Joanne Harris thinks so:
Personally, (and as a feminist reader) I don't feel that it is sexist. It's just a marketing category, as someone who doesn't read a lot of Women's Fiction (struggling to think of the last time I did so.) All it means to me is that I would move to another bookshelf as I don't really like those stories (and look for the HF/crime shelves instead.)
Although as a woman who writes military HF, I agree with this:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/16/women-fiction-sign-sexist-book-industry
Thoughts?
Goodreads, meanwhile, has a hugely diverse list of genres to pick from (wizards or Spider-Man fiction, anyone?). "Womens" and "Women's fiction" both feature, but no equivalent men's labeling.
I asked Amazon to explain their reasoning; I didn't hear back. I asked Harris why she thinks it is an issue and this is what she told me: "It's an issue because effectively the gendering of books excludes certain readers from an area they don't need to be excluded from … Women aren't a sub-category … When you say literature it seems to me there is a definite implication it is written by a man. That is absurd and ludicrous but it is everywhere. It is a general and very broad strand of prejudice."
If there is women's literature, points out Harris, why not men's literature? "Why does fiction need to be gendered? ... How good does a woman writer have to be before she is referred to as a writer?" (Hilary Mantel has got there, she says, and so has Margaret Atwood.)
Perhaps there's something in the air, because Harris isn't the only author enraged by this. Randy Susan Meyers blogged earlier this week for the Huffington Post about how "if you want to publish on Amazon, you must pick a category from a wide-ranging list of possibilities that includes 10 subgenres of women's fiction and zero that are labeled 'men's fiction'".
Personally, (and as a feminist reader) I don't feel that it is sexist. It's just a marketing category, as someone who doesn't read a lot of Women's Fiction (struggling to think of the last time I did so.) All it means to me is that I would move to another bookshelf as I don't really like those stories (and look for the HF/crime shelves instead.)
Although as a woman who writes military HF, I agree with this:
Apart from the fact that Harris first wrote about Loki way before the Marvel films starring Hiddleston came out, she believes the comment is the tip of an iceberg. "A great big iceberg of sexism within the whole book industry, which stealthily perpetuates the belief that no woman writer can ever really be successful without having somehow copied from, used or otherwise capitalised upon the popularity of a man."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/16/women-fiction-sign-sexist-book-industry
Thoughts?