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On Writing Women. Looking for honesty...
- Thread starter Heliotrope
- Start date
Since some people have brought it up, I do think men and women think and behave a little different on average - there are small differences in the brain, large hormonal differences, and even the obvious physical differences will affect people in some ways.
I don't think this conversation has been about any of that, though.
I got the impression from Helio's OP that the question was about the relationships that develop once you have people of different genders and look at the ways different people interact. LOTR gave us elf-dwarf relationships and wizard-hobbit relationships and ranger king to steward's son relationships. It didn't give us the types of relationships most people are familiar with.
I thought the point of the thread was, don't you want to those kinds of relationships where it does matter? And I think a lot of us are saying, well, yes.
I don't think this conversation has been about any of that, though.
I got the impression from Helio's OP that the question was about the relationships that develop once you have people of different genders and look at the ways different people interact. LOTR gave us elf-dwarf relationships and wizard-hobbit relationships and ranger king to steward's son relationships. It didn't give us the types of relationships most people are familiar with.
I thought the point of the thread was, don't you want to those kinds of relationships where it does matter? And I think a lot of us are saying, well, yes.
pmmg
Myth Weaver
I've been talking around it. I think this is obviously true, based on a lifetime of, well...a lifetime.
I agree with, yes. I prefer stories with more male/female relationships to Dwarf and Elf, but LOTR did a pretty good job pretty much without them. Maybe it could have been better. I don't think LOTR did anything that did not seem true to that world. If it did, I don't recall anymore. As I've said before. He did his job, and got his place, but its our turn now, right? We stand on the shoulders of giants, and he gets to be one of them. So write something better.
Russ
Istar
There is actually a lot of science that supports this as well. They question still contested however is how much of those differences in behaviour are caused by culture (environment) and how much is caused by hardwired factors (genetics). The science is showing significant sex behaviour differences in younger and younger children, which means that at least some of the behavioural differences are likely genetic. The next big job is to figure out which is which, which ones we like and what to do about them.
Returning the the Alien example that SP brought up, I would argue that Alien is the exception rather than the rule. IT contains two of the factors that I identified the can lead to a story where gender is non-factor. One is a gender blind culture (proven by the female space marine in Aliens) and an isolated man vs. nature type story.
In a more typical story, where characters will interact with a culture that is not gender blind, sex or gender is a factor. That doesn't mean the writer has to go out of his way to highlight those differences, it just means that they are there and need to be taken into account or the story will have issues.
Mythopoet
Auror
But any conversation about writing women and comparing/contrasting writing women and writing men always comes back to this. Because no matter what you say to open the topic, someone (usually multiple someones) will pop up to spout a lot about the hormonal and neural differences between men and women. And often they'll have "studies" to back them up. (I put "studies" in quotes because most people don't even bother to look into the study and determine if the source is legitimate or the methodology is sound. They just repeat whatever headline they read about it. I'm not saying anyone in particular here is doing that. I'm talking about my observations in general about when this conversation comes up anywhere.)
Now, the problem with this assertion is that it always ends up being exaggerated. People say, "well obviously there are differences between men and women." Usually based on their experiences of the men and women they know personally. However, they don't take into consideration whether or not the observed behavior is an actual result of the person's biological nature or whether the behavior is simply engraved by society or a reaction to the expectations of society. Are women naturally less violent and aggressive? Or have we been treated as delicate flowers who need to be protected for so long that we don't even consider any alternative in our formative years? And here's the thing, no matter how many studies you conduct, you'll never find the answer to this question because it is simply too complex. There are too many factors that would need to be taken into account. And any large number of women that you studied would be much too varied to come to any kind of general conclusion.
But "studies" generally ignore the fact that "women" are not a monolithic entity. They have to because science depends on observed phenomenon always acting in the same way under the same general conditions. But people simply aren't like that. You can put two people in the exact same conditions and observe them act in wildly different ways and there are simply too many factors involved to come to any reasonable, reliable conclusion as to why. Studies of human behavior always end up generalizing their results. They will give you what ever the largest common denominator is as the "result" of how people act while ignoring all the other people in the study who didn't act that way as if that's not important at all. (Which I suppose is true, because whatever the intentions of the people conducting the study, the only practical application of such studies is figuring out how to manipulate the largest percentage of people possible.)
