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Male authors writing female characters vs female authors and male characters


Liadin

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So much is made of male authors' difficulties writing good female characters; I hear less about female authors' ability to write male characters, and I'm curious about that. What sorts of problems do guys typically have with female-created men? Are they as prevalent as the problems women have with male-created women? If so, why do we hear less about them--because it's easier for men to avoid female authors altogether than the reverse, or for some other reason?

I'm also curious about how the gender proportions of the cast of a book affect this. Most male-written works seem to have a cast that's well over 50% male, whereas female-written works seem to be all over the map, but generally with at least half the cast male. Does including a large number of characters of the opposite gender make for better characters (because they cease to be tokens) or worse (because inherent problems are compounded and become patterns)? Does it depend on who's given the POV? When I notice problems with men in female-written fiction, it's usually when they're given the POV and aren't (to my mind!) thinking like men, but the problems I see with female characters in male-written fiction tend to crop up regardless of POV.

Is it really just a matter of "we all notice problems when authors of the opposite gender try to write our own gender", or are there men who think women write men decently for the most part, or vice versa?

(It might help if we limit this discussion to works that actually attempt to create realistic characters. Romance novels and erotica for women aren't meant to feature realistic men any more than porn and superhero comics are meant to feature realistic women.)

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I do think female authors tends to be slightly better at writing male characters than the reverse. It's not a BIG differenc, and there's enough people who fall on both sides of the fence tonot use it to make judgements, but in my (personal, subjective) experience there's a slight diference.

Why exactly I don't know, possibly because of the entire "male default" thing makes it easier for women to "fake" it (they can just follow the regular writing-trends ad it's going to work out, while the opposite is not true)

Most people tends to be better at writing their own gender, of course. (an exception, I think, is Robin Hobb: Her female characters tends to be much less intersting than her male ones)

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Why exactly I don't know, possibly because of the entire "male default" thing makes it easier for women to "fake" it (they can just follow the regular writing-trends ad it's going to work out, while the opposite is not true)

I hadn't thought about this, but it makes good sense. There are thousands of highly acclaimed books written by men using male POVs. Anyone who's even moderately well-read has read at least some, so women probably absorb more of how men think and how to portray a man in fiction than the reverse (since it seems like a lot of men avoid female authors/protagonists, and historically there are fewer female authors, men probably learn less through simple osmosis).

ETA: About Hobb--I suppose she must do a good job since so many men read her books, but every once in awhile I come across a passage (usually the first-person hero thinking about his love interest) that breaks my suspension of disbelief a little. But maybe that's because I'm stereotyping men and not because she does it badly? I don't know.

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Yes, and in an even broader cultural sense, to the extent that the male gaze is the dominant one in Western culture, and that masculine values are the default values, 1) women often need to be aware of these "male" traits and values, and be able to mimic them in order to achieve certain goals themselves, and also 2) the "female" role in this culture is more one of understanding the wants and needs of others, and so women may tend to be better at listening and observing, and thus better--all other things being equal--at capturing the characteristics of genders other than their own.

The cultural pairing of women with emotion, men with logic may also be a factor...even male authors I esteem very highly often have male characters who hide from emotion in various ways, through prose style, unreliable narration, etc. The cultural acceptance of women dealing with emotion may mean that female authors are simply more likely to try creating male characters who depict a well-rounded sense of emotional involvement.

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I hadn't thought about this, but it makes good sense. There are thousands of highly acclaimed books written by men using male POVs. Anyone who's even moderately well-read has read at least some, so women probably absorb more of how men think and how to portray a man in fiction than the reverse (since it seems like a lot of men avoid female authors/protagonists, and historically there are fewer female authors, men probably learn less through simple osmosis).

ETA: About Hobb--I suppose she must do a good job since so many men read her books, but every once in awhile I come across a passage (usually the first-person hero thinking about his love interest) that breaks my suspension of disbelief a little. But maybe that's because I'm stereotyping men and not because she does it badly? I don't know.

