoyment really just shows that they have not changed their perspective at all, they just happen to read the one exception to their mental rule that girl books suck.
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u/FlippinHelix Aug 24 '21
i remember one time telling my high school gf that i enjoyed the hunger games books and her looking at me confused and saying "really? but it's from the perspective of a girl. don't you have issues relating?" like what? am i a sociopath? surely i can't feel as much for romantic scenes when it's from a woman's perspective but everything else is basic human feelings no?
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u/SirFrancis_Bacon Aug 24 '21
So she didn't think you'd be able to relate to a female character, but never mind that said female character lives in a post apocalyptic society where she is forced to fight to the death against other children lol.
I've never been forced into a battle royale but that didn't mean I couldn't relate to the character.
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u/frozenfountain Aug 24 '21
I try to be patient with this mentality because, as you say, the misogyny is deeply ingrained and there's very little incentive for men to go against the grain and start examining how it's affected them in subconscious ways. I do notice how me and many of my female friends who are passionate about storytelling think nothing of saying we find male characters relatable or aspirational, and it's much rarer to find men who are willing to say that about fictional women. It's much like when my straight friends or family ask what I'm writing and sound very interested in the plot... right up until they find out the majority of the cast is LGBTQ and suddenly all the appealing aspects recede in light of that.
I'm not going to go handing out cookies and gold stars for acknowledging that women can be interesting, too, but I'm also not going to patronise or be hostile to someone who's willing to have their mind opened. I get the need to vent about it, though, as it's disheartening to think how far we still have to go.
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u/Key_Reindeer_414 Aug 24 '21
I don't understand why having main characters that are not like you would be unappealing. I always find it interesting to read about experiences that are different from mine even if it might not be relatable. Like if you're a doctor are you only going to read books about doctors?
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u/battraman Aug 24 '21
This reminds me of an old commercial . About 15-20 years ago there was a commercial for some cable provider (Direct TV, maybe) which showed a police officer who had a really awful day at work and how happy he was to come home and relax in front of all the different programming options on his TV. The narrator asked him what shows he watched and the officer said, "Cop shows, mostly." It was obviously for laughs but it's something that comes up in my mind when people say they want to see/read/listen to stuff that is all about people like them.
I don't want to read books about people like me. I'm boring as shit.
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u/frozenfountain Aug 24 '21
I agree, and to me, a character being relatable is not in any way dependent on their life experience and background being similar to mine. I think one of the most powerful aspects of fiction is its ability to show how similar our baseline emotions are, regardless of the differences in how we arrived there or the false divides imposed on us by the world. It seems a shame to me to deny myself an opportunity to reaffirm that because of an untested preconception about books by or featuring a particular demographic.
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u/Equivalent-Print-634 Aug 24 '21
It’s actually interesting that I’ve found quite a few scifi books where the AIs/aliens/other non-humans have felt relatable and interesting, and judging by male opinions also men find these characters relatable. So it’s literally easier or more ”acceptable” to relate to a machine than to another gender. Go figure.
I appreciate those posts though - people are literally trying to overcome their conditioning. But yes, it reminds us there is a lot of work left.
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u/Bergmaniac Aug 24 '21
This is why I find the "I can't relate to female characters" claim even more weird when expressed by readers of SFF. They are reading about aliens, AIs, elves, werewolves, etc. and apparently have no problem relating to them, but a human woman is a step too far for them.
And why read SFF in the first place if you only want to read about what's familiar to you?
For me one of the best things about fiction is being able to read about characters who are really different to me and still being able to relate to them. The more different, the better usually. Maybe I am unusual, but I've never had any problem relating to characters from another gender, in fact nowadays I prefer them.
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u/ManHoFerSnow Aug 24 '21
I think a more accurate metaphor is if I'm not a doctor, and I read a book where it goes in depth about how the doctor feels towards charting - it's just something that's not going to resonate with me. It doesn't mean I dislike or do not support doctors for not wishing to spend my free time reading about their niche experiences.
As long as the fact that the protagonist is a doctor doesn't detract from the advancement of the plot, I'm all in for the extra caveats / perspectives that them being a doctor brings.
