Completely uncalled for bio-essentialism.
It begs the question: how do you even know the gender of an author? If we did the Pepsi challenge with a bunch of short stories and had people guess who wrote them, how accurate would those guesses even be?
There is probably something to literature being gendered. But claiming this is due to biology is hella weird.
This would seem to me incredibly difficult to prove or quantify in any meaningful way. Further complicated by the existence of editors.
There has to be market research in the publishing industry for stuff like that.
Presumably, but the publishing industry helps build the norms around what counts as “female literature” and “male literature” and how both are marketed/sold, so it would be pretty limited in terms of insight.
the publishing industry helps build the norms around what counts as “female literature” and “male literature”
Sure and the outcome of this and other factors is gendered literature.
also make sure the participants have no idea the authors have different genders, or that the study is about genders, and also
I have known multiple people who refused to believe American Psycho was directed by a woman even though she’s in the opening title credits
you can (usually) clock men and women writing around hornyness topics tbh (or rather the particular focus), but airport level-novels aren’t end all be all of writing. faulkner could have been a woman or agatha christie a man for all i care
you think people can read?
Jakkkobin
im guessing only a man would write this which is weird because i dont enjoy this
I push back. I’ve seen women IRL who love to talk about bio-essentialism like its the core of their personality.
I assert that it’s a gender neutral genre of loser.
Yep. I almost feel like saying a man must have written this is giving the argument too much credit because, with the exception of hilarious anatomical errors, virtually any author could use a pseudonym from the opposite gender and no one would think to guess that without being clued in first.
Yep my mom could have written this -_-
Your biological reality must not be sticky enough, time to refill your gender fluid /s
It’s true, though. Just the other day I decided to give this female author a shot and immediately noticed the lack of penis at which point I had to stop reading.
I tried to watch one of my sexy time adult movies and saw that the director was a FEMALE and I was devastated
I know the feeling, comrade. I too don’t want a female anywhere near my adult movie experiences.
If you just presuppose that sexism naturally must exist, then I guess sexism is real and valid
Female writing carries pheromones that deter male readers from engaging
There are sticky biological realities that do exist, like the slimy prion-laden ooze the average western journalist uses instead of a brain, but the fact that i prefer artistic works by women
Spoiler
or by totally not eggy indie creators who just happen to be able to write extremely compelling yuri for no reason at all
is actually due to the fact that i do not enjoy art that reproduces the patriarchal unpersoning of women. Which is something that unfortunately happens all the time when an author is a self-absorbed white boy who has never learned anything but the masturbatory, navel gazing solipsism that, sticky socio-political reality incoming, arises almost inevitably from an existance founded on trampling everybody else in the world.
I hate it when the words on the page are written womenly.
i only wear underwear designed and woven by the minds and hands of men.
this is how i maintain my man power.
I’ve lost track of the horrible trash that Jackoffbin has published. there was a really bad one recently
if only Harper Lee had described Atticus Finch as “a bear of a man” she could got gotten somewhere with her little writing hobby.
editors note: the author of this article thought Harper Lee was a man because ‘a Harper is a job, right? like the kind of thing only men have?’
Harper is a job, right?
That’s actually a harpist. Or a harpy.
it’s just basic biology folks. words on a page are clearly manly or womanly and its obvious to anyone which words are which by who wrote them.
she breasted boobily into her word processor
What year is it?? Can you link the article I wanna share?
What a weird article.
yup… written by a man.
Much apreciated!
Another chaucobinism?
When did Jordan Peterson join Jacobin’s writing staff
Purely anecdotal evidence, but I work in a bookshop and this is largely true, most fiction readers are disproportionately buying books written by a member of their gender marketed at their gender. The people buying the classics seem to do this less (especially women reading famous hundred year old books by male authors) though both genders are still more likely to buy classic authors of their gender.
Imo this will continue for a very long time until we live in a very different society and gender divisions fall away much more.
well that’s socialized behavior, not “biological reality”
they seem to imply people are just intrinsically much less likely to enjoy the contents of literature from the opposite-gender, which is ridiculous considering how many men have historically raved over books written by women only because they *thought* they were written by men (but were actually women using male pseudonyms)
I think a distinction has to be drawn between people actively disliking a work because they know it was written by the opposite gender vs relating more to a work of fiction written by their gender that emphasises how it feels to live as their gender (Hemmingway, Mishima, Wilde on one side and Austen, the Brontës, and Atwood on the other) and also the high barriers to entry for any woman looking to become a truly respected author that led many of them to pretend to be men. Most men like great works written by women and vice versa, they just feel more comfortable reading things in their comfort zone written by people they relate more to; the lower brow the books are, the more stratified this divide seems to get. The divide also increases the younger a person is
Somewhat interesting side note, the number of men and women reading ‘high brow’ stuff is roughly the same, but (like the article says) i see a lot less men than women reading low brow pulp stuff (presumably men looking for low brow stuff go elsewhere) so as a percentage of their reading population men seem to buy more fiction written by women than the other way round (but like i said earlier, the women who read high brow stuff read much closer to a 50/50 split than the men who do). The divide also seems to decrease the older the customer is too, before having a rebound when they’re getting really ancient, I don’t really know the implications of that but it seemed worth mentioning.
Jacobin just made an assertion and left it at that - idk
They also frame it as biological rather than social. It would clearly be a social phenomenon.
the claim that it’s a biological imperative of some kind is weird but the rest of the argument is just true in my experience and I don’t see why people on here are getting so het up about it
You can’t just handwave away the claim about biology as “weird”, it’s fucked up and signals all kinds of regressive bullshit, so that’s why people are upset by it. I don’t think it would attract this kind of response if it pointed to sexist marketing and culture or even simply stated the observation without attributing a cause.
Why are people on the site that has a huge amount of trans people upset at the “leftist” magazine using the same bullshit claims that right wing politicians are currently using to persecute trans people, so mysterious
It might be largely true as a function of marketing. In my case it isn’t really.
my worms thank you