The same goes for people who simply use common sense to observe how the genders interact in the real world around them. That's a nice idea, but the first problem is that you can't be objective about it. You can't look at the question from the outside because you are a human being also taking part in the interactions between the genders and you are physically incapable of looking at the problem from the outside. The second problem is that you are also incapable of considering all the factors. You may know some of the people you observe fairly well, but no one knows enough about other people to sort out a question of this scope. People are simply too complex.
The reality is that even if men and women do have physical differences, different levels of hormones for example, those things don't form who you are. They have some influence. But for the most part they are there to facilitate certain biological processes that have little to do with who you are as a person and whether or not you like fighting. People are too complex and there is so much more that forms their nature than chemicals in their body. The presence of my uterus enables me to have children and makes me a mother, but it does not form who I am as a person in any other area. Unless I allow society to tell me it does. Unless I allow other people to tell me that being a mother means that I am a nurturer who has to stay home and nurture and that's my role and nothing else. The idea that women = stay at home nurturers and men = earners and protectors is a result of how society has decided things should be, not a result of my biology.
Now, personally, I choose to stay at home and mother my children. But that is mostly because I am an incredibly lazy and self centered person who HATES working for other people and also because I love being with my kids. My husband works outside the home because honestly isn't capable of running the household but he's very good at what he does at work. But that is NOT because he's a man, but a result of his personal nature including his autism. It has nothing to do with my hormones or sex organs or his. But a lot of people out there would look at me and my choice to remain at home with my kids and his choice to work and assume that it's because I'm a woman and he's a man. BUT YOU CAN'T DO THAT. You can't boil people down to what you can observe. There's too much inside us that can't be seen.
I suppose this has been a bit of a long rant that looks like it has gone off topic, but my point is this: you simply can't assume that what you observe in other people or even what scientists observe in other people is the result of a certain thing. You can't lump humans into huge groups of "men are like this" and "women are like this". The truth is that humans are an infinite spectrum of individual differences that come from an infinite amount of sources. And it's not even men on one side and women on the other. It's all mixed up. Some men and women will be completely different from each other, and others will be so similar you couldn't tell the difference without society's markers. We always want to be able to tell the difference, so we tell people that men cut their hair short and women grow it long or women wear pink and men wear blue. But those are only superficial signs that come from outside. They have nothing to do with our nature and thus are useless and even dangerous.
People can go around saying "well obviously there are some physical differences. There have to be." But when it comes down to it, those differences can't be quantified in any meaningful way and mostly people are just making them up out of their own biases. And people can say, "well certainly I wouldn't do that. I know better." But do you? Take a look at how you write women vs. how you write men and ask yourself seriously whether or not the differences you've written in a result of unquestioned assumptions or the result of digging deep and trying to truly understand the nature, not of men and women, but of people. Do you hide behind comfortable labels and stereotypes, or do you accept the true complexity of humanity?
I'm not singling anyone here out or addressing this to anyone in particular, despite quoting Devor above. This is something that every single author needs to consider honestly for themselves. Including me. It's normal to just slide along the path of least resistance. But to transcend normality and achieve greatness you have to force yourself to dig deeper and question these things for yourself in the context of your own work.
Ok, this got A LOT longer than I intended. I just kind of spilled out everything going through my mind. This is everything I feel I have to say at this time and I'm going to try not to come back to this thread because I seriously just spent way more time than I can afford to writing this. If you want to continue to discuss this subject with me, pm me.
I'm not going to speak to the wider discussion here; it goes beyond my pay grade. But I'm writing a story right now and gender enters into it, so I'll contribute in that manner. My WIP is called A Child of Great Promise and the main character is Talysse, and she's female.
Why is Talysse a girl?
It was a whim.
That’s not a profound answer, I realize. I had the title first. My notion was of a young person who was supposed to do great things—not a child of destiny, but one who showed promise, and who kept not living up to that promise. A problem child. One who in fact would do great things, but not according to the expectations.
In picturing this kid, I sort of experimentally, provisionally, thought female. I’m not sure that was my first thought, or if I deliberately swapped genders. My previous book was predominantly about males, so maybe I was looking to change things up. I cannot recall.
