Male pseudoynms for women writers: take two

The issue of women authors taking male names (or initials) to camouflage their gender is a very,, very, very old one. It's an issue that continues to come up, though. An article this last week in the Wall Street Journal-- Why Women Writers Still Take Men's Names-- revisits the issue, but from a slightly different angle. (This is the Wall Street Journal.) The underlying reason offered in the article remains broadly the same (viz., the problem of gender bias), but the article's author, Stefanie Cohen, places the emphasis on book editors' conventional wisdom informing what is basically a business decision and therefore implies that the reasons for an author's concealing her gender have changed. Cohen observes:

Women make up the majority of readers for most fiction genres, with the exception of science fiction. Nevertheless, the industry is wary of alienating men, who tend to favor male authors, according to several studies. In 2005, two professors from Queen Mary College surveyed 100 academics, critics, and writers and found that four out of five men said the last novel they had read was written by a man. Women were almost as likely to have read a book by a man as a woman, the study found.

"For a new author, we want to avoid anything that might cause a reader to put a book down and decide, 'not for me,' " Ms. Sowards says. "When we think a book will appeal to male readers, we want everything about the book to say that—the cover, the copy and, yes, the author's name."

Science fiction has a strong tradition of female writers not only using male names, but pretending to be men. Throughout the 1970s, James Tiptree Jr. won fans and book awards. Not until 1976 was it revealed that the author's real name was Alice Sheldon.
Fantasy has been somewhat friendlier for women, but generally not if they are writing about male characters. J.K. Rowling has famously said that her publisher, Bloomsbury, told her that she should sell the Harry Potter books under initials, not her given name, Joanne. Even after being revealed as a woman and becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time, those rules often still apply.

"Would a 12-year-old boy have picked up a book by Joanne Rowling?" asks John Scalzi, a sci-fi writer and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. "Once you have your audience, you're fine—J.K. Rowling still sold when people found out she was a woman—but it's getting the audience that's important."

Probably my favorite quote from the article comes from the two women who write under the joint pseudonym of "Magnus Flyte."

Ms. Lynch and Ms. Howrey decided to use a male pseudonym for their first thriller partly because they read studies saying that while women would buy books by either sex, men preferred books by men, says Ms. Lynch. They didn't want to risk losing a single reader. "Why would we want to exclude anyone?" says Ms. Lynch.

Why indeed? Since gender bias is with us, short-term thinking (which is all that corporations or even most individuals ever engage in) necessarily means adapting oneself to gender bias. It's what we do, right? Sure, it has ideological resonances, but it's basically a business decision. The article shows photos of Charlotte Bronte, George Sand, Isak Dinesen, and references James Tiptree Jr. They all did it, too. But not, perhaps, for precisely the same reason. Same decision, different reason...It's all just so very complicated.

We all know what the masculine mystique is, right?

In today's New York Times, historian Stephanie Coontz addresses The Myth of Male Decline. Not only does she debunk the resentful myth that women have become "the richer sex" and are taking over in the US, but she also proposes the hypothesis that many men are in the throes of a "masculine mystique" that is limiting the development of their individual potential:

ONE thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options.

Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique.

Just as the feminine mystique discouraged women in the 1950s and 1960s from improving their education or job prospects, on the assumption that a man would always provide for them, the masculine mystique encourages men to neglect their own self-improvement on the assumption that sooner or later their “manliness” will be rewarded.

According to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans now believe that a college education is necessary for a woman to get ahead in life today, but only 68 percent think that is true for men. And just as the feminine mystique exposed girls to ridicule and harassment if they excelled at “unladylike” activities like math or sports, the masculine mystique leads to bullying and ostracism of boys who engage in “girlie” activities like studying hard and behaving well in school. One result is that men account for only 2 percent of kindergarten and preschool teachers, 3 percent of dental assistants and 9 percent of registered nurses.

Do check out the entire article. Besides being interesting, it's crunchy with statistics about the gender differences in employment, education, and income over the last 15 years you might find worth reviewing.

Some Stuff of Interest

Here are a few links you might find interesting:

--Allison Flood's Gender bias in books journalism remains acute, research shows reports on Vida's compilation of statistics for 2011:

It was the year when VS Naipaul infamously declared no woman writer to be his equal, so perhaps it's not surprising that new research shows a huge skew towards male authors and reviewers in the literary establishment in 2011.

