gender question

Dan Rhys said:

Women outnumbering men 4 to 1 means a LOT of happy men :-D

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Oh, FFS.

indianroads said:

Not in the world of my novel. Trust me.

Never underestimate the human capacity for cruelty - no matter the gender.

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I'm going to Oh, FFS this too.

ETA: An explanation of my response: with a ratio of Xn women to n men, there are more interesting options than oh, hey, teh sexy times are here and/or sadism.

Helix said:

I'm going to Oh, FFS this too.

ETA: An explanation of my response: with a ratio of Xn women to n men, there are more interesting options than oh, hey, teh sexy times are here and/or sadism.

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Yep.

Indian Roads,

There are scattered reports of the woman's genital tract being selective for one type of sperm over the other. Things like pH and cervical mucus 'hostility' (I did not invent the term) have been suggested as a way for female physiology to skew sperm populations in one direction or the other.

It's not hard science.I'm not saying that it is. But it's out there, and as someone from a heavily female-skewed multi-generational family, it seems possible to me.

So, one plausible way (to me) for a bottle neck to lead to a female:male ratio like you want is if during the population bottleneck, the genes that predispose vaginal environments toward X-carrying sperm become fixed.

Basically, all your women have vaginas that select the X-carrying sperm.

Separately, if I haven't recommended it before take a look at Alderman's The Power. 90% female:male ratio. The males are smaller and meeker than women, etc. This drift happened over thousands of years (many generations).

Some of the women are quite nasty to the men, because they are the ones in power. There are other ramifications in the book as well, to Helix's point. And the book is recent.

AW Admin said:

You might want to look at the way Anne Leckie treats gender in her Ancillary trilogy.

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I strongly second this. Ann Leckie's way of handling the understanding of gender in different cultures was done extremely well.

indianroads said:

In a society 600 years in the future, where women out number men 4:1, would they still be called female or woman? If not, what might they call themselves?

Of course they're people. What I'm looking for is identity nomenclature that doesn't include the words male or man.

I'm currently using 'fem', but it feels a bit awkward... but maybe that's because I'm not used to it.

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1. it is your world; you get to call the shots. Call them "the folks who don't scratch their nuts and watch tractor-pulls" for all I care, so long as you can make it make sense in your story.

2. language evolves. "Faggot" has a vastly different meaning now than it used to. We rarely use "thou" or "hath."

3. Except when it hasn't. We've referred to females and women for hundreds of years.

4. "Fems" might be a bit of a stretch to my ear personally since it has a certain connotation already, and that connotation especially would hardly seem to go with any sort of equality or whatever, and almost feel like a back-step....but there too, if you can write it compellingly....

Do what you like, personally I don't expect the terms to change but there's no reason they can't.

AW Admin said:

That's a nice heteronormative sexist and exceedingly naïve conclusion regarding the nature of human sexuality.

You might want to do a little research on what happens in social contexts where women are the majority of the population.

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Well, you certainly took the words right out of my mouth!

I love the idea of the terms evolving in your world. Whether you choose to change them or not, good luck! I've been looking forward to THAT world for some time now.

No matter the time period in my novel, I would still call them men and women. That would make it less confusing for me.

If you ask me, there's a very good chance that English, as we know it, would not even exist anymore. Think about how much English has changed just in the last few centuries. And you're talking about six centuries in the future. If English still exists then, it will essentially be an entirely different language.

And what do we do when writing characters who speak a different language? We write them in English, of course, in such a way as to maximize reader comprehension. You wouldn't publish a book for English speakers where all the characters only speak French. And if we're writing in modern English anyway, and trying to maximize reader comprehension, why use words other than "man" and "woman"?

Sure, ideas of gender will probably be quite different, but those differences should be described using modern, easily comprehensible English.

It's pretty clear languages will continue to evolve. Maybe the rate is slowed when we have recording technology, dictionaries, and the ability to communicate across distances, but from the arguments about changing word meanings, new words, and changes in grammar and syntax we see here on AW, language is still evolving and changing.

If we ever go into space, or live in other situations where communication is slowed down between populations, language evolution will happen even faster. I have no doubt changing gender norms will change language in that situation too.

