How realistic are authors when it comes to portraying characters of the opposite sex?

Cafe Society
21

I find your observation funny and generally accurate, though I tend to have the hardest time with the way women are portrayed, period. I guess I just feel that internally I don’t fit the gender norm, so it’s hard to relate to female characters. Some books create dissonance more than others – Heinlein’s Friday, alleged to be this great strong female voice, was boring, unrealistic, and read like a parody to me. Stephen King’s heroine from Gerald’s Game on the other hand, was completely relatable. I actually find most of King’s females pretty convincing.

As a writer, I find the hardest characters to write are women. I almost exclusively write in the male first person, and I have been told by men writers that I do this well. I wrote hundreds of 1st/3rd person female stories as a pre-teen/teenager, copying the style of every cheap thriller/romance I could get my hands on… but it wasn’t until I read The Catcher in the Rye that I found my voice. And that voice has been almost exclusively male. I think my women are actually most convincing and real through the eyes of men.

My first-person women on the other hand are hollow, generally pretty stereotypical, and often seem shrill to me. I lose interest. I’m incapable of creating a woman who I feel reflects the way I think and act, but I did finally find one character, for a novel I’ve worked on extensively, who is female and pretty realistic. She is much more stoic and oblivious and tactless than me, but she’s real and I have come to love her. Nevertheless, while writing her story I naturally gravitated toward the dude, and found myself with the realization that I wanted to do the novel in two parts. Part II is his voice, and I have to admit he’s the character who has the most meaning and relevance to me. He is the heart of that novel.

And so you see, I follow your point, but find myself the exception. I think that makes me more open-minded in general toward gender and voice.

22

And did I say “all” ? No, although I expected that you’d ignore that to bash me. And I was thinking of more basic personality traits than the list of standard cliches. Men and women DO behave differently; they DO think differently; we are fundamentally different creatures. We are more different than we appear, not less.

Because women are still women, and men are still men. Every culture, every place, every time. Just because customs change doesn’t mean that human nature does.

23

Worst novelists for portraying opposite sex characters that I’ve read:

Michael Crichton (this guy must have been dumped a lot, because his literary women are some of the most irrational shrewish harpies I’ve read [particularly in SPHERE).

Anne Rice (sugar, in spite of what your husband and college boyfriends may have told you, not every man is bisexual).

Dan Brown (though in fairness his male characters are also cardboard thin and not believable)
Some of the best that I’ve read and who come to mind at the moment (heavy qualifications, those):

Larry McMurtry (I thought Aurora Greenway and her daughter were excellently drawn 3 dimensional people)

Conrad Richter (in The Awakening Land and Sea of Grass his heroines were flawed and colorful but very feminine and believable)

Anne Tyler (several books, but my favorites are Searching for Caleb and The Accidental Tourist, both of which had excellent idiosyncratic male characters)

24

Robin Hobb does a good job of writing first person as a man in her fantasy novels. She portrays Fitz and Nevare as very stubborn or lazy, sometimes impetuous and bull-headed, which, though not uniquely male, are certainly common in men.

I think she (and others) probably tries to stay away from things she doesn’t understand about the opposite sex, or has to guess about, and instead sticks to what she knows is either gender independent, or is commonly accepted as a significant gender trait.

25

…what.

I. What. Newt wrote… what?

26

I’m with RC as well. I am a female who tries to write credible, realistic people, dialogue and situations and not wring my hands over male and female behaviors and so on.
I wouldn’t assume anything about a particular writer from the get-go based upon that person’s name.

27

I think in general you all are right. But for me, the dissonance comes when an author is clearly writing about gender. olivesmarch4th mentioned Heinlein’s Friday, which I haven’t read, but I wanted to post here to mention Stranger In A Strange Land. Jubal Harshaw’s three secretaries were so clearly a man’s fantasy that any point Heinlein might have been trying to make with them is lost. In general he’s miserable writing women. I can’t think of the title, but there’s another one of his in which an old man gets his consciousness implanted in the mind of his buxom secretary. Again, it felt too much like a grandpa’s wet dream for me to believe the characters.

28

I dunno – maybe it’s the 35 years of perspective, but it seems pretty obvious that Tiptree’s stories were written by a woman. Very well-written, but thematically, too full of those 1970’s “men suck and ruin everything with their testosterone” plots. (e.g “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”) If Tiptree were a male, he’d be an unusually self-hating one.

29

Think of a man, and take away reason and accountability. —Melvin Udall

30

Ira Levin’s two most famous books, Rosemary’s Baby & The Stepford Wives, were both written from women’s points of view. He succeeded so well he put the two phrases into the nation’s lexicons.

31

The book in question would be I Will Fear No Evil. And yes, I’m named after one of the worst of his female characters. His books are sexist, elitist, and take absolutely no accounting of actual human nature, well, except as it applies to those other people who are going to ruin the world. And yet I love them anyway. For all of the game playing his characters, both male and female, do in order to protect their SO’s from themselves, I still get the feeling from them that they actually like and admire each other. And thats nothing to sneeze at.

