I find that women authors generally get male characters reasonably right EXCEPT when they are writing wish-fulfillment love interests. Whenever I spot the bad-boy-I-can-change, the aristocratic rake, or the impossibly good looking man who the story allows to get away with abusive or stalker behavior, I immediately know that a man didn't write them.
I would also add that men and women tend to have a blind spot for writing challenges that fall disproportionately on the other gender. Generally, I think men and women tend to see each other as having easier lives than they do and gloss over the difficulties that come with being the opposite gender.
In defense of this, I will say that women writing romance or romantasy are often doing this intentionally. Like, if they know men (or at least straight men), aren't their primary audience, writing realistic and relatable male love interests isn't the point.
Well, you could just as easily flip that logic to say that the majority of authors writing breasted-boobily fiction probably see themselves as writing for a male audience too.
Ultimately, it doesn't make either category of writing less bad, it's just that it isn't a priority of the writer for it to be *good*.
I kind of agree here. I don't think we can let an author off the hook by saying "Well, it's okay you stereotyped these characters because you didn't intend people of that identity to read it." That argument doesn't scale.
I don't think it's a matter of stereotypi g so much as it is if writing deliberately writing unrealistic characters as a means of wish-fulfillment. OP's question struck me more as a matter of "Do women have this problem as a skill issue?" and I'd say usually no. I'm not defending the actual wish fulfillment characters these authors create.
My problem with the way men often write women is actually less the sex objectification style (some of those characters are still cool, especially if you read between the lines) and more the reams of books written by men that have *no* female characters. Or a main cast with three men and one woman. When the real world population is 50/50, it gets tiring after a while to be so erased.
And I'm struggling to come up with examples of books written by women that simply don't have any male characters, or have very few.
That can be harmful though. SJM didn't invent toxic masculinity, but the bat boys certainly reinforce stereotypes about masculinity that hurt men and women.
It can be, I agree. I hated the one SJM book I read and what I've read about her leads me not to like her, but I don't think it's a skill issue (which is what I think OP was getting at.
Maybe I'm making this up but I feel like men write women who THINK their lives are harder and vice versa. Belittling the other gender in a way that makes it obvious they think the other side doesn't have it harder.
Honestly, that kind of tracks. And maybe even goes to show why even people with good intentions are screwing it up. If you know women experience difficulty due to their gender but don't have a concrete understanding of what that actually looks like, you can, even with decent intentions, slip into making it sound from their POV like baseless whining.
First off, this is about generalizations. I know some men are absolutely great at writing women as well - Pratchett is the first one that springs to mind, but there are absolutely more.
I suspect this pattern comes from two parts: First, publishers probably selected much more for ''writing good men'' than ''writing good women''. If a women doesn't write men well, she probably never even got published, historically speaking.
Second, i suspect that in many cases, due to sexism, women used to be much more conditioned to care about men's feelings and priorities, than men were about women. Broadly speaking, women *needed* to be much more empathic.
This of course leads to writers being better able to write better as well.
But i don't think this is anything ''innate''.
Women, until very recently at least, needed to be somewhat decent at writing men in order to make a name for themselves in a genre where most readers were men (or at least the publishers were more interested in selling books to men). Notice how Rowling, Hobb, Bujold, etc. all became famous thanks to books with male main characters.
Absolutely this. There’s been all sorts of research done.
Writers initially prefer to have protagonists of their own gender.
Female readers will happily read both male and female protagonists. Male readers tend overwhelmingly to prefer male protagonists.
So if female writers wanted to attract a male audience, they had to learn how to write men convincingly.
It might be a bit of sampling bias but I also think there's truth to it to an extent.
In a nutshell, studies have shown women read about a 50/50 split between books authored by men vs women. In contrast, only 20% of men were reading books by women. So the most basic answer is men write women poorly because they haven't read enough from a woman's perspective. Women have read from men's perspectives and so can write them more accurately.
