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Why is it that not many girls like Fantasy?


rumple9

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Great! I got fed up with "Twilight" so how about you have a stab at "New Moon"? lol.gif I have to admit tho, my desire for shitty book reading is much lessened after the Twilight read. It covered this year's shite and maybe a bit of next year's too.
Dude, I just finished the Lisbeth Salander trilogy; I've done my part for shitty books.

Though I'll probably read the Gone YA series next.

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As for Ghandhi's comments I'm in the UK where there's nothing wrong with using girl/women interchangably for members of the opposite sex.

I'm 33 and from the uk. You use girl to refer to me we are gonna have a row.

N

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In a previous thread Eloisa I think came up with some figures that suggested it was fairly equal and growing with more women reading fantasy and more men SF.

But maybe I'm misremembering, still haven't had first coffee of the day yet.

Yeah I'm pretty sure I've heard somewhere that there are more women reading fantasy than men although I can't find anything substantive to back that up. I suppose subgenres like paranormal romance might factor into that.

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:dunno: I have far more female friends that like SFF than ones who don't. Yes, that includes epic fantasy, cyberpunk, even Star Trek. Maybe it's a metal thing? Some subcultures are definitely gonna be more receptive to this stuff than others. You guys are clearly all just hanging out with the wrong people. :P

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Fantasy (in these days) = rape, killing, rape, killing, rape, rape, killing, rape etc.

Fantasy prior to the current Dark and Gritty Age was just as stereotypically a male genre.

(Though like most stereotypes, it broke down the closer you looked. Ursula Le Guin, etc).

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Dude, I just finished the Lisbeth Salander trilogy; I've done my part for shitty books.

Though I'll probably read the Gone YA series next.

Oh yeah, I feel a need to apologise to you on account of my nationality now. :lol:

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Just to add an extra bit of information on top of all the information underscoring the fact that, yes, women do indeed read fantasy -- but it's entirely possible that they don't read what you consider to be fantasy (which is your problem, not theirs) -- the forum is 40% female (based on self-reporting of gender in profile), and according to demographics data I have, Westeros.org in general (across all sub-sites) also has a 40% female readership.

Plenty of women interested in fantasy here, on the interwebz, and in real life in general. But if they don't necessarily like reading the kind of fantasy you particularly enjoy, you need to be more specific than just saying "fantasy". What's the fantasy you like that they don't like? And what's the fantasy that they do like that you don't?

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Well, I wouldn't go as far as to say its a problem for straight males either. Ultimately you wouldn't want to be with someone who would actually reject you on that basis anyway.
That's true. I don't care what anyone thinks about my reading preferences. When people who get all judgy about it that says far more about them that it does about me. Just last week I was having a conversation with a geeky colleague about flashmobbing and he was getting excited about the Star Wars one in NYC. An older female colleague came into the room and said to me, in quite a snide way, 'Looks like you've found a kindred spirit there!'. Then she went on to say how she couldn't stand any of THAT STUFF. What stuff? You know, the stuff that isn't real. Then she admitted that she loved Star Trek. This person reads the Daily Mail (actually pays to read it) and enjoys detailed conversations about celebrities' new looks. I don't go into her office and make comments about her interests though because I think that would be rude.

But unless I KNOW going in that I have that in common with someone, I'll keep the convo pretty light on the dragons 'n stuff.
Makes perfect sense. But you know, it's awesome not having to moderate yourself at all. Using a geeky dating site (and I don't mean the board) took that uncertainty out of the equation.
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Guest Raidne

:dunno: I have far more female friends that like SFF than ones who don't. Yes, that includes epic fantasy, cyberpunk, even Star Trek. Maybe it's a metal thing?

Interesting. So it's just that my taste in books is better than my taste in everything else.

...the forum is 40% female (based on self-reporting of gender in profile), and according to demographics data I have, Westeros.org in general (across all sub-sites) also has a 40% female readership.

I was wondering about that. Thanks! It seems that way in Misc.

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Guest Raidne

Just as a folloup commentary to this:

I've almost always read fantasy and epic fantasy and have got a lot of flak from female friends over the years due to it. My mother complained a lot about it actually since she was worried I sent too much time on stuff that was not "realistic".

Female friends have also been quite judgemental and basically pressed books on me that they considered more "proper", i.e. mostly romances.

Can I ask a question about this? How does it come up? I remember not being able to get my book club to read anything decent, but now that it's gone by the wayside I'm not sure how I'd end up talking about it with anyone. I think I tend to change the subject before someone tells me how much they loved Hunger Games and I have to suppress a desire to explain the concept of a Mary Sue. Not sure.

