Came in here to mention this, and maybe S.E. Hinton. And grown man Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) managed to capture teenage girls in a refreshingly realistic way. Not that I’m always reading for realism, and not that that is the intention of every writer. I am a woman and I wouldn’t know how to start speaking on behalf of all women, and I’m sure if I was written up as a character (hobbies, quotes, physical description) I’d come across as a teenage boy in a lady’s body.
As a few others have mentioned, with some male authors I am just happy if they manage to make their female characters more than big-titted window dressing.
Something like that exists, using ‘feminine’ (with, where, when, myself) and ‘masculine’ (the, around, more, above) keywords to determine the writer’s gender. Apparently, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am a boy.
Stephen King portrays psychotic women well. Annie Wilkes is a very well written, believable character, and it’s good, as she is one of only two people in the major portion of the book. He makes her a living, breathing person, not a stereotype “crazy lady.”
Kathy Bates won the Oscar, but King created the role.
Toni Morrison sucks at male characters. IIRC it was Tar Baby that really turned me off her writing. Mainly becaus one of the male characters was so lame. The swearing was just wrong and unnatural.
Douglas Kennedy is one of my favorite authors (although he;s had some misses). State of the Union and Pursuit of Happiness both have female leads, and I thought were well done. Dunno what female dopers think?
Well yes it does do this discussion good not to debate, but to state as a fact that there are differences in perception and action between the sexes as a result of our biological construction seeing as the thread is about the accuracy or lack of in authors depictions.
Yes there ARE women who are disinterested in children and enjoy bodybuilding and firearms but that doesn’t mean that they think like men just as men who are interested in knitting and kids think like women.
Believing that both sexes are pretty much the same except for their genitalia displays a stunning lack of imagination which must make the story a trifle unbelievable to say the least.
The old chestnut" stereotype" seems to be thrown around everytime there is a discussion about any group of people as though in real life there are no broad boundaries containing the more normal varieties but an unbounded infinity ofthoughts ideas or people.
By that reckoning living in England its not unbelievable for me to bump into a Mongolian Horseman as anyone else.
My last post as this one I was and am very tired so maybe I’m not making my point as clearly as I might so I tried to abbreviate it with the caveman story but I think that if you go through historical records of invention you will find DAMNED GOOD evidence and so on and on and on…
As to what authors think etc.etc as you so grandly speak for them all the point of this thread is all about the readers rating of sexual characterisation.
I’m sure that you’re very proud of the story(s) that you have written whether or not they have been published or are even best sellers but I’m afraid that doesn’t make you the absaloute authority on all things literary so even if you are unable to understand the arguments or disagree with them or the debate isn’t following the course that YOU have decided it should go then I’m afraid that you’ll just have to be a brave little soldier and put up with it.
Unsubstantiated denial followed by abuse doesn’t help your case any.
Apologies to all for my jerky flow,I really really am bloody tired.
Historical records of invention don’t exist much before the modern era. I doubt you have any actual evidence on whether it was a man or a woman who invented the wheel. Anyway, I don’t see the importance of invention to this matter.
I think I should have stressed more my point that the debate over whether gender differences are innate or created by culture is mostly irrelevant to what we’re discussing here. Men and women are different (on average) in all known human cultures, and therefore fictional characters should be written in a way that reflects those differences. The problem is that both writers and readers tend to expect more consistent adherence to the stereotypes than reality would present.
Yikes, that sounds stuck up. I’m not trying to imply that I’m a better writer than anyone else here; I just meant to point out that it was something I had worked on seriously and very carefully, and an example of my best writing.
It’s the difference between plausible and probable. Characters need to be, on the whole, plausible within the framework of the piece (i.e., I think you can get away with more variation from social norms in a science fiction story or with a character who is otherwise extreme: I’d expect a female race car driver to be further from the norm than a female homemaker) . They do not need to be probable, and in fact a work would be fairly boring if they all were. On the other hand, if all the characters of a certain gender in a work (or in a body of work) seem to be improbable, and the characters of the opposite gender do tend to be probable, that disparity is noteworthy.
People are more skeptical about fiction than about reality because reality has already, more or less, established it’s reality.
If we base it on other primates (which in my biased opinion I think we should) then females are the ones who did more of the early inventing. In non-human apes, it is females who do most of the inventing and spreading of culture. The idea of males wanting to spread their genes far and wide and not caring who they impregnate at all is horse-shit. If that were true, why doesn’t every male donate to sperm banks? Why do so many men remain monogamous?
And females also get survival benefits from mating with many males. Why do you think men are so concerned with paternity certainty? It’s because women can and do fuck one guy and get another to raise her kids.
There are biological differences between the sexes. However, many of the social differences exist on a continuum. You will often find females in the “male” range and males in the “female” range. I’m a tomboy so I seem to naturally ID more with males. The guys who read my stories don’t make many corrections and the corrections they do make are normally to the descriptions of male orgasm.
Well I can see a lot of wishful thinking here but unfortunately without any evidence to back it up
I didn’t want this thread to degenerate into a pissing contest about "we’re better then you ,no your not,yes we are"and so on and on and on as oft times before but I’ll address your points.
Supposing that your claim that in non human primates the females are the originators of any higher level behaviour is indeed a fact(I’m not actually going to bother checking)it is actually irrelevant in this debate about Human attributes.
If female Orangutans behave in a certain way it doesn’t offer any insight of any worth into how Human females are motivated.