What I do recall is that as soon as I thought of her as female, the character was locked. She was female. I went off to find a name and eventually came back with Talysse, and there she was. Characters can take shape like that.
Next was her age, and there presented a problem. If she’s nubile, then sex becomes part of the context. It’s a lot easier to move a boy of fifteen through a medieval world than to move a female of that age. So Talysse has slid around quite a bit, from twelve or thirteen all the way up to twenty or so. I couldn’t make her too old or I’d have to give up that title. If I made her too young, I couldn’t sell her doing some of the things she would need to do. Even now, her age is somewhat unclear to me. Teen.
Making her female drove some important decisions. I put her in a quasi-monastery to keep her away from the whole business of marriage. I gave her a companion and so developed Detta, one of my favorite characters. I made her a kind of orphan, a donata, which in turn drove a whole bunch of consequences.
I doubt very much I would have gone down those roads had the main character been a boy. He probably would have wound up in a boarding school of some sort, with Tom Brown-like bullies and tyrannical teachers. I do remember sort of peeking down that road and rejecting it as too conventional. Maybe that’s when I had the notion to make the character a female.
Talysse still presents challenges for me. Should she fall in love? Should she flirt, or have others flirt with her? Throughout the story she is in unusual social situations, so I can believably leave much of that to one side, but does that truncate her character in some way?
More importantly to me, am I doing right by her? Are her thoughts, her speech, her actions, proper and fitting for such a person? She is not at all typical, I’m not looking for that. But neither do I want to have her a girl in name only. I don’t merely want her to be female, I want her to be convincing as a female.
There again, I doubt I would have any of these concerns if Talysse were a boy. I would just write the story. My next book will have a female major character as well. So I hope Talysse teaches me well.
So, gender does matter for me, right now, in this book, with this character. I'm aware of the broader social issues in literature generally and fantasy specifically, but I can't seem to make any of that matter. Talysse matters (so does Detta, but she's a gnome and the dynamic is a little different there). I'm not after writing a female properly, I'm after writing Talysse properly and while there are plenty of things that make her unique, she's still a young female out in the world and to pretend to be blind to that would do her an injustice.
Working on it ....
Why is Talysse a girl?
It was a whim.
That’s not a profound answer, I realize. I had the title first. My notion was of a young person who was supposed to do great things—not a child of destiny, but one who showed promise, and who kept not living up to that promise. A problem child. One who in fact would do great things, but not according to the expectations.
In picturing this kid, I sort of experimentally, provisionally, thought female. I’m not sure that was my first thought, or if I deliberately swapped genders. My previous book was predominantly about males, so maybe I was looking to change things up. I cannot recall.
What I do recall is that as soon as I thought of her as female, the character was locked. She was female. I went off to find a name and eventually came back with Talysse, and there she was. Characters can take shape like that.
Next was her age, and there presented a problem. If she’s nubile, then sex becomes part of the context. It’s a lot easier to move a boy of fifteen through a medieval world than to move a female of that age. So Talysse has slid around quite a bit, from twelve or thirteen all the way up to twenty or so. I couldn’t make her too old or I’d have to give up that title. If I made her too young, I couldn’t sell her doing some of the things she would need to do. Even now, her age is somewhat unclear to me. Teen.
Making her female drove some important decisions. I put her in a quasi-monastery to keep her away from the whole business of marriage. I gave her a companion and so developed Detta, one of my favorite characters. I made her a kind of orphan, a donata, which in turn drove a whole bunch of consequences.
I doubt very much I would have gone down those roads had the main character been a boy. He probably would have wound up in a boarding school of some sort, with Tom Brown-like bullies and tyrannical teachers. I do remember sort of peeking down that road and rejecting it as too conventional. Maybe that’s when I had the notion to make the character a female.
Talysse still presents challenges for me. Should she fall in love? Should she flirt, or have others flirt with her? Throughout the story she is in unusual social situations, so I can believably leave much of that to one side, but does that truncate her character in some way?
More importantly to me, am I doing right by her? Are her thoughts, her speech, her actions, proper and fitting for such a person? She is not at all typical, I’m not looking for that. But neither do I want to have her a girl in name only. I don’t merely want her to be female, I want her to be convincing as a female.
