One of the curious things about sacrificing your children (or your books) to Molech is that despite the priests urging… it doesn’t seem terribly beneficial, either to children (or books) or to those who made the sacrifice.
The priests always seem to say it was because you weren’t pious enough, and you need to give more.
Hmm. Seems like the only ones who win out of the deal are the priests, as even Molech doesn’t seem to be terribly real, or energized and kindly because of the sacrifices. Of course, the kids (or books) may been snotty little whiners and it is entirely possible those sacrificing really didn’t want a son or a daughter, or another one, or one of that gender.
But in the end they had less children to look after them in their old age, which was kind of the law of unintended consequences, because in those days there was no other kind of pension.
And for an example of the law of unintended consequences – I got led to these articles (1 and 2) by a writer who believes women writers are still the victims of male conspiracy. The take I actually got from the author/s of the blog post is that they were trying to show YA isn’t totally female dominated “How often do we hear that YA is full of women? That this is a land where there aren’t boys or men? That readers and writers are girls and the implications of what that might mean?”
They picked a curious route to do so: the NYT bestseller list. Now: 1)The list is a far-from accurate reflection of how popular an author or book is. Its methodology is secret, which is probably just as well because it’s unlikely to stand up to the most rudimentary dissection. The list achieves the rare distinction of in my opinion actually a providing worse data source than Bookscan, an achievement of some kind I suppose. I can bore you with details of why neither is worth much, if you like. 2)It is supposedly a weekly sales metric. So for instance, lets assume 10 000 books bought from the right stores in that week gets you on. 9999 – even you keep that for 40 years – does not. So at best it is a metric of fast-sellers. As we have no ways of comparing fast sales to total sales, it’s pretty well a waste of time except as a sort of vague indicator ‘those guys are selling quite a lot as soon as they get out there’. 3) It merely (with questionable accuracy) selects out the fast-sellers. You have no idea if there is 10 book difference between no. 3 and 4, or 100 000 book difference, or if number 1 for instance sells twice, ten times or a hundred times what number 10 does, or what is happening outside the extended list – which is where 99% of the books lie, and almost certainly cumulatively more sales. 4) It has no way discriminating the of the gender of the buyer.
I could go on, but in short, all it is any good for is telling you you (vaguely because the sampling is not representative and badly flawed) how popular an author is. As the bloggers doing this divided it by gender you can conclude that male authors at the top end of YA do sell faster.
Therefore their conclusion seems to be that the readers and writers aren’t predominantly female, and that men still get (by implication) an unfair share of the acclaim.
At this point you can imagine the Monkey pulling his beard out in chunks and saying ‘see what happens when you sacrifice your kids to the god of Political Correctness instead of sensibly indenturing them to Mathematics and Logic.’
Firstly: the crucial number they forgot to get is the number of male:female authors in the pot at all.
To work out how probable there is a male or female bias… means without knowing the size of the relative pools, the figures are even more iffy. If 7 out of 10 NYT Bestsellers are male, but 7 out of 10 books available are by males… then the ratio is as it should be. If (and this more like the case) 7 out of 10 NYT bestsellers are male, but 8/10 available are by female writers… You have some interesting questions to ask. 1) The first an most obvious one is how accurate is this? Answer: the data is worth roughly the same as used toilet tissue for (among others) the reasons mentioned above. Female writers can still account for 99% of the sales and the above situation could still be true. Without actual numbers this isn’t worth a lot, except to point out fast-sellers. The only real measure of female writer dominance would one of access, which seems to show it’s a LOT easier for female authors of YA to get published. (unless you assume that men are stupid or incapable of writing. Assuming it is equally possible for either gender to write as well as the other, you are left with either: men are failing to submit (why?) or failing to get published in the same numbers as women (why?))
