Why men love science fiction so much?

[coalescent]

From the Observer blog:

But the appeal of the sci fi system to the ordinary fan lies not just in its orderliness, but in its finiteness. As with any holy text, the science fiction universe is knowable in its entirety. You can watch every single episode of Star Trek and learn everything there is to know about it. You can contain an entire universe in lists and DVDs. The kind of universe that is knowable by heart is much less threatening than the real universe outside, off screen, full of unpredictability and disorder.

It is my contention that the reassurance offered by a system of order, internal coherence, completability and collectability - a universe that can be put in alphabetical order - is particularly appealing to men.

It is always dangerous to draw stark gender distinctions, especially when, as here, there is no basis in science to back up the theory. These are just my observations. Obviously there are female Star Wars/Star Trek geeks, but nowhere near as many as there are male ones. Not by a mile.

Where to start?

Firstly, it's probably true that the appeal of Star Wars/Star Trek, for many, is that it offers a knowable universe. Secondly, it is probably true that canon can be treated as a holy text by some fans.[1] I'd even be prepared to go so far as to say that maybe the most critical cases of this syndrome are predominantly men (although to suggest, as the article does elsewhere, that 'Star Wars loyalists didn't hate The Phantom Menace because the acting and script were so bad, but because it contained canonical travesties' is overstating the case, I think).

But.

If there are more male Trek/Wars fans than female, I'd be inclined to suggest it says more about the nature of those two universes--with their emphasis on adventure and exploration by men--than it does about science fiction in general. Given that Revenge of the Sith features a grand total of two female characters and that one of them gets shot in the back without having a chance to defend herself while the other spends the entire film Just Being Pregnant, it's hardly a welcoming universe, after all. Trek has Janeway, but it's not clear to me that that's much of an improvement.

But I'm far from certain that that 'if' is true (I don't know how many people actually have serious trouble relating to characters of a different gender, for example) and certainly I can't imagine that the writer of the article has had much contact with, say, Buffy fandom and the factions contained therein. It might easily be true that the women outnumber the men there, and it's a place where, for all the easy jokes about fangirls obsessed with Spike's cheekbones, the women are certainly just as capable as the men of citing chapter of script and verse of writerly interview. Plus, you know, The World's Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly, going on even as I write.

For additional amusement, the comments on the original post give us this utterly moronic gem:

It's also a necessary social filter. Good looking chicks don't like science fiction; so you over the course of time you'll get a race to the bottom amongst sci-fi geeks as they have to mate with uglier and uglier women until they eventually join the neaderthals

I think I speak for us all when I say: s'yeah, right.

On a related note, SFX--the magazine infamous for obscuring part of its logo so that it appears to say 'SEX' [2]--recently started running a column by Jayne Dearsley with the stated aim being 'to redress the balance and to give a female viewpoint on all aspects of sf'. You can view this as cynically as you feel is appropriate, but she makes some good points:

Some male readers get upset whenever SFX prints pictures of James Marsters looking sultry; it's as though they feel their territory is being invaded. Which is funny, 'cause us girls don't mind when Jolene Blalock lights up a few pages with her lips--she seems like a nice gal. It's a strange double standard that annoyed me for the four years I worked in the SFX office, and will probably annoy me beyond it. Why do men get irritated when SFX acknowledges its female readership?
[...]
After all, we all like sf. And judging by the SFX mailbag, many women enjoy waxing lyrical about everything from the charms of Spike to the moves of Hellboy or the hard sf of Stephen Baxter--as many women as men put pen to paper [3]. Women can't be pigeonholed; yes, we often like films/shows/books for different reasons than men. But so what? We still love sf and fantasy or we wouldn't be reading SFX.

Which I think is one of the most sensible things I've ever read in SFX.

[1] The fun backwards implication of this, of course, is that holy texts are 'knowable in their entireity' and offer a universe that is 'much less threatening than the real universe outside, off screen, full of unpredictability and disorder.'

[2] Although in the interests of fairness, the magazine cover that caused me the most embarrassment in the kitchen at work at lunchtime was the lesbian tentacle porn issue of The Third Alternative.

[3] When I read this I was seized by the strange urge to test the theory that there are women Baxter-fans writing letters to SFX by sending in a personal ad. 'Malenfant seeks Emma Stoney', anyone?

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

That annoyed me quite a bit, so I posted a comment

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

What shocks me more about that article is its deeply idiotic gender assumptions, rather than anything it says about SF (after all, I've been known to accuse you of wanting order and finitness before now ;P). But you know I was going to say that, right?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Actually I thought I already had said that. :-P

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

It's always me, me, me with you, isn't it?

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Dammit, stop stealing what I was going to write before I get a chance to write it! Although, I'm rarely "shocked" by people writing stupid stuff about gender assumptions :-p

I've said it before: you can't say anything meaningful about a group of 3 billion people that isn't based on biology or stereotype, so why bother? On the other hand - "It is the phenomenon known as geekiness, and it emerges at the point where the Venn diagrams of maleness and Autistic Spectrum Disorder intersect." - well, maybe, but only if you agree with his definition of "geekiness", and also accept that the sentence works equally well if you substitute "femaleness" ^[1] for "maleness". But only maybe. And whether those two subsets would be proportionate in numbers to the two gender sets would be an interesting question to obtain emipircal evidence for, if such a thing were possible to do.
I was discussing with DH this morning, that if you accept that "dorkiness", "nerdiness" and "geekiness" are on a spectrum, then most people fit somewhere along it about some interest in their lives. I'm less dorky about SF than most people I know around here; but I'm more geeky about techy stuff, so it's all good :-)

[1] Clunky word isn't it; but carries less baggage than "femininity".

