It's Always More Complicated

Though honestly, given the gloom-n-doom about Teh Menz of late, this is really rather cheering:

It’s often assumed straight men are not interested in romantic fiction – but many are sharing their passion in forums online:

He doesn’t talk to anyone about his love of romance novels, communicating only with other users of a Discord channel called Romance for Men.... Straight men like Paul who read and write romance are largely invisible to the wider world. Women are the genre’s main audience, followed by queer romance, which is a well documented success....
At Mills & Boon, the best known publisher of romantic fiction, men account for only 4% of sales, according to an editorial director, while less than 2% of the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association is male. Almost nothing is known about how many men read romantic fiction, and why.
For those I spoke to, however, reading romance is more than just entertainment. It offers a kind of liberation, allowing them to feel deeply, imagine being desired, and accept parts of themselves that conventional masculinity has little room for. Many would only speak anonymously, worried about being misunderstood or mocked.

I have a vague, very vague, feeling that there have been male romance authors who concealed themselves under very femme pseudonyms (rather than the initials that women have concealed themselves under) but would be hard put to it to actually name any. Trying to remember whether Orania Papazoglou/Jane Haddam's Patience McKenna mysteries, set largely in the world of romance writing, at any point mentioned men among the various authors. In Robert Barnard's The Cherry Blossom Corpse, the apparent romance writer is not actually the author of the works attributed to her, but a hired performer at the event to be Cartlandy for promotional purposes because actual author is (?stereotype) a shy mousy girl, rather than a huge bearded bloke.

This is so something that is facilitated by The Internetz and e-readers. In bygone days, did men sidle into bookshops and say they were buying the volumes from the romance shelves for their wives/girlfriends/sisters?

(The 'shedding manly tears' thing was massively prevalent amongst the Victorians and seasoned veterans of Her Majesty's wars were soaking their whiskers over The Heir of Redclyffe.)

Traditional patriarchy has always told women not to laugh. Today, female laughter still disturbs a male-dominated world

An absolutely po-faced article by a (male) social scientist about why women don't laugh. (We strongly suspect that he has not noticed them doing it behind his back.)

(I think I remarked some while ago that men think 'GSOH' = 'laughs at my jokes' and women thinks it means, is actually funny.)

He does not even seem aware of the apothegm about men's greatest fear being women laughing at them?

Maybe this is a cultural thing? Because I look at the literary/cultural tradition of my own nation and even in the works of acclaimed foundational male writers we have Women Being Hilariously Funny, come on down, Wife of Bath, and Beatrice speaking all mirth and no matter along with other Shakespearean ladies.

And once women pick up their pens - or even when their words are recorded - they manifest wit and humour in a fashion, dare we say it, subversive of the patriarchy?

I think this is reasoning from a very limited sample.

On which theme, I was irked earlier this week, in a YouTube thing I came across by a massive fanboy of Stella Gibbons (a very funny writer) while looking for links to the TV versions of Cold Comfort Farm, which was otherwise extremely endearing in how massively fannish about her he was, when he claimed that she was A Rare Bird because she was a professional reviewer as A Woman At That Date - you know, like what V Woolf, R West, D Parker, and a plethora of other scribbling women were?

I loved this The Robber Time: Joanna Russ in the Archives, not just because of the exploration around Joanna Russ and her circles but because it is SO what archival research is like (including the things that are on the backs of what she was actually writing, a phenomenon that also featured re the Olive Anderson parts of the Economic Divorce book), and the finding of the other collections you need to look at and so much this (not just field-specific!):

the importance of folks who might not be considered core to sff history (like Koppelman or Bravard) but who had a measurable, deeply important impact on how it came to be produced and contextualized.

And given my perennial complaint about the 'I discovered hidden in the dusty archives' narrative, massive kudos for this: 'I might be one of the few people to have looked through her Russ-specific files, other than the archivist who catalogued it'. Bless.

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This is an Older Piece about writing history, and in fact writing as a process of thinking generally: How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around)

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I feel my dr rdrz already know this, but it cannot hurt to have it yet again laid out: Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional.

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It was remarked in comments on this that it is No Surprise that businessmen of the City of London (even if Not All) were involved in the Triangle Trade, and in fact, pretty much to be anticipated: City of London members' slave trade links revealed.

