STFU, Pass It On.

I occasionally visit The Volokh Conspiracy to get libertarian commentary on law and the Constitution, usually when there are important things going on like District of Columbia v. Heller. (Incidentally, congratulations to the Bush administration for convincing me of the need for an individual right to bear arms. Before the marked erosion of personal freedoms in the last eight years, I hadn't really worried about the United States becoming a tyranny that could only be opposed through violent resistance. Now I do.)

I don't visit them for idiocy about SF:

This 2001 National Science Foundation surveyshows that 31% of men say they read science fiction books or magazines - a number statistically indistinguishable from the 28% of women who claim to do so.

The NSF's results are so contrary to conventional wisdom that I wonder if there's something wrong with the methodology.

. . . .

I wonder if the study simply suffers from random error (i.e. - even a methodologically sound poll will sometimes get an unrepresentative sample just by random chance).

With a typical libertarian bent, Somin appeals to market forces for absolution:

If there were a large unment demand for feminist SF or other types of science fiction that may be of special interest to women, publishers and writers would have a strong incentive to meet it. The portrayal of women in science fiction has been debated for at least forty years, and publishers are certainly aware of the issue, and would act on it if they smelled profit.

Because markets are always instantly responsive to the demands and never subject to internal biases. We certainly wouldn't want to look at the actual experience of someone in the market:

I wanted to increase the number of female writers I was getting submissions from, so I started courting them. For a while, I didn't do any more than court here and there and felt that was enough. Then I realized that the issues that had a more 50/50 blend of men/women sold better.

But no, it's probably just that the survey was wrong.

There's so much writing on this subject already, but it seems particularly relevant given the dustup with Eclipse One and Two. Both posts by coffeeandink, the first is a write-up of a Wiscon panel, and the second is a link roundup among several interesting link roundups.

ThuNYTX: 10:30.

(Comments have been reopened. I must have turned them off by mistake.)