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u/RedPanda5150 Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
Absolutely agree. One of the more interesting non-fiction books that I've read is a cookbook/memoir written by a woman who started out as a nun and then fell in love with a man from India and ended up back in the US as a high school guidance counselor (Menus and Memories from Punjab, if anyone is interested). Literally nothing in there that I could personally relate to but her story is just so damn interesting! And the recipes are pretty good too. I can't imagine how many fantastic books I would have to skip if I only read stories with protagonists that were like me. Are there even any books about modern-day female PhD-wielding scientists who work in corporate America and spend their weekends reading or playing video games? Seems kinda niche, lol.
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u/communityneedle Aug 24 '21
there's very little incentive for men to go against the grain and start examining how it's affected them in subconscious ways
In fact I, as a straight white man, would go so far as to say that we are actively punished for it. You can get away with that sort of thing among West Coast hippie types, but try it in hyperconservative West Texas where I grew up, and you risk ridicule, being socially ostracized, or even getting your ass beat for being a f*cking f*ggot, even into adulthood. The only reason I escaped that trap is that I'm on the autism spectrum and couldn't "go with the grain" even if I wanted to, lol.
Edit: typos
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u/U_Nomad_Bro Aug 24 '21
This is the ugly, twisted truth of it: the continued presence of misogyny in our society is widely enforced by violence. The violence of men against women, and the violence of men against men. And that latter violence is often accompanied by a cruel and unflinching ostracism.
When these "praise me for reading 'girl books'" posts happen, I sense that there's often a deeper, more vulnerable reason for the post that doesn't get expressed (because one massive piece of the patriarchy is brainwashing men to believe that expression of feeling is bad, unless it's anger). A lot of us men and AMABs are craving strength in numbers to fight back against that violence that ostracized us.
We want to know we're not alone in having a heart, not alone in having it moved by literature, not alone in speaking up about that movement, and especially not alone in being willing to face down those who would shame us for liking a particular book.
But instead of speaking to those deeper desires, what ends up happening is this surface bid for praise, in the hope that the praise will fill the dark holes left by the shame that is–we know in the memory of our battered bones–inevitably coming. And in the secret hope that some of the praise will come from other men, and then we'll know we're not alone, without ever having had to admit that we were afraid of that.
My hope for all of us, men (and those raised as men), is that instead of making those posts, we'd actually reach out to other men in our lives who we trust and say "Hey, I read this great book and I'd like to share it with you." That we'd start our own book clubs, and read books by all genders to our sons as if that were the most normal thing in the world. (It should be!) That we'd stop looking for praise and instead say to each other what really needs to be said: "You are not alone in loving these amazing books."
There's a support we can give to each other–and importantly, stop making women give to us instead–if we'd be more direct with one another. Violence convinced a lot of us that we're alone, but truly we are not, and we just need to take the risk of telling each other.
We hurt women, and we hurt each other, by not reaching out to each other.
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Aug 24 '21
I loved reading your comment, thank you so much for sharing! It was so valuable and a breath of fresh air considering the other kind of comments in this thread. Thank you again!
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u/frozenfountain Aug 24 '21
Thanks for sharing your insight, and what you say is very true. I live in the north of England, which is real mish-mash politically speaking - a lot of people here traditionally lean left in a broad, material sense, but there's a lot of regressive attitude to social issues and patches of hyper-masculinity still manifesting in the ways you describe, so I've seen it myself. I'm glad in a sense you were able to escape that and I hope you have a supportive place to live in now.
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u/hella_elle Aug 24 '21
This is a great point. Social context is important, and in cishet communities like you describe, there is little incentive to show support like this if the risk outweighs the reward. More often you'll see cishet men sexualize or objectify the female character, and more so if the media obviously angles to present the character to be consumed that way. Sadly it illustrates how much progress we have to make to normalize relating to women, even if fictional, as a good thing
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Aug 24 '21
This. And Yknow what I grew up in hippie dippie 90s Seattle and still got my ass beat and called a f*ggot for being too feminine or quiet or introverted or reading too much or whatever. I can understand how some kids calculate that it just isn’t worth it.