Of course, a novel is going to be written in the language spoken by the current-day audience. For most of us on AW, that would be English. But speculative fiction has long had a tradition of playing with language in subtle and not so subtle ways through the introduction of new words, manipulation of the words chosen, and changes in the way certain words are used.

It's kind of an art, actually. Different readers will have different tolerances for these manipulations. In general, I think readers of speculative fiction are going to be more open to changes in the way a society's cultural reality changes the way certain words are used. Certain styles of speculative fiction (when social differences are major speculative elements) is supposed to immerse us in otherness, even if it's a bit unsettling to read at firs.

Not everyone is looking for this when they read SF or F. A high percentage of SF and F books don't tweak our expectations much at all, and in spite of being in a futuristic or fantastical world, characters seem to think the same way we do in modern western cultures. It's not exactly realistic, but a lot of speculative fiction is read for the adventure or for the description of alien worlds through the eyes of an outsider who is like us, or for the analogies it presents to our own world.

I guess you have to decide if you want a large element of this story to center around the immersion in a relatively foreign way of looking at gender, or if the difference in gender norms are essentially an exotic backdrop for a more traditional adventure story.

Nothing wrong with either choice, but it's a matter of knowing your audience (and of pleasing yourself too). You won't please everyone, no matter what you do. A brief foray into one of those "most hated tropes" threads will prove that something beloved by one reader will be hated by another.

I think if you use normal terms (man, woman, female, male) the reader will think nothing of it. If you use a new term it will be noticed and means the writer is making a point. So I would only use a new or different term if it was part of the plot or world-building - if it told the reader something meaningful about the world. As a reader I'd want to know why you're using a different word and what it means. I would want an explanation, even if implicit or subtle, otherwise I'd wonder whether a "fem" (for example) was a 'normal' woman or something different - perhaps not cis-female.

Patty said:

Indian Roads,

There are scattered reports of the woman's genital tract being selective for one type of sperm over the other. Things like pH and cervical mucus 'hostility' (I did not invent the term) have been suggested as a way for female physiology to skew sperm populations in one direction or the other.

It's not hard science.I'm not saying that it is. But it's out there, and as someone from a heavily female-skewed multi-generational family, it seems possible to me.

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Actually I think the science is pretty well studied for this. I read up on it 19 years ago because I wanted a daughter. There are a number of factors that can influence the gender of the child:

# The 'male' sperm (carrying the Y chromosome) generally swim faster than the 'female' (X carrying) sperm. So if the ovum is waiting there (& other factors are eliminated) there's a higher chance of making a boy (don't know the statistics - might only be a slight increase)

# The male sperm though are less 'durable' - they are more easily destroyed by heat or an acidic environment, and if I remember correctly they don't live as long either. This last would mean that if the ovum is released say 4 days after the sperm arrive, by then a good number of the sperm will have died and a higher percentage of the living will be female
# Following on from previous point, the heat required to kill sperm, especially male sperm isn't that high. This is why the 'sperm factory' hangs down from the body - to keep it cool - and it shrinks close to the body to keep them warm in cold conditions. Living in a warm/hot conditions and keeping the scrotum close to the body with tight undies - and thus hot, has been linked with reduced sperm count and in particular the 'male' sperm.
# Lastly what Patty touched on - the pH - The vagina has a somewhat acidic pH most of the time (this prevents yeast infection). At the peak of fertility in the monthly cycle, the vaginal environment becomes less acidic and the mucus changes in other ways too I think to make it all nice for the sperm and more conducive to fertilization.

It probable that a minority of women have a vaginal environment that is always somewhat 'hostile' to sperm - in theory, not enough to kill them all, just the male ones. But I can't imagine any natural selection favouring those women to produce way more offspring and pass this on, nor is there enough time for any evolutionary mechanism to account for the drop in fertilization of males.