2)The second question is obviously: is this being manipulated to favor men, and if so, by whom? Well, as a bastion of feminism… I think we could safely write (a)the NYT off the list of deliberately doing this, and probably not by accident either, as they’d live terror of being accused of such bias. If anything, they’d be likely to cook the books the other way. b)The authors. Yes, a few have cheated the system before. But systematic cheating by one gender – a gender that is in such a vast minority, takes conspiracy theory to a whole new level. Trust me, men just aren’t very good at keeping any kind of secret, and authors in general are far too poor to cook the books like this. c)The publishers. Well, in their second post the bloggers did show that some publishers had a disproportionate share. They didn’t of course go through the logical step of taking the number of YA books each publisher produced, and dividing by the number of NYT bestsellers, which would have made comparing apples with apples possible. Spend may have something to do with it. But let’s take logic that if publisher Fred has No. of NYT/Number of YA books… 1/300 and Publisher Mary has a 1/500 ratio, Fred is outspending Mary on publicity, and if Fred’s male author ratio is 1/20 and his female ratio is 1/330 – you might want to wonder if he is favoring those male authors (which is possible)… but as YA is overwhelmingly run by female editors, and few males are terrified of being accused of such bias, this again seems unlikely. As for (d) the bookstores that NYT is liable to solicit co-operation from – those would be all the sexist rednecks from Flyover country… and they’d send in figures by winged pig, right? Which leaves…
Readers (and librarian purchasers – who are overwhelmingly female.) Now we know – and I can dig for data I have seen – that females read far more fiction than males in recent years. The 80:20 figure bounces out of my head, which may be nonsense, but it is definitely heavily skewed to female readers, as much or more in YA as elsewhere. And there are a lot more female authors available to them.
Ah. The fruits of sacrifice. The law of unintended consequences. There are many more female authors – I think it’s about an order of magnitude last I counted, in YA. The readers are overwhelmingly female. The system is if anything biased all the way through against male authors. And yet males – compared to the entry numbers make up a vastly disproportionate number of NYT bestsellers.
There is of course a historical component, but as the bloggers producing the stats didn’t bother with it, I won’t either. And without that there are only two ways I can read this: 1) Either men are better writers, or 2)That’s what happens when you apply affirmative Molech. Only the best, hardest working, and most determined of those discriminated against get through. And as it’s not the forefront of challenge, I guess the best of those discriminated in favor of… go on to something more challenging, or get used to not having to try as hard.
So what do you think? Will they destroy the cause, and banish the priests, or instead lean on NYT to cook the books to ‘appropriately’ distribute ‘status and acclaim’ (which should do NYT bestseller list what cooking the books has done for sf awards)?
My bet, sadly, is on the latter, which won’t help women, YA, reading, or society.
But the priests will be pleased.
Mad Genius Club 
32 responses to “Passing through the fire to Molech”
You are of course correct, but it will not do to point this out, in this horrible state of struggle in which womyn (or is that wimmin?) are one gender traitor away from being deported back to the horrible hell, hell I tell you, of 1950s Stepford Wife-dom.
Molech demands a sacrifice, and it is decreed that you shall be next.
Or wymyn, don’t forget that option.
You left out the probability that came to my mind first. If there are 100 authors writing stories and 10 of them are male. and there are 1000 readers and 200 are male. If each if each author, male and female, gets an exact percentage of the readers of the same gender then each male author gets 20 readers and each female gets 8.8 readers. Obviously any male author is out selling any female by more than 2-1. I won’t say that this is all of it but, it probably has an influence
Hmm. Good point. Of course we are being repeatedly told male authors don’t sell, and stories with male lead characters don’t sell. So either that is a lie, and your contention is correct, or if it is true… why aren’t they buying more male YA authors?
To be honest as a reader I still don’t care what sex my author is as long as I enjoy the story. I have a feeling the army of militant feminists do, and… shall we say encourage readers and writers to make an issue of it. Therefore logic states the males -although lower in number will be reading anything that passes ‘good story’ barrier (which means some by women) whereas the larger group are actively discriminating against male authors. Except it would appear that actually that doesn’t work too well. I do suspect, though it is not organized, supported, preached, (whereas posts about how wonderful/how you should read/how they’re discriminated against female authors of sf particularly are endless) demanded, that a fair amount of the reverse is happening anyway: where boys actively look for boy-stuff authors, who are mostly men.
