Although I think Slithy_Tove has a point that female authors of romance novels on average are less likely to supply insightful deep studies of male character than female authors of acclaimed masterpieces of the fiction genre, I take issue with his more general claim:
How many male authors of both fiction and nonfiction, even among those known as major writers, have been really quite crap at depicting female characters, but nonetheless succeeded very well in their careers? Depicting male characters well has always been a sine qua non of “serious” “realistic” fiction, while depicting female characters well has always (well, at least until quite recently) been more or less optional.
Oh preach on Kimstu. If I had an 11 year old son and discovered a notebook in his underwear drawer scribbled with anything resembling George R. R. Martin’s, he’d be off to therapy like shot.
Spice Weasel, I’ve never read your romance novels, so you’ll have to suffer my offensiveness at wholesale rates. My contempt for your genre is so far down the line in a culture already choking on space laser and caped crusader escapism that it’s considerably watered-down at that. Forgive me but I may have you confused with another poster, whom I recall had a considerable enthusiasm for Friedrich Nietzsche. If I’m not mistaken in that, bringing that aspect into romance fiction would be pretty damn interesting indeed.
(but what do I know? Besides my regard for Edith Wharton, I also think highly of Joyce Carol Oates.)
I was not suggesting they’d draw as well as the men’s side. Your claim was that they did not draw well at all. They draw VERY well. Those are lucrative professional businesses.
That would be me! And yes, there’s a lot of crap out there. I won’t argue with that. I see the denigration of romance far more often than other genres. I see that in my science fiction writers community, in writers willing to learn about every genre except romance, in men poking fun at their wives’ reading habits, it’s like people go out of their way to include drive - bys in even tangentially related topics. It drives me nuts. I’ll admit your comment was at least relevant.
There’s a hilarious Subreddit about this called r/menwritingwomen. Worth it for the comments alone. I think my favorite is the murder victim who kept a little billfold with some cash and credit cards stored in her vagina.
However, questions sent to lovelorn/advice columnists about male-female relationships predominantly come from confused women, so there’s that.
On the other hand, the disparity could be at least partially explained by men figuring that there are some mysteries that will never be solved, so better to leave them be.
I don’t consider 800K on an international sporting event well. But I guess everyone’s definitions are different. For example Women’s volleyball’s NCAA championship drew ~700K viewers the other sport I mentioned is gymnastics and again the NCAA championships drew 800K. So non-top level competitions in gymnastics and volleyball equally draw the highest levels in Women’s golf.
On the other hand Women’s tennis does draw very well multiple millions is great for a sporting event and puts them on par with the low end of NASCAR viewership.
I get it if you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail.
This all seems kind of irrelevant. Boys high school teams don’t generally play all that well, either. No one goes to those games to watch spectacular sports. They go there to SUPPORT THE PLAYERS. Why is there more pressure to support male players than female players? You know, if the glove fits… Yes, of course it is sexism.
On the other other hand: what about professional advice-givers as opposed to advice-seekers? When folks go to psychologists or whatever for help in dealing with depression — or panic attacks, or issues with addiction, or whatever — do female therapists have a higher success rate than male ones do? When a marriage is on the rocks and couples therapy is the order of the day, do male marriage counselors typically have a harder time figuring out what the people in front of him are on about than female ones do?
(And: when marketing this or that product, do women in the advertising profession have a strikingly higher success rate both at crafting ad campaigns aimed at women and ad campaigns aimed at men? And so on.)
Honestly, when I saw the notification that you had responded to me I was expecting a note to knock off the high jack. That’s probably a good sign I need to knock this off. I’ll happily join in another thread if someone wants to start it.
“Everything”? What we’re talking about here is a case where a poster described in detail, and other posters supported, something that pretty clearly is a nail—namely, the gender disparity in expectations or criticism of girls and boys attending their partners’ events—and you’ve been twisting and stretching their descriptions every way but loose in a frantic quest to maintain that hey folks, maybe this isn’t really a nail!
