In the past I have been a voracious reader but I find myself only reading novels by women authors as a last resort.
The reason?When many women write, their characterisation of men is well off of the mark,they depict men as thinking and feeling according to how they think that men SHOULD think and feel rather then how they actually think and feel and it makes the whole story a little bit unbelieveable.
Men routinely have crisis’s of confidence about whether or not they are good enough to be with their SOs,they display an unnatural interest and affinity to all things childbirth/children oriented and it just totally spoils the book for me.
Maybe you think I see a female authors name and my preconceptions influence my opinion of the story telling to its detriment?
Well its not the case,before the boom in historical "Who dunnits "took off there was only one author doing it,a bloke called Ellis Peters.
I read every single book “He” wrote because it was a genre that I really enjoyed and “He” was the only person writing it.
But I kept thinking that this bloke writes like a woman,his heroes dont seem to think or act like normal men and then it was revealed Ellis Peters was a nom de plume for a woman writer.
Dont get me wrong I’m not saying that every single authoress is guilty,Agatha Christie came across well and one of my all time favourite authors,a veritable genius Colleen Mc Cullough gets men dead right.
But also some of my favourite male authors try to write with a female protagonist as the main character and that doesn’t work for me either .
I hope that I am not being sexist though I dont like men with tits or women with beards .
How do women feel about male attempts at writing with a heroine rather then a hero,are the results believable,comically bad or somewhere in between?
Like dancing at a wedding, many people attempt it, most have fun trying, and a few succeed at making it work.
When I read traditionally “male novels,” i.e., fiction having to do with science fiction, government conspiracies, international spies, and the like, the women are generally window-dressing. And they are treated as such…cardboard females who serve a goal within the plot, even if that goal is merely to prove the male hero is a ladies’ man.
When I read “women’s fiction,” the results are (IMHO) a bit more varied. Some women write the same cardboard male figure; some women write men rather brilliantly. Jodi Piccoult comes to mind as a female author who writes remarkably honest characters of both sexes. She doesn’t do anybody any favors, and the result is something remarkably real.
I think it depends on the genre you’re reading. And it’s also worth noting that some men do actually wonder if they are worthy to be with the girl they’re with, and some men are interested in their own spawn. Even to the extent that they may display interest in childbirth!
Any author worth his or her salt can write a character of the opposite sex that realistically depicts that character. I’ve written and sold quite a few stories where the main character is female (even in the first person), and I’ve yet to have anyone complain that the women didn’t behave like women.
An even better example is James Tiptree, Jr., who had Robert Silverberg saying the rumors that Tiptree was female were ridiculous and the stories were definitely written by a man. Silverberg is no dummy, either.
Your base assumption is that there is a quantifyable difference in how women and men behave, but women and men are individuals and don’t behave according to stereotypes. Some women are more nurturing, some are less so. Same for men. So, ultimately, you’re really just seeing how the characters match your stereotypes, not how they portrayed women or men.
I can’t speak for Ellis Peters – I haven’t read the books, though I have watched the Cadfael TV episodes. Perhaps she isn’t good at portraying men. But perhaps the problem is that she portrays men that don’t fit your stereotytpes.
(I have noticed that the idea that men are one way and women are another seems more entrenched these days than they were even back in the 50s. It’s no more true now than it when people said women were only fit to be housewives and men to hold down jobs.)
John Irving, a fine writer by any estimate, showed a tone deafness for portraying women in The World According to Garp. No Feminists would recognize themselves as Ellen Jamesians.
The OP is dead on. I definitely notice, particularly in genre fiction, an inability among otherwise competent writers to get the opposite sex correct. I of course know more about how men think, being one, but I also have six sisters and I have some idea of how women’s minds work and men often get their women characters horribly wrong as well.
Each tends to make women or men the way they THINK they should be, ideally, rather than the way they are. This is very noticable when you have a woman action heroine written by a man.
Depends on the author - Stephen King used to be great at old women and little girls and suck the goat ass at writing adult women. He knew it and has been working on it, you can tell.
