siryouarebeingmocked:socialjusticewargames:siryouarebeingmocked:siryouarebeingmocked:mohandasgandhi:
siryouarebeingmocked:socialjusticewargames:siryouarebeingmocked:siryouarebeingmocked:mohandasgandhi:What happens if you flip gendered book covers?You are informed about a book’s perceived quality through a number of ways. Probably the biggest is the cover.And the simple fact of the matter is, if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.This idea that there are “girl books” and “boy books” and “chick lit” and “whatever is the guy equivalent of chick lit”* gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints. Click here to read more about the perceived differences between ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ books.(Continue reading…)This is a pretty interesting experiment from author Maureen Johnson.From the comments;Sad truth is, as teachers have long known, more books feature male protagonists cuz boys won’t normally read books with female protagonists. Girls? They’ll read anything; they’ve acclimated to the sexist culture.You mean like the Hunger Games? Or Wonder Woman? Or Portal? Yes, men and boys hate those. Korra who?Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic got new covers, but less to look less girly, and more to look like more traditional high fantasy books, not “kiddie” books (which they weren’t in the first place). It wasn’t so long ago most fantasy and sci-fi books had an anatomically implausible woman in a bikini, often for no reason. Many Baen books still do. (HEYOOO!)It’s interesting that actual female preferences for covers are not mentioned in the post.It’s also interesting that the stigma against men reading “girly” books is couched as a problem for women, even though they’re not the ones mainly affected.Also, many of the original book covers in the article seem to be very gender-neutral.So a time-loop teen drama is somehow turned into…a mystery thriller? This isn’t just gender-flipping, it’s changing genre entirely.Also, this book got a movie, so clearly it did pretty well. The lady claimed the lady book covers are lower quality, but many of the submissions, including this one, clearly aren’t.Weird. Male writer, one of the biggest names in fantasy, and his YA novel cover looks just like any other.And seriously, the ‘female’ GOT looks like a Baen cover. Most of Baen’s writers? Men.These are all recent, BTW. Some of these are their big-name series.I have to agree with the “genre-flipped” part. With, for instance, The Lord of the Flies, the idea is supposed to be what the cover would look like if it was written by a woman, but what they’ve actually done is to show what the cover would look like if the novel itself was a completely different kind of book.Not to mention that it was designed that way by request, in a contest. So all they actually did was design a sexist cover to The Lord of the Flies.falsely claim that this is what the book would have looked like with a female author.complain about the sexist cover that they actively asked for, and which does not resemble what it would have looked like for real.I have to protest the mention of the computer game Portal as a guy-popular story about women, though. Yeah, both the protagonist and the villain are female, but it’s not exactly a story about womanhood.Also, on the whole, men are in fact less likely to read books written about women by women than the opposite. But yeah, it’s a bit stupid that they don’t acknowledge that on the whole, books have different covers because of men’s and women’s actual buying habits.It’s like… on the one hand, I get the point that it feels sexist to say that “girl books must have girl covers!!” But on the other hand, if that is in fact what sells, then it’s not really the job of cover designers to replace a cover that sells books with a new cover that’s feminism-approved.Honestly, this is one of my main problems with 21st century feminism–people keep talking about an important subject where women are in fact being discriminated against, but then go on to use “evidence” that’s either biased or just plain made-up.I’d like to point out how feminists see women preferring media about and by women as a good thing. So it would be a tad hypocritical for them to call men sexist for doing the same.So, standard operating procedures then? -- source link