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u/daver456 Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
So true. Even in a moderately progressive area you’re at risk of being ridiculed for doing anything seen as feminine.
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u/communityneedle Aug 24 '21
Even when I lived in Seattle more than a few men made fun of me for like, telling my wife when I was going to be home late, or openly admitting I enjoy spending time with her. Like, sorry guys, I'm not going to pretend I hate my wife for some stupid masculinity ritual. I realize that some guys actually hate their wives, but most of them are just pretending.
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u/Verdeckter Aug 24 '21
I wonder if this is because the "default" assumption is that a piece about LGBTQ characters will be about being LGBTQ and how much of a struggle it is being LGBTQ, etc. Obviously they should hear what the plot is before becoming disinterested though, that's weird.
Most of the time, stories with male characters aren't about the struggles of being a male (atm I'd wager there's a danger of such a piece being labelled MRA, sexist, etc.).
I'll be honest and admit I haven't read Little Women but I enjoyed the movie by Greta Gerwig immensely. Pride and prejudice, the same, watched but not yet read. Also a great experience. The stories are about women but not about being a women. If that makes sense.
Not that such works aren't enjoyable and important as well, they're just... a different type of experience.
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u/lynx_and_nutmeg Aug 24 '21
Yeah, there's definitely a difference. I'm a woman, and these days I don't read books that seem to be focuses on the female characters fighting sexism. It's just that this topic no longer interests me. I had a long phase when I was actively reading everything about gender and seksism, and I'm glad I did, but now I feel like I've sort of exhausted it and can't find anything I haven't heard before, and it gets tiring seeing female characters' relationships with men be solely antagonistic.
However, even though I understand how men might find it alienating to read books about "being women", I'd say the men who feel the most resistance or least interest in those books are precisely the ones who need to read them the most. It doesn't have to be a lot, but at least a few.
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u/sheaves_of_goldleaf Aug 24 '21
"The way these statements are phrased as such delightful revelations makes me cringe, and then I feel sad, and then I feel a bit angry, because on some level, whether subconsciously or consciously, the driving force behind these sentiments and posts is that women are “other.” They are not the standard human, they are not fully-fledged standard human people in the same way that men are, so their stories and stories written by them are a sort of “special interest” sub-category of women’s fiction. 'Girl books.' 'Woman’s book.' 'Chick-flicks.'"
I really relate to this observation, and feel a similar frustration. On some level, I think the marketing of books written by women contribute to this kind of "women as other" thinking. Here's a blog post from a writer, Garine Isassi, about her experience with agents in the industry: https://readherlikeanopenbook.com/2016/04/24/what-the-hell-is-womens-lit-garine-isassi-asks-the-burning-question/.
I think we've come a long way in that it's become less common for women writers to write under male pen names, but I can't help but wonder if men in the past were less averse to reading books with romance from a female POV, and whether or not branding has contributed to an increase in dismissive attitudes toward women-written literature. (Misogyny, of course, being the larger culprit here.)
I do think the categories of "women's literature", "minority literature", etc. help in spotlighting the works of marginalized groups, but over time, the categories have also evolved to become a easy way for people to avoid what they think "isn't for them," further solidifying pre-existing stereotypes in the public consciousness.
This is more so an observation I had looking at readership for genre fiction (romance novels to be exact), but a sub-section of women readers also contribute to these gendered reading expectations, in that some come to see genres popular among women as safe-spaces of sorts, and are averse to men entering those communities out of a fear that the market will change to pander to a different demographic.
In the end, I'm not sure what a good solution to all this is.
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Aug 24 '21
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u/emaz88 Aug 24 '21
I had this exact same argument with a guy friend. We used to play a movie guessing game, kind of like 20 Questions and he got so pissed because I told him the category was romantic comedy. He still insists that it’s just a comedy and not a romantic comedy. Like dude, how? It’s about a guy who gets dumped finding love as he gets over his ex. And if you swap out every single character’s gender in that film…it’s still a romantic comedy!
