After a few moments I realized that none of the male writers were speaking up very much in response, so I did. Since then, I have received many letters from women wanting to share similar experiences.
This year at a science fiction convention in Anaheim, there was a panel on this very subject: what women have to deal with in a very male-dominated business. One of the panelists ended up being Melissa Jones, and I was thrilled that she got to address her fellow writers on this issue.
Melissa had talked very eloquently about the problems of being a woman writer and all the difficulties that it brings: what to wear, what the relationships are with editors and with the fans and so on. And she spoke honestly about the kind of silences and condescension that women often have to deal with.
Some of us were hired in part because we're attractive and/or we're good at writing in a way that the editors and the readers find pleasing. And the women writers were saying that this was a problem, even though it was sometimes an unconscious problem. For some reason, when men complain about the problems of being a writer, their complaints are taken seriously.
But when a woman complains about these problems, she's told that she's just being a typical suburban housewife. This makes sense. After all, science fiction and fantasy are supposed to be escapist fantasies. So for a woman to complain about the sexism that is such a strong component of these genres is to say, in effect, "You're all wet, I don't want to be here to begin with." And that clearly does not make sense.
This was what I was trying to talk about on Saturday at the Big Fresno Fair. I was a little surprised when I saw that the sales of all my books had done what? Nothing? At least, they hadn't fallen off. Well, this is not the first time I have been surprised.
To give you the full story of how the women's liberation movement came to be, I'll have to go back in history.
There were two main signs of the women's liberation movement. First, there was the widespread use of the word "women" in public places, instead of "girls" or "ladies", even though people often still referred to a woman as a girl or a lady. The second was that more women were running for office than ever before, because it seemed like women needed to do something about the unfairness of the world in general. And so on.
But after the first shock wore off, the men of the world came up with a list of the top ten problems women were facing. And the problem that came first and greatest was man problem number one: we don't get enough sex.
It wasn't that women actually received less sex than they had before the liberation movement. It was just that men expected them to get less. It wasn't going to be good enough for men to be the main breadwinners of the household and the maintainers of a happy home. The women had to be available for sex after work, even though it was hard for women to relax and go to bed with a man after a full day at work, not to mention that there were so many women with jobs.
So, men decided that women had to give up their jobs, even though the majority of women agreed that they liked having jobs. This was man problem number two.
Then there was problem number three: all the laws that women had forced onto the books - to prevent abuse and to protect women from financial exploitation and so on - were derided as "ludicrous". For example, men were constantly bringing up the example of the law that said men couldn't force their wives to perform sex on any schedule other than the woman's schedule. But it was impossible to have a schedule when you were a sex slave, right? Not to mention that God had decreed that sex should be a free-for-all. If a woman didn't want to have sex, it was her fault.
Problem number four was that women were opening up "feminist bookstores" and asking the men in the area to donate their sperm to a sperm bank, since they didn't have time to reproduce. And when they found out that the sperm of average-looking men was not powerful enough to make a child, they decided to criticize it as poor sperm quality.
The fifth problem was that women wanted to use birth control and wanted to determine their own abortions, instead of having to go through the hapless man.
So, with the help of the local women's rights organizations, the men passed a law forbidding women to use birth control and forcing women to have any children they wanted regardless of career or sexual availability of the husband. The women said this was a sexist law, so men made it much more severe than that. The women said that it was a feminist law, so men made it much more severe than that.
By now, the women had stopped using the word "women" and started using the word "woman".