Recently, Alex Layne shared an article on her Facebook page about how gender equality is still by and large a problem for the science fiction world of literature. It’s an interesting read, (you should go and check it out) but not the reason for this post. Instead, what frustrated me the most about this post was the fact that there was one lonely comment at the bottom in which the commenter made very plainly his ignorance to the real issue at hand.
One thing to keep in mind about this article is that it came from a French source, was translated to English, and then redistributed by WorldCrunch. The original source (when translated via Google Translate) offers 7 comments vs. the one, but no more intelligent conversation than the WorldCrunch version. So, digression aside, here is the comment from the article:
Notwithstanding the outrage that I felt reading this person’s comment, the biggest problem for me comes from the fact that people still think that the end all argument is consumerism. “Buy it and they will come” this person says, but offers nothing else as to why he/she thinks that there are larger problems than the issue of women being treated poorly in the SciFi world. The commenter even goes on to say that this article and all of the other “500” articles this year about the same issues are petty. Not because sexism is petty, but because consumerism could easily fix this problem and therefore these “petty” issues are a “great indicator of how good we have it.”
Sometimes, I just want to rip my hair out.
First of all, while consumerism does speak volumes as far as getting the attention of the people in power/control of what gets published versus not, it is not the be all/end all answer to how we fix the issues of how women are treated in science fiction (or really in most aspects of business/the world where consumerism is the base for business). The article discussed how women in real life are treated poorly by their male peers in the SF world because of their status as a woman. This is not an issue that can be fixed by consumerism. If all the women went out and bought solely female written SF novels, the male authors would not suddenly have a change of heart and start treating women more fairly. And the point here is not, “oh, we want more women to buy women’s books so that the men can feel our pain,” but that we want an equal/fair playing field so that men and women alike can consume books written by an equal share of women and men.
Second, if you listen to our podcasts you’ll know that on the last episode we talked about how much power marketing has over what sells to which gender. In an article on Polygon, author Tracey Lien trails the history of marketing as it pertains to video games and pinpoints the moment in time when video games suddenly became meant for boys and not girls. What the commenter above fails to realize is how much marketing intentionally affects our perceptions of what is meant for a man versus a woman; marketing specifically targets one type of audience because it is easier for them to sell to one person (generally speaking) rather than hundreds of diverse and different minded people. Consumerism does not fix this problem either; Rodger Roeser, president of marketing firm The Eisen Agency, explains that with enough money and intention he could market tampons to men:
“Given enough money, I could make guys buy tampons,” says Roeser. “I mean, I could figure out something to do with them. It all comes down to how somebody like me, and there’s frighteningly thousands of me across the country and the world, creates a campaign that specifically targets an audience.”
This is one of my favorite quotes from the Polygon article as it perfectly articulates what kind of mental games marketing plays with consumers on a daily basis. While consumers come into play when marketing is looking at results of their campaigns and may be the original basis for a targeted audience, it does not always boil down to consumers being the sole reason for a marketing campaign to occur. Roeser goes on to explain in the Polygon article that there has to be a decision made as to who the marketing is targeted at, the marketing firm presents the research and a potential ad campaign and the execs over at “insert development studio name here” decides which one to go with. Consumerism does not fix this problem. Sexism is a mentality within these industries (technology, video games, SF literature, etc.) that has not arisen because of the people purchasing their products, but because of a larger problem of an age old mindset that men are entitled to certain things that women are not allowed to be a part of. And the same goes vice versa, men are not “allowed” to participate in some things designated for the female gender.
While consumerism plays a small role in the discrepancies between what is meant for male versus female, it is not the answer to a very large problem at hand. As a matter of fact, I think it is the biggest cop out answer anyone can come up with and unfortunately it is used quite often by people who think that women are overly sensitive to the “harsh realities of the world.” There are much larger issues than consumerism that need to be battled and the fact that women have to constantly reinstate how inaccurate the argument is only deters us from fixing the issue and making the world more fair/equal for men and women alike.