Not surprising at all that a boy who reads wants to read about stowing away on a pirate ship and having adventures. Having all the token boys in the story be sidekicks and servants for the courageous heroine who can defeat grown men 5 times her strength because of the power of her magical glittering vagina on the other hand
In other fields, I have noticed that the opposite-to-the-majority-sex participants are really, really good. The merely passable go do something that is easier to get into. In low level horse shows, it was a few boys and hordes of girls. The boys were always very good and took home “more than their fair share” of ribbons. In geology, the other way around. The women were sharp as tacks, and notably missing from the ranks of mediocre.
The later may no longer be true, as affirmative action has struck. Or perhaps its true equality. I was joking with my husband that perhaps women have permeated the field to the point that they can now find their own level of mediocrity all by themselves. True equality.
In YA, one wonders how many pen names are confounding the statistics, None the less, I am not surprised at all to find that the male writers in a female dominated genre are among the top in the field.
Molech, unfortunately, seems to still be going strong. I fear he’s (she’s–in this case) got at least one more generation to go before the rebellion against sacrificing our children becomes widespread.
Oh yes, it’s certainly not a unique situation. My favorite example is the Bumiputera medicine effect in Malaysia. Medicine used to be dominated by the Chinese in that country. So: enter the Bumiputera system, which was supposed to redress the imbalance of wealth and skills with various forms of bias. Admission to University required far more of non-Bumiputera (the Chinese, Indians, Christians), and it was generally made easier for Bumiputera throughout. So for example they’d need a 70% aggreagate to get in, the non-Bumiputera would need 90%. So: as an end result the situation you describe in the horse world, or that used to be true of women-geologists – there are some good Bumiputera Doctors and some mediocre, but any Chinese one is bound to be good, and thus when granny/beloved/child is really sick and you want the best for them… who do the Bumiputera take them to?
I don’t think that men are better writers but I do think that men are far far more likely to treat writing as a business instead of a soul affirming artistic endeavor.
Case in point, John Ringo commenting in a thread about the new Harlequin “Bombshell” line: “Huh… I could do that. File off some of the edges…”
(I’m paraphrasing and he may not recall, but it stuck with me.)
Yep. Also, and you can moan rage and bitch, but some of this is baked in the biological cake, women tend to have to take a bigger share of kids-and-house and be the home manager, which means less support for career. It is what it is. And this job doesn’t pay enough to HIRE support personnel until you make it. This is something I, personally, have battled.
While that is true, sometimes, there are plenty of stay at home dads who write, raise kids, clean house and cook, while mummy has a regular 9-5. I was one, I know another two – both quite successful writers. And on the other hand I know several male and female childless and career obsessed authors too. It would be interesting to see the breakdown of who got the top – those with children and caring for them, and those without. I don’t care much, I am far happier with the children than I would be without them and a regular NYT bestseller slot.
Yes, I know — I was just going on “average”. I wouldn’t have traded raising the boys either. But this is also an effect that none of the feminsanistas ((totally a word) never take into account.
I thought you were going to suggest that maybe the difference, if there is one, could be that male authors might have less invested in sacrificing the book on the alter of feminism.
Stuff like having a young girl pick up a sword for the first time and defeat hardened soldier men.
Well, that too is possible.
There is also the point — an uncertainty principle — that it is impossible to determine the sex (gender is for nouns) of an author from only his name and that it is sexist to assume that one can.
Parse that, Germaine Greer!
M
For example, MLN Hanover is Daniel Abraham publishing UF/paranormal of the female monster hunter variety, on account of he didn’t think women would buy UF/paranormal/quasi-romance written by a man. (Or his publisher thought so… same thing.)
And to relate it back to my last comment… it also not being a case of *identity*, as in, “I can’t write that girly stuff.”
I think that women have (and this may possibly be changing and there always were exceptions, of course) tended to view writing as expression of self.
That was as a result of the first name not selling sufficient copies to sell another book, IMO. Which does bring to question Sanford’s male authors are smaller numbers but selling to larger numbers per author than female.
But when you open the box, can you tell the sex of the cat?
