Not enough novels with lesbian protagonists, or not enough interesting ones?

And you may be right about the “writing to our desires” thing – or to our misconceptions on the part of misogynistic figures like Robert Jordan – me, I would like to see more interesting novels with lesbians as the protagonists … we just don’t get enough of those.

Do you happen to have statistics on the gender distribution of published authors? The only stats I found were skewed by a large proportion of the works being reprints/reissues.

Otherwise, I’ve enjoyed male and female authors with equal enthusiasm throughout my life … even, on a few occasions, mistook one for the other and only discovered my mistake much later.

Admittedly you see a different focus, in general, between the stories written by each gender … especially in the region of relationships vs action. But there are certainly women who prefer the latter over the former and vice versa.

I find it a terrible shame that anyone should think “men deserve to win more” … don’t they win enough?

That said, if they were not careful to be certain men and women were equally represented at the onset of their judgment it is quite possible there were more books written by males in the list to begin with … as there tend to be more widely published male authors. (for whatever reasons)

Although, perhaps not many men, in a virtually all male environment, will defend women. The ones who have a different opinion might just stay quiet. Strong the male pack mentality is. But I don’t think many guys will tell another guy that he’s being immoral, even in private. And I have to admit, it’s something I quite like about men — that they tend to assume other people’s lives are none of their business.

The men vs pregnancy thing is surely(?) more complicated than men tell themselves it is. I mean, they talk about not getting any, but there are obviously ways to achieve sexual satisfaction without intercourse. And hey, if his partner’s too tired/ill to give so much as a handjob, well, perhaps Sir could go off and have a quiet wank. But surely(?) there must be a lot of emotion involved, too. Fear of the responsibility of fatherhood, fear of having to share your partner’s affections, fear that the motherly part of her will no longer be available to you… all those things that a bloke isn’t going to admit in public or possibly even to himself. Not to mention revulsion at the pregnant body, which men might experience and not know how to deal with except by running from it into other arms. Not that I think any of this is an excuse for lying and cheating — but perhaps if men understood their own fears better they’d feel more in control and be less at the mercy of their impulses. Or maybe not. The penis is always distracting.

Poor old humanity. We’re living complex lives with stone age brains. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that we manage to keep civilisation going at all.

Whether women make relationships central to fiction and men emphasise outside conflicts is a general truth, I’m not sure. The male writers we call great are often those who do explore relationships and interior conflict — but maybe they’re the great and the few?

I have to say, I think it might be doing men a disservice to judge them by the inhabitants of chan boards…

Michael – even Jesus would cut that Collector guy’s penis off, then cut his head off, possibly after making him eat his own severed penis. I’ll stick with Southpark.

“EEK, a penis,” Southpark, is much more intellectual.

/lit/ is a very slow moving board but some interesting things do crop up. And one of the most interesting things is the prevailing attitude that Russian literature is God-tier (I personally think it’s death but anyway) and that there are no women writers except Ayn Rand. On the rare occasions that female writers are brought up the screams are deafening and every criticism in the world is flung at them. Yet, if a male writer comes up that is deemed to be, well, less than stellar, the statement is usually made that yes, it’s rubbish but it’s entertaining rubbish so STFU. I remember a very old thread- I forget who it was centred around, I’m thinking Dean Kootz but I could be wrong- about a book that ends with a man living on an island with a woman locked in a cage. Apparently it’s a love story but the man tells her that he can’t find the key even though he has it, and there she stays, in the cage, basically his pet. The commentary provided was, “Nice dream, huh?” And I remember that further down the page there was another thread, unusually discussing female writers and the howls of rage about man-hating femminists were deafening to behold.

Another thing I notice about this board is that the writers there, although male, are usually ones with workman-like prose. China Meiville, who has a poetic bent to him, sometimes gets mentioned but that’s it. And when I go to my bookshelves, the female writers there are mostly of a poetical bent themselves; Angela Carter; Anais Nin; yourself, even. And with just about all female writers the focus is on relationships, or the relationship drives the story. With the male writers, relationships are often an important part but the plot is often driven by some outside conflict. Aliens. Fascism. Cthulu.

I overheard a frightening conversation yesterday. I work in a male dominated field. Indeed, there’s fifty-sixty odd people who work on this site but there are four females in total, two of whom work in the office and I’ve seen in the operational areas maybe twice in two years. I am not a particularly feminine female. I’m not even a particularly human human. I regard the concept of being in a REL-la-TION-ship with something close to the horror I have of becoming pregnant and bearing a child, and both levels of horror are similar to that I feel at the concept of wearing makeup or doing my hair before work. For that I’ve been awarded title of, ‘can safely be ignored’ by some of the guys when they come over for a chat to my male boss and co-workers. And what they say can be terrifying.

Yesterday the subject of pregnancy came up. My co-worker’s wife is pregnant and is due next month. And he is both resentful of that fact and, since it’s a difficult and painful pregnancy for her and he’s not gettin’ any, faithless. And quite open about that to his friends. An interesting thing for a devoutly religious Muslim who prays five or six times a day. The general consensus amongst the group of men was that ‘most (yes, they said ‘most’) women will deliberately get pregnant without the man’s permission, sometimes to trap him and sometimes because she wants kids’. The further consensus was that contraceptives are mainly the responsibility of the woman, and that it’s her fault if she gets pregnant and not because, like, he stuck it in.

Sometimes the lunchtime conversations scare the crap out of me. And two of these gentlemen have extended a standing invitation to go out horse-riding with them of a morning. Themselves, and myself. Just the three of us. Um. Yeh.

I’m not sure where all this ties together. At the heart of much female writing is often relationships; at the heart of most male writing, relationships are not. Many of the conversations I’ve overheard concern faithfulness, or the male lack thereof. Not once does the concept of morality come up, from the ones that are faithful to the ones that are faithless, whereas in a group of women, a faithless woman will often receive scandalous condemnation. I’ve been sexually approached by more than one man I knew to be involved in a relationship. I’ve known several men who were openly resentful of their pregnant partners and who were/are unfaithful, justifying themselves saying that they had to get it from somewhere.

Maybe it’s just the type of places that I work. Maybe I don’t know enough straight women. What I do know is that the concept of feminism implies that a woman can be as fucked up, cruel, psychotic and amoral and sexual deviant as any male, and that I fucking hate humanity at times.

Colin — the cock is a lucky charm here. The carved ones, er, come in all sizes.

Michael — proving once again the irrelevance of content over packaging