Hi, Akkana Peck schrieb:
Sure. I am not too much into TV in general, but I would probably assume that TV (not always cinema) tends to feed more conservative tastes and prejudices.A TV show or movie isn't very representative of printed literature. I expect you'll find that if you survey TV shows or movies in genres other than SF, you'll find the same stereotypes.
Also I guess it takes more effort to read a book and therefore as a medium itself has a different kind of public.I am not a media specialist though. I do see a lot of interesting, challenging, and very innovative SF. The genre itself makes it easy to expand imagination. I do not want to say that the genre as such is derogative towards women. I want to say that a lot of the SF literature/films I have been referred to transport conservative assumptions about gender.Books are less so. I expect there are several reasons for that: books are a lot cheaper to produce, so you're going to see a wider range of types and more publishers willing to take chances on nonstandard views than movie and TV makers are; and there are just so many more books that if you don't like the sexist ones, you can always find something else, whereas there are only a handful of SF movies or TV shows showing at any one time.
Role models are really important. Probably a lot of women who are already in free software do have a similar background and approach to you and do act as role models. But this is a preselection I would assume. Whereas I think that there is nothing wrong with women who can identify with male characters. However I ask myself whether a signification of activities, states of minds, etc. as fixed male or female will rather determine ideas about masculinity or femininity among the male open source participants.Whether sf *books* are more sexist than mainstream books is another interesting question. It's possible they are, on average, but Star Trek won't work as an example. As to how this affects girls growing up, I couldn't say. I was a "tomboy" (more interested in climbing trees than playing with dolls) and if a story featured male characters doing all the fun stuff, I just went ahead and identified with those characters. It never crossed my mind that being female meant that I should only identify with only female characters. I know a lot of girls aren't like that and good female role models are important; but for me it wasn't an issue.
Bernhard