The White Council

Re: Tolkien, the WWW, and gender

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: I can only say that up until very recently I had never met a girl interested in Tolkien. In fact they either looked baffled or laughed. Mind you, I got the same reaction from most guys too. I went to Oxonmoot (the annual september bash of The Tolkien Society) for the first time (having reached the point of despair, I decided to be proactive). When I mentioned my plans the night before departure down the pub with my mates they all looked at me as if I'd just sprouted another head (so what's new?), the conversation turned to what I could expect to find. We came to several conclusions: That: 1) it would be full of nerds wearing spectacles and clothes their mother's had bought them; 2) the male/female ratio would be about 10/1; and; 3) everybody would talk about hobbits all night. Delighted to say we were wrong, wrong and wrong. There was what I would imagine to be "a standard distribution sample" of humanity there, however the female:male ratio was about 1:5 (if Shadowfax is out there I'd like his opinion) but thats the only evidence I have.

PRESENT: That's me. It was my first Oxonmoot too. Coming from a scientific/engineering background, I am used to there being practically no women sharing my views, interests etc. However, the Tolkienist community has, in my eyes, always been the least male dominated of these. The counting of numbers alone at such an event is of course not a real indicator, as you have to differentiate between those who are there out of personal conviction, and those who are girlfiends/wives of hardliners. I know of at least one woman in the latter category who regularly attends Tolkienist events and joins in and enjoys them but has never read anything by Tolkien. She says she doesn't have to because her husband talks so much she probably knows everything already. But to come back to sex ratios at the Oxonmoot, I'd guess that 1:5 is being conservative, I had the feeling there were more women that that. In the organising commitee and the core directly around them, it may well have been 1:1. Also, scanning the various fanzines, I observe that the proportion of female contributors is very high (maybe one third). As, for various reasons which you could ultimately attribute to traditional gender education etc., women are less likely to become involved in societies than men, this is a very high score for women indeed.