Male authors writing female characters vs female authors and male characters

[Gigei]

If you look at play behavior for instance girl children will engage in all the same play behavior as males but will engage in wider range of play behavior and have far less drive for play behaviors like rough and tumble which males are highly driven towards.

I thought that was because of societal factors. Parents expect boys to play rough and tumble while they discourage girls from such activities because they are seen as too delicate for them. If a boy likes physical activity it's perfectly normal but if a girl is fond of cycling, running, etc. she is labeled as a "tomboy" by people.

I definitely remember being told over and over not to play with the boys when they were doing stuff like playing in the mud because "girls shouldn't do that."

P.S. I used to wrestle with my brother a lot when we were kids and I always won because I was very aggressive.

In this book she is shown as involving herself constructively and decisively with her son's affair of the heart.

My (male) reaction to this was firstly that no man would allow his mother to get involved in this way (except possibly the type of weak man who is tied to his mother's apron strings, in which case his marriage would probably turn into a battle between his wife and his mother); and secondly that it is a bit of female wish fulfilment - the author likes to think a mother might get constructively involved in this way, or thinks her readers might like to think so.

Huh? Well it kind of depends. If it was a modern-type "affair of the heart" which is very romantic and all, probably.

On the other hand IIRC Miles is in fact a lord of some feudal society and as such marriages would be treated more as a Jane Austen thing where it's also about money, power and social status not just true love.

For example, when the Prince of Wales got married, he had to get approval from his parents. Yes, he could have stood his ground and said he would marry whomever he wished, and hang the consequences like another crown prince when he married an American divorcee and had to abdicate.

The point is, family would meddle in an old-fashioned sort of marriage.

[Datepalm]

This is a blatant attempt to poison the well.

Its also really repetetive. HE, you've been going on on these attempts to turn to gossip analysis of social dynamics every time this comes up for a while. Why? I know you think the issue stands on its own legs, so why instead of arguing the science, such as it is, you go for the idea that the reason someone dosen't agree with you is not becuase they could possibly hold a different opinion, but because they're really cowardly social sluts. Its like the global warming denial folks - any disagreement is clearly evidence of The Conspiracy. I'm with Lyanna - This is beneath you.

re-bechdel test - I don't think theres a problem with a man being present, and obviously if you've got some kind of artistic novel that consists entirely of 800 pages of three brothers in one room probably you can give it a pass in terms of judging the authors attitude towards women. Its a test devised by a comic strip, not some hard rule held by all the universes feminists that you can now cleverly try to poke holes in to show how unfair it is.

Reversely, can anyone think of a book that would fail a male bechdel test? (It dosen't have two men talking about anything other than a woman?) Giving genre romance a pass, or anything told narrowly from a single female POV (same as i'd give a narrow male POV) I'm not being sarcastic, it must exist someplace.

[Dr Spoon]

The question you're asking is why, IRL and in about 90% of SFF, motherhood is treated as detrimental to the woman's agency and prospects, and, in fiction, to their roundedness as a character? (Heck, not even just in fiction. How many times is a real woman immediately reduced to just her children, or a pregnant woman reduced to just her pregnancy?) That's far too long a question for this thread...

For what it's worth I don't agree with this, but as you say, it is too long a question for this thread.

I suppose another factor is "What sort of story do you want to read?" A story about a marriage alliance between two corrupt kingdoms could be brilliant, but it would be a totally different story to a slightly dim berserker hacking his way to the wizard who killed his parents, and would probably involve very different people in all respects.

IIRC Ursula Le Guin wrote some good female characters in The Dispossessed and some good neuter ones in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Edit:

Reversely, can anyone think of a book that would fail a male bechdel test? (It dosen't have two men talking about anything other than a woman?) Giving genre romance a pass, or anything told narrowly from a single female POV (same as i'd give a narrow male POV) I'm not being sarcastic, it must exist someplace.

How about Carmilla, by Sheridan LeFanu? It has two lead characters, both female, and is set in an isolated castle. All of the discussion between male characters is about Carmilla, either about how great she is or that she should be staked through the heart. I'm not sure whether this works!