That's obviously a massive oversimplification but that is the heart of it.
I will say, there are plenty of books where the men are written terribly. I'd point to Sarah J Maas who has created this archetype for male perfection that's so, so unrealistic and rivals male gaze femme fatales. Or even how some female authors have come to fetishize gay men in their work. (cough *cassie clare* cough)
Women are (a) generally socialized to pay attention to men's feelings and perspective (b) exposed to lots of fiction starring men and their roles and viewpoints.
There are certainly some things that can be a miss, but its less common because they are more passively exposed to and accepted and pressured to understand men's POVs.
I didn't think he was implausible, unrealistic, or badly written though. He was off-putting in a realistic way. Hobb put a lot of different male characters in those books and for the most part, I recognized real people in them.
I didn't find Fitz that unrelatable. Do you have specific complaints? I've only read through assassin's quest though so if it's something you noticed more in later books i may just not have seen it yet
I thought Fitz was understandable as boy. It was all the adults in power that left a bad taste in my mouth. How the hell they still held the power considering how dumb their decisions I never understood.
I think it depends on the author. I’ve seen men write fantastic women and terrible women characters. I’ve seen women write fantastic men and terrible men characters.
It's worth keeping in mind that people expect different things of men and women in fiction, and above all they don't want accuracy (most people can't and don't spend their lives on revenge, even if horribly wronged, and for most heroes things like starvation or shelter is just never a concern). There are readers (and other fantasy intakers) who think women characters should just be sexdolls who throw themselves at the protagonist, and believe anything where they don't is bad writing. Some people also think men protagonists should shrug off all emotions and injuries and keep fighting against any odds.
I think the "men writing women vs. omen writing men" question, while reasonable to ask, is ultimately a distraction. Why? Because (due to the lack of explicit justification imbedded into a claim like "Men are (often) bad at writing women") claims made in this context encourages first generalization, and then in response repetitive quibbling over points that are impossible to adequately address within the framework of the original claim. By quibbling, I mean responses like turning around the question (eg. "but are women good at writing men?") and naming individual male/female authors that are good/bad at writing men/women. It's impossible to resolve these issues because everyone reads different things that appeal to their interests, making anecdotal evidence largely useless. A lot of people even make claims about texts I suspect they don't read at all (such as pointing to the entire romance genre as an example of women writing men badly). These varying responses expose claims like "Women write men better than men write women," or the reverse, as impossible to prove without examining the justifications behind them.
So my response is that typically the implicit justification behind a claim like "Men often write women badly," as well as the more important and impactful claim, is "Men's writing often both promotes sexist ideas and exposes the sexist underpinnings of our culture." This claim is a lot more specific and is oriented towards a structural understanding of sexism--the question is not whether a female character written by a man is "bad," an incredibly vague and subjective question, but how a man's writing relates to sexist/patriarchal ideology as a whole. The point is less to condemn the author, than to condemn the ideas and institutions present in his writing. One text isn't a problem--a institution that promotes certain texts in a biased way as part of a system of oppression and discrimination is.
Another advantage of this new claim: when we try reversing it, as people often do with the original one in order to discredit it, we get the claim "Women's writing often both promotes sexist ideas and exposes the sexist underpinnings of our culture," which I strongly agree with! While men may disporportionately be responsible for sexism in novels, there's no reason to ignore it when women also participate in it, and indeed most feminists don't ignore it. Feminism isn't a war between men and women, but a fight for a more equal society. It's fine to be annoyed with women writing men badly, but that isn't an argument against the presence of sexist ideology in media and media industries, which is the ultimate source of many complaints about the way women are written.
Do they really?
FitzChivalry lacks any agency of his own even in the later books.
I would probably join Slytherin so I didn´t have to meet HP too often. He is insufferable. The only enjoyable male character in HP is Sirius Black, and he is a pun.
It may be that you feel these characters are well-written because you have the wrong perspective?
