Is it alright for men to read Jane Austen?

It's all right for men to watch the movies too although, I have to say, in my opinion, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is more fun than Pride and Prejudice.
 
Swank said:
I just found out that the dude that wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, is a woman!
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I'd stick with those rugged chaps George Eliot and James Tiptree Jnr. You know where you are with those lads.
 
Montero said:
I didn't get it either. Needed a wink emoticon or summat.
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Deadpan humor doesn't work as well if you say "Just kidding!" right after the punchline.


My post was poking fun at the thread by pointing out that the founder of "male-driven SF" was a woman, and how we can become so blind to our own assumptions about gender stuff that you can look right at a name and not register what it is telling you.

So a combination of "Nurse, where's the doctor?" "I am the doctor!"

AND

You ever notice how you don't notice celebrity names? You just accept Sigourney Weaver, without thinking "what's a Sigourney???" If you believed that only men wrote SF, you would probably not process that Mary Shelley is clearly a woman's name until pointed out to you.


But that's just my digression in this silly, silly thread. Next up:
"Will viewing Manet's ballerina paintings cause low T?"
 
Swank said:
If you believed that only men wrote SF, you would probably not process that Mary Shelley is clearly a woman's name until pointed out to you.
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This is nonsense though, isn't it? I think anyone would process that "Mary" was likely to be a woman regardless of any peculiar ideas they might have about SF. And, I'm not sure anyone thinks only men wrote SF back in the day anyway.
 
Bick said:
This is nonsense though, isn't it? I think anyone would process that "Mary" was likely to be a woman regardless of any peculiar ideas they might have about SF. And, I'm not sure anyone thinks only men wrote SF back in the day anyway.
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Well, no. My point about famous names is that we don't really process them like normal people. The name becomes "Maryshelley" when you hear it often enough. And, "Mary" might just seem to be like Ashley, Jody, Kelly, Lindsey, etc. All those names that might later take a more definitive gendering, but long ago maybe were not.

And then there's the part about everything SF from Shelley 'til much more recently being dominated by men, until women with obviously female names like James, Leigh, Andre, Pat and C.J. became famous. ;)


So it was more about the unthinking associations we make rather than some big conspiracy about male domination. The same automatic but opposite assumptions about the gender happen with other professions like OBGYNs and YA authors where one might also presume.
 
Sure I've mentioned this somewhere around here before but years ago I was browsing a second-hand book stall in a market. Lots and lots of paperbacks. I asked if they had any science fiction. "All the books by women are on this side - all the books by men are on that." was all the answer I got.
 
Swank said:
My post was poking fun at the thread by pointing out that the founder of "male-driven SF" was a woman, and how we can become so blind to our own assumptions about gender stuff that you can look right at a name and not register what it is telling you.
Click to expand...

Hugo Gernsback invented science fiction. Shelley, Verne and Wells were drafted.
 
Swank said:
My point about famous names is that we don't really process them like normal people. The name becomes "Maryshelley" when you hear it often enough. And, "Mary" might just seem to be like Ashley, Jody, Kelly, Lindsey, etc. All those names that might later take a more definitive gendering, but long ago maybe were not.
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I understand your point, I just don't agree I'm afraid. Perhaps this is how you hear "Mary Shelley", or other famous people, but I hear the name, and register her as a woman, because, well... "Mary", and I process it just the same as anyone else, famous or not. I'm not sure your point applies generally to most people.

Swank said:
And then there's the part about everything SF from Shelley 'til much more recently being dominated by men, until women with obviously female names like James, Leigh, Andre, Pat and C.J. became famous. ;)
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I get your point, and you're right about the genre in its earliest decades, but still, it's a selective list. What about the numerous early female pioneers of SF with first names such as Judith, Katherine, Anne, Pauline, and Ursula? (And Leigh and Pat are both usually female names anyway).
 
Bick said:
I get your point, and you're right about the genre in its earliest decades, but still, it's a selective list. What about the numerous early female pioneers of SF with first names such as Judith, Katherine, Anne, Pauline, and Ursula? (And Leigh and Pat are both usually female names anyway).
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Because I was being funny.


I will try to avoid doing so in the future. But I'm not going to tell my actual male friends Leigh and Pat that their names are feminine.
 
Well I'd heard of Mary Shelley before I heard about the famous poet, and it was obvious to me right from the start that the author was that rare thing, a woman
 
Bick said:
This is nonsense though, isn't it? I think anyone would process that "Mary" was likely to be a woman regardless of any peculiar ideas they might have about SF.
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I can see it.

Names do change over time and there are cultural differences to deal with too: I have no idea what gender most Japanese, Asian, Indian, or other non-western names are. (Or indeed which part of a name is the family name and which the individual's.)

But even western names are ambiguous.

These days 'Marion' seems to be exclusively a female name but when the actor we know as John Wayne was born he was christened Marion Morris.

Gabriel García Márquez - in English speaking countries 'Gabrielle' is far far more common than the male version 'Gabriel' so for years I though he was a woman.

Vivian, Evelyn, and Hilary used to be almost exclusively boys' names - how many people assume/d Evelyn Waugh was a woman?

I can never keep in my head which spelling of Leslie / Lesley is which and there are all sorts of gender neutral names to deal with (especially diminutives) like Robin, Holly, Sam, Pat...

Or how about 'Anne' - pretty solid girls' name right? Not in Holland - Anne de Vries - Wikipedia, Anne Vermeer - Wikipedia
 
That's odd about Marion, because the only Marion I can think of was the medieval Maid Marion, which I thought would have set a fairly strong precedent.

The rules seem slightly different in America. For a long time, I thought Tracy Hickman of Dragonlance fame was a woman. And rapper Ice-T is a Tracy.
 
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