[AutumnEvenings]

Reversely, can anyone think of a book that would fail a male bechdel test? (It dosen't have two men talking about anything other than a woman?) Giving genre romance a pass, or anything told narrowly from a single female POV (same as i'd give a narrow male POV) I'm not being sarcastic, it must exist someplace.

The closest thing to my mind (and it's written by a man, Michael Cunningham, but in the style of Virginia Wolfe) is The Hours. Although the main male/male conversation that I'm thinking of is about a woman, but also about themselves, because the men are gay/bisexual. (Most of the characters in all 3 sections are female, husbands, or bit players.)

But I really love this book and I find it interesting that he was able to capture women so well. I do think imitating Virginia Wolfe's style really helped. (I found his other work wanting, by the way.)

[fionwe1987]

Regarding the biological determinism of behavior (and this is not directed at any one person):

A lot of it is nonsense. It is not at all absolutely true that the structure of the female brain will drive her to play with dolls while men play physically aggressive games. All you can say is that relatively speaking, girls will enjoy playing with dolls more than boys, and the reverse for rough and tumble. That most girls don't play rough games (and are not allowed to play) is a social construct.

In the end, this kind of argument for biological determinism is like the whole left brain-right brain thing. Sure, the left brain is more involved in language and logic, while the right is more involved in abstract concepts and the "big picture". But only relative to the other half of the brain. Chop the right brain off and a person will have great difficulty constructing and understanding metaphors. So how can one argue that only the left brain is used for language?

Its the same with behavioral differences. The emotional aspect of an event is likely to be given more thought by a woman than a man. That doesn't mean the man is going to be emotionally uninvolved!

Further, while the neural circuitry may be different in men and women, there's no reason to think this will completely alter the behavioral output of the person. Say there's an accident where the child of a couple is seriously injured and trapped in the car. It may be argued that the woman will be more emotionally involved, whereas the man will be more concerned with the practical aspects of getting the child out.

This may result in the man hunting for his cell phone in the debris so he can call for help, whereas the woman may desperately try to pry open the door, while also comforting her distressed child.

Evolutionarily, this bifurcation in behavior was probably supported so that in a group, different strategies are tried to solve a problem (which makes it more likely that it will be solved). But, exactly the reverse may happen, and the two people will still be using different strategies to solve the problem.

What is absurd is that people argue that a woman's emotional involvement is detrimental to the situation, and most of the time portray them as getting hysterical and impeding the work of the calm, logical man. But that will almost never be the case if we simply go on biology. The reason this may happen more often (in certain social strata) is not because women are wired to sit around and cry helplessly, but because societal norm was that women shouldn't be involved in physically demanding tasks (but birthing a child is okay, for some reason).

Put simply, in the nature vs. nurture debate for behavior, anyone arguing exclusively for one is missing the picture.

[Lummel]

IIRC Ursula Le Guin wrote some good female characters in The Dispossessed and some good neuter ones in The Left Hand of Darkness.

and some good male characters too!

[Bastard of Godsgrace]

Wait, is a male not allowed to be PRESENT at the discussion for it to pass the test? In A Madness of Angels, there are several discussions involving both Vera and Oda, but Swift is at all of them, as the whole book's told from his viewpoint. If you can't have a man there, though, doesn't that mean that anything from a man's point of view automatically fails?

Actzually there isn't very much of it. Both Vera and Oda participate in the council in the pancake house, but a lot of other people are present as well. Before that they exchange some catty remarks, but Matthew remains center of the conversation. Besides I am not sure if those should count, since they are stereotypes in their own right, ;)

[Toe]

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.

That is a very interesting observation. Very easy to dismiss RJ's women as all being badly written self-assertive clones while this may be the natural outlook in a society where women have been at the top of the power pyramid for thousands of years.

I also think RJ's magic system is an interesting since it is very clearly divided into a feminine female and manly male part. Male channelers tend to be individually stronger in raw power than females but cannot form circles on their own and female channelers are better at weaving together. Men must constantly struggle with the power, women must submit to it and influence from within. Men are better at the fire and earth, women at air and water. Men have poorer perception than women at sensing power in others. Men "seize" and "wield", women "embrace" and "guide".

[Datepalm]

That is a very interesting observation. Very easy to dismiss RJ's women as all being badly written self-assertive clones while this may be the natural outlook in a society where women have been at the top of the power pyramid for thousands of years.

