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

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.