The Hugo Awards Kerfuffle...

[Jo Zebedee]

Ordering from newsagents - wow that took me back , I have vague memories of doing that for comics when I was young

Actually thinking about it - I've not had a local big newsagent near me since the early nineties in Cambridge. After then I probably hastened their demise and got everything via big supermarket chains...and then the internet. Sorry independent newsagents!

And much like the bookshops, we only have ourselves to blame for the lack of choice. Like you, I prefer paper reading but I try to support the shops still doing okay and keeping the range. That's your big Smith's and Eason's of this world, and a few really good indie newsagents. But if we buy our papers and magazines from Tescos and cut off their daily life blood and footfall, then tis no wonder we can't find anywhere big enough locally to stock Interzone (which has a reasonable circulation and isn't, actually, all that niche).

Rant over.

 

[soulsinging]

*edited for brevity*

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Puts hand up warily. I'm a woman. I like action. I like humour, even blokey humour (just sniggered my way through one of @Toby Frost 's). I'm not big on romance. I was told by my teachers my reeading taste was execrable.

Let's not get too generalistic, eh? Especially when sff readership is pretty evenly split.*

*which does beg the question of why the sff awards aren't so evenly split, and why the perception of sff readers and writers is still that they're predominantly male. Something has got skewed somewhere.

 

[soulsinging]

Puts hand up warily. I'm a woman. I like action. I like humour, even blokey humour (just sniggered my way through one of @Toby Frost 's). I'm not big on romance. I was told by my teachers my reeading taste was execrable.

Let's not get too generalistic, eh? Especially when sff readership is pretty evenly split.*

This is what I don't get. You're upset that a survey found that women have a general preference that differs from yours? I don't get mad about studies showing most American men prefer football to baseball anymore or act like I'm being marginalized because some academic study found a trend in my gender that I don't share. If a study came out that most white guys like Ford cars, I wouldn't race to point out that the study must be completely invalid because I own a different brand. It's like the objective fact that women and men might have diverging tastes is offensive, but the person that actually called your tastes execrable is not? To me, the latter is what's offensive.

I see nothing wrong with sociological studies that say "hey guys seem to prefer stories where stuff blows up and girls seem to prefer other stories." I see something very wrong with a teacher telling you your tastes were execrable because you were reading SFF, and doubly so if they only said it because you are a girl. Acknowledging social fact is not prejudice. Using that evidence to prevent an individual from participating in something is VERY prejudiced. I don't get why the rest of the world seems to think it's the other way around and somehow acknowledging that maybe there are things about a given genre that appeal more to one gender than the other is grossly sexist. It's like a basic understanding of sociology and statistics is lacking the world over. The fact that the world's richest 1% are heavily male and white hasn't made ME any richer!

I don't get why I'm sexist for daring to suggest that any gender imbalance might have something to do with more men enjoying, supporting, reading, and voting for the genre and is not necessarily due to some huge conspiracy of men trying to ensure no woman ever reads SFF, let alone dares to write it. I don't get why I'm racist for thinking that maybe the lack of SFF from African authors has something to do with the lack of a legit space program on the continent and a population that needs to solve the problems of famine before speculating on conquering the stars, not necessarily because white guys don't want anyone with brown skin at their awards.

This is why I don't think this is a big deal. The existence of the SP movement proves there is NOT some big conspiracy to exclude women from the genre, that the genre is doing just fine with respect to embracing diverse authors and subjects, so much so that a few nuts went to crazy measures to change that. If they weren't already losing, they wouldn't have had to do that. SFF has left them behind and all this hoopla is unfounded because the SP's represent the last desperate gasp of a dying viewpoint.

 

[Ursa major]

*which does beg the question of why the sff awards aren't so evenly split, and why the perception of sff readers and writers is still that they're predominantly male. Something has got skewed somewhere.

I think the fact that those eligible to nominate and vote form only a tiny, self-selecting** and (probably) unrepresentative*** percentage of the wider SFF readership has a lot to do with the chosen award winners. Some Chronners have been to Worldcons, as far as I can tell, and so had the opportunity to nominate and vote for the Hugos. Did they? (Note that neither the SP and RP people are part of great hordes: a few hundred people voting for those two slates seem to have been enough to create the kerfuffle we're now witnessing.)


** - Self-selecting by 1) choosing (when eligible) to be a member of SFWA (Nebulas) or attendees (or paying supporters) of Worldcons (Hugos); 2) using that opportunity to nominate; 3) using that opportunity to vote.

