Why Are the Little Differences So Hard to Imagine in Fantasy?

A fellow writer recently asked (on an online fantasy site) how people had sex in the olden days, when most people lived in one room cottages or huts. Surely the presence of a couple's children, in the same room, or perhaps even the same bed, would have put a damper on things, he reasoned.

As someone who grew up loving the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, there as a point (sometime around my own pre-adolescent period, probably) when I wondered something similar. How did Ma and Pa have sex when Laura, Mary, and Carrie were sleeping in the same one-room cabin on the prairie?

The answer, of course, is that people in different times and places did not (or do not) share our modern, post-Victorian sensibilities about having sex in front of the children. They probably waited until they thought the kids were asleep and had at it. And maybe, when the weather was fine, couples found ways to steal moments alone together in barns, thickets, haystacks, even churches.

Nowadays, many people think it's immodest, or even potentially harmful, for kids to overhear, let alone see, their parents making the beast with two backs. That attitude has hardly been the norm throughout history. Parents probably didn't sit down with their kids and  have "the talk" back then. Kids simply learned about sex via osmosis (and of course, most people in agrarian, nomadic, or hunter-gatherer societies were around animals a lot while growing up, so they almost certainly made the connection there too).

This article does a great job of discussing sex in the middle ages. In fact, people really weren't as prudish back then as many suppose.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/02/14/sex-in-the-middle-ages/

In spite of what some people have been insisting (in light of the recent SCOTUS ruling legalizing and legitimizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states), sexual morality is a very fluid and variable thing across history and cultures.

This question got me to thinking, though. There are numerous fantasy novels that show people living in societies with attitudes where the big things--slavery, torture, sexism, public executions, a rigid class or caste structure--are very different from ours. Yet the things that we have trouble envisioning as writers and readers are often the little, everyday differences (like people mostly living in a single room and parents thinking nothing about having sex while their kids are present).

Imagine a romance or fantasy novel with a love scene where the couple is holding back their cries of passion so they don't awaken their toddler, who is sleeping in the bed with them.

Another example of a fact that freaked me out when I learned (sometime around middle school age, I think) it was that women didn't wear underpants under their dresses until fairly recently. The thought of walking around all day with one's most personal and vulnerable parts open from below, gave me the heebie jeebies.

Fragonard's The Swing: What is this fellow looking at?

Of course, I've since figured out that those heavy skirts and petticoats were unlikely to blow up or reveal one's nether regions, even when it was windy or their owner climbing ladders, but it still feels a bit odd to me. On the plus side, the idea that brassieres didn't exist before the 20th century turns out to be untrue.

One thing that's very hard to relate to is differing attitudes about personal hygiene. I admit I was very relieved to learn that all those tales about how no one ever bathed in the olden days were rather exaggerated (though, interestingly, westerners were at their most foul during the early modern era, not the middle ages), and in fact, clothes washing and periodic bathing have been the norm throughout history, even if people didn't always live up to modern standards of cleanliness.

Given how itchy and stinky I am after just a couple days of days camping, I'll admit that a character who bathes but once a year and never cleans his/her teeth is harder for me to relate to than an assassin who kills people for a living. Brent Week's Durzo Bint? I had more problem with his garlic-chewing habit (I have a very low tolerance for garlic, even in food, and the smell of it on someone's breath makes me physcially ill) than I did his talent for slaughter. No fangirl crush on that character!

And speaking of bathing, anything resembling the Japanese tradition of families bathing together doesn't seem to be something that comes up terribly often in fantasy novels. I suspect that many modern authors have too much trouble stepping away from the notion that nakedness is an inherently sexual condition.

A print of this painting hangs in my hall bathroom.

Another social convention that few modern fantasy writers explore in their worlds are communal latrines. Outside of boot camp, modern western bathrooms tend to have locking doors or screens around the toilets, at least. Yet the Romans had communal latrines and public piss pots where people of both genders "went" in front of one another, and even socialized whilst they did. Especially revolting to me, however, is the concept of the shared sponges.

Toilets are definitely one of those intimate, everyday things with which we like to take for granted. Anyone who has been camping, or traveled in a country where facilities are designed differently, knows how disconcerting it is to adapt to a different way of answering nature's call.

Moving to the other end of the alimentary canal, I also have a hard time getting my head around the idea that toothbrushes seem to be a very recent invention (though unsurprisingly, the Chinese might have had something similar). However, people did indeed have ways of cleaning their teeth in the old days, and some research suggests that tooth cleaning sticks made from some kinds of trees or shrubs do an excellent job of promoting gingival health.

