Women novelists writing a story through the POV of a man

Roxxsmom said:

And then we go rewrite them into someone they're not just to fit the mold for male and female that they put up on over-generalizing sites like this.

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Aaaargh, that site was so patronising! But I'm also annoyed about the sweeping generalisations because by those standards, I think my MC comes out lookin 'typically male'. Maybe all the men I know are just stereotypes

What's even worse than the sweeping statements about gender that are prefaced as "guys culture are," rather than "many guys iare," or "guys are more likely on average to," is the assumption that the female reader has never had any contact with men and will just by default write all her characters of either gender a certain way based on her own presumed personality.

Also, there's that assumption that every novel is set in the modern US (or west, anyway) and therefore all characters of either gender must conform to our current cultural norms re gender.

I don't normally do gifs (because I know not everyone has brilliant internet connections)

But...

Roxxsmom said:

What's even worse than the sweeping statements about gender that are prefaced as "guys culture are," rather than "many guys iare," or "guys are more likely on average to," is the assumption that the female reader has never had any contact with men and will just by default write all her characters of either gender a certain way based on her own presumed personality.

Also, there's that assumption that every novel is set in the modern US (or west, anyway) and therefore all characters of either gender must conform to our current cultural norms re gender.

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YOU are downright genius material, Mom!!!

Roxxsmom said:

Yeah, the problem as I see it is when we're writing a character who is doing something that he or she needs to do, or something that makes sense to be doing in that situation--like maybe noticing the expression on someone's face--then thinking, "Wait, this is a guy, and guys notice body postures, not faces." Or thinking, "Wait, this character is more laconic than that character, but she's a woman, and women are supposed to be more verbal."

And then we go rewrite them into someone they're not just to fit the mold for male and female that they put up on over-generalizing sites like this.



I strongly suspect comments like this say so much more about the reader than about any era your story is set in. Some people prefer reading stories in certain settings because they think they're going to get a certain kind of characterization, and they'll be disappointed when they don't. And they'll use the "But history," label to justify their own prejudices. I saw someone ranting in another thread about how someone had a female character who had premarital sex in the 50s or something like that. Evidently, this person really, honestly believes that no one ever had premarital sex in that era, because her mom told her so or something. Well, my mom tells me that people did (and in fact, my dad and she did). Things weren't the same as they are now, of course. You had to be careful, because social disapproval was much more likely, especially if you were the woman and had sex with the wrong person and they gossiped, or if your parents found out they were more likely to be angry (though that was still a thing for some of my friends, even in the 80s) and many states still had laws on the books making it hard to get contraception. But people have always fooled around. There were even advocates of "free love" in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What might be an issue is if you wrote a 1950s woman having sex with the exact same attitudes, or in the same social context, as if she lived in the later 20th century. But some people will be disappointed if your Regency era (or Victorian, or 1950s era) character has sex at all, because they read stories set in those times with the expectation that there won't be any sex.

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Although this is a tad beyond the parameters of this thread, I am (very) convinced that we see the past through a Victorian lens. For better or worse, I think those stereotypes and norms are still lingering. And when people think of "the past" they're thinking of "a past" that was governed by Victorian norms, even if the time period they're thinking of is, say, the 18th century. (People in the 18th century were nowhere near as up-tight about sex, for instance.) Because of that, they're expecting certain things that simply were never there. The study of history as we know it really started in earnest in the Victorian age, which is part of why we see everything prior to then through that lens. And Queen Victoria personally made a huge impact on what was considered "respectable". But that was not necessarily reality, either, just an ideal (even though the happy little nuclear family was considered ideal, that happened almost as rarely then as it does now).

What everyone needs to keep in mind is that gender norms, then and now, are/were just ideas, not reality.

Sometimes I'm afraid I'm over-compensating. I find myself wondering, will readers find this female character too weak? do I need to make her "strong" in order to avoid complaints about yet-another-weak-female-character? But women are sometimes weak. And strength takes many forms. I run the risk of trying to make her "tough" just because I'm afraid of being dinged for not portraying a "real" woman.

