[LMB] Re: gender and reading, was Legacy bound galleys & breakpoint

[Paula Lieberman]

Coming -late- to this...  [backed up email reading, and going through 
haphazardly...]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lois McMaster Bujold" <lbujold at myinfmail.com>


>I almost removed spoiler space because this has gone general in focus.
>
> Laura Gallagher celticdragonfly at gmail.com
> Thu Dec 7 16:03:01 GMT 2006
>

> ***OK, but be it noted this is a theory still under construction, and this 
> will be the stripped-down messy version, because of time constraints.
>
> First, gender formation.  Gender formation consists of a certain amount of 
> biology overlain by a lot of culture.  In our culture, gender 
> differentiation goes into high gear at puberty, and consists to a large

As others have noted, it starts even BEFORE birth!

> extent of a process of deletion.  The individual ejects or suppresses 
> aspects of him/her/self perceived as belonging to the other gender, and 
> the resultant cripples are called "young men" or "young women".  Maturity, 
> to an interesting extent, consists of people reclaiming a lot of these 
> lost aspects to become more complete persons again.
>
> Status and status emergency.  Status seems to me under-examined as a 
> biological (as contrasted with a social) motive.  It's necessarily a group 
> thing; no one has status as a lone individual, as it is created relative 
> to the group in which the individual is embedded.  But of course, humans 
> evolved in small social groups.  Lack of status can really kill one, in 
> any crunch situation.  (Lifeboats, starving villages, the hunt, etc. See 
> _Lord of the Flies_)   So humans have a *biological* need for enough 
> status to obtain whatever their personal threshold may be to feel safe. 
> There are a million ways to satisfy status needs, just as their are a 
> million ways to prepare food to satisfy the underlying universal 
> biological need, hunger.  When a person drops below their comfort zone of 
> status, they are thrown into a state of status emergency or panic behavior 
> (often bad or wildly disproportionate) sometimes having little relation to 
> any actual physical threat (see any internet flame war.  And a lot of real 
> wars.)
>
> Combining these two, there are three arenas of status/gender struggle: man 
> vs. man, woman vs. woman, man vs. woman.  All overlap and all are

There are also some others, which involve lifestyles and orientation--that 
is, culture decrees "these are MALE pursuits, and those are FEMALE pursuits" 
and woe to those who don't fit the prescribed patterns... just this past 
weekend a friend told me that big  showy flowers would be a gift appreciated 
by one of her housemates, a fellow I've known for years and years and had 
never realized would appreciate being given flowers--it's not a thing that 
the culture is supportive of, the idea of males as recipients of bouquets. 
In some other cultures interests in such things I think is socially approved 
for for men, but not US contemporary culture.

> combined with equally urgent needs for various kinds of cooperation 
> amongst the participants, so at this point it all sort of goes fractal. 
> But anyway.
>
> In the post-puberty, not-yet-mature mode, the social model goes: girls 
> attract guys by out-competing other women in attractiveness/status, the 
> latter being defined as (million ways again) anything from beauty to 
> owning more cows.

Or, competition to get positive attention from males.  There is the case of 
being popular for the sake of being popular, the old band wagon thing, that 
because someone -else- wants that, it is the more desirable.

The competition to attract males, can also include who is the most 
subservient to them...

> Guys attract girls by *competing with other guys* to obtain 
> victory/wealth/status: girls then happen automatically, without the guy 
> having to actually, like, talk to them or anything.  (See: trophy wives.)
>
> Note that both genders are focusing on guys.
>
> Problems happen when the girl has way more status than the guy, throwing 
> him into possibly-unconscious status-emergency mode.  Problems also

That depends on the individual "Uptown girl, downtown guy" and all those 
fairy tales about the humble boy winning the hand of the princess...

> happen when the girl has *so* much less status, association with her

Again, there are those fairy tales about the prince and Cinderella, etc... 
there are also perhaps elements involved in those of power issues, that the 
person from the low status background is going to be much more 
accommodating....

> saps the boy's status, ditto status-emergency for him.  In the puberty 
> phase, when social enforcement of gender roles is in high gear, boys also 
> lose status in the eyes of their very dangerous peers by association with 
> anything "girly"; tomboys have similar troubles, if

Status is involved in being associated with those who are most popular...

> less directly lethal.  (But not always: see rl murder of Brandon 
> Teena/Teena Brandon, and about a gazillion other people who stepped 
> outside of prescribed gender boundaries in an unsafe place.)  So guys have 
> more directly visible status-motivation not to appear "girly" than girls 
> do not to appear "tomboy", but the indirect pressure on the girls can be 
> just as nasty.  (Many females do not read SF because they perceive it as a 
> guy-genre, unwelcoming to them; many guys read it for the exact same 
> reason.  Or rather, because the suspect sissy thing, reading a book, is 
> redeemed by being strongly guy-associated.)

Failing to conform to social standards of appropriate is perhaps the 
cardinal sin in that society.