Habits of grooming or beauty aesthetics that are different from ours can be a jolt also. It's hard for me to imagine being attracted to a man with a tonsure, for instance, though those have existed in various times and places in history (and not just for monks). And when I saw the Kurosawa movie Ran many years ago, I was put off by the way the women plucked their brows to nothing and drew fake ones in way above their natural position. These looked odd to me. It's another one of those "small things" that wouldn't be very comfortable for me to imagine in a protagonist in a fantasy novel.

There are plenty of other "little things" that have changed throughout history and that vary between cultures. Taboos, habits of personal hygiene and grooming, even table manners (like using fingers to eat instead of utensils). Even though it can be a bit uncomfortable, I think authors sometimes miss opportunities to use these kinds of small differences as a means of reminding their readers that their characters aren't simply modern people wearing costumes. It's challenging, though, because for some readers, the ability to connect emotionally, even romantically, with a character is an important part of the experience of reading.

Feel free to comment and chime in on some of your own blind spots about history. What kinds of small, everyday differences have you tried to incorporate into a fantasy culture? Which ones put you off so much it's hard to relate to a character who practices them?

Gender Essentialism and Writing in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Those of us who are fans of speculative fiction and don't live under an internet rock are probably aware of the storm that's been raging over at the SFWA this week. I am not a member of SFWA, (though qualifying for membership is a long-term goal of mine) and a lot has been said about the issue. I don't think I can really add much more to the exchange, but if anyone wants to know what I'm talking about or needs access to some links about this controversy, AW has a thread, and this blog also contains some good links. This link also.

But this whole thing got me thinking about sex, gender and writing and how my favorite genres (SF and F) have long been regarded as male bastions. Yet there is an increasing number of women writing in these genres, and there are an awful lot of female fans. It is oh so seductive to think that this means that sexism is behind us, but sadly, it's not true.

I participate in some online writing forums, and now and again someone will comment that they just don't like fantasy or SF books by women writers as a rule. When pressed for an explanation, they state that women "write differently" than men, and will usually couch their arguments in terms of the "men and women are just different" position.

Well, we all have our own tastes, and if you have read the majority of female authors in the genre and the majority of males, then I suppose you may have a basis for making such a judgement. It is certainly possible that there are overall difference in the themes the two sexes prefer to write and in their approach to characterization, conflict, description or narrative or whatever. But it seems to me that there is still going to be a lot of variation within each group and overlap between them. But inevitably, it seems, these threads drift into a discussion about sex and gender differences, and at some point, the specter of gender essentialism will be trotted out.

For the uninitiated, gender essentialism is the notion that most or all of the differences between the sexes are driven by biology and that the biological differences between the sexes are absolute and immutable with no (or only a very small)  area of overlap between the two sexes. It is, in essence, an attempt to refute the concept of gender being a social construct.

In short, gender essentialist seem to purport that most traits that vary by gender look like this:

If you challenge them on this notion, they will usually start talking about sex hormones and brain structures and yin and yang and sociobiology etc., as if there was anything approaching a scientific consensus about these issues and about the relative importance of experience and biological variables in shaping a person's personality, talents and interests.

But to some extent, these arguments can be used as a red herring. Why? Because even traits that do have a very strong biological component almost never fit the pattern depicted in the graph above.

For example: on average, men are physically taller than women.  As a person with biology training, I know that sex hormones play an important role in these differences, and that there is probably a reason that humans (and many, but by no means all, mammal species) evolved with size dimorphism.

But, this does not mean that all men are taller than all women. Nor does it mean that shorter men or taller women are abnormal, unnatural or biologically unfit in most situations.

Height varies around a median. In fact, there is a large area of overlap between the male and female "bell curves" with regards to height.

Like height, very few qualities that we possess as human beings are all or nothing. Traits (assuming they can be reliably and repeatedly quantified at all) nearly always vary around a mean.

So even if one's approach to writing is strongly influenced by biology, making a comment like, "Women just write differently than men" makes about as much sense as saying "Woman are just shorter than men." Even if it's true in a statistical sense, the exceptions are almost as numerous as the rule.

Or to look at it another way: men differ almost as much from one another in height as men and women do. So why wouldn't something like writing style have a similarly large area of overlap? Most writers will fall somewhere in that purple zone in the middle, with only a relatively small number (maybe just a handful) falling in the "tails" of the distribution. You may, in fact, prefer writers who lie in one or another of these tails. But if this is the case, you can't really say you "like male writers" or "like female writers." Rather, you like a fairly extreme and atypical approach to storytelling that is not the norm for either gender.

And if you do, this is fine. I'm not judging your taste. In fact, our personal tastes in fiction are all driven by factors that probably vary around different means, and we probably all like some things that are outliers in some way. I'm just saying that equating the style you prefer with a given gender is simplistic.

So who cares?

