Women in SF and a missed opportunity

Yesterday i attended and facilitated an UN Women event on Women in Speculative Fiction. It was a great discussion with three super panelists and a small audience. We talked about how SF has been a male dominated genre and how that is changing - too slow for some perhaps. The two women panelists spoke of how women tend to self-edit a lot and submit stories/manuscripts less often than men. One said that though submissions by men on online journals are higher than those by women the published stories by gender are on par. One of the panelists who is founder editor of the journal LONTAR shared statistics of the percentage of stories by women in the journal. They had dips but on average the stories by women hovered around 45% of the total. Yet published books by women writers of science fiction, epic and high fantasy lag behind books by men. 

Are men better writers? Are they more confident submitting or is something else operating here? Is what they write more commercially viable?

Next we spoke of female characters and how the roles they play are changing. One of the authors on the panel described one of her characters, a werewolf dealing with werewolf issues but also a mother of three. Why should women in SF only be young, curvaceous and leather clad, she said. Many in the audience nodded vigourously. The author also spoke of different kinds of strength not just that which is depicted by sword yielding warriors. A question was raised - women characters in SF have changed but have male characters changed? Depends on what you read, one said - but there seemed to be a consensus that male characters have not changed much. One of the panelists pointed how often readers related easily to stereotypical roles and it was easy to write within those roles and much harder to try to change the stereotypes. Someone in the audience said that it was not enough to have just the women change but men's behaviour towards the women also needed to. 

Mad Max, Fury Road - a feminist film? There was some disagreement around that. One of the panelists said that change in popular culture themes and roles need to come in slowly to be accepted. I felt a slight constriction in my chest and wondered do they really?

Then we moved on to speaking of SF worlds and how SF has been used well to comment on and challenge existing fault lines in society. The setting of a different world allows our minds to reflect on phenomena that we find too painful to face in ours or have normalised in our realities. An interesting question was asked - when writers write politically do they need to be gentle in their writing so as to not turn off readers but create opportunities to introspect? One panelist said if she wanted to write strongly about an issue she would go ahead and do it. One talked about books where the issues have come up very silently (Neil Gaiman - American Gods) or books where the characters and narratives have been so absorbing that the issue though very direct has felt natural (Left Hand of Darkness). 

It was at this point that a question began slowly forming in that constricted chest. I seem to have written this long post just to get to that question - which i still  have trouble articulating clearly. Something feels wrong here - worlds like the one George R.R. Martin has created with a very disturbing form of patriarchy - dystopic - are accepted easily. Despite having a few strong women characters he really does hit you over the head with a culture where men dominate and control and rape culture is normalised. In our current times when we are struggling towards an equal world - is he not also making a 'political' statement? Maybe i have got it wrong but it felt that if i wanted to make a counter statement in fiction about how abhorrent rape culture is i might need to tone my voice down - to be heard, to be commercial enough?  Why is it wrong to have a 'feminist agenda' but not wrong to have a misogynist voice? As i write this i see that perhaps i too am too careful in my own re-write of the hindu myths - i too am approaching the issue too gently.

Writing counter culturally is hard -  i need to push my boundaries. But i wish that this question had formed clearly within me yesterday - a missed opportunity :( for discussion from the panel and audience.