Oh, there were a couple of instances when I went "Oh, this was written by a woman." But I think it's interesting that she's generally *better* (if not perfect) at writing men than women.

Partially this is because her POV characters tends to be men, and thus we get more inside their heads, but still...

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The cultural pairing of women with emotion, men with logic may also be a factor...even male authors I esteem very highly often have male characters who hide from emotion in various ways, through prose style, unreliable narration, etc. The cultural acceptance of women dealing with emotion may mean that female authors are simply more likely to try creating male characters who depict a well-rounded sense of emotional involvement.

This is an interesting point as well, but as far as having characters who hide from emotion--is that bad? Obviously it would be a problem if every single character they wrote did it, if the author couldn't deal with emotions at all, but many real-life people are unemotional, so I see no problem with their writing characters that way.

Something else I've noticed (let's see if anyone agrees with me): when I notice a problem with a female author writing a male character, it's usually with the way he thinks or talks--the most common one being thinking or talking about his emotions too much. In other words, the author has written this guy as if he were a woman.

Whereas, when it's a male author screwing up a female character, it's very rarely that she thinks or talks like a man (outside of a few specific examples I'm not really even sure what that would mean--the traditional female role being so much more constricted than the traditional male one, I think most of us must "think like men" at least to some extent). It's that she's the embodiment of male fantasy--she's sexy, she exists solely in relation to men, she doesn't have close or positive relationships with other women (is this a male fantasy btw? It's quite pervasive in male-written fiction), and she hits the right wish-fulfillment level of availability as far as sexuality and mothering are concerned. It's an interesting discrepancy at any rate--for instance, women don't seem to avoid male friendships, father-son relationships, and so on, but instead write them in a somewhat feminized way, whereas men don't seem to "masculinize" women's relationships so much as cut them out altogether.

Does anyone else see this?

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Whereas, when it's a male author screwing up a female character, it's very rarely that she thinks or talks like a man (outside of a few specific examples I'm not really even sure what that would mean--the traditional female role being so much more constricted than the traditional male one, I think most of us must "think like men" at least to some extent). It's that she's the embodiment of male fantasy--she's sexy, she exists solely in relation to men, she doesn't have close or positive relationships with other women (is this a male fantasy btw? It's quite pervasive in male-written fiction), and she hits the right wish-fulfillment level of availability as far as sexuality and mothering are concerned. It's an interesting discrepancy at any rate--for instance, women don't seem to avoid male friendships, father-son relationships, and so on, but instead write them in a somewhat feminized way, whereas men don't seem to "masculinize" women's relationships so much as cut them out altogether.

Does anyone else see this?

It's not, although I've noticed that a lot of the women I've met* who claim all their friends are guys tend to have a certain style of misogyny that could correlate with how some writers write women: "Girl stuff" is boring/trivial/stupid, and I don't like "girl stuff", therefore I'm an exception/rarity, and I'll only hang out around men. For a male writer who thinks that the vast majority of women a. have a different style of thinking than men, and b. are interested in a limited set of topics, their female character who is found mostly in the company of men is an exception, and that's the point. (And by making this character an exception, they are often held as an ideal against what stereotypical femininity is.)

Another possibility is that they mostly hang out around other guys, and thus would have a higher frequency of encountering women who fall into the above category. It's probably some of both.

I meant to say something about this (mostly re: Maege Mormont) in the Women and Exceptionalism thread in that other forum, but I think I forgot to finish my post and lost it. :worried:

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This is an interesting point as well, but as far as having characters who hide from emotion--is that bad? Obviously it would be a problem if every single character they wrote did it, if the author couldn't deal with emotions at all, but many real-life people are unemotional, so I see no problem with their writing characters that way.

Oh indeed, it's not a problem as such, but I was thinking that one result could be that male authors might have more trouble writing about a female character's emotion than vice-versa. (Or indeed a male character's emotion, when required.)