There again, I doubt I would have any of these concerns if Talysse were a boy. I would just write the story. My next book will have a female major character as well. So I hope Talysse teaches me well.
So, gender does matter for me, right now, in this book, with this character. I'm aware of the broader social issues in literature generally and fantasy specifically, but I can't seem to make any of that matter. Talysse matters (so does Detta, but she's a gnome and the dynamic is a little different there). I'm not after writing a female properly, I'm after writing Talysse properly and while there are plenty of things that make her unique, she's still a young female out in the world and to pretend to be blind to that would do her an injustice.
Working on it ....
I want to say.... so... many... things...... about coming to a personal reckoning..... about hormones and self-control....... about the difference between macro and micro, sociology and psychology..... about white and gray matter ratios...... about consumer behavior..... about WWII, Playboy, and the color pink..... about abstract reasoning and personal relationships...... about my kids and the baby doll my daughter got (from the grandparents) for Christmas...... about feminists who sew... about ignoring outside pressures....... about the need to understand differences instead of projecting yourself onto others. On and on and on, I already have a headache.
But despite acknowledging my belief that men and women are a little different on average, it was honestly my intention to direct the conversation back to relationships and the intent of the OP.
But despite acknowledging my belief that men and women are a little different on average, it was honestly my intention to direct the conversation back to relationships and the intent of the OP.
Russ
Istar
Don't worry I plan to cover a lot of this stuff in a post responding to MP's when I can make the time to do it justice later today or tomorrow...
pmmg
Myth Weaver
Sorry Mytho, but I think this is incorrect. I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that make people what they are, including the stuff science would suggest I believe, and environmental factors, societal conditions, cultural conditions and all that. I think most people who are engaged in trying to understand humanity (something artists do in particular), are also asking these questions. I think you are discounting them too much to say that their efforts are not studied or considered ones. I further think, it is possible to come to some general conclusions, and about a lot of things, not just gender issues. General conclusions do leave room for exceptions, but they would be exceptions.
I don't know why I wish to make a comment on this but here goes. I am not sure we see that gender blind culture until Aliens. I wanted to avoid that and stick to just Alien, as that story has not yet been expanded to anything more. In Alien, if Ripley had been male, and was the only survivor, we, the audience, would have thought less of him, and, IMO, thought less of the movie. Because he would have failed to have saved anyone, including the girl. Further, additional scenes, like going after the cat would not have seemed to have been a male sensibility, and so scenes like that would not have stood scrutiny. I think Ripley's gender does matter to the story, and the story is better because she is female. Ripley is believable cause she did what needed to be done, and did not give up her female identity to do so.
- Thread starter
- #250
As a feminist, the women are just “men with boobs” argument is super problematic for me. We are not men with boobs. Ignoring twenty thousand years of history and suggesting “women are the same as men” is dangerous. Writing us the same as men is also dangerous. It may have worked for Ripley, because it is a movie, but I don’t think the example works when we are discussing fiction. In fiction you are so much closer to the POV. You get all the thoughts, the history, the inner debates. Girls have different experiences than boys. Period. Boys have different experiences than girls. If you are writing a short character, they may have problems reaching things, maybe they get teased and called “dwarf”, maybe they are always mistaken to be younger than they are. They have different experiences than a really tall person.
Boys and girls have different life experiences. You can’t write them the same. They are not interchangeable,
Boys and girls have different life experiences. You can’t write them the same. They are not interchangeable,
Michael K. Eidson
Archmage
I didn't think anyone here was trying to do this. I didn't think the question was one of how are men and women different. I thought it was a question of whether they are different.
In my WIP, one of my main characters is a twin. I don't specify in the story that they are mirror twins, but this is how I picture them in my head. It would completely change how I think of the character and her twin sister if I were to change the main character to male and not change her sister to be her brother. And if I did make these two characters male, I'd definitely have to rewrite other characters, either as another gender or as gays, because, yes, I do have romantic relationships between the MC and other characters.
