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?

[(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.

[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.)

[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.)

[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]

"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.

[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.

[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.
:)