The converse is that yes, some female authors do occasionally go too far, and write men as sufficiently more emotionally expressive than the cultural norm that it becomes hard to credit.

Related to this, and back to one of your original questions, the thing that I notice with Hobb and several other female fantasy authors such as Sarah Monette and Carol Berg is a certain aesthetic that in fanfic is usually labeled hurt/comfort. That is, with say, Hobb, I don't especially notice her male characters talking about their love interests as you do, but I do notice A ) how much they suffer, B ) how much the author seems to enjoy seeing them suffer, and C ) how emotionally expressive the characters are about their suffering. It's not just that this is out of keeping with the cultural norms of male stoicism in the face of suffering and so unlikely--fantasy is all about outliers--but it's emblematic of an aesthetic that seems to find male suffering adorable in some sense, to linger over the breaking of that stoicism and the release of male emotion in a way that's almost emotionally pornographic. I was thinking about this in context of Larry's comments on yaoi, which seems to function in similar ways.

It's an interesting discrepancy at any rate--for instance, women don't seem to avoid male friendships, father-son relationships, and so on, but instead write them in a somewhat feminized way, whereas men don't seem to "masculinize" women's relationships so much as cut them out altogether.

Does anyone else see this?

Yup, I think you're right. I think this may tie in somewhat with what I wrote about above--cultural ideas about masculine and feminine, which gender's story is being told and what is more easily ignorable for that gender, what is seen as "important" and thus worthy of being written about, what these patterns mean for what genders know about each other vs. what they have to make assumptions of similarity about, etc. But there are likely other reasons, too. What do you think?

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slightly off topic: Does anyone find it a bit jarring when male authors, somewhat out of the blue, reference a female character's sexual history? My reading is currently split between GGK's The Lion's of Al-Rassan and a reread of Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, but in both, it seems as though female characters are meant to be introduced as empowered individuals by having had past lovers.

Back on topic: I do believe females tend to write males better than males writing females, but I'm still not sure why (though there are some great ideas offered here). Let me ask you this: Done properly, should the sex of a protagonist be noticeable through their actions? Should a female protagonist (or antagonist, for that matter) noticeably act like a woman (what that means is beyond me), or should a female's character be interchangable with that of a male in the role?

There are a number of strong women in stories, who, at least in my eyes, come off as men written as women. I thought Best Served Cold was a good story, but I didn't think Monza was really that much of a stand-out character. She could have been written as a man and the story would have been just as enjoyable. Mind you, I don't believe the interchangeability is a truly accurate measure of writing the opposite sex well, but I am curious what everyone else thinks.

Basically: What defines a quality female character and a quality male one?

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One stereotype I find about men in a lot of books written by women, put simply, is that men are "simple". They don't waste time untying emotional knots, they are direct, they act swiftly, they don't spend too much time introspecting, they cannot empathize enough and hence are hurtful without realizing it, etc.

The women around them, of course, roll their eyes and help the men "understand". The man thus matures and becomes more responsible by being around women.

I think this is shameless wish fulfillment, along the lines of the sexy, strong woman who melts for the right man.

But, on the whole, I do agree that women seem to write men way better than the reverse.

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Some very interesting points here.

It's not, although I've noticed that a lot of the women I've met* who claim all their friends are guys tend to have a certain style of misogyny that could correlate with how some writers write women: "Girl stuff" is boring/trivial/stupid, and I don't like "girl stuff", therefore I'm an exception/rarity, and I'll only hang out around men. For a male writer who thinks that the vast majority of women a. have a different style of thinking than men, and b. are interested in a limited set of topics, their female character who is found mostly in the company of men is an exception, and that's the point. (And by making this character an exception, they are often held as an ideal against what stereotypical femininity is.)

Another possibility is that they mostly hang out around other guys, and thus would have a higher frequency of encountering women who fall into the above category. It's probably some of both.

