# Writing from the Female POV



## Centerfield97

I have found it difficult to write from the female POV thus far...is it all about just practice, and getting women to read and critique your work for accuracy?  Or are there some tricks to how you should approach the writing?  Writing from the opposite gender has always proved difficult for me.


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## Devor

Centerfield97 said:


> I have found it difficult to write from the female POV thus far...is it all about just practice, and getting women to read and critique your work for accuracy?  Or are there some tricks to how you should approach the writing?  Writing from the opposite gender has always proved difficult for me.



Loosely and very broadly speaking, women think more about people and less about abstract ideas than men do.  So far as "tricks" go, I think that's the best one.  _"Wait, why is my woman character talking about losing the war when fifty people were just killed?  Her first thought would be along the lines of the people affected by their loss, and questions like 'how many more'?"_  She can use those thoughts to come to same conclusions about what they should do, but her perspective would likely be more about the people directly while a man's would be more likely to think about the war broadly.

That distinction, as a trend, I understand to be generally accepted to be somewhat hardwired into the chemicals in the brain.  It would still only be a trend, there are no absolutes.


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## AFistfulofBalderdash

A lot of what Dev said, but my advice is that it seems you might be putting yourself in the pov instead of the character. Which is why it might seem awkward. Try fleshing the character out some, see how her personality is, feel for it like she's your best friend, then give it a shot by imagining what 'she' would say about things. 

A lot about pov is gained through practice and characterization helps a long way towards getting comfortable in that second skin, even if it isn't your gender. And gender does play a part but do remember that any personality can develop given the right circumstances, so don't feel limited. To me I treat this as being an actor, like how Heath Ledger became the Joker. You got to get into their flesh and see the world with their eyes.


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## ShortHair

Woman react emotionally, men logically. As noted above, it's a generalization, not universal truth.

I tend to write from a female POV because it's a good way to keep the feelings of your characters in focus. Women are better at reading emotion and will act to improve the mood of those around them. They talk more, which gives you more opportunity to show the processes going on inside them. Women tend to have more-complex mental states, so they make more-interesting characters.

The other reason is that I grew up around women, so I misunderstand them less than most males. At least I think so.


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## Devor

ShortHair said:


> Woman react emotionally, men logically.



I'm sorry, but I think that's a terrible "trick" for understanding the difference.  Anger is an emotion, and men certainly get angry.  And is there something somehow "illogical" about the way women think?  I know you may have meant something inoffensive - your following points suggest as much - but in terms of a guiding aphorism, that's just bad.


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## Amanita

Some views on women that are still around even among intelligent people in 21th century western countries really shock me still, I have to admit. This isn't directed at anyone of you, but through my studies of history I'm all too familiar with the idea of women=emotional and men=rational leading to ideas about only men being real humans and women something closer to animals because they aren't supposed to be capable of rational thought. These ideas have been around since the so-called enlightenment all through to the first half of the twentieth century. Maybe I'm some lowly being incapable of really thinking, and therefore this irrational allergy against such ideas, but I'm not really prepared to accept it. 

I have my doubts about those ideas about psychological things being solely determined by biology. And some of these ideas are creating all those annoying and useless female characters who care about nothing besides the question if their true love really loves them or not and all those other cliches around. 
There probably will be women in your family, among your friends and collegues, how do they react to certain events? Watching other people around you can prove very helpful for writing even though you shouldn't do it too obviously of course.  Other men will be very different from you as well. 
Besides that, I don't think you have to worry about this too much. If your character is one who ix more leaning towards "masculine" behaviour because the story demands its, there won't be many people who mind, I daresay.


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## Reaver

I don't think that writing from this POV is really that much different from writing a male POV.  As I've mentioned in other threads, my MC is a 19 year old woman named Imani who's very intelligent, quick-witted, strong-willed and an excellent fighter.
In my opinion, you've just gotta keep your MC honest. Their gender is superfluous.


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## Sheilawisz

I am really annoyed when they say that women are always emotional and men are rational!! Women can be emotionally cold while men can have deep emotions too, we are not all the same depending on gender =P


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## Reaver

Sheilawisz said:


> I am really annoyed when they say that women are always emotional and men are rational!! Women can be emotionally cold while men can have deep emotions too, we are not all the same depending on gender =P



Well put. I couldn't agree more!


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## Devor

To try and get back to the topic a little, here's a great scientific piece about the differences in brain activity between men and women.  There are some genuine differences between men and women which can make it challenging to write one gender or the other effectively, so I hope this article will help to address those differences without being bothered by bigotry or fears about being PC.

10 Big Differences Between Men’s and Women’s Brains | Masters of Healthcare


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## Sheilawisz

Interesting, Devor!! Anyway I do not have the writing problem described in this thread, because my characters are a different species that I know perfectly well- I do not have to worry about accurately describing the reactions and feelings of human characters, and I love that about my worlds =)


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## Legendary Sidekick

AFistfulofBalderdash said:


> A lot of what Dev said, but my advice is that it seems you might be putting yourself in the pov instead of the character. Which is why it might seem awkward. Try fleshing the character out some, see how her personality is, feel for it like she's your best friend, then give it a shot by imagining what 'she' would say about things.
> 
> A lot about pov is gained through practice and characterization helps a long way towards getting comfortable in that second skin, even if it isn't your gender. And gender does play a part but do remember that any personality can develop given the right circumstances, so don't feel limited. To me I treat this as being an actor, like how Heath Ledger became the Joker. You got to get into their flesh and see the world with their eyes.


I completely agree... and wonder if my post will be useless because maybe everything I want to say has already been stated here much more eloquently.

But when I saw the title of this thread, the first thing I thought of was my MC's love interest. She's based on my wife. I also have a male character who befriends my MC and dies. I wanted him to be likable in a way that would NOT seem like I'm setting up a tragic character, so I based his personality on that of a friend who's kind of a wise-ass.

In short, what I did to make a female character work is no different than what I did to make a male character work. I gave each a personality.

I actually do that with all of my characters, but these are the only two major characters whose personalities come from one real life person that isn't me.


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## Taytortots

I think there are a few differences, but not all that many. I used to believe that men and women thought so differently that i'd never be able to write in a male point of view. After reading through books by both men and women authors, and with men and women main characters, I found that they were incredibly similar, more so than I thought it would be. I think it's us, as authors, that try to over think it and make it into something that isn't.
On top of that, I'd like to say that as a women who is categorized as a tomboy, people don't always fall into the categories they are supposed to. There are women who are terribly emotional, and men who are very emotional. I can go on and on, but I wont. Just think of the character as a person going through the events, not a women.


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## ascanius

Sheilawisz said:


> I am really annoyed when they say that women are always emotional and men are rational!! Women can be emotionally cold while men can have deep emotions too, we are not all the same depending on gender =P



I have always found women to be irrational, I cannot seem to get my head around them whatsoever.  Sorry ladies, to me you are an enigma wrapped in an illusion but I like the difference it's enlightening to learn a different way of thinking.  Does that mean women are any less capable of logic than a man, no.  But from what I have observed women tend to include emotion in their logic.  The major thing though is that I have been told by man friends that they do not understand the logic of men.  I have to say that I do not see a problem with any of this, so what if we think about the same topic along different paths one is no less right than the other, just different.

As to how to write from the female POV I find that having a good understanding of the characters story and personality is what writes that characters POV.  Using a generic template for either sex is bad, not because of stereotyping and whatever but because you are writing about a single person.  This means you are showing how She solves problems she is confronted with and not how a population of women solves a problem.

However I do think some differences among the sexes need to addressed for instance women are physically weaker than a man.  Also women tend to empathize with those around them to a much greater degree than a male would.

Now to throw a wrench in the gears, though I don't know how well this works with women.  There is a difference in how children, boys and girls think and act.  For instance girls tend to ask for help more often then boys do.  Boys on the other hand don't ask for help often and are a lot more rambunctious than girls.  What about environmental influences?  The professor, a women, went on to say that her best friend was trying to raise her children in a gender neutral environment.  She told us that her daughter was the girly-est girl she had ever met.


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## Amanita

> The professor, a women, went on to say that her best friend was trying to raise her children in a gender neutral environment. She told us that her daughter was the girly-est girl she had ever met.


Well, the mother probably wasn't the only influence on the child. (Or at least I hope so.) 

I highly doubt the claim that men are always "rational" while women are not. Or why else do so many men in powerful position get themselves into trouble by having extra-marital affairs, visiting prostitutes and (allegedly) forcing women to have sex with them. Feelings seem to dominate male behaviour as well, even though they may not necessarily be empathy and compassion. 

In my opinion, the obvious (and un-disputed) biological differences between men and women should matter to a female character in some way. For a woman, spontanous sex can have lasting consequences even if both people involved are healthy.  Therefore it is plausible that some women will be less inclined to that kind of thing than men in a setting without effective birth control. Or she takes the risk and actually does get pregnant...
The menstrual cycle is also affecting women and might involve pain or discomfort on certain days of the month. How a female character is dealing with this isn't unimportant to her character either.
For some reason, this has been a subject laced with disgust and maybe fear by men and many women for centuries but that doesn't mean that it can't and shouldn't be adressed. 
(Male) writers who want to describe the differences between men and women but keep to the parts where they can feel comfortable in their supposed superiority aren't giving the biological aspects more respect than those who ignore other differences. 
No offense against the many male forum members here, this is a general thing. Many female fantasy characters are still lacking in substance and usually top the lists of "cliched characters" for a reason.


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## mythique890

> Many female fantasy characters are still lacking in substance and usually top the lists of "cliched characters" for a reason.



So true.  Unfortunately, a lot of those cliche female characters are written by women, especially in YA fantasy.  

I agree with the people who say "give them a personality."  The majority of my characters are at least loosely based on interesting people that I know, so I don't have to ask myself "How would a man react?" but "How would Will react?" (answer: not very visibly).  The handful of characters that spontaneously create themselves in my head have personalities so strong that gender stereotypes don't seem to matter much.  

I did notice that when I try to write typical highly masculine characters, I have to go back and take out about 50% of their dialogue in my second draft.  However, _if_ the masculine character is the POV character, I switch what I can to internal monologue.  It's my way of thinking (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong) that men typically _think_ as much as women, they just don't _say_ as much (though of course, some do... like my brother-in-law... he's a big talker).

Also, something I've noticed in myself that I think is fairly universal (though of course, not entirely, as I'm sure someone will point out) most women need the company of other adult women on a semi-regular basis.  If I can't hang out with my friends for long stretches of time I tend to get cranky.  And I think it's good to point out (like Devor's article did) that woman-woman friendships are different that man-man friendships, and both are different from man-woman friendships.  Personally I think the dynamics you find in those differences make for fun writing.


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## J. S. Elliot

If I can put my two cents' worth in, I'd like to know why men have such a difficult time writing female characters. From the perspective of a female, male characters aren't difficult at all. Could I ask for an example of what you [theoretical "you", not any one person - only if applicable] might struggle with, and why?


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## MasterfulMoose

I may be rehashing the whole "personality" thing again, but it really is important. When you create a character, you don't just give them a name and a gender and say "Okay, this person is a woman, and needs to act and talk like a woman," or say "He's the hero. He needs to manly and heroic." You need to dive into this character and make them someone memorable. Even if it's something as small as giving him a simple mentality and a certain way of saying certain words, it can take a minor little something and turn it into someone your readers will remember. Once you know kind of who your character is, regardless of the gender, it becomes easier to write for them. I switch back and forth between male and female characters all the time, and I don't seem to have any trouble, personally. 

You just need to make your characters feel a little more alive, and then the whole process becomes much easier.


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## Feo Takahari

SeleneHime said:


> If I can put my two cents' worth in, I'd like to know why men have such a difficult time writing female characters. From the perspective of a female, male characters aren't difficult at all. Could I ask for an example of what you [theoretical "you", not any one person - only if applicable] might struggle with, and why?



I think this is the natural consequence of how fiction typically treats being female as being different from the default. Men are written as people first, so writers who need a model for a male character can look back at all the male characters they've read about, and use them to write a person. Women are written as women first, so anyone who doesn't understand the model of "women" presented in traditional narratives, and who assumes that real women all fit that model of "women", won't be able to write a female character. (Incidentally, I believe that a woman who's written as a person first can be a model for a later male, and vice versa.)


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## Penpilot

Whether it's writing Male, Female, Caucasian, Chinese, Black, Purple, Red, etc... I don't think you should be thinking about writing a convincing/real one of those. IMHO, instead asking yourself if a female would react like X, I think asking would my character named Alice react like X?

Humans come in infinite variations so almost anything is fair game as long as it's written well. I mean sometimes you have women who wear the pants in a relationship and others not. Some of the women I know are just one of the guys -- and no, they're not gay -- and others I know are kind of girly-girls. There are gay men who are manly-men and gay men who are the stereotypical flamboyant. There are butch lesbians and girly lesbians. All this and all the points in between.

So to be thinking along the lines of just women and men is IMHO limiting yourself.


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## Weaver

SeleneHime said:


> If I can put my two cents' worth in, I'd like to know why men have such a difficult time writing female characters. From the perspective of a female, male characters aren't difficult at all. Could I ask for an example of what you [theoretical "you", not any one person - only if applicable] might struggle with, and why?



My own "problem" with writing female characters:

_I write them like people. _ (Notice that I do not say "like humans."  I write fantasy and sci-fi; not all of my viewpoint characters are the same species as my readers.)  I have been told over and over again that this is not an acceptable practice, that I must write female characters according to the "standard" view of how women act and think, as if all women acted and thought the same way.  Here is part of what one person on a peer-critique site said about one of my short stories:

"Just a note in regard to your note, I'm getting the impression the narrative is male.  I can't pinpoint exactly why though I think if you could make it more emotional (in the bedroom females are more emotionally lead, where is males are more physically turned on, maybe you can apply this kind of concept to some of the details you've given - for example 'Time to time, I even found people.'  How, emotionally, does this make the narrative feel?  Instead of 'I even' maybe 'I was pleased/excited/relieved'.  Maybe mention something about what it's like being female in the profession (which would work well if it is a predominantly male career), so you can nail any assumptions we may have.  If you introduce the fact that the narrative is female early on, we will build our image of the character up from this."

(If you want to read the entire critique - and my thoughts on the whole mess after the fact - here's the link to my bloggish tirade about it:  North of Andover: An old critique dissected (part 1) )

The assumption that a woman MUST be hyper-emotional offended me.  It still offends me.  So does the assumption that a man is always _less_ emotional.  Here am I, a grown man (and a straight one at that, in case someone claims that that matters), and I just admitted on another thread that I _cried_ the first time I read a particular scene in a novel I love.  Yes, men can have feelings.  Deal with it.  The POV character in my story is a private investigator (oversimplification, but close enough for current arguments), and she lives in a time and place where people don't _expect_ women to be passive and timid and non-confrontational compared to men.  People are people.

The thing is, someone else helped me out by rewriting that story a bit.  When I posted the new version, the same critiquers who told me how unrealistic and _wrong_ my female MC was before - after all, the hadn't expected me to be able to write a female character, what with me being male and all - they _loved_ the changes, wanted to know which of my female friends had helped me out... And I had to laugh.  The person who did the rewrites?  My twin brother.


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## Alex Beecroft

Weaver said:


> My own "problem" with writing female characters:
> 
> _I write them like people. _ .



I wish more people would do the same. I think that men and women are far more alike than they are different, and it comes from both of them being human. Yes, there are differences, but they are all differences that a writer can take into account, while remembering that women are no more homogenous than men are (or vice versa).

To answer a question further up the thread, it's easier for women to write male characters than it is for men to write female ones, because as part of a still largely patriarchal culture, and as a physically weaker person in an environment where 50% of the population is stronger than you, the ability to understand men is a necessity of survival for women. Plus, we're brought up in a culture which normalizes the way men (are supposed to) deal with things. We know the rules society sets out for both men and women, and we have been trained to observe and understand people in order to have some hope of influencing events. Men also have to understand men as a survival necessity but they don't need to understand women, so largely they don't bother trying - they just say "oh, women are irrational and mysterious," and leave it at that.

