QUESTION - Fantasy, Romance and The Effects of the Female Demographic

In the wake of Mark Chadbourn's comments about the artistic decline of the fantasy genre, I decided to post a link on RPG.net, the biggest non-system specific RPG forum out there.  During the ensuing discussions a couple of interesting ideas appeared that I thought I'd share one in particular as I'm really curious as to how much water the idea holds.  I was not reading fantasy in the 1980's and I'm wondering whether the idea is paranoid nonsense born of misogyny or whether there's some germ of truth in it.  I really, sincerely hope it's the former.

       

When did Fantasy, as M. John Harrison puts it,  lose its interest in the genuinely fantastical and the weird?  Looking back at the rise of epic fat fantasy series it seems that this took place during the 1980's and between then and the 1990's, the Fantasy genre expanded and expanded to the point where it completely eclipsed the SF genre.  One of the most notable changes in the book market around that time was the sharp decline of the Romance genre.  Throughout the 1970's the Romance genre was so popular that it completely dominated the paperback market.  Anyone the same age as me will know this because their mother doubtless has loads of books from that era that boast about how many millions of copies they have sold.

 

 

Where did these books go?

 

Harlequin still exists, as does Black Lace but what is notable about these contemporary romance publishers is that they are now niche publishers.  Indeed, the only time you are likely to see a romance novel anywhere near the best-seller list is when it has had some comedy grafted into it and it has been rebranded as Chick Lit,  a genre that was created in the 1990's to appeal to young women.

 

Where has the romance genre's demographic gone?

Has it moved across to fantasy?

 

One of the most successful fantasy authors to appear in recent years is Laurell K. Hamilton.  Her Anita Blake books sell by the hundreds of thousands by virtue of being largely about relationships and sex.  Not only do they feature descriptions of swollen members and lurid frequently sadomasochistic sex (though the rape scenes are frequently cut from the paperback editions), they even get stocked in the Romance section of bookshops that still have such a thing.  But Hamilton is not something out of the blue... she follows in the footsteps of Anne Rice whose stories, though always relationship-heavy in content, became increasingly mocked and satirised as stories regarding pretty, angsty goth boys.

 

So here is the weaker of the two hypotheses I'm going to throw open to public discussion.  I say "weaker" because I think it's the one that's more likely to be true.

 

The young readers who once would have read romance novels are now reading fantasy.

 

 

The second hypothesis is partly reliant upon the first hypothesis being true.  If it does turn out to be true then it would explain a lot not only about the fantasy genre, but the genre marketplace as a whole.  I am throwing this idea out there because it is interesting, not because I think it is true.  My knowledge of the history of genre is limited and I'm sure that there are obvious objections that knock it down because if there aren't then this idea could prove divisive.

Up until relatively recently, genre was a boy's club.  The books were written by men, they were read by men and they featured stories about huge engineering projects, gadgets and fighting... lots and lots of fighting.  In short, they were a blend of Top Gear, Scientific American and the WWE.  What female protagonists there were tended to be empty-headed love slaves that were frequently little better than walking, taking MacGuffins.  Even the less pulpy elements of fantasy and SF tended to focus on abstract ideas and scientific theories, areas that some feminist critical theorists would have us believe are characterised by profound phallogocentrism (a neologism that combines phallocentrism with logocentrism).

However, as the years progressed things changed.  The pulpy masculine fantasy of the likes of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber that once dominated the fantasy scene were suddenly struggling to stay in print despite the fantasy genre selling more books than it had ever sold before.  Indeed, these new books had no interest in engaging in abstract ideas, or even seeking out the genuinely fantastical and weird.  Instead they were written in order to facilitate escapism and included complex webs of relationships where once there were twisted outsiders and lavish worldbuilding borrowed from Tolkien's experiments in myth and language construction but shorn of any such high-minded goals.  Fantasy even arrived on TV (a medium long resistant to it outside of children's programming) with the likes of Buffy with its complex webs of relationships, doomed love affairs and pretty, angsty gothboys and secretly romantic badboys who are both, of course, utterly in love with the central female protagonist.

 

This leads me to my second hypothesis :

The massive influx of female readers into the fantasy genre over the last three decades has been directly responsible for its artistic conservatism.

