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

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.