You're so right about that. A large number of people assume that all historical periods prior to the mid to late 20th century were basically Victorian in both external and internal sensibilities (and of course, there's also the assumption that the external prudery in the Victorian era was actually mirrored in everyone's private lives is another head scratcher).

You'd think all the bawdy jokes and themes in classic works, like Shakespeare's plays and the Canterbury Tales would be a reminder that the Victorian era represented a departure from past sensibilities in many ways, though.

I do think cognitive dissonance is something writers could explore more when they create characters in any era. As has often been noted in this thread, people don't always live up to the ideals of their time, place, and culture with regards to gender norms (nor other norms too).

Now, the world is full of people who don't live up to their internal ideals, yet seem to suffer very little in terms of psychological stress. But people often do sometimes engage in bizarre trade offs that seem to be about "paying" or overcompensating for some way they fall short of their own ideals, or the norms that are thrust on them.

My characters just *are* male or female. I couldn't change it without changing them totally, not because I don't believe in the spectrum and individuality, but just because the characters appear in my mind like Athena from the head of Zeus, like I'm getting to know them instead of creating them.

That sounds more crazy now that I write it.

Mr Flibble said:

I don't normally do gifs (because I know not everyone has brilliant internet connections)

But...

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LOLOLOLOL, quite right.

I have always written with mcs of both sexes. Men are no more foreign or weird than women are. It comes down to writing about a believable human being, even if misconceptions or stereotypes ruin everything.

No, you're wrong. Men are mysterious and exotic. Unknowable and unfathomable. Probably alien creatures, or perhaps a trial designed by the gods to test the patience and character of normal people (aka women).

Roxxsmom said:

What's even worse than the sweeping statements about gender that are prefaced as "guys culture are," rather than "many guys iare," or "guys are more likely on average to," is the assumption that the female reader has never had any contact with men and will just by default write all her characters of either gender a certain way based on her own presumed personality.

Also, there's that assumption that every novel is set in the modern US (or west, anyway) and therefore all characters of either gender must conform to our current cultural norms re gender.

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THIS. As a writer of hist fic and someone who is passionately interested in history THIS.

Gender roles are very much cultural constructs. They are not eternal and unchanging over time and across the globe, as any decent historian or social anthropologist can tell you. I don't care if you tell me that our modern western gender roles are biologically conditioned because if they are, then experience shows that humans are pretty good at setting aside biological conditions as they are in no way universal.

Showing emotion being "feminine" for example is something that is a modern western thing (did anyone see the BBC series about stiff upper lip a few years ago? really interesting on that topic). If you go to earlier centuries, men crying, tearing their hair, wailing etc. in public is thought to be perfectly masculine. I've also seen it said (historically) that women because of their cold, wet humours are less susceptible to pain and emotion than the hotter, drier men.

So when I write my 17th century men, a modern man's opinion on how a man thinks is pretty useless to me. However, it is interesting to hear modern people's reaction to my 17th century men (and women) as readers, because readers come with their modern baggage and sometimes it's a fine line between accuracy and alienating. But in general, all characters are more or less sui generis, and will have different ages, socio-economic backgrounds, personalities etc. Not all men think the same way, just as not all engineers, all musketeers, all Swedes or all Catholics think the same way. Gender expectations, nationality, religious beliefs and other experiences all influence us but we are made up of so many different aspects (including quite possibly different individual biological conditions) that each blend is unique. It's not a matter of finding the eau de man scent, but the essence of James and the essence of Jacob scent (to use two characters from my WIP).

If anything, I find it harder to write historical female characters because while the historical sources are full of men speaking, writing and acting, it is much rarer to get close to women of the past. At the same time, the worlds of men and women were quite separate. It makes it harder, I think, to get under the skin of women of the past. The fact that it is also, I think, as Voirey said, harder to distance myself from women in general, makes it a challenge to write them convincingly. And I do think that female characters are much more scrutinised than male characters and held to different standards, like Mr Fibble said. A male character is mostly thought of as a person, but a female character is somehow always representing Woman. If you make her weak or strong or a virgin or with a chequered past or whatever, people will assume it is because she's woman and judge accordingly. Male characters, OTH are usually assumed to represent just themselves as individuals.

