Do you find it difficult to be a female genre writer? Do you perceive, say, your husband being treated differently by "the industry" (magazines, award groups, editors, etc.)?
We went through our library and pulled down 35 science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies.
the vast majority had only 10-20% female contributors.
I wrote a poem about a 12-year-old girl who is nearly raped by a high school boy she's idolized from afar
: "Thanks for sending (title), but I decided not to use the poem. A fat woman being called by a good-looking guy always turns out badly, so I didn't feel as much for her plight as I might have."
A 12-year-old is attacked, and the editor doesn't feel sympathy for her ... because she's fat?
Would the poem have been feelworthy in the editor's eyes if the barely-pubescent girl in question had been portrayed as a little hottie? Or if she'd been a boy?
Bias against "female" themes in genre fiction and poetry is a hard thing to call somebody on
clipped from: www.sequentialtart.com