This! It’s quite possible to not like the work of ANY of the authors being described here.

I understand that society will move a lot of goalposts when judging work done by women as opposed to work done by men. However, I’m not going to let stuff I believe is actively harmful (or just plain bad) go by without comment just because the author is a woman. I’m perfectly capable of criticising the bad women authors, the bad men authors, AND the hypocrisy of a society that holds each group to different standards.

I can’t speak for everybody, but every single person I’ve seen write articles and essays about the harmfulness of Fifty Shades is also unhappy with the kind of writing you describe here. They just don’t spend a lot of time talking about it in that particular article, because that article is about Fifty Shades.

Thank you for reminding us that women (in society at large, not just authors, and not just EL James) are still having to justify their ambitions and success in a way that men do not. When we stick our heads a little ‘too high’ we’re viewed as unnatural and presumptuous.

We may not admire or envy a specific achievement but we can admire and respect the drive and determination that brought someone to their point of success.

“Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers asked that she use two initials, rather than her full name. ”

She also writes under the name Robert Galbraith.

I have heard of male writers using a female pen name, but only for Mills and Boon style romantic fiction. I think that illustrates the point.

Men are not often threatened with rape, dismemberment, death, and harm to their families for having written something that displeased men.

Women are.

Individual male writers may be dissed individually because of their content, their style, their lack of popularity (when their contract isn’t renewed) but they are not told by reviewers,critics, editors that their work is inferior *because they are men*. They are not told they can’t write about something *because they are men.*

Female writers have been, and sometimes still are, told that. I write military SF and epic fantasy: both fields about which many people still say “Those are men’s fields; the good writers in those fields are men; women can’t really write good military SF/epic fantasy because (list of reasons why women writers are inferior.)” My first books (later published and still in print 25 years later) were rejected specifically because I was a woman writer. They were rejected later in some foreign markets because “only a man could write that” or “only men would read it”–and I refused to change my name to a male one to get the sale. (They’re pirated in at least one of the countries that refused to publish them legally with my name on them.)

Is every lack of sale, every bad review, of women’s work purely sexist? Of course not. Not all women writers are great writers any more than all men writers are great writers. But reviewers as a whole come to women’s work with a different set of assumptions and biases than they come to men’s work. There are instances in my genres in which a man-written book is praised for containing an element that is damned when it appears in a woman-written book. Some reviewers have, over the years, matured in their ability to see past the assumptions (that a woman’s book will be (and should be) family-centered, about personalities and feelings, about romance, about the “touchy-feely” stuff, more feelings than intellect, more “the small story”; that a man’s book will be about issues, politics, war, justice & injustice [racial or class-based], more intellectual, more “the big story.”) Others have not.

The playing field is not yet level. It’s not level at the entry level of publisher acquisitions, at the contract level of money, at the production level of cover design, at the distribution level of bookstores’ choices, placement, and in-house “recommended” lists, at the level of reviewers, critics, academic courses, and at the level of readership–too many men still will not read a book written by a woman. When Penguin recently queried academics/writers in other countries about their choice of quintessentially American books, only 20% of those mentioned were by women. (Reported in Twitter. No data were given on whether the respondents read books by women of their own nationality, or how many books by women they’d ever read.) The unlevel nature of the playing field is a black and white situation because something is either level or it’s not. How unlevel, and whether it’s becoming more level, is another topic. It’s definitely not level now.