I’ve written before about the bizarre snobbery in genre fiction, where some genres (science fiction) think they are better than others (fantasy).
In the SF community this snobbery usually takes the form of, “That trope isn’t plausible. This isn’t SF, it’s fantasy!” (As though a fantasy magazine would buy your FTL ship story. Spoiler: hells no they won’t. Some of this is semantic error – a conflation of “fantasy” as in “make believe” and “Fantasy” a genre, buuut… read on…)
Lately I’m noticing a sexist component to this. And yes, this blog post is going to be a feminist rant. Please stop reading now if feminist rants make you break out in angry sweat.
A fellow female SF writer posted to a group I’m in about a particular editor asking her to submit to his fantasy imprint as he rejected her SF story. She thought this odd since he had been on the record that his SF imprint got fewer submissions. But see… he’d said the same thing to me. At the time I was merely perplexed. Was he trying to drum up interest in a struggling companion magazine? If he knew me, he’d know that I SUCK at fantasy. I have never successfully sold a fantasy story to a fantasy market.
But after finding out this had happened with someone else, I put two and two together: Female writes SF editor didn’t think was good enough, editor suggests she submit fantasy… OH you think we write good but our feeble woman-brains can’t handle teh sciencez.
I wish I didn’t have a long list of experiences with men harshly criticizing female SF, holding us to higher standards of accuracy than male authors and pointing out every flaw like we’re in a dissertation defense.
Here’s a conversation I’ve had more than once and gritted my teeth to dental distress every time:
Him: [Female Author] doesn’t do the science right. There was this one nit-picky thing wrong in her novel!
Me: So who does it right?
Him: Old White Dude.
Me: Here are eight equally wrong things in Old White Dude’s novel, that were known to be wrong at the time he was writing, and are in fact more badly written.
Him: That’s not the same! He TRIED.
Men are allowed to “try” – women have to be perfect.
Luke is allowed to go from being a farm-boy who has never been in a fight in his life to defeating Darth Vader. No one bats an eye. That’s what protagonists do. Rei grows up fighting every single day in a lawless refugee camp and we’re supposed to demand a training montage before she fights a badly-injured Kylo Ren to a draw (while the actress does an amazing job working uncertainty and a sense of poor training into her moves).
Ok so those are fictional characters, but the way we react to fictional characters is a model for how we react to real people.
So there’s this cultural stereotype: Girls Are Bad At Science and it’s extended into: Girls Are Bad at Science Fiction and you tie that in with the misconception that Bad Science Fiction is Fantasy, oh hey, Girls Write Fantasy, and Fantasy is Bad, because Everything Girls Do Is Bad.
Unless of course it’s one of the many many male fantasy writers writing, then suddenly it’s not THAT KIND of fantasy. Or something. Sexism is weird and full of contradictions.
Of course women write science fiction. And men write fantasy. And fantasy is not merely science fiction you don’t think is plausible, it’s its own damn genre with its own conventions and look I have been trying for decades to figure out how to write a fantasy story and I haven’t yet so don’t think it’s encoded in my ovaries, okay?
Men write romance. Women write hard boiled detectives. Good gravy we have enough gender roles to conform to, let’s free what genre you write in from that garbage!
Here endeth the rant.