 

By this I mean that many of the criticisms leveled at fantasy by me as well as others can be explained by the demographic change that took genre from a boy's club to a more inclusive milieu.  Obviously, feminist SF and LeGuin's fantasy explicitly set out to attack the phallocentric tendencies of fantasy, but if this second hypothesis is true then they were simply an intellectual vanguard of a larger demographic change that turned the fantasy market into a place that punishes authors who fail to appeal to the values once native to the exclusively female romance genre but that are now increasingly coming to define the fantasy genre due to the fact that there are far more female readers than there are male ones.

I hope that this second hypothesis is false as if it were true it would prove hugely divisive.  As it is, female authors and fans feel that they are unfairly treated and discriminated against by a male-dominated SF establishment.  It would be disastrous if, rather than blaming nebulous cultural factors such a lack of interest in the future, critics of the state of the genre came to blame the tastes of female genre fans.

 

Reasons for Optimism

 

Firstly, I am not certain that there is such a thing as "female tastes".  I've never been comfortable with the feminist thought attacking science because it always struck me as sexist to suggest that women can't do abstract thought and science or that they're better off thinking about relationships and fashion.  Surely these are arbitrary tastes foisted upon us by society?  Most young female fantasy fans will never have read romance literature, so where could they have acquired a disinterest in the more logocentric aspects of genre?  what attracted them to the genre in the first place?

Secondly, it's not clear in which way the bad stuff in fantasy and fantasy's dominance are reducible to stereotypically female characteristics.  The lack of interest in abstract and scientific ideas fits the old stereotypes but what of worldbuilding?  isn't worldbuilding systematic scientific thought about a fantasy world?  it's supposed to be the clomping foot of nerdism, not the march of Manolo Blahniks.

Thirdly, if modern female fantasy fans are in fact looking for the kind of writing that previous generations found in romance novels, then why are they not all out reading romance novels instead?

Fourthly, fantasy is still overwhelmingly a genre dominated by male authors.

All of these criticisms damage that second hypothesis but I can think of a number of reasons why they don't do away with it completely.  So I'd be grateful if someone could help me dispose of this poisonous idea.

Comments

[Halloween Jack]

If fantasy books are becoming "artistically conservative," I doubt that it's because of a new female readership. Quite the opposite. If I had to speculate, I'd say it's because they're choosing to market to a hardcore base rather than try to draw in new readers from the general public.

Why don't comics sell the way they used to? Because the publishers are marketing to a shrinking, but monied fanbase who want to read about the further adventures of Superman's alien robot duplicate from Alternate Reality #7 that they remember from two issues they read when they were kids. Likewise, fantasy authors (or at least publishers) are choosing to pander to the hardcore obsessive nerd market, who will continue to shell out money for volume after volume of a series that stopped being good after the first book, just because they have to know where the story goes.

[Andrew Wheeler]

Romance is not a small, niche genre. Romances are over 26% of all books sold, by units, in the USA. (Further staggering statistics available from the Romance Writers of America.) Perhaps the situation is vastly different in the UK...but I doubt it. You're just not paying attention. Romance, as a genre, is approximately four times the size of SF and Fantasy put together.

As to the lack of romances on the bestseller lists...did you even bother to look? Check out the most recent mass-market paperback list from the New York Times. There are romances at number 2,3,5,6,7, and so on...

You really should check facts first.

Other points:

There has always been fantasy that has an interest in the "genuinely fantastical and weird." It has always sold poorly. (The original Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, beloved in fannish folklore ever since, was a dismal commercial failure.) Starting in the late 1970s, it was discovered that there were other kinds of fantasy which sold very well. Those other kinds of fantasy then grew in importance, for the obvious reason that lots of people were buying them.

There has been a major crossover of writers and readers between romance and fantasy over the past decade or so, but it has nothing to do with the "death of romance." It has a lot to do with a natural confluence of subject matter, which you seem to realize in your very negative assessment.

One of your points might be true if by "relatively recently" (referring to the "boy's club" of genre) you mean "up until the early 1970s." That is, of course, about thirty-five years ago. In popular culture, that's not recent -- it's the dead past.

Yes, fantasy never succeeded on TV before Buffy. We all imagined The Twilight Zone, and Dr. Who, and dozens of others.

