The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [27]
To heck with sex, women, squishy stuff, and liquidity. The real phobia at the bottom of all this gender/genre allergy is to chores, I'm absolutely convinced.
LSC: It's another status thing. Whoever cleans up is the abject. Your mother used to collect your Analog from the mailbox and hide it until you'd cleaned your room.
LMB: This whole dialectic presents particular problems for women, and especially for women SF writers. Women in our culture are given the duty and responsibility (though not the power, of course) of "molding" our kids; we're drafted willy-nilly into the Cultural Gestapo, and woe betide us if our kids "don't turn out right." How can we become mothers, yet not become our mothers? We are SF writers in the first place only because, like our brothers, we resisted being assigned many of the chores of womanhood, handed out from our culture via, usually, our moms. Instead we went off and read disapproved books. And then, by damn, we even started writing them. (I can still hear my mother's voice, echoing from my own adolescence—"If you don't stop reading those silly science fiction books and get out of bed, you'll never get anywhere!" Now I sit in bed writing silly science fiction books, and my career has given me the world. Ha!) So, which side shall I be on? Must I choose, and lose half my possibilities thereby whichever choice I make?
LSC: But since you write "guy stuff," too, you're respected. By the earnest young (male) fan, for example, who told you that you "write like a man."
LMB: To which I should have replied (but didn't, because I don't think fast on my feet—that's why I'm a writer, the pencil waits) "Oh, really? Which one?"
I'm still trying to work out whether or not it came to a compliment. In all, since I write most of my adventure books from deep inside the point of view of a male character, Miles Vorkosigan, I've decided it's all right; if I'm mimicking a male worldview well enough that even the opposition can't tell for sure, I'm accomplishing my heart's goal of writing true character. The comment worried me for a long time, though. A trip through the essays of Ursula Le Guin also shook my self-confidence. Was I doing something wrong? But then I wrote Barrayar, returning at last to the full range of a female character's point of view, and I haven't been troubled by such comments since.
LSC: What does it mean to "write like a woman"?
LMB: Not one damned identifiable thing, as far as I can tell. As any competent statistician can testify, from a general statement about any group of people (such as a gender), nothing reliable can be predicted about the next individual to walk through the door.
I once ran a selection of my work through a supposed " gender-identifier" algorithm-machine found on the Net. All of the scenes written from the point of view of female characters came out as "written by a woman." All the scenes written from the point of view of male characters came out as "written by a man." I concluded that I wrote like a writer.
I see plenty enough female SF writers not to feel unusual. When I start naming them, it adds up pretty quickly—Willis, Cherryh, Asaro, Moon, McCaffrey, Turzillo, Czerneda, Zettel, Kagan, Kress, Le Guin for heaven's sakes, and dozens more. I don't know why journalists and critics and commentators keep mentally erasing us; perhaps we mess up their pretty theory. I'm less sure about foreign markets, but in the American midlist, SF seems a pretty level playing field between men and women writers. There are lots of women editors in the genre, as well.
But even in fantasy, the very top best-sellers do seem to be disproportionately male. I've heard it theorized that it's because more women will buy and read books by male writers with male protagonists, but fewer men will buy and read books by women writers with female protagonists. Women writers with male protagonists seem to get a partial free