The cultural rules which shape the way women behave are largely invisible unless you go looking for them, but I would thoroughly advise reading some feminist blogs such as The Hathor Legacy or at the very least some female orientated SF/F blogs such as The Mary Sue. That helps you to see the contradictory pressures that women are under to conform to society in a way that (they hope) will keep them safe.

Of course, in other societies there may not be these embedded rules and double standards. In which case you're better off just writing all your people as people. If your society is based on magic and your women are generally stronger in magic than your men, then instead of being the weaker half of society who must worry about being physically and mentally safe all the time, your women will be part of the stronger half of society, and are likely to act more like men than your men.


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## glutton

ascanius said:


> However I do think some differences among the sexes need to addressed for instance women are physically weaker than a man.



Depends on the setting/character.


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## T.Allen.Smith

Alex Beecroft said:


> To answer a question further up the thread, it's easier for women to write male characters than it is for men to write female ones, because as part of a still largely patriarchal culture, and as a physically weaker person in an environment where 50% of the population is stronger than you, the ability to understand men is a necessity of survival for women. Plus, we're brought up in a culture which normalizes the way men (are supposed to) deal with things. We know the rules society sets out for both men and women, and we have been trained to observe and understand people in order to have some hope of influencing events. Men also have to understand men as a survival necessity but they don't need to understand women, so largely they don't bother trying - they just say "oh, women are irrational and mysterious," and leave it at that.


Although I understand the sentiment used in this determination, the logic is somewhat flawed.  I don't believe this type of thinking applies to writers in the same way it may apply to the broad population.

Writers, good ones at least, tend to be very observant people. Regardless of sex, writers as a group, would be far more observant than others that would not train themselves on creating well fleshed out and realistic characters.


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## Ophiucha

The difference between men and women is whatever your society dictates is the difference between men and women. Our society considers emotional expression to be a feminine trait - for better or for worse - which is why women, by and large, are more expressive about their emotions. Not every culture in the world and in history has considered that to be a feminine trait; if your culture considered it masculine, then _spoiler alert!_, your men would be more prone to emotional expression than women. Consider the gender roles in your society to consider how your female character may act versus how they think and consider the subconscious impact of gender roles on your character growing up. Even ~strong independent women~ will still have grown up seeing women whose only job was mother and housekeeper, who are objectified, and who are not allowed to fight. Even if she picks up the sword, these stereotypes will have a strong influence on her because they are - almost moreso than the technical bits - part of what _defines_ a woman in her culture.

In terms of how you should write them, you should write women and men as people, who can experience the same emotions, who can have the same personalities and aspirations, and who are functionally the same... but who were raised with different expectations. Some people don't conform or live up to those expectations, but they are there. The only thing that should really hold you back from writing a female character is a lack of sufficient worldbuilding in the department of gender roles.


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## Jamber

ShortHair said:


> Woman react emotionally, men logically. As noted above, it's a generalization, not universal truth.



I'll struggle to handle this logically rather than emotionally, of course, but here goes.

Logic would point out that a life of crime is likely to lead to long periods in prison, yet many more men than women wind up spending their lives behind bars.
Logic would say if you do a risky thing you might get hurt... Yet more men than women wind up in casualty wards for something predictable like speeding in a car, climbing something high, picking a fight outside a pub, etc.

The above statement is a belief, not a truth, and I'd argue there's a lot of real-world material to contradict it.

Arguments aside, I think it's very hard to find a comprehensive 'fact' about genders, and perhaps much more valuable to a writer to start with asking yourself what you want a character in that position in the story to feel, think and do? What are the ideas you want that character to deal with or represent? Yes, you can write gender as an add-on. Later you can always run a test of the characterisation on different readers to see if it rings at all true. I guarantee this will get you more interesting characters than if you use the logic/emotion divide as a starting point.

Then again, I'm all tied up with feelings, so don't expect my thoughts to sound logical. (Only joking, ShortHair. )

Jennie


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## Devor

Just in case people missed it, this thread was necromanced from over a year ago.


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## Anders Ã„mting

Hm. Even though I mostly use female main characters, this isn't something I usually think about.

I guess I just kinda go by the girls I've actually known over the years.


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## skip.knox

Centerfield97 said:


> I have found it difficult to write from the female POV thus far...is it all about just practice, and getting women to read and critique your work for accuracy?  Or are there some tricks to how you should approach the writing?  Writing from the opposite gender has always proved difficult for me.



What about it have you found to be difficult?

The best advice I've read says: just write a character and have them do what needs to be done. 

Why is your character female in the first place? "I dunno, it just felt right" is a legitimate answer. I've got a female important character like that. For some reason I picked "female" out of thin air and it felt right and I've left her that way and it still feels right. I don't take exceptional steps to emphasize female-ness except in romantic scenes. Those are all told from a male's POV; not sure if that's me being cowardly or realistic!  But it's also just sort of how the narrative worked out.


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## Jamber

Devor said:


> Just in case people missed it, this thread was necromanced from over a year ago.



Oops! It seems to be a current topic generally, so I didn't notice the date.


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## saellys

I agree with everyone who has already said that it's harder to write female characters if you consider them females first and characters second. Don't try to squeeze them into a psychological mold to conform to how people expect men and women to react in situations. Ask not what a woman would do, think, or say, but what _your character_ would do, think, or say. 



Feo Takahari said:


> I think this is the natural consequence of how fiction typically treats being female as being different from the default. Men are written as people first, so writers who need a model for a male character can look back at all the male characters they've read about, and use them to write a person. Women are written as women first, so anyone who doesn't understand the model of "women" presented in traditional narratives, and who assumes that real women all fit that model of "women", won't be able to write a female character. (Incidentally, I believe that a woman who's written as a person first can be a model for a later male, and vice versa.)



We've had a lot of writers here on the forum in similar threads say that they naturally write an equal mix of male and female (or any shade between) characters, which is awesome. The sad fact is that most writers don't. I can read a given novel and imagine the author's thought process during character creation: "Okay, my party needs a proud half-elf mage, a strong barbarian who's actually really civilized and polite, an honorable thief, and an experienced ranger." Bam--they're all men by default. The justification for this, if any is offered, is often that this fantasy society the author created is a mirror of the real world's patriarchal history. Why? Uh... because.



Alex Beecroft said:


> To answer a question further up the thread, it's easier for women to write male characters than it is for men to write female ones, because as part of a still largely patriarchal culture, and as a physically weaker person in an environment where 50% of the population is stronger than you, the ability to understand men is a necessity of survival for women. Plus, we're brought up in a culture which normalizes the way men (are supposed to) deal with things. We know the rules society sets out for both men and women, and we have been trained to observe and understand people in order to have some hope of influencing events. Men also have to understand men as a survival necessity but they don't need to understand women, so largely they don't bother trying - they just say "oh, women are irrational and mysterious," and leave it at that.
> 
> The cultural rules which shape the way women behave are largely invisible unless you go looking for them, but I would thoroughly advise reading some feminist blogs such as The Hathor Legacy or at the very least some female orientated SF/F blogs such as The Mary Sue. That helps you to see the contradictory pressures that women are under to conform to society in a way that (they hope) will keep them safe.
> 
> Of course, in other societies there may not be these embedded rules and double standards. In which case you're better off just writing all your people as people. If your society is based on magic and your women are generally stronger in magic than your men, then instead of being the weaker half of society who must worry about being physically and mentally safe all the time, your women will be part of the stronger half of society, and are likely to act more like men than your men.



Well put. I've never really seen that first paragraph put into words before, but you expressed a lot of stuff I've been feeling for a while now.


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## Mindfire

I would argue that most humans are primarily emotion-driven. Onle those with great discipline can truly subjugate emotion to reasoning and even then there are slip-ups. Instead I would say the gender divide is in what kind of emotions men and women prioritize. Higher testosterone drives most men to operate on more... primitive emotions (resulting in the incarceration figures mentioned earlier). By contrast, emotion-driven women tend to be romantics. Not Valentine's day type romantics (though this is not uncommon), but romantics in the other sense. These are oversimplifications obviously, but I think they're truer oversimplifications than the old logic/emotion chestnut.


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## geekgrrllurking

A part of me seriously can't believe we are having this conversation in the 21st century. Write either gender as a three dimensional person, with thoughts and feelings, someone who is interesting and unique and I think the rest will fall in naturally. 

Your job as a writer is to use your imagination and put the reader into your character's world. If you are worried about the gender, heaven help you if you end up writing from an elf point of view. Think outside the cliches and outside of the box and you may be surprised at how better your story will be.


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## Devor

Mindfire said:


> I would argue that most humans are primarily emotion-driven. Onle those with great discipline can truly subjugate emotion to reasoning and even then there are slip-ups.



I don't think emotions and reasoning are at odds.  I think most of the time we get angry or sad or happy for pretty good reasons, and I think we just as readily do pretty stupid stuff out of poor reasoning.




> Higher testosterone drives most men to operate on more... primitive emotions (resulting in the incarceration figures mentioned earlier). By contrast, emotion-driven women tend to be romantics. Not Valentine's day type romantics (though this is not uncommon), but romantics in the other sense.



Very loosely, I think men compartmentalize their emotions a little more, while women more readily feel multiple things at once.  I think that's probably the biggest reason many men have trouble understanding many women, but also, again, why men are more prone to dangerously impulsive behavior.  Many men tend to want to be angry, and let that anger out, and then move on, while many women are prone to feel a little angry (and a little of everything else) wherever they go.

Following the example of anger, there's a big difference between when I yell at the kids and when my wife does.  She has to be extremely angry to get the point where she's yelling, and you can feel the tension that stays with her pretty much the rest of the night afterwards.  But I can yell, often, and two minutes later be done and things will be happy again.  My anger will come and then be gone, while hers will linger.




			
				Alex Beecroft said:
			
		

> Men also have to understand men as a survival necessity but they don't need to understand women, so largely they don't bother trying - they just say "oh, women are irrational and mysterious," and leave it at that.



So you're saying we understand people most through the workplace, where we don't like anybody and bottle up our emotions and try to precisely control everything we think, say or do?  I would say the people we understand most are our loved ones - family and friends we've grown up with, the people we marry and share our lives with, the children we raise.  It's pretty hard to talk about a gender gap within the typical modern family or in a coed school system, and certainly within the typical household.

My wife and I have been watching Dick Van Dike on Netflix, and so many episodes are about the misunderstandings between men and women.  I think the show highlights many of them - it's not always a simple failure on the parts of men to try.




			
				saellys said:
			
		

> I agree with everyone who has already said that it's harder to write female characters if you consider them females first and characters second. Don't try to squeeze them into a psychological mold to conform to how people expect men and women to react in situations. Ask not what a woman would do, think, or say, but what your character would do, think, or say.



I think it's a mistake to assume that everyone writes best by approaching their characters the same way.  But there's a big danger to ignoring the real differences between men and women, both in writing and in the world.  By ignoring the differences, you fail to recognize when the environment has been adapted for one way of thinking over the other, and how you can reshape that environment to suit another thought process.

For instance, most businesses are highly compartmentalized, appealing not only to the male brain, but to the extreme male brain.  Most women who rise to the level of CEO struggle with the position - unless they do two things.

 - Stop approaching the business the way men tell them to approach it and develop a strategy for leading that's appropriate to the way they think as women.

 - Generate buy in from relevant parties for the new approach.

Women who are able to do that often excel as CEOs.  But if we can't stop and say, "Wait, what are these differences?  How can we adapt to them?  How do I develop strategies which work for someone who thinks differently than I do...?" - if we can't isolate the differences and discuss them, then we're holding women back.  That's what we've seen, for instance, in the literature on women leaders.  And that's what's happening here to hold back the development of female characters by male authors.

If the differences are real - and they are, you can take brain scans of infants to see that men and women have slightly different areas of prominence in the brain - then ignoring them only hurts the people who have the greatest need to adapt to the way those differences play out in society.


----------



## Mindfire

saellys said:


> The sad fact is that most writers don't. I can read a given novel and imagine the author's thought process during character creation:


Hmm...



saellys said:


> "Okay, my party needs a proud half-elf mage,


This kinda matches my main character, Reuben. I don't have elves in my world, but he is bi-racial, proud, and a mage.



saellys said:


> a strong barbarian who's actually really civilized and polite,


This is a tough one. My party doesn't rally have any "barbarians". But I do have two characters who loosely fit into the "fighter" role. There's Leith (male), a former high-ranking soldier and the group's first "badass normal"... until he gets ice powers. Then there's Devra (female), inventor, strategist, and budding ruler of Mavaria. She's the group's second "badass normal" fighter/gadgeteer.



saellys said:


> an honorable thief,


Shan-Ri is more of a ninja (with lightning powers!) than a thief, but close enough. Female.



saellys said:


> and an experienced ranger."


Oh that's definitely Meeka. Skilled hunter-tracker, nature expert, master archer- and also female.

And then there's Kianna, who doesn't really fit any of those four descriptions. She's the group's prophetess/seer, but she's also a powerful mage with some ranger training.


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## Steerpike

There's a difference between identifying societal structures that have developed along male dominated lines, and developing a character herself differently because the character is female. I think that's a mistake and just ends up leading to flat, stereotypical female characters. The best approach to characters of either sex is to simply treat them as people, and assign characteristics in accordance with your view of what the character is like. Once that is done, your character will be put into situations that might be biased against her and she'll react in accordance with what her personality dictates, not with some uniform conception of what a 'woman would do' in that situation.


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## Devor

Steerpike said:


> There's a difference between identifying societal structures that have developed along male dominated lines, and developing a character herself differently because the character is female. I think that's a mistake and just ends up leading to flat, stereotypical female characters. The best approach to characters of either sex is to simply treat them as people, and assign characteristics in accordance with your view of what the character is like. Once that is done, your character will be put into situations that might be biased against her and she'll react in accordance with what her personality dictates, not with some uniform conception of what a 'woman would do' in that situation.



I don't understand your point, Steerpike.  If I'm going to develop a character, I'm still going to think:

This character grew up a farmer, she's spent all her life toiling the farms, so she's going to think . . . .
This character has two brothers, maybe they treat her poorly, so she'll have to . . . .
Now this character is the chosen lady of destiny, so she'll need to . . . .

What you're saying is that I can't add "woman" to that list?  Does being a woman mean so little to the character?


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## Nihal

And I don't understand why being a "woman" is relevant. The fact people think that women "think/act differently" _just_ because they're women puzzles me. They might think differently when being a woman in first place put them in different situations, but read something that sounds like "Oh, I'm in the exactly same situation but going to chose this option because I'm a *woman*!" is, _at least_, artificial.

Seriously? Read that a female character will focus on, let's say, the losses of war _because she's a woman_ instead of winning the said war offends me. She might do this because she's emotional, not because she is a woman.


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## Steerpike

Devor said:


> What you're saying is that I can't add "woman" to that list?  Does being a woman mean so little to the character?



Sure, you can add it. But what characteristics are you going to add because of it? If you add some solely because you have some idea that it is an immutable characteristic of 'women,' then I think you're making a mistake. People are individuals, not statistics. Individual women run the full gamut of human characteristics. What characteristics are you going to assign the characters that you otherwise would not solely because the character is female?


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## Steerpike

Nihal said:


> Seriously? Read that a female character will focus on, let's say, the losses of war _because she's a woman_ instead of winning the said war offends me. She might do this because she's emotional, not because she is a woman.



That's my view. Some women are emotional. So are some men. In fact, there's no characteristic of personality you can find that is exclusive to one sex or the other, so if you're assigning personality traits based on sex instead of on the character as a person, I think it's a mistake. There's nothing to be gained from it, and the potential to lose yourself in some stereotype.


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## Feo Takahari

Devor said:


> I don't understand your point, Steerpike.  If I'm going to develop a character, I'm still going to think:
> 
> This character grew up a farmer, she's spent all her life toiling the farms, so she's going to think . . . .
> This character has two brothers, maybe they treat her poorly, so she'll have to . . . .
> Now this character is the chosen lady of destiny, so she'll need to . . . .
> 
> What you're saying is that I can't add "woman" to that list?  Does being a woman mean so little to the character?



