male authors writing female POVs & vice versa: possibly ilb’s worst thread title

Fintan in Last Chance Saloon is great. Jack in Sushi for Beginners is a bit meh, but the book is not really about him. Artie in The Mystery of Mercy Close is pretty ok, but he has to be to be Helen’s boyfriend. Oh, Paddy in This Charming Man ofc…memorable but if you’ve read it you know why.

re Tiptree, the last two books (The Starry Rift and Brightness Falls From The Air) are maybe my favorites and iirc less bleak

it's been almost 30 years since i read 'a long and happy life' or 'kate vaiden' so i can remember very little about them apart from (the duality of) the southern thing

but also reynolds price being gay may (or may not!) have helped him avoid the very worst in female characterizations

from the excerpts here, it seems that mediocre male authors have a hard time writing about characters they are attracted to. these women come across as flat, one-dimensional fantasies. that makes sense, but i wonder how virginia woolf was able to pull off "orlando," which was a portrait of someone she was infatuated with who had "drenched violets" for eyes. is it just literary skill or could a man never really pull this off?

feel like it's two parts literary skill and one part men being bad at sex

possibly optimistic

it could also be that woolf portrays orlando -- aka a fairytale or mythologized vita sackville west -- as transcending gender, so the kind of beauty and sexual charisma he (then she) has is not built on cliches.

much like a male author, though, woolf had as much contempt as admiration for vita's grace and beauty and the ease with which she moved through the world.

Re Tiptree,can't imagine reading xp the collected works all at once, for the same reasons that keep bringing me back: the intensity times the bleakness, the driving force, and what fueled it, creatively and otherwise. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the perfect title and a great collection, but there are other good stories that didn't make the cut, in earlier (and maybe later?) collections. Also enjoyed the ones Sleeve mentioned.

The opening paragraph of Jonathan Franzen's 2001 review of Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days:

Colson Whitehead's first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' was a lively comic fantasy about a New York City elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson. The book established Whitehead's intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn't too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author's choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it's technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities; and so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

I'm in the middle of reading Mating by Norman Rush, written from the POV of a 30-something female anthropology grad student who is frequently musing on her experience of gender, sex, types of femininity and masculinity, relations between men and women, etc. I'm finding it very compelling and believable (as a cis-het man), though there's not much depiction of a woman's ordinary navigation of society/the world, as the narrator is living in an isolated community in Botswana, and is depicted as a very unusual, hyper-observant person. It's reminding me a bit of the first half of The Last Samurai.

Can't believe Franzen wrote something stupid and bad

Some of the examples cited upthread seem limit cases -- good for laughing at, or for indicating a problem, maybe, but not proof that most authors could not, in principle, if they were careful and thoughtful, write an opposite-sex POV.

re: the "embodied experience" idea that I threw in (which does relate to those limit cases), it occurred to me that you could get another take, possibly even a clearer one, on this whole issue by transposing it to:

"Can an able-bodied writer write a disabled character POV, and vice versa?"

(Note: the terms are no doubt contested - one critic replaces able-bodied with "temporarily abled"! - so, replace with whatever terms you think accurate.)

Can a sighted person write a blind POV? Could a person who's always been blind write a sighted POV? ... Here I think you get into territory that might possibly make the "woman writing a male POV" seem straightforward.

It should be easy enough if you think of the character as a person and not some sort of wish fulfilment fantasy. So many people fail to meet that very low bar!

I love Mating and think it’s a good example of a male writer creating a fully realized (and awesome) female protagonist.

is the distillation of pf's musing not rather "can anyone write a character not a facsimile or facet of their own self?" which is either a deep question without an answer or a simple question with an answer that is a sliding scale between badly-excellently depending on their skill as a writer and/or the distance between their self and the character

I think people can, but I'll confess one of the main reasons I've never written fiction is I don't think I can, and am somewhat awed by the level of self confidence I feel is necessary to think it possible.

I don’t think you need to be X to write Y but you should know something of what you’re talking about, whether by research or experience. But also, experience can make a character and book more meaningful, like I was saying in the what are you reading thread, Marian Keyes being an alcoholic herself means that all the stuff she’s writing about she knows personally, which I think is important in such a subject. Does that mean that someone with no experience, either direct or indirect, couldn’t for example write about alcoholism? No, but I don’t understand particularly why they would want to. Does that make sense at all?