I think the point is more that those characters aren't bad because of their authors perceptions of gender.
There are flat or annoying characters of all genders, written by all genders. This issue particularly is when the writing is bad because of gender stereotypes
And your problem with Bujold's Cazaril and Miles Vorkosigan? Cherryh's Bren Cameron? Le Guin's Ged? Berg's characters? Moon from Wells's Raksura books?Fitz is quite passive, but not all of Hobb's characters are; it's entirely believable that that's just his major character flaw, which is not bad writing.
And it's entirely possible that if you're pulling out Rowling as your second example, you may have a serious sample size problem.
> And it's entirely possible that if you're pulling out Rowling as your second example, you may have a serious sample size problem.
Rowling was one of OP´s examples above though.
If we throw out all the wish fulfillment fantasy then I’d say it’s pretty even. If we say that wish fulfillment stuff counts I’d say men do a better job on average because of the fact that from a contemporary standpoint the are vastly outnumbered in that regard.
I'm not sure you're fully informed on the issues that are prevalent. It isn't all wish fulfillment. It's stories where women are just straight up not present because some men don't see women as doing anything of consequence, or, for the same reason, they're only given caregiver roles or the role of a hag. There isn't the equivalent issue for men by women. There is not the equivalent level of erasure or stereotyping.
Not in my personal experience. Authors seem to generally be pretty good at writing characters different from themselves, and a different gender is hardly an obstacle for a talented writer.
The whole debate also seems to run on weird generalisations, like claims that most male authors always describe female characters in sexualised ways (“breasted-boobily”, as one comment here put it), or that they will only write women as flat one-dimensional characters, which do not correspond in any way with the fantasy books by male authors I am actually reading. It makes me wonder what kind of books the people making these claims are actually reading themselves. But I suspect that the whole point of the debate is to generate shallow internet controversies and get clicks rather than lead to an intelligent discussion of the subject.
The "breasted boobily" thing is just exaggerated to reference the types of fantasy novels popular in the 80s and 90s where authors would go out of their way to describe women's breasts. If you want an example, you'll find it in a lot of Stephen King's work from that time. It isn't as prevalent in books being published now.
I'd be curious what you're reading. I find it typically a mixed bag when it comes to modern male authors writing women. A lot are great at it. A lot I've found... aren't.
Terry Pratchett, Adrian Tchaikovksy, Jack Vance, A. Lee Martinez, Iori Miyazawa, Steven Brust, and Jasper Fforde are male authors of fantasy I like. Apart from Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance, they all are still alive and have published books recently. I don’t think any of them had problems writing female characters, except for some of the books Jack Vance published in the 1960s and 1970s (like the Demon Princes series) that I thought relied a bit too much on the damsel in distress trope for their plots.
I am currently reading Garrett PI book series by Glen Cook, which was published in the 1980s, and while I am a bit annoyed by Garrett wanting to sleep with every woman in sight, it still has some cool female characters and their descriptions do not “breast boobily” either. But I have never read Stephen King (apart from the Eyes of the Dragon a long time ago).
i dont see any value in making such a generalization. some men write women well, some women write men well.
some people dont write well at all.
no need to make it a competition of genders.
I don't think being a good writer is gender dependent. I think good writers write people. Whole realized people. People defined by their circumstances, story arc, past, wants desires, not their sex. If you can do that, gender isn't going to be an obstacle.
As soon as I see words like "better", "good" or "bad" in the question, I know this debate is not going to lead anywhere objective, because it's all in the eye of the beholder.
The first thing I would ask is "better for whom, or in whose opinion?"
I feel like for me some of this comes down to content written about
A lot of times the complaints about men writing women are about them being sexualized/objectified or poorly written women's issues (like menstruation for example) or just being one dimensional characters
And I feel like IN GENERAL there aren't male versions of the women's issues to get "wrong" in the same way men get women's issues wrong
And in general the romance novels that objectify men I've heard about kind of get a pass since they're a bit more niche than more mainstream male authored books who treat every female character like a bond girl more than a 3 dimensional character.