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

Well, indeed. As andrewducker points out below, what SF offers is similar to what many other interests offer. But I also think that people don't define 'geekiness' like that - a Shakespeare geek, for example, is called a scholar. :P The term 'geek' in popular usage is, for better or worse, almost synonymous with borderline interests like SF and video games. 'Tis the tyranny of the cultural majority.

I would have thought that female geeks are more or less identical to male geeks in what they get out of their interest (especially if, as that article argues, what geeks get out of it is a simpler, broader world - this seems to me a decidedly non-gender specific desire.). If there are fewer females in 'fandom' (and Niall has before this post sometimes admitted there are, particularly in literary 'fandom'), I suspect that says something more about 'fandom' than it does about 'women'.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

"dorkiness", "nerdiness" and "geekiness" are on a spectrum

So is wanting you to provide a diagram of this spectrum dorky, nerdy or geeky? :p

[andrewducker]

The male/female ratio for autism is around 4:1.

[andrewducker]

The fun backwards implication of this, of course, is that holy texts are 'knowable in their entireity' and offer a universe that is 'much less threatening than the real universe outside, off screen, full of unpredictability and disorder.'

This is _entirely_ true. And in many ways, even more so about computer games, sports (and, to a lesser extent, roleplaying games). All of these offer defined rules and a vastly simplified world, in which success is much more clearly defined and attainable - without having to worry about the subtle complexities and subjectivities which populate real life.

When there's clearly a 'good' and an 'evil' - life's so much clearer, n'est pas?

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Absolutely - and I somehow doubt that a preference for a defined, ordered life has anything to do with gender, and everything to do with personal preference. I've never seen anyone try to claim that there are far more male than female Catholics, Muslims, or Buddhists, for example. SF is just one area where maybe the men are more visible, or more overtly involved in "fandom"; but I doubt the the love of clear guidelines is gender-related.

[andrewducker]

I doubt it too.

However, in my experience, rules-lawyering (and the fascination with rules) is an almost uniquely male thing. Which isn't to say there _aren't_ female rules-lawyers - it's just rarer.

[deccasanta.livejournal.com]

While I completely agree that the article is simplistic to the point of dunderheadedness in terms of making gender generalisations, I have to point out that shows like "Buffy" whilst, yes, SF, are also coming from a different genre - that of the Gothic Tradition, which has historically has always had strong female exponents (Mrs. Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Angela Carter to name a few). There are, of course, many layers at work here - as in everything.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Fair point. Though we could always talk about female appreciation of Daniel Jackson Stargate instead, if you like. :p

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[deccasanta.livejournal.com]

Well, it would be a short conversation on my side.

[hawleygriffen.livejournal.com]

<3 korovyov_x.

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

1. Assuming stuff based on a gender is always going to be a wild generalisation, but this one seems particularly bad.

2. Jayne Dearsley used to annoy me by not being able to conduct an interview with any of the actors on Stargate SG-1 without drooling over them, and on one occasion asking to measure the sizes of their biceps.

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

2. Jayne Dearsley used to annoy me by not being able to conduct an interview with any of the actors on Stargate SG-1 without drooling over them, and on one occasion asking to measure the sizes of their biceps.

Typical. Women, eh?

[veggiesu.livejournal.com]

Thank god that none of the women you know are so incapable of conducting themselves in a decourous and approriate manner.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

"Malenfant seeks Emma Stoney for unconvincing cardboard romance", surely.

Also, surely if one is to accuse any genre of retreating from the complexity of the universe it should surely not be sf but, say, "mainstream".

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

"Malenfant seeks Emma Stoney for unconvincing cardboard romance", surely.

Oh, hush. :p

[dsky.livejournal.com]

"Some male readers get upset whenever SFX prints pictures of James Marsters looking sultry"

WTF? We do? I used to go "yay! James! *fanboy*" and leap to the interview with great gusto. When I used to read SFX that was.

[hawleygriffen.livejournal.com]

I read this entry and comments yesterday when I'd had something to drink, or maybe it was before then. It felt like I had, though. Either way:

I think I speak for us all when I say: s'yeah, right.

For some strange reason, that is quite amusing.

'to redress the balance and to give a female viewpoint on all aspects of sf'

Sorry, but *snerk*

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I don't know how many people actually have serious trouble relating to characters of a different gender, for example

It's not so much a problem of relating to individual characters as relating to a world or a story in which one gender is not represented or hardly represented.

Revenge of the Sith is a bad example - I can't relate to any of the male characters in that because they're terrible characters - but I suppose still counts as a case in point. Maul is another though, although in that case the imbalance is the subject of the story, which is less weird than when the writer seems unaware that they've sidelined an entire gender.

I also note it more in RotS than in films with smaller scope - if you're telling a story about men that happens to be set in a fantasy world then there's less of a sense of excluding women than there is in RotS which is an epic, designed to be telling the story of the whole society and also with a clear opportunity to provide female roles which was missed to a staggering degree.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Fair point, though I didn't feel particularly excluded by Maul even though neither of the two men were much like me. On the other hand, I did feel it a bit during Buffy S6, but I think that's mostly because I missed Giles.

I think even more than the Padme thing, it was the handling of the one female jedi that annoyed me. She's the only one who just gets shot in the back without even having a chance to defend herself.