I also think RJ's magic system is an interesting since it is very clearly divided into a feminine female and manly male part. Male channelers tend to be individually stronger in raw power than females but cannot form circles on their own and female channelers are better at weaving together. Men must constantly struggle with the power, women must submit to it and influence from within. Men are better at the fire and earth, women at air and water. Men have poorer perception than women at sensing power in others. Men "seize" and "wield", women "embrace" and "guide".

Yeah, no stereotypes there at all. I think that it kind of drowns in all the other gender weirdness WOT has going on though.

[Spastic Plastic]

Datepalm, now you're just criticizing for the sake of criticizing. I haven't read WOT, but complaining about sexism in a male/female magic system sounds like grasping at straws.

[Finn]

Regarding the biological determinism of behavior (and this is not directed at any one person):

A lot of it is nonsense.

True. The problem is that you seem to buy into some of this nonsense in the rest of your post.

I also think RJ's magic system is an interesting since it is very clearly divided into a feminine female and manly male part. Male channelers tend to be individually stronger in raw power than females but cannot form circles on their own and female channelers are better at weaving together. Men must constantly struggle with the power, women must submit to it and influence from within. Men are better at the fire and earth, women at air and water. Men have poorer perception than women at sensing power in others. Men "seize" and "wield", women "embrace" and "guide".

Ugh.

Datepalm, now you're just criticizing for the sake of criticizing. I haven't read WOT, but complaining about sexism in a male/female magic system sounds like grasping at straws.

Srsly?

[Zoë Sumra]

Reversely, can anyone think of a book that would fail a male bechdel test? (It dosen't have two men talking about anything other than a woman?) Giving genre romance a pass, or anything told narrowly from a single female POV (same as i'd give a narrow male POV) I'm not being sarcastic, it must exist someplace.

I've got a couple of paranormal romances (the chicks in leather type) where I don't remember any two men talking not to a woman. Lots of characters of both genders in various "story roles", but no male conversation. (One POV, female first person. As was previously mentioned, passing the BT is harder with a single first-person POV, but far from impossible - I've got another paranormal romance in the same series that passes, for instance.)

I suppose another factor is "What sort of story do you want to read?" A story about a marriage alliance between two corrupt kingdoms could be brilliant, but it would be a totally different story to a slightly dim berserker hacking his way to the wizard who killed his parents, and would probably involve very different people in all respects.

Which demonstrates the problem instantly, in two ways.

1) You've assumed that relationship = female centred story, action = male centred story.

2) The way you've constructed the paragraph suggests that you've assumed that male action = preferable to female relationship.

Next stop is identifying the "you" in your original question, "what sort of story do you want to read?" To whom are you catering? The shrinking male SFF readership already catered to by the majority of published books? The growing female SFF readership gravitating to paranormal fantasy as a more palatable alternative to hard SF and trad epics?

There is absolutely no reason why any subgenre needs to be as exclusive and excluding as a lot of them are. Let's have a wider range of characters and experiences, hmm?

[Datepalm]

Datepalm, now you're just criticizing for the sake of criticizing. I haven't read WOT, but complaining about sexism in a male/female magic system sounds like grasping at straws.

Um, yeah, seriously? A Magic system where women are intrinsically weaker than men, where male magic is based on 'struggle' and 'conquest' and female magic is based on 'submission' and 'bonding'. Nothing dodgy there at all, in your eyes?

[Toe]

Um, yeah, seriously? A Magic system where women are intrinsically weaker than men, where male magic is based on 'struggle' and 'conquest' and female magic is based on 'submission' and 'bonding'. Nothing dodgy there at all, in your eyes?

Most likely in a direct conflict between men and females, men would be utterly defeated since women can form circles while men cannot on their own. Men stronger as individuals, women stronger as a group.

[Datepalm]

Most likely in a direct conflict between men and females, men would be utterly defeated since women can form circles while men cannot on their own. Men stronger as individuals, women stronger as a group.

Thats not the point of the criticism. Jordan isn't describing a reality - hes creating one. So in his world, women are stronger - but only in groups. Female power comes from emotion and submission, while men's comes from a constant, individual struggle...its can't be reduced to a game of arm wresteling where someone wins and someone loses and thats it. Why did Jordan decide to construct his world like this.