On a more personal note, I grew up in an almost 100% feminine environment, full of very strong women. I had very little understanding of the gender expectations because of it. In my world, women represented a wide spectrum of emotional, intellectual and social varieties and I had never, ever been taught to explain something with "she's a girl". This left me quite bewildered when I had to start to interact with a world full of gender expectations because I didn't know the codes. To this day, I find myself rarely explaining something with "she's a woman" or "women do this", but quite often going "men!" and "men are this way" because I have seen men solely from the narrower view of gender binoculars. Interestingly, I am often thought to be much too direct and aggressive by men, which, I think (my own personal opinion) is because I behave around them like I behave around women. Generally, women are expected to take up less space and talk less than men, and they are also expected to be "softer". I think this is because women are usually trained to have two different sets of behaviour - one for men and one for women. Girls are trained from an early age to give way to boys, but I wasn't, and so I'm a bit of a social dyslectic in that sense (which has served me excellently in my professional life).

angeliz2k said:

Although this is a tad beyond the parameters of this thread, I am (very) convinced that we see the past through a Victorian lens. For better or worse, I think those stereotypes and norms are still lingering. And when people think of "the past" they're thinking of "a past" that was governed by Victorian norms, even if the time period they're thinking of is, say, the 18th century. (People in the 18th century were nowhere near as up-tight about sex, for instance.) Because of that, they're expecting certain things that simply were never there. The study of history as we know it really started in earnest in the Victorian age, which is part of why we see everything prior to then through that lens. And Queen Victoria personally made a huge impact on what was considered "respectable". But that was not necessarily reality, either, just an ideal (even though the happy little nuclear family was considered ideal, that happened almost as rarely then as it does now).

What everyone needs to keep in mind is that gender norms, then and now, are/were just ideas, not reality.

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I totally understand what you mean about the Victorian lens. I write prehistoric fiction and the common stereotypes about neanderthals/caveman are so blatantly viewed through that lens. The idea that primitive man is a brute who will use violence to have his way and the idea that women had to just put up with this and had a low status and were not valued much, seems to me to comes from the Victorian ideas that women have no libido at all and have to just reluctantly accept men's desire for sex (lie back and think of England), and that men's work was important and women's work was not. The idea that when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons met, the Cro-Magnons wiped the Neanderthals out through violent confrontations also smacks a lot more of Victorian colonialist attitudes than anything the fossil record suggests.

Neanderthals were first discovered during this era and it seems that the picture fossil hunters had of them then was based their idea of how they believed men and women would be if you removed the social constraints, and this idea has persisted even to modern times.

Modern hunter-gatherer societies are not like that at all, and there's no reason at all to assume that ancient hunter-gatherer societies were somehow like those Victorian values. And viewing it from an evolutionary perspective, chimpanzees and bonobos are not like that either. The archaeological evidence from neanderthals shows that they cared for injured, elderly and disabled members of the tribe. The injury patterns in Neanderthals match those of rodeo riders (i.e. injured by large mammals while hunting), not the patterns you'd get from interpersonal violence. And Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons lived in Europe together for 10,000 years with no evidence at all of any deliberate genocide. (Additionally, the evidence is pointing more and more towards the idea that the two groups interbred and Neanderthals were assimilated rather than driven to extinction.)

Needless to say my characters are not like the stereotype. In my stories both men and women are strong when they need to be, and both men and women cry and turn to others for help when they need to. And the sex is mutually consensual because both men and women have desires. Interpersonal violence between equally matched individuals happens (people squabble and fight), but one person victimising another would require a ton of backstory to explain a) how and why that person became a bully and b) why no-one else is coming to the defence of the victim.

