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salineaThere's a whole discussion that happened last week on Ran's Board which my friends from there most probably know all about, but about which I'd be curious to have some other opinions. (BTW, I use the nickname "Stranger" in those forums).
It all started with a post about Kushner's novel Priviledge of the Sword started by Pat, who beyond his activity on that forum also manages a Fantasy blog, which I think has a pretty good reputation.
Anyway, one of the thing that caught my eye was that Pat, among other things, called Priviledge of the Sword "chick lit through and through". Other people gave good or bad opinions about that novel or Kushner's novels generally speaking. Ran, notably, denied that it was Chick Lit, whereas Calibandar called it "the girliest books I've laid my hands on in recent years".
Discussions about the "male-ness" or the "girly-ness" of specific books is something I have seen often, and which I may have sometimes made use of myself, even though I don't like it, to refer to some hard-to-define aesthetics. So I started a thread about that subject, using Pat's thread as an example, in which I asked a lot of questions to people : Chick Lit, What is it? Why isn't there any Boy's Lit?
I had two agendas with this thread : pointing out the sexism in calling some books Chick Lit in order to dismiss their quality, and questionning which specific images and idiosyncracies were associated with which gender and why. The thread saw much more discussions about the first point, both in agreement and disagreement, although some people did good effort to answer my second point as well. The discussion grew in some points somewhat heated and even wanky, but wasn't uninteresting.
A certain amount of people did agree that "Chick Lit" described a specific genre of book about female protagonists in urban, modern setting with an irreverant tone and some sexual situations, that such a genre had nothing to do with Kushner's writing. Some people also agreed that Chick Lit wasn't a good name for such a genre because it described what kind of market the genre is aimed at instead of the content of the books; and because it can cause confusion about other books, like Kushner's. Although lots of people still disagreed about that, so I'd hardly call it a consensus.
Last part of this little debate, Pat's eventually posted his final review of Priviledge of the Sword at his blog yesterday. Unsurprizingly, he was still mostly negative about it, but also persisted in calling it "Fantasy chick lit" and "one of the 'girliest' novels [he's] ever read", moreover he extrapolated this description by saying :
You'd think he was talking about about badfanfics ^^ I'm not entirely surprised by this reading because earlier at Ran's Board, I'd seen ErrantBard, who appeared quite sane otherwise, say about Swordspoint :
A number of which terms had me raise my eyebrow in regard of Swordspoint. But hey! People read books are see different things in it. It happens.
It makes sense that a certain lack of sensitivity about specific genres that one doesn't like mean that one blurs the distinction between those genres. Thus romance, mannerpunk, and Chich Lit elements are all confused and equally dismissed as if they were equivalent although to anyone looking into those seriously it's obvious they're very far from being the same. The fact that all these different elements are, for some reason, associated with female taste and female writing is of course what makes such confusion problematic and sexist.
The thing that really makes me angry there is that several people as well as Pat have defended their use of the term by saying "what is so bad about works written by women that cater to what women want to read?" even though they're very obviously using the word "Chick Lit" or "girly" to dismiss and criticize a specific type of writing : "corny romance", "inordinate amount of emo moments", "the emo male characters are not authentic."
That's not the description of a genre of writing that one doesn't like but that's still considered as legit. That's a description of bad writing, through and through. A bad writing that is typified as female.
Now, while I'm still infuriated about the structural sexism of such use of terms, I'm also still curious about which elements are associated with specific genders and why.
It all started with a post about Kushner's novel Priviledge of the Sword started by Pat, who beyond his activity on that forum also manages a Fantasy blog, which I think has a pretty good reputation.
Anyway, one of the thing that caught my eye was that Pat, among other things, called Priviledge of the Sword "chick lit through and through". Other people gave good or bad opinions about that novel or Kushner's novels generally speaking. Ran, notably, denied that it was Chick Lit, whereas Calibandar called it "the girliest books I've laid my hands on in recent years".
Discussions about the "male-ness" or the "girly-ness" of specific books is something I have seen often, and which I may have sometimes made use of myself, even though I don't like it, to refer to some hard-to-define aesthetics. So I started a thread about that subject, using Pat's thread as an example, in which I asked a lot of questions to people : Chick Lit, What is it? Why isn't there any Boy's Lit?