This character is a farmer. She's spent her life toiling on the farm. She hates it and wants to escape.

This character is a farmer. She's spent her life toiling on the farm. She's proud to be one of the people whose labor keeps society going.

This character has two brothers. She gets along well with them. She's picked up some of their hobbies and attitudes.

This character has two brothers. She gets along poorly with them. She places less value on family bonds.

At some point, you need to develop your characters past their descriptions.


----------



## Devor

Nihal said:


> Seriously? Read that a female character will focus on, let's say, the losses of war _because she's a woman_ instead of winning the said war offends me. She might do this because she's emotional, not because she is a woman.



I'm not going to be around for a couple of weeks.  Before I head offline, I just want to be clear that the only differences I've really meant to talk about are fundamental and rooted in the brain science which I posted about, and which I understand to be pretty well accepted in the psychological community.  The male brain tends to be more specialized, needing to shift gears from one region to another, while for most women, most parts of the brain are always active.  Men also tend to think more abstractly, while women tend to empathize more and think about people more directly.

I've said repeatedly that it happens on a continuum with tremendous overlap.  So I can understand being offended if you took the war example as an absolute - it was just an example of how those differences might play out, and there's a reason I used the same example more than a year apart, so that I wouldn't over-state them - but I don't understand trying to ignore something that's rooted in the biology of who we are.

And, y'know, I haven't in any way characterized those differences as a bad thing - I think those kinds of differences are something to proud of.


----------



## Feo Takahari

Edit: Completely removed my original post.

I guess it's a matter of nature versus . . . Actually, I don't know what it's nature versus. I believe that even if you can easily pick out trends, applying several of these trends to any individual person will almost certainly yield at least one inaccuracy. I also believe that the most interesting characters to write about are the ones who're different from what's expected (not necessarily different from what's average, but different from what society allows them to be.)

(As for being proud of difference, I'd actually consider it a character flaw to look at a war in terms of win and loss rather than in terms of suffering.)

Edit 2: Looked back at that article you linked back on the first page. I can't believe I let that slide. To give just one example, the size of a part of a brain has nothing to do with the efficiency of that part of the brain (and I'm amazed someone's still making that argument after racists used it to argue that blacks had inferior brains to whites.)

Edit 3: I'm sorry if I get a little worked up about this. I admit a lot of it's personal (since I feel like people like me are excluded by mainstream fiction.) I'll try to calm down.


----------



## Alex Beecroft

Devor said:


> I'm not going to be around for a couple of weeks.  Before I head offline, I just want to be clear that the only differences I've really meant to talk about are fundamental and rooted in the brain science which I posted about, and which I understand to be pretty well accepted in the psychological community.  The male brain tends to be more specialized, needing to shift gears from one region to another, while for most women, most parts of the brain are always active.  Men also tend to think more abstractly, while women tend to empathize more and think about people more directly.
> 
> I've said repeatedly that it happens on a continuum with tremendous overlap.  So I can understand being offended if you took the war example as an absolute - it was just an example of how those differences might play out, and there's a reason I used the same example more than a year apart, so that I wouldn't over-state them - but I don't understand trying to ignore something that's rooted in the biology of who we are.
> 
> And, y'know, I haven't in any way characterized those differences as a bad thing - I think those kinds of differences are something to proud of.



And then there are all the people like me who have male brains in female bodies, (or vice versa) with varying degrees of gender dysphoria as a result. If I have a male brain and a female body, what am I by your categories? The body determines the way other people treat me, what they see, how they react, the assumptions they make, the way I need to behave in order to be treated as acceptable. I don't stop being what society thinks of as a woman because I happen to have a male brain - most people don't see that part.

What I'm saying is that yes, perhaps there are broad differences between the minds of cis-gender men and women which are physically determined. But then there's all the other people who find themselves not being one or the other, or being one but looking like the other. And it's not great to make us invisible just because we're not a majority.

Even if gender essentialism is a real thing, that just means that instead of having to deal with all humans as people, you suddenly have to bear in mind that not all humans are either male or female. Some of us are both.


----------



## Nihal

Nah, what offends me is seeing a character, who happens to be a female, being reduced almost to a piece of cardboard due her gender. She would be a richer character—rich as we are in real life—before having her personality "trimmed" to fit abstract conclusions draw from these studies (I couldn't find any reliable source for the conclusions in this blog post). While some of these differences really exist, _who_ can dictate they affect behaviour so radically as this post wants us to believe?

There is a reason it can be accepted by some people in the psychological community but it's not the norm: Two Myths and Three Facts About the Differences in Men and Women's Brains

I call these conclusions abstract, yes, since many of these facts are assumptions rooted in popular beliefs. I could go pastafarian and argue how the decrease in the number of pirates is causing the global warming. If I linked both of them in a graph would it become true?


----------



## Steerpike

Devor said:


> I've said repeatedly that it happens on a continuum with tremendous overlap.  So I can understand being offended if you took the war example as an absolute - it was just an example of how those differences might play out, and there's a reason I used the same example more than a year apart, so that I wouldn't over-state them - but I don't understand trying to ignore something that's rooted in the biology of who we are.



Yes, it is a continuum with overlap. So it doesn't make any sense to adopt the approach of "what would a woman do here" because not all women are the same. Even if there is a statistical distribution along the continuum, it doesn't make sense to write an individual character as though she has to be in line with the greatest statistical distribution. That's not how statistical distributions work. They talk about groups, but they break down on the individual level. They're not meant to be some kind of oracular science that predicts the characteristics of one person.

Your character is an individual, not a statistically likely distribution of traits. Approaching it as though she's the latter is a huge mistake, in my view, just like writing a black character based on some idea of how most blacks feel about something (whether borne out by studies or not) would be a huge mistake.

You're dealing with an individual. She has the character traits you assign, which can be literally anywhere on the continuum for any given trait, including on the male side of the continuum (like males can be on the female side). Again, statistics won't help you here. If I give you a population and a set of statistics that distribute that population along some set of data, and then I present you with an individual from that population and ask you, based on nothing other than the fact that the individual belongs to the population, to locate that individual along the distribution, you can't do it. All you can do is deal with a likelihood.

In writing, however, you have complete control over the character's traits. So pretending she has to be at point X along the distribution instead of point Y, just because she's female, doesn't make any sense. She falls along the distribution at whatever point is determined by the characteristics you gave her, and it could literally be anywhere and still be reflective of reality. So her sex becomes meaningless when you're trying to decide where her reactions fall in relation to the reactions of others. The only thing that matters are her individual traits. 

And then you're back to just saying "what would this person do" and forgetting about trying to say "oh, but she's a woman, so she'd do X."


----------



## saellys

Alex Beecroft said:


> And then there are all the people like me who have male brains in female bodies, (or vice versa) with varying degrees of gender dysphoria as a result. If I have a male brain and a female body, what am I by your categories? The body determines the way other people treat me, what they see, how they react, the assumptions they make, the way I need to behave in order to be treated as acceptable. I don't stop being what society thinks of as a woman because I happen to have a male brain - most people don't see that part.
> 
> What I'm saying is that yes, perhaps there are broad differences between the minds of cis-gender men and women which are physically determined. But then there's all the other people who find themselves not being one or the other, or being one but looking like the other. And it's not great to make us invisible just because we're not a majority.
> 
> Even if gender essentialism is a real thing, that just means that instead of having to deal with all humans as people, you suddenly have to bear in mind that not all humans are either male or female. Some of us are both.



Excellent points here. On a given day I tend to not feel particularly male or female despite my physical sex. I find biological determinism (particularly when based on questionable research conclusions) incredibly silly even when it is applied exclusively to people who are cis and fall into oversimplified gender categories and even stereotypes. It's even sillier in fiction, where characters are most interesting when they do things the reader doesn't expect. 



Nihal said:


> Nah, what offends me is seeing a character, who happens to be a female, being reduced almost to a piece of cardboard due her gender. She would be a richer character—rich as we are in real life—before having her personality "trimmed" to fit abstract conclusions draw from these studies (I couldn't find any reliable source for the conclusions in this blog post). While some of these differences really exist, _who_ can dictate they affect behaviour so radically as this post wants us to believe?



Devor brought up the example of the female character's attitude toward casualties in the war vs. winning or losing in another thread:



Devor said:


> So if I catch myself writing a woman who's upset about losing the war (an abstraction), I go back and change it to being upset over how many people are dying.



I can't get behind that as a reader. Even if the generalization is as accurate as a generalization can be, the conscious decision to conform to it "just because" is at best suspect, and at worst lazy and could potentially interfere with the development of a character.


----------



## Mindfire

I think what Devor is trying to say is that the difference between man and woman adds a certain _je ne sais quoi_ to a character that, while difficult to define or describe, is one of those intangibles that are part of what it means to be human, and that such things shouldn't be callously ignored. 

I agree with that sentiment and I incorporate it into my characters, but it's instinctive rather than statistical. I want my male characters to "feel" male and my female characters to "feel" female, regardless of what their role is. What that precisely means I can't say, but I know it when I see it.


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## Steerpike

Mindfire said:


> I think what Devor is trying to say is that the difference between man and woman adds a certain _je ne sais quoi_ to a character that, while difficult to define or describe, is one of those intangibles that are part of what it means to be human, and that such things shouldn't be callously ignored.
> 
> I agree with that sentiment and I incorporate it into my characters, but it's instinctive rather than statistical. I want my male characters to "feel" male and my female characters to "feel" female, regardless of what their role is. What that precisely means I can't say, but I know it when I see it.



Again this is a mistake, because women and men aren't monolithic groups where all members 'feel' a certain way.


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## Steerpike

You can see how silly this all is by simply applying it to another group. Polling data from the last Presidential election showed that 58% of black males oppose gay marriage. So if I have a black male character who supports gay marriage, am I supposed to change it?

Also, what percentage of the population is gay? 10%? So if I have a male or female character who is gay, should I change the character to be straight to be in line with the majority distribution of the population? Obviously not.

In both situations, my character is defined by his own traits, not by a statistical distribution of what the population as a whole does.

Similarly, a female character is defined by her own traits, not by a statistical distribution of what females are supposed to be. 

It's lazy writing in some instances, and in others just a serious misunderstanding of how statistics work in relation to individuals in the sample.


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## saellys

Mindfire said:


> I think what Devor is trying to say is that the difference between man and woman adds a certain _je ne sais quoi_ to a character that, while difficult to define or describe, is one of those intangibles that are part of what it means to be human, and that such things shouldn't be callously ignored.
> 
> I agree with that sentiment and I incorporate it into my characters, but it's instinctive rather than statistical. I want my male characters to "feel" male and my female characters to "feel" female, regardless of what their role is. What that precisely means I can't say, but I know it when I see it.



You say "I know it when I see it"; I say "It varies from character to character". Either way, it's not a template that can be applied across the board. All your female characters don't react the same way to a given situation, I'm sure, but they all "feel" feminine to different degrees, in different ways.


----------



## Mindfire

saellys said:


> You say "I know it when I see it"; I say "It varies from character to character". Either way, it's not a template that can be applied across the board. All your female characters don't react the same way to a given situation, I'm sure, but they all "feel" feminine to different degrees, in different ways.



That's what I said. I don't know what Steerpike is crucifying me for but I assure you I haven't done it. To clarify, I agree with Devor that there is a difference between men and women and that the difference is important. I don't agree however that it's something that can be accurately represented through statistics or by assigning certain traits male or female values. In my view its something you sense intuitively, not a hard line you color inside. It is, as I said, an "intangible". Such intangibles may not be important to you, but they are to me.


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## Steerpike

Mindfire said:


> That's what I said. I don't know what Steerpike is crucifying me for but I assure you I haven't done it. To clarify, I agree with Devor that there is a difference between men and women and that the difference is important. I don't agree however that it's something that can be accurately represented through statistics or by assigning certain traits male or female values. In my view its something you sense intuitively, not a hard line you color inside. It is, as I said, an "intangible". Such intangibles may not be important to you, but they are to me.



Again, this treats all women as the same. If you change something that your character would otherwise do because she's female, you've got a problem in your characterization.


----------



## saellys

Mindfire said:


> That's what I said. I don't know what Steerpike is crucifying me for but I assure you I haven't done it. To clarify, I agree with Devor that there is a difference between men and women and that the difference is important. I don't agree however that it's something that can be accurately represented through statistics or by assigning certain traits male or female values. In my view its something you sense intuitively, not a hard line you color inside. It is, as I said, an "intangible". Such intangibles may not be important to you, but they are to me.



Nope, I totally agree. My problem with Devor's statements (and I feel bad about hammering them over and over when he's not here to defend them) is that he's trying to turn a nebulous intangible that can be completely different from character to character into a very tangible difference based on outdated research and fallacious conclusions.


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## Steerpike

saellys said:


> Nope, I totally agree. My problem with Devor's statements (and I feel bad about hammering them over and over when he's not here to defend them) is that he's trying to turn a nebulous intangible that can be completely different from character to character into a very tangible difference based on outdated research and fallacious conclusions.



So, this gets us back to just treating the women as a person, and asking what that person would do in situation X. If, as a person, she is more prone to behave in a stereotypical way, then that's what she does. If, as a person, she's apt to do something completely different, then she does that. If you have to change what the character would do as a person, because you want her to behave in line with some stereotypical assumption of what the average woman would do, then you've got a problem


----------



## saellys

Steerpike said:


> So, this gets us back to just treating the women as a person, and asking what that person would do in situation X. If, as a person, she is more prone to behave in a stereotypical way, then that's what she does. If, as a person, she's apt to do something completely different, then she does that. If you have to change what the character would do as a person, because you want her to behave in line with some stereotypical assumption of what the average woman would do, then you've got a problem



I think it's important to note that Situation X can be a variable based on the gender of the character, depending on what the writer has established in the worldbuilding process. Situation X could be "You can't join the army because you're a girl." Character X could say "Screw these guys--I'm going to cross-dress and join anyway," while Character Y could say "Meh, maybe the army isn't for me and I'll go find a sympathetic knight who will take me as a squire," and Character Z could say "Why are you telling me this? I'm busy with my needlework and courtship," and Characters A through W could respond in any number of other ways. I think making outside influences contingent on a character's sex or gender is perfectly legitimate, but basing the character's _reactions_ solely on their gender is not.


----------



## Steerpike

saellys said:


> I think it's important to note that Situation X can be a variable based on the gender of the character, depending on what the writer has established in the worldbuilding process. Situation X could be "You can't join the army because you're a girl." Character X could say "Screw these guys--I'm going to cross-dress and join anyway," while Character Y could say "Meh, maybe the army isn't for me and I'll go find a sympathetic knight who will take me as a squire," and Character Z could say "Why are you telling me this? I'm busy with my needlework and courtship," and Characters A through W could respond in any number of other ways. I think making outside influences contingent on a character's sex or gender is perfectly legitimate, but basing the character's _reactions_ solely on their gender is not.



Yes, I think that is exactly right. And as you said, how a woman might react to external forces is highly variable depending on the character's individual personality traits.


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## Mindfire

Steerpike said:


> Again, this treats all women as the same. If you change something that your character would otherwise do because she's female, you've got a problem in your characterization.



None of that follows from what I said. You seem to be viewing gender as external to the character and therefore irrelevant to characterization. I view it as something internal, one element of many that comprise the essential mixture that makes that character who they are. A character's actions are not dictated by any singular trait, but by the whole mixture. Isolating that singular trait from the others is a mistake, but that does not make that trait irrelevant.


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## Steerpike

Mindfire said:


> None of that follows from what I said. You seem to be viewing gender as external to the character and therefore irrelevant to characterization. I view it as something internal, one element of many that comprise the essential mixture that makes that character who they are. A character's actions are not dictated by any singular trait, but by the whole mixture. Isolating that singular trait from the others is a mistake, but that does not make that trait irrelevant.



I don't think you've been reading my posts. Nothing I've said indicates it is external. Just think about it a minute. If a person can fall anywhere along the spectrum, then the only way to approach it, unless you just want stereotypes, is to treat the character as an individual and not a slave to some likelihood imposed by gender.