I don't think it's too big a leap though to imagine an earth where climate change has resulted in the climate being hot enough to greatly reduce the population of Y-carrying sperm in the testes resulting in less males being born - BUT, (a) did you say your story is on space-ships anyway?? (b) you would have to have a reason why men are exposed to heat much of the time, not living in air-conditioning (c) If this is the future where one would assume medicine is as good or better than now, this imbalance of gender could be 'fixed' if men were valued enough, through IVF, or even simply providing men with the means to keep their jewels cool.
So you'd need lots of plugs for all the plot-holes (no doubt more than I have thought of here)

On a side note: I just recalled from my friend's actuarial studies that males are slightly more likely than females to die aged under 2 years, and in the teens to early 20's bracket. The latter is due to reckless behaviour. I don't know the reason for the babies - could that be the claimed weakness in the Y chromosome?? It's only about 5% though.

Lone Wolf said:

On a side note: I just recalled from my friend's actuarial studies that males are slightly more likely than females to die aged under 2 years, and in the teens to early 20's bracket. The latter is due to reckless behaviour. I don't know the reason for the babies - could that be the claimed weakness in the Y chromosome?? It's only about 5% though.

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It's got nothing to do with the Y chromosome, though it is true that more male babies die than female babies. The main reason is that testosterone dampens the immune system slightly. Males are not just more likely to die of infectious disease than women under the age of 2 - it's a lifetime thing, and it's not just young men who die more easily than women. Last time I checked the stats (admittedly a while ago now), men were more likely to die than women of nearly every cause of death at all ages.

Man flu is real. Men, on average, get more ill than non-pregnant women from all illnesses including flu. However pregnancy dampens the immune system more than testosterone does - if it didn't the mother's immune system would destroy the foetus. So pregnant woman flu is much worse than man flu (and potentially dangerous so always seek medical advice you're ill during pregnancy). But man flu is a thing.

Men being more likely to die in accidents than women is also blamed on testosterone, as testosterone increases risk-taking behaviours (presumably because we evolved to be hunter-gatherers and men are mostly the ones that had to do things like close range hunting of large animals - Neandertal males had similar injury patterns to rodeo riders) however it's not entirely down to testosterone as different cultural expectations of men and women in many cultures around the world require men to do more dangerous things in the first place so it's not just men being reckless.

The worst statistic is that men are more likely to die of suicide. That's got nothing to do with testosterone and everything to do with toxic masculinity in culture, i.e. expecting men to be stoical all the time, not express emotion, not seek help or support etc, not even be able to cry or let people know they're not okay.

Often times, names/terms can be used to symbolize the meaning of the subject in relation to the story. For ex. does the outnumbering of woman vs man in your story serve a specific purpose? If so, would you be interested in naming them in relation to that purpose? On the flip side (not trying to be sexist but just from a story standpoint), if men are more rare, would it make sense to keep woman as woman (because they are more common), but give men a new term?

indianroads said:

In a society 600 years in the future, where women out number men 4:1, would they still be called female or woman? If not, what might they call themselves?

Of course they're people. What I'm looking for is identity nomenclature that doesn't include the words male or man.

I'm currently using 'fem', but it feels a bit awkward... but maybe that's because I'm not used to it.

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Hi,

Male and female will still be used since that is basically a biological term used for almost all animals on the planet.

I think the term "Fem" is a good one.

I hope this helps!
Juggernaut

indianroads said:

Thanks all.

The book has been written and is in my final editing stages and will go to my editor next week. Cover artist is locked in for May 1, and it should go up on Amazon soon after.

I went with male/female and woman/man just because it was familiar and easier to read.

Thanks as always.

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One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the language we use in our books, it isn't for the characters, it isn't for the story, it's for the readers. In my current WIP, there's a single-gender alien species, but I refer to them all as "he". Why? Because readers told me that was the easiest and most understandable thing to use. The aliens have no concept of gendered language, but the ones reading it do. That's why it ended up that way.

Cephus said:

One thing a lot of people don't realize is that the language we use in our books, it isn't for the characters, it isn't for the story, it's for the readers. In my current WIP, there's a single-gender alien species, but I refer to them all as "he". Why? Because readers told me that was the easiest and most understandable thing to use. The aliens have no concept of gendered language, but the ones reading it do. That's why it ended up that way.

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Male is indeed the default in most people's minds. In fact, if you don't specify gender, people assume male, just as they assume white if you don't specify race (and sometimes if you do).

Language does affect the reader. Sometimes it makes sense to use it to shake the reader up a little bit, but of course it depends on your goals for the story.