I had two agendas with this thread : pointing out the sexism in calling some books Chick Lit in order to dismiss their quality, and questionning which specific images and idiosyncracies were associated with which gender and why. The thread saw much more discussions about the first point, both in agreement and disagreement, although some people did good effort to answer my second point as well. The discussion grew in some points somewhat heated and even wanky, but wasn't uninteresting.
A certain amount of people did agree that "Chick Lit" described a specific genre of book about female protagonists in urban, modern setting with an irreverant tone and some sexual situations, that such a genre had nothing to do with Kushner's writing. Some people also agreed that Chick Lit wasn't a good name for such a genre because it described what kind of market the genre is aimed at instead of the content of the books; and because it can cause confusion about other books, like Kushner's. Although lots of people still disagreed about that, so I'd hardly call it a consensus.
Last part of this little debate, Pat's eventually posted his final review of Priviledge of the Sword at his blog yesterday. Unsurprizingly, he was still mostly negative about it, but also persisted in calling it "Fantasy chick lit" and "one of the 'girliest' novels [he's] ever read", moreover he extrapolated this description by saying :
"There's a very "girly" approach to the narrative. It focuses on undying/forbidden love, corny romance, flowers, jewelry, gowns, fabrics, and an inordinate amount of emo moments. For crying out loud, the characters shed more tears in this book than bridesmaids at a wedding! There is only so much crying one can take, after all. In addition, the emo male characters are not authentic."
You'd think he was talking about about badfanfics ^^ I'm not entirely surprised by this reading because earlier at Ran's Board, I'd seen ErrantBard, who appeared quite sane otherwise, say about Swordspoint :
what I would say classify it as "chick-lit" in my mind is, from memory:Flowers and effeminate looking men with open shirts on the cover, first Prominence of homosexuality in the relationships Pure love Invincible yet sensible, fragile, honourable hero. Insufferable whiny useless support characters you're supposed to pity rather than wish dead, for some reason A plot revolving around the feelings some people have for each other.
A number of which terms had me raise my eyebrow in regard of Swordspoint. But hey! People read books are see different things in it. It happens.
It makes sense that a certain lack of sensitivity about specific genres that one doesn't like mean that one blurs the distinction between those genres. Thus romance, mannerpunk, and Chich Lit elements are all confused and equally dismissed as if they were equivalent although to anyone looking into those seriously it's obvious they're very far from being the same. The fact that all these different elements are, for some reason, associated with female taste and female writing is of course what makes such confusion problematic and sexist.
The thing that really makes me angry there is that several people as well as Pat have defended their use of the term by saying "what is so bad about works written by women that cater to what women want to read?" even though they're very obviously using the word "Chick Lit" or "girly" to dismiss and criticize a specific type of writing : "corny romance", "inordinate amount of emo moments", "the emo male characters are not authentic."
That's not the description of a genre of writing that one doesn't like but that's still considered as legit. That's a description of bad writing, through and through. A bad writing that is typified as female.
Now, while I'm still infuriated about the structural sexism of such use of terms, I'm also still curious about which elements are associated with specific genders and why.
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no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 09:19 am (UTC)I agree with you, I find the term "chick-lit" demeaning, especially when used to describe books in this way. This is something I have argued for in the past: if people use a word and load it with negative connotations, then it WILL be negative, even if they try to cover they arses by saying "Well, some people like this stuff". It's still wholly negative and wasn't meant in any other way.
It's also demeaning since it insinuates something aimed at a female audience is necessarily of worse quality and that women prefer inferior literature.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 09:46 am (UTC)But just regarding the male version of chick lit - isn't this lad-lit, by authors such as Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons with an emphasis on a selfish male protagonist and a male centric view of the world?
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Date: 17 October 2007 09:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 10:13 am (UTC)I think there is a huge difference between complaining that a book is overly sentimental, corny, or inauthentic, and complaining that it's designed to appeal to women, ewwww feh, who have no taste. Creating a parallel genre, "bad books designed to appeal to men"--this fails to appease me.
The whole genre of the novel--and even genre novels--were created by women, for women, in nearly every language that novels exist. Go read some Latin religious texts, you manly men.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 10:16 am (UTC)Yeah, odd how they fail to understand this.
Go read some Latin religious texts, you manly men.
XDDD you're awesome!
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 10:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 10:55 am (UTC)What she said: you are awesome.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 10:59 am (UTC)QFT. *claps* Now I'm having visions of Mr Collins from "Pride and Prejudice", horrifiedly exclaiming how he "never reads novels". :-)
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Date: 17 October 2007 11:09 am (UTC)Also, what 'ErrantBard' said in the list above could also be applied to Eragon by Christopher Paolini which is just appallingly bad, but I don't think would ever be called 'Chick Lit.' (Granted it is also YA, so it could probably be dismissed as that).
