A few days ago, Linda Nagata talked about gender and writing.
I thought I’d carry on the discussion, though I know sometimes such discussions can hang up as soon as someone says, “Women don’t think like that!” or “Men never do that.” That can be followed by “Yes they do! Because I am a woman and I field strip my M-16 every morning before I drive my tank to Mickey D’s for breakfast, on the way to the artillery range!” “Yes they do, because I’m a male, and the first thing I ever notice about anyone is their hair style and how long their eyelashes are—I’m a professional make-up artist, I can’t help noticing such things!”
Generalizations will sound true to many, but so will the exceptions. Example: I am a woman, but I couldn’t tell you what shoe styles are in much less who makes them, and as for knock-offs, I couldn’t point to one if my life depended on it. I wear one pair of sandals year round. So much for “All women love shoes.”
Not long ago a male reviewer sneered at a female-written novel about a man who loved being domestic as a stay at home dad. “Only a woman could make that up!” I counted up all the stay-home dads I knew, whose wives were the ones to climb into power suits and commute to the office each day, and shook my head.
There are two observations I want to try on people here, to see if they make sense or not.
The first is, sometimes the language might trip the reader. A woman remarked at a slash panel that erotica written by men from a supposedly female POV tended to betray the male gaze: the female protagonist would go on about her breasts, and compare them to other women’s, and would also talk about men’s privates in inches.
The audience cracked up. Women pointed out that young women especially can get anxious about chest size, and compare themselves to others, but unless they are lesbian, the tone tends toward body dissatisfaction, and not lingering over details in an erotic manner. And as for guys and their parts, not a single woman in the room was interested in “inches” however het they were.
Some female friends have said that they had trouble with male-written female characters their entire lives. I don’t recall having that trouble until I branched out in my reading in my teens, and sexual awareness hove up on the horizon, then indeed I began noticing distortions.
But as a kid? Lloyd Alexander—Geoffrey Trease—Eleanor Cameron—E. Nesbit—their characters, male or female, were fine to me.
I remember that first stumble. I was around sixteen, and first read S. Hinton’s The Outsiders. This was in many respects a tough, often violent book, and yet the way the narrator lingered on the boys’ pretty eyes, eyelashes, and hair, and the way their emotional breakdowns were described, signaled female to me.
I was not surprised to discover in college that Hinton was a female, but I remember other readers not believing it. I wondered if the difference was in how we visualized details: the visual ‘gaze’ of the narration, the emotional tone, signaled female to me. Others insisted the violence as well as the characters all being male had to be written by a guy.
Same deal when I read L.M. Montgomery’s The Golden Road, with its first person male narrator who went on and on about the freshness and daintiness of the girls’ clothes and hair, their eyelashes, yet this was not supposed to be a Humbert Humbert character.It went the other way, too, when I read one of Robert Heinlein’s novels, supposedly from a female POV, and there it was, pages and pages about her breasts.
Over the years I’d encounter male readers pointing out objections to female-written male POVs, but not many. It could be that that is accident—that there are a lot more than I’ve seen—but I formed the theory that females could more easily write male POVs because so many of us females grew up reading fiction mostly written by males, about males, aimed at the general (i.e. male) audience, so it was easier to assimilate those male verbal patterns and especially the male gaze.
Guys used to get whapped if they exhibited curiosity about books with “FEMALE!” cover clues. The learning curve was steeper about how females talked when males were not present, whether in life or in fiction, and so we got endless scenes of females who primarily talked about the guys in their lives.
Except that women would also write female characters who primarily talked about the men in their lives.
Here’s the second observation: that writers want to explore aspects of male or female. Like female writers who write about very pretty men with big eyes and soft voices who prowl around their stories like tame cats. This is not new! Eleanor Aquitaine warned men nearly a thousand years ago that big, hunky, hairy, stinky knights, talking only of blood and death, were not always going to be the most successful at winning the lady fair, no matter how many heads they’d hewn off…though of course even then there were exceptions. Female-written troubadour songs featured soft-spoken, beautiful men whose grooming and manners were impeccable–though there were also those who liked their cave men rough and tough.