It should be easy enough if you think of the character as a person and not some sort of wish fulfilment fantasy. So many people fail to meet that very low bar!

― mardheamac (gyac), Thursday, March 10, 2022

In relation to the gender issue, I think I see this.

In relation to the disability question, I don't think I do.

I don't see "wish fufilment" coming in if I write about, say, a person in a wheelchair or a blind person. Whatever I'm doing in writing such a character, I'm probably not wishing to be that character. The potential obstacles to writing them well seem clear: that these people, as real people, have experiences that I don't know, haven't yet had. ("Yet" because, after all, any of us could have these conditions soon enough.)

You can say "well, just write them as an individual consciousness, don't focus on the disability" - sure, but people's bodies may, in some cases, strongly shape their consciousness and experience.

A writer who has given this a lot of thought is, of all people, Adam Mars-Jones - especially re: disability but also I believe re: gender.

A very popular woman writer who has, as I understand it, written a lot from a male POV (in various series) is J.K. Rowling.

Has anyone ever criticised her on this score - eg: argued that she doesn't understand what it's like to be a teenage boy?

I don't know. I'm afraid I've never read her.

I think the wish fulfilment in this context is less about wanting to be disabled and more about having a fantasy of what you want disabled people to be like, i.e. so that you don't have to feel troubled by their existence.

That wiki entry on Tiptree is quite something. I never got round to reading any of her stories.

The world in general gets framed around men’s perspectives and priorities, so I think you could argue that women have no shortage of “insights” into what it’s like to see the world through a man’s eyes.

I'm reading Them by Kay Dick, whose narrator is (or narrators are) unnamed and not explicitly gendered, yet I intuit from dialogue, setting and action that they are female. I don't know if that is because I know the author was a woman.

i’m reading written on the body where the protagonist’s gender is never identified, and if you spend any amount of time trying to figure out their gender you’ve kind of missed the point of the book. more books should be written in this register

that franzen quote upthread makes me want to kick his ass

Franzen has made loutish remarks his specialty. He infuriated me years ago with his Edith Wharton essay -- he couldn't believe 21st century readers would care about a rich lady writing about the rich.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/a-rooting-interest

i think a lot of cis men are incapable of writing women bc the only perspective they have the inner landscape of their own assholes. i know that we are all different, shaped by individual experiences, but at the same time i tell myself almost mantra-like that we are all the same and you only have to think of your character as a person to write them well (you should also do your research and talk to people if you are writing someone really outside of your personal experience bc “we are all the same” does not preclude the hard work of understanding)

Franzen has made loutish remarks his specialty. He infuriated me years ago with his Edith Wharton essay -- he couldn't believe 21st century readers would care about a rich lady writing about the rich.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/a-rooting-interest🕸

Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in “Lolita.”

i think a lot of cis men are incapable of writing women bc the only perspective they have the inner landscape of their own assholes. i know that we are all different, shaped by individual experiences, but at the same time i tell myself almost mantra-like that we are all the same and you only have to think of your character as a person to write them well (you should also do your research and talk to people if you are writing someone really outside of your personal experience bc “we are all the same” does not preclude the hard work of understanding)

i think a lot of cis men are incapable of writing women bc the only perspective they have the inner landscape of their own assholes. i know that we are all different, shaped by individual experiences, but at the same time i tell myself almost mantra-like that we are all the same and you only have to think of your character as a person to write them well (you should also do your research and talk to people if you are writing someone really outside of your personal experience bc “we are all the same” does not preclude the hard work of understanding)

He obsesses over her looks.

It’s so fucking weird and such a tell!

“Why read a woman if you don’t want to fuck her”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/jonathan-franzen-sexism-accusations-s-816763

“I’m not a sexist,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women’s work that I think is not getting enough attention.”

“None of that is ever enough,” said the author. “Because a villain is needed. It’s like, there’s no way to make myself not male.”

“Not only am I not a sexist, but if you think about it I’m really kind of a hero, for women”

You don’t need to be a cis woman to write one; however you probably should know and be friends with some so you don’t write big glaring tells into your book like, for example, a character soaping her vagina.