As for gender roles - as people have said, this is a cultural construct and varies wildly from culture to culture. I base my society on modern hunter-gatherers (who themselves show considerable variation). Men hunt large animals while women gather plant foods, insects, eggs and trap small animals, because sneaking up on a large mammal and ramming a 6 foot long stone tipped spear into it is not compatible with being pregnant or breastfeeding small children. However, some of the women in my stories hunted when they were young before their first pregnancy, and men who are injured or elderly and so can't hunt sometimes go gathering with the women.

The degree to which gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies are fluid depends on the society, but even when the roles are rigid (e.g. taboos against women hunting), both hunting and gathering are equally valued as each relies on the other. Women rely on the men to provide enough red meat to give them the iron and protein they need for pregnancy and breastfeeding, and men rely on women for a steady supply of food so they have something to eat if/when the hunt fails. Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be very egalitarian.

So yeah, I totally agree about the Victorian lens thing. The scientific evidence paints a very, very different picture.

I tend towards writing female POVs, but I have a little side project novelette going now that's a male first person voice.

I think ultimately there are so many other factors that go into shaping a character's voice that the gender thing is relatively minor. An older gentleman from a conservative background whose first language was something other than English would be a pretty big stretch for me, but it wouldn't be that much more of a stretch than a female character with all those same attributes. Not that gender wouldn't make a difference between those characters, but it would be similarly difficult for me to wrap my head around what it would be like to be a woman in that context as to be a man.

Whereas writing Jonah, my 15-year-old gay male POV character, I don't have the experience of being his gender, but I've at least been through a relatable context. I have a decent grasp of what the rules for boys are there, and I know from my own mirrored experience of navigating the rules for girls what techniques work/don't to evade those rules.

ishtar'sgate said:

True, but isn't that how information is collected by those studying human behavior? They go through rafts of anecdotal stuff then break it down and test those conclusions.
I'm sure there are many women who would respond differently than I did and many men who would respond differently than my husband but behaviorists look for a general norm and then share that information. Averages are averages for a reason. It's how most men or most women would think or act in a given situation.

The neat thing about being a writer is that we don't have to stick to norms but I think we do have to make reasonable choices of when and where to make that departure.

I recall a policewoman saying she'd rather partner up with a male cop than a female cop. She said the majority of female police officers, when faced with a dangerous situation, will step back and let the male cops deal with it. That's not a bias, that's reality based on experience. Her own experience and the admission and experiences of her fellow female officers. So if I decide to make my female cop a kick-butt, aggressive take-no-prisoners type I know I need to take extra care to make that plausible or else I'll have women on the force reading the story and rolling their eyes in disbelief and I don't want that.

I think that's the only thing I'd say to the original poster. Write your male POV however you want but be mindful of plausibility. If you have a variety of male friends and acquaintances and you're not sure how your character might react, ask them to tell you how they'd react. Kind of a mini focus group.

I didn't do all that well with this in my last novel so I'm taking better care with my current WIP. When in doubt, I canvas the men I know whose characters best reflect my story character. It will give me a baseline. There's nothing worse than being made pointedly aware that an author is writing about the opposite sex and not making it all that believable.

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Your policewoman friend was probably right on. I'm an old man. I didn't think about it until I started reading this thread, but all my MC's have been female. I have three kick butt younger sisters and two daughters.

My wife is no shrinking violet either. She drove a fifties Rambler Station wagon with two spare tires tied on the roof, windshield and grill guards she made her self, up the Alcan highway, 1,500 miles of dirt road back then, with her two kids to visit her brother two years before we started dating. That would have been 50+ years ago. They camped along the road both directions.

The MC in my novel (former deep cover CIA operative in witness protection) is female as well. Because of what they are, and the story (spy or police thriller), I did some research into women and men related to adrenaline cycles especially as related to how they fight.

I learned that, based on recent research (I think people only recently started to study female adrenaline cycles), there is a noticeable difference between male and female adrenaline cycles.

There is a continuum of course, but on average, women's cycles start after a short delay, few seconds but long enough to plan what to do with the results of the adrenaline if they are trained. Men's can go off like an injection from a large syringe and have them seeing red in a couple of seconds. Not always, but it happens way less with women.