Even when it's well intentioned, I think gender essentialism has the potential for serious abuse. One problem is that we often end up pathologizing people who fall away from the mean for their sex/gender in some regard. An example of this is the issue of unusually short men or unusually tall women being perceived as unattractive or poor examples of their sex. Think of all the ways people who deviate "too far" from the perceived median or average for their sex can be ridiculed or marginalized. Especially when the trait in question is regarded as an important determinant of femininity or masculinity in our culture.

In fact, there are very few of us who do not deviate from the mean for our biological sex or social gender with regards to at least some traits. When was the last time you met someone who was right on the median in every possible way?

I think this is something people should keep in mind when they're discussing whether or not they "like" writers of a given gender. If you use the gender the author as a primary criteria for determining who you are going to read, you may be missing some stuff you will like.

In another vein that is beyond the scope of this already too-long entry, I also think it's something to keep in mind when creating characters in fiction.

**********************************************************************************

Graphs from:

http://perrystreetpalace.com/2012/09/06/on-gender-essentialism-in-public-schools-bell-curves-and-cpd/

Iris Vander Pluym, perrystreetpalace.com

And I am female...but barely!

The gender genie thinks the current version of my novel (all 128,000 words of it) was written by a...female, but only by a narrow margin (my net female score was 175,322 and my net male score was 171,174--not sure that's even statistically significant).

                     In case anyone was wondering, the gender genie is an algorithm that is available at http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php. You can paste a work of fiction or nonfiction (they recommend something that is at least 500 words long) into a window and click a button. It spits out a couple of scores and tells you whether the program thinks you are male or female. It assigns a certain number of points (male or female) to certain words. For instance, the word 'with' has a feminine score of 42, while the word 'it' has a masculine score of 52.

                     The program has a list of words (16 for feminine and 17 for masculine) that its creators state are used more often by one gender versus the other. I assume that this is based on some kind of statistical analysis that they've performed on a large number of  writing samples. Some of the word assignments seem in line with stereotypes. "With" is feminine, because women are supposed to be all about cooperation...right?  'Above' and 'below' have male points assigned, because men are all about hierarchies, right? Yes, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek here. But what about 'it,' 'at' and 'around' (also words with masculine scores)? Those words don't seem stereotypically masculine. And while 'she' and 'her' refer to female people or animals, of course, don't men ever write novels with lots of female characters? Can a man 'cheat' the gender genie by writing a story from a feminine point of view? And why aren't male pronouns assigned 'masculine' scores? They're not on the word list at all. Does that mean that women refer to male characters or animals about as often as men do?

                     So I have some questions about this thing. My novel comes out having a net feminine score, but barely. Since one of my protagonists is male, I'm not thinking that this is a 'bad' thing. I don't doubt that word usage probably varies a bit by gender, but it seems like there might be other things (such as pattern of word use or use of certain word combinations) that would vary more between the sexes. And wouldn't culture play a role too, even among native English speakers?

                     I also wonder whether some of these gender differences in word use stem from the subjects that male and female authors most often choose to write about. The only way to test that would be to have large groups of males and females asked to write about a narrowly proscribed topic (fiction or non fiction) and then to analyze their word choices.

                     I am guessing that topic may have a significant effect, because it seems to with my own writing. I find that when I break my novel down and run individual chapters through the gender genie, some come out strongly masculine and a larger number come out  modestly feminine. The 'masculine' chapters tend to be the ones where there is some kind of action or my male character is dealing with some kind of personal issue, while the 'feminine' chapters are ones that are written from my female character's pov or that involve a lot of dialog from anyone's pov.

                     My non fiction is almost unilaterally 'masculine.' This blog entry, for instance, comes out as having a higher 'masculine' score (1160 to 925), as do the handouts I write for my students (I teach biology, so the handouts are written in very straightforward, 'technical' language). My short story 'Forever Home' is written in first person from a female pov, but gender genie also thinks it was written by a male (1713 to 1589).

                     I suspect that my writing style is not highly 'gendered' whatever that is, so my word usage depends on what I am writing about. The authors of the program say that it accurately guesses an author's gender most of the time, but I wonder what percentage of people come out near the middle of the distribution or cross over into the other gender. Are they people who tend to write about subjects that are usually chosen by the opposite sex? Is there a 'feminine' way of writing a physics textbook or a 'hard' science fiction story and is there a 'masculine' way of writing a romance novel or an article on prom dresses? I'm not trying to be shamelessly sexist here, but I am curious about whether the creators of this program controlled for non fiction topics and for fiction genres or not.

                     I also wonder if it would be possible to create a similar algorithm that can, with reasonable accuracy, guess a person's culture, age or nationality (if you're checking for British English versus American, spelling of certain words and use of certain slang terms is a give away, but if you corrected for that, is there still a difference in word usage?

                     In any case, I'm a bit skeptical about what it is the gender genie is really telling us about our writing, but it is fun to play with.