Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's fair enough, but does that fact that a book has a gender imbalance mean that it's offensive? [...] Why should a woman be offended at works of SF and fantasy targeted at a male readership?
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An individual book? Obviously not, and I didn't say it was, and I very specifically said that the B-W test is to highlight gender imbalance in a body of works.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: F/SF/horror is not a field that has an overwhelmingly male contingent of fans or writers. Women have been in the field from the beginning, in all sorts of ways. However their battle to be published, recognised, acknowledged (from existence as fans to contributions as writers/volunteers/etc/etc) has been uphill. It is still uphill, though less so, today (and FAR less so in Australia since the past three or four years, thanks to the tireless work and happy non-reactionariness and willingness to change of very many other folks).
It's a situation that continues to be challenged in a multitude of ways, this article being just one of them. Feel free to not be part of it, though to actively resist it I find a little strange. If you're interested in some non-fiction reading around the subject, I recommend Letters to Tiptree (for easy/quick reading), or The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (for more academic reading).
ETA: I'm not aware of a movement by men for increased recognition in the romance field. This is possibly because there isn't one, possibly because there is one but it's so tiny I haven't noticed it (I'm relatively in touch with the field, but not all over it), and possibly because when men do write romance, it's not pushed under the carpet, rather we end up with books like The Rosie Project, feted from here to kingdom come. If there were a movement focusing on the increased recognition of the role of men in the romance industry, I wouldn't be opposed to it, and I might be quite interested. For what it's worth.