Y'know last year, for the first time I was skewing more heavily towards reviewing female authors than male authors. I'd made a real effort to combat the years of skewing the other way, when I was reading (and maybe reviewing, I'd have to check the numbers, but I suspect reviewing as well) more men than women even though I was way keen on female writers. Last year I found was reading so many books by ladies now. And instead of feeling great about that I felt... guilty. I wasn't achieving parity and I'm always countering sexist arguments with the ideas that gender inequality hurts men and that equality means um equality, not women dominating men. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite and I may have apologised in my stats breakdown post.
What I've come to realise over the last few months is that my personal reading parity is unimportant in the face of vast, systematic inequality of women. So many places aren't reviewing women, or are actively denigrating female literary contributions (which if you want to drill it down to practical capitalist terms may result in women earning less through their books and receiving less prestigious awards, or grants which could further their earning ability) that any worries I may had about not reading enough men really don't matter. Male authors get a lot of attention right now, a lot of visibility and that is creating huge, problematic, real inequality. If I don't review as many men as women, well that does not affect men in a comparably negative way. So I've stopped worrying about that and won't return to being concerned about it until everyone everywhere is reviewing 99 female authors to 1 male author.
'I just feel that we gravitate to what interests us. I'm sure if we looked at the gender bias in romance novels you'd see a predominately female audience that reads predominately female authors.'
I have feelings about this and I'm seeing this argument repeated elsewhere, so I'll be back to talk about it later, but I have to go to work now. Maybe someone else will beat me to replying ;P
no subject
What I've come to realise over the last few months is that my personal reading parity is unimportant in the face of vast, systematic inequality of women. So many places aren't reviewing women, or are actively denigrating female literary contributions (which if you want to drill it down to practical capitalist terms may result in women earning less through their books and receiving less prestigious awards, or grants which could further their earning ability) that any worries I may had about not reading enough men really don't matter. Male authors get a lot of attention right now, a lot of visibility and that is creating huge, problematic, real inequality. If I don't review as many men as women, well that does not affect men in a comparably negative way. So I've stopped worrying about that and won't return to being concerned about it until everyone everywhere is reviewing 99 female authors to 1 male author.
'I just feel that we gravitate to what interests us. I'm sure if we looked at the gender bias in romance novels you'd see a predominately female audience that reads predominately female authors.'
I have feelings about this and I'm seeing this argument repeated elsewhere, so I'll be back to talk about it later, but I have to go to work now. Maybe someone else will beat me to replying ;P