You're mildly correct that female readers are conservative. But guess what? So are male readers. Readers in general are conservative. The works that are liked by the largest number of people are only very, very rarely ground-breaking or new. (Please tell me this doesn't come as a shock to you.)

Saying that fantasy is still "overwhelmingly dominated by male authors" is true only if you define fantasy very narrowly. Yes, Robert Jordan is the single best-selling recent fantasy writer. But there are several women published as fantasy in the next rank of bestsellers, and the entire strong-selling subgenre of "paranormal romance" that you seem to think doesn't exist also moves a lot of books. Of all the units of books sold in a given year with fantasy elements in them, I'd bet that well more than half are now written by women.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Thanks Andrew... that's what I was looking for.

I think the situation is different in the UK as far as Romance is concerned because if you look at something like the Amazon.co.uk best-seller list you'll find fantasy and murder mysteries but nothing that you'd class as traditional romance. Indeed, I think that the Chick Lit thing took off in the UK because young women simply stopped reading romance. 35 years is recent because it's about a generation and a half meaning that the romance audience in the UK would be aging.

I know about "paranormal romance", I even mention it specifically. I'll also mention the "misery porn" emerging genre that deals in graphic portrayals of abuse... that too sells incredibly well and arguably taps into the same prurient market desires

The idea that I'm slightly unclear on is the extent to which there's an overlap between romance and fantasy. I can see the similarities between vampire porn and romance... it's the fact that it's socially acceptable porn marketed at women. But where is the overlap between The Wheel of Time and romance? is it just the dealing with relationships? You seem to acknowledge that there's an overlap so I'm wondering what it was.

As for my "negative assessment", I'm not assessing, I'm asking. As I said, I wasn't around at that time and my knowledge of the wider publishing market is patchy and based upon what I read in the newspapers. If there's negativity it comes from the fact that if the hypothesis was correct then the marginalisation of the kind of fantasy I like was a direct response of genre ceasing to be a boy's club. If true that's a horribly divisive fact as it means that diversity has resulted in, from my perspective, more books that don't interest me and less books that do.

[Mark Chadbourn]

Now *that* is called sticking your head above the parapet!

Seriously, there's a similar conversation running in the comments of my original blog, raised by reader David Chunn who raises the spectre of romance 'infecting' the fantasy genre.

And he's right. But if fingers need to be pointed, it should be at the US publishers who originated the trend (it's still not really true in the UK). They identified a crossover in the readership of fantasy and romance - a certain age and sex demographic - and also identified - mistakenly, imo - a confluence of tastes: that fantasy readers and romance readers both really wanted emotional comfort.

And it's true that some do. There are parallels between the hugely conservative elements of one slice of the fantasy genre and the romance genre. Crossover fantasies were bought by editors, sales trended up where other fantasy book were flat though high, more romantic fantasies were bought...and so on...

But I think you are probably wrong to state that fantasy is a genre dominated by men. That was true of the last generation, but I think the majority of fantasy writers are now women, from best sellers Trudi Canavan and Naomi Novik on down. That's just my experience - I don't have numbers.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Mark :-)

Yeah... I expect to be pelted with stones for mentioning this but I have no love for the idea and kind of hope it's false so as long as the stones are directed at the idea and not at me then I'm happy.

I think David Chunn might have nailed what the overlap I am unclear above is. I remember that I raised the specter of aspirational comfort reading in my original and much loathed "aesthetics of fantasy" piece and it would fit with the tropes... it would explain the lack of politics in a lot of fantasy, the tendency towards moral simplicity (good, bad and mysteriously ambiguous) as well as the reliance upon familiar Tolkienian settings and tropes. There's nothing there to disturb and a lot there to comfort.

So does it make sense to talk about these fantasy trends arising from a demographic shift or was the split between fantastical fantasy and aspirational fantasy always the same (thereby suggesting that the growth in the female fantasy market is not punishing fantastical fantasy) but there are just more books being sold now.

I agree though, fantasy clearly isn't dominated by men. The three big names are all male but beyond that there are a lot of female writers.

[Ariel]

Talk about synchronicity: shortly after reading through this post and the comments I switched back to my inbox to find an e-update from Juno Books - an entire imprint dedicated to the fantasy / horror / romance / softporn genre maelstrom...

