I recognized that boys around me tend to read phylosophycal text and non-fiction while girls around me prefer novels and poetry... I myself do so (although I like some phylosophycal stuff every now and then)
did you realize simmilar tendencies?
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I recognized that boys around me tend to read phylosophycal text and non-fiction while girls around me prefer novels and poetry... I myself do so (although I like some phylosophycal stuff every now and then)
did you realize simmilar tendencies?
Better title would be Connection between Gender and Preferred Literature.
Most boys...and men... in my family don't read willingly at all. Though when they do it is mainly non fiction.
Do boys prefer to get their fiction/fantasy through computer games? My 13 year old nephew can't be prised away from them.
Just out of interest...why move bodies?
sex is correct. It refers to the biological male and female. While gender is the more sociological masculine and feminineQuote:
Originally Posted by Seasider
but to answer the OP. Yes, women like romance drivel and men like 2-fisted westerns :angel:
No it's something of gender, I think it would be incredibly difficult to attach anything to do with biological sex to literature preference.
Just historically, in the 18th century the novel was a genre that was considered feminine, while poetry was generally regarded as a male pursuit. Today, we look at lyric poetry as feminine and some novels as perhaps a more masculine pursuit. However, just in general women are more likely to read anything than men these days.
connection between sex and preferred literature
My initial thought was that this thread could be interesting. Is your preferred literature about sex? And I have long sworn by Yeats dictum that "sex and death" are the only subjects worthy of serious contemplation. But no such luck... the usual guys read adventure novels with lots of car chases and convoluted philosophy and women read romantic poetry (Man=culture/woman+ nature?) Unfortunately I actually prefer poetry myself... followed by short stories, essays, histories, and novels... I also like the opera, classical music, and even the ballet (at times). On the other hand, I like a strong Belgian ale or English stout, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and Muddy Waters and paintings of "nekkid" ladies.:devil: (I even make 'em myself:ihih:)
Go figure.:shocked:
I think gender is the appropriate term in this case as the poster is enquiring about social rather than biological behaviour.Quote:
Originally Posted by keilj
And the angel icon is there to denote irony, I take it. Nice try, but I'm not convinced.
I find it quite hysterical that my own dearly beloved who is both biologically a male, and in most regards, physiologically a male as well, he is typically a guy guy, very masculine in many regards, but go figure he reads paranormal romances which I myself find loathsome. In fact though my own reading tastes are quite varied, romance of any kind (with the exception of some classical works) does not fit in anywhere.
Honestly I have always associated poetry as the male pursuit, and novels as the female pursuit.
The OP is from Germany. It seems for a lot of posts she makes people are nit-picking her grammar. Give her a break. We have other posters here who write grammatically non-sensical posts that don't get nearly the amount of grief she seems to be getting for something as trivial is interchangeable synonyms.
They aren't interchangeable synonyms though, sex and gender are different things. Conflating them is like saying that having a vagina should make you naturally want to wear a dress.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
Sex is a biological state, which I would contend is not as clear cut as the male/female dichotomy anyway, since intersex children are occasionally born. Gender is the cultural and social constructs that are built up around biological sex. Conceptions of gender vary between cultures. They aren't all two gender systems either, several cultures have been documented with different conceptions of gender systems.
My point still stands. Cut her a break.
That is actually true to an extent, and the general belief until 1960 or so too. The genre of poetry has generally been associated with men, and read by men, whereas novels were read by women, and absorbed by women.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
In Canada, all genres seem dominated by women, with perhaps drama as an exception (though drama is not a dominant genre in any regards). Novelists and poets are close to 50/50, with much of the great work being done by women.
