So here's a question. If "a film like The Matrix attracted female viewers partly because it was about complicated concepts of life and death" then why do Strictly Dancing and Coronation Street attract female viewers?
I'd love to think that women avoided SF until recently because it was too simple and trivial for us and we were all busy reading Kafka instead but the evidence doesn't stack up somehow.
Presumably I like Buffy because there are strong female role models, and Firefly because Mal's cool and sexy. And your average straight guy has it the other way round. Whereas actually Joss could write a show about small purple hermaphrodites and I'd still buy the DVDs full price.
(I tried reading some of Adam Roberts stuff recently; couldn't get into it at all.)
Well, yes, her quotes were reduced, but pixeldiva 'corrects' several things which were not attributed to her, unless the Torygraph have rewritten the article again.
Louise H is quite right, the words I'm quoted as saying are daft. But it's not quite what I said: a Telegraph journalist phoned me up and conducted a twenty-minute phone interview with me, and in response to their qys I gave them a not-original account of why female viewers are much more prevalent in SF than they used to be. There were lots of caveats (ie. that although early C20th SF was largely created and consumed by men, there were always women doing both things too); then there was an account of how the 1960s turned on a new female audience to SF (mainly through Star Trek on the telly and popular novels by Zimmer Bradley, Le Guin and Andre Norton) and how 'feminist SF' became such a significant thing from the 1970s onwards. In response to a question about what women liked in SF today I said that SF today was a really wide-ranging and diverse set of things, and that I assumed different women liked different aspects, eg women might like q for r reason, or x for y reason, and (I did say) they might like the Matrix for its pseudophilosophical meditations on life and big questions, or they might like watching Keanu Reeves. I said a bunch of other stuff too; but out of it all the journalist wrenched the bits she wanted and left the rest behind.
Incidentally, Louise H, quite a few people say they don't like my writing, or that they can't get into it, so you're in good company. I'm probably doing something, as a writer, wrong.
Incidentally, Louise H, quite a few people say they don't like my writing, or that they can't get into it, so you're in good company. I'm probably doing something, as a writer, wrong.
Well I wouldn't change what you're doing on my account; I have the same problem with William Gibson and he seems to have managed pretty well so far without my patronage.
Odd isn't it that we know perfectly well that every time we have heard about people's personal experience of journalism someone gets misquoted yet we still make snipey remarks about people's quoted comments.
(But on the other hand if we gave everyone the benefit of assuming they were being misrepresented we'd probably still be thinking Blair was a socialist really who had just got a bad press. Maybe it's safer just to avoid having opinions at all.)
I said a bunch of other stuff too; but out of it all the journalist wrenched the bits she wanted and left the rest behind.
Umm, yes, well. That's what journalists do. And while one is entitled to complain if they completely change the sense of what one says (which, God knows, happens often enough), trimming stuff down to terse and punchy snippets is simply them doing their jobs.
One can only even complain about that if one never reads newspapers at all. If one doesn't want it happening to one's pellucid prose, one shouldn't speak to journalists at all, ever.
(Which, by the way, is a perfectly rational policy. Very few people give really good soundbite, and it's often smart to know better than to try.)
9 comments:
So here's a question. If "a film like The Matrix attracted female viewers partly because it was about complicated concepts of life and death" then why do Strictly Dancing and Coronation Street attract female viewers?
I'd love to think that women avoided SF until recently because it was too simple and trivial for us and we were all busy reading Kafka instead but the evidence doesn't stack up somehow.
Presumably I like Buffy because there are strong female role models, and Firefly because Mal's cool and sexy. And your average straight guy has it the other way round. Whereas actually Joss could write a show about small purple hermaphrodites and I'd still buy the DVDs full price.
(I tried reading some of Adam Roberts stuff recently; couldn't get into it at all.)
I hate being classified by broadsheets.
And yet again the word 'geek' makes its mandatory appearance
The young sci-fi watching lady in the article feels she may have been slightly misquoted...
Now I feel bad, but not quite as bad as she obviously does.
It was clearly a very ill informed article; Geeks are small men? I don't think so. Has the author never seen Comic Book Guy?
Well, yes, her quotes were reduced, but pixeldiva 'corrects' several things which were not attributed to her, unless the Torygraph have rewritten the article again.
Louise H is quite right, the words I'm quoted as saying are daft. But it's not quite what I said: a Telegraph journalist phoned me up and conducted a twenty-minute phone interview with me, and in response to their qys I gave them a not-original account of why female viewers are much more prevalent in SF than they used to be. There were lots of caveats (ie. that although early C20th SF was largely created and consumed by men, there were always women doing both things too); then there was an account of how the 1960s turned on a new female audience to SF (mainly through Star Trek on the telly and popular novels by Zimmer Bradley, Le Guin and Andre Norton) and how 'feminist SF' became such a significant thing from the 1970s onwards. In response to a question about what women liked in SF today I said that SF today was a really wide-ranging and diverse set of things, and that I assumed different women liked different aspects, eg women might like q for r reason, or x for y reason, and (I did say) they might like the Matrix for its pseudophilosophical meditations on life and big questions, or they might like watching Keanu Reeves. I said a bunch of other stuff too; but out of it all the journalist wrenched the bits she wanted and left the rest behind.
Incidentally, Louise H, quite a few people say they don't like my writing, or that they can't get into it, so you're in good company. I'm probably doing something, as a writer, wrong.
Apologies for butting in; I'll butt out now.
Incidentally, Louise H, quite a few people say they don't like my writing, or that they can't get into it, so you're in good company. I'm probably doing something, as a writer, wrong.
Well I wouldn't change what you're doing on my account; I have the same problem with William Gibson and he seems to have managed pretty well so far without my patronage.
Odd isn't it that we know perfectly well that every time we have heard about people's personal experience of journalism someone gets misquoted yet we still make snipey remarks about people's quoted comments.
(But on the other hand if we gave everyone the benefit of assuming they were being misrepresented we'd probably still be thinking Blair was a socialist really who had just got a bad press. Maybe it's safer just to avoid having opinions at all.)
I said a bunch of other stuff too; but out of it all the journalist wrenched the bits she wanted and left the rest behind.
Umm, yes, well. That's what journalists do. And while one is entitled to complain if they completely change the sense of what one says (which, God knows, happens often enough), trimming stuff down to terse and punchy snippets is simply them doing their jobs.
One can only even complain about that if one never reads newspapers at all. If one doesn't want it happening to one's pellucid prose, one shouldn't speak to journalists at all, ever.
(Which, by the way, is a perfectly rational policy. Very few people give really good soundbite, and it's often smart to know better than to try.)
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