Richard raised some really interesting points but, whatever
it is, myth or fantasy, the one problem with dividing
hard-boiled fiction along gender lines, especially these
days, is that not all "female" fantasies or whatever are
written or read by women, anymore than
"male" fantasies are written or read exclusively by men.
Never have been, and certainly aren't now. Leigh Brackett,
whom Maura recently mentioned, didn't just write great
hard-boiled fiction -- she was also a fan.
If I read Paretsky or Grafton or whoever, that doesn't make
me one of those "chicks without tits or a dick." I'm
confident enough in my masculinity that I don't worry about
schoolboy crap like that. Likewise, Marianne and Maura and
Victoria are not rendered any less female because they read
"male fantasies," and they probably don't lose too much sleep
over it, either.
In fact, despite all the chest-thumping and pigeon-holing,
what's the actual gender breakdown of readership of all these
"male" fantasies? It might be interesting to find out. Given
that more women read fiction in general than men, my guess is
that an awful lot of women
(perhaps even most?) are doing the reading of all these
"male" fantasies. I do know that maybe thirty percent of the
mail I get on my site is from women, and the internet is
currently mostly a male domain, for what that's worth. There
are some writers of hard-boiled fiction on this list. Any
idea of the gender-breakdown of your readership?
So what's in it for these women? Maybe it goes beyond gender
fantasies, and is actually more about trying to be a strong
and decent person, trying to survive in an unfair and
menacing world. Maybe it's more about hero fantasies, than
anything else. Of course, gender's part of everything, but
surely when a woman reads, say, THE MALTESE FALCON, she
identifies with Spade, not Brigid.
Of course, in noirish books, there are rarely any heroes at
all, but that's a whole other thing....
Oh, and Maura, it's really hard to read your stuff. Not all
of us have the Antigua font installed, and those of us who
receive the digest can't receive formatted text anyway, so we
receive a jumble of confusing codes as well as the
text.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
Now online: Our December issue. The Thrillies. Christmas Gifts. New fiction. And Tim Broderick's ODD JOBS. -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 18 Dec 2000 EST