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I was just reminded that although in the discussions we have we tend to talk about male authors there are plenty of female writers that write epic fantasy. It is just one of these strange artefacts that out of all the possible writers out there, we tend to discuss only a small selection and that selection has a male bias (oh, who am I kidding, we only talk about Bakker).

Apparently for a non-random example of a (female) epic fantasy writer half the fanmail is from women.

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To me, Urban Fantasy is things like Harry Dresden, the Matthew Swift novels, Rivers of London, etc...(or does that have a different drawer nowadays?)

I really liked Rivers Of London and Moon Over Soho, I haven't tried the Harry Dresden books yet, are they worth a read?.

I put my hands up and admit I've read the True Blood book series mainly because I like the TV show alot and wanted to see what happened-although the 2 arn't very similar anymore, I'm under no illusions of them being great pieces of writing though, although I found them enjoyable.

I think one of the worst for vampire/werewolf porn is Laurell K Hamiltons Anita Blake series, a friend was convncing me to try it and lent me one of the books, I managed about 50 pages before I gave up.

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A very interesting thread....

I am from a very different demographic than most others on the board. I know three women who I know read more "epic fantasy" other than ASOIAF. Not surprisingly, all three are college professors -- a psychologist, an accountant, and a computer information systems professor. Perhaps the last one would qualify as a female geek.

Of course, the university where I teach and the church I go to are the main places I meet women, and I don't normally discuss with the women in church what fiction they read. Guess I should ask.

30 years ago when I was still living in Michigan one of the first lesbian couples I knew were really into all sorts of science fiction and fantasy. I believe they had even met at a "con". But I suppose that's also a different demographic from what most of you are talking about on this thread. :)

I'm pretty sure the mass market paperbacks I see that could be called "vampire/werewolf porn" are designated as "urban fantasy" by their own publishers. Can't we just say that stuff is "bad urban fantasy" in the same way that Goodkind is "bad epic fantasy?"

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Can I ask a question about this? How does it come up? I remember not being able to get my book club to read anything decent, but now that it's gone by the wayside I'm not sure how I'd end up talking about it with anyone. I think I tend to change the subject before someone tells me how much they loved Hunger Games and I have to suppress a desire to explain the concept of a Mary Sue. Not sure.

You thought Katniss was a Mary Sue? I mean, she comes off a bit that way in the first book, but in the second and third? Not even slightly. If anything she's a dismantling of the idea of a Mary Sue, with traits that would usually be presented as a positive for an MS becoming definite weaknesses.

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I'm a girl (aged 20) and I love epic fantasy! Although to be fair, I did study Classical literary epics such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, so I guess I'm able to appreciate the way its written. And admittedly I'm a girl-geek as well (cosplay is my guilty pleasure), so...do I count lol :huh:

Speaking from experience here, it is a big turn off when a guy is obsessed with something like the card games, WOW, things like that. I mean it's nice to have common, geeky interest, but it's always good to wake up and come back down to Earth for a moment.

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I remember not being able to get my book club to read anything decent,

By decent, you mean fantasy, presumably? ;-) Took me 3 years to get my group to try sci-fi (Left Hand of Darkness, which they struggled with, but those who finished it found it worthwhile). This month we're finally getting to fantasy (Raymond Feist/Janny Wurts, Daughter of the Empire). Not sure how this is going to go... One of them read the back cover and said 'Hmm, funny names'. Yeah, welcome to my world.

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As usual, I'll just stereotype.

Most traditional fantasies have had at their core guys wearing armor, swinging swords, killing bad guys, etc. War and battles. That's a warrior role that historically has been dominated by men, mostly for reasons of pure gender-based physicality. So it does not seem odd for younger boys/men to be attracted to those stories because they are heroic male archetypes. The women in such stories tend to fill a more traditional/historical female role as well, which is to say that they are generally more in the background. So it is pretty easy to see why women may not have been as attracted to the genre.

I'd guess that more authors vary from those stereotypes, the more likely they are (in general) to attract a larger female audience. Though I still suspect that fans fans of Erickson are still overwhelmingly male because his story is still so centered on warfare, in which men tend to be more interested than women.

At the same time, I'd also bet that RJ and WoT were more popular with women than most fantasies because they had the female dominated Aes Sedai, and generally did not glorify those warrior archetypes to the same degree. Instead, they had a larger romantic element which is at least gender-neutral in terms of appeal.

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