I just finished Alas, Babylon and the women in that were atrocious - male writer. It does come up a lot in genre fiction.
As more sexual barriers are being lifted in the modern age, it gets more and more difficult to tell the sex of someone through text. Just look at all the gender confusion that happens here on the forums.
Most men and most women tend to think and act in typical ways, but if a written character doesn’t, I just chalk it up to that character being quirky. If the story is a period piece though, in a time when men and women had rigidly defined roles, then it becomes less believable.
I dunno. I can think of some very good authors who seemed to have trouble dealing with the opposite sex: Hawthorne’s women were often simplistic and single-toned (with the huge exception of Hester Prynne: but look at Georgiana in “The Birthmark” or Faith in “Young Goodman Brown”) while his men were complex, nuanced characters. Melville doesn’t seem to have known women existed, or when they did, he seems to have seen their lives as unrelieved vales of pain. In fantasy or SF, you also have some otherwise competent writers who don’t seem to be able to write about women in a believable fashion: Asimov admitted as much, claiming he hardly ever talked to women, including his wife, until after he was a well established author. George R.R. Martin’s woman all seem to be batshit insane or tomboys. In television, David Simon (The Wire) admits his positive female characters are mostly men with tits.
On the other side of the coin, there are plenty of authors who are good at portraying members of the opposite sex: Shakespeare, very notably, and I’d argue Jane Austin, and, to some degree, Twain as well (his understanding of women wasn’t flattering, but neither was his understanding of men). In Fanasy/SF, you have Guy Gavriel Kay: in television, Joss Whedon.
The worst offenders are books not really meant for members of the opposite sex: men’s adventure and women’s romance. You can’t really even comment on the skill of the writer, there, as the intent is not to be true to life, but rather to sketch out a fantasy. To some degree, I think that the pop culture thriller novels/chick lit type stuff is also aimed at one gender or the other, and accuracy is less important than fantasy. The opposite sex exists primarily as a tool for character development and wish fulfillment, and so isn’t particularly accurate.
I may have been a bit harsh, but ultimately most authors are able to write for both sexes and can create realistic characters of the opposite sex. In some stories and genres, the “realistic” character isn’t what the story is going for in the first place (e.g., pulp fiction and early mystery fiction was more about the puzzles than the characters).
But there are probably some authors – even good ones – who are better at portraying one gender or another (I tend to be better at portraying women than men). Even your example of Hawthorne gives a major counterexample.
But “a good portray of an opposite sex characters” should not equal “a one-to-one correspondence to the reader’s stereotypes.” It should equal “an interesting character.”
Anyone here read “Memoirs of a Geisha”? Now there’s a male author writing females with a certain amount of finesse. I find male authors seem to have a harder time portraying women accurately than women have portraying men accurately, though female authors tend to romanticize males more. And that’s a problem.
Personally, as a screenwriter, I suck at writing female characters. Don’t ask me why… I don’t know. I can, however, create the most believable, multi-dimensional, strong and true-to-life middle aged men and men close to retirement, especially if they’re complicated S.O.Bs (with a couple ex-wifes and military backgrounds). Go figure.
I can handle female characters who are total whack-jobs or really off the wall, however.
Just because people don’t rigidly adhere to them doesn’t mean there aren’t such things as typically male or female personality traits and ways of thinking, which most people adhere to. The claim that their aren’t such traits is based on ideology, not reality.
And yes, some women do seem better than others at portraying the male viewpoint; I immediately thought of Lois McMaster Bujold, who’s according to her has been told “You write like a man !” quite often. I wonder if that’s why she’s written more from the female viewpoint recently ?
There were some parts of “Memoirs” that rang a little false to me, but perhaps they ring a little more “really very screwed up young woman desperate for a father figure” instead. Certainly he got the somewhat shadowy world of female bitchiness down to a T.
I like Neal Stephenson as a writer, though I’ve only read Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon so far. However, his female characters seem to mostly be afterthoughts or cartoony, while the men are much more real.