This is probably true to a certain extent, although I've only ever met a couple of women like that, and they still had one or two female friends (who basically shared their views). The problem is that few fictional women are intended to resemble the women you describe (with their particular arrogance and effort to be as masculine as possible), and yet male-written female characters still tend to have relationships only with men.

Of course it ties into the tomboy/girly girl dichotomy, which is just so false--the vast majority of women and girls I've known couldn't be pigeonholed as either.

Related to this, and back to one of your original questions, the thing that I notice with Hobb and several other female fantasy authors such as Sarah Monette and Carol Berg is a certain aesthetic that in fanfic is usually labeled hurt/comfort. That is, with say, Hobb, I don't especially notice her male characters talking about their love interests as you do, but I do notice A ) how much they suffer, B ) how much the author seems to enjoy seeing them suffer, and C ) how emotionally expressive the characters are about their suffering. It's not just that this is out of keeping with the cultural norms of male stoicism in the face of suffering and so unlikely--fantasy is all about outliers--but it's emblematic of an aesthetic that seems to find male suffering adorable in some sense, to linger over the breaking of that stoicism and the release of male emotion in a way that's almost emotionally pornographic.

I've noticed that dynamic in Farseer. What aspect of it seems unlikely to you--all the emotional expressiveness? I agree with you, if a man was writing it Fitz probably wouldn't go into nearly so much detail.

Is this a dynamic that goes both ways? Male authors often put female characters in towers, or other situations where they need to be rescued by men (which is funny, because in medieval England apparently the men were the ones being captured and put in towers--holding women hostage was either unlikely to get results or socially unacceptable). Is it a case of women wanting to see men emotionally vulnerable, and men wanting to see women physically vulnerable?

Yup, I think you're right. I think this may tie in somewhat with what I wrote about above--cultural ideas about masculine and feminine, which gender's story is being told and what is more easily ignorable for that gender, what is seen as "important" and thus worthy of being written about, what these patterns mean for what genders know about each other vs. what they have to make assumptions of similarity about, etc. But there are likely other reasons, too. What do you think?

I've always wondered if men don't feel threatened by women's relationships to some extent, maybe because they're often close and exclusive. Whereas, for a lot of guys, friendships with other guys seem to me to be about shared activities much more than emotional intimacy, and so women don't really feel threatened by them. (Of course, the fact that when the author is a woman, male friendships often have a lot of emotional intimacy mucks that up a bit.)

But there's also the issue of what's seen as important, and the kinds of stories men and women choose to tell and what's plot-relevant in those stories. And also maybe lingering cultural ideas about the value of different relationships. We all know that a man whose only close relationships are with women is a little odd; in real life, if a man's only friends are women people would start wondering if he's gay. Whereas for some reason a woman whose only close relationships are with men--much less common in real life than in fiction--for some reason don't immediately strike people as odd. (Someone else will have to explain why: it seems very odd to me, but men write this character into their fiction time and time again. Perhaps it's stereotypes about girl friendships being all about choosing makeup and doing each other's hair. Thus, if your character isn't shallow, she has no girlfriends. Or something.)

slightly off topic: Does anyone find it a bit jarring when male authors, somewhat out of the blue, reference a female character's sexual history?

Like when GRRM felt such a pressing need for us to know about Osha's sex life that he had her relate it to 8-year-old Bran? That was pretty jarring, although I don't think it was meant to show her as empowered.

Back on topic: I do believe females tend to write males better than males writing females, but I'm still not sure why (though there are some great ideas offered here). Let me ask you this: Done properly, should the sex of a protagonist be noticeable through their actions? Should a female protagonist (or antagonist, for that matter) noticeably act like a woman (what that means is beyond me), or should a female's character be interchangable with that of a male in the role?

There are a number of strong women in stories, who, at least in my eyes, come off as men written as women. I thought Best Served Cold was a good story, but I didn't think Monza was really that much of a stand-out character. She could have been written as a man and the story would have been just as enjoyable. Mind you, I don't believe the interchangeability is a truly accurate measure of writing the opposite sex well, but I am curious what everyone else thinks.