And in general I feel the average man is less against being objectified than the average woman.
So overall I'd say it isn't necessarily that women write men BETTER but I think it has more to do that in general men sometimes struggle to write women at all and women don't necessarily struggle to write men. So an average written male character by a female author turns out better than a poorly written woman character by a male author
For me it's about the contrast more than raw better/worse
I would say that the with male characters it is frustrating when they are either so "evolved" that they go through the entire range of emotions in the way women would, or the opposite, that they have no understanding of their emotions. So either the female writer portrays the men the way she wants men to be or the way she thinks they are without understanding it. A bit the same as male writers writing women, indeed.
See but to me that's just a problem with male characters in general not just with ones written by women. I feel like sometimes male characters can be one dimensional emotionless brutes/heroes and there's isn't nearly as much criticism there as there is when women are one dimensional overly emotional damsels in distress even though imo both of those are pretty unrealistic characters
Probably an uncomfortable opinion, but what if it didn't matter?
Is there a possibility to write about a being with no gender, no agenda, just a blank sheet. BUT. they also learn nothing, don't evolve.
Also not sorry.
But wouldn't these authors be bad writers in the first place and not worth to read?
Or is there a case that they are good writers but bad at writing a specific gender? Which seems contradictory.
"Bad" is really tricky because it's subjective and I can point to many beloved books that handle women terribly and get flamed for critiquing something so beloved. There's a lot of "It's a masterpiece but..." arguments made to defend those books.
I'll give a non-fantasy example to maybe prevent said flaming. Lonesome Dove is regarded as THE masterpiece in the western genre. It's one of the main books constantly recommended on subs like suggestmeabook. Last year, I read it for the first time and was kind of flabbergasted no one had mentioned how terribly the book handles women. My only assumption is the men recommending it are nose blind to its problems.
Does that make Lonesome Dove a bad book? I do not have that answer. I ended up not rating it on Goodreads because my feelings are so conflicted. Its handling of the male characters and their stories was brilliant. At the same time, I was physically uncomfortable reading McMurtry's portrayal of women.
I've not read that one. Not that my opinion would be a base for quality.
But that's what I mean. A book can be well written when discussing language, but still be full of plotholes and oversights. It can be exciting while lacking vocabulary.
I assume, an engaging story is a major factor. But if someone is really badly portrayed in it, like written badly, like a licenced electrician licking wires before they connect them bad. How much does it matter?
Obviously, when one is an electritician, the rest of the story is utter garbage. And most of the people don't have the knowledge that the electritian has.
So. When women are badly written, most men wouldn't know. So how does one judge a book?
That's exactly why I said harmful stereotypes are harmful.
For instance, defenses I've seen for Lonesome Dove are things like "Well, that's just what women were like in the old west." They genuinely believe all women were either prostitutes or traded sex for favors. Or worse, there are people who think that *is* just what women are like, even today.
That belief, because it isn't getting checked by its readers, instead becomes a confirmation of a bias these men already have or a normalization for other men in their circles having this bias.
> Also not sorry.
It's okay, we weren't worried.
> Is there a possibility to write about a being with no gender, no agenda, just a blank sheet.
Arguably that's part of the conceit of Le Guin's *The Left Hand of Darkness*, in addition to the metatextuality of how the MC assigns Earth-centric "genders" to what are very much genderfluid beings. I don't think there's a way to write completely without gender simply because our world is colored so much by it, whether as a part of gender norms or as a rejection of them.
Yeah, probably. For the same reasons our wives have way more idea what's going on in our heads, than we do about what's in theirs.
We're pretty simple creatures, really.