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## FatCat

It seems to me that all societies differentiate between male and female, and different aspects of gender are applied to either man or woman. In fantasy, you can create whatever social construct you want, but in the end, men and women ARE different and are treated as such. I'm not arguing that those differences are extreme or even biological beyond physical characteristics, but to not view a character as a woman, in whatever context that applies, seems like an oversimplification. Why not just write a story where there's only unisex characters then? If you don't treat your characters differently because of their gender, then that makes there gender useless, and I don't see the point in that. Unless your idea of a woman character is an overly-emotional baby-factory that is chained in the kitchen and holds to whatever other stereotypes there are, then why shy away from writing a women as a women, whatever conclusions can be drawn from that. Just my two cents.


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## Mindfire

Steerpike said:


> I don't think you've been reading my posts. Nothing I've said indicates it is external. Just think about it a minute. If a person can fall anywhere along the spectrum, then the only way to approach it, unless you just want stereotypes, is to treat the character as an individual and not a slave to some likelihood imposed by gender.



THATS WHAT I JUST- 

I'm taking a break.


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## saellys

FatCat said:


> If you don't treat your characters differently because of their gender, then that makes there gender useless, and I don't see the point in that.



Egalitarian treatment (from authors and fictional societies alike) does not make gender useless. It doesn't even make gender less interesting. Elizabeth Moon's _Paksenarrion_ trilogy has been brought up a lot in these threads, and I recommend that you check it out. Paks joined a mercenary company that accepted women as well as men. Every recruit was expected to perform the same tasks and undergo the same training, regardless of gender. The company, as an institution, did not treat its soldiers differently based on sex. Some of the soldiers treated _each other_ differently, though, and it was very engrossing to read their interpersonal relationships, good, bad, and neutral. 

Later when Paks ventured into the wider world, she encountered all manner of attitudes, which felt as natural and varied as they are right here in the real world. These situations cropped up once every few chapters on average, and in between, Paks didn't give her own gender any thought as she went about her business. Moon clearly chose to write a female protagonist on purpose, but the story didn't feel like she had a preachy agenda because her worldbuilding regarding social attitudes was so solid and the environment felt so natural. Nevertheless, Paks's gender was integral to the story and to the attitudes, at many times, of the characters around her.


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## FatCat

So the book would have been the same if the MC was a male? The same themes and motifs apply?


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## Steerpike

FatCat said:


> So the book would have been the same if the MC was a male? The same themes and motifs apply?



No, because the book deals with a lot of externalities of gender in the setting.


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## Steerpike

But, Paks isn't the stereotypical woman of her society, which is what some people seem to think we should employ. If she had been, there'd be no story.


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## T.Allen.Smith

saellys said:


> All your female characters don't react the same way to a given situation, I'm sure, but they all "feel" feminine to different degrees, in different ways.


This is important & I agree. We should write our characters as people first. Levels of masculinity or femininity are only one layer of the overall persona.

Would a female MC make a story different from the same story with a male MC? It most certainly could. However, those differences could be differences forced upon characters from the society the live within (maybe not though). Within a fictional world, views on gender could have an impact on the story (for the character's self-view as well as how others perceive them) but it doesn't have to...so, it depends.

I know what you're getting at FatCat. It might affect how the story is told but that choice of how it affects the story is more up to the author, and how the characters are written, than some forced notion of how gender must impact the story.


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## FatCat

Exactly, so being conscious of gender is important to writing a character and book. It seems like everyone wants to agree and say that men and women are the same, should be treated and written in the same manner, but that completely destroys gender identity, and makes it impossible for a book like Paksenarrion to be thematic. If the argument is men and women should be written according to stereotypes and devoid of personality traits that aren't derived from their gender, then that's just retarded. But to say that gender should have no influence to the story or the character, to me, is just as silly.


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## Steerpike

FatCat said:


> But to say that gender should have no influence to the story or the character, to me, is just as silly.



But no one is saying that, unless you go out of your way to misread posts to pretend they're saying it


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## FatCat

I apply great effort to misreading posts.


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## Steerpike

Heh.

I think it can be summed easily - develop your character, as a person, in whatever way you see fit for that character. Then determine her actions based on what she would do as a person. Simple. It could be anything along the spectrum of possibilities. But if you have a character that would do X, and you change it to Y solely because of the fact that the character is female, you're on the wrong track.


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## FatCat

So if you're writing a female heterosexual character, changing x=man to y=woman is fine?


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## T.Allen.Smith

Steerpike said:


> Heh.
> 
> I think it can be summed easily - develop your character, as a person, in whatever way you see fit for that character. Then determine her actions based on what she would do as a person. Simple. It could be anything along the spectrum of possibilities. But if you have a character that would do X, and you change it to Y solely because of the fact that the character is female, you're on the wrong track.



Yes.

It's fine to consider how gender might affect a character within the societal structure of the story (& how others may view them). It's good to consider how gender might affect the character's self-perception & image. Regardless, you write the character foremost as a person. Gender is no more important an aspect than wealth, race, education level, skill with a sword, etc.

Your character will be far more interesting and realistic if handled in this manner. It will also help to diversify your cast of characters and assist in creating characters that are distinct from one another.


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## saellys

FatCat said:


> Exactly, so being conscious of gender is important to writing a character and book. It seems like everyone wants to agree and say that men and women are the same, should be treated and written in the same manner, but that completely destroys gender identity, and makes it impossible for a book like Paksenarrion to be thematic. If the argument is men and women should be written according to stereotypes and devoid of personality traits that aren't derived from their gender, then that's just retarded. But to say that gender should have no influence to the story or the character, to me, is just as silly.



Yyyyeah, this is the exact opposite of what I said. _Paksenarrion_ was thematic in spite of your claim that it could not possibly be. The author was conscious of her gender without turning it into a defining trait for Paks herself. It was part of her character, but it was far more relevant to the world around her than to Paks. Paks's gender did not shape her decision making process except in situations where it was a factor in an outside influence.

Apropos of nothing in particular, over the course of my time on this forum I have grown quite weary of people insisting on interpreting things I say in ways that have nothing to do with what I actually said. I'm okay with clarifying my points for the sake of a thorough discussion, but I've consistently had to go above and beyond that, and it's exhausting. Not directed at anyone in particular. Just something I need to get off my chest.


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## FatCat

I never claimed Paksenarrion wasn't thematic, I was saying that gender identity played an important role in its theme, is this correct? If gender was neutralized, would it have worked in the same way? I don't claim that gender is a defining trait, but I do realize that there are differences between men and women, and according to how they're written, different personalities come about depending on the social construct of gender ideas.


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## T.Allen.Smith

saellys said:


> Apropos of nothing in particular, over the course of my time on this forum I have grown quite weary of people insisting on interpreting things I say in ways that have nothing to do with what I actually said. I'm okay with clarifying my points for the sake of a thorough discussion, but I've consistently had to go above and beyond that, and it's exhausting. Not directed at anyone in particular. Just something I need to get off my chest.


An inherent difficulty when discussing complex ideas through small chunks of text only.

Most times the misinterpretation is 50% the fault of the post's author writing in a manner that is less than clear & 50% the reader imposing their own impressions on the words of another.


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## Addison

Writing opposite gender is tough, you grow up knowing what you, as a guy or girl, want or not, feel, how you think etc. But then again, as you grew up, you made observations, opinions, and had experience with the opposite gender. (Especially easy if you have a brother or sister) So you could use those observations as  window, a platform with the character.


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## saellys

FatCat said:


> I never claimed Paksenarrion wasn't thematic, I was saying that gender identity played an important role in its theme, is this correct?



You said that treating male and female characters the same (which is what happens in _Paksenarrion_) destroys gender identity. Gender identity in the form of society's perceptions play a role in Moon's books, as sources of minor external conflict. It doesn't get destroyed by Moon's egalitarian treatment of her male and female characters.



FatCat said:


> If gender was neutralized, would it have worked in the same way? I don't claim that gender is a defining trait, but I do realize that there are differences between men and women, and according to how they're written, different personalities come about depending on the social construct of gender ideas.



What I'm saying here is that for all intents and purposes, gender _is_ neutralized for Paks until the times she encounters someone else's perceptions. Paks's reactions to events are not dictated by her gender, even though at times the events themselves concern her gender. The influence of her gender is external, not internal.

I agree that the social construct of gender influences personality to varying extents between individuals. I do not agree that writing a character so far to one side of that spectrum that she may as well be genderless removes gender as an element from a story, and I'm citing an example to support that. There is more to (almost) any story than just the main character's perspective.


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## FatCat

saellys said:


> What I'm saying here is that for all intents and purposes, gender _is_ neutralized for Paks until the times she encounters someone else's perceptions.



Ok. /10char


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## Alex Beecroft

Devor said:


> So you're saying we understand people most through the workplace, where we don't like anybody and bottle up our emotions and try to precisely control everything we think, say or do?  I would say the people we understand most are our loved ones - family and friends we've grown up with, the people we marry and share our lives with, the children we raise.  It's pretty hard to talk about a gender gap within the typical modern family or in a coed school system, and certainly within the typical household.



No, I'm saying that it's_ literally_ a survival skill to be able to understand men enough to be able to predict a stranger's behaviour. Is this unknown man in the train carriage with you likely to attack you now the other passengers have got off? (In which case relocating to a different carriage might be a good thing.) Are those youths the happy drunk types or the 'lets have some fun with this lone woman' types? (In which case the benefits of taking the long way home to avoid them outweigh the risks of taking longer to get home.) Is this drunk guy going to back down or is he going to glass me? This situation is getting hairy, is it time to back down myself in order to defuse it?

At work and at home, you can get to know individuals well enough to adjust your understanding of how they behave to take in their individual personalities. With strangers you don't have that degree of fine calibration.

But also, when I say that women find it easier to understand men than men do to understand women, I say it also because we are all surrounded by a culture permeated with stories about men. Stories about sons and their relationships with their fathers. Stories about young men coming into their power - learning to handle it with responsibility (and maybe to get the girl in the process.) It's still quite common for shows and books to have only one woman in the cast, and she's the love interest - so we never get to see what her story is, what she thinks of life, what her hopes and dreams are. The story is not _about_ her. Stories about women and their relationships with their mothers are vanishingly rare. I can only think of "Brave". Stories about girls coming into their power and learning to deal with it responsibly are rare. Fortunately not so rare as they used to be, but still something of a novelty.

Women, from a very early age, find themselves steeped in stories about what it's like, what it means, to be a man. Nobody is steeped in stories about what it's like, what it means, to be a woman. So of course it's easier for both sexes to understand men. Our culture has historically not considered understanding women to be a task worth bothering with, so there are far fewer resources to start off with.


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## Steerpike

Alex, even looking at it from a survival standpoint, you're still only working with a likelihood of what a male might do. Not all males act the same in any given circumstance, so you base your actions on risk or likelihood and the potential harm that can result. It makes sense, when dealing with unknowns.

But your characters are not unknowns, nor at they statistical likelihoods. They're individuals. Writing a male or female based on how you think it is likely a male or female reacts means you have an underdeveloped character. Develop her further and you can base her reactions on what she would do as a person, not on some over-broad statistical generalization of how women are supposed to think and behave.


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## Feo Takahari

Alex Beecroft said:


> No, I'm saying that it's_ literally_ a survival skill to be able to understand men enough to be able to predict a stranger's behaviour. Is this unknown man in the train carriage with you likely to attack you now the other passengers have got off? (In which case relocating to a different carriage might be a good thing.) Are those youths the happy drunk types or the 'lets have some fun with this lone woman' types? (In which case the benefits of taking the long way home to avoid them outweigh the risks of taking longer to get home.) Is this drunk guy going to back down or is he going to glass me? This situation is getting hairy, is it time to back down myself in order to defuse it?
> 
> At work and at home, you can get to know individuals well enough to adjust your understanding of how they behave to take in their individual personalities. With strangers you don't have that degree of fine calibration.



A bit off-topic, but I think to some degree, women are (or at least were) taught the _wrong_ survival techniques. There was a time when we had a lot of media attention focused on the idea of evil strangers who wanted to rape women, and barely any focused on rape by friends and acquaintances (which is vastly more common.) That's starting to change now, but we're still getting all sorts of weird messages I'm not sure are backed up (e.g. "Dressing slutty is asking for trouble", even though I've never even heard of a study of how clothing affects the likelihood of rape.) I'm not entirely sure these messages can be used to create or develop male characters without just furthering more misguided ideas.

(To be fair, I'm male, and I've never been in a situation where someone might suspect that I was going to get raped. However, I did once pick up a hitchhiker who was a tall, dreadlocked, informally dressed black man who turned out to be an ex-marijuana dealer. He was harmless, and I enjoyed his company.)


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## Ophiucha

I agree with the political aspect of Alex's post, but I'm going to focus on the literary point because I empathize quite heavily with that. It took me _years _to learn how to write female characters because I just hadn't read enough work written with female protagonists who got a lot of characterization. Yes, yes, write what you know, women are people, blah blah, etc., etc.. That's an excellent approach in theory but it's hard to deny how much of an influence what we read has on our writing, and - as somebody who reads primarily fantasy literature - I just hadn't read enough female characters to really _get _how to write them. It wasn't until I started seeking out, actively, female protagonists that I really got a grasp on it; and I don't necessarily think my female characters are much like the ones in the books I've read, they are generally more homely and romantic than the badass lady warriors of most lady-headed fantasy novels, but it was like there was a gap in my abilities that I just couldn't fill until I'd sought out those works.

I had the same problem with gay romance despite being bisexual. And I think reading more work with protagonists of colour has helped me write those characters better as well, though I _am _white so I wouldn't like to judge. For what it's worth, this applies to everything - not just social issues. I had difficulty writing science fiction until I sat down and started reading a lot of hard science fiction and getting myself immersed in the genre. While women and men (and every other group of potentially divided people) are inherently the same, the omnipresence of the white, straight, cisgender male protagonist kind of... normalizes the human experience as something designed for that character, and when most of what I read only had non-white, non-male, non-cis/het characters serving some token role, no amount of conscious recognition of the difference really helped me get over that sort of learned stereotyping. It took a lot of excellent literature and a bit of fighting on my part to really overcome some of these things.


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## Alex Beecroft

Steerpike said:


> Alex, even looking at it from a survival standpoint, you're still only working with a likelihood of what a male might do. Not all males act the same in any given circumstance, so you base your actions on risk or likelihood and the potential harm that can result. It makes sense, when dealing with unknowns.
> 
> But your characters are not unknowns, nor at they statistical likelihoods. They're individuals. Writing a male or female based on how you think it is likely a male or female reacts means you have an underdeveloped character. Develop her further and you can base her reactions on what she would do as a person, not on some over-broad statistical generalization of how women are supposed to think and behave.



Oh, God, yes. I've never been saying, at all, that you should write your character to some kind of stereotype of what 'a man' or 'a woman' is, because frankly I've never met any individual who fitted the stereotypes, and I suspect I wouldn't like them if I did. I don't actually believe there's much if any difference between men and women except from what comes from the different expectations set on them by society. If I'm writing a male or a female character, I do exactly the same thing - I figure out what they want, give them a family & backstory, decide where they fall on the Myers-Briggs personality type, give them a problem to solve, let them go and find out what happens next.


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## Alex Beecroft

Feo Takahari said:


> A bit off-topic, but I think to some degree, women are (or at least were) taught the _wrong_ survival techniques. There was a time when we had a lot of media attention focused on the idea of evil strangers who wanted to rape women, and barely any focused on rape by friends and acquaintances (which is vastly more common.) That's starting to change now, but we're still getting all sorts of weird messages I'm not sure are backed up (e.g. "Dressing slutty is asking for trouble", even though I've never even heard of a study of how clothing affects the likelihood of rape.) I'm not entirely sure these messages can be used to create or develop male characters without just furthering more misguided ideas.
> 
> (To be fair, I'm male, and I've never been in a situation where someone might suspect that I was going to get raped. However, I did once pick up a hitchhiker who was a tall, dreadlocked, informally dressed black man who turned out to be an ex-marijuana dealer. He was harmless, and I enjoyed his company.)



