An article in the Guardian says, don’t patronise popular fiction by women. Patronise in the negative sense, not the positive sense.
The attitude talked about here, where women will read books aimed at women OR men, whereas men refuse to even try books written by or marketed to women, is so common as to be systematic. Little girls will happily read books with a male or female narrator/main character; little boys want male leads. Women will respond to ads with voice-overs by men or by women; men will ignore ads voiced by women (unless it’s an extremely sultry voice implying super hotness in an ad for alcohol). Men will get quite shitty with and contradict their GPS navigation system when the voice is female. I am not kidding. They did a study or something.
It’s not so much the automatic rejection, ‘that’s woman-focused, that’s not for me’ – marketing is about putting things into little boxes to reach who you think will buy it (and women buy books for themselves and others, and if men are sick of ‘chick-lit’ dominating the marketplace, they need to starting buying more books themselves). If you can’t bend your mind past the marketing to assess a product on its merits, that’s your issue. And on the other hand, if you’re not interested in a genre, no-one is forcing you to either read it or go online and whine about it.
It’s more the main thrust of the article, that the thought continues, ‘that’s woman-focused, that’s not for me…and therefore it’s crap’. If it’s not aimed at men, it must be trivial and shallow. It’s the same across the board, where women ‘gossip’ but men talk, and women ‘fritter’ their money away on shoes and beauty magazines and I don’t know, anything women like to buy, but men…what, invest in computer games and porn magazines?
So reading about women’s relationships and working life challenges is an empty, shallow pursuit, but reading about men’s relationships and working life challenges is worthy literature or high-brow humour or whatever. (Note: I tend not to read either genre as get bored with real-world settings, but if I avoid one like the plague it’s yet another literary recounting of a middle-aged man having a crisis at work and cheating on his wife).
It’s not breaking any new ground here to say women writers get dismissed as serious literature. And the fact that people reject and disparage a whole genre is hardly surprising (I’m over here in the SF/F ghetto myself, as a reader and a writer). It would just be nice if people could get past the ‘that’s different to my tastes, therefore it cannot be good’ mentality. Grow up, people.
This is depressing because your comments reflect on a much wider issue than books. This is why so many women managers have difficulty in the workplace.
I noticed the same teaching high school boys as a young woman. I had to rely on body language more than the men.
I even notice it watching those reality police programs, where the tough female cop gets way more stick from the young men she has pulled over than her lower ranking male counterparts.
Yup. Depressing. No wonder women’s voices have dropped over the last century.
Yeah, it’s pretty much systemic – and ingrained enough that people will claim feminism has done its job and should go away quietly.
Even some strands of feminism, especially in its early days, fell into the trap of denigrating traditional female occupations like keeping a house or nursing, as if an occupation was only valid if it was something from the traditionally male field. It’s just sad that the same attitude persists so widely.
ETA: to quote Tom Hodgkinson in How to Be Free: ‘the problem is not that people are different but that they do not respect differences.’
This is a stimulating topic. I’ve read a fair bit of chick lit and find some of it quite relaxing but the quality is variable and some authors are intensely irritating. It has nothing to do with the genre. It is personal. As for the men Harriet Evans mentioned, they are insufferable! Toby Young, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem are puffed-up egomaniacs in love with themselves and their writing is annoying when it isn’t dull. Joanna Trollope and Marian Keyes write more entertaining books, but I wouldn’t offer their work as a model of what good writing should be. It lacks conviction and is therefore unsatisfying. Rose Tremain would be a better model but I’ve no idea what genre she falls into. She’s a woman so she must be writing chick lit, right? These genres are not the fault of readers but of publishers. It is publishers who do the patronising. But, presumably, their patronising attitude is based on years of commercial experience and what they can induce us to buy.
Great discussion, thanks.
That’s the exact problem with dividing books by genre and then attaching stigmas and assumptions to each genre: within _any_ genre (including the vaunted literary genre which somehow doesn’t get counted as a genre and yet has its rules and formulas just like other genres), quality is variable – quality as judged by people’s personal tastes, as you say.
And what people need from the book they are reading at any given time differs too. Sometimes I want entertaining and funny and will pick up something in the chick-lit genre. Sometimes I want something meatier…which does not mean I turn to male authors! If the critics find that male authors are somehow more worthy than female authors, it is because they are setting the criteria so that they _can_ make that finding. The great sin of poor science.
But forcing writers into genre categories is very much a function of how bookstores are set up and how publishers categorise their books to get on the right shelf for the expected audience. I sort of wish they would just group similar authors together instead.
(And it’s inconsistent anyway; I loved the SF novel The Gone-Away World but when I went to buy a copy for a friend, I found it shelved in Literature.)
Oh yes, if SF is good then it gets whisked away from the ghetto and onto the Literature shelf. But you can’t quite do that to a female author, unless you want to give her a pen-name without her consent
My favourite stories are cross-overs between styles anyway. My own shelving system is more like a spectrum than an organised genre system – authors sit next to other authors who feel similar in tone, or who have similar settings that I enjoy. And I doubt I’m unusual, I think most readers will make groupings based on what feels right rather than what bookshop section they found the book in.
Except Margaret Atwood, of course…
It reminds me of Kingsley Amis:
SF’s no good,
they say until we’re deaf
But this is good
Then it’s not SF.
I think part of the problem women authors in the chick-lit genre particularly face, too, is contained in the real name of their genre – commercial women’s fiction.
Commercial – yet another thing that sets the critics’ sneer-meter going.
[...] Rejecting genre fiction vs growing up ["The attitude talked about here, where women will read books aimed at women OR men, whereas men refuse to even try books written by or marketed to women, is so common as to be systematic. Little girls will happily read books with a male or female narrator/main character; little boys want male leads. Women will respond to ads with voice-overs by men or by women; men will ignore ads voiced by women (unless it’s an extremely sultry voice implying super hotness in an ad for alcohol). Men will get quite shitty with and contradict their GPS navigation system when the voice is female. I am not kidding. They did a study or something."] Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Diary of a Wimpy KidWhen actresses turn ugly … [...]