Vida, an American organisation supporting women in the literary arts, has compiled statistics on the gender split in books coverage at publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, each of which showed a substantial bias towards using male reviewers and covering male authors.

At the LRB last year 16% of reviewers were women (29 out of 184) and 26% of authors reviewed (58 out of 221); at the New York Review of Books 21% of 254 reviews were by women, 17 of 92 authors reviewed were female and 13% of 152 articles were by women. Of 1,163 reviews in the TLS in 2011, 30% were by women, and of 1,314 authors reviewed, 25% were women. Granta was the only publication to have more female contributors, at 53%, but much of this was down to its women-only feminism issue.

Flood's article notes that gender bias is worse for nonfiction and quotes editors of the publications preferring to review work by males over work by women effectively blaming women for not stepping up to the plate and sententiously "hoping" that the Vida reports will "encourage women." (What this has to do with getting women's books reviewed absolutely mystifies me.) She concludes with a comment from Jennifer Weiner:

Author Jennifer Weiner, who, with Picoult, has campaigned against the continuing gender bias of book reviews towards men over the last year, felt that the best response was to let the "vital conversations" take place elsewhere. "Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration," she said. "In the end, it's going to take a New Girls' (and Boys') Network to counter the Old Boys' Network. Men and women committed to change are going to have to step up and speak out, (and, of course, risk being called shrill, hysterical, annoying or 'just jealous' of the attention the men receive when we do)."

I suppose that Weiner's remark may be interpreted by some as pursuing a separatist strategy, but I think, rather, she's suggesting that men and women need to join together to create new venues where women's work will be treated with respect. That may be considered a kind of separatism, but it isn't gender separatism. I rather like the idea of allowing the old male-dominated bastions of the commercial literary world dry up on the vine, myself. (Link thanks to Wendy Walker.)

Two links to posts by Amanda Marcotte:

--When we say they hate women, we mean they hate women is prompted by Rush Limbaugh's despicable attack on Sandra Fluke, but sees it as part of the ongoing war on women underway in the US today:

I'd point out that most animals fuck according to the ideal Rick Santorum model: joylessly, infrequently, and only for procreation. Most even wait until the female is ovulating, to minimize the time they spend rutting! If your objective is to not be like other animals, the best strategy is to fuck all the time and take advantage of our unique ability to enjoy sex for its own sake.

Beyond all the hatefulness, prudery, and misogyny is just the plain weirdness of all of this. Reading the right wing reaction to Sandra Fluke, you get the strong impression that they think that a single woman in her mid-20s who is sexually active is some kind of freakish outlier, as if Fluke admitted to being a mercenary with side business in running drugs to pay off law school. In reality, Fluke is as normal and American as apple pie. Being sexually active before marriage is just what people do; 93% of Americans have premarital sex before turning 30. We can safely guess there's no love here for women whose main pregnancy prevention strategy is to only have sex with women. Additionally, since no distinctions between women who use contraception in or out of marriage are being made here, women who use it to have monogamous sex with their husbands are being rolled into the "town dump" category as well, which means that basically, the utterly normal and nearly universal experience of being female is being characterized on the right as something disgusting and beyond the pale. Which is just a long, roundabout way to say they straight up hate women.

--Marcotte also has a brief post about the endless GOP primary season: It's the Race that Never Ends that made me nod my head and say, yes, it does feel as if it will never end. And then led to the reflection that the reason that no end is yet in sight is because so many whackos have the support of very, very, very, very rich patrons, who have endless amounts of money to lavish on obscenely expensive campaigns for losers eager to serve them and their interests (and no one else's).

--Kim Stanley Robinson has an essay about climate change and the utopian in his novels at arena: Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change:

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution.[i] This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we’re not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

Through the essay, he moves through fascinating territory until he arrives at a startling (but utterly plausible) conclusion:

How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity.

This is a must-read essay. Do please check it out. (Link thanks to Niall Harrison.)

--Common Dreams reports on an insurance industry meeting about how uninsurable parts of the United States are becoming because of climate change. The meeting occurred just one day before the latest devastating tornados slammed the Midwest and Southeast US:

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”

“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re's sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”

Cynthia McHale, the insurance program director at Ceres, issued a more unequivocal statement: “Our climate is changing, human activity is helping to drive the change, and the costs of these extreme weather events are going to keep ballooning unless we break through our political paralysis, and bring down emissions that are warming our planet. If we continue on this path, extreme weather is certain to cause more homes and businesses to be uninsurable in the private insurance market, leaving the costs to taxpayers or individuals.”

