Dragaera

Gender Distributions in SF & F

Michele Riccio mr1 at rcosta.com
Thu Jan 30 14:37:41 PST 2003

On 29 Jan 2003 at 16:55, Ruhlen, Rachel Louise (UMC-St wrote
> 
> I enjoyed your commentary but do you have any answers to the original
> question of why? I didn't.
> 
> Rachel

Oh sorry...I went off track again, huh?

The short answer is - I don't know why females tend towards fantasy 
and males to SF.  

In my case, I was raised by wolves...er...my siblings, and they didn't 
really pay much attention to what I was reading.  I was let to run wild 
through the library, and never noticed I was reading "boy stuff".  I 
just read whatever looked good.

My sisters both read lots of romance novels - I tried a few, found 
them to be repetitious, and went back to what I found interesting.  I 
may have unconsciously avoided fantasy novels back then because 
the covers reminded me of romance novels.  Of my male role 
models - the only one who read fiction, read SF.  

So, nature or nurture?

M
 Michele Riccio
mr1 at rcosta.com