It’s not at all that I’m trying to claim that everything is a nail. It’s that you’re obstinately trying, in the teeth of all available evidence, to impose the implausible reinterpretation that this particular thing that very distinctly looks like a nail is actually not a nail. And you can’t manage it without misrepresenting the things that MandaJo and Cartooniverse, for example, have explicitly said.
And/or that men may simply be more averse to openly seeking advice about romantic relationships, because it’s perceived as not an appropriately “manly” thing to do. It signals confusion, vulnerability, interest in understanding a woman’s feelings, etc.: in general, a state of mind that is traditionally not considered “masculine”.
That and the fact that such things are self-perpetuating. If women write into Ask Jane, then they will also be the ones who read Ask Jane, and so are the ones likely to keep writing.
Comedian Bill Burr does an advice podcast and the great majority of letters are from men who need relationship advice. It’s a forum that, as it happens, men listen to, so they’re the ones who keep writing, and then male listeners hear men’s problems getting advice, so they keep writing in.
Good point, the gender of the columnist also may have a significant effect on the gender ratio of those who feel comfortable asking him/her for advice.
I think it’s more that people are watching a sport, and they want to watch the best version of that sport. Like with football, the varsity games will be packed while the junior varsity games have almost no one. The same with basketball and baseball. Even though boys are on both the varsity and junior varsity teams, there is almost no one watching the JV games. A HS supporting basketball fan is generally going to want to watch the highest caliber basketball, so that would be the boys varsity team. The boys JV team and girls teams will be lower level play and won’t have as many fans. And many HS sports have almost no fan support regardless of gender. Minor sports like soccer, swimming, tennis, golf, and many others will typically have fans made up of just relatives.
One sport where I noticed there seemed to be more fan support for the girls was volleyball. Volleyball in general doesn’t really pack the stands anyway, but the girls games seemed to be better attended than the boys. I can sort of understand this, as I enjoy the cohesive team aspect of girls volleyball more than the individualistic nature of the boys. I think college volleyball has more support for the women than the men as well. I seem to notice more local news stories about the success of the college’s volleyball team than the men, for example. So here I would attribute the greater interest in women’s volleyball over men to be based on their higher quality play (based on teamwork).
Hey, when I asked ‘Is this one of those times you want me to tell you what you want to hear, or do you want my real opinion?’, I was merely seeking the above guidance like you said… but, somehow, she didn’t see it that way. Odd.
Is that what he’s been doing since he handed in his resignation as Attorney General? I got to admit, he doesn’t seem to be funny and I can’t imagine what advice people would expect from him. Good for him for trying something new.
If women know men so well, why do so many women have a history of getting into bad relationships? Men that belittle them, beat them, rape them, abuse the kids, and many other things. Yet many women fall for these guys, go back to them after breaking up, go back after a divorce, get back together when they have a restraining order. If they have men so figured out, many don’t seem to be making use of that knowledge.
Women don’t have to understand men particularly well to know more about them than men know women. If we ascribe some arbitrary score, men could understand women 20% and women could understand men 40%. Nobody is asserting 90% understanding or anything.
What I see come up over and over again is that women often have a difficult time accepting that their partner will not change. Right now I’m involved in about five different forums for mothers and that is without question the prevailing theme. “Why does he continue to be this way when I don’t want him to be this way?” They cling, tenaciously, to the ideal they want as if they can change reality just by wishing hard enough. You could argue this points to a lack of understanding about men, but man, isn’t it just the root of so many issues we all have with other people? I personally could boil down a lot of my interpersonal problems to this one idea, that X person should be different than they are.
Not that I have many interpersonal problems, but I’ve been wearing myself out lately over my FIL. I understand him better than he understands himself. This is because he has low self - insight and I’m particularly observant about what makes people tick. But it doesn’t really help to understand him when he keeps doing things I don’t like.
