/lit/ - Literature

To make it clear what I mean, I'm talking about the kind of novels with Fabio on the cover and contain long passages about "engorged members". The kind of shit that meets only the most basic technical definitions of literature.

It is not that women primarily write bad romance novels, anon. Most women write no novels at all. However, the writers of bad romance novels are primarily women, just as the writers of godawful sword-and-sorcery books are primarily men. Why? Because women are generally interested in feelings, flowers, and kittens, and men are more interested in flying around on dragons and cutting things heads off.

I would bet that 50% of contemporary romance novels from female authors are actually written by men.

This might lure in more female buyers, who will think that a female author writes better romance books because of a better understanding of romance (which is a cliché in itself)

Women like feelings, men don't really know that feel.

>>1769019
I don't know if the actual number is anywhere close, but I think you're spot on with the idea that there are probably a fuck ton of male authors of conveyer belt fantasy novels using female pen names.

What torrent did you download? Maybe the uploader just had poor taste. I once downloaded a torrent containing 2Gb of "good books", which, upon opening it, I found to entirely consist of books on meditation.

Romance genre fiction is a huge industry— at least several times bigger in dollars than that of traditional literature. Only women are interested in writing about romance.

So, the Romance fiction establishment has a much broader spectrum of what it allows, simply by virtue of the massive demand, whereas traditional literature has a very narrow window of successful authors meaning that good authors are typically very good.

makes sense?

it says nothing about gender and skill. it says that women read romance like men watch porn

We get this thread often enough, OP. "Where are the females in literature?" Apart from Woolf, Dorothy Parker, and Shelley, I'm hard-pressed to name a female writer I enjoy.

Women, by and large, are emotional creatures. Emotion does not readily translate to literature, excepting melodrama and the erotica you mention.

>>1769028
Fair enough, you like what you like, but there's a metric fuckton of known/acclaimed female writers out there.

>>1769024
It was called "Kindle Library 12-26-10"

I don't think the creator had any taste in making it since it looks to me like it was every book available in mobi format on the internet at the time. I mean the spreadsheet list that comes with it claims there's 4692 books here. There's no way this represents any one persons or group of peoples taste.

>>1769018
See I thought that might be true at first. But the more I go through with sorting this it's not that 9 out of 10 bad romance novels is written by a woman. It's looking more like 9 out of 10 books (period) that was written by a woman is a bad romance novel. Yeah the overwhelming majority of the sword and sorcery books in here are by men, but they are a small percentage of the overall number of books written by men here.

Again, I totally realize this torrent is not likely to be a perfect random sample, but its sheer size and seemingly random distribution in type and genre thus far makes it damn close.

It just seems strange to me that I would find something so skewed here.

>>1769028
This is idiocy. I can name 20 excellent female authors off the top of my head. If you don't like more women than that, you either aren't very widely read or you are judging them by something other than literary merit.

>>1769028
This actually gets into a related question I had. Who are the good (as in critically acclaimed) female authors? Part of the reason I started this thread is because I realize that as someone who majored in computer science in college and only took the required literature courses but still enjoys reading on a daily basis I could simply be ignorant. For all I know to literature majors asking for good female authors could be as silly as asking for good male authors. The contents of this torrent left me thinking something was amiss.

It is called writing for money.

Which is pretty smart but disrespectful to the craft that is writing.

>>1769027
This is the only explanation I could think of that seems plausible. It's just that I never would have expected it to be this lopsided.

2009 fiction sales, off the internet, like:
Romance: $1.36 billion
Religion/inspirational: $770 million
Mystery: $674 million
Science fiction/fantasy: $554 million
Classic literary fiction: $462 million

Most science fiction, fantasy and mystery will presumably be highly generic and written by men...

>>1769047
Also, what in God's name is religious/inspirational fiction? Do I even want to know?

>>1769050
Check by the bibles in your local bookstore. I suggest starting with Left Behind.

actually often a lot of the romance novels are written by men using a pen name

>>1769051
Oh, right, this is one of those American things...

>>1769039
Who? Peggy Atwood?

Fuck off.

From my experience working in a bookstore, I can say that women aren't the only ones buying these things, but all of the men who buy them are 60+. Maybe they never made the switch over to video porn.

>>1769050
>>1769054
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspirational_fiction

>>1769036

I am familiar with this torrent. The torrent creator's wife likes romance novels, and that is why they are so overrepresented. The torrent creator has kept updated forms of this library, in epub format as well, which you can find at demonoid.me:

http://www.demonoid.me/users/digitallibrarian

>>1769055
margaret atwood
anais nin
marguerite duras
christa wolf
emily dickinson
adrienne rich
the bronte sisters
miranda july
chris kraus
anne sexton

that's without breaking a sweat. read more books.

Flannery O'Connor, motherfucker.
stop grouping trashy pop-fiction with good literature, OP

There are fewer good women writers because women are less often remarkable in any direction than men. Most people of extraordinarily high IQ are men; most people with learning disabilities are men. Men also favour risk-taking behaviour (and dedicating your life to being a writer is always a huge risk). Women favour mediocrity.

>>1769940

lrn2feminist theory.

>>1769947

lrn2science

>>1769949
got the science thing down. but what science doesn't explain is why the trends are reversing. women outnumber men in college 3-1, etc. etc.

culture affects biology. they're in a dialectic relationship with one another.

Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Carey, Elizabeth Barret Browning and Carol Ann Duffy to name a few are all female writers of quality literature. There are many, many more.

>>1769954

lol you think entering college means you aren't mediocre

>>1769956
it's certainly a shift in cultural direction, and it's not the only changing trend i could cite. you're avoiding the question.

>>1769957

No, it's just that what you are saying has no bearing on what I said

Saving an interesting thread from 404

>>1772137
it's not an interesting thread - it's silly. The OP ponders whether some torrent of ebooks with dragons in them indicates that women p much only write romantic bodice-rippers, and then 19-year-old 4chan posters pontificate on the biologically-determined nature of the female tendency towards mediocrity