This goes the other way as well. There are men who write about women who display traditional alpha male behaviors—alpha women who play and fight hard, with few tender emotions. In books written long ago, I noticed that these women were pretty much always depicted as predatory, and they seldom got happy endings unless they did a Taming of the Shrew and learned to be submissive, whereas the rough male heroes all got the trophy gorgeous girl and the good life, if they survived to the last page.
Nowadays more of the alpha women are getting their fair share of rewards; the implied message, that women should get back into their aprons and curlers if they want a chance at happiness, is blurring. But it is not entirely gone.
The thing that I find interesting, at this period of my life, is ways in which we transcend gender, such as emotional experience and insight.
Not to imply that “both genders are the same.” No. We live in these bodies with their discrete physical limitations and attributes. We’ve grown up receiving complex cultural and social signals, not all of which we are aware of all the time. We’re the same and not the same, we share some emotions and attitudes and diverge on others.
Which makes us all endlessly fascinating.
BVC ebooks (with both males and females) by Sherwood Smith
I think your theory about how a lot of women grow up reading more male POV books and often have a better chance of writing them well is very likely to be the case. I’ve found when critiquing romance, one thing I’ll have to do in some cases is point out when the woman is being allowed to objectify the man, go on about his broad chest and chiseled abs, etc, but the man is only allowed to comment on the niceness of the woman’s laugh. In romance I don’t think an ‘authentic’ (whatever that means) male POV is really the goal, and when it drops into crude comments about the lady’s ass (overcompensating) I have to mark those things too. Finding a balance, where the man finds the lady physically attractive and also intellectually and emotionally attractive, requires enough ‘gaze’ to allow the reader to also find the lady attractive, but not such an objectifying gaze that we find the man offensive. (I think the reverse is also the case. A lady a bit too obsessed with tight muscled buttocks makes me want to cringe.)
I was critiquing a bit of fiction with a lesbian romance in it recently, and found the same problem. I read a lot of lesbian fiction, and write it, and physical attraction is still a key element. (This should be entirely unsurprising.) Unless we’re going with a Cyrano type story, the gaze is going to play a role in grounding the characters’ attraction to each other. But the ‘lesbian’ gaze is not just the male gaze transposed into a woman’s eyeballs. It’s qualitatively different. And I think that probably the best way to figure out what it is, is to read, read, read!
Excellent point, especially about lesbian romance. (I once read a lesbian romance with a female byline but the details were so very male gaze–BOTH women were objectified. Later found out that the female byline was a pseud for a well-known porn writer.)
For a period of time I had my husband, a faithful beta reader, go through each novel with the specific brief of considering the male characters. Did they sound like guys, to a guy? (I should mention that, mysteriously, nearly all my protagonists are men; my muse just loves guys.) Every now and then he would tag a slushy moment, but by now I think I have got them to ring fairly true.
If I am well in to a character’s head, I know -everything-: his digestive quirks, what he dreamed about last night, the status of his arterial plaque, whether he can taste cilantro, his toenail texture. At that point making them react like males is a mere detail.
Interesting issues, and I was deeply relieved by your nuanced discussion. (Different people like different stuff–across boundaries of gender.)
The availability of reading matter from the other gender’s POV is certainly an issue. I had no problem reading stuff by female writers as a kid–the gender of the writer simply didn’t occur to me as an issue when choosing a book. But most of those books had male protagonists, even if they were by female writers.
Another issue might be how prepared a writer is to shuck off preconceptions and actually look at the women and men that they know–what they do, how they talk, etc. And and get inside their heads (as opposed to simply project a stereotype onto the screen of the person’s identity). When I was younger, the prospect of putting on a female POV was embarrassing to me. Now I guess I’ve burnt out my embarrassment circuits and it doesn’t bother me so much. (I’m not saying this necessarily improves the quality of my observations, but it’s one obstacle out of the way.)