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The review of this in the FT which drew my attention to it is now inaccessible, chiz: The Country House at War: A Story of Loss, Reinvention and the Birth of a New Britain. Relevant to my interests, but I get the sense that one thing it's not doing is looking at the literary narratives on this subject (pity, but probably a whole other project).

How Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18th‑century royal PR strategy (this one was the wife of George II - not the one Prinny tried to divorce - who he asserted to on her deathbed that he would not remarry but only have mistresses thereafter).

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Today’s arguments about disability benefits have been raging for 500 years - well, probably longer, but

One of the clearest examples comes from the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which was England’s first organised welfare system. It required parishes to support people who couldn’t earn a living because of age, illness or impairment. In practice, however, access to assistance was often contested.
Tudor writers spread stories about supposedly fake disabled beggars who tricked the public by covering themselves in artificial sores or pretending to have seizures. At the same time, local officials worried about the cost of supporting people who might need help for years. Claims could be rejected because an applicant was considered of poor moral character or because they were new to the parish.

Three brain myths that need to die:

While brain scientists hem and haw and hedge their bets, many people gravitate towards those who sound more certain—those who offer tidy explanations and definitive answers, whether or not they are true.
The result is that psychology has become home to an unusually persistent collection of zombie myths: ideas that have been debunked repeatedly but which refuse to die. Some of the most tenacious concern the structure and function of the brain itself, including whether we use just 10% of it, whether bigger brains are always better, and whether we harbour remnants of earlier brains within our own, from a reptilian “lizard brain” to the popular idea of an “inner chimp”. These ideas endure because they are neat and memorable, and perhaps because they place humans where we like to think we belong: at the pinnacle of evolution.
But these simple stories about the brain and its evolution are wrong. And, it turns out, the reality is far more interesting.

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Another myth - biographies about scientists do not necessarily inspire the kiddies: Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages:

First, scientific ability was portrayed equally often as fixed and as malleable, a pattern unlikely to support motivation. Second, interest in science was overwhelmingly portrayed as fixed: Most scientists were said to be captivated by science from a young age. Third, scientists in physics, engineering, and computer science were portrayed as more reliant on fixed ability than scientists in other fields. Fourth, biographies of female scientists disproportionately emphasized effort even after adjusting for the obstacles they faced, consistent with stereotypes attributing women’s success to hard work over talent. These findings suggest that well-intentioned efforts to diversify science through role model exposure in children’s science biographies may fall short.

This sort of thing is why I am so sad about the turn the Women's Institute lately took, it is not in their fine tradition: Women and environmental activism: the National Federation of Women’s Institutes

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Apparently Esperanto is Still A Thing: Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive

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Rare jug showing Peterloo Massacre to go on display:

Experts believe the jug was made in the years following the massacre and that it reflected the escalating public anger felt in its aftermath, the People's History Museum said.

I was accosted in the park during my walk this afternoon. This occasionally happens - someone comments on my hair, or asks for directions - I have mentioned beforetimes that I Have The Look of someone who knows directions such that people come up and ask me just outside the railway station of towns I have never visited before and just arrived in.

But this was different.

I realised, from the badge the young woman was wearing saying Church of Latter-Day Saints, plus, she was clutching a book, I did not linger to determine whether it was the Bible or the Book of Mormon, that she was On A Mission.

Back in the day, I thought that only young male Mormons went out as missionaries - in my youth, there was a lady at the end of the street who let lodgings to the youthful 'Elders' who were undertaking this - and the ones I encountered were all rather stereotypically Mid-Western WASPy types. In suits.

This - there may have been two because I saw someone go up to a bloke pushing a pushchair just ahead of me - was a young Asian woman in a very femme flowery summer dress.

I said I was not up for proselytization and went my way.

Not sure how much luck they're likely to have around these parts.

But anyway, is this now A Thing? Gender-equitable being sent out on missions?(And wasn't this obligatory?)

A somewhat annoying piece in Guardian Saturday on non-professional sleuths in TV cop dramas is not currently online. While it did give some gesture towards the longer history (Sherlock Holmes etc) I thought it was a bit lacking in any general sense of the field, in particular when it suggested that the rise of gurly crime-solvers (presumably as opposed to Knowing Old Ladies like Miss Marple) was a recent phenomenon.