[Toe]

Thats not the point of the criticism. Jordan isn't describing a reality - hes creating one. So in his world, women are stronger - but only in groups. Female power comes from emotion and submission, while men's comes from a constant, individual struggle...its can't be reduced to a game of arm wresteling where someone wins and someone loses and thats it. Why did Jordan decide to construct his world like this.

I do not think the female power is more "emotional". Not sure what you put into that word. Also, you are misquoting me, more correct would be "submission and guide from within" instead of only "submission".

Why did he create that magic system like that? Probably from what is considered to be the archetypes for femininity and manliness and creating a magic system from that which would still be equal in power and complementary in the end. I find it very interesting. There is a reason for RJ being one of the modern rulers of fantasy and so enormously popular both among females and males. There is a lot more thought in his work than if often recognized.

[ljkeane]

Thats not the point of the criticism. Jordan isn't describing a reality - hes creating one. So in his world, women are stronger - but only in groups. Female power comes from emotion and submission, while men's comes from a constant, individual struggle...its can't be reduced to a game of arm wresteling where someone wins and someone loses and thats it. Why did Jordan decide to construct his world like this.

I think you're being a bit unfair, the bit you missed out is that the men go crazy and die. To be fair to Jordan he's one of the few authors who has actually created a world where there is supposed to equality between the genders if not with women actually holding more of the power. There's not much doubt that writing female characters is not one of Jordan's strong suits but how he has tried to address the role of women in the world he created is not exactly stereotypical.

[Datepalm]

Probably from what is considered to be the archetypes for femininity and manliness and creating a magic system from that which would still be equal in power and complementary in the end. I find it very interesting.

I guess your archetypical is my stereotyped and sexist, i'm afraid.

I think you're being a bit unfair, the bit you missed out is that the men go crazy and die.

Not inherently - thats a problem thats solved. The whole struggle/submission thing is the 'correct' way.

To both of you - i'm not entirely disparaging of WoT, there were a few female characters who had some variety and were well done - A few of the female villains, particularly the more minor ones, Birgitte, Siuan, a handful of other minor characters, and overall characters of either gender were not really Jordans strong suit.

What I do find dodgy is his weird dichotomization of men and women - first, of course, they use different magic, which is just flat out odd. To the best of my recollection, this is never explained or examined, its simply a basic matter of natural fact in Randland. Men and women have different sources of magic, oh, and the sun rises in the east. But at the same time, its not really a coherent theme - compare the wonky seasons in Westeros - its a natural fact with no explanation on the characters part too, simply a product of the worldbulding, but its this giant symbolic thing that resonates and is questioned and has an ominous quality and so on.

Obviously, the characters don't know that having long seasons in weird, but the reader does, and the reader wonders why this is so - will it change? Is it good? Did something cause it? and GRRM relies on the reader knowing that to get across part of the tone of the book. With the male/female dichotomy in WoT, I don't get that impression - It dosen't seem to occur to Jordan that the reader might ever scratch their head and go, 'hey, whats up with this total dichotomy in magic on a gender basis, of all things?'

Then theres the stereotypical sexist 'women are gentle and guiding and men controlling and combatative', which, just, really, blah.

And then, leaving magic aside, a lot (not all, but a lot) of Jordans characters and even the structure of the plot hinges on this gender struggle, from the truly inane "i'll never understand women" repetetiveness, to the pervasiveness of single gender communities of all kinds, to the very sharp, formalized divisions in a whole range of societies between mens and womens spheres. Its just all really weird, and it would make sense if that what the books was about, but its mostly not - the big battle between Good and Evil or whatever exactly the lines drawn there isn't in some way resonant of this gender struggle, and I don't get it. Jordan asks me to accept that men are from neptune and women from pluto or something, as a totally natural fact, without offering me any reason why this is so.

ETA - and this is without suggesting that WOT is basically a piece of 4,000,000 odd word softcore S&M erotica.

[ljkeane]

Not inherently - thats a problem thats solved. The whole struggle/submission thing is the 'correct' way.

Well I don't ever recall it being referred to as 'submission' to be honest, so far as I remember it's only ever called embracing the source and it's only a superficial thing with no real impact on the story.

