Hey Deflective,
Standard disclaimers. Just trying to give you my honest response to what you're saying. Hope it doesn't come across as personal, and all that. :-D
I wasn't sure whether to hop in again or not, but it seems to me like you're really thinking about and engaging these issues, and I want to respect the time and thought you're willing to put into our podcasts. (Your engagement is really cool, in my opinion.) I just hope I'm not coming in too much with the stentorian editorial tones. ;-) If I am, it's totally unintentional, and I apologize. Just let me know if I'm crossing a line for you.
come lady death and books of Terry Pratchett that aren't focused on gender.
I sure do love me some Terry Pratchett. Can you name an example written by a woman that you're comfortable with?
i want you to consider the possibility that, like male characters in podcasts in general, there may be an element that's common to female voiced podcasts. and, like male characters in general podcasts, it's so common that you don't even notice it anymore. can you see possibility that people may object to this element rather than the female voice?
This is possible... perhaps even likely. See also: K. Tempest Bradford on "penis versus vagina stories." (Gah. I have no link. It is late. Someone want to dig it up?)
Although of course, all this gets muddy rapidly. We occasionally get subs from men that I am damn sure come from women -- and once in a while when there are ambiguous first names, I'll pick the wrong honorific in reply. (The only time this has happened that I know of for sure, the man wrote back saying he was flattered, since he was glad he'd nailed the feminine voice so well.) And of course there's the famous example of James Tiptree, who was really a woman (Alice Sheldon) who wrote as a man (James Tiptree) and was described by Robert Silverberg (who thought she was male) as having a voice no woman could ever have, one that was "ineluctibly masculine." (Interestingly, all her stories revolved around partriarchal oppression of women in a blatantly feminist fashion.)
After it was revealed Tiptree was female, Silverberg made some references that tokenized her - indicating he felt she was a one-of-a-kind exception to the rules about how and whether women can write. (For a much more belligerent example of this, see Vox Day, also known as science fiction writer Theodore Beale, who has written that women can't write hard SF because our brains can't hack the science.)
Still -- there are certain generalities that can often be drawn between "male" stories and "female" stories, just as one can often detect the voice of a person of color. This is to be expected. The social experience of men and women, and of whites and people of color, is usually different in some important ways.
So, it's not just male narrators that go unremarked -- it's also a male perspective. It's what's called in sociology "defaulting" -- we're used to the default narratives that support the perspective of our society's defaults, which are white, heterosexual, etc etc. Perspectives that come from other places are "othered."
In other words, it's not the mere presence of a female voice that catches one's attention -- though it often does (and that was part of the point of bringing up the studies about what percentage of people are in a room versus what the perception is of those percentages, or who gets hired when you listen to them play a violin while you can see them versus when they're behind a screen). It's also the presence of non-male (non-white, non-straight, etc, but basically "othered") perception.
It may be -- though it's not necessarily -- this element of female voice that's bothering you. I don't really know. We've got way too small a sample size, and certainly I can totally see where all your analysis of - say - "Heartstrung" is on target.
I don't mean any of this to be accusatory; it's just my response to what you're saying. I am trained in anthropology, so I use tools of sociological and cross-cultural analysis to look at how people look at things; I'm also trained in literature, so I tend to use lit theory. These are, of course, limited tools, as any set is. They're just what I have to bring to bear.
week after week of victimization wont sit right with me, no matter how well it's done.
OK. Well, I think we can agree on there being two stories that play with these ideas, at least on some level, in PodCastle itself, "Run of the Fiery Horse" and "For Fear of Dragons" (Although I've already mentioned why I don't necessarily see them as straight-up male v female stories, I do see where you're drawing textual support for sustaining those readings). Personally, I really don't see "Giant" as fitting in, unless basically all fairy tales do, but that's a different argument. So, we're back to small sample size -- although again, that's just the material with me as editor, and I understand that your broader point is about all the podcasts simultaneously.
Unfortunately, since I'm the editor of PodCastle, I'm PodCastle focused. (Terrible confession: I haven't even listened to the Escape Pod episode that's been mentioned in these discussions.) So, please forgive me for continuing to think about our podcast. ;-)
This coming week's piece has a female hero -- but also a female villain. It involves collusion between a man and a woman with a happy result, and it ends with a happy relationship between equals. Perhaps it'll work better for you.