Not only has this long been A Thing in textual mystery/thrillers, as long ago as 1983 Antonia Fraser's Jemima Shore was investigating on the telly.

I'm probably just being a bit My Particular Niche Favourites over omissions in this essay here: Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird.

WOT no mention of Tanith Lee???

Not sure if one would count Jane Gaskell as S&S - we consider that if Cija picked up a sword she would probably endanger herself before anyone else.

I am not sure if anyone besides me remembers the Silverglass sequence by JF Rivkin, which was perhaps a fairly late manifestation of the earlier S&S cycle?

A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -

- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -

Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?

(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)

Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)

Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.

(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)

I must admit, I was going, 'And today's Mandy Rice Davies' Well, He Would, Wouldn't He, Award, Goes to Him': Thrillers should be on UK school curriculum to boost reading, says Lee Child.

NB I'm not entirely sure Mr Child is up to date with what is currently on school syllabi and in school libraries, in particular on the basis of that Carol Atherton book, Reading Lessons I was reading recently....(on which I commented, 'how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....'

Does he really think schoolkids get plonked down with David Copperfield in their tiny hands at an early age?

(I think I was, what, 13 and in the top stream at a grammar school when we first got it, and that was back in the Upper Neolithic when we had to read it chiselled on granite slabs. I suspect things have moved on since then.)

And my dr rdrz know me and that I am all for reading should be pleasurable and people should read what they like and children's reading should not be gatekept - hat-tip here to Mr Fischer at my primary school who was all 'Comics are not the devil, comics can be a good thing' which was pretty progressive for 1950 something.

But maybe I'm most in particular raising my eyebrows when A Particular Genre is being touted, and moreover, one that is, shall we say, bloke-coded?

I think he's making a lot of assumptions there about what kids will read and want to read, but what do I know, I was hyper-lexical from an early age.

Not OK? Booker winner Flesh ignites debate about state of masculinity

No, really, you don't say? Can it be that - once again, or perhaps, still MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS?

Does it not sound as though the author goes in for 'dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension'? (Sigh.)

I am sorry to discover that an excoriating retrospect on John Fowles with particular reference to The Magus by DJ Taylor in the latest Literary Review does not appear to be fully accessible online, chiz, chiz -

[E]ach of his novels when stripped of its fashionable appurtenances - The Magus, for example, is rife with Jungian animas - is ultimately about male entitlement.... the books are all about men expecting to get the things they want and being mortified by their absence.
....
[A] series of exercises in what Maurice Bowra called 'the higher bogus'.

I note that there was a BBC programme last night on the 'manosphere': young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives. They sound rather sad and confused. (And historian is appalled at the persistence of a panic drummed up by an early C18th quack....)

Am trying to think of period when one could reliably say that masculinity was not in (some kind of) crisis.

I do feel, Lee Child, that this categorisation is a bit simple:

But I think it’s nuts that people think genre is easier than reaching a very small and reliable audience. Some good, middle-class Julian Barnes or Martin Amis reader, they don’t expect to be 100% satisfied with a book. They put it down and start the next one. When you’re a bestseller, you’ve got to satisfy the person that reads one book a year on the beach. If you leave him disappointed, he may never read another book.

Okay, I read a lot and I very very seldom expect to be 100% satisfied with a book, but the ones that ring the bell are all over the place. I won't say I expect to be satisfied by a book but you know, Middlemarch exists, Tam Lin exists, The Fountain Overflows exists, etc etc, I can always hope.

And what do we mean by being satisfied by a book anyway? I was in Slow Motion Trainwreck Relationship with a person who had some very weird stuff going on about reading and what they would or would not read and somehow being afraid of investing time in reading a book that might not be Right. It was not about satisfaction precisely, it was about having some internal template a book had to match.

Actually I suppose this rather went with making the occasional askance expressions and noises at the kind of things that I was reading, because I may not be entirely indiscriminate in what I read but I do have to be reading something and I will give quite a lot of things A Go.

I also wonder how one fits into the above paradigm people who do read a lot but want the exact same thing with just slight changes, which is also a market that bestsellers aim at, surely?

Also, are there literally people who only read one book a year when they're on holiday (and probably on the plane rather than the beach)?

On another paw (how many have I got up to?) there is Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love who would never read anything (except for Country Life, presumably, if he found the chub-fuddler there) after the transcendant experience that was White Fang.