What I do find dodgy is his weird dichotomization of men and women - first, of course, they use different magic, which is just flat out odd. To the best of my recollection, this is never explained or examined, its simply a basic matter of natural fact in Randland. Men and women have different sources of magic, oh, and the sun rises in the east. But at the same time, its not really a coherent theme - compare the wonky seasons in Westeros - its a natural fact with no explanation on the characters part too, simply a product of the worldbulding, but its this giant symbolic thing that resonates and is questioned and has an ominous quality and so on.

I disagree, in fact it's the logic behind the, rather unusual for fantasy, gender equality that WOT has. Jordan has taken the time to devise a fairly consistent structure of his world that results in the relative power between the genders being different than in the real world.

That's not to say that there aren't some issues with it and as I said the fact that he's not particularly good at writing female characters doesn't help but I don't think the rather superficial differences in how he describes men and women accessing the source is a great concern.

ETA: In fact thinking about it I suspect that specific difference has rather more to do with how Jordan wanted to show Rand's struggles with going insane etc than anything else.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Lots of good stuff in this thread. Will have to be brief with my $0.02, cos I'm supposed to be working, but for the most part, it's kind of like this:

Many male authors writing female characters seem to be writing them specifically because they've reached a point in the plot that says "insert female here"; GRRM aside, it rarely seems to be a case of "well I want a character with complicated motivation X, and that would affect the story in ways Y and Z", cos those parts usually go to the men. So, it's less that the female characters are bad, more just underdeveloped and lazy; their gender is their sole reason for appearing in the story at any point.

Female authors do this to a certain extent as well, of course, but much less so; their female characters are at least slightly more likely to have different reasons for appearing in the plot, and there might even be more than one of them on screen at the same time (and not just to fight over the hero, either).

This gets at the heart of what I perceive as the primary problem: existence without being and agency. I suppose this could just as easily be called "the problem of female agency."

Existence without being entails the existence of a named recurring character who exists in the narrative plot without actively contributing to it. Many poorly written female characters passively exist in the story. They serve as story objects. They are the object of romantic affection.* The object to search and rescue. The object of information. The object of relationship (e.g., "his wife" or "his daughter). The object of aggression. And the list goes on. But female characters rarely push the story forward on their own accord or through active involvement. They are there, but they do not do anything. As such, these existence characters frequently come across as being "token females." If you took them out of the plot, you probably would not know that they were missing. In many cases, you could just as easily replace the female character of existence with a male character of existence. Existence characters frequently serve as shallow archetypes.

* One of my closest friends made a remark that I have been unable to forget (to paraphrase): "Male fantasy authors use their books to work out their own sexual wish-fulfillment and frustrations." She typically avoids fantasy for this reason.

Existence without agency is an overlapping problem in which the named recurring character, typically female, exists without any clear sense of agency. Real characters pursue believably real agendas. Surprise surprise, this is as true for female characters as it is for male ones. All to frequently, females in fantasy lack real goals, motivations, or agency. They are tag-along characters who pursue the agendas of the male protagonist. Even in patriarchal societies we still expect females to actively pursue agendas and goals. It would be odd, and stand out like a sore thumb, when they do not do so. And well-written female characters in the broader spectrum of literature outside fantasy do just that. Despite Elizabeth Bennett existing within the confines of a patriarchal society that shapes gender relationships, she still shows clear agency in which she actively and pro-actively pursues the fulfillment of goals. Female characters in fantasy may have some goals, such as stopping Evil Overlord, but as this overarching goal is shared by practically everyone else, this effectively makes them indistinguishable from everyone else.

Re Wheel of Time Magic System: I find the magic system of the Wheel of Time to be fascinating. But I do think that it would have been potentially more interesting if the requirements to master the magic was reversed. So male channelers would be required to a degree of submission and female channelers would be required to a degree of struggle. I believe this would further Jordan's attempt at portraying sexual dualism and interdependence better than how it is as written. But even this could be interpreted as sexist. That is, female channelers frequently have difficulty mastering these archetypically male qualities and male channelers with these archetypically female qualities. Though it could subsequently interpreted that both male and female channelers become more humanistically whole for adapting both male and female qualities within themselves.