Basically: What defines a quality female character and a quality male one?

I honestly can't think of very many female characters who are basically men (we talk about warrioresses, but the problem there has more to do with the strength discrepancy and historical laziness than the actual behavior/thought processes of the women in question). Hermione from the Harry Potter books is an example that comes to mind; minus a couple dance scenes and a male love interest toward the end, one could do a find/replace and switch out the "she's" for "he's" and it would make no difference. (Now that I think about it, this is true of nearly all Rowling's women, despite the fact that she's a woman herself. She's no great character writer.) But it seems much more common for men to write women as Other than as men with boobs.

I'm going to have to think more about your last couple questions.... a sign of a good discussion. :) As far as whether the gender of a character should be clear from their thoughts and actions, I would say that authors don't need to go with gender stereotypes, but gender certainly informs who the character is. For instance, you can certainly have an unemotional woman or an emotional man, but the fact that the character is unusual for their gender is going to affect their self-image and relationships with other people, and the rest of their personality needs to be cohesive.

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But the thing is that gender isn't binary. Even sex isn't binary. It's true that in plot-driven fantasy character development often takes second place, and then you end up with a bunch of pretty similar cardboard cutouts of Adventurer (default: male) regardless if they have boobs or not. I almost prefer that to the other common option, which is having the woman who doesn't take male social role to be the romantic plot device. I think in general male authors write a narrower spectrum of female characters than the other way round, even in character-driven books where also shows more.

Let me ask you this: Done properly, should the sex of a protagonist be noticeable through their actions? Should a female protagonist (or antagonist, for that matter) noticeably act like a woman (what that means is beyond me), or should a female's character be interchangable with that of a male in the role?

If the writer aims to have a non-binary gender, then by all means! Characters shouldn't be the clones of some archetypical Female Character (*cough* Jordan *cough*), they should have their own voices. If those voices are not what some people define as feminine, so what? To me, it's more important that the characters, be they female or male, are individuals and not cardboard cutouts. Of course it may raise questions whether the (m/f) author can actually write (f/m) characters if all of their female, or male characters are very gender-neutral or downright "wrong sex", as in the yaoi example.

Being quite genderless myself I really feel much more comfortable reading from the POV of those gender-neutral characters than trying to see through the caricatyrish view of a badly crafter Female character. Or male, come to that. It's more important that the character feels real, than what their tubing says they should be like. Which nicely answers the next question. :)

Basically: What defines a quality female character and a quality male one?

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Characters shouldn't be the clones of some archetypical Female Character (*cough* Jordan *cough*), they should have their own voices.

I often feel that the criticisms about Jordan's female characters says less about his ability to write women and more about the critics.

As I understand it, the argument goes that most of his PoV women are depicted as over-confident and with a negative attitude towards men (to vastly varying degrees, which is totally ignored), and hence they are all interchangeable.

Take any other author who writes in a male dominated society, and you can say pretty much the same about their male characters. Yet, I don't see anyone arguing that all men are the same in the works of these authors.

It seems absurd to me that just because a bunch of women are depicted with a non-traditional trait like self-assurance, people fail to notice the character traits that make these women different. These women have some fundamental differences from women in our world (where women have never dominated society like in WoT), and hence them must be defined by these altered traits. I'm yet to see someone give me a satisfactory reason for why these women shouldn't be as they are given they world they inhabit.

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I honestly can't think of very many female characters who are basically men (we talk about warrioresses, but the problem there has more to do with the strength discrepancy and historical laziness than the actual behavior/thought processes of the women in question). Hermione from the Harry Potter books is an example that comes to mind; minus a couple dance scenes and a male love interest toward the end, one could do a find/replace and switch out the "she's" for "he's" and it would make no difference.

This is so not true. There are so many things about Hermione which scream 'girl'. You wouldn't have to erase a couple of scenes, more like half the series to hide it.