But you looked at that guy and you immediately performed a character evaluation on him before you picked him up (even though you may not have been doing it consciously.) You looked at him and had to decide whether or not he was going to be dangerous. Because I'm not really talking just about rape here. He could have been mad/drunk/coked up and intent on taking your money and car at gun point. You had to make the snap decision that no, he looks like a perfectly decent guy who's just trying to get somewhere. That's what I mean about the ability to predict men's behaviour. Not that you do it via stereotype, but that you do it via a process of fine judgement you're probably not even aware of, which you have honed over a lifetime of being in potentially unsafe situations.

Are you telling me you've never been in a bar when some guy kicked off and you had to decide whether you could intervene or you should call the police? Or you've never had some bloke get in your face because you looked at him funny? The ability to get out of such situations with your life/your teeth intact as opposed to saying exactly the wrong thing depends on good judgement of what kind of a man he is, what kind of an approach will be successful/conciliatory, how drunk he is, how many friends he has with him and what they seem to think of his behaviour... etc.

All of which amounts to an understanding of the way men behave in tense social situations, depending on the power balance of the situation, their apparent character, the presence or absence of intoxicants, the presence or absence of a crowd and so forth. 

Again, I'm not talking stereotypes. I'm talking about an ability to read social situations in a way that doesn't get you beaten up. It's a learned skill, and it's a very useful skill for a writer to have if they want to write fight scenes at all believably. Why didn't so and so back down? What was the trigger that pushed this situation into violence?

Look at the movie _Thor_, for example. Everyone knows that when the Jotun calls Thor 'princess' all chance of peaceful negotiations are over. But why does everyone know that? It's because we know he's the kind of man who could not walk away from that kind of insult. How do we know that? Because we're good judges of what will cause men to become violent. Why are we good judges of that? Because it's something we (and by 'we' I mean all humans) need to know to avoid getting our heads kicked in.


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## Mindfire

Because obviously it could never be to anyone's strategic advantage to know what makes a woman angry. Amirite?


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## glutton

Mindfire said:


> Because obviously it could never be to anyone's strategic advantage to know what makes a woman angry. Amirite?



No, because women are never any sort of physical threat whatsoever.

*In case it isn't clear, that was SARCASM, folks.


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## Mindfire

Yeah. And it's not like knowing these things is helpful in relationships or anything.

(more sarcasm)


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## Chilari

Let's move this away from the snark and unpleasantness, please. It's not condusive to rational debate, it's a tactic to discredit an oppositing position without having to put your own experiences and opinions in the line of fire.

I'll mirror what Ophiucha said about learning to write female characters: I struggled for a long time, because I'd never read many female protagonists. They were always the princess who needed rescuing, the sexual reward for the hero's victory, or, occasionally, the villain. Never the protagonist. Never the platonic best friend. Never someone whose perspective was important. I thought for a long while I could not write female characters. Even now I draw more heavily on myself and the women I know than I do on female characters I've read.


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## Feo Takahari

Alex Beecroft said:


> Are you telling me you've never been in a bar when some guy kicked off and you had to decide whether you could intervene or you should call the police? Or you've never had some bloke get in your face because you looked at him funny? The ability to get out of such situations with your life/your teeth intact as opposed to saying exactly the wrong thing depends on good judgement of what kind of a man he is, what kind of an approach will be successful/conciliatory, how drunk he is, how many friends he has with him and what they seem to think of his behaviour... etc.



Maybe this is a matter of different social groups. I have never in my life been attacked, been seriously threatened with attack, or even seen someone attack someone else outside of TV and video games. People have tried to intimidate me a few times, but I've never had reason to take them seriously, or to expect that their attacking me would not have social and legal repercussions.

To be fair, what you are saying is indeed useful in writing a "hardscrabble" sort of character.

P.S. For what it's worth, all but one person who's ever threatened me with physical violence has been female.


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## glutton

Chilari said:


> I'll mirror what Ophiucha said about learning to write female characters: I struggled for a long time, because I'd never read many female protagonists. They were always the princess who needed rescuing, the sexual reward for the hero's victory, or, occasionally, the villain. Never the protagonist. Never the platonic best friend. Never someone whose perspective was important. I thought for a long while I could not write female characters. Even now I draw more heavily on myself and the women I know than I do on female characters I've read.



This seems a little surprising, aren't there tons of fantasy books out there with female lead characters? Or are they not in the type of stories you guys want to read?


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## Feo Takahari

glutton said:


> This seems a little odd, aren't there tons of fantasy books out there with female lead characters? Or are they not in the type of stories you guys want to read?



Challenge: name a fantasy story that _isn't_ in a contemporary setting, _isn't_ either "feminist fantasy" or "fantasy romance", _is_ well-written, and has a female character as the _primary protagonist_ (not the sidekick or love interest.)

Hard mode: name one not by Tamora Pierce. (Anne McCaffrey doesn't count, since her stuff's closer to sci-fi. Andre Norton or Mercedes Lackey might, if you're willing to call them good writers. Piers Anthony probably doesn't.)

(To be fair, you can easily remove condition one or two while fulfilling the other three.)


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## T.Allen.Smith

Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie

Primary Character: Monzarro "Monza" Murcatto 

Didn't really even have to think about it...(okay I read it a couple months ago but still...).


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## Mindfire

Define "primary protagonist". In _Furies of Calderon_, the first book of the _Codex Alera_, the first character we meet is Amara, a female cursor (imperial spy) in training, and she is arguably the books main character, or at least one of the most important characters, although Tavi becomes the obvious Main Character as the series progresses.

But if Amara doesn't count, Brian Jacques's Redwall books have had several females who are indisputably the primary protagonist. Heck, some of them have their names in the title!

_Mariel of Redwall_- Mariel Gullwhacker
_The Bellmaker_- Mariel Gullwhaker
_The Pearls of Lutra_- Grath Longfletch (Don't let the name fool you. Grath is female.)
_Marlfox_- Songbreeze Swifteye
_Triss_- Triss
_High Rhulain_- Tiria Wildlough

Now it's been a while since I've read these, so I'm not sure about _Bellmaker_ and _Marlfox_, but I'm positive that the others have the female characters I just mentioned as primaries.


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## Mindfire

Also, the _Enchanted Forest Chronicles_ books, by Patricia C. Wrede. And _Wyrd Sisters_ by Terry Pratchett. And also _Dragon and Phoenix_ by Joanne Bertin.


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## glutton

Feo Takahari said:


> _isn't_ either "feminist fantasy"



Doesn't seem like it should disqualify a story and is nebulous...



Feo Takahari said:


> is well-written



Completely subjective...

The Book of Ash by Mary Gentle and Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon would certainly qualify off the top of my head, as would Allan Cole's The Warrior's Tale and The Warrior Returns, or Matthew Stover's Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon, and these are just 'my' specific type of preferred female leads, I'm sure you can find many more with non-warrior ie. spellcaster etc. type leads that I'm not as into; also shouldn't books with a group of main POV characters count when one of the POVs is female?

Also my self-promo urges are acting up lol.


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## glutton

Feo Takahari said:


> but I've never had reason to take them seriously, or to expect that their attacking me would not have social and legal repercussions.



You've been lucky then since people who are prone to real violence often don't let the possibility of 'future' social and legal repercussions deter them. Since this thread is about gender females can certainly be this way too, a little while back there was a young woman in the UK who killed a man with a punch (he hit his head on the ground after being dropped) after he tried to chase her friend who had robbed him, although statistically I'm sure such behavior is more common among men... but in any case, people who are actually willing to throw fists (or use weapons) will often do it in spite of such physically flimsy barriers as laws. I've had people try to mug me several times without me ever looking for a fight.

And I imagine in many fantasy settings there will be more openly brutish people walking around than in our society.


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## Steerpike

Yeah the Paksenarrion books are great. Actually, there are tons of mainstream fantasies with female MCs (and not set in modern times). You're right about that.


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## glutton

Steerpike said:


> Yeah the Paksenarrion books are great. Actually, there are tons of mainstream fantasies with female MCs (and not set in modern times). You're right about that.



I'm always surprised when people still say these days that they have trouble finding female-led fantasy - are they only looking at Tolkien-style epic fantasy (I don't go for that kind of stuff so I couldn't say if that still had a shortage of female leads)?


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## Chilari

T.Allen.Smith said:


> Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie
> 
> Primary Character: Monzarro "Monza" Murcatto
> 
> Didn't really even have to think about it...(okay I read it a couple months ago but still...).



Publication date 2010. For me, looking for something with a female protagonist when I was in secondary school from 1999 to 2006, that doesn't help.

In my school's library, there were three Tamora Pierce books (the second and fourth of one series, the third of another) and no other fantasy books with female protagonists. This in a girls' school in the early 2000s. Sure, there were the Redwall books, but I don't remember any of those having a female protagonist (maybe some of them did, maybe my school didn't have them, maybe I forgot, but still most had male protagonists). Since the school library was my primary method of finding new stuff to read at that time, and my pocket money amounted to Â£1.30 a week when I was 13, Â£1.40 when I was 14 and so on, I didn't have a huge amount to spend on books (I managed to save up for a Pratchett at Â£7.99 every few months; the rest went on sweets).

There is, quite simply, much less on offer featuring female leads than male leads. There's a lot more in the last few years than there was when I was growing up, but it's still a massive imbalance.

And for the record, I read every single fantasy book my school library had. Every single one. Many of them twice. Literally hundreds of books. When I ran out in about 2004 (by which time the pocket money situation had changed), I started spending all my pocket money on books and I read a fair chunk of my local library's fantasy offerings too. The only female-led books I read were a few Tamora Pierce books, a couple of Pratchetts, and potentially a couple of the Redwall books. 1 or 2% of everything I read.


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## glutton

Chilari said:


> Since the school library was my primary method of finding new stuff to read at that time



This is a specific situation and different from saying there is a lack of female led fantasy available in general though... I'm sure if you looked on Amazon you could find enough female led fantasy to only read it and nothing else.


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## Steerpike

Just to add some examples (either from a quick glance at my own shelves):

Garth Nix's Sabriel.
Juliet Marillier
Mindy Klasky's Glasswright series
Kristen Britain
Megan Lindholm
Abercrombie's Best Served Cold has been mentioned
Meredith Ann Pierce
S.D. Tower, The Assassin's of Tamurin
Robin McKinley (The Hero and the Crown, and others)
The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
Tanith Lee
God Stalk, P.C. Hodgell
Joan D. Vinge
Philip Pullman (Golden Compass)
Elizabeth Scarborough (Bronwyn's Bane, and others - great books btw)

This is just from me looking over my shoulder. I haven't even gotten into the vast bulk of my books, which are in boxes. And then, of course, so many I don't have.

I'd throw in Marion Zimmer Bradley, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Angela Carter, etc., but that would probably get written on as "feminist" fantasy (though I'm not sure why that matters).


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## Chilari

glutton said:


> This is a specific situation and different from saying there is a lack of female led fantasy available in general though... I'm sure if you looked on Amazon you could find enough female led fantasy to only read it and nothing else.



Not very useful for internet-less 14 year old me in 2002. My point is, those of us who are adults now didn't have the internet to guide us to good books when we were growing up, we had what was available to us in school and local libraries, and if that was 98% male led, then 98% of what we read was male led. Now, it's not quite so bad in 2013 because there's a lot that has been written in the last decade featuring female leads, but even stuff written by female authors is quite often male led - look at Robin Hobb's books. The Farseer trilogy, the Soldier Son trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, all male led; the Liveship trilogy was more half and half, but not female-only led. And that's from a female writer. I would be willing to bet the protagonist gender divide in the 100 bestselling fantasy novels published in each of the last 5 years is not even at 70/30 yet, certainly not 50/50. I wonder if there are any studies available for that information.

And that's the point here: if we're constantly told, implicitly or explicitly, that the male perspective is more worthy of attention, more worthy of adventure, than the female perspective, then how are you going to get authors, even female authors, writing female characters? This about it: it's such a big problem that *women like me and Ophiucha thought we couldn't write female protagonists*, because we'd never been shown how to do so convincingly.


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## glutton

Chilari said:


> what was available to us in school and local libraries



Who's to blame for this though, the industry or the libraries that choose to order mostly male-led books themselves? If more of the bestselling books are male led, is that because there are no female led books being written or because people aren't buying them as much?


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## Chilari

glutton said:


> Who's to blame for this though, the industry or the libraries that choose to order mostly male-led books themselves? If more of the bestselling books are male led, is that because there are no female led books being written or because people aren't buying them as much?



Or is it a symptom of a much large problem with the patriarchal mindset; a self-fullfilling prophecy, as it were? It is becuase of the biases built in to the minds of publishing houses' editors, bookshop chains' buyers, and so on? Might it be that male led books are for general reading, whereas female led books are just for girls to read? Might the male led books have recieved larger marketing budgets than the female led books because of this? It's probably impossible to find out now, at least on a scale which would enable a largescale study, but these are factors that need to be considered. It's not just a case of "male led books are better thus sell better so there", you've got to ask why they sold better, why more were published, whether it was an inbalance in what people were writing, or what publishers were publishing, or both, and why.

Do you deny there are fewer female-led books than male-led? If not, why are we arguing? If you do deny this, we'll have to look at stats and numbers in some detail to get to the bottom of things in an undeniable manner, though that will require some serious legwork I doubt any of us have time for.

My experience has been a lack of female led fantasy. The specific examples people have given don't change that; that I missed these books could have been for any number of reasons, from the level of knowledge my school's librarian had about fantasy suitable for 11 to 18 year olds, to what the publishers thought was worth publishing and promoting, to random chance (it's possible I missed some good books by virtue of them frequently being out, read by my classmates or neighbours). But my experiences with reading fantasy which was predominantly male led left me with the belief that I could not write female protagonists, and that is a symptom of the problem at large.


----------



## glutton

Is an individual person's experience necessarily a symptom of a problem at large though? Nobody said anything about male led books being 'better' but could it be that readers both male and female go for them more, and if that's the case are the readers or industry being 'wrong' or maybe there is another reason? Also does whether or not the female-led books are 'bestsellers' matter in any way other than getting them into libraries and such?


----------



## Jamber

T.Allen.Smith said:


> Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie
> 
> Primary Character: Monzarro "Monza" Murcatto



This is a really interesting one to bring up -- I didn't really buy her 'femaleness' very well. I felt her femininity was an add-on, since it pretty much stuck to those features a heterosexual man might focus on (a vagina and breasts but no womb, no menstruation, no contraception). She was really quite androgynous, I felt.

However despite the fact that I wasn't its ideal reader, I also felt it was technically interesting -- an unlikeable protagonist, nominally female, who acquires scars at a rate of knots (albeit not lover-deterring ones) and is extremely single-minded when it comes to revenge. That certainly adds some new elements to a history of 'female characters'.

I think it's a good enough project to pluralise the depiction of female characters, and I'd always argue that there's no one way to write 'a female' (let alone 'the female'). Still, I'd prefer to read about a socially and sexually convincing female character overturning domination than a socially ambiguous (warrior but regarded as 'female') androgyne doing the same thing. It just seems there's more at stake in the former, and the fact that it's also partly about gender appeals to me (as someone who's occasionally had to fight sexism).

cheers
Jennie


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## T.Allen.Smith

A valid point Jamber & I agree that, in large part, she did feel androgynous. However, as I read, I noticed a multitude of occasions where it seemed as if true femininity wanted to break free of that unlikable/heartless exterior. There was an internal battle against her own womanhood that I liked as a female lead (as it relates to this story). Further, she knew how to use her gender to advantage.



Chilari said:


> Publication date 2010. For me, looking for something with a female protagonist when I was in secondary school from 1999 to 2006, that doesn't help.


Yes. I don't think anyone would disagree that the balance wasn't heavily skewed towards male MCs. I don't think that anyone would argue that it still is slanted towards the male POVs. Equally, I'm not certain one could make an argument against a steady change within the genre towards more female MCs. I'd like to think that shift is partially due to recognition of a female consumer base but mostly attributed to maturity within the genre as an art form.


