Listen up, lady writers, let a man explain
Editor’s Note: This comment appeared online at www.valleyadvocate.com under the article “Stories From All Directions: Tackling the gender gap in publishing.”
Where women miss out [in getting their writing published] is in being as interested in writing as men are and writing things with no commercial value more often than men do.
As for studies showing things, how about you quote which studies, rather than just claiming it so. Claiming it so doesn’t make it so. I can claim that according to studies all women are morons … Doesn’t make it true.
Now lets get to the crux of the issue: the issue isn’t that women are being kept out of publishing by editors, since roughly 90 percent of all genre editors in the United Kingdom are women, according to both Tor UK and the annual publishers statistics. No, the reason female authors are less published, less read, and less cared about is that women are less likely to write a book in the first place, as demonstrated by the numbers out of feminist publishing company Tor UK. Only 32 percent of all manuscripts they receive even after seeking out female authors were penned by a woman. And of those the only genres they are more prolific in than men are urban, fantasy, romance, and young adult (which is just the teen version of urban fantasy romance).
This is why women authors aren’t as widely read: because you write less often, so get published less often, and when you are published you have a tendency to write things only other women want to read. For every Anne Mccaffrey out there, there are thousands of Stephenie Meyers.
Gun control and the Confederate flag
This letter is in response to the coverage of the fatal shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the subsequent surge of momentum to take down the Confederate flag from all public and private places.
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Obviously the need for a state militia has been replaced by the National Guard and Coast Guard whereby trained military personnel are entrusted with the defense of this country against domestic enemies. Their weapons are tightly controlled and safeguarded.
The only two reasons for a citizen to own a firearm are for hunting or defense of the household from intruders. In either case, ownership of a handgun, shotgun or rifle is more than adequate to satisfy these purposes.
There is absolutely no need for any U.S. civilian to own any weapon more powerful or sophisticated than these.
Accordingly, all handguns, shotguns, and rifles must be licensed and registered to the degree necessary to match weapon to owner at the click of a computer key. Furthermore, we must guarantee that the mentally ill do not gain access to them under any circumstances. Finally, if we had prohibited the purchase of more sophisticated weapons, several innocent victims would not have died or been harmed at shopping malls, college campuses, Congressional meetings, and now churches.
As for the Confederate flag, I agree that it should be removed from all government buildings because it is neither a national nor state flag. But the outpouring of yanking it from everywhere else seems a bit extreme. Neither the flag used by the Army of Northern Virginia nor the official flag of the Confederacy had anything to do with being a symbol of pro-slavery, but rather was the colors adopted by men who chose to fight for the preservation of states’ rights against what was perceived as the growing encroachment of the federal government.