In truth though, there has been some bad pressure on women poets to be "women poets" rather than "poets." That basically stunted growth in many poets, who were restricted to alienating male audiences, and limiting their scope - the female-academic readership shot its followers in the foot, when they realized such a thing cannot be sustained, and people do not want to read about such experience for a whole anthology. The trend is still echoing but we see more and more the removal of political-poetics in favor of a return to artistic poetics - that is probably why Atwood has stopped writing novels and poetry, for the simple fact that her traumatized woman bit has gotten old, and in a country like Canada which is close to equality (though with some unresolved issues detailing men's and women's rights) her rants about male abuse and violence, of male suppression and restriction of women have gotten old, and, quite simply, she has gotten old.
The trend applies similarly to novels, but that trend is different across countries. The problem though is, that marketing has also created a rift in novels - fantasy is marketed at males, romance at women, J. K. Rowling removes her first name from the book jacket of her book, and changes her protagonist to a male as a means of securing higher sales - the world of popular fiction is screwed up, because it is way too commercial. Promotion and sales pitches have too much control, and thus, steer readers and create imaginary genres and niches.
I believe this is true for the psychological distinction of men and women also.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
On topic, I know more men who read poetry than women. On the whole, it seems there are more women than men who read at all.
I remember having come across an article once which stated that men are (unconsciously) tending towards using their visual sense whereas women are emphasizing their tactile and auditory senses (including every kinds of variation, of course). However, if true, it could be an explanation why men seem to prefer watching movies or playing video games.
While that is a valid argument and it is actually right at least in Anglosaxon criticism, for all we know, the OP might not know this and so knit picking like Mutatis-Mutandis says, is not exactly nice for anyone (I can testify). So, like MM has said, we should give her a break so that she may learn without being targeted, although it is probably in a nice way. I learned a tremendous amount just by reading other posts, my English was not even near to this a few years ago.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
So just talk about 'gender' and stop talking about 'sex' in that context and he/she will learn without telling her what the difference is. Otherwise she can send some of us a message asking for clarification.
On topic :D:
There are probably exceptions to the rule, but probably overly romantic stuff is not going to appeal to the average man. Nor will action stuff without any purpose really appeal to the average woman, but I suppose that there are very few books of the extreme kind in the good section of lit. That said, though, there are whole target markets to certain genders: the chicklit genre as one of them. But then again classics will probably appeal to the two sexes as otherwise they would probably not have entered the canon. (apart from Austen, although I have known a few men who actually like it. It has probably rather to do with general impression than with genuine reading, though.)
Can't comment on poetry. I don't really choose to spend my time with it AND I'M A WOMAN! :D
Margaret Atwood is... Fellow of the Royal Society of CanadaQuote:
Originally Posted by JBI
winner of Arthur C.Clarke Award
winner of Prince of Asturias Award
winner of Booker Prize (and shortlisted 5 times)
winner of Governor General's Literary Award twice (runner up 5)
was made Companion of The Order of Canada
And that's just a selection.
I doubt she would have achieved all this if her oeuvre could be reduced to a traumatised woman's rants about male abuse and violence. Her politics include Green and Environmental issues and Animal Welfare.
What is described here as political- poetics has a long and honourable history including Chaucer,Dryden, Pope, Shelley and Byron and that's only English poetry. I suspect it is Atwood's feminism rather than her politics that is being targeted here. Her most recent work has covered environmental matters which concern young and old alike.
I pretty much read and enjoy the same things as my guy friends, and poetry and romance are both out. Westerns, classics (I especially enjoy soldiers and epic battles or adventures), science fiction, some fantasy. I think more than gender, at least in my case (last I checked I'm female), it's up bringing. I was raised around all guys. My friends consisted of almost exclusively guys until college.
Then again, not that he reads anything, but my step dad likes sappy romance movies. My dad will only read political non-fiction. My mom reads medical textbooks and journals. I think the only people in my family who fall into a gender stereotype would be my grandparents - my grandpa reads lots of philosophy, though he also loves Harry Potter, and my grandma likes religious fiction with a touch of romance.
That would definitely be an interesting study to do, survey a population that doesn't frequent a literature forum (because obviously, we read and probably have friends who read).