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## Steerpike

T.Allen.Smith said:


> A valid point Jamber & I agree that, in large part, she did feel androgynous. However, as I read, I noticed a multitude of occasions where it seemed as if true femininity wanted to break free of that unlikable/heartless exterior. There was an internal battle against her own womanhood that I liked as a female lead (as it relates to this story). Further, she knew how to use her gender to advantage.



Yes. And, importantly, you could understand _why_ she was the way she was.


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## Ophiucha

I should say that I am currently only 21 - while I am very well-read for my age, I'm still shuffling through the 'top 100 sff novels' lists and classics and Hugo/Nebula/Locus winners for my next read. When I was 15 - which was when I really said "I love this, I want to write a novel _for real_~" - I was sitting down and starting up on _Lord of the Rings_. Considering that, here's the first list of 100 Best SFF Novels that pops up on Google. Being _very _generous, about 1/5 of the hundred 'best' stories of science fiction and fantasy have female protagonists with any time as the perspective character. (_Game of Thrones_ gets to count despite still being primarily about male characters, for instance, as does _The Time Traveller's Wife_, as half of the novel is written from the wife's perspective and half from the husband's). And the majority of those were science fiction, at least three explicitly feminist.

Certainly there are many good fantasy novels with leading ladies, but how many of them are in the school/local library? How many of them are in the public domain? How many of them are still in _print_? How many of them have won awards, have featured on these lists and others? How many get the same attractive covers as _Wheel of Time_, with gorgeous paintings instead of bad photoshops of models who look nothing like how the characters are described in the books?


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## glutton

Ophiucha said:


> I should say that I am currently only 21 - while I am very well-read for my age, I'm still shuffling through the 'top 100 sff novels' lists and classics and Hugo/Nebula/Locus winners for my next read. When I was 15 - which was when I really said "I love this, I want to write a novel _for real_~" - I was sitting down and starting up on _Lord of the Rings_. Considering that, here's the first list of 100 Best SFF Novels that pops up on Google. Being _very _generous, about 1/5 of the hundred 'best' stories of science fiction and fantasy have female protagonists with any time as the perspective character. (_Game of Thrones_ gets to count despite still being primarily about male characters, for instance, as does _The Time Traveller's Wife_, as half of the novel is written from the wife's perspective and half from the husband's). And the majority of those were science fiction, at least three explicitly feminist.
> 
> Certainly there are many good fantasy novels with leading ladies, but how many of them are in the school/local library? How many of them are in the public domain? How many of them are still in _print_? How many of them have won awards, have featured on these lists and others? How many get the same attractive covers as _Wheel of Time_, with gorgeous paintings instead of bad photoshops of models who look nothing like how the characters are described in the books?



Here's the thing though - why search through 'best' lists and award winners for your future reads? Why not search for books with plots/themes/characters that appeal to you, whether their lead characters are male or female (and if you want to look specifically for books with female leads, that's fine too)? All 'best' lists are subjective anyway, and I'd think the story being about things you like would be a better 'guarantee' of enjoyment than being a 'best' book according to some other people...

...yeah that all's not particularly relevant to a discussion of gender but still.


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## Ophiucha

Two reasons.

A) I think it is useful to read the stories that are considered the best, because there is a lot more to writing than just character choices - the writing itself, for instance. I certainly apply discretion when necessary - I hate military science fiction, and I don't care if it is considered the best damn book of the century, I probably won't read it. But I love SFF and I also want to publish in it, so I think it is worthwhile to know the market and to read as much as I can. Also, it's not like I _don't_ actively seek out books that have female/queer/poc protagonists. I just _also_ read what's popular, there just... isn't as much crossover between the two as I would like. And really, it'd seem strange for someone who reads as much fantasy as I do to have not read _Lord of the Rings_ just because it's a total sausage fest.

B) I am poor. The more popular a book is, the more likely it is to be in the library.


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## glutton

The last one is a very valid point.

0.99 and free promo ebooks with female leads FTW? 

As for the first point you may have a point also but I'm too much of a rebel to say yes or no on that one.


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## Addison

I thought this would be a good place to post this question:

From what I understand there are three kinds of twins. 

Those who are the same gender and are identical.
Those who are the same gender but not identical.
Those who are not the same gender but have the same physical traits (blonde hair, green eyes etc)
And there's Scottish twins, brothers or sisters who are a few years apart but look so much alike they're mistaken for twins. I have this with my older brother. 

But what are the other types of twins called?


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## T.Allen.Smith

Addison said:


> I thought this would be a good place to post this question:
> 
> From what I understand there are three kinds of twins.
> 
> Those who are the same gender and are identical.
> Those who are the same gender but not identical.
> Those who are not the same gender but have the same physical traits (blonde hair, green eyes etc)
> And there's Scottish twins, brothers or sisters who are a few years apart but look so much alike they're mistaken for twins. I have this with my older brother.
> 
> But what are the other types of twins called?



Was this supposed to be a separate post Addison? It doesn't seem relevant to the topic.


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## Feo Takahari

glutton said:


> 0.99 and free promo ebooks with female leads FTW?



For me, it's webcomics, and to a lesser extent fanfiction. I find it jarring sometimes to go back to reading published fiction after a webcomic binge and realize how comparatively bland and underdeveloped the female characters are.


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## Addison

Yes it's a separate topic. I thought the topic of my post would be obvious that it's separate.


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## T.Allen.Smith

Addison said:


> Yes it's a separate topic. I thought the topic of my post would be obvious that it's separate.



Understood. However, your questions have nothing to do, as far as I can tell, with "Writing from the Female POV". Topics can, at times, morph off their original track. Still, we don't want to jump completely off the rails from post to post. 

Please submit your questions in a separate thread, titled as you see fit.

Thank you.


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## Chilari

glutton said:


> Is an individual person's experience necessarily a symptom of a problem at large though? Nobody said anything about male led books being 'better' but could it be that readers both male and female go for them more, and if that's the case are the readers or industry being 'wrong' or maybe there is another reason? Also does whether or not the female-led books are 'bestsellers' matter in any way other than getting them into libraries and such?



The thing is, my experiences are far from unique. There was a discussion on reddit/femalewriters a few weeks ago about the same thing - many of the writers there told how they struggled to write female characters because they'd not read enough stories with female leads. I am not an anomaly here.

I think it's all a symptom of something larger. JK Rowling was told by her publisher not to use her first name; many other female writers have used male names or initials only, because apparently, boys don't read "girly" stuff or books written by women as much as the opposite: in other words, male experienece is normalised while female experience has to fit around it, disguise itself. Boys don't tend to read books ith female protagonists because it's a girly thing, and as we all know being girly is a negative trait ("he cried like a little girl", "don't be such a girl", "you run like a girl" etc - surely we've all heard that kind of thing in the playground). But girls are expected to, and do, read books with male protagonists, in part because that represents the bulk of what is available, certainly in SFF, but also because being male is normalised. Being male is how you have real adventures; stories for girls are all about the romance, stories for boys are about adventure. You can see it in films. Films aimed at women are rom coms. Films aimed at men are action films. We're told, basically, that the only adventures we're worthy of are adventures of the heart. Repeatedly.


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## Jabrosky

I'm a guy who's writing from female characters' PoVs right now, and so far I don't feel any particular difficulty doing so. I do not buy most of the "men and women are from different planets" crud promoted by popular culture.


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## Ophiucha

Yeah, and I think part of the dearth of female fantasy protagonists comes from the fact that 'fantasy' is borderline synonymous with 'action/adventure' in terms of what is published in the genre. I am not a big fan of romance novels in terms of the stories they tell, yet I've read dozens of them just because I enjoy getting the full range of female characters in the leading role. Unfortunately, it isn't always the best written genre - certainly you have the Victorian writers, but most of what's published is in the dollar bin at the grocery store checkout line. They still helped me get a better grasp on writing from the female POV, though, because there are so many different sorts of leading ladies in romance novels whereas your (non-romance) fantasy leads are usually Red Sonja 'man with curves and _definitely _written by a man' sorts, maybe the occasionally hooker with a heart of gold, and if you're very lucky, you might get a farm girl who is the daughter of the king and has some prophecy about them. There are a few excellent exceptions, of course, but how many of those exceptions are award winners, getting reviews in the New York Times, and have fandoms who are willing to discuss the nuances of the series and the characters? How many of them are getting big Hollywood adaptations? How many of them have only been published in the last decade, the last _five_ years?

I mean, we've really only got _The Wizard of Oz_ in terms of notoriety, and even that isn't being left alone. The Oz film that is in theatres right now has the male conman character in the leading role, as opposed to any of the witches or Dorothy or Princess Ozma or any of the other female characters who would have made for a more interesting film.


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## Alex Beecroft

glutton said:


> No, because women are never any sort of physical threat whatsoever.
> 
> *In case it isn't clear, that was SARCASM, folks.



I'm thinking that I've gone on too long on this subject and am now just pissing people off, so I'm going to answer this one with a link and then leave the subject for other people to pick up if necessary. 

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Longest War | TomDispatch

One of the things to think about when you write your female characters is that perhaps she does feel a bit more threatened on a regular basis than your male characters do.


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## Jabrosky

Ophiucha said:


> They still helped me get a better grasp on writing from the female POV, though, because there are so many different sorts of leading ladies in romance novels whereas your (non-romance) fantasy leads are usually Red Sonja 'man with curves and _definitely _written by a man' sorts, maybe the occasionally hooker with a heart of gold, and if you're very lucky, you might get a farm girl who is the daughter of the king and has some prophecy about them.


I wonder, would you be interested in a story starring a female ruler? I don't mean a princess or king's wife, mind you, but a woman who rules her country in her own right. I'm writing that kind of heroine right now, and she's a woman of color while we're at it.


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## Ophiucha

Jabrosky said:


> I wonder, would you be interested in a story starring a female ruler? I don't mean a princess or king's wife, mind you, but a woman who rules her country in her own right. I'm writing that kind of heroine right now, and she's a woman of color while we're at it.



Certainly. Women in leadership roles are pretty rare, and the royal ones tend to be princesses who inexplicably have no real power or responsibility despite half of them having dead parents. An actual queen (empress, lady, whatever) is always nice, plus it necessitates a different role for the character than we'd usually see. If a female character has responsibilities, it is either to her father or to her children (e.g., her primary motivator is either to get married or to save/protect her children), having a female character who has responsibilities to her people in some tangible sense would be a chance of pace.

And I always approve of main characters of colour; they are far more rare than female characters, and most of the ones who _do_ appear are men of colour. (Similarly, on the subject of intersectionality, it seems that most queer main characters are also white, gay men...)


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## Feo Takahari

A little late, but an interesting article on reviews. Female authors have become relatively common in speculative fiction, but for whatever reason, reviews of books by female authors are disproportionately few.


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## saellys

glutton said:


> Is an individual person's experience necessarily a symptom of a problem at large though?



It can be, and attempting to deny or diminish that experience (for instance, by offering a list--approximately thirty authors long, so far--of books the person who had that experience never got to read and presuming there are "tons" of female leads in a sea of men and people have no trouble finding books that feature them) is counterproductive. When people talk about a lack of representation, and the very idea is met with resistance, that is part of the problem. 

Threads like this inevitably become post after post of people who have experienced these things defending their experiences and reiterating that it's a problem over and over to people who just don't believe it, until everyone gets tired and gives up or the thread gets locked, and we never reach a point where progress can be made, en masse, to fix the problem. I'd love to have a discussion, just once, where everyone who hasn't experienced these things listens to the people who have, and accepts what they say without trying to convince them that their experiences are irrelevant or not connected to a larger issue. 

A small stack of books that happen to be different from the overwhelming majority of what has historically been, and still is, available to the average reader, won't fix things. Let's talk about the books yet to be written, and the evolving fantasy genre we are helping to shape with our own work.


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## T.Allen.Smith

saellys said:


> ...attempting to deny or diminish that experience (for instance, by offering a list--approximately thirty authors long, so far--of books the person who had that experience never got to read and presuming there are "tons" of female leads in a sea of men and people have no trouble finding books that feature them) is counterproductive. When people talk about a lack of representation, and the very idea is met with resistance, that is part of the problem.



The listing of books in this thread, by many members, was in response to this challenge:


Feo Takahari said:


> Challenge: name a fantasy story that isn't in a contemporary setting, isn't either "feminist fantasy" or "fantasy romance", is well-written, and has a female character as the primary protagonist (not the sidekick or love interest.)



Simply because someone responded to that challenge does not mean they are resistant to a person's experience or diminishing it in any way. Quite possibly, those individuals merely wished to share their own personal experiences with works that fit the criteria of the challenge & the subject matter at hand. Shouldn't that be encouraged if the genre is going to move towards greater equality in representation?

Many books mentioned, I'd never heard of before. If I wanted to read more stories with female MCs, this would be great information.


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## saellys

T.Allen.Smith said:


> The listing of books in this thread, by many members, was in response to this challenge:
> 
> 
> Simply because someone responded to that challenge does not mean they are resistant to a person's experience or diminishing it in any way. Quite possibly, those individuals merely wished to share their own personal experiences with works that fit the criteria of the challenge & the subject matter at hand. Shouldn't that be encouraged if the genre is going to move towards greater equality in representation?
> 
> Many books mentioned, I'd never heard of before. If I wanted to read more stories with female MCs, this would be great information.



You're absolutely right, and I always appreciate more book recommendations. But I nevertheless want to point out that in numerous threads on this forum, when someone says "I haven't read many fantasy books with ___!" someone else inevitably responds with "Have you read ___?" as if one book would change the fact that there is a huge imbalance in the fantasy genre. I want to make sure that Glutton isn't using the lists people have posted as justification for their apparent belief that there are tons of female-led fantasy books out there and they're totally easy to find.


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## glutton

saellys said:


> I want to make sure that Glutton isn't using the lists people have posted as justification for their apparent belief that there are tons of female-led fantasy books out there and they're totally easy to find.



Well it probably _is_ easy to find a ton of female-led fantasy books on say Amazon and for cheap (ebooks) if you look for them, a more accurate statement than 'there are few female-led fantasy books' might be 'there are few heavily marketed and traditionally published female-led fantasy books'.

The former statement (that there are few female-led fantasy books _period_) just doesn't seem factually true enough not to protest. Heck, you could probably read only female-led fantasy and have plenty of reading material.


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## Steerpike

Yes, I think that's right. If someone says there are not many female-led fantasy novels, they're making a statement of objective fact (and one that happens to be untrue). You can hardly fault respondents for addressing what they actually said rather than what they intended to say.

If someone indicates that their experience has been such that they haven't seen many female-led stories in the genre, then that's different and there could be a wide variety of explanations, ranging from that they don't have a very broad understanding of the genre to buying decisions of their book stores or libraries, to marketing.

In that regard, here's an interesting article:

Women Genre Authors Much Less Likely to Get Reviewed | The Mary Sue

Lots of women writing in the genre (and no they aren't all writing about male characters) but they aren't getting reviewed. 

Some of the statements made about experience are evidence of underlying problems in the market (see Chilari's posts above, where such books simply weren't available to her). But other posts, particularly when presented as objective statements (someone said something above to the effect that they couldn't read novels because the female characters were never well-developed) is just preposterous on its face. It just means they are reading the wrong fiction (and a very limited section of the market indeed). On a writing site a person posting has to be able to say what they mean and those replying are justified in responding to what was said.

As for lists of books, I posted mine in response to a challenge someone made, and frankly the person who made the challenge seems to have an extremely limited range of experience in the Fantasy genre. The question is whether this is evidence of something particular to them or symptomatic of the genre as a whole. For someone growing up in the 1990s or before, I think you can the problems were largely within the genre itself. Speaking from today's vantage point (having just walked through my local Barnes & Noble fantasy section yesterday and given the access to books online) I think you have to say that some of the fault lies with the reader. Unless you live nowhere near a sizable bookstore and are cutoff from the internet, then the only reason you can't find books with well-developed female characters, or plenty of female-led fantasies is that you aren't looking for them. 

