A bold resolution

[james_davis_nicoll]

Reviewer grudgingly gives into hairy legged peen-hater pressure; will try to read a whole ten books by women in the next year

Comments

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

"Hairy legged peen haters"? Mike Huckabee, Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's a reference to that time tor.com gave Sarah Hoyt a podium to rant about Heinlein.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, 1 in 5. How heroic. *headdesk* And the point of the complaint once more goes over a man's head, news at 11.

--thornsilver

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I stopped reading at "The SFF feminists and PC police," which, as it happens, are the first six words. Hard to get back to actual meaningful content from there.

[(Anonymous)]

You didn't miss much. I would say anything but I might have missed something after I started skimming.

rgl

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The man is a walking New Yorker cartoon.

(Unrelated: This entry's number is 5559559 and that amuses me for some reason.)

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I have no reason to be amused and glad that you observed that, yet I am. What a pretty number. Moreover it factors to 41 * 135599; the latter is a prime full of fives and nines.

[brandiweed.livejournal.com]

IOW, you can pretty much caption any image of him as "Christ, what an asshole"?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

...Bloke doesn't get it at all, does he?

[colliemommie.livejournal.com]

Well, if female authors stopped writing about yicky girl stuff then maybe people would actually want to read them. They have only themselves to blame.

(40 reviews a year. Is that unusually low for a declared reviewer, or is our host unusually prolific? I don't have any other data points with which to compare.)

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Our host is *remarkably* prolific. There was a post with comparisons awhile back. Compare number of reviews vs number of reviewers with, say, Locus.

From the strange horizons round up

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Venue	              Reviews/Reviewers 

James Nicoll Reviews    329
Analog	                 58
Locus	                 26.9
Asimov's	         15.7
F&SF	                 11.8
Tor.com	                  8.2
SFX	                  6.6
io9	                  6.2
Romantic Times	          6.0
Interzone                 3.8
Strange Horizons	  2.5
Vector	                  2.4
NYRSF	                  1.4
Foundation	          1.5
Science Fiction Studies	  1.2
CSZ	                  1.2
LARB	                  1.2

Re: From the strange horizons round up

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Although the effect is very subtle, I believe I have a slight but detectable lead on my fellow reviewers.

Re: From the strange horizons round up

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Are those average reviews per named reviewer in some period?

Re: From the strange horizons round up

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Over one year. For me, 2015. For everyone else, 2014.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

The thing I notice is that he hasn't realized that his basic process for choosing new authors -- " When I get back home, I open them one at a time and I check the cover art and read the blurbs. " is extremely susceptible to unconscious bias. It sounds as if he's going to read only long-established women authors, even though he routinely reviews up-and-coming male authors.

[brownbetty]

So he's going to give the Kushiel books another try? This doesn't seem like an experiment destined to succeed.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"If there's one thing that reading the first two Kushiel installments by Jacqueline Carey has taught me, it's that I have awesome works of fantasy and science fiction awaiting my attention on my shelves."

Sounds like he liked them.

[brownbetty]

I, less charitably, interpret that as "Reading Carey teaches me not to waste time on Carey, and to go read (other, better) books waiting on my shelves."

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Well, if you look at his actual review... http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2014/08/kushiels-dart.html

[brownbetty]

I am obviously too quick to sneer. But honestly, I've always thought of the Kushiel stuff as half-way to women's erotica, which I had supposed was very specific to its audience.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

"I mean, I'm going back to read and review a lot of stuff from the 90s. Oddly enough, it appears that female authors such as LeGuin, Kurtz, Moon, Bishop, Rawn, Friedman, Cherryh, West, Weis, Norton, Butler, Bradley, L'Engle, Marillier, McKinley, Kerr, Gentle, Czerneda, Lackey, Roberson, Lee, and many more, enjoyed more respect and exposure back then than they do nowadays.

Looks as though the fantasy genre is contracting, not expanding. . ."

[moonlithoughts.livejournal.com]

"Between January 2005 and December 2015, 89 reviews out of 477 were for books written or co-written by (or anthologies containing works by) female SFF authors."

He's counting anthologies that had at least one female contributor, and that's how he gets to 19%. Sounds to me like he was trying pretty hard to massage those numbers to something acceptable.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

It's a girl-cooties sort of thing. A single drop counts.

I was amused to count the author links down the left side of his site and noted that women took up the same ca. 20% of space as in his reviews. So I guess we can conclude that 20% is gender parity in his world.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a study that showed that when there are 20% females, males believe there's 50:50?

[(Anonymous)]

I've heard of this but have had a hard time finding an actual cite.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

Geena Davis Institute for Gender In Media found that, in crowd scenes, women tend to comprise about 17 percent of any given crowd. She's argued, based on outside data and her own interpretations, that this imbalance relates to and reinforces the way men perceive the actual number of women in any given room.

“If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50,” she told NPR. “And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”

--http://inthesetimes.com/article/16157/our_feminized_society

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks!

[selki.livejournal.com]

Thanks, bookmarked!

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks. Just what I was looking for.

[selki.livejournal.com]

There is (I'm not sure if it was 20% exactly). Sorry I haven't figured out the right search terms to bring it up and pass on the link.

[vass]

Dale Spender, if I remember correctly. 30%, and both women and men believe it.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

His attempts to massage his percentages are -- well, I can spell pathetic, and so can everyone else.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

James, did you ever bean count the F/T ratio of all SF published in a year, or all SF from some publishers in a year? I thought you had, I remember comparing Baen and Tor, but I don't see it in the f/m tag.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The tag is "cooties" but I got derailed by the difficulty of finding a complete list for all publishers in the same year.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks.
And yeah, about 21% for Tor, 28% for Baen.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

I guess the fact that he's actually doing *something* should count for...um...something. The hardest part is to admit that there's a problem.
:)