I suppose it is also interesting how some classic authors are read mostly by one gender. For instance ,though some men enjoy her, most guys wont read jane austen unless they have to for an english course.
I can also think of another few examples. Personally I love Byron, but do the women on the forums enjoy him or not? I can understand why a woman might have trouble relating to the byronic hero, though on the other hand the byronic hero appears to be the guy most women dream for.
I can't speak for women in general but I love Byron. My favourite is A Vision of Judgement but I also like Don Juan and many of his shorter lyrics. I don't think he behaved very well to the women in his life, but that doesn't take anything away from his achievements in my view.
There are most certainly differences in preference. I don't know about poetry because so few people read poetry to begin with, but I think there is certainly a tendency of males to prefer non-fiction and philosophical material (in particular, existential and philosophy of mind issues). I have yet to meet any female with an interest in philosophy (barring one professor in college) and yet most every guy I've met if you bring up troubling philosophical issues about existence or the mind will be intrigued. Bring up the same issues to most girls and they seem repelled by its lack of practicality. This is the most salient difference I have noticed living in the U.S.Quote:
Originally Posted by inbetween
Here's what dictionary.com has to say on the issue. I'd say the words are pretty interchangeable. The only reason you'd want to avoid saying sex in this instance is because it has more commonly used meanings. For instance when I read the title of this thread I thought it might have something to do with the frequency that one has sex and their resultant literary preferences.
Sex
–noun
1.
either the male or female division of a species, esp. as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions.
2.
the sum of the structural and functional differences by which the male and female are distinguished, or the phenomena or behavior dependent on these differences.
Gender
2.
sex: the feminine gender.
Not very enlightening.
Which post... or bothQuote:
Originally Posted by Seasider
I don't think it was nitpicking though. No one was commenting on her grammar or syntax. Conflating sex and gender is a mistake often made by native English speakers as well, I think the distinction should be obvious but many people conflate these things. Being more precise in our language isn't meant to make the OP feel bad, it's meant merely to make the discussion clearer. I don't care about how people write, as long as the meaning is clear, and when the meaning is not made entirely clear it helps to establish the terms properly.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
Edit: Dictionary.com is living in the 19th century apparently. Since the 70s, the distinction has pretty much been de jure in the social and natural sciences, and the humanities.
sex or gender
take what you like
I watch and enjoy
Right, dictionary.com deals more in common parlance than philosophical / sociological jargon. For the OP, someone trying to learn English, its important to realize that in 99% of the conversations you have, this distinction is not a crucial one.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Quote:
Originally Posted by inbetween
See ambiguous... I don't know if you are watching and enjoying the thread or watching and enjoying sex.
Rores, quit being an a-hole.
My comment was about the dictionary.com definition. In this case the distinction was a crucial one. As Orphan Pip wrote, the correction was in the interests of precision which is the goal of most writers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rores28
There are feminized male authors, just as there are masculine female authors, though the latter who do not define themselves according to our contemporary view of GBLT identity are rarer. Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing are two I can think of who don't identify, like Willa Cather, as lesbian.
I recently had a snafu, I will call it that, with the fantasy novelist Lee Doty, whose work I would deem feminine, and unsuccessfully so, yet I was riveted by Stephen Baxter, whose realism falls into hard (i.e. male) science fiction, and as a consequence I gave him a five star rating. How this breaks down along traditional gender roles and readership I cannot say, but it might serve as a critical study OrphanPip might enjoy pursuing.
This Merriam-webster, not in 19 century or anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seasider
: either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures
The nitpicking is annoying, anyone reading the title may have doubts but not the first post. The words can be used as synounimous (Merriam-webster do list Sex as defintion of Gender) and humanisties use or water, is a restricted use. It does not nullify the use in other contexts, just amplify it.
The nitpicking was annoying. I mean, there was more things to comment or correct in his first post that are on topic, than this.