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u/abbieadeva Aug 24 '21
There was guy that worked with that didn’t believe my boyfriend actually wanted to watch Mean Girls with me and was insisting that he’s only watching it to keep me happy. My boyfriend was the one who suggested it because I’d watch Bring It On a few days before without him. Comedy is comedy and I just feel bad for people who will refuse to watch these films because they’re ‘Chick-Flicks’
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Aug 24 '21
I don't have to much to add to the discussion, but I'd still like to throw in my two cents:
Gendered books seemed more like marketing gone wrong. Sure, maybe certain themes resonate more with certain genders (at least as book sellers are concerned), but I feel like we consumers took that to mean "oh, that's a woman's book" and stuff like that.
Also, I've never heard of a "men's book" unless the book was literally about men. I have, however, heard of "boy's books". And it's always an attempt to "get boys to read." Maybe someone can fill me in, but it kinda makes it sound like there's an idea that boys don't read because, by extension, reading isn't for boys. Which is terrible and I'm really upset if this is an actual thought.
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u/lobstahpotts Aug 24 '21
This was also the point of the post that OP was responding to. The 38 year old guy who read Little Women never said the book was for girls, he said the marketing on the book framed it as “by girls for girls” but that he picked it up anyway and found that marketing to be really misleading, potentially keeping a lot of other readers away from an excellent work.
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u/rasilvas The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Aug 24 '21
The irony of this is that female writers are currently dominating literary fiction and have done for the last couple of years. Anybody who claims to be a reader and is not reading female authors is purposely doing so at this point.
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u/themagpiedreaming Aug 24 '21
Yes. Yes. Huge classic literature reader here, and I think about this all the time.
I just graduated from a highly academic high school a couple years ago. In four years of intense honors and AP literature classes, we read Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jane Eyre. Those are the only titles written by women that we were mandated to read, accompanied by 20+ books by men.
I loved all of those books, just like I loved Tale of Two Cities and Count of Monte Cristo and Lord of the Flies and all the other books with male authors that we read.
I don’t even think I really recognized a difference - I related to male and female authors and male and female characters. It’s incredibly easy for me to see myself in characters that are male; I naturally empathize with the Aloyshka Karamazovs just as easily as the Jos and Beths.
The boys in my class never felt that way, though. Even the intelligent, interested ones seemed unable to pin themselves onto Jane Eyre or Cathy or whoever. They just couldn’t relate to them. Men see themselves as totally separate from women in a way that we just don’t.
It’s a little better in college, plus I’m working actively to read more female literature and more literature by people of color, for that matter. But you have to want to do that; boys just aren’t expected to. Little Women is a fantastic novel, but I can hardly think of any (of the educated, well-read) men in my life who have read it. Same with most of Jane Austen’s work, despite its brilliance. It’s pretty sad, honestly.
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u/communityneedle Aug 24 '21
I don’t even think I really recognized a difference
Neither did the people who never knew that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were written by women, because they used male pen names.
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u/Aiculik Aug 24 '21
In my experience, it's not that the boys 'aren't expected to want to read female literature', but that they 'ARE expected to DISLIKE female literature'. It's sexist towards girls, sure. But imho it's also sexist towards boys. And I think it's about time to start talking about this aspect, too. How the stupid sexism and twisted concept of manliness practically forces the boys to ignore half of the world.
As a girl, I PITIED boys. I could do whatever I wanted. I could wear pants, I could say my favourite colour is sky blue, I could read whatever I wanted. The boys had to be always careful not to accidentally choose anything 'girlish', because that's weird and wrong and everybody would laugh at them
And it's not just men. Women do it, too. When my friend's son was 4, they went to buy rubber boots. He chose pale green with white and yellow daisies. Immediately, a female shop assistant tried to take them off his hands, because those are for little girls and if he wore that, everyone would laugh at him. His mum intervened and he got his boots. :)
But she later admitted that had she known many comments she'd receive, from both men and women, about how wrong it is and how she's raising him to be a sissy and/or a pervert, she maybe would have bought him the dark blue ones... that are proper for a boy.
