Sometimes you don\u2019t notice things until you\u2019re looking for them.<\/p>\n
When I realized there was going to be a many-months gap between the end of Roles and the Final Arc, I started looking around for other stories to podcast in the interim. You read things differently when you read for a podcast. It\u2019s not just \u201cDo I like this?\u201d but \u201cWould the audience like it? Can I do it believably? What SFX would I need? Who would voice this character?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps due to a quirk in my circle of friends, or my psychology, or the direct effects of the Self-Actualization arc, I feel like I have a fair bit more female voices I can call on easily than I do male voices. So when I see female characters I immediately snap to \u201cYes, X can do her, Y can do her, Z can do her, and I still have people left over\u201d and when I see male characters I think \u201cCrap\u2026 I can use A for him, but B and C wouldn\u2019t really work for these roles, and that leaves me without anyone to voice Supporting Character!\u201d So I feel a twinge of emotional pain when I see a lot of male characters and few\/no female characters, because it means production stress for me.<\/p>\n And when something produces a flash of pain, you quickly notice when almost<\/em> every single thing you read<\/em> produces that pain. There are very<\/em> few women in most SF.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to attack anyone, and it\u2019s really not something anyone in particular should be faulted for. Most characters don\u2019t need to be a specific gender, they could go either way. So when an author chooses to go with a male character there\u2019s no reason to fault him, it isn\u2019t malicious. Whatevs.<\/p>\n But when everyone unconsciously chooses male consistently, you end up with a sea of fiction that feels fake in the aggregate. It feels like genre fiction happens in worlds that simply don\u2019t have women in them, at least not as agents that matter. All those little twinges of pain add up and you think \u201cHoly shit, what the hell is going on here?\u201d It\u2019s something that I wouldn\u2019t even have noticed until recently.<\/p>\n Over the past few years things have been getting significantly better. But when people ask things like \u201cWhy do we need Women Destroy Science Fiction<\/a>? Isn\u2019t that sexist?\u201d I tell them to try producing a podcast with more women than men voice actors and then come back and try asking again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes you don\u2019t notice things until you\u2019re looking for them. When I realized there was going to be a many-months gap between the end of Roles and the Final Arc, I started looking around for other stories to podcast in the interim. You read things differently when you read for\u2026 Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-production-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1317,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hpmorpodcast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}