> Modern sexually-explicit romances as a genre have two strikes against them 
> for male readers, in this model.  The woman's agenda always wins (status 
> discomfort), and the sex is viewed through female eyes, with

I don't think that it's that clearcut--there -are- men out there who are or 
have gone looking for a permanent female partner for marriage etc., who 
consciously have gone looking. Status to them involved finding the woman to 
be their wife and marrying.  That stick out even in a lot of SF novels 
written by men--look at David Brin's Startide Rising, where even the 
dolphins get permanently paired off!  There are romantic pairings-off in 
Poul Anderson novels, Gordon R. Dickson novels, Roland Green novels, Jim 
Butcher novels, Steve Brust novels, D*v*d W*b*r novels, even Jerry Pournelle 
novels.... and sometimes the sex is even though the eyes of female 
characters (Roland Green, for example, has at least one such scene in his 
books).

> other males the focus of a sexual "gaze" as the femcrit term has it

I think that there may be some amount of hypocrisy in the readership--look 
at how popular the Honor Harrington books have been, female protagonist 
written by a male author.  (I don't accept that "male character in female 
body" claim that some people make... there are people who in on-line forums 
were CERTAIN I was a male pretending to be female... news to me and everyone 
here who's ever met me in person), and hardly the only such.

> (gender-identity discomfort, with a side-order of homophobia.)  Porn for 
> men has the opposite bias: women are seen sexualized through a male gaze, 
> and the guys win.  (Or win (sex) and are then punished (with

Poorn for men in this culture traditionally tended to depersonalize the 
women involved and make them into sex objects/things.   There were 
exceptions, e.g. Behind the Green Door which had a plot and acting in it, on 
second thought, that was not aimed specifically at men and depersonalizing 
of women.  It was porn with a gender bias slanted towards either men or 
women, as far as I recall (having seen it long long ago as a college 
student, back in the days when the movie shown on campus for finals week was 
traditionally pornographic...)

> tragedy), allowing the consumer to have his cake and eat it too.)  Many 
> women find such very uncomfortable, and I don't think it's because they

The discomfort came from several different sources--the objectification of 
women to be turned into use-and-throw-away (sometimes violently....) objects 
was one source.  Another was the cultural value that women either aren't 
supposed to like, or it they like, ADMIT IT, sex, and and aren't supposed to 
like having it described/be shown graphically.   The popularity of 
loaded-with-explicit-sex-scenes novels in particularly the romance section 
which women consume in huge quantities is demonstrable proof that sex scenes 
are NOT offensive to very large numbers of women....  it's demeaning ones 
and such that prinicipally are offensive and repellant to women.  The ones 
demeaning to women are also offensive and repellant to a lot of men, but how 
many of them are going to admit -that- to anyone else?!

> dislike sex.  In romances for men -- Bridges of Madison County, Love Story 
> (? -- where girl dies of cancer just before male would have to settle down 
> & support her) the male protagonists likewise get let off the hook for all 
> the work a happy ending would actually entail.  Granted, women bought 
> these books in droves, but the books didn't lose status by being 
> classified as "romances".

But what about Love Story, novel and film both?   Aha, it got the male 
readership and viewing audience BECAUSE it was a sob story with the female 
dying...  men were -allowed- to enjoy it because the woman died, Russian 
love stories are acceptable romance for men in this culture!!!

> "Winning", in the paragraph above, being once again variously defined. 
> See any number of male action films where the guy gets to screw and run, 
> extra bonus point for ones where the female lead also dies messily, 
> providing a free moral pass for assorted subsequent bloodshed, release of 
> the hero any further social or economic obligations to the female,

Or he's allowed to be emotional because the love of his life is dead, and 
since she's dead it's -safe- to admit with her gone, how important she -had 
been- to him...

> and built-in punishment of her for inspiring him to be "bad", all in one 
> package.  No wonder this stuff sells.  Less toxically and more 
> even-handedly, append various amime examples, yaoi vs. fan service.  For 
> that extra-special brain-bending moment, watch canonical male characters 
> run through the female fanfic sausage-maker of slash, and turned into... 
> well, I'm still figuring that one out.   Sock-puppets for the female

Alien stuff?!

> writers' psychological agendas can certainly be one.  Contrast especially 
> notable when said characters started out as sock-puppets for their male 
> creator's psychological agendas.  Note to self: why odd dearth of 
> lone-male-hero James-Bond/Conan-and-his clones fanfic?  Seems

Perhaps it's because there is -such- a glut of that stuff around, that 
fanfic is superfluous?  The character to identify with is Conan, not his 
female plug-into bedmate of the week....

> ripe for hijacking.  Women not interested -- those are heroes for guys?
> Anyway, back to *my* book...
>
> Among many other things, TSK attempts to be a romance that is even-handed 
> between the genders. ...
> Fawn's problems are the problems of a girl ambushed by puberty-traps, 
> starting to reach for maturity/reintegration.  Dag is already mature, but 
> has other troubles...   These are *not* the same as the standard 
> pubescent-male hero's-journey problems of the usual fantasy hero, because 
> Dag's already a grown-up.  That will change... many things about this 
> fantasy novel.

You do, however, have a large male readership... and those folks who can't 
deal with "the woman hidden inside the man" and "the man hidden inside the 
woman" would not have gotten past  Shards of Honor, Warrior's Apprentice, 
Ethan of Athos, and Barrayar....