The “male genre”

 Australian army, Advertising division. “Our Job to Clothe the Men Who Work and Fight.” Australian War Memorial, 2017, www.awm.gov.au/collection/ARTV01064. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.

“Our job…to clothe the men who work and fight”  – Australian Army propaganda poster during world war 2.

Quotes like these were common around these times, which most often depicted women as having only “one job” or “one purpose” which was to care for the men overseas and “serve their husbands”.

This thinking bled into Science Fiction, most early modern Sci-Fi stories depicted male protagonists going on adventures, unraveling secrets, and just living through interesting character arcs. Whereas, female characters were often pushed to the side with not much character development happening in the stories due to most writers believing, that they had a mostly male audience.

Unknown to the writers at the time, Sci-Fi was growing a stronger female audience but most were afraid to admit it due to it being viewed as a “male genre”. The stronger female audience meant that more female fans would take to writing their own Sci-Fi stories as well which, eventually, gave us some great writers like; Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, and James Tiptree Jr who was really Alice Bradley Sheldon.

The appearance of female writers in Sci-Fi, was an awakening to the publishers of these novels who realized that the genre had a female audience too.

Novels such as Warm Worlds and otherwise, The handmaid’s tale, and Dawn proved that Sci-Fi was much more than a single gender based form of literature but was equally love by both genders. Now, female protagonists were prevalent in a lot of stories in the Sci-Fi genre, but the gender discrimination continued between both sides of this genre.

Although today Sci-Fi has plenty of female protagonists, and female authors getting more praise for their work, there are still people that see the genre as a “male only” one. This argument is complete bogus considering that, many studies have show that around 40-50% of readers, are in fact female.  So why do many readers and publishers feel this way? well many point to the fact that 15-30% of authors/writers are female with the remaining 70% being male.

Despite these stats, Sci-Fi is far from a genre with a single gender fanbase and the past decades prove this statement. The gender discrimination that started this stereotype, is deep rooted in when women were still fighting for better rights & more opportunities, and many believed that women were only meant to “serve their husbands” which is why they viewed Sci-Fi in this perspective for so long.

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