I think a problem you're half pointing at is the fact that characters in novels are just that. We may get a description of them, and we may see some of the things they do, and we may get some introspection on their feelings, but our source of information is necessarily limited.

Now certain genres might revel in relationships, in their character's sexuality, in the small details of day to day life which differentiate women from men like sitting down or standing up in a toilet... but SF/F is not one of those genres. Relationships and sex matter, but they're normally accesories to a main plot involving something much bigger than any of the individual characters caught in it. You may have a realistic and gritty saga like ASOIAF where Sansa tries to burn the sheets stained with her first menstruation, but you can also have Tolkieny high-fantasy where none of the riders of Rohan notice Eowyn doesn't piss standing up. This isn't true of Harry Potter, however, which is a very character-centred series, where we follow the three protagonists through seven years of their lives and the petty and domestic gets almost as much screen time as the very slowly developing Voldemort plot.

To sum this up, characters in a novel and the relationships between them don't have the complexity of real life people and their relationships. Much is lost in translation, and I think that's part of the problem when looking for gender specific nuances... in some genres there aren't that many at all. And thus from neutrality, we assume maleness, we might even default out of pure lazyness, as has been pointed out.

For instance, you can certainly have an unemotional woman or an emotional man, but the fact that the character is unusual for their gender is going to affect their self-image and relationships with other people, and the rest of their personality needs to be cohesive.

I disagree. Human beings are emotional in general. If you don't depict them as such they come out as sociopaths (like Octavian in Rome, for instance). A burly warrior might not cry for his loved one, but he can fly into a fit of rage and crush the skull of someone who angers him. In SF/F, gender roles are so influenced by the setting, that they're basically whatever you want them to be, anyway.

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Something else I've noticed (let's see if anyone agrees with me): when I notice a problem with a female author writing a male character, it's usually with the way he thinks or talks--the most common one being thinking or talking about his emotions too much. In other words, the author has written this guy as if he were a woman.

Whereas, when it's a male author screwing up a female character, it's very rarely that she thinks or talks like a man (outside of a few specific examples I'm not really even sure what that would mean--the traditional female role being so much more constricted than the traditional male one, I think most of us must "think like men" at least to some extent). It's that she's the embodiment of male fantasy

I'm not so sure about what the first part entails, but the second is dead-on.
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Honestly, and only ever having been of one gender, I can't know for sure, but I think men and womens internal, inherent emotional and thought processes are not massively dissimilar. There are plenty of characters who could have a simple gender flip and still make sense, and I would be ok with that - they would still be good, interesting, consistent characters. I can identify with plenty of male characters fully and I can indentify with many female characters written quite neutrally by men.

Monza Mercatto, for example, could more or less be a man. However, this only works becuase Abercrombie wrote a world where gender norms lie fairly lightly and really demphasized them in the story. Maybe its not hugely realistic, but it is mostly internally consistent and super realistic accurate worldbuilding isn't the point of the book, so it dosen't detract from it any. But, had this been a westeros like world, where the gender dynamics are important, pervasive, and an important theme, Monzas ability to not really absorb them would be weird.

Take Brienne - shes not exactly girly, but she's very clearly a female character - shes shaped, very powerfully, by being a woman. (In a mans world trying a mans job) Her low self esteem, her awareness of the male gaze, her awkwardness, etc, all those would just not make sense in an ugly man, becuase thats the interaction between Brienne - as a woman - and her sorroundings, which a man dosen't have (he would probably have other issues.) Even Arya, who mostly gets away from it by being often treated as a boy, being young enough to be all but asexual and not having a particularly normal socialization process for a few years, has her moments of asking "but Lyanna was beautiful".

Hermione too - I agree she's very much a girl (and reads as a very realistic girl to me, having been a bookish and mouthy teenager with more guys than girls as friends). She has a lot of traits that are gender neutral - she smart, perfectionist, etc, - but the sanctions she gets for it, her reactions to them, that pull between scoffing at 'girly stuff' but being really pleased by looking good in a dress at the ball but being totally unwilling to admit it...those are not dynamics men have to handle.