Resonates with Stan Robinson's essay, no?

Helix SF Magazine Publishes All Female-Authored Issue. Verdict: Cookie Allotted.

The science fiction magazine Helix SF, which describes itself as publishing "controversial" stories, has posted an issue featuring all women writers.

It features fiction by authors such as Esther Freisner, Eugie Foster, Yoon Ha Lee, and Samantha Henderson. There's also a nice selection of poetry by authors including Jane Yolen and Joselle Vanderhooft.

Sanders wrote an editorial about his decision to make this an all-women authored issue. I appreciated this bit: "Certainly it's not intended to prove that women can write SF, or that they can write it well. That's something that doesn't need proving; it's been proved over and over again — anybody who needs further proof by now is beyond hope."

I was also interested in his discussion of the motives: "The truth is that all of the stories you see in this issue had already been accepted before I decided to do this. In fact that's where the idea originated: I was looking over the stories I had in stock, choosing which ones I wanted to use for the next issue, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of excellent stories by women — and had in fact already picked several of them — and suddenly the light bulb went on and I said to myself, "Self, you ugly old son of a bitch," (myself understanding this to be in the spirit of good-natured bandinage)**, "why not an all-women issue?"

And indeed, why not?

He adds, "But you know, in a way it's a pity that this should even be worth talking about. Really, if things were as they should be, nobody should think it surprising or remarkable that an SF magazine should publish an all-women's issue — any more than if, say, all the contributors were from Illinois, or all their last names began with R, or they all had red hair...Or if they were all straight white guys. That happens all the time, and nobody seems to find it strange."

When I first read that last line, I was cheering it, but then I realized that its meaning is ambiguous. It could mean that the editor acknowledges that straight white men are the default state, and that no one finds it odd when issues are all straight white men because the assumption (pre-feminism and anti-racism) is that everything everywhere will be all straight white men. He could be referring to the phenomenon whereby a group of people that is less than half women will be perceived as "all women." He could be referring to the recent study about conversation in which it's demonstrated that if women and men are forced to speak for equal lengths of time, both parties perceive the women as completely dominating the conversation.

However, it's also possible to read the statement another way: which is that no one pays attention to straight white male authored issues because feminists and anti-racists want special rights, and whites and men have "no one" arguing for their interests.

The more I think about this comment, though, I have trouble sustaining my second reading. In order for the second reading to work out, Sanders would have to believe that there are as many all-women tables of contents as there are tables of contents filled with authors who are straight, white, and male. But that doesn't seem to be the case, since he acknowledges that an all-female TOC is still worthy of comment, while TOCs of only straight white men happen all the time.

However, an editorial by Helix guest editor Melanie Fletcher reveals an unambiguous example of the condescending attitude I'd feared: "it's not a big deal that the Summer '07 issue of Helix is pretty much all female — like the almost all male Hugo ballot this year, it just shook out that way. And yet there was much hue and cry across the land about the 2007 Hugo nominees' preponderance of testosterone, so we're probably going to catch some shit about the clouds of estrogen wafting about this issue. Frankly, both complaints strike me as pretty damn stupid because it shouldn't matter what flavor of gonads a writer is packing; what does matter is whether or not they can tell a cracking good story."

Fletcher appears not to understand what is meant by systemic sexism or unconscious bias, from the way that she mischaracterizes the feminist critique of Hugo awards. She appears to be offering this issue as an example of how sometimes things "shake out" to female benefit -- but she's countered by the very fact that there was a conscious effort to put together an all-female table of contents. There was no conscious effort to skew the Hugos. Unconscious gender bias did that all on its own, as it does monthly in the table of contents for magazines like Harper's.

I am inclined to give Sanders the benefit of the doubt and say his heart was in the right place when he orchestrated it. It's harder to believe him when he says this isn't a publicity stunt since he complained about the lack of attention he received for doing it. But I'm inclined to forgive publicity stunts; he's trying to grow the audience for a small magazine.*

However, the editorial by Fletcher makes it clear why an effort like this isn't usually greeted with open arms. It's hard to tell what kinds of concealed motives people have for these kinds of actions. In this case, Fletcher seems to have been trying to hide a GOTCHA under her coat, even if it was a particularly ineffective one.

While I remain cagey, I'm going to go ahead and say this: Good on you, Sanders. Cookie allotted.