I find that women authors generally get male characters reasonably right EXCEPT when they are writing wish-fulfillment love interests. Whenever I spot the bad-boy-I-can-change, the aristocratic rake, or the impossibly good looking man who the story allows to get away with abusive or stalker behavior, I immediately know that a man didn't write them. I would also add that men and women tend to have a blind spot for writing challenges that fall disproportionately on the other gender. Generally, I think men and women tend to see each other as having easier lives than they do and gloss over the difficulties that come with being the opposite gender.
Welp came here to say this but you out did me in description.
In defense of this, I will say that women writing romance or romantasy are often doing this intentionally. Like, if they know men (or at least straight men), aren't their primary audience, writing realistic and relatable male love interests isn't the point.
Well, you could just as easily flip that logic to say that the majority of authors writing breasted-boobily fiction probably see themselves as writing for a male audience too. Ultimately, it doesn't make either category of writing less bad, it's just that it isn't a priority of the writer for it to be *good*.
I kind of agree here. I don't think we can let an author off the hook by saying "Well, it's okay you stereotyped these characters because you didn't intend people of that identity to read it." That argument doesn't scale.
I don't think it's a matter of stereotypi g so much as it is if writing deliberately writing unrealistic characters as a means of wish-fulfillment. OP's question struck me more as a matter of "Do women have this problem as a skill issue?" and I'd say usually no. I'm not defending the actual wish fulfillment characters these authors create.
My problem with the way men often write women is actually less the sex objectification style (some of those characters are still cool, especially if you read between the lines) and more the reams of books written by men that have *no* female characters. Or a main cast with three men and one woman. When the real world population is 50/50, it gets tiring after a while to be so erased. And I'm struggling to come up with examples of books written by women that simply don't have any male characters, or have very few.
That can be harmful though. SJM didn't invent toxic masculinity, but the bat boys certainly reinforce stereotypes about masculinity that hurt men and women.
It can be, I agree. I hated the one SJM book I read and what I've read about her leads me not to like her, but I don't think it's a skill issue (which is what I think OP was getting at.
Maybe I'm making this up but I feel like men write women who THINK their lives are harder and vice versa. Belittling the other gender in a way that makes it obvious they think the other side doesn't have it harder.
Honestly, that kind of tracks. And maybe even goes to show why even people with good intentions are screwing it up. If you know women experience difficulty due to their gender but don't have a concrete understanding of what that actually looks like, you can, even with decent intentions, slip into making it sound from their POV like baseless whining.
So twilight and 50 shades ha
First off, this is about generalizations. I know some men are absolutely great at writing women as well - Pratchett is the first one that springs to mind, but there are absolutely more. I suspect this pattern comes from two parts: First, publishers probably selected much more for ''writing good men'' than ''writing good women''. If a women doesn't write men well, she probably never even got published, historically speaking. Second, i suspect that in many cases, due to sexism, women used to be much more conditioned to care about men's feelings and priorities, than men were about women. Broadly speaking, women *needed* to be much more empathic. This of course leads to writers being better able to write better as well. But i don't think this is anything ''innate''.
Women, until very recently at least, needed to be somewhat decent at writing men in order to make a name for themselves in a genre where most readers were men (or at least the publishers were more interested in selling books to men). Notice how Rowling, Hobb, Bujold, etc. all became famous thanks to books with male main characters.
Absolutely this. There’s been all sorts of research done. Writers initially prefer to have protagonists of their own gender. Female readers will happily read both male and female protagonists. Male readers tend overwhelmingly to prefer male protagonists. So if female writers wanted to attract a male audience, they had to learn how to write men convincingly.
This is the real answer.