32

Oh, he’s a good example.

Whoever said Stephen King was generally good at writing old women and little girls but not so much adult women was right. Though I liked Carrie…most of the other ones tend to be…just a little off. Somehow a little lacking.

ETA: Though I never read “Rose Madder”–was that any better? It was a later book, anyway.

33

Stephen King’s ability to write from an abused woman’s point of view is so damn good it’s scary!

34

I read the first couple of chapters of it years ago, as I recall, but for some reason wasn’t able to finish it…I’ll try to pick this one up again.

I do remember a character of his in Needful Things was abused…the wife of one of the policemen, I believe. (NOT Alan Pangborn, but the one they nicknamed Buster, as in Keaton.) That was a really good characterization.

35

Sue Townsend, who wrote the Adrian Mole books, appeared to channel the mind of an adolescent male in those diaries. I read the first Adrian Mole book as a 12 year old and I was convinced that “Sue Townsend” was a pen name of a boy going through puberty. Still a classic… I find myself re-reading all of the books from time to time.

36

I’m reminded of a bit of dialogue from M. Butterfly:

SONG: Do you know why female roles were always played by men in traditional opera?

CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY OFFICIAL: Because [stream of Maoist jargon] . . .

SONG: Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

37

A Tale of Two Cities. Lucy Manette was … too boring to be annoying. She was also a major hole in the plot. How could such a piece of cardboard inspire either Darnay or Carton to so much as tie their shoes?

Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester was the original bodice-ripper ‘hero’; what sane woman would have taken him on for any thing more than a brief torrid affair?

Jane Austen was pretty good with men; she had to be, as her plots all revolved around the difference in men’s and women’s worlds and expectations.

Shakespeare was pretty good with women; but his most memorable women impersonated men, even if briefly.

38

I think it is a problem with a lot of male authors. I worry about it in my own writing, so I have straight males read over everything I write and tell me if I need to change anything. I haven’t had to change much so far.

39

Apologies to all for taking so much time to get back to the thread but I really wanted to give peoples views the merit that they deserve rather then the quick hit and run posts on other topics that work has forced me to make.
As a man used to the thoughts and actions of many,many men from all walks of society from many cultures throughout the world I dont hold a stereotypical view of our sex and E.Peters was just plain wrong,but i wont address her writing in detail but my experience of writing in general.
I believe that many if not most women think and act differently from men even without cultural references purely out of biology.

We are always being told about hormonal effects on womens moods plus menstruation ,pregnancy,post natal depression etc etc.

I have never ever come across a man who has emotionally felt “Broody”,wanted a family maybe just like he’s wanted a nice house and a good career later on in life but broody no.
The nearest I can come to imagining this is how I felt when I gave up smoking or maybe low blood sugar though this is probably not a good analogy even if I’m not totally wrong.

Women are usually physically smaller and weaker then males so that their reaction in personal space when encountering a male(say just passing in the street)is different to a mans but this is further complicated by a usually more passive role in the mating game so wrong signals are not sent out to the man but he is unlikely to see any of her behaviour as a physical challenge to him.,the sex drives are different in their effect as are arouasl and orgasm.

Having breasts or external genitalia also bring a different approach to carrying or scrambling over obstacles say,but I doubt we ever notice consciously.

In thinking women tend to be more down to Earth and practical,no doubt in the Stone age when Og was pondering about this round thing his SO was thinking about where the next meal was coming from which is probably why alot of historys inventing was performed by males.
I could write a book about this but I will finish with the primeval(Apparently)instincts that we supposedly have today,many men fall asleep after orgasm so that the hunter can rest protected by their wide awake SO,well thats what we tell YOU anyway and most men find a pregnant woman a sexual turnoff NOT because we’re insensitive brutes but because in the cause of spreading and immortalising our genes it would be pointless as the woman is already impregnated.

We are led to believe that this also is at the root of a male without having cultural pressure on him being quite happy to impregnate willy nilly far and wide at the drop of a hat,the more women the more wide spread his genes will be.

But an impregnated woman will not get any genetic survival benefits from mating with more men.

And thats just some of the biological factors that result in some quite different modes of conduct between the sexes,I’m not even going to touch on historical or cultural factors.

40

I don’t think it would do this discussion good to have a debate on whether men and women are fundamentally, biologically different in their thoughts and behavior. They probably are to some degree, but anyone who claims to know how much and in what ways, without DAMN GOOD EVIDENCE (not silly made-up caveman stories and appeals to personal experience) is spouting bullshit. What’s more, authors of fiction are not usually concerned with how people act independent of culture.

The issue of the reader’s stereotypes is an interesting one, though. Would you all agree with me when I say that readers tend to expect a higher degree of “normality” (that is, stereotype) in fiction than you find in real life? The best example of this is personal names. A lot of real surnames are too weird to be believable if an author made them up.

It would be interesting to attempt an experiment: get a number of men and women to write first-person accounts of a true experience (preferably an experience most men and women have in common), edit out any factual clues, and see if readers can guess the author’s gender.