The effects of adrenaline are both positive and negative. I won't go into that here.

The level of adrenaline in the female's blood stream rises slower and peaks lower, and lasts longer, than a man's. This means that while her strength and speed may be less, she's better able to adapt to changing conditions during a fight and more likely to maintain better small motor coordination. That translates to a faster smarter OODA cycle that can put them inside the loop of an enemy and allow victory over someone bigger and stronger.

The bottom line is that a woman with training and expertise will plan and try to avoid the fight, but once it's on she will fight like a cornered cat, sometimes like a stone cold killer. She may throw up shortly after, but while 'it's on' she's all in, take no prisoners. I suspect that's some of where the expression 'mama grizzly' comes from. Although a female brown bear is both larger and more fearsome based on what I've read.

There is a rather detailed description of this in Rory Miller's book, "Violence: A Writers Guide." Chapter 7, Gender Differences, is an eye opener. It was for me anyway. I had my sisters read it and they thought it was pretty much right on. A worth while read for those with characters of either gender that engage in physical violence, defensive or offensive.

Fitch

missbluestocking said:

I know, men and women are the same; they're both human beings. But I do wonder now and then what it might be like for women writers (especially those who have been writing through the POV of a female protag for years) who decide to write a story through the POV of the opposite gender. Anyone care to share their experience?

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My first novel has a male protag. A few people have asked me "Why I chose to write a male." I didn't choose it. I just had the vision of a story, and that was who it happened to be about.

Jamesaritchie said:

And, really, I have no possible way of knowing how a woman actually thinks, and a woman has no possible way of knowing exactly how a man thinks.

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All you have to know is how one man thinks: your character.

Bing Z said:

One thing I know, though, I won't be able to handle a sex scene. Luckily there will be none.

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Before I wrote my big male POV sex scene, I started a thread on another forum asking men to tell me how it felt to have a boner, what sex with a woman felt like from their perspective, etc. I got over three pages of funny and honest replies. It was incredibly helpful!

http://www.absolutewrite.com//www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/

Since gender is purely a social construct and I build my own fantasy societies, I get to create whatever gender roles and expectations I want. This erases any basic difference between writing the sexes, so I could never find one sex more challenging than the other.

I still don't want to feed our society's prejudices and stereotypes with my stories, though. Normally I have an easy time avoiding this, but I'm stuck on one of my current stories because I have a character who's both the emotional and compassionate 'heart' of the adventure party (stereotypical female role) and the 'chosen one' with the power to save the world (stereotypical male role). The character comes from an equal society, so that gives me no guidance. I don't want to follow either stereotype, dammit. Maybe I should just make them a hermaphrodite.

Chasing the Horizon said:

Since gender is purely a social construct and I build my own fantasy societies, I get to create whatever gender roles and expectations I want. This erases any basic difference between writing the sexes, so I could never find one sex more challenging than the other.

I still don't want to feed our society's prejudices and stereotypes with my stories, though. Normally I have an easy time avoiding this, but I'm stuck on one of my current stories because I have a character who's both the emotional and compassionate 'heart' of the adventure party (stereotypical female role) and the 'chosen one' with the power to save the world (stereotypical male role). The character comes from an equal society, so that gives me no guidance. I don't want to follow either stereotype, dammit. Maybe I should just make them a hermaphrodite.

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This movie solves your issue well for me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_Wind_(film)

She's very much a 'heart' character, but also incredibly brave and adept at physical skill.

If your story is set in a society where gender stereotypes run strong or are expected, then those stereotypes do become important and relevant.

People are saying that gender is a Social Construct but that doesn't change the fact that Social Constructs have a wide ranging impact on a person's development. Gender differences do exist, even though they are artificial. A lot of things are artificial, whether a burp at the table is offensive or a complement to the cook is a Social Construct.

If your POV truly believes they should behave a certain way then that's how they'll behave or even think. That's no different to how a POV raised in either a rural or urban setting might have a different perspective.