So your reasoning is that females went out and discovered clay working,flint knapping,metal working and the wheel etc but having discovered these things immediately stepped backwards and handed over the development of and the crafting of these discoveries to males and showed no further interest in these technologies.
Not only that but for the rest of history the vast majority of scientific and technological discoveries were made by males as a matter of undisputed record.
So what happened to the part of the female brain in evolution that was making, according to you, ground breaking discoveries one moment and then discovering nothing the next?
Using Occams Razor it seems,putting it kindly,unlikely that females were responsible for discoveries made before records were kept how ever much you’d like it to be so.
It would be like being a skilled footballer one week and an uncoordinated reserve the next.
As to spreading genes about ,males dont think about it on a conscious level just as we dont think for the vast majority of the time oh lets make a new human when we want to have sex.
If there was no such thing as the male orgasm then I suspect the population of the world would be a fraction of what it is now.
As to your questions about “Why doesn’t every male donate to sperm banks?”
In the first part there are social taboos about it
,“Going down the Pub?”
“Yes might as well I’ve just knocked one out up at the sperm bank,shake buddy”
And secondly its not fun,which is why they have to pay donors to do it.
Why do some men remain monogamus?
Because of lack of opportunity to do otherwise,because of cultural strictures and lets face it judging by the divorce rate many of the faithful males might just be pulling a fast one(No connection with the point about sperm donors).
Before we evolved intelligence we we were no different from any other animals so to ensure survival of the species and the individuals genes it would require a mechanism that didn’t rely on consciously spreading those genes.
A Roebuck isn’t going to decide to breed it will act on instinct (If it didn’t it would become extinct)just like human males in fact which is why men have a higher sex drive then most (But not all women)and would happily,if allowed to,impregnate any passable women in their vicinity which having done so would not give it a thought even in retrospect.
As to men and women being in the "Range"whatever that means I would bet that women would tell me that effeminate men are not like genuine women but are in fact charicatures of women.
I genuinly dont mean to be offensive here and this is not directed at you as I’ve never met you but the Tom oys that I’ve met and Dykes sem to try TOO hard to act masculine,they swear too much are TOO loud and TOO physical,they certainly dont come across as men who just happen to have the wrong genitalia.
Stephen King has been mentioned several times in this thread. One type character I’ve seen come up now and then in Stephen King novels is the Hypocritical Self-Aggrandizing Feminist Bitch: The public speaker who gets her head cut off by a flying pane of glass in Insomnia; the one who runs the battered-women’s shelter in Rose Madder; and there are probably others. What that says about his views I don’t know.
An inversion of Shakespeare’s theatrical world, where women were not allowed to perform so male actors (preferably boys whose voices had not yet changed) had to play female roles – so in a contemporary production of Twelfth Night you would have a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a eunuch . . .
I’m skipping over most of this debate on human evolution because it’s mostly BS on both sides and it’s also a huge hijack.
You bet that women would tell you that, but who knows if you bet right? In any case, if the idea of gender behavior being on a range is confusing to you, you need to think more carefully. It’s just like height. Everyone knows that women tend to be shorter than men, but in fact each sex displays a range of heights, and those ranges overlap. So it’s easy to find male-female couples that are the same height, and you can also find men who are shorter than most women, and women who are taller than most men. So even though everyone knows men are taller, if you wrote a book where all the men are taller than all the women, it would be unrealistic.
Behavior patterns presumably show the same situation. Supposing it’s true that American women exhibit more empathy than American men, it would be unrealistic to write a book set in America and make all the female characters more empathic than all the male characters. In reality, even if the generalization that men have less empathy than women is true on average, men still have a range of empathy and women still have a range of empathy.
I think Eliza in The Baroque Cycle and Nell in The Diamond Age are very well-developed characters, at least as much so as the men. And so, for that matter, is Y.T. in Snow Crash (yes, she is “cartoony,” but every character in that book is cartoony).
One character type that comes up in almost every S.M. Stirling novel is the Awesome Dominant Warrior Woman (sometimes good, sometimes evil, usually but not always lesbian or bisexual). There are such women in real life but they’re so extremely rare I wonder if Stirling doesn’t have some kind of Amazon fetish.
Am working so will be short and sweet but will reply in depth later.
I agree that IRL there are men who may well think almost as though their personalities are the product of an unseen creator of the opposite sex who doesn’t really seem to understand the thought processes of men because, there are a myriad number of variations of males and male thinking.
But suspension of disbelief is required by any reader to get something out of the story in Fiction and the more separate suspensions we have to make when reading a book the harder it gets, particulary if there seems to be no apparent reason for one of the factors in the story being of the credulaty stretching sort and the hard to believe factor plays no part in the construction of the plot.
I think it is insulting to the readers to expect them to put up with poor sexual characterisation by saying that the person is just not within typical stereotypical bounds,when in fact it is down to the authors poor writing or poor research of and/or poor empathy with portraying members of the opposite sex.
My comments apply equally for unconvincing portrayals of women by male authors.
If authors weren’t so complacent about their lapses in quality then they would feel compelled to do something to improve their game,either that or stop attempting those things that for one reason or another they simply are not competent to do.
If we the readers let them off of the hook too easily then they will just carry on supplying substandard protagonists.
I’m sorry but the "stereotype "old chestnut of a stock excuse has worn rather thin as it has been used by far too many people on far too many occassions for far too many different reasons .