Sorry, I'm rambling without much direction, but interesting post.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 11:15 am (UTC)There's a very small step between "I don't like it, but women do" and "I don't like it, women do, so women like bad writing". Some people seem to have taken it, and are likening "girly" to "bad".
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 11:54 am (UTC)I have a feeling that this sort of thing is just very lazy criticism. They go "I dont like it, but somebody is buying this stuff" and then just say "it must be 'for' women." without thinking through what that means.
Of course, if this is all it is and the charge of sexism is levelled at them, they are likely to get defensive and use poor logic to defend a position they don't actually support.
I dont think Pat should have used that language in his website review, having known that people were questioning his terminology.
I'd hope that most people saying this sort of thing don't actually think that "girly" equals "bad", but as I say it's lazy thinking. And maybe this leads to such invalid conclusions being drawn (though I hope this isn't so).
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:09 pm (UTC)Maybe I'd better go and reread it.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:19 pm (UTC)A winner is you.
It's depressingly the case that women have a lot of trouble breaking into "masculine" genres--it took a while for there to be many women poets, for example--while men seem to *take over* "feminine" genres. When was the last time you heard of a female epic poet? But male novelists are all over the place.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:23 pm (UTC)I'm rather pissed at Pat about the incident -- instead of sitting back and examining the problems with what he wrote, he decided to act like a pompous jackhole instead. The "well, we've had endless sexism discussions in my province and I'm sick of it" excuse doesn't hold water. Especially when the *reason* for those discussions was a sexist nutbag who blew away 18 female engineering students with an assault rifle.
Yeah, maybe Pat *ought* to be examining that sexist culture a bit more, 'cos he's feeding right into into it.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:32 pm (UTC)Besides, it's speaking for the tastes of a group (women) done by a member of another group. If he's going to presume that "women" have distinct tastes, as a group, then he automatically loses the right to generalize about these tastes (at least without a strong statistical backing), because he has no way of knowing if they are true. Speaking for "women" as a group, women have exactly the same range of tastes as men, although cultural influences weight the scale in a different direction. I myself am very fond of explosions and not so fond at all of romance. I despise most of the books sold under the heading "Chick Lit" (or for that matter "YA", bar fantasy, which has no age limit if it's good), because a)they're demeaning stereotypes, and b)most of them are poorly written. A book is not "Chick Lit" just because I like it.
If I referred to any book written by a man which I happened not to like as " typical penis-compensation", that would not be fair, or accurate. Likewise, it's unfair to lump all books written by women which one does not like under "chicklit".
Okay, end spiel.
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:37 pm (UTC)(No, I didn't know the date of publication off the top of my head. Yes, I did remember this poem's existence from a paper I wrote in middle school! ha ha!)
It's also true that some early examples of the novel in English were written by men, but they share all the characteristics of "chic lit"--I'm thinking of Richardson's Pamela, for example. It's hard to think of an early novel written by men for men. Hmmm. Maybe Tristram Shandy?
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Date: 17 October 2007 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 12:54 pm (UTC)I particularly like this argument. It angered me about the whole dicussion that the idea to use neutral and technical descriptions was dismissed, because of something like "what's the problem with having a word that describes the readers?"
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 01:03 pm (UTC)All I'll say is that as a writer (since he decided to throw that phrase around in a response to Elio) he should recognize the enormous power of word choice, and not claim that he didn't intend to be inflammatory and derogatory with terms like "Chick lit" and "girly". I'm still not even sure what he meant by that, after reading the review and all the responses. Was it sappy? Melodramatic? Trite? Contrived? Lacking in developed characters? Printed on pink paper in a flowery font? Sporting a provocative tattoo near the base of the spine? Lacking in gore? Unrealistic in representing relative physical strengths of petite young women versus big, brawny men?
no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 17 October 2007 01:19 pm (UTC)I was going to compare it with YA, too. It's not exactly the same situation, but they're both demeaning stereostpes, aren't they? "Chick lit" implies that all women like the same stereotypically "girly" things and a book doesn't need to be good as long as those things show up. "YA" implies that kids are stupid so you don't need to bother with things like plot. (If I hear the "what do you expect, it's a kids' book" argument once again I'm going to kick someone, really.)