I am so resurrecting the pseudonym with only initials.
And going back to being the mysterious unknown author.
All of you look at this shiny object I’m dangling – and forget you ever saw my name.
I could do that myself, to stop the jabbering ;-/
eh, I don’t know if you want to be known as DF, some are sure to parse that into a pseudonym you could do without.
I happened to have been trapped in two classrooms with a surfeit of YA books last week. (OK, not exactly trapped – I could have beaten the students to the door, I think.) I’d not looked at a random assortment of YA fiction recently, and was mildly surprised to find that even in the action-adventure-EOTWAWKI books, female authors predominated. Only in the sports section did male names lead. I was not impressed. And after skimming through some of the books, well, there were two that turned my stomach (subject matter) and more that were so badly written or at such a low reading level that I wanted to sneak them into File 13 (aka the Circular File) before any of the students lost brain cells from reading the “books.”
You raise a terrifying spectre there — where not reading might be better for them than reading…
Horrible, isn’t it? Usually I have a visceral reaction to the thought of censoring or destroying books (that haven’t been drenched in something noxious) but I’m not sure ten-to-twelve year old kids are really ready to be reading a graphic account of child sex slavery, including explicit descriptions of sexual torture. At least the narrator made a break for it and escaped (in the last sentence of the book.) The other one . . . I’ve read better grammar and dialogue in assignments by 13 year-olds. I was appalled. I wonder if the teacher had read that particular book, or if it came in a set with better books. It was from a well-known school book publisher.
Eeee! I wish parents realized where YA has gone. I actually had a beta reader rather dubiously wonder if I ought to call a book YA, when the male half of the main characters walked into a rowdy party, fast going “clothing optional.” I pointed out that, no, that was mild. Especially since the young men turned around and walked out. An option that kids need to know exists.
Gah. You do realize they’re going to kill it with this sort of stupid, sure as death.
Oops. I guess I just turned a gender traitor. Or will when I publish it. An adventure story with a young man as the protagonist, and the only girl who is in it doesn’t do much of anything important besides getting the boy into trouble (and I’m not talking about the sexual kind, you of dirty mind). Although I have planned a more important role for her in the future, in this she is just a supporting character.
Although one thing which might please the establishment is that the colony world where they adventure is pretty bad – serfs and lords and lots of prejudice – and the people of it are white (sort of anyway), while one of the heroes is dark skinned. Was bit of a necessity, I’m afraid, since I wanted a reason why the far more accomplished and experienced guy would be unable to work well in that colony and so is confined to the ship in the beginning, and the inexperienced kid is the one who goes out and gets into trouble, and then has to get them both out of that trouble – the older guy stands out, badly, and they don’t like his type there, while the young hero can blend in.
Besides, I like to play with these things. Make up a universe which may at a first glance fit certain, er, expectations, but really doesn’t on the deeper level. Probably not the best possible strategy when it comes to selling, but right now I’m mostly amusing myself anyway.
What I have a hard problem understanding is how come better information is not collected. It seems that every bookstore I’ve use lately keeps a running record of what they sell, for reordering purposes anyway. It shouldn’t be impossible to get the running receipts from Amazon, B&N, The Strand, Powell’s and other large indies and compile the totals. For that matter Credit Card data could be mined for age and sex buyer information. Is the publishing industry the last industry that doesn’t know how to collect and use customer data to respond more quickly? Or are they afraid that if they look too closely that they might have some illusions popped.
But they already know what we _ought_ to be reading.
Perhaps a bit late to the party, but my boys have been devouring (with a fair bit of pushing and shoving and ‘read faster so I can have that one’) John Grisham’s Theo Boone books.
They like Theo because they can relate to him and he does cool stuff. I like Theo because his parents are non-abusive and present (and since when does that combination happen in a YA book?). The only downside is that Theo wants to be a lawyer so now my boys want to be lawyers!
Ack. Find some books where they have two parents and non-abusive at that, and the hero does not want to be a lawyer. (I’d suggest Steam Mole, but the parents – who have literally sacrificed everything for their child’s welfare, and do end up happily ever after – have a daughter.