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mc776This 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:
I don't know how much a bra costs.
I also have to look up online how much a gun costs, or drugs. Or even some stuff I have bought before (and isn't something I'd be buying multiple times a week), because why would I remember something like that. Not a blocker at all as long as one doesn't assume.
The plot has people constantly doing things over a couple months and I totally forgot to have the character have her period.
I've never really seen this complaint made that often. So many stories where the characters don't seem to eat or shit unless it's relevant to the plot. One more thing to keep track of but not the end of the world if you don't.
And, of course, between the prepubescent girls, the menopausal women, the trans women, the cis women with other medical things going on and the trans non-women who also menstruate, and the significant diversity in how this is experienced, it's probably better to frame this as a question as a particular physiological condition that I don't have that I'll probably write wrong if I don't do some basic homework.
A lifetime of male privilege makes me assume my character can take things for granted that I do.
I have met women who have the same approach as I do when it comes to walking alone through a quiet isolated part of town at weird times in the night. I've also been repeatedly told by other women that this is highly atypical.
The bigger difference I notice, though, (and keeping in mind of course these are all tendencies with lots of obvious exceptions) is that certain permission and willingness to suffer without immediate retaliation that at best keeps people from acting like idiots in a tense situation and at worst condemns a person and everyone close to them to a lifetime of second-guessing, Abilene paradoxes, missed opportunities and legacies of mutually destructive Unselfishness.
As far as this last point goes, Chloe Price is a particularly interesting case, as someone who could at first be easily mistaken for your typical Joss Whedon type but once you pay attention to (a) how her reactions contrast (and are blatantly intended by the author to serve to contrast) with Max's and (b) how they, and similar things going on with the male characters in the story, tend to end tragically subject to Max's intervention, it starts to sink in just how thorough this is as a deconstruction of that mindset.
Related to this is how being disagreeable is more profitable as a general social strategy for men than for women. There are a lot of situations where a man will safely get his way by posturing and making a clear show of refusing to back down, that can end much more poorly if a woman tried practically the same thing (cf. Chloe again) - and whereas a woman may well do better by politely making an indirect show of refusing to back down, a man trying to do that might accomplish nothing but increase his risk of being ignored or misunderstood as capitulating (cf. own personal experience; dealing with idiots in various fields who watch a bona fide negotiation and call it a betrayal). This does not directly affect the subjective mindset of the character being written, but it does affect what they're likely to do or say given they recognize (and are willing for the sake of immediate benefit to comply with) these scripts and roles being handed to them and the people they're dealing with.
Literally anything else I can think of.
Boils down to needing to research expectations within a given culture or subculture, not being afraid to make mistakes and being willing to go back and fix them and do better next time.
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).)
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:
I don't know how much a bra costs.
I also have to look up online how much a gun costs, or drugs. Or even some stuff I have bought before (and isn't something I'd be buying multiple times a week), because why would I remember something like that. Not a blocker at all as long as one doesn't assume.
The plot has people constantly doing things over a couple months and I totally forgot to have the character have her period.
I've never really seen this complaint made that often. So many stories where the characters don't seem to eat or shit unless it's relevant to the plot. One more thing to keep track of but not the end of the world if you don't.
And, of course, between the prepubescent girls, the menopausal women, the trans women, the cis women with other medical things going on and the trans non-women who also menstruate, and the significant diversity in how this is experienced, it's probably better to frame this as a question as a particular physiological condition that I don't have that I'll probably write wrong if I don't do some basic homework.
A lifetime of male privilege makes me assume my character can take things for granted that I do.
I have met women who have the same approach as I do when it comes to walking alone through a quiet isolated part of town at weird times in the night. I've also been repeatedly told by other women that this is highly atypical.
The bigger difference I notice, though, (and keeping in mind of course these are all tendencies with lots of obvious exceptions) is that certain permission and willingness to suffer without immediate retaliation that at best keeps people from acting like idiots in a tense situation and at worst condemns a person and everyone close to them to a lifetime of second-guessing, Abilene paradoxes, missed opportunities and legacies of mutually destructive Unselfishness.
As far as this last point goes, Chloe Price is a particularly interesting case, as someone who could at first be easily mistaken for your typical Joss Whedon type but once you pay attention to (a) how her reactions contrast (and are blatantly intended by the author to serve to contrast) with Max's and (b) how they, and similar things going on with the male characters in the story, tend to end tragically subject to Max's intervention, it starts to sink in just how thorough this is as a deconstruction of that mindset.
Related to this is how being disagreeable is more profitable as a general social strategy for men than for women. There are a lot of situations where a man will safely get his way by posturing and making a clear show of refusing to back down, that can end much more poorly if a woman tried practically the same thing (cf. Chloe again) - and whereas a woman may well do better by politely making an indirect show of refusing to back down, a man trying to do that might accomplish nothing but increase his risk of being ignored or misunderstood as capitulating (cf. own personal experience; dealing with idiots in various fields who watch a bona fide negotiation and call it a betrayal). This does not directly affect the subjective mindset of the character being written, but it does affect what they're likely to do or say given they recognize (and are willing for the sake of immediate benefit to comply with) these scripts and roles being handed to them and the people they're dealing with.
Literally anything else I can think of.
Boils down to needing to research expectations within a given culture or subculture, not being afraid to make mistakes and being willing to go back and fix them and do better next time.
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).)