reality check

[calimac]

Is this article on "Why Aren't There More Woman Sci-Fi Writers?" as condescending as it looks from here? (The author is male, of course.) (And besides that it should be "SF", not "sci-fi", shouldn't it be "women", or better yet "female", rather than "woman"?)

First it tries to excuse poorer review coverage of SF books by women by saying they write fewer of them, but since women write more of the fantasy than they do of the SF proper, the article fails by not matching that up to the coverage of the review surveys. If women only write 1/4 of SF proper, then it makes sense that the SF proper coverage of a review magazine would be only 1/4 women. But is the survey talking just about SF or about SF/F? The article doesn't say.

Then it tries to explain the sex-ratio differential between SF and F by attempting to say that women are less geeky than men. First, it means less nerdy, not less geeky. Second, it fudges the distinction between less nerdy and fewer nerds. Third, it disappears the prominent female nerds. Fourth, by acknowledging that epic Martinesque fantasy can be just as labyrinthine as hard sf (it actually uses the words "hard sci-fi", a combination I don't think I've heard before), it implies that women shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about scientific details. And last, it seems actually to say outright that women are "casual fans", not "hardcore". Which is ridiculous, if you've been to any hardcore fandoms in the last, oh, thirty years or more.

Then, despite trying to acknowledge that not all SF is like this, it paints a picture of hard SF as if it were all still being written by Hugo Gernsback. Oh, please. And even if you want to toss out people like Le Guin and Connie Willis as too "soft" (or "humanist" in genre terminology), can you write about women and hard sf - the real kind, with spaceships and battles and at least a veneer of scientific literacy (not that Le Guin isn't fabulously literate in the sciences she uses) - without mentioning, at the very least, Lois Bujold?

Then he writes, "The most popular and respected authors also tend to be male, as China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and Brandon Sanderson can attest." (Sanderson, really? Has he risen that far, that fast? I found his first novel nonsensical and never tried any more.) It doesn't mention that they're all, with Miéville as an only partial exception, far more fantasy writers than SF. But later on he writes, "The three most successful fantasy authors of the past decade—J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Stephenie Meyer—are women." How exactly does successful not equal popular, and are you trying to say these women's work is not respected? Because, well, by some it isn't. And is that supposed to be because they're women?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But the subject and the object are different entities, logically if not physically speaking. The "it" is an unknown, the object of the inevitable preceding question, "Who is it?" The purpose of the answer, "It's me," is to identify the unknown "it" (subject) with the known "me" (object). But until they're identified, they remain different. The reason we don't say "It's myself" is because we aren't told who "it" is until the act of speaking the sentence is complete, so it wouldn't make sense to say "myself" which refers back to a known subject, which in this case we don't have. Whereas "I shaved myself" begins with "I", so the subject is already identified with the object before the object shows up in the sentence.

I think we could resolve this dilemma with a coherent answer to the question "Who is it?" that doesn't involve the verb "to be."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, in Indo-European languages that mark case explicitly, both are characteristically in the nominative case.

Traditional English grammatical terminology reflects that: in the sentence "Barack Obama is the president of the United States," the first noun phrase is called the "subject" and the second is called the "predicative nominative." It is never called the "direct object."

Now, I suppose you could say that in that sentence, we have [subject] is [predicate nominative], but that in the sentence "It's the president!" we have [subject] is [direct object]; but it makes more sense to me to say that all sentences with "to be" have the former structure, regardless of whether the subject's reference is known or unknown, and that English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions as well as subject functions.

I'd also note the English sentence "Who is she?" as one that still takes the standard nominative case, even though the subject not only is an unknown but is an explicit marker of its being unknown! So even if we accept your argument that "me" is a direct object, your explanation for its being so in terms of the subject being unknown and thus "a different entity" seems questionable. Some other process is probably involved.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Nonetheless, in Indo-European languages that mark case explicitly, both are characteristically in the nominative case.

And that's what causes grammarians to think that we ought to say "It is I." That's where grammarians lose the thread.

For that reason, the grammatical terminology you describe is, in this specific case, simply wrong, and I am going to use correct terminology instead.

It makes a lot more sense to describe the endings of these sentences as objects than to offer a convoluted explanation that "English has generalized "me" to be used for predicate nominative functions." Why has English so generalized "me"? Because in this situation it's actually an object!

Similarly, that the "It" is a different entity seems to me the simplest explanation. "Who is she?" is an imperfect parallel because "Who is she?" is a question, not a statement, and questions are constructed grammatically backwards from statements (a statement would begin "She is ..."), so it makes sense for them to end with a nominative.