This is spectacular failure not only of writing, but of editing. I'm not necessarily an "every written detail must advance the plot" person but not all details are created equal and I can't think of a single story that would be enhanced by knowing that a female character soaped up her vagina to little or no consequence.

late to this but Mating is really good! I have never read a book that used so many obscure words, I got so mad at one point that I borrowed my friends' OED

i think the old adage to 'write what you know' applies here in the sense that many men don't know women very well and aren't likely to start knowing women very well. the challenge inherent in this, that is men writing from a female perspective, is to be able to know at least one woman very well, i think. maybe meaning something like, their internal experience is linked to one's own. the ability to do this in my estimation requires that a man be aware of patriarchy and then relinquish it to some degree, i.e. stop being a dickhead (which franzen seems incapable of doing) and become someone who relates, someone who feels commonalities. i think one necessary part of that process is that a man has to not be terrified of their own femininity (i think by doing this they also become not terrified of their masculinity).

You don’t need to be a cis woman to write one; however you probably should know and be friends with some so you don’t write big glaring tells into your book like, for example, a character soaping her vagina.

This is spectacular failure not only of writing, but of editing. I'm not necessarily an "every written detail must advance the plot" person but not all details are created equal and I can't think of a single story that would be enhanced by knowing that a female character soaped up her vagina to little or no consequence.

― castanuts (DJP), Thursday, March 10, 2022 3:43 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it may be "enhanced" if the reading audience is a bunch of dickheads like the author

“Why read a woman if you don’t want to fuck her”

I don't hold a brief for Franzen's novels but the linked article is in fact a pretty decent run-through of about a dozen reasons why yes, you maybe really DO want to read Edith Wharton, because Edith Wharton is great. He's especially right about The Custom of the Country, which is every bit as good and more currently relevant than the Big Two, and which is much less read. My only criticism is that he dismisses Ethan Frome as "minor, frosty" -- nope, it's short, but it's MAJOR and frosty. I know few novels frostier.

that's cutting him a lot of slack. which, incidentally, is something that men on team dickhead do a lot.

but he also avers that insecurity about her looks motivated Wharton, the kind of twaddle male writers aren't accused of.

otm about The Custom of the Country, which i reread last year.

Be interested to read a description of a man shaving from a woman's perspective.

_“Why read a woman if you don’t want to fuck her”_

I don't hold a brief for Franzen's novels but the linked article is in fact a pretty decent run-through of about a dozen reasons why yes, you maybe really DO want to read Edith Wharton, because Edith Wharton is great. He's especially right about The Custom of the Country, which is every bit as good and more currently relevant than the Big Two, and which is much less read. My only criticism is that he dismisses Ethan Frome as "minor, frosty" -- nope, it's short, but it's MAJOR and frosty. I know few novels frostier.

Be interested to read a description of a man shaving from a woman's perspective.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, March 10, 2022 5:06 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

curious what you mean by this. women shave all the time so it's not like the physical sensation is foreign to them. other than that, it would very much depend on the character i would think.

I know but still, a male character doing something everyday like this to see how a woman would write it. I don't recall reading it.

Assume he means facially. Shaving your face is ofc different because the blood vessels are so near the surface and the skin is so tender, but yeah, women shave sensitive areas all the time.

i've always been a terrible shaver and just let my beard go because of it, so i probably know less about the ins and outs of it than your average woman

I am trying to think of an example now but I wonder if you would just get a description that is either overly or covertly fetishising the act, it can be nice to watch a man shave.

xp

Alfred mentioned Henry James earlier ... I reread The Turn of the Screw the other day and am now thinking about it as a particularly extreme example of a male author writing female POV. It could be criticized as a typically sexist representation of "hysteria," but James' performance seems to persuade a lot of readers, regardless of how they interpret the narrator's mental state or the weird events of her story.

We shouldn't reward Franzen with too much attention, but

Stopped reading this deeply stupid essay right here:

Wharton embraces her new-fashioned divorce plot as zestfully as Nabokov embraces pedophilia in “Lolita.”
makes me want to beat him slowly into gravel with a baseball bat.

Just imagine:

"Woolf embraces her schizophrenia plot as zestfully as Bret Easton Ellis did mass murder in American Psycho.

That sounds just like Franzen, but, not having read so much Wharton, was especially pissed on behalf of Vladimir.

(have read enough of her to agree with this:
he dismisses Ethan Frome as "minor, frosty" -- nope, it's short, but it's MAJOR and frosty. I know few novels frostier.