*** - At Eastercon's Publish and Be Damned seesion -- where the issue of short form works not being published was mentioned -- it was pointed out by (some members of) the panel that the audience in the room were not at all representative of the wider reading public, even that part of it devoted to SFF.

 

[soulsinging]

You give them what they want to get them to eat/read when they're too young to know better, but as they get older, their tastes naturally change. So let them change, but in no way does that mean enforce some kind of "this is what I liked at 13 so it's all that I'll ever read forever" mentality.

So let me get this straight... a girl reads dozens of school assignments from all genres, picks up one hard SFF book and finds it dull and never reads the genre again, and she is open-minded and well-developed. But a guy reads dozens of school assignments from all genres, is so dreadfully bored by them that the only time he enjoys reading is when he picks up an SFF book in his free time, is subsequently told by a female teacher that such work is trash and gives up on reading entirely... HE is stuck in some immature mentality because he's not willing to read MORE of the books he has already learned are not to his liking?

That seems more sexist than anything I've read here yet.

 

[millymollymo]

Interesting reading. :>

http://aliettedebodard.com/2015/04/11/the-stories-i-wanted-to-read/

 

[Jo Zebedee]

@soulsinging I'm not angry about anything and I don't think anything in my post suggested that. Nor did I suggest you were in any way sexist. I merely suggested generalisations were being made which Don't tend to be helpful or, indeed, right in this case as shown by stats on female sff readers not being anywhere near the minority suggested by the generalisations.

(The execrable was my general reading taste not specifically sff. it didn't offend in the least

 

[soulsinging]

Wait. The teachers educating children are women. The librarians guiding children to books are women. The publishers in the position of deciding what books even exist and how they're marketed are women. And there is some vast male conspiracy that causes women not to write or read or be represented or win awards and it will all be fixed if men just just quit reading straight white male stuff? (BTW, I see again the diversity crowd is pure and sweet and all the wingnuts are on the SP side.) I'm confused. Why the hell aren't these female teachers, librarians, publishers, and readers doing their jobs? How is this an example of patriarchal injustice?

This, this, this and more of THIS!!!

Seriously... did I wake up with a piece of my brain missing this morning? An entire post about how women dominate publishing, education, and the choices young readers make, one that acknowledges that male readership is plummeting, and the conclusion is... men are engaged in a conspiracy to keep women out of the book world and we need to stop letting men's tastes control the book world? REALLY? How is that any different from the RP's saying "yeah, I know white guys dominate the hiring positions, capital ownership, and upper management, but this one black guy got a janitor's job over my white cousin because of affirmative action, so really it's us white men that have it tough."

I haven't wanted a cigarette this bad in months, because I think my head is going to explode trying to make sense of that argument.

 

[soulsinging]

@soulsinging I'm not angry about anything and I don't think anything in my post suggested that. Nor did I suggest you were in any way sexist. I merely suggested generalisations were being made which Don't tend to be helpful or, indeed, right in this case as shown by stats on female sff readers not being anywhere near the minority suggested by the generalisations.

(The execrable was my general reading taste not specifically sff. it didn't offend in the least

My bad, I just get annoyed at the way every study now has to have a disclaimer. It's like because one trend doesn't apply to me, therefore all evidence is thrown out. As my example above, if I own a Chrysler and 99 other guys own a Ford, there seems to be a movement now where nobody is allowed to point out that guys seem to prefer Fords because that trend doesn't account for ME, the most specialist snowflake in the world. What ever happened to it being ok to be different? To me, THAT is what diversity should aspire to... not some false notion that we're all identical and there are no differences among various genders/races/cultures, etc. It's like because we can find an exception to any "trend", we therefore can't make any general statements about anything in society. It's throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Why is it not ok to say "hey, I know it seems odd, but I'm a girl and I like action and humor?" If someone says "no, you can't read these books because you're a girl and action and humor is not fit for girls" then yes we have a problem. But short of that, what's wrong with admitting it's maybe slightly unusual? Why can't a guy say "I know it's odd, but I really like romance." It's always got to be "I'm a guy and I like romance, and because of that nobody can ever say anything about romance being more appealing to women for the rest of time because it makes me feel uncomfortable." BE WEIRD people. Life is SUPPOSED to make you uncomfortable sometimes. Forcing the rest of the world to change for the comfort of one person is not diversity, it's narcissistic personality disorder. Accepting that the world is not going to always align with one's desires or pre-conceived notions and being willing to accept that (whether it means being the weird one when you're the weird one or being open to letting the weird one win the award sometimes) is what promotes diversity.