Anyhow, I'd just like to say a this point, very briefly (because I'm desperately short of time today) that I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that there's a definite male / female division in reading habits within the fantasy genre. Yes, it could be said to hold reasonably true for a few select sub-genres (and the f/h/r/s-p sub-genre might be one good example) but in my years as a bookseller I never noticed a particularly clear split along gender lines when it came to buying fantasy, particularly the 'bestselling' fantasy authors. But this was five or six years ago, so things may have changed, especially as the f/h/r/s-p market has dramatically increased in size during that time.

And in my more personal experience, most of my early fantasy reading material was supplied by my Mum, who at that time - the late '80s - had been reading within the genre for about 15 years, and indeed has continued to do so ever since. And at the time I certainly didn't think of any of the books she gave me as being particularly girly (indeed, she's the only person I know who still owns a pretty much complete set of the Gor books... but I don't really want to dwell on that too much...)

Our tastes have diverged more in recent years, partly because she's a very conservative fantasy reader, far more apt to re-read a favourite series (she's been through the Wheel of Time about six times... I haven't the heart to tell her about Robert J.) whereas I'm always on the lookout for something new and interesting and have only re-read about two or three books in
the past decade.

But mostly our tastes have diverged because she tends to read for particular themes and tropes within fantasy - she loves a classic quest story and is never happier than when she's got a feisty heroine type to journey with - whereas I seem to be getting more and more into the Fantastic and Weird.

And yes, she did read romance novels when she was younger, and did make the shift into fantasy, but I wouldn't say that romance within fantasy is something that particularly drives her choice of reading matter now. Although, obviously and again, it's a completely different marketplace these days to back when she was starting to fill her shelves.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

That's interesting... my GF was the same till she met me. She had this huge collection of paperback fat fantasy books that she would reread again and again. She had the sense to give up on Robert Jordan (BTW, I wouldn't be worried, within five years I bet someone like Kevin J. Anderson will appear and write a conclusion to the Wheel of Time based upon Jordan's notes) but her reading habits were the same as your mother's including feisty heroines and quests.

I think it could well be an escapism thing. I suspect escapism's easier when you've read the book before. I don't know, I don't and have never read for escapist purposes.

I also wonder whether it's not an economic thing. People who don't buy into the whole "disposable culture" thing might be happier reading and reading the same books over and over again.

I know what you mean though, I have serious misgivings, as I said, about the idea of males and females having certain tastes purely because they're male or female. But I'm also conflicted on the idea.

I know that there are such things as male and female brains. In fact, one of the reasons why I have no problem thinking of male to female transsexuals as women is because studies have shown that most of them DO have female brains with slightly different lay-outs.

Also, I look at something like Friends and I think that it's not the male fans that are interested in the interminable incestuous relationship bollocks.

So I'm conflicted about this idea because, on the one hand, I could just being casually misogynistic and thinking "the problem with fantasy is that there's too much skirt reading it" but at the same time the hypothesis could be correct in that a lot of the traits I like least in fantasy ARE those favoured by the increasing numbers of female readers and that the reason I am not embracing this hypothesis is that it sits uncomfortably with my belief that a more diverse sub-culture and artistic scene is necessarily a better one.

[Martin]

(though the rape scenes are frequently cut from the paperback editions)

This is a rather interesting aside. Why is this? The belief that children don't buy hardbacks?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Or maybe it's something to do with library copies.

I imagine that there'd be something of a to do if it turned out that money was being spent on buying rape stories for young girls.

[A.R.Yngve]

The fact that women (and, indeed, mothers) read Gor books disturbs and aggravates me to no end.
:-(

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Apparently, in the UK at the moment book shops just can't keep graphic stories of child abuse on the shelf. Suddenly Gore seems somewhat less outre.