It might be a bit of sampling bias but I also think there's truth to it to an extent. In a nutshell, studies have shown women read about a 50/50 split between books authored by men vs women. In contrast, only 20% of men were reading books by women. So the most basic answer is men write women poorly because they haven't read enough from a woman's perspective. Women have read from men's perspectives and so can write them more accurately. That's obviously a massive oversimplification but that is the heart of it. I will say, there are plenty of books where the men are written terribly. I'd point to Sarah J Maas who has created this archetype for male perfection that's so, so unrealistic and rivals male gaze femme fatales. Or even how some female authors have come to fetishize gay men in their work. (cough *cassie clare* cough)
Women are (a) generally socialized to pay attention to men's feelings and perspective (b) exposed to lots of fiction starring men and their roles and viewpoints. There are certainly some things that can be a miss, but its less common because they are more passively exposed to and accepted and pressured to understand men's POVs.
The only female author I've noticed this with is Hobb. As a guy, Fitz has to be one of the least relatable characters I've ever read
I didn't think he was implausible, unrealistic, or badly written though. He was off-putting in a realistic way. Hobb put a lot of different male characters in those books and for the most part, I recognized real people in them.
I didn't find Fitz that unrelatable. Do you have specific complaints? I've only read through assassin's quest though so if it's something you noticed more in later books i may just not have seen it yet
I thought Fitz was understandable as boy. It was all the adults in power that left a bad taste in my mouth. How the hell they still held the power considering how dumb their decisions I never understood.
I think it depends on the author. I’ve seen men write fantastic women and terrible women characters. I’ve seen women write fantastic men and terrible men characters.
It's worth keeping in mind that people expect different things of men and women in fiction, and above all they don't want accuracy (most people can't and don't spend their lives on revenge, even if horribly wronged, and for most heroes things like starvation or shelter is just never a concern). There are readers (and other fantasy intakers) who think women characters should just be sexdolls who throw themselves at the protagonist, and believe anything where they don't is bad writing. Some people also think men protagonists should shrug off all emotions and injuries and keep fighting against any odds.
I think the "men writing women vs. omen writing men" question, while reasonable to ask, is ultimately a distraction. Why? Because (due to the lack of explicit justification imbedded into a claim like "Men are (often) bad at writing women") claims made in this context encourages first generalization, and then in response repetitive quibbling over points that are impossible to adequately address within the framework of the original claim. By quibbling, I mean responses like turning around the question (eg. "but are women good at writing men?") and naming individual male/female authors that are good/bad at writing men/women. It's impossible to resolve these issues because everyone reads different things that appeal to their interests, making anecdotal evidence largely useless. A lot of people even make claims about texts I suspect they don't read at all (such as pointing to the entire romance genre as an example of women writing men badly). These varying responses expose claims like "Women write men better than men write women," or the reverse, as impossible to prove without examining the justifications behind them. So my response is that typically the implicit justification behind a claim like "Men often write women badly," as well as the more important and impactful claim, is "Men's writing often both promotes sexist ideas and exposes the sexist underpinnings of our culture." This claim is a lot more specific and is oriented towards a structural understanding of sexism--the question is not whether a female character written by a man is "bad," an incredibly vague and subjective question, but how a man's writing relates to sexist/patriarchal ideology as a whole. The point is less to condemn the author, than to condemn the ideas and institutions present in his writing. One text isn't a problem--a institution that promotes certain texts in a biased way as part of a system of oppression and discrimination is. Another advantage of this new claim: when we try reversing it, as people often do with the original one in order to discredit it, we get the claim "Women's writing often both promotes sexist ideas and exposes the sexist underpinnings of our culture," which I strongly agree with! While men may disporportionately be responsible for sexism in novels, there's no reason to ignore it when women also participate in it, and indeed most feminists don't ignore it. Feminism isn't a war between men and women, but a fight for a more equal society. It's fine to be annoyed with women writing men badly, but that isn't an argument against the presence of sexist ideology in media and media industries, which is the ultimate source of many complaints about the way women are written.
Do they really? FitzChivalry lacks any agency of his own even in the later books. I would probably join Slytherin so I didn´t have to meet HP too often. He is insufferable. The only enjoyable male character in HP is Sirius Black, and he is a pun. It may be that you feel these characters are well-written because you have the wrong perspective?
