(no subject)

[tiamatschild]

I bought Andrew a quiz card game about literature from the New York Public Library for his birthday.

There are forty eight cards in the game. Only six of them concern novels by women.

Comments

[aldanise]

Argh.

That is actually why I started studying classical Japanese literature (the biggest name is a woman, and a fair proportion of the others are, too), but then I slipped into the medieval period, and suddenly it's all men. It's disturbing how that happens.

Also, it might be a little unreasonable to learn two new languages just because you want women's literature.

[tiamatschild]

Well, Andrew's already learning modern Japanese to add to his modern Chinese, so he's already more than moving in that direction. :D

I'm ESPECIALLY annoyed about this deck tho, because it had examples on the back packaging of who it had in it - six authors listed, two of them women. Which is hardly parity, but it is the point at which sociologists tell us people start perciving women as having an equal voice in the conversation, even though they don't, so I figured it wouldn't be totally tokeny. And therefore bought it.

but 12.5 percent is waaaaaaay not 33.33 repeating percent. :/

Oh well. At least it didn't set me back much.

[aldanise]

Sneaky, deceptive packaging. When you feel like you need to include a higher proportion of women on your packaging than you have in your content, maybe it's time to revise your content.

Well, Andrew's already learning modern Japanese to add to his modern Chinese, so he's already more than moving in that direction. :D
I am happy he exists and studies what he does, then! There are some pretty awesome classical Chinese women writers, too, but I don't think I've seen any female author anywhere or anywhen who beats the stature of Murasaki Shikibu.

[genarti]

And the sad thing is, six out of forty-eight is more than I expected when I started reading this post.

That said: ARGH.