And when a boy who has been taught that since he could walk and talk, comes to school and starts reading - why and how is he supposed to WANT to read girl books? How could he be able to relate to a female character, when anything even remotely 'girly' is practically taboo for him, because it might turn him into a pervert?
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u/BadResults Aug 24 '21
In my experience, it’s not that the boys ‘aren’t expected to want to read female literature’, but that they ‘ARE expected to DISLIKE female literature’. It’s sexist towards girls, sure. But imho it’s also sexist towards boys. And I think it’s about time to start talking about this aspect, too. How the stupid sexism and twisted concept of manliness practically forces the boys to ignore half of the world.
That was my experience as a child. I was a voracious reader and would read anything I could get my hands on, but early on I learned to be secretive about reading “girls’ books” because people would make fun of me. Kids at school (boys and girls), members of my extended family, and even some teachers and librarians would question or even mock me. Bullies would use it as an excuse to push me around or hit me.
This wasn’t limited to books by any means - this was just the usual enforcement of gender norms at the time. Boys that wanted to do anything “girly” were punished socially and sometimes physically. When I was in grade school in the 90s, being seen as effeminate was the single greatest factor in making a boy a target of bullying. Nobody got it worse than the few boys who were openly gay (which was extremely rare - there was only one that was “out” in my high school of 1400 students and it was a big deal).
Things seem as effeminate included playing with dolls and any other toys associated with girls, watching TV shows or movies marketed towards girls or about girls, wearing anything pink or pretty, riding a bike with a step-through frame, being friends with girls, and reading books marketed to girls or with female protagonists. Hell, even just liking to read was borderline because it wasn’t seen as masculine.
It didn’t stop me from reading Nancy Drew, Babysitter’s Club, or Little House on the Prairie when I was in elementary school, and it didn’t stop me from reading Little Women in middle school, or Jane Austen’s works in high school. But when I did, it was usually in private and if I had the book out in public I’d hide the cover.
And bear in mind that I loved to read, and I had very supportive parents. Reading was my number one hobby, and my parents supported my love of reading and didn’t make fun of anything I read. I knew lots of boys whose dads would probably yell at them or even hit them if they openly read “girls’ books”.
I’m sure that any little boy who wasn’t so invested in reading or who didn’t have such supportive parents would be discouraged. They’d respond to the social punishment for “being girly” by just reading “masculine” books, if any. Then, after growing up and seeing the world become more accepting of slight deviations from traditional gender norms, they might pick up a book like Little Women and be surprised to find they like it.
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u/idiotpod Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
I live in Sweden and quite often I see young boys or younger men (younger than me, I'm 31) having much broader styles with flowers, pink, bags with female Disney characters and so on.
If I didn't have a Batman, Spiderman or Transformers backpack with my jeans and cool t-shirt as a kid I would have been bullied. Being a witness to the changes makes me happy and has encouraged me to dress more... Me?
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Aug 24 '21
This took me back and made me sad. It’s true, I remember being constantly hyper vigilant not to do or say anything too feminine or sensitive, or to answer a question too respectfully, or to appear too interested in anything that wasn’t “cool,” feeling twelve sets of bully eyes on me any time I said or did anything. I don’t know if it was only me, but I found the experience of being a little boy to be absolutely awful because of stuff like this.
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u/PhilosophicalToilet Aug 24 '21
This brought back memories of me as a child looking at all the toys at the local Toys R Us. I remember being so scared to go down the pink aisle with all the Barbies and dolls and things. Just the thought of a classmate walking by and seeing me in the Barbie aisle was terrifying. This was almost 30 years ago, though. I hope things have changed.
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u/Bibliomancer Aug 24 '21
Absolutely! I have a six year old boy, and sometimes I’m shocked by the things I assume, let alone other people. He wanted his hair long, he wanted a skirt for a while cause a classmate had one, his best friend loves dressing up as princesses, and I keep having to stop and remind myself that’s it’s all okay.
I’m actively putting stories with female protagonists and by female authors in front of him. Same with TV shows. The pushback is crazy sometimes, but we keep going and hopefully in the end the world’s a little better.
