The Feminization of Science Fiction (and Fantasy)

For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are getting in on the act -- is this bad news?

Five reasons why it isn't:

1. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie Banlieue 13, which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a "big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.)

2. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of loserdom.

3. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become superstars.

4. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone-deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened long ago.

5. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of "feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi ultimately means more good "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety of good sci-fi for everybody to read.

That's a funny site:

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us.

(Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?)

Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!"

Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about.

I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished.

Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc).

Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and you have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so.

Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-equivalent basket of books?

I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams).

For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap.

The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this isn't a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men).

There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor.

I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there.

A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth.

EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment.

There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have lots of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time.

As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home).

The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics:

- the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne)

- the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics)

The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today.

I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it.

If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a markedly better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.

Oh, come on. Are people really taking this article seriously? Look, it would be interesting to read an academic analysis of possible differences in how the sexes both produce and perceive entertainment. That is not what this article is. It is about pushing a gender war, where men are battling against a female gay alliance for control of the media.

From the article: Men, young and old, find gays and bisexuality (among men at least) about as attractive as a “fabulous” Broadway show followed by a viewing of all three of the “High School the Musical” movies. In fact, the more “gay” Broadway has become, (and the more technically excellent), the more repellent it has become to men and boys. Indeed, metal and rap’s popularity stem from the hostility both have to gays, making male sexuality not “questionable” the way the love for Broadway showtunes would be.Women generally like gays, and find gay sex fascinating the way men do lesbian sex. However, men know well that most young women, if presented a magic button that would make most men (average joes) “gay” they’d break their fingers pushing it. The chief objective of attractive young women being turning off male desire of all but the most Alpha of men.

This is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author misrepresents men who like musicals, gay men, rap music, and women all in one paragraph. The article he is responding to, "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky" is just as bad.

As a final note, some of the recent television shows the author uses to support his conclusion that women are ruining science fiction are "Battlestar Galactica", the new "Dr. Who", "Buffy", and "Firefly". It has not been my experience that any of these shows have succeeded in repulsing a male audience, although perhaps that's just my group of friends.

I don't know about the fiction, but anything that might marginalize critics(?) like this one is an improvement.

Wait now; there were a bunch of girls at comic-con and the guys were complaining?!

I don't think it's just women who are responsible for the rise of Extruded Fantasy Product.

In a sentence, the OP is nuts.

The traits that it notes as the hallmark of feminine writing are really the signs of SF's maturation as a real literary form. The old days of pulp and space operas were, as noted, generally male-centered. They were almost entirely plot-driven, with tissue-thin characters.

Today's SF is a legitimate vehicle for the exploration not only of new worlds, but of philosophy and the human condition. This isn't because of females, but because the genre as a whole -- coming from writers of both genders -- have learned how to really create characters, and that lets us really explore their humanity.

For example, Orson Scott Card's second series of Ender novels all retell the same story, just from the perspective of different characters (male and female). What could emphasize characters and their relationships more, and de-emphasize the plot itself, than this? (and yes, Card is male). Indeed, it seems to me that most of the SF I've read recently is like this to some extent, like the work of Robert Charles Wilson.

To the extent that being able to address the hard questions is a good thing (and I think it is), this is very good for science fiction.

And BTW, Frankenstein is not horror, it's proper science fiction. Its theme deals with man's apparent mastery of nature, and how that becomes his folly. (More properly, horror should be considered a sub-genre of fantasy.)

And conversely, The Hobbit and Conan are not science fiction, they are fantasy, in that they deal with man (or halfling, I suppose) at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension, trying to make sense of those forces. Indeed, Tolkein's work is THE canonical fantasy.

The "Big Idea" science fiction was never really about the technology. It's always been about the social implications and about exploring current situations but in a different way.

WTF, feminizing means nothing in that context.

Sexist, homophobic. I'm surprised he didn't also include some comment on how "Adama's a spic when before he was white this is a catastrophy!". I'll take my captains latino, my fighter pilots chicks, and my immortal secret agents omnisexual, thanks.

Bigotted asshole.

Pretend the con is Starfleet - full of weird people, with various degrees of alienness to you. Different groups have different cultural and emotional development. Try to understand them and get along with them, you'll be a better person for it.

yawn. dude confuses introvert/extrovert dichotomy with male/female dichotomy, complains about trashy pop-culture.

This dude seems to have some issues with his sexuality.

I read quite a few female writers and they're good and relevant. Bujold would be an obvious example, and much more local authors.

I'm going to visit a fantasy/role playing convention in two weeks, and I think female participants would account for more than half visitors.

Why don't we just throw up some Council of Conservative Citizens links as well. Perhaps a link to Stormfront?