But you know what's better on Sanders than an all-women issue? The fact that (if we are to go by the statistics listed in his editorial) of the 28 stories he published in his first year, 13 were by women. Sanders, and editors like him who publish an equal or near-equal gender ratio, are definitely part of the solution.

There's one more net result that's unambiguously positive: seven female short story writers, and six female poets, have sold their work. They will be paid and their work will be read. I urge people to read this issue, and throw in a couple of bucks to the authors if they think the stories are worthy.

UPDATE: Sanders points out that there are a lot of people of color who have written stories for this issue, also, such as Eugie Foster and Yoon Ha Lee. The name that jumps out at me is N. K. Jemison who I was fortunate enough to see speak last year at Wiscon. She’s brilliant. You can find her at her personal blog, but she’s also got the keys to Angry Black Woman’s place, where she’s recently written aa guest post or two. There may be other writers of color on the TOC besides these talented three, but those are the only three I know of for sure.

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*And hey, complaining worked. I wouldn't have written about this if he hadn't complained. Of course, the fact that my health issues have been mostly cleared up! meant that I now have time and attention to write, which I didn't have when the issue initially came out. (I did consider writing about it then.)

**Sanders also gets a musical-theater-related cookie for quoting Ruddigore.

But You're A Girl!

Remember that revolting discussion about women and achievement on Asimov’s forum a couple of weeks ago? I thought of it just now when I read Boing Boing’s report on instances of sexist discrimination by Disney recruiters in 1938 and 1997. It’s not likely that they were the only such instances—though we can take comfort, at least, that the 1997 “but you’re a girl!” response got the recruiter fired.

Feminist SF Luvin'

I have taken a couple days almost completely off the internet! One thing this means is that I did not keep up with my livjeournal friends list.

Sometimes, not keeping up with my livejournal friends list (which is mostly composed of SF writers) means that I miss a few witty anecdotes and announcements of great sales. Sometimes it means that I miss horrible, horrible explosions of sexism in science fiction.

Alas, the last few days have been filled with detonation. The stupid: it hurts, it burns, it is all over me, it is all over everything, possibly we'll have to scrap this internet and buy a new one.

I have given all this some thought, and after much deliberation, I have this to say:

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT.

Now, that's out of the way.

Rather than link to the debates, or discuss their validity, what I would like to do is this. I would like to create a short-list of allies that people -- say, feminists and anti-racists -- might like to support with subscriptions, submissions, and positive word of mouth. I want to feel positive about the SF world. There's a lot there to love. I want to create and form community networks of support. I think there's power in that, as well as fulfillment.

I'll start out with a few -- not meant to be representative or comprehensive, just the first few to get things started. Please add more in comments.

• Matthew Kressel of Sybil's Garage has impressed me greatly with recent comments.


• Sean Wallace of Fantasy Magazine is really thinking about issues of diversity. At Wiscon, he told me (paraphrased) that he's interested in finding stories with voices we don't often hear.


• Nick Mamatas of Clarkesworld is right about 99% of everything, and he's right about issues of representation in SF short fiction, too.


• Sheila Williams publishes stories that center on communities; recent issues have featured astonishing work by feminists like Nancy Kress and L. Timmel Duchamp. She's mentioned that she doesn't always get kudos for her work toward representation. Here, I'd like to give her some kudos. Kudos!


• Kelly Link and Gavin Grant of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet are publishing work that interacts seriously with race, such as the recent story about the passive complicity of all first worlders in the death and pain of people from the global south.

So far, folks on my LJ have already added:

• Paul Jessup at Grendel Song


• Endicott Studio and the Journal of Mythic Arts


• John Klima at Electric Velocipede

No knocking any market or editor on this thread, please. This is for positive endorsements only.

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UPDATE: The list so far

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List so far:

Clarkesworld (first suggested by: me)
Asimovs (first suggested by: me)
Lady Churchills Rosebud Wristlet (first suggested by: me)
Fantasy (first suggested by: me)
Sybil's Garage (first suggested by: me)
Grendel Song (first suggested by: squirrel_monkey
Endicott Studio and the Journal of Mythic Arts (first suggested by: Gwenda Bond)
John Klima at Electric Velocipede (first suggested by: Gwenda Bond)
Strange Horizons (first suggested by: M. K. Hobson)
Fantasy & Science Fiction (first suggested by: Kate Schaeffer)