I was working as a barista the other day, wearing the second drive-thru headset so that I could start making drinks as soon as the customer ordered them. It's an efficient system, and listening to people make up names is always entertaining. One of my coworkers, especially, never actually uses our real names; one day we were Timone and Pumbaa, another day we were Calvin and Hobbes. As soon as he finished that order though, I had to ask him, "Why Wesley of all characters?" For those of you unfamiliar with Star Trek, I'll note that Wesley Crusher is quite possibly the single most universally-hated character in that series.
He looked surprised when I asked that, and the ensuing conversation quickly turned to science fiction. If you don't frequent coffee shops, or perhaps have never paid attention to the people behind the counter, we tend to talk a lot while working, it helps to relieve the tedium of making the same four or five drinks a couple hundred times a day. What stood out to me most about that conversation however was my coworkers' surprise at finding out that I, a woman, love science fiction. How could I not? The sense of discovery and adventure have always appealed strongly to me, and exploring the universe is a logical extension of my early love of the great explorers such as Magellan and Cook. For one who generally finds history tedious, I had a remarkable love of the explorers. It's not a subject that one would expect to interest only males, and yet I have repeatedly encountered incredulity that I love it as I do.
It's something that has never made any sense to me, this illogical assumption that all or most science fiction fans are men. While much early science fiction writing did tend to objectify women and cast them almost solely as either damsels in distress or objects of desire, that has long since changed and strong female characters are written often and well. It is, therefore, a genre that should in theory be equally accessible to both men and women, though the majority of the fans I meet tend to be men. This could be due to two things: either the majority of fans are men, or I expect them to be and therefore do not speak to other women about science fiction as often as I do men. Bias is perhaps most difficult to detect in yourself, and therefore I can never really be certain if I am guilty of the latter.
Either way though, the disbelief that I am faced with when expressing my love of science fiction is a reality. A nonsensical one, but a reality nonetheless. What I fail to understand is why it happens. Why do people assume that science fiction fans are men, and that women who enjoy it are an aberration?
The same thing happens with video games, especially of the shooter variety. I'm particularly fond of Team Fortress 2, a game which, as the name implies, relies strongly upon teamwork in online games. Much of this is coordinated via team voice chat, and a reaction I hear all too often is "Where did the girl come from?" "There's a girl here?" "Make me a sandvich!" (The "v" in "sandvich" refers to one of the characters, which can regain health by eating a "sandvich".) Gamers are already an often-marginalized group, and to be further marginalized by them is a rather disheartening experience. I tend to keep quiet now, speaking only when necessary or when I hear another female already in the game.
Both science fiction and video games should appeal to women as strongly as they do to men. They work on ideas that are universal aspects of humanity, not just masculinity or femininity. Despite this, the core fan base is assumed to be male, whether or not it's actually true. I hope that this changes within my lifetime, because men and women alike can look up at the stars and dream of going there themselves. We can look at the Moon and wonder what it would be like to actually live there, or watch a rocket launch and wish that we were on board.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Perhaps my dream is best exemplified by Commander Shepard, the main character of the Mass Effect video game series. Man or woman, Shepard is a strong leader who commands his/her ship, bringing his/her crew through the most difficult of circumstances to eventually save not just Earth, but the entire galaxy. If Shepard happens to be a woman, not one person comments on her gender with any surprise that she is doing what she is doing; her competence is simply accepted as fact. While this was originally an accident of script-writing, most scenes changing nothing but the pronoun with which people referred to Shepard, it served to create one of the strongest female characters ever seen in a video game, and that is a very good thing.
I work again tomorrow. If I have a different drive-thru pseudonym, I'm hoping that this time it's Zoe Washburn, though I wouldn't object to Kathryn Janeway.
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