True, but general use of a lot of words is imprecise and not very useful for discussion. As a biologist, I often face an uphill battle trying to make people understand why categorizations of living things are often merely for convenience of reference and that they fall apart under any kind of serious scrutiny, discrete species concept being the major archaic concept that hangs around in the general populace. Sex is a roughly archaic concept, which is why it is ultimately likely to be usurped entirely in academic writing by gender. Masculine and feminine is more than genitals, even at the level of biology genitals facilitate categorizations but they aren't really adequate for defining everything we mean by masculine or feminine biologically, if we took a child with a vagina and fed them male hormones are they then male, a masculineQuote:
Originally Posted by JCamilo
I think it's important that we distinguish between what gendered behavior we think arises directly from biology, and what arises out of cultural understandings of how we relate to our biology.
This is not nitpicking, it is merely clearly defining what we are talking about. Seasider wasn't even correcting the OP, she/he was just proposing new, and more precise, terminology for the discussion.
Edit: I'll add that I'm probably just a tad persistent on this terminology because I think it has honest sociological effects that propagate certain repressive systems of thought.
I no more bow down to scientific narrative for guide posts than I do to religious doctrine. There are two methods for procreation, asexual generation and sexual generation and humans care more about the latter because we define ourselves along gender roles, inclusive of those whose orientation switches are biologically confused. Indeed, the best I've seen writers imagine in terms of alternative sexes are humans who have both genitalia, and that isn't saying much, because we can't imagine another type other than male, female, neuter. Culturally, socially, how we view ourselves as men and women matters, and this will always be reflected in our literature.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
I would agree that asexual and sexual pretty much do define the means of procreation for living things. That doesn't really demonstrate that the two sex dichotomy isn't really a matter of convenience, it works just because it first most people not because it is a solid determined thing. Besides hermaphrodites and intersex humans exist. That's without getting into the issues of sex-related traits, like brain chemistry, hormones, breasts, etc. which are not always aligned how we like to think they should.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
Of course, I agree how we view ourselves as men and women matters, but it also matters how we reconcile tensions with how we identify as men and women, and how people who identify as neither men or women feel. How exactly are intersex people supposed to feel, when their adult sexual morphology is often something that has been surgically and pharmaceutically imposed on them. Should they be forced to flip a coin and choose a sex, or go with the old "it's easier to dig a hole than build a pole" mantra.
This has been the funniest thread since the girls discussed Twilight.
It reminds me of the form that was circulated to companies saying:
List all the people in your company broken down by age and sex.
Count me in.
This is as relevant to disability identity as it is to the GBLT identity that keeps pushing the envelope, and only science fiction as a genre meets those expectations, as a whole. It is a gender crossing genre in this sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
I associate philosophy, poetry, and anything serious (for lack of better word) with men. I associate fluffy chick lit, romance, and self-help with women.
Interestingly I am a female and I do not live up to my own stereotype.
If you mean what I think you mean I find this to be a strange assertion. I take this to mean that if we randomly sampled 1000 humans with penises and 1000 humans with vaginae and recorded their literary preferences that no correlative pattern would emerge? Likewise, we could do the same thing with 1000 XY individuals and 1000 XX individuals.Quote:
Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Edit: While I realized that vaginae was a plural form of vagina I did not realize that spell check would actually reject vaginas. :)
A correlative pattern here doesn't demonstrate a causative link, nor would it delineate between cultural and social impact over biological. Not that I think those are entirely mutually exclusive entities, as I defined gender as a function of our understanding and relation to our biology, which is itself influenced by our biology.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rores28
Or in other words, just because more people who have penises are reading fantasy novels doesn't mean that it is because they have a penis that this is so. It may be in part, but if any matter of culture is involved in producing in that pattern, then we're looking at something of gender.
I agree with Brian that this is the weirdest thread. :D
@OrphanPip:
I recognise that 'gender' is the right way to talk of 'sex' in sociological terms, but I was talking of the way it was introduced. Why not just continue talking about 'gender' instead of 'sex' and be done with it? Why do we have to say, 'I think you mean "gender", right?' To me that sounds like, 'Tut-tut, you don't know it quite as well, do you', a tad offensive actually. That was my point.