If I had started out my WIP with the intent to write the characters with different genders than what I've given them, maybe I could still make the story work without changing the plot too much. Maybe. But having all of my story written already, it would take a lot of work to rewrite the story the way it would need to be if I changed the gender of the MC and followed up on all of the changes required by the domino effect of the one change.
There are some characters in my WIP that I could easily change the gender on without a lot of rewriting. The relationships they have with the other characters are purely business ones, not personal ones.
Russ
Istar
You make some excellent points there and you may have changed my mind on a few points.
A lot of what you say seems to be based on our cultural gender sensibilities rather than those of the fictional world. This is an important point to make. The audience is going to bring a ton of that stuff to any story we put out and we very much need to be cognizant of that when we write. It offers us certain hard choices to make, such as should be simply conform to those sensibilities or should our world confront them directly and vigorously enough to let our readers now our fictional world does not share them and they need to understand that. Now you got me thinking.
Dark Squiggle
Troubadour
The biggest difference I see is how they relate once they are married, especially if their spouses are in the room.
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
Hmmm
My WIP so far has had an ENTIRELY female cast. Entirely. (Well, except for a few nameless, faceless mooks that don't last longer than a page, and a drug lord that is named but doesn't even come into the story.) The two main settings have been a women's prison and an all girls school (well, like Hogwarts except if you were learning to be an assassin and overthrow the government)
There's pretty much only one male character that ever comes in, maybe two.
I'm trying to think of how things would be different if it was the reverse and i had an entirely male cast...an escape from a prison populated entirely by men, and an assassin school of all men. And I honestly can't figure out how anything could be different.
Okay, I guess teaching seduction to a bunch of dudes is a bit weird, one character's past as a prostitute and/or sex slave is more intuitive if she's female, and one character disguising herself using heavy makeup makes more sense. But in terms of the interactions between the characters, I can't imagine anything being different.
Perhaps the reason for that is that there ARE no men. No male-female relationships, platonic or otherwise.
I don't know. I guess my characters would have marginal differences, but the story is just as plausible and the characters makes just as much sense if they were all boys and men. MC could still be a cynical, street-smart antihero if she was a boy. Her friend could still be a dangerous Deadpan Snarker with a tendency toward pyromania. And so on.
My WIP so far has had an ENTIRELY female cast. Entirely. (Well, except for a few nameless, faceless mooks that don't last longer than a page, and a drug lord that is named but doesn't even come into the story.) The two main settings have been a women's prison and an all girls school (well, like Hogwarts except if you were learning to be an assassin and overthrow the government)
There's pretty much only one male character that ever comes in, maybe two.
I'm trying to think of how things would be different if it was the reverse and i had an entirely male cast...an escape from a prison populated entirely by men, and an assassin school of all men. And I honestly can't figure out how anything could be different.
Okay, I guess teaching seduction to a bunch of dudes is a bit weird, one character's past as a prostitute and/or sex slave is more intuitive if she's female, and one character disguising herself using heavy makeup makes more sense. But in terms of the interactions between the characters, I can't imagine anything being different.
Perhaps the reason for that is that there ARE no men. No male-female relationships, platonic or otherwise.
I don't know. I guess my characters would have marginal differences, but the story is just as plausible and the characters makes just as much sense if they were all boys and men. MC could still be a cynical, street-smart antihero if she was a boy. Her friend could still be a dangerous Deadpan Snarker with a tendency toward pyromania. And so on.
Russ
Istar
While my suggestions about how a male or mixed sex assassin school would be a little speculative, I can say with great confidence that all male prisons and exceedingly different from all female prisons.
Alora pendrak
Scribe
Michael K. Eidson
Archmage
Yes, but how different would your story be if you changed the gender of only your MC? Everyone else stayed female, but your MC is male. Now would your story be effectively the same?
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
Well, it wouldn't make sense that he was in an all women's prison or an all women's school...so i guess you'd say, entirely different.
Michael K. Eidson
Archmage
You wouldn't have to claim the prison and school are only for women. Just think of the relationships between the characters. Would they behave to each other the same realistically? Could you strip the "all-female" label from the prison and school, switch the gender pronouns for your MC to masculine pronouns, not make any other change to your story, and have a story for which readers could easily suspend disbelief?
DragonOfTheAerie
Vala
I think so.
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