You mean the traits like women prefer to stay home and raise kids and men go out and be the breadwinners? Or that women don’t really enjoy sex? Or that all women love to shop? Or that all men love to watch sports?
Most of these “traits” are just generalizations and rationalizations (which change over time). There are so many counterexamples to any “trait” of one sex or another that it’s ridiculous to say they are characteristic of one sex or another. We laugh at the generalizations about the sexes in Victorian times, or in 50s America, but what makes you so sure our current generalizations are any more accurate?
In fiction, characters are there to take part in the story. Sometimes it’s useful to have a shorthand – making a woman a mother figure, for instance. But any author who assumes men always act one way and women another is limiting himself.
So the question really isn’t “are the men and women realistic?” It’s “does the portrayal of men and women work in the story?”
I’m with RealityChuck. A talented author should be able to write the opposite sex just fine, and there’s tons of evidence out there that supports it (Memoirs of a Geisha and She’s Come Undone are two very good examples mentioned earlier in this thread. As far as women writing men - Colleen Mc Cullough as was mentioned, I think Edith Wharton does a good job with her male characters, as did Harper Lee. And the list goes on…)
I think the OP is a little limited in what he thinks a male character should be. Not all men are the same - my husband, for example, has a huuuuge swath of interests/emotions that are not typically masculine. I’ve watched him go through multiple crises of consciousness over various relationships and incidents, he cries while watching movies based on Jane Austin and various Bronte sisters books, and he likes to decorate. If I were to write him accurately, would the OP consider it a bad portrayal of a man?
Calling forth one of my favorite authors (Lois McMaster Bujold), I have no idea whether Mark is an accurate nutso. I know I enjoy him. Then again, I have no idea whether Taura is an accurate pseudowerewolf, not any more than I can tell whether Angua is an accurate werewolf in Pterry’s books, and he’s a favorite of mine as well.
Bujold and Pratchett’s characters get more or less depth based on how central they are to the specific story. It’s got nothing to do with their plumbing. Now, whether the plumbing has anything to do with whether the character concept is believable is another problem - would Angus have the same problems working with a vampire partner as Angua has? With the “vampire” part, yes; with the “female” part of the vampire, no; so the complete byplay would have been completely different, and the byplay between Angua and a male vampire partner would also have been different (I’m speaking of Thud!, for anybody who’s gotten lost). Would it be possible to have a Discworld where there were hedge wizards and the University was an all-female institution? Well, yeah, but it would have been a different world. Whether the difference would have involved more macrame at UU, I’ll leave to anybody who’s ever been in the house of a female scientist.
IANAW, but I ‘ve noticed that men writing about women had a high-quality mark in the Depression. James M. Cain’s women (“Mildred Pierce.” “The Postman Always Rings twice,” etc.) are believable. Budd Schulberg made the character of Kit Sergeant more three-dimensional that the main character, Sammy Glick, in “What Makes Sammy Run.” In the original book “They Shoot Horses, Don’t they?” Horace McCoy may not have entierly fleshed-out Gloria Beatty on the page, but he sure gave Jane Fonda something to work with as a movie character. Nathanael West ("Miss Lonely Hearts,’ “the day of the Locusts,”) unfortunately, had women who were pretty much the standard ball-busting or sweety-pie devices. But then all of West characters were devices - his message is what counts.
Before that era, Ford Maddox Ford wrote women well, but of course Ford Maddox Ford was a great author.
Special dishonorable mention goes to Newt Gingrich:
“Suddenly the pouting sex kitten gave way to Diana the Huntress. She rolled onto him and somehow was sitting athwart his chest, her knees pinning his shoulders. “Tell me, or I will make you do terrible things,” she hissed.”
I just finished “Written on the Body” by Jeanette Winterson, and I think she also had some problems writing male characters, but I think that may have been intentional. All of the characters in the book were cliches of gender types, but in particular the male characters were all very one dimensional.
Of interest of course is the narrator who is genderless (well capriciously gendered to be honest). It is hard for me to say how realistic I found that character, (s)he is never presented in a full enough manner for my tastes.