On vulnerability - I think this is again a cultural norm. Women are 'allowed' to be more open, men encouraged to show stoicism. In that kind of setting, I would expect a really open, emotional man to stand out and be shaped by that fact somewhat (like Sam, for example). (although theres the older stereotype of the passionate dreamer that is man, and the boring sensible shrewish woman.) I agree that theres a kind of pornification of it sometimes, but thats percisely becuase it is a taboo, to an extent. When done in more moderation, I always find trying to break through to a generally un-emotional characters emotions interesting, of whatever gender, and it does happen with women - I can't think of written examples off the top of my head, actually, but its prevalent on TV - Aeryn from Farscape or Beka from Andromeda* - and they don't ring wrong as women.

*That show that only had one and a half seasons.

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Honestly, and only ever having been of one gender, I can't know for sure, but I think men and womens internal, inherent emotional and thought processes are not massively dissimilar. There are plenty of characters who could have a simple gender flip and still make sense, and I would be ok with that - they would still be good, interesting, consistent characters. I can identify with plenty of male characters fully and I can indentify with many female characters written quite neutrally by men.

Speaking as a male, I, like Galactus, have moments reading books by female authors where I think "this is clearly being written by a woman". Typically though they are caused by the thought processes of a male character entering into a romantic relationship with a female character. I can well understand that this might be a very difficult thing to get right.

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Speaking as a male, I, like Galactus, have moments reading books by female authors where I think "this is clearly being written by a woman". Typically though they are caused by the thought processes of a male character entering into a romantic relationship with a female character. I can well understand that this might be a very difficult thing to get right.

...whereas the moments when, as a female reader, a passage about a female character feels like it isn't being written by a man are very rare. (The absence of the "men-writing-women" vibe was one of the first standout things that struck me about AGOT.)

I agree with the earlier sentiment that a lot of the problem is overly sexy/overly wish-fulfilling female characters - they become unbelievable. This isn't to say that anyone, male or female, can't write a sexy female character; the problem is making them believable too. It's useful to ask the question: what is this character doing here? As a general rule, a male author with a male protagonist may write in a female character to be a love interest, and that's pretty much all she is - cardboard cut-out, gets rescued once or twice, maybe gets to shoot one bad guy to demonstrate "agency", and that's it. Female author writing female protagonist needing male love interest will, as a general rule again, give the man a lot more to do. The result is that the male love interest of a female protagonist will feel much more embedded into the story - much more believable.

(The above applies to front-of-page-characters more than background characters. Every book needs background characters who aren't fleshed out. Gender issues therein are likely to be different...)

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Speaking as a male, I, like Galactus, have moments reading books by female authors where I think "this is clearly being written by a woman". Typically though they are caused by the thought processes of a male character entering into a romantic relationship with a female character. I can well understand that this might be a very difficult thing to get right.

Can you give an example? I think I see what you're getting at, but i'm not really sure. I can think of plenty of men thinking about entering romantic relashionships written by men that seem to pass muster - Jon think about Ygritte, Robert pines after Lyanna, Logan in the First Law thinks about Ferro (more than she thinks about him, IIRC) and Jezal pretty much does nothing but think about one woman or another, and I can think of plenty more examples.

(I think how a character thinks and behaves is a bit different from what role they get in the story to start with, and I agree with Eloisa that more often than not women are kind of 'wrong' not becuase theres some subtelty off in the thought process but because their whole role, the entire shape of their lives, is just so blah that theres nothing there to relate to. Most extreme example I can think of is Heinlein. Hes got male fanatasy fulfillment female characters as main characters sometimes, which makes for a horrible read as a woman. Ofcourse, their internal thoughts and emotions are also off completely, but they have to be to be in that role.)

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