Although the rest of this dicussion is very interesting. :p
One thing I've realised from reading the posts on this forum is that posters come from a huge variety of countries,cultures,genders,languages,ages and everything else that divides people. And still we try to communicate with each other in one language about things that are interesting or important to us.And we must do it without tone or volume of voice, facial expression, body language or any of the other ways we supplement the words we use to get our meaning across.
So is it not sensible to try, when the written word is our only tool, to ensure that the terms we use,regardless of grammar, spelling or idiom as far as possible communicate the same ideas to the debaters? At the UN they have interpreters...I suppose to avoid offence being taken thus leading to An International Incident!:)
The original title was ambiguous; the word sex can be used in many contexts. It was clear that the poster was speculating as to whether men and women have different tastes in literature. My suggestion was not a correction and it certainly was not a criticism of the poster. I was not saying to the poster tut tut you got it wrong! I simply suggested that if we used a more precise and less ambiguous word the chances of our understanding each other would be increased.
The only reason I post this is because what had the potential of being an interesting debate seems to have got somewhat snarled up.
yep a little
when I posted this I was actually thinking of using the word "gender" but I didn't know (still don't) whether it was a gender or a sex matter... perhaps I choose sex to provoke answers and to get more readers (at least in one case this worked out exellenty... :D)
perhaps that's part of the question. does the difference in taste concerning literature tell us anything about the general differences?
I saw a documentary about authism which followed the theory that there is sytemathik brain (S brain) and an emotional brain (E brain). it said men mostly have S brains and women mostly E brains (as to why that is I got my own theory... I think our brains adapted to the tasks they were given, which were, due to the physical differences, mostly emotional for women and mostly systematic for men. doesn't mean that a woman can't have a S brain and the other way round but as a matter of fact the majority of autistik people are male) . the absolute S brain was the autistic.
so the real question is perhaps: how strong is the connection between gender and sex?.. and does this literature thing tell us anything about it?
and complaining about a word (when there's something fishy with the meaning) is something I would do as well, just I'd try to choose my words more carefully not to hurt anyone... see you could as well have asked me if I meant gender rather then sex... that would have sounded a little kinder
but anyways ... none of you complained about the missing "r" in the very headline. so either you didn't notice or you were kind enought not to. (I would apreciate the later one very much since spelling is something I loose so easily when writing these things in the evening... and of course I'd be kind with you as well if it's just about spelling in comments... )
that's bin too long
I do apologize for this mass of letters, I usually have it shorter...
Since there is no way anyone can grat that both sides will not interpret the text in the way they want, except with silence, there is no much point in debating which word.
Anyways, women was introced as public and producer of literature quite lately. They were present in the oral aspect, only after the burgoise raise in the XIX century and a considerable inclusion of reading public, which included women (with the education to them) the literature was a male game. And what was literature main products? Philosophy and Poetry. Novels in prose were behind it, so in a way, many will identify the raising of novels in XIX century with the inclusion of woman. The number of writers increases clearly on this field. And they have great importance, Jane Austen, Bronte sisters, George Elliot are all major names of english novel. Maybe only Elizabeth Barrett had such power in poetry. About the romantics, most of them are men and most are writing for men. The idealized love or woman is a good signal of that - even those who are close to their "muses" like Shelley or Keats, still consider the acceptance of his peers in first place. And in a way poetry, still a male game. The number of great male poets after XIX century easily outnumbers the female poets. But this is less about phylosophy (it should be how it is writen, not the format. We have enough themes and ways of poetry or prose for both genders) more about the social momment. Poetry and Philosophy were downcast, so woman education moved to what was on the top - prose, novels, romances - and more pratical. If the woman inclusion was earlier, they would certainly be educated reading poetry and would be writting poetry too.