 

[soulsinging]

Just like everyone else, guys need to find the stuff they like. I agree there needs to be more done to bring boys into reading as a thing to do, but any hint of boys only or no girls is the opposite of helpful. The point isn't to isolate and build walls around the stuff boys might like, rather to expand what's there that boys gravitate towards and get them to also try more kinds of books.

But this is not at all what happened, not even close. What happened was that the Hugos were doing exactly what you wanted... bringing in more women and minorities and more atypical SFF. That annoyed a handful of old coots that got together to rig awards voting for ONE year, before the backlash became so severe that even its leaders seem to be racing to find ways to downplay what they did. That shows that the genre as a whole is not building walls or isolating male interests, it's open and expansive. The SP movement is the aberration, but you're treating it like it's an alarming norm that needs to be challenged right now, which is not at all the case. They will be irrelevant by the next Hugo's.

This brings me to the problem I keep having with these posts... you're long on outrage over what happened, but short on answers or solutions. Do you have any ideas for what people should actually DO to address this problem you're perceiving? All I've seen is vague indication that these SP authors should be shouted down, and I know there are a lot of people like me that are opposed to real prejudice but the idea of joining a witch hunt against "close-minded" authors isn't really our idea of solving the problem of exclusion.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

But my point is that it isn't odd for a woman to like action (or, indeed, for a man to like romance.) There is a perception that it is, but that perception is a generalisation that simply isn't borne out by fact. Whilst there is a slight bias towards males, it's nowhere as near as being implied by generalising that women don't read action.

So, yes, it would be perfectly okay to say 'hey I know it's odd but I'm a girl and I like action and humour' if it was in any way odd. It's not. It's a myth that isn't borne out by fact. And, whisper it, in treating it as if it were fact, it starts to tread periously closely to sexist.

I'm not saying there aren't differences between men and women, I'm saying that this example - readership of action based sf - isn't one of them, especially once you take into account that women tend to buy more books. There are plenty of us around - I could name many other women here who like action based sf and many men that don't. It's got little to do with what sex we are.

 

[soulsinging]

But my point is that it isn't odd for a woman to like action (or, indeed, for a man to like romance.) There is a perception that it is, but that perception is a generalisation that simply isn't borne out by fact. Whilst there is a slight bias towards males, it's nowhere as near as being implied by generalising that women don't read action.

So, yes, it would be perfectly okay to say 'hey I know it's odd but I'm a girl and I like action and humour' if it was in any way odd. It's not. It's a myth that isn't borne out by fact. And, whisper it, in treating it as if it were fact, it starts to tread periously closely to sexist.

I'm not saying there aren't differences between men and women, I'm saying that this example - readership of action based sf - isn't one of them, especially once you take into account that women tend to buy more books. There are plenty of us around - I could name many other women here who like action based sf and many men that don't. It's got little to do with what sex we are.

Umm, the statistics provided above indicate that it IS unusual. That's not perception, it's fact, based on sociological study of self-selected reading preferences. It wasn't "hey do you think women like action" and thus reflecting biases. It was asking women what they like, and the majority said they don't care for action or humor. That is sociology. Again, why is that so offensive to you? I'm not offended when the numbers say 80% of romance readers are women... I don't run around trying to prove that "hey, you can't guys don't like romance because I do". I understand nobody is saying that. They're saying most guys aren't interested. And it's TRUE. I'm not going to argue that ALL guys like romance just because I do, that's toddler-style logic (my interests are the world's interests). Unless you think people are routinely lying in academic surveys?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Umm, the statistics provided above indicate that it IS unusual. That's not perception, it's fact, based on sociological study of self-selected reading preferences. It wasn't "hey do you think women like action" and thus reflecting biases. It was asking women what they like, and the majority said they don't care for action or humor. That is sociology. Again, why is that so offensive to you? I'm not offended when the numbers say 80% of romance readers are women... I don't run around trying to prove that "hey, you can't guys don't like romance because I do". I understand nobody is saying that. They're saying most guys aren't interested. And it's TRUE. I'm not going to argue that ALL guys like romance just because I do, that's toddler-style logic (my interests are the world's interests). Unless you think people are routinely lying in academic surveys?

Then we're reading different surveys:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s5.htm

I've been doing some research into this since I'm in the interesting position of being asked about it in interviews and I can't find anything to support the idea there is a huge imbalance of male to female sf readers. (Like I said earlier, there is a slight imbalance but not enough to make a female reading it unusual.)

