The Horseblog is taking a break this week, because I have this irresistible desire to get ranty, and where better to rant on this subject than right here at Crone Central?

Yes, Book View Cafe was founded by older women writers who, in 2008, saw the writing on the wall of publishing, and knew it was time to explore new ways to get their words out there. And yes, early on, there was, here and there, a mutter of dismissal: “Oh, it’s just a bunch of women who couldn’t make it any more so they got together to try to help each other out.”

Never mind who some of the names on the masthead were and are. “It’s just a bunch of women.”

Now it’s 2014 and a lot has changed, including the gender mix at BVC. But then again, a lot hasn’t. The proximate cause of my riff here is a killer blog post by the indomitable Kari Sperring. The post is here. Go. Read it. Read the comments, too.

This is a war we’ve been fighting for a long, long time. Centuries. Millennia. Our very young world of commercial publishing with its market-derived genres concentrates it to a notable degree, and points up, sometimes painfully, exactly where our culture draws its lines and determines its hierarchies. The idea of literary importance being the province of straight white males is under serious siege. Women, non-whites, non-straights of all genders, are speaking out, loudly, and sometimes even being heard.

And yet, there’s still so very far to go. As a white American woman I carry a good number of privilege points in publishing–race privilege, nation privilege–but I lose points for gender, disability, and now age.

This conversation happened a few years ago:

ME: I have this space opera I’m writing, I’d really like to sell it. Here’s the proposal! Isn’t it a gas?

AGENT: I love it! (beat) But I can’t sell it. If it were twenty years ago, or if you were a twentysomething guy…

Translation:

The book would have been a lot easier to sell in 1992 or thereabouts. Much better market, much more friendly to space opera.

(The market in 1992 was better, period. So, fair enough.)

I might be able to sell it now, but you’re too old and too female to have your name attached to it.

(HULK. SMASH.)

I put up a timeline a while back, describing my trajectory through the genre. The individual events didn’t hit particularly hard–especially in the earlier years, that was just how things were–but taken together, they form an all too familiar pattern.

I have not actually tried the androgynous pseudonym. Mostly because I’ve been busy Kickstarting the YA rejected by one publisher as “too ‘girl-friendly’ for science fiction,” and the above-mentioned space opera, plus working with and for BVC and bringing out my backlist and running a horse farm and a lot of other things. I’ve been busy.

I’ve been watching the genre fight its fights, and participating as I can and will. The gender fight is particularly fierce this year, with some particularly notable victories–the all-female Nebula winners list, for example. This is progress, and it’s wonderful.

And yet.

I have a superpower. I’m invisible. I only show up on general lists of Great Fantasists of the Eighties if one of my devoted fans (who are awesome) speaks up. I have never shown up on major awards lists, except for World Fantasy. “She might as well write in invisible ink,” one of my publishers once said. I can’t count the number of times someone has said, “Oh. Yeah. Wow. She’s great. How did we manage to forget her?”

It’s not just the books, either. I can post on internet mailing lists to resounding silence, until someone else says the same thing; then suddenly it’s visible. I’ve got so I don’t even try, because when I do…crickets.

That’s always been a thing. What’s changed in recent years is that now I have an actual demographic of fellow invisibles.

Our culture makes a cult of youth. Both genders. But males as they age manage to stay visible, and even manage to keep matinee-idol status–and if they’re writers, they become literary lions. Females simply drop off the radar.

“But!” the commenters on the blogs exclaim. “There are older women in media! Helen Mirren Meryl Streep Barbara Walters one or two others in regular rotation!” And for our genre, “Le Guin Willis Bujold one or two others in regular rotation!”

You see what they did there?

It’s called tokenism. The arbiters of importance choose one or two representatives of whatever group is making too much noise to be completely ignored–or maybe three or even four if they’re pushed hard enough. Whenever it’s pointed out that there is a gap in their coverage, they cite this very short list to prove that there is, in fact, no gap. “See? We do too include these people! Now we can all go home.”

Never mind that “these people” also include people who are not white or American or… They are presumed to include their entire subset of Other, and to preclude any need for further consideration of that Other. However multitudinous the precluded may actually be.

This is changing. Oh yes. And I’m delighted to see it.

What I am not seeing is all too many of the older women writers who were disappeared by life, markets, and cultural blindness. They are still alive. Still, in many cases, writing–though many have been so discouraged by the lack of interest in their writing that they can barely scrape out the words. Even those who are still getting contracts and still being published just are not seeing the success of their male counterparts.

It’s insidious. Even where there is success–by far the biggest current market for books is category romance, and that genre is dominated by women at all levels. And yet, where are the adulatory reviews in Serious Publications? Where are the major films and television series? Where is the plain and simple respect for the genre that is, to a large extent, supporting the rest of publishing?

A man can write a completely conventional romance and become a household word. Horse Whisperer, anyone? A man can bring out a piece of Jane Austen fanfic and start a landslide of a trend–after women with the same idea have been rejected for years as “It’s just fanfic, there’s no market for that.” If a man writes a big fat fantasy epic that hits all the checkboxes for the genre, it’s “original” and “brilliant” and “bestselling.” The woman who does the exact same thing and breaks new ground (backwards, in heels) is told to her face, “Oh, but his book is original.”

Add the stigma of age to this and she might as well just shut up and go away. Stop taking up space. Let someone younger and prettier and newer and “fresher” have the slot. Because when you’re Other, there are only those few slots, and even those might be begrudged.

It’s hard to be the heir of the 100% in a world in which you only get at least 65% of the money, the sales, the reviews, the attention. If you’re also having to compete with the old bats who aren’t even cute any more, O the pain!

There’s a whole culture to push against here. A world that may be giving women and Others the right to exist, but still refuses to see the ones who aren’t young and pretty and suitably marketable. That doesn’t respect their names or hear their voices or see their faces.

I’m pushing, damn it. So are my age-sisters. It’s long past time.