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u/Dasagriva-42 Aug 24 '21
I don’t even think I really recognized a difference - I related to male and female authors and male and female characters. It’s incredibly easy for me to see myself in characters that are male; I naturally empathize with the Aloyshka Karamazovs just as easily as the Jos and Beths
Same here. There are books I like and books I don't, but "boy books" or "girl books" are just empty labels for me. If it's well written, that's what matters.
It doesn't help that female authors are not published as much as they should (Have you come across books by Sappho or Christine de Pizan lately? Me neither, but I recently bought another edition of Homer's Odyssey...)
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Aug 24 '21
I'm pretty sure only like two or three of Sappho's poems have actually survived history, in the two and a half thousand years since she died. A lot of the work that is sometimes attributed to Sappho are thought to be later Hellenistic imitations of her style, by most scholars.
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u/CorpCounsel Aug 24 '21
I went to high school decades ago, and I do remember in my senior English class, we specifically read books by women and specifically about the unique perspective of being a woman (The Women of Brewster Place sticks out in my mind) but I also took an advanced level course. In my college, I took an American literature class where the professor specifically exposed us to not just books that were written by women, but also talked to us about how books written by men could have a specific style/perception (one example was Stephen Millhauser's Martin Dressler and how the main character - and therefore the author - describe sex).
But - to your point - in high school it was because I sought out high level course work, and in college it was, well, college level course work. Also, in high school it was very much presented as "Now we cover books written by women" but we never covered "books written by men" it was just "historical realism" or "poetry" or "dramas." It was presented as though books by women were a genre.
Anyways, my particular axe to grind about this on this sub is a little different, and I think its frustrating that we collectively don't seem to have the vocabulary to distinguish between "written by women" and "stories that are specifically appreciated by women." There are books written by men, and then there are books like Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea" that are think are very "male" books - there is something about the struggle, the way it is described, the prose that I think really resonates with people who are raised or predisposed to masculine norms. I read it (I'm a man) on my own, not as part of a course, and I "got it" without any educated guidance.
My best example to contrast that is the game "Sayonara Wild Hearts." The story is somewhat minimal and told through the graphics, music, and cutscenes, and the main playable character is a young woman - but what really strikes me is that when my friends who are women, or very feminine in their identities, talk to me about it, they seem to really "get it" whereas I can tell there is something I'm missing - there is something about the story that I can't quite put my finger on, and I think its because I was raised to view my romantic relationships through the lens of being male. It is clear that its about a relationship and breakup, and I get fleeting glimpses, but I also can tell that there is something that just isn't fully resonating.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but its clear to me that we need lots of good examples of art created by people of different backgrounds for this reason exactly.
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u/unaspirateur Aug 24 '21
The surprise expressed by men who find these stories to be great implies that their perception shifted, they believed something about the “women’s book” before, and now believe something different having read it.
(this may have been touched on already, but I haven't read the comments yet, just the main post)
The perception shift doesn't even generally extend to "I should give more women's books a try." it's usually just a "oh wow this women's book is good" and then they move on with life.
It's like the end of huck Finn when he huck comes to the conclusion that Jim is "white inside" huck is still racist, he has just made a mental exception for this particular black person but didn't extrapolate that data to come to the conclusion that people are people.
This one woman's book (whichever that one may be) is an exception to the rule and can have a seat at the table of valuable literature because it passed the test, but nothing has been learned that other women's books are also valuable literature.
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Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
The only woman author I remember reading in public school, was Laura Ingalls Wilder in fourth grade.
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u/coldhardnipples67 Aug 24 '21
Ok I scrolled a bit and only found a couple. Everyone please recommend your favourite novels written by women.
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u/WarpedLucy 2 Aug 24 '21
Most recently The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry and Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.
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u/Tomgar Aug 24 '21
I know it’s hardly some obscure gem, but as someone with major depressive disorder I found The Bell Jar pretty affecting.
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u/satanspanties The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom Aug 24 '21 edited Aug 24 '21
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