Anyhow, this is derailing the thread so I'll bow out on that.

 

[soulsinging]

Then we're reading different surveys:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s5.htm

I've been doing some research into this since I'm in the interesting position of being asked about it in interviews and I can't find anything to support the idea there is a huge imbalance of male to female sf readers. (Like I said earlier, there is a slight imbalance but not enough to make a female reading it unusual.)

Anyhow, this is derailing the thread so I'll bow out on that.

That's an interesting survey, but the results aren't really that persuasive, especially since they seem to focus on tv viewing and are coming from the NSF and trying to promote interest in science. Also, answering that they had read one SFF book in the last year doesn't say much to me. I've tried a lot of things in a given year that I didn't wind up enjoying, and, as you point out, women read more to begin with. There's also the question of how SFF was defined in the question, as it's possible someone could read Twilight and then mark that they had read SFF because it had vampires. Or they could read the Hunger Games and have it be the only SF they will ever read. "Have you driven a car in the last year" is a very different question from "Is driving an activity you enjoy greatly?"

I was going by the studies posted earlier by a librarian that purported to study general reading habits and preferences of the population as a whole. Instead of leading questions like "have you read anything SFF in a year" it seems to be more along the lines of "check off the things you look for in a book." Guys checked off action and humor as being top priorities, women didn't. Most interesting in the study posted, when you split the genre further to just fantasy and just sci-fi, there is no gender difference for fantasy, but still a strong one for SF. *EDIT* I looked at some of those studies again and they look to be from the 90's at the latest, so not very persuasive either. I would be very curious to see if that has changed significantly in the last 20 years, as the whole equality movement has made pretty huge strides in that time.

SIDE NOTE: That survey you posted has results on American beliefs on various pseudo-sciences, including the fact that most Americans still believe in psychics apparently. I don't understand how people can get bent out of shape at the demographic imbalances in an award show (which vary year to year anyway) when we have REALLY disturbing problems like that to address.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

So let me get this straight... a girl reads dozens of school assignments from all genres, picks up one hard SFF book and finds it dull and never reads the genre again, and she is open-minded and well-developed. But a guy reads dozens of school assignments from all genres, is so dreadfully bored by them that the only time he enjoys reading is when he picks up an SFF book in his free time, is subsequently told by a female teacher that such work is trash and gives up on reading entirely... HE is stuck in some immature mentality because he's not willing to read MORE of the books he has already learned are not to his liking?

That seems more sexist than anything I've read here yet.

Good thing that isn't what I said.

 

[Brian G Turner]

We've had some really great and thoughtful responses in this thread, but it's starting to heat up a little. Let's try and get back to the original topic, which is about the Hugo awards, not chronicles members.

 

[millymollymo]

There's always one that mucks up the darn survey.
Or more then than one. Then what?
I like action. I like a certain kind of humour. As a kid I was destroying Autobots not dressing Barbie dolls. My role models were different.
Oh yeah. I'm a girl.

I must be some kind of weird, though. I prefer practical over theory. I don't 'do' maths. (I do, it's just more hard work when I tell myself that.) I didn't have any desire to be a hairdresser, nurse, mother, vet. Ok. I guess I'll have to be a teacher, seeing as forensics means dead people.
Being a teacher was hard work too. I don't like hard work.
I'll run my own business or six instead.
I don't mind hard work.
What I like to read isn't what you like to read. That's ok, I'm still my kind of normal. You're still your kind of normal. That's ok.
What I right doesn't make any flipping sense? Nope, Not ok with that... That I can do something about.

My kind of normal isn't easy to market to. Some of stuff I read doesn't have big sales, it isn't highly profitable. you can't buy it off the shelf. I had to find my short stories, I had to hunt down my Interzone. I still manage to get my hands on physical anthologies without going to *insert mass market, 1%er supply chain only here*. Why? Because I get the whole-supply-and-demand idea. Because of small press publishers like Fox Spirit, Tickety Boo, Alchemy Press, Kraxon, Newcon Press, TTA, Boo Books and the rest.

I get that I am not your kind of normal. That's ok. I get that my idea of success isn't your idea of success. I'm fine with that.

I'll buy what I want. NOT what I am told I want. Send me crap, I'll stop paying. Money turns this world. Respect is a different currency.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Here's a thought - if the Hugos really wanted to express diversity, why not have a new category for "best translated work"? The Oscars have a best foreign language film category...

 

[millymollymo]

You could go so far as to have an award for every sub-genre and an over all award.