Men vs. Women
This morning (or maybe last night, over where English sounds good, stephanieburgis linked to Jed Hartman's riff on how not to write female characters. Hartman's smart and interesting--I selfishly wish he was on LiveJournal as i never, ever get caught up with my list here, much less get a chance to go clicking on the bazillion Other Blogs I've scrupulously bookmarked, but just sit there gathering phosphorwebs.
I'd rather not get into the whole rape/rescue issue. It seems to me it's been pretty well hashed. I would like to discuss character instead, from the perspective of cross gender writing and reading.
Here's the biggest problem that I've seen with most males writing females/females writing males discussions: just about any writer, and yes, even John Norman, is going to have defenders. If someone says, "Women don't think like that!" or "Men never do that," sure enough, a host of women (and men) come flocking in and roost around squawking, "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!" And these things are true. 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've read about them in fiction, but I couldn't point to one if my life depended on it, because I don't give a flying fig. I hate shoes, only own two pairs of sandals. So much for "All women love shoes." A few years ago, I saw a sneer at a fictional exploration of a man who loved being domestic--a stay at home dad. "Only a woman could write that!" Even at that time I could name two personal friends who were stay-at-home dads, while their wives earned the family paycheck--and both were happy that way. And so were the families. Now I can name a number of men who much prefer holding household while their wives climb into a Power Outfit and commute in to the job each day. What that male writer sneered at as totally impossible has become unremarkable.
There are two observations I want to try on people here, see if they make sense or not. The first is, sometimes the language used might trigger false impressions. A specific would be something brought up at the slash panel at ConDor a couple of months ago, when Rachelmanija I believe it was observed that the usual signal that a piece of erotica was written by a male is that somewhere it listed comparison in inches. Females, as a rule, just don't give a fig about that, but males seem to. The converse was how some male writers would describe their females' attitudes toward their breasts--the language read like the way het men ogle, not the way a woman thinks about herself.
The first time I ever noticed language hitting a false note gender-wise was when I first read L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl or maybe it was The Golden Road--anyway, supposedly it was first person by a young het male. But the narrator 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. I finally just pretended that the narrator was another female, and that intrusive, very coy voice lost its distortion and faded behind the images.
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 the topic of sex hove up on the horizon, then indeed I began noticing distortions. But as a kid? Lloyd Alexander--Geoffrey Trease--just to name two, their female characters were fine to me. Of course male characters as written be females were fine--it wasn't until years later that male readers would point out objections they'd had, but by and large these seemed fewer in retrospect. I've always thought that that was because so many of us females grew up reading fiction mostly written by males, about males, and for males, it was easier to assimilate those male clues. Guys got socially 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.
Here's the second observation: that maybe the other gender gets more interested in aspects of male or female, and wants to explore that aspect. Female writers who write about very pretty men with big eyes and soft voices who prowl around their stories like tame cats. Well, Eleanor Aquitaine was onto something when she 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. Then there are men who write about predatory women who are a whole lot like men in thinking and action--alpha women, who play and fight hard, with few tender emotions. Well, there are women like that. Many of them got whapped back down to miming domestic and social submissiveness by their peers and environment.
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're the same--and not the same. Which makes us all endlessly fascinating.
I'd rather not get into the whole rape/rescue issue. It seems to me it's been pretty well hashed. I would like to discuss character instead, from the perspective of cross gender writing and reading.
Here's the biggest problem that I've seen with most males writing females/females writing males discussions: just about any writer, and yes, even John Norman, is going to have defenders. If someone says, "Women don't think like that!" or "Men never do that," sure enough, a host of women (and men) come flocking in and roost around squawking, "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!" And these things are true. 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've read about them in fiction, but I couldn't point to one if my life depended on it, because I don't give a flying fig. I hate shoes, only own two pairs of sandals. So much for "All women love shoes." A few years ago, I saw a sneer at a fictional exploration of a man who loved being domestic--a stay at home dad. "Only a woman could write that!" Even at that time I could name two personal friends who were stay-at-home dads, while their wives earned the family paycheck--and both were happy that way. And so were the families. Now I can name a number of men who much prefer holding household while their wives climb into a Power Outfit and commute in to the job each day. What that male writer sneered at as totally impossible has become unremarkable.
There are two observations I want to try on people here, see if they make sense or not. The first is, sometimes the language used might trigger false impressions. A specific would be something brought up at the slash panel at ConDor a couple of months ago, when Rachelmanija I believe it was observed that the usual signal that a piece of erotica was written by a male is that somewhere it listed comparison in inches. Females, as a rule, just don't give a fig about that, but males seem to. The converse was how some male writers would describe their females' attitudes toward their breasts--the language read like the way het men ogle, not the way a woman thinks about herself.
The first time I ever noticed language hitting a false note gender-wise was when I first read L.M. Montgomery's The Story Girl or maybe it was The Golden Road--anyway, supposedly it was first person by a young het male. But the narrator 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. I finally just pretended that the narrator was another female, and that intrusive, very coy voice lost its distortion and faded behind the images.
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 the topic of sex hove up on the horizon, then indeed I began noticing distortions. But as a kid? Lloyd Alexander--Geoffrey Trease--just to name two, their female characters were fine to me. Of course male characters as written be females were fine--it wasn't until years later that male readers would point out objections they'd had, but by and large these seemed fewer in retrospect. I've always thought that that was because so many of us females grew up reading fiction mostly written by males, about males, and for males, it was easier to assimilate those male clues. Guys got socially 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.
Here's the second observation: that maybe the other gender gets more interested in aspects of male or female, and wants to explore that aspect. Female writers who write about very pretty men with big eyes and soft voices who prowl around their stories like tame cats. Well, Eleanor Aquitaine was onto something when she 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. Then there are men who write about predatory women who are a whole lot like men in thinking and action--alpha women, who play and fight hard, with few tender emotions. Well, there are women like that. Many of them got whapped back down to miming domestic and social submissiveness by their peers and environment.
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're the same--and not the same. Which makes us all endlessly fascinating.