As indicated by the article above, however, there are issues within the industry as well, and these can still have an effect because of the purchasing habits of many book-buyers (which is limiting in and of itself, but it is what it is). It is (or should be) more of a problem to the general book-buying public than to other writers, who should have a decent understanding of the genre they're trying to write in.


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## Nihal

I don't know if it matters or not to the authors here, but some people hadn't access to female-led or books with well developed females for another reason beside growing in the 90's-: Language.

If it's not a blockbuster or achieved a certain degree of success no one is going to translate the books. No national publisher will bother to print it. I _still_ have some trouble finding good not-so-famous books in my language, even famous authors _don't_ get translated if it doesn't sell. First, I turned to fan-made translations or Portugal-portuguese books. Now I picked the habit of reading in English, but I'm one in a thousand.

Theeen you can argue I should pick things written by people in my country. Really? I challenge you to find good books in fantasy genre. They're rare, and I bet it's like this in another countries too. Fantasy writing isn't a tradition here—some people frown upon any national author who writes fantasy that has _any_ foreign-inspired element, like if we should use our folklore or nothing—and I would be alienated if I decided to stop reading books from foreign authors.

So, the point about "successful" books with well developed females is valid from an worldwide point of view.


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## glutton

Nihal said:


> I don't know if it matters or not to the authors here, but some people hadn't access to female-led or books with well developed females for another reason beside growing in the 90's-: Language.
> 
> If it's not a blockbuster or achieved a certain degree of success no one is going to translate the books. No national publisher will bother to print it. I _still_ have some trouble finding good not-so-famous books in my language, even famous authors _don't_ get translated if it doesn't sell. First, I appealed to fan-made translations or Portugal-portuguese books. Now I picked the habit of reading in English, but I'm one in a thousand.
> 
> Theeen you can argue I should pick things written by people in my country. Really? I challenge you to find good books in fantasy genre. They're rare, and I bet it's like this in another countries too. Fnatasy writing isn't not a tradition here—some people frown upon any national author who writes fantasy that has _any_ foreign-inspired element, like if we should use our folklore or nothing—and I would be alienated if I decided to stop reading books from foreign authors.
> 
> So, the point about "successful" books with well developed females is valid from an worldwide point of view.



This is a good point and hopefully the advancement of automated translation technology will help with it.


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## Steerpike

glutton said:


> This is a good point and hopefully the advancement of automated translation technology will help with it.



Hopefully the translations would be better than a lot of the automated ones I see now


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## glutton

Hence the word 'advancement' lol.


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## Ophiucha

One must also consider ease of access to a big book store, particularly when talking about young adults. I'm 21 and I don't have a credit card, nor do the majority of my friends my age or younger. Online shopping is done sparingly and largely through some third party (for me, my husband; for my friends, their parents). We still do a lot of our book shopping at book stores, but... with Borders closed, there are huge areas where there aren't book stores that have entire rows of fantasy and science fiction. The closest Barnes & Noble to my parents' house (where I am staying right now) is far enough out that my mum wouldn't take me there more than twice a year. The closest book store to this place has _two _shelves of fantasy books, maybe 100 titles in total, and the only non-urban female-lead stories they had were _The Mists of Avalon_ and _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_. It's been a few years since I was at my old high school, but unless they've done some serious expanding, those two titles are two more than our library had. The only thing I distinctly recall them having was _Dragonriders of Pern_, which I didn't like much in high school since I didn't like science fiction much at the time. Our local library had a bit more variety, but I had to be driven there by my mom if I ever wanted to take out a book. She was good about buying me books online when I asked for them, but libraries and the local Borders (which went out of business a bit after I graduated; my brother went two years without one) were still where I got the vast majority of the books I'd read in high school, and it's no coincidence that I didn't read many books with female protagonists until I moved to a major city with a school that has one of the biggest libraries in North America and a bookstore dedicated entirely to SFF a twenty minute bus ride from campus.


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## saellys

Everything Opiucha said above is applicable to lots of people today, just so we're all clear. 

And since we're getting personal about "experience" with the fantasy genre that so many of us don't seem to have, here's another obstacle for you: I don't have a lot of time to read books. I'm raising a kid, fixing up a cargo bike to be my primary vehicle, training with my local roller derby league, and dealing with whatever else comes up in between. I've been reading _The Deed of Paksenarrion_ at mealtimes, between interruptions, for two months and I'm halfway finished. When I have the leisure time to read, I do try to focus my attention on female-centered books, and that often means looking at recommendations like those posted above. But the other problem, the one relevant to this thread in particular, is that sometimes those recommendations are not accurate. People told me for months that _The Lions of Al-Rassan_ had a female protagonist with agency, and when I finally had a chance to read it, I discovered that wasn't true. It was very frustrating, and now I'm hesitant to dedicate several months of reading to a book someone tells me I will like because of the female protagonist. 

But the above is just my personal experience, of course.


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## glutton

Ophiucha said:


> I'm 21 and I don't have a credit card, nor do the majority of my friends my age or younger.



Most online sellers accept debit also, don't they? You just put your debit card info into the credit card info fields. Amazon also accepts direct from bank account payments, and some sellers accept Paypal which can be directly funded from a bank account... kind of surprised since I excepted younger people to be much more savvy about making online payments than me.


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## glutton

saellys said:


> But the other problem, the one relevant to this thread in particular, is that sometimes those recommendations are not accurate. People told me for months that _The Lions of Al-Rassan_ had a female protagonist with agency, and when I finally had a chance to read it, I discovered that wasn't true. It was very frustrating, and now I'm hesitant to dedicate several months of reading to a book someone tells me I will like because of the female protagonist.



Now this I can definitely sympathize with, and I'm not sure how one would go about getting around this problem beyond reading spoiler-type reviews/comments on the book in question.


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## Nihal

glutton said:


> Most online sellers accept debit also, don't they? You just put your debit card info into the credit card info fields. Amazon also accepts direct from bank account payments, and some sellers accept Paypal which can be directly funded from a bank account... kind of surprised since I excepted younger people to be much more savvy about making online payments than me.



Depends upon where you are, again. Paypal _doesn't_ have an agreement with banks from many countries. I don't have a national credit card (I don't like credit cards =P) but I have an international, I got it only to use Paypal because here it's the only way to get cash in your account–unless you're a seller too; and Paypal is my bridge to the world.

It's also wise to mention that international cards aren't the easiest thing to get your hands on, it usually boils down to having a job and proving it.


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## glutton

Nihal said:


> Depends upon where you are, again. Paypal _doesn't_ have an agreement with banks from many countries. I don't have a national credit card (I don't like credit cards =P) but I have an international, I got it only to use Paypal because here it's the only way to get cash in your account—unless you're a seller too; and Paypal is my bridge to the world.
> 
> It's also wise to mention that international cards aren't the easiest thing to get your hands on, it usually boils down to having a job and proving it.



Ah okay, I guess we have it super easy here in America... globalization really needs to happen faster at least in terms of providing for worldwide online commerce without such fuss.


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## Ophiucha

Inane Adult Financial Chatter: Half and half with Canadian banks. The bank I was with until I got married had really awful online banking options - they were literally the only bank of the major four or five that I couldn't make direct payments with for my tuition. You could get it to work with Paypal, but that was about it. Amazon is a bit finicky about accepting the bank stuff from Canadian banks, but I did use it a few times back when I still had an American bank account. My current bank doesn't seem to like Paypal but it will do Amazon Canada without complaining, though Amazon Canada costs more than the American one most of the time, so I don't tend to buy books from them (see also: my reference a few pages ago to me also being poor as heck).

On Topic: Definitely true with the reviews and recommendations. Some of it is just a matter of opinion - one person's 'strong independent woman' is another's oversexualized caricature - but sometimes people will recommend something and it's just, like, a real stretch of the imagination to even call the woman in question the main character. This is particularly true of romances, where the woman might technically be narrating the story, but it's still the man who is the chosen one, the magical one, the dynamic character. The female perspective might be there, but it doesn't do much good if she's not actually doing _anything_ besides telling the story. (Unless you are going for like a Dr. Watson sort of thing, I guess, but then I'd still like a lady as your Sherlock Holmes. And as your Moriarty - Moriarty is like my favourite literary character and I would kill for a good genderbend of him.)

You also have difficulty trusting adaptations, too. _Game of Thrones_, though the source material had problematic elements, has a lot of unnecessary misogynistic overtones. In a recent episode, a female character (Brienne of Tarth) insulted one of the male characters by comparing him to a woman... when _she herself was a woman_, and considered women who die in childbirth equally valiant as those who die in combat. In the same scene of the book, she just called him 'craven'. Arya Stark had a similar scene last season, I believe. It's very irritating that they would take these female characters who were, by and large, positive and female-friendly and add so much unnecessary pettiness to the characters (not to mention a couple of extra scenes of assault against these women). I love the show, but it really bothers me that the writers would change that element of the source material.


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## PaulineMRoss

saellys said:


> People told me for months that _The Lions of Al-Rassan_ had a female protagonist with agency, and when I finally had a chance to read it, I discovered that wasn't true.



Mostly when when people say that a book has a female protagonist with agency, they mean one of the main characters is female and she does stuff. It's really not the same thing.

Here are a few that I've enjoyed recently that genuinely have female protagonists with agency:

'Havenstar' by Glenda Larke
Anything by Andrea K HÃ¶st
The Draykon trilogy by Charlotte E English
'Thorn' by Intisar Khanani
'The Duchess of the Shallows' by Neil McGarry and Daniel Ravipinto


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## Jamber

Ophiucha said:


> You also have difficulty trusting adaptations, too. _Game of Thrones_, though the source material had problematic elements, has a lot of unnecessary misogynistic overtones. In a recent episode, a female character (Brienne of Tarth) insulted one of the male characters by comparing him to a woman... when _she herself was a woman_, and considered women who die in childbirth equally valiant as those who die in combat.



GRR Martin certainly produces interesting characters, but I don't think he sets out to write feminist ones. I'd argue instead that he uses that particular struggle (woman against limiting gender norms) as a source of narrative and internal conflict, just as he uses father-son, inheritance, sexuality, you name it. As far as I can see, everyone in GOT has a huge conflict that pits them against their own inner core of place/self/belief and stops them being who they believe they should be.

For Brienne to utter a misogynist insult was, for me, interesting (and consistent) rather than disappointing.

cheers

Jennie


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## Steerpike

Jamber said:


> For Brienne to utter a misogynist insult was, for me, interesting (and consistent) rather than disappointing.



And, such an insult would probably have the intended effect on the target.


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## Shockley

Reading threads like this make me think of the last two women I dated, who are very different.

 The first one was very, very emotional (to the extreme) and was a music major. The other one was very logical and rational and, like me, is a historian/political scientist - she can out bench most people and drinks Scotch like a champ.


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## saellys

Ophiucha said:


> ... Moriarty is like my favourite literary character and I would kill for a good genderbend of him.



YES PLEASE.



Ophiucha said:


> You also have difficulty trusting adaptations, too. _Game of Thrones_, though the source material had problematic elements, has a lot of unnecessary misogynistic overtones. In a recent episode, a female character (Brienne of Tarth) insulted one of the male characters by comparing him to a woman... when _she herself was a woman_, and considered women who die in childbirth equally valiant as those who die in combat. In the same scene of the book, she just called him 'craven'. Arya Stark had a similar scene last season, I believe. It's very irritating that they would take these female characters who were, by and large, positive and female-friendly and add so much unnecessary pettiness to the characters (not to mention a couple of extra scenes of assault against these women). I love the show, but it really bothers me that the writers would change that element of the source material.



This is my number one problem with _Game of Thrones_ right now. That Brienne line tore me up inside, and Arya's "most girls are idiots" moment last season was completely out of character. More on that below...



PaulineMRoss said:


> Mostly when when people say that a book has a female protagonist with agency, they mean one of the main characters is female and she does stuff. It's really not the same thing.
> 
> Here are a few that I've enjoyed recently that genuinely have female protagonists with agency:
> 
> 'Havenstar' by Glenda Larke
> Anything by Andrea K HÃ¶st
> The Draykon trilogy by Charlotte E English
> 'Thorn' by Intisar Khanani
> 'The Duchess of the Shallows' by Neil McGarry and Daniel Ravipinto



Too right. I think you and I generally agree on what agency really means, so I will definitely put these in my queue!



Jamber said:


> GRR Martin certainly produces interesting characters, but I don't think he sets out to write feminist ones. I'd argue instead that he uses that particular struggle (woman against limiting gender norms) as a source of narrative and internal conflict, just as he uses father-son, inheritance, sexuality, you name it. As far as I can see, everyone in GOT has a huge conflict that pits them against their own inner core of place/self/belief and stops them being who they believe they should be.
> 
> For Brienne to utter a misogynist insult was, for me, interesting (and consistent) rather than disappointing.
> 
> cheers
> 
> Jennie



But Martin has a grasp on the nuances of humanity within those conflicts, and he understands that just because someone transgresses the societal norms for their gender (Arya, Brienne, Asha Greyjoy, the Mormont ladies), does not mean they have to despise the people who fit into those norms. It takes very little contextual analysis to see that Arya had a deep-seated wish to fit in socially the way Sansa did. She wasn't good at "ladylike" things, and it was a source of frustration to her even as "manly" things were a source of enjoyment. 

As for Brienne, her admiration for other women is overt in the text. Like Ophiucha said, she expressed disgust at the injustice that no one wrote songs about women who died in childbirth. She admired Catelyn Stark immensely, and it wasn't because Catelyn bore her trials "like a man," so I can't help but wonder which "bloody woman" show-Brienne had encountered that book-Brienne had not to so sour her attitude toward the gender.



Steerpike said:


> And, such an insult would probably have the intended effect on the target.



But why? Why does that have to be the impetus? Jaime _likes_ women (well, okay, Cersei), and by that point in the book and the show, he already liked and respected Brienne. Someone on Tumblr told me Brienne was trying to make a statement about Jaime's own misogyny, but that doesn't make sense to me, because how would saying he sounded like a woman teach him anything about misogyny? He sat up and got over himself and ate some bread, so I guess it didn't.


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## Steerpike

I haven't seen the show. However, if Brienne was talking to someone she knew to be a misogynist, I could see the line as one meant to bait that person with an insult, and probably effectively. It's all about context and character. Whether the comment was in line with her character, I don't know.


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## glutton

I would hesitate to condemn a female character for making a sexist-sounding comment. In real life, people who say 'controversial' things are not necessarily 'bad' people or truly prejudiced. Someone who calls another person a 'faggot' mockingly doesn't have to hate actual gay people, nor does a woman who criticizes a man for being a 'girl' need think her own gender inferior. Some people are just verbal barbarians and don't concern themselves with being PC, but just say whatever comes to mind based on the type of speech they've heard growing up... in some ways, these people might be appreciated for being more pure.


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## Ophiucha

I agree with saellys' assessment of the characters in regards to whether or not they would use/be effected by the line in question, but I would go so far as to even say that it doesn't matter if they would. The point is that in the book, the exact same scene played out in the same way with the line 'craven'. The writers of the show chose to change this to a gendered insult for _no reason_. At best, it is just an unnecessary alteration from the source material. At worst, it is unnecessarily sexist and out of character for two of the major recurring characters of the series.

A single instance could be excused, if still ultimately unnecessary, but the fact is that the writers have done this _several _times with _different _characters. Arya saying "most girls are idiots" is, again, out of character for her - she's a lady, who loves and respects her mother and sister (who are both very ladylike). There was also Asha Greyjoy - who I think has a different name in the show, but I can't remember what it was. She has a line in the books where she scoffs at men who use the word c**t... and in the show, she calls her brother the _exact same word_. The lack of irony with which they could write that into her character is profound.


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## glutton

Ophiucha said:


> There was also Asha Greyjoy - who I think has a different name in the show, but I can't remember what it was. She has a line in the books where she scoffs at men who use the word c**t... and in the show, she calls her brother the _exact same word_. The lack of irony with which they could write that into her character is profound.