As wrong as it is to say one gender should be 'x' and another gender should be 'y', a lot of people buy into that. Some men have very short comfort zones when it comes to this (more so that women) so their experience would be different to mine. Decide how important it is to your characters world view. My POV characters are indifferent to gender but if I wrote a character who had 'gendered views' I would try to capture that in their voice/actions.

Roxxsmom said:

No, you're wrong. Men are mysterious and exotic. Unknowable and unfathomable. Probably alien creatures, or perhaps a trial designed by the gods to test the patience and character of normal people (aka women).

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Well, I have a son, and I pretty much am in tune with his ups and downs. He is my mini-me in many respects, and his own person in many as well.
Neither of us are normal, so my frame of reference is skewed!

Paramite Pie said:

If your POV truly believes they should behave a certain way then that's how they'll behave or even think. That's no different to how a POV raised in either a rural or urban setting might have a different perspective.

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Not necessarily, if the gaping chasm between what people believe is the right way to feel and behave and how they actually feel and behave in our own times is any indication.

But that's where you get into things like denial, shame, guilt, deception, reconciliation, cognitive dissonance, and other ways of dealing with this. All these can be fascinating aspects of characters.

C.bronco said:

Well, I have a son, and I pretty much am in tune with his ups and downs. He is my mini-me in many respects, and his own person in many as well.
Neither of us are normal, so my frame of reference is skewed!

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Just turning the normal stereotype held about women by many men on its head--that there are regular default-perspective people (men) and strange, exotic, mysterious beings (women).

I don't think we'd qualify for either normal, and wouldn't want to. That makes everything more fun!

I agree (and in fact, I think I turned out to be a real blend of my two parents' traits), but I think you know what I mean. It seems to be a commonly held notion in society that women are the "other," while men are society.

I was simply having a poke at that idea.

I haven't really been exposed to that in the workplace. Also, my boss is female and awesome. I truly can say I have never been treated differently at work based on gender. Dealing with male misconceptions about women and double standards in my personal life however, is a whole other story.

phantasy said:

She's very much a 'heart' character, but also incredibly brave and adept at physical skill.

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I'd be more comfortable making them female if they were a physical fighter, but the story absolutely requires they be the magical fighter, another female cliche. I feel like I'm in a cliche box with this character, running into another one every direction I turn.

Eh, I should probably make my own thread to complain about this character instead of derailing this one.

I don't think it's necessary to avoid all traditionally female roles in a story either. My FMC is a healer. She needed to be for the story to work. I didn't think of that as a girlish thing, since medicine has actually been dominated by men for a large portion of western history. And many of the books I read growing up (and some I still have read) don't even have female wizards at all, or if they do, they're much rarer. But someone brought this up a while back "Are all the women in your story traditional?" No, actually, they're not. And the society where most of the story takes place has a matrilineal inheritance system that's stirred gender roles and sexual norms in some ways that blow the mind of my MMC (who comes from a more patriarchal society). But it's not all giggles and grins for women either. It really sucks to be a woman who lacks a mother house to support you in motherhood, marriage seeking, or a profession.

As for magic being traditionally feminine in fantasy worlds? You wouldn't believe how many male (and female) writers haven't gotten the memo there. Oh the books I've run into by aspiring authors at workshops and crit groups that have magic systems that are all male, and it goes completely unexamined. Girls/women aren't mentioned at all and how they feel about either not having any magic, or about not being allowed to train it if they do, just doesn't come into the story.

Yes, I'm that gadfly critter who asks, "Why aren't there any women in your world?" or "Is your magic system passed down on the Y chromosome or something?"

But the thing is, embracing more equality and diversity in your stories doesn't mean you have to shoehorn characters into roles that don't suit them or the story at hand. It's more an issue of how you develop them as characters. So your FMC is in a role that's somewhat traditional in some ways, but not in others? Good. Creating a woman who who has only traditionally masculine traits can be problematic too. Real people tend to be blends of traits that are traditionally masculine or feminine. And if you're worried that readers will think you're reinforcing traditionalism, you can always make sure you show some women doing things that are less traditional, even if it's just in the background.