In haste,
JE
That’s interesting, James. If you have time, I’d love to hear more about how you went about burning out those circuits.
Listening to real people and observing how they act is I think the key. How many men really listen to women? At least among the men of my own generation (ancient crone that I am,) men listen to women mostly to argue with them or to find a place to interrupt. Some interrupt without bothering to listen first. How is a male writer afflicted with this kind of gender-selective deafness going to accurately portray the way women talk? He won’t have any clue how the women around him feel, either, if all he does is stare at their bodies.
Or they tell them how to think. (I recall a supposed feminist male telling women how to think . . . And the end of the talk came with no chance for questions, instead an opportunity to buy his writings)
While, yes, there are differences between the average (substitute your preferred term, but I mean the middle-of-the-bell-curve) woman and the average man, there are more differences in the range of women and the range of men than between the average man and woman. Whenever someone says “Women are this and men are that” or “Men prefer this and women prefer that,” or when there is a test for gender differences, I am as likely to be on one side as on the other.
I recently have been reading several cozy mystery series, and I realized that I far prefer the women protagonists who are written by men to the ones written by women. (Sometimes one has to dig a bit to find out, as most cozy authors use female or androgynous names.) I relate more to the women-written-by-men. One aspect is that the women-written-by-women talk so darn much, worry so much, about their own appearance, which just stops the story for me. And SO many of them have what seem to me to be the weirdest attitudes toward men. (A common theme seems to be distrusting all men on the basis of a bad experience with one, even when the current man has nothing in common with the other one and has never given any sign of being anything other than a good guy. I accept that some women feel that way, but I can’t relate to it.)
I remember that many years ago when I first read a “Well of Souls” book by the late Jack Chalker, I related more to his female character Mavra Chang than to almost any other character I had ever encountered in fiction (I should read them again to see whether that’s still true), with the exception of the male-written male character of the little boy in Stephen King’s The Shining.
And I often relate to the tough-guy protagonist in male-written mysteries. Even though my material life is far more like that of the women in women-written cozies, my outlook, my approach to life, seems more like that of some of the men-written tough-guys.
Yes–that’s pretty much what I mean about aspects. So much of our experience and outlook as well as preferences actually crosses back and forth more than might be perceived at once.
Or perceived ever, by some. The “’Women don’t think like that!’ or ‘Men never do that’” reactions are akin to telling those who DO THINK like that, “You are not a woman,” or those who DO that, “You are not a man.” I have had the experience of being told that I was in denial when I said that I did not match some “Women _____” statement, and on other occasions I have been told that my opinion doesn’t count–told in a way that came very close to literally saying, “If you don’t/haven’t _____, you are not a woman.” Since this happens to me, a cis woman, one can only imagine how much it happens to trans women.
I dislike all lumping of people who share a single characteristic into “These do this” and “Those think that.” But I rant about it enough in my own forum, and will not take up more space in yours.
I think I mentioned this in the last discussion about cross-gender writing, but for me (as a male writer) I find writing female characters more interesting. Perhaps for the same reason that I enjoy writing SF–it takes me out of the usual experience and forces me to think more.
I also attribute my affinity to strong female characters to the fact that I was raised by a single mother. I wonder to what extent our personal backgrounds play into our character choices….
How about Memoirs of a Geisha? The female point of view by a male author convinced me. I also loved the way he set up the narrator’s observant nature from childhood.
It’s a rare adult that can pull off a kid’s point of view.
I’ve found when comparing books I’ve read with guys I know, that we are most likely to overlap on male authors. I’ll name Tamora Pierce, Diana Wynne Jones, and Robin McKinley, and they won’t have heard of them, let alone read them. But Garth Nix, Terry Pratchett, and Robert Jordan are all commonalities.
I think that goes along with your point that girls are more likely to read books written by male authors, while guys are less likely to read books written by female authors.
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