Well in the case of Asha, they did change her character quite a bit overall and when you look at her on the show, she kind of looks exactly like the kind of person who would use the word 'c**t'... yeah I know talking about her look might be stereotyping, but I think that's what the show creators are trying to do ie. reinforce how the character is supposed to come off with her appearance... and off topic I think she has an awesome look on the show, much prefer it to most of the fanart depictions of Asha made before she was cast. *Ducks tomatoes*


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## Ophiucha

I don't agree with the idea that somebody could "[look] exactly like the kind of person who would use the word 'c**t'", but I do prefer how she looks on the show to most of the fanart - I love Elia Fernandez's illustration of her, but I think it looks a fair bit like how she does on the show, anyway.

Regarding the comment above my previous one, I think it really depends on who says it and in what context. A woman - like Asha - using the word c**t, or a gay person using the word fa**ot is very different from a man or a straight person using it. The latter could be excused between friends, if everyone in the group is comfortable with that. My old group in high school was almost entirely female, save for one guy, and we always let him use 'b*tch' in the same friendly way we did with each other. But if you're using it as an insult in any context, regardless of your own gender/sexuality/whatever, it really doesn't matter if you don't regard yourself as sexist or homophobic, you are using the word to demean somebody by implying that being that way is _bad_; it simply wouldn't be an insult if all you were saying is 'don't be such a person with slightly different biological and social traits to you', it's an insult because the word 'woman' or any of the less pleasant derogatives carries the connotation of negativity (specifically, of weakness). When Asha is talking to Theon in the show, it is used as an insult; when Brienne likens Jaime to a 'bloody woman' it is an insult.

*ETA:* On a related note and on the earlier subject of recommendations: anyone have any good ones for more - for lack of a better word - _feminine_ female protagonists? Many of the great female protagonists mentioned so far in this thread have been warrior women and runaway princesses escaping arranged marriage sorts of ladies, which is fine, but one of my favourite _Game of Thrones_ ladies is Sansa Stark, so I'd love more recs for girls like her who get their own story. The only one that comes to mind off the top of my head is Mrs. Frisby from _Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH_ (Mrs. Brisby, if you've only seen the film). The 'mothers protecting their kids/homes' is probably the most typical plot line with that sort of character, but I love a good subversion of that if anyone has any ideas.


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## glutton

Ophiucha said:


> Regarding the comment above my previous one, I think it really depends on who says it and in what context. A woman - like Asha - using the word c**t, or a gay person using the word fa**ot is very different from a man or a straight person using it. The latter could be excused between friends, if everyone in the group is comfortable with that. My old group in high school was almost entirely female, save for one guy, and we always let him use 'b*tch' in the same friendly way we did with each other. But if you're using it as an insult in any context, regardless of your own gender/sexuality/whatever, it really doesn't matter if you don't regard yourself as sexist or homophobic, you are using the word to demean somebody by implying that being that way is _bad_; it simply wouldn't be an insult if all you were saying is 'don't be such a person with slightly different biological and social traits to you', it's an insult because the word 'woman' or any of the less pleasant derogatives carries the connotation of negativity (specifically, of weakness). When Asha is talking to Theon in the show, it is used as an insult; when Brienne likens Jaime to a 'bloody woman' it is an insult.



It might be a little different in this context because the source material doesn't use such language, but in general I wouldn't think much of a female character using a gendered term as an insult - I've heard females in real life mock guys like this many times, and I wouldn't think that those women are sexist against their own gender... it's natural for people to do this, and I find it a leap to attribute sexist motives based on it. Most people, I'd think, don't think so much when throwing out insults whether in real anger or in jest, how often do younger people say 'faggot' offhand without even actually thinking about homosexuality? A female character using a gendered term as an insult does reflect the values of the culture they (or even the writer) live in, but I don't think there's any 'responsibility' to watch out for it and/or avoid it. To read so much into offhand use of language is often over-scrutinizing things IMO, and it's much better to judge the characters or work as a whole than to nitpick at 'sexist' language that women use all the time in real life, and people don't and are hardly obliged to think about.

I think the GoT TV writers just thought that the language they choose fit/'worked' in the scene, and if so, why should they be required to be so concerned with anything else? As for changing it from the source material, maybe they didn't pay that much attention to the nuances mentioned or remember it?


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## Steerpike

Changing it from the books does make me wonder what their thought processes was. Seems like a pointless decision.

I do think it all comes down to character and context for this sort of thing. For example, Loki's insult in the Avengers movie caused a big uproar. As soon as I heard it in the theater I knew people would be upset about it, but in the context of that movie it didn't bother me. Loki's a bad guy and it seemed to me to be the sort of thing he might say. It wasn't held out as positive in any way. If Stark had said it, it's a different story.

Characters have to be free to act in character, and that includes despicable characters. In the case of Brienne, going with what was written in the book makes a lot more sense, it seems to me. Not sure who thought it was a good idea to change the dialogue.


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## glutton

But what I was thinking is that maybe the show writers just didn't pay that much attention to things like Asha protesting the word 'c**t' or forgot about it, and/or didn't think about the implications of the other lines mentioned. That might be my own bias working though to attribute a lack of carefulness (like mine lol) to the writers.

The worst of the lines mentioned is definitely Arya's though which is pretty unlikeable when you think about it.


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## T.Allen.Smith

saellys said:


> ...Arya's "most girls are idiots" moment last season was completely out of character.
> 
> ...It takes very little contextual analysis to see that Arya had a deep-seated wish to fit in socially the way Sansa did. She wasn't good at "ladylike" things, and it was a source of frustration to her even as "manly" things were a source of enjoyment.



This is an interesting take on the Arya character. I never saw her "most girls are idiots" moment as out of character as I felt she views other girls in the same way she views Sansa. She thinks they all aspire to be Sansa and finds that idiotic. Further, we interpreted Arya's viewpoint on social expectations differently. Where you saw a desire to fit in socially like Sansa and a frustration as she tried to do so, I felt she was frustrated because she was expected to do so. The frustration, in my view, came from her disinterest in "ladylike" pursuit yet still being forced along that path.


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## Mindfire

Just to be clear, what's the difference between calling someone a c**t and calling them a dick? Other than the fact that one is (for whatever reason) more profane than the other?

EDIT: Also, I'm casting my vote on the "Arya's line was in character" side. I don't think it made her unlikable. Quite the opposite. She reminds me of my sister in a way. She'd say something like that.


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## T.Allen.Smith

Steerpike said:


> Characters have to be free to act in character, and that includes despicable characters. In the case of Brienne, going with what was written in the book makes a lot more sense, it seems to me. Not sure who thought it was a good idea to change the dialogue.



Well, Martin is also a TV writer & has had a long career in TV. He works on that aspect along with HBO so I'm certain he had a high level of input on the decision.


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## Steerpike

T.Allen.Smith said:


> Well, Martin is also a TV writer & has had a long career in TV. He works on that aspect along with HBO so I'm certain he had a high level of input on the decision.



Yeah, that's true, he has a great deal of experience in television. Maybe he made the change or approved it, I don't know. Would be interesting to be behind the scenes when writers make these kinds of decisions.

For what it's worth, my view of Arya from the books is that she doesn't really like 'girls' that much, as a general rule. It has been so long I'd have to go back to see what made me think that, but I knew 'tomboys' growing up who could hardly stand other girls, and she strikes me that way a lot of the time.


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## glutton

The line could be in character, I just said it was the 'worst' meaning that IMO it seems the most worthy of drawing ire compared to 'c**t' or 'woman' used as insults.


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## Nihal

Steerpike said:


> For what it's worth, my view of Arya from the books is that she doesn't really like 'girls' that much, as a general rule. It has been so long I'd have to go back to see what made me think that, but I knew 'tomboys' growing up who could hardly stand other girls, and she strikes me that way a lot of the time.



I had the same impression, wanting to fit in doesn't equal to "liking". It also brings to my mind the proverb "It is only at the tree loaded with fruit that people throw stones.".

About Brienne's line, it makes sense to me. She had a goal and said what was needed to achieve it. I get the feeling that _sometimes_ she's already so over the issue that words don't matter anymore. She knows her truth, she believes it, she can say something she knows will be an insult to a man–specially because it's coming from a woman–without agreeing with it because she's sure of her beliefs and words are just words.


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## Ophiucha

From what I've heard, George R. R. Martin is too busy (god knows doing what because I'm not seeing a new book out yet George...) to have a heavy hand in the little elements of the show like specific lines - he writes his one episode a season and gets asked about major changes like reworking the time line or adding/removing characters, but something like changing 'craven' to 'bloody woman' in an otherwise identical scene probably doesn't make it to his desk.

*Regarding Arya:* I personally did not see Arya as against the other girls - she wasn't like them, but she wasn't above them, either. She has problems with the way things are for women, and in some ways she definitely projects that onto the women in her life, but she is unquestionably very respectful of her mother and Sansa despite them being feminine, and she definitely wouldn't consider them part of a broad 'most girls are idiots' line. Given how few other girls she knows, at best we can assume she is making an unfounded, broad generalization about girls she's never met, which just doesn't seem in character for her, given everything.

*Regarding Mindfire's Question on Insults: *Well, the basic fact that femininity is regarded as "worse" than masculinity is really the only thing that differentiates them - I don't really like any gendered insults, though the vast majority of curse words are that way. On a raw level, I don't think there is a strong difference between c**t and d*ck - they both mean, essentially, the same thing, as long as you are using it on the gender the insult pertains to. A history of sexism in Westeros (and our world) makes c**t more powerful as an insult, because it has been used to demean people who were oppressed. Also, I think female gendered insults are made worse by the society in question's sexism because... well, if you call a woman a d*ck, it doesn't really mean anything worse than calling a man a d*ck... but if you call a man a c**t, you are not only conveying the same meaning as the masculine insult, but you are also attaching femininity to it - this is particularly true of b***h and p***y, which are both used explicitly to convey weakness when used again a man.

Part of it is also very much how the society of Westeros _views _women. While I wouldn't call our society a utopia of gender equality by any stretch, modern day America is leaps and bounds ahead of Westeros and that gives gendered insults much less power. Consider, for instance, 'bastard'. In our society, that... doesn't mean anything. It's a cuss, an insult, but it has no backing in anything. There is no societal prejudice against the children of unwed couples, nobody uses 'bastard' in the same way every man, woman, and child uses it against Jon Snow. In their society, it is a more powerful insult, and in a society where women are regarded as poorly as they are in Westeros, a word like c**t has a lot more power, too.

For the record, I'm only *asterisking since I'm not sure which words are against the rules for this forum. Don't want to tip off any censors or whatever.


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## T.Allen.Smith

Instead of focusing on a comparison of vulgarities and societal viewpoints on those words, please keep focus on the topic at hand which is "Writing from the Female POV".

If we are discussing characterization with uses of particular words (like in the example use with the character Brienne), then it is fitting within the context of the main discussion. Once we delve into contemporary cultural perspectives on the use of vulgarities, we are stretching the boundaries of our family friendly guidelines. Please remain mindful. 

Thank you.


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## ThinkerX

Some real life things I keep in mind to help differentiate between male and female outlooks:

When I was in high school (not quite back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but back there anyhow), I typically climbed out of bed about half an hour before I had to catch the bus - just enough time to shower, get dressed, and eat.

When my daughter was in high school (I have no sisters), she would typically get out of bed an hour or more before it was time to catch the bus.  She didn't bother with breakfast; that time was to make her 'look presentable'.

Presentable for a teenage boy is clean skin, clean clothes, and combed hair.

Presentable for a teenage girl apparently involves being really clean, fashionable clothes, plus styled hair and makeup.

When I commented on this to my daughter, she patiently explained that by the standards of the girls at school, she skimped a lot on these things; her friends apparently spent two hours or so 'prepping' before heading off to school.

More recent incident from work:

Bossette came in and said she'd be taking photo's for new ID badges.

Reaction of the six or eight (mostly middle aged) men:  'Grunt.' 'Whatever'.

Reaction of the six or eight (mostly middle aged) women: 'We need time to put our warpaint on!'  'I left my makeup at home!'
followed by a general female stampede to the rest room.

When it comes to story writing, this tells me that female characters are going to care a great deal more about their appearance than male ones.  

Years ago, I knew a struggling local merchant, who out of sheer desperation, put up a rack full of cheap jewelry, sunglasses, ect in his shop.  The teenage boys that frequented his shop barely knew it existed.  The teenage girls that came in almost invariably checked it out and bought merchandise from it. 

So for story writing, a male character will likely walk right by the stall selling ointments and combs, while a female character might spend quite a bit of time inspecting the wares.

Another item:  I spent years delivering pizza in my younger days, mostly for the same outfit. (desperation at first, followed by the realization that a fair pile of cash could be made with the right shifts).  I was far from the only pizza driver at this place; there were quite a few others, usually male ranging from competent and reliable to...well the exact opposite.  Far fewer females put in for the job.  The ones that did either quit or became waitresses in short order, even though the money was substantially less.  Reason: they hated (delivery) driving.  For whatever reason, this was near universal, be they 18 or 38.  

After that, I drove a passenger van for a while.  90% of the riders were female; many used it on a regular basis to get back and forth to work or school. Males used it only if they had a plane to catch, issues with their drivers license, or something of the sort.

So...story writing: women probably won't mind being 'passengers' nearly as much as men.  Hence, you see a man and a woman in a cart together, the one holding the reigns will likely be male.


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## Steerpike

ThinkerX - it might tell you that on average women care more about that, but you can create a female character that doesn't give a damn about her appearance


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## ThinkerX

> ThinkerX - it might tell you that on average women care more about that, but you can create a female character that doesn't give a damn about her appearance



Still a place to start.

And there's more than mere appearances, its attitude as well.


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## wordwalker

Steerpike said:


> ThinkerX - it might tell you that on average women care more about that, but you can create a female character that doesn't give a damn about her appearance





ThinkerX said:


> And there's more than mere appearances, its attitude as well.



Remembering, of course, there's also attitude of the people around someone. Do women care more about their appearance, or do men (and some women too) care more about treating them like --well, like Brienne-- whenever they don't bother?


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## Ophiucha

Though considering the stereotypes and cultural standards is important, I don't think you can just apply the modern American standard to most fantasy settings. Many things which are considered feminine, or at least gender neutral, in our society were masculine at some point, somewhere. For instance, in Heian Japan, the soft arts - poetry, calligraphy, etc. - were a masculine trait because women were not taught to write. Romance was the same; all the great romances until the 1800s with Austen onward were written by men with masculine ideals of love and courtship. Fashion, though I don't know of a time or place when it was exclusively masculine, was not always something regarded as inherently feminine, but rather inherently _elite_. As nobody but the wealthy could afford to consider such things. Certainly even after Western views turned care for appearance into a feminine trait, there were your fops and dandies who cared deeply about it and were not always viewed negatively. Lord Byron is practically the poster boy for dandy-ism, and many loved (and still love) him for it.

Given the potential range of a fantasy setting, the possibilities for society's idea of a woman are basically endless. You could write about a matriarchal society, where women are 'natural leaders' (quote, unquote) and 'born to take charge'. There is nothing about those traits that are inherently masculine, and there have been a handful of such societies. Plus, it's easy to twist the language. Women are leaders of the household, taking care of the children and making sure things run smoothly while the men are out doing the manual and dangerous labour, and what is the queen but the mother of a country? But regardless of whether your society has values essentially identical to modern America's or if it is completely different, it is always important to know how it views its people, since those people are going to be your characters.


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## Alex Beecroft

Exactly. In the 18th Century a high born man would also have rolled out of bed and then spent several hours dressing with a small army of servants to paint his face, pluck his eyebrows, apply beauty spots, style and powder his hair or help him choose his wig and outfit for the day. Society's idea of what was 'manly' changed, so men stopped doing that stuff. These days it's changing back, so some men now moisturize and spend hours clipping their beards into odd shapes and use guyliner. This kind of gender behaviour is entirely mutable depending on cultural pressures. So why not try writing a culture which is not identical to 21st Century America, and make your own rules about what is 'manly' and what's 'feminine?'


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## saellys

ThinkerX, the deliver drivers at my Dominos store were an even split between male and female. Just because your limited experiences align with an arbitrary stereotype you have accepted as truth doesn't mean your writing has to follow suit.


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