[MattD]

Jonathan, your basic conception of where fantasy is right now seems very much at odds with my own experience. Granted what Andrew wrote, that "fantastical" fantasy has never sold well: that said, there seems to be substantially more of it, more attention paid to it, and more casual readers reading it, than ever before (at least in the USA). There are a ton of small presses that publish these sort of novels regularly: Prime; Night Shade; Aio; Small Beer; Wheatland; Overlook; PS Publishing in the UK; etc. There have been a number of authors who began their career with the small presses that have recently sold new novels and/or sold new editions of their small press novels to major publishers, like VanderMeer, Valente, K.J. Bishop. Miéville had a major publisher right from the start; just the existence of so many sub-genres and movements within fantastical literature -- "new weird," "new wave fabulist," "interstitial" -- gives some idea of how popular it is. (I'd suggest, referencing your RPG.net post, that the popularity of their work helped bring about the 2005 Viriconium omnibus here in the States; realize that The Pastel City was sadly out of print for much of the 1980s and 90s here.) We've also seen recent new editions of older works by fantastic authors ranging from contemporaries like John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll to Angela Carter, Mervyn Peake and Hope Mirrlees.

Meanwhile genre magazines and zines that publish fantastic fantasy regularly seem to be thriving: Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede...and is there a more influential zine out there than Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet? You don't hear complaints about falling subscription numbers or the death of the short story from these publications. And if we're discussing the women most influential in fantasy, surely Kelly Link is up there with Rowling and LKH: between publishing and co-editing LCRW, her two collections that received enormous genre and mainstream recognition (Salon, Village Voice, etc.), her co-editing of the The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volumes, now a major publishing deal for the Best of LCRW volume and a new collection of stories; her Small Beer press's publishing of collections from fantastic authors like Alan De Niro and Theodora Goss (who's gone on herself to co-edit the Interfictions anthology of fantastical fiction); etc.

And let's not forget the mainstream, which seems more accepting than ever of fantastic fiction as literature: Nobel prize winner Pamuk; Saramago; Plascencia; plus new editions of Calvino's catalog, Borges's work, etc. Fantastic short fiction regularly gets published regularly in mainstream magazines like the New Yorker and McSweeney's...just check the TOC of the recent Best American Fantasy volume.

This is all rather personal, anecdotal evidence of course...I don't have hard sales numbers. But I'd like to know more about why *you* think fantastical fantasy is in decline, Jonathan. If it's from looking at book stores, well, let's factor in the overall decline of the book store as a point of sale for anything other than bestsellers. If it's from scraping the surface of online fantasy and RPG forums well then yes, we'd expect those groups to in general prefer the more conventional, trope-driven style of fantasy, wouldn't we?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Matt --

I know... I know... I have a problem.

I am to fantasy what Spider Jerusalem is the The Smiler (only more shit).

I know that there is a niche of decent fantasy. I even subscribed to Lady Churchill and bought F&SF the other day as proof. My complaint is not that "there isn't any fantasy I want to read".

My problem, I think, is that popular fantasy pushes all of my buttons at once. From its intellectual and social politics to its support for escapism (I read in order to engage more with the real world... not less... why would one want to escape reality?), there is not one of my hobby horses that is not happily ridden by mainstream fantasy.

As such, the popularity of fat fantasy is not just something I can be indifferent to... it is a constant reminder of how completely at odds my values are with those of most people.

The problem, kind of, is that I should really be able to leave fantasy completely alone. I don't talk about romance and I shouldn't have to talk or think about fantasy but unfortunately I am a gamer, I love SF and I love horror and all of these elements are closely intertwined with fantasy at a cultural level.

It's genuinely difficult to not encounter fantasy and when I encounter fantasy, particularly if it's someone else agreeing with me, it's like a red rag to a bull... I can't not rise to the bait and dwell upon what I hate about fat fantasy or try and work out how the human race has so lost its way that Robert Jordan sells hundreds of thousands of copies of his books while someone like Peter Watts is so disgusted with his treatment by genre publishing that he's considering not writing another book.

[Jacob Martin]

Maybe Fantasy is undergoing a shift in identity, now it's not just male geeks and nerds who read it, but the audience is now appealing to women.

What I'd like to see is "guy-lit" Fantasy books that instead of reinforcing gender stereotypes, actually give hope for non-football playing jocks, and assure them that one can be a man and respect women at the same time. Interestingly, as female readership of Fantasy increases, we could well see a reaction against the stereotypical Conan-like hero in favour of the more feminine male hero, because Anime and Manga has made gender-confusion popular with women, both in Japan and elsewhere. It's Giddens's concept of "fluid identity", gender roles aren't as cemented as they used to be, and with that, we might see change in the way genres of books and films depict gender roles.