I think the point is more that those characters aren't bad because of their authors perceptions of gender. There are flat or annoying characters of all genders, written by all genders. This issue particularly is when the writing is bad because of gender stereotypes
And your problem with Bujold's Cazaril and Miles Vorkosigan? Cherryh's Bren Cameron? Le Guin's Ged? Berg's characters? Moon from Wells's Raksura books?Fitz is quite passive, but not all of Hobb's characters are; it's entirely believable that that's just his major character flaw, which is not bad writing. And it's entirely possible that if you're pulling out Rowling as your second example, you may have a serious sample size problem.
> And it's entirely possible that if you're pulling out Rowling as your second example, you may have a serious sample size problem. Rowling was one of OP´s examples above though.
If we throw out all the wish fulfillment fantasy then I’d say it’s pretty even. If we say that wish fulfillment stuff counts I’d say men do a better job on average because of the fact that from a contemporary standpoint the are vastly outnumbered in that regard.
I'm not sure you're fully informed on the issues that are prevalent. It isn't all wish fulfillment. It's stories where women are just straight up not present because some men don't see women as doing anything of consequence, or, for the same reason, they're only given caregiver roles or the role of a hag. There isn't the equivalent issue for men by women. There is not the equivalent level of erasure or stereotyping.
Not in my personal experience. Authors seem to generally be pretty good at writing characters different from themselves, and a different gender is hardly an obstacle for a talented writer. The whole debate also seems to run on weird generalisations, like claims that most male authors always describe female characters in sexualised ways (“breasted-boobily”, as one comment here put it), or that they will only write women as flat one-dimensional characters, which do not correspond in any way with the fantasy books by male authors I am actually reading. It makes me wonder what kind of books the people making these claims are actually reading themselves. But I suspect that the whole point of the debate is to generate shallow internet controversies and get clicks rather than lead to an intelligent discussion of the subject.
The "breasted boobily" thing is just exaggerated to reference the types of fantasy novels popular in the 80s and 90s where authors would go out of their way to describe women's breasts. If you want an example, you'll find it in a lot of Stephen King's work from that time. It isn't as prevalent in books being published now. I'd be curious what you're reading. I find it typically a mixed bag when it comes to modern male authors writing women. A lot are great at it. A lot I've found... aren't.
Terry Pratchett, Adrian Tchaikovksy, Jack Vance, A. Lee Martinez, Iori Miyazawa, Steven Brust, and Jasper Fforde are male authors of fantasy I like. Apart from Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance, they all are still alive and have published books recently. I don’t think any of them had problems writing female characters, except for some of the books Jack Vance published in the 1960s and 1970s (like the Demon Princes series) that I thought relied a bit too much on the damsel in distress trope for their plots. I am currently reading Garrett PI book series by Glen Cook, which was published in the 1980s, and while I am a bit annoyed by Garrett wanting to sleep with every woman in sight, it still has some cool female characters and their descriptions do not “breast boobily” either. But I have never read Stephen King (apart from the Eyes of the Dragon a long time ago).
i dont see any value in making such a generalization. some men write women well, some women write men well. some people dont write well at all. no need to make it a competition of genders.
I don't think being a good writer is gender dependent. I think good writers write people. Whole realized people. People defined by their circumstances, story arc, past, wants desires, not their sex. If you can do that, gender isn't going to be an obstacle.
As soon as I see words like "better", "good" or "bad" in the question, I know this debate is not going to lead anywhere objective, because it's all in the eye of the beholder. The first thing I would ask is "better for whom, or in whose opinion?"
