Free The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Page B

military fiction, Golden Age engineering, thriller, and satire, for starters—SF is a very malleable genre, rather like whichever blood type is the universal receiver (AB, if I remember correctly), able to accept transfusions from all sources. How many genres can I fit in one series? Well, let's see . . . 
    LSC: Ah yes, romance. Girl stuff. When we were kids we'd knit little sweaters for our Barbie dolls and also build spaceships for them to pilot. I don't think many little boys knitted sweaters for their G.I. Joe action figures.
    LMB: Poor deprived tykes, missing out on all that small muscle development and pattern-recognition practice. . . . I have noticed, over time, the allergy of many SF readers—male and female, mark you well—to romance; not just lack of interest, an "I don't care for that" response, the way I feel about horror as a genre, but genuine, almost hysterical hostility, which I shorthand as, "Girl germs! Girl germs! Run away!" In my view, nobody gets that heated up over a mere book. They get that heated up because, on some level, their identity or status seems threatened. Why should a reading choice do that?
    And then there's the parallel reaction to SF by many romance and mainstream readers. "Ick!" would probably be the politest shorthand. Whatever underlying identity thing is going on, it runs both ways. Why do these women (and men) reject (in an almost medical-organ-transplant sense) SF?
    Status-based arguments about ejecting the abject would seem to fall down, here—except that these women don't see SF readers and writers as having status. They see us as geeky dweebs stuck in permanent adolescence. At a book fair once, I talked to one such woman about this perception thing—to her, it was as though SF were some sort of disease vector for social dweebishness, and if you read that stuff, you'd turn into one of them, spontaneously sprouting rubber Spock ears and Nintendo thumbs through some sort of Lamarckian devolution. This is a war with two sides. And SF doesn't actually have any manifest destiny to win it. Indeed, in many—most—cases, in an SF story, the woman's traditional agenda is either totally ignored, or clearly loses, which may be something else that's putting off all those women readers.
    LSC: So why is there a literary gender/genre war? What does this systematic put-down of the romance genre really mean?
    LMB: You'd think males would line up to applaud a genre that works so hard to interest women in men—after all, wouldn't the relentless celebration of heterosexual relationships seem to increase their chances of getting laid? And yet, it is not so. . . . 
    In my view, the key to the romance/women's fiction genre is, the woman's agenda wins. Her situation, her personal responsibilities, her life, her needs, and above all her emotions, are made central to the reader's attention. (And if there is anything in the world more thoroughly diminutized and dismissed than women's emotions, I can't think of it right now.) In the end, she gets what she wants, or needs—a committed guy who will stick around to help raise children. In short, in the course of the plot the hero, however much a rake he is initially presented, is transformed into a guy who will do the chores, personally or by the proxy of servants. No wonder adolescent males—and some females, too—of all ages run screaming. . . . 
    To heck with sex, women, squishy stuff, and liquidity. The real phobia at the bottom of all this gender/genre allergy is to chores, I'm absolutely convinced.
    LSC: It's another status thing. Whoever cleans up is the abject. Your mother used to collect your Analog from the mailbox and hide it until you'd cleaned your room.
    LMB: This whole dialectic presents particular problems for women, and especially for women SF writers. Women in our culture are given the duty and responsibility (though not the power, of course) of "molding" our kids; we're drafted willy-nilly into the Cultural Gestapo,