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

The world in general gets framed around men’s perspectives and priorities, so I think you could argue that women have no shortage of “insights” into what it’s like to see the world through a man’s eyes.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, March 10, 2022

Tracer, I posited this idea on the thread (Elena Ferrante) from which this one sprang.

I think it's partially true and convincing.

But probably not wholly. 'Being a person who happens to encounter real life via a male body' is, I imagine, somewhat different from 'male POV and discourse as given to us by media'.

Further, given the vast amount of textual and narrative material out there, it would not be very difficult to find things 'framed around men’s perspectives and priorities' (you could start by picking up one of the dozens of magazines of stories and memoirs written for women readers; or watching daytime chat shows hosted by groups of women talking to each other; or reading discussion boards by and for women; or just reading tons of good and great novels written by women) -- but having done all that, I am still not sure I would feel confident writing a woman's POV. (If I were a creative writer, which I am not.)

sp: "it would not be very difficult to find things 'framed around WOMEN's perspectives and priorities'"

PS: I'm afraid I forgot to add: a male author, seeking insight into women's perspectives and priorities, could also ... talk to women that they know.

Yes, I did make that point upthread!

But Tracer's point is surely not that female perspectives are difficult to find - it's that male writers would have to want to find them in the first place (the example of magazines for women's readers is relevant here - not something aspiring writers are automatically pointed to!), while female writers are exposed to male perspectives whether they want to or not, because there is such an overwhelming amount of male perspectives in the culture, and because the majority of the canon that any person seeking to be a writer is nudged towards is male. That's not an excuse for lack of curiosity amongst male writers, it's just saying that female writers would have to actively work very hard to not be exposed to male views.

This is changing ofc but I think for the time it still stands.

Pinefox as a male writer you could do those things, as a part of your research, I suppose, but my point is that the male point of view suffuses our reality so completely that no one needs to do special research to understand its outlines. The heroes of our world, particularly in the public sphere, the cops and fireMEN and spies and surgeons, have been male for so long that the heroic qualities we see in them tend to be male qualities, or at least qualities that "code" male. There is a bit of question begging here but I do think that's how it has tended to work. No one needs to do special research to grok this stuff. (You'd probably need to do special research just to UN-grok some of it!)

xpost ahh now Daniel has made this point.

What you say about bodies is interesting, because I don't think it works the same way for men and women. It feels quite important for men to "understand women's bodies" in order to write them but I'm not sure it's actually very important the other way around, because men so often exist in both society and literature DESPITE their bodies rather than because of them - they are public people whose words and motivations take them beyond the merely corporeal. What is the hero of For Whom The Bell Tolls' body like? I'm not sure we learn much about Harry Potter's body (thank god) because men aren't defined by their bodies the same way that women are - their thinness, their fatness, their boobness, their hiddenness, their exposure, etc

I broadly agree with these points, or at least see why they can look persuasive.

Tracer Hand is on the right track, I think, in talking about something like "male = neutral, female = something that stands out and needs specifying".

But it ought to be possible not just to accept that but to contest it and look more closely, eg: at what a male bodily experience is like (only if you want to!).

Given that most of us (male or female) spend large amounts of our time around women, it doesn't seem quite accurate to me to say that women's perspectives are obscured or unavailable. They are all around - but in a different sphere from the one Tracer cites as containing "the heroes of our world".

"the majority of the canon that any person seeking to be a writer is nudged towards is male" -- a majority, maybe, but fair to add that large amounts of the most revered literary canon are written by women. You might well be "nudged towards" Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot; Gaskell, Woolf, Mansfield and many more. The C19 ones especially I think are so foundational that most writers should, or might, read them.

Given that most of us (male or female) spend large amounts of our time around women, it doesn't seem quite accurate to me to say that women's perspectives are obscured or unavailable.

i don't mean to sound above the kind of casual investigative approach that the pinefox and others are taking here, that kind of discussion is a welcome part of ilb, but i just want to point out that there is a large practice and field of research that has explored these kinds of questions at great length called feminism that can really enrich one's understanding around gender, sex, bodies, etc. judith butler, donna haraway, bell hooks, others i'm not familiar with.

anyway tracer brings up an important point about male subjectivity in that it tends to subsume and transfigure the male body. if a man is to be properly patriarchal he needs to erase or forget about his body in certain ways.