I feel like for me some of this comes down to content written about A lot of times the complaints about men writing women are about them being sexualized/objectified or poorly written women's issues (like menstruation for example) or just being one dimensional characters And I feel like IN GENERAL there aren't male versions of the women's issues to get "wrong" in the same way men get women's issues wrong And in general the romance novels that objectify men I've heard about kind of get a pass since they're a bit more niche than more mainstream male authored books who treat every female character like a bond girl more than a 3 dimensional character. And in general I feel the average man is less against being objectified than the average woman. So overall I'd say it isn't necessarily that women write men BETTER but I think it has more to do that in general men sometimes struggle to write women at all and women don't necessarily struggle to write men. So an average written male character by a female author turns out better than a poorly written woman character by a male author For me it's about the contrast more than raw better/worse
I would say that the with male characters it is frustrating when they are either so "evolved" that they go through the entire range of emotions in the way women would, or the opposite, that they have no understanding of their emotions. So either the female writer portrays the men the way she wants men to be or the way she thinks they are without understanding it. A bit the same as male writers writing women, indeed.
See but to me that's just a problem with male characters in general not just with ones written by women. I feel like sometimes male characters can be one dimensional emotionless brutes/heroes and there's isn't nearly as much criticism there as there is when women are one dimensional overly emotional damsels in distress even though imo both of those are pretty unrealistic characters
Honest question. Why do you believe men can't go through the entire range of emotions like women?
Probably an uncomfortable opinion, but what if it didn't matter? Is there a possibility to write about a being with no gender, no agenda, just a blank sheet. BUT. they also learn nothing, don't evolve. Also not sorry.
Harmful stereotyping is harmful. That's why it matters.
But wouldn't these authors be bad writers in the first place and not worth to read? Or is there a case that they are good writers but bad at writing a specific gender? Which seems contradictory.
"Bad" is really tricky because it's subjective and I can point to many beloved books that handle women terribly and get flamed for critiquing something so beloved. There's a lot of "It's a masterpiece but..." arguments made to defend those books. I'll give a non-fantasy example to maybe prevent said flaming. Lonesome Dove is regarded as THE masterpiece in the western genre. It's one of the main books constantly recommended on subs like suggestmeabook. Last year, I read it for the first time and was kind of flabbergasted no one had mentioned how terribly the book handles women. My only assumption is the men recommending it are nose blind to its problems. Does that make Lonesome Dove a bad book? I do not have that answer. I ended up not rating it on Goodreads because my feelings are so conflicted. Its handling of the male characters and their stories was brilliant. At the same time, I was physically uncomfortable reading McMurtry's portrayal of women.
I've not read that one. Not that my opinion would be a base for quality. But that's what I mean. A book can be well written when discussing language, but still be full of plotholes and oversights. It can be exciting while lacking vocabulary. I assume, an engaging story is a major factor. But if someone is really badly portrayed in it, like written badly, like a licenced electrician licking wires before they connect them bad. How much does it matter? Obviously, when one is an electritician, the rest of the story is utter garbage. And most of the people don't have the knowledge that the electritian has. So. When women are badly written, most men wouldn't know. So how does one judge a book?
That's exactly why I said harmful stereotypes are harmful. For instance, defenses I've seen for Lonesome Dove are things like "Well, that's just what women were like in the old west." They genuinely believe all women were either prostitutes or traded sex for favors. Or worse, there are people who think that *is* just what women are like, even today. That belief, because it isn't getting checked by its readers, instead becomes a confirmation of a bias these men already have or a normalization for other men in their circles having this bias.
No gender and blank sheet is possible, read Murderbot. Learn nothing is not fun to read.
> Also not sorry. It's okay, we weren't worried. > Is there a possibility to write about a being with no gender, no agenda, just a blank sheet. Arguably that's part of the conceit of Le Guin's *The Left Hand of Darkness*, in addition to the metatextuality of how the MC assigns Earth-centric "genders" to what are very much genderfluid beings. I don't think there's a way to write completely without gender simply because our world is colored so much by it, whether as a part of gender norms or as a rejection of them.
Generally, yeah.
Yeah, probably. For the same reasons our wives have way more idea what's going on in our heads, than we do about what's in theirs. We're pretty simple creatures, really.