May 21st, 2021

mc776: Life is Strange screenshot: Chloe Price looking through Frank Bowers' computer. (chloe frank computer)
This thread got me thinking about that whole ~"men writing women"~ thing again, and in particular what sorts of things I would inevitably miss if I were to naïvely just write ~whoever~ and then append a feminine gender as an afterthought.

This was going to be a response to that thread but a quick look at the notes suggests that interacting would be a Bad Idea.

So the biggest problems that I can identify seem to be:

Read more... )

Obviously I'm missing a lot here, and I'm intentionally ignoring any of that awful male-gaze "she breasted up the stairs boobily" sort of nonsense - my focus on this post is primarily on the specifics I'm most likely to miss with a "just write a character and remember to use she/her pronouns to refer to them" approach.

(As for women writing men, the only times I've ever felt that a woman author's rendition of a man character seemed a bit off has been in MLM slashfics where I simply cannot parse how two guys go from this kind of interaction to that kind, but it turns out that's just because I, personally, have no concept of enemies-to-lovers shipping without prior crying heartfelt repentance and I get this reaction regardless of gender (cf. a lot of mainstream media heterosexual interactions that do this and leave me baffled in more or less the same way).)

I know this

If life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags