Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 01:11:54 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Men writing women characters

Started by Fambo Number Mive, April 04, 2018, 02:37:46 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Fambo Number Mive

There's a BBC Trending with women mocking how male writers portray them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-43639004

However, it's difficult to create a character if you don't have their life experiences. How do women writers portray men?

It all seems a bit one sided to me really. Do male writers really portray women so badly?

Captain Z

I know it goes against popular opinion but I could never get into the Adrian Mole books precisely because it felt exactly like a middle-aged woman's attempt to characterise a teenage boy, rather than reflecting my own thoughts and experiences.

Chriddof

I liked the Mole books, but I get what you mean. Adrian always came across as a very eccentric type, which is of course the point, but he felt like someone who should have been bullied to within an inch of his life for constantly writing terrible poetry and going on about Malcolm Muggeridge rather than someone who once managed to get into Barry Kent's gang.

The cultural reference points were always awkward and spotty - by 1981 / 82 punk was strictly for hardcore crust types yet you've got a scene in the first book where Nigel has a "punk" party. Someone as hip and consumerist as Nigel was meant to be would have been into something else. It was the age that Neil Tennant often said was like "if punk never happened", after all. Adrian is well into Toyah and Abba, which may make sense these days but in 82 was probably a bit of an odd mixture.

I would have thought Adrian's diary entries would have mentioned - purely in passing, obviously - other pupils at his school talking excitedly about copies of Cannibal Ferox / The Exorcist / etc, maybe with him despairing about "cultural vandals" or something at the end of it. Video games are nowhere to be seen. Computers are mentioned briefly but as unfathomable devices operated by people called "Brain-Box" Henderson, rather than 16k ZX Spectrums or Vic-20s that your friend had that you played games on and wrote 10 PRINT "I AM SKILL"; 20 GOTO 10 on.

Went a little off-topic there but you get what I'm saying, hopefully.

bgmnts

How do you write a fat person or a gay if youre not fat or a bummer? You just imagine.

paruses

Those read like Bulwer Lytton prize entries, to be honest. The one about the high breasts / cheek bones is funny. The one with the older lady being a 7/10 is not. If that type of sentence were in a story I was reading then I imagine the rest of it would be equally shit. I don't think it adds anything to a debate though as there's no specific target; it's just good and bad parodies of sexist writing tropes. Well done on them for trying though.

Good to see that someone was called out though. People should be called out. If I call someone out then they know they've been called out.

Sebastian Cobb

Those 'i described myself like a male author described me' things had done several laps of twitter years ago.

Wet Blanket

I try to stay out of the gender wars but as a literary sort I find this particular strand of ya-boo men very annoying. There are loads of subtly drawn female characters written by men in literature: Molly Bloom, Alice out of Alice in Wonderland, Anna Karenina, Bathsheba Everdene, Lisbeth Salander, Daisy Buchanan...

If the female characters are badly drawn it's probably because it's a bad book, and there are plenty of bad bestsellers written by women. I haven't read any of the 50 Shades books but I doubt Mr Grey is a tour-de-force deconstruction of male psychology.

(I thought Adrian Mole was pretty well observed, although I've never read any of the later ones where he's a fully grown adult)

manticore

That reminds me of this piece of satire of male novelists. The thing is, I don't think I've read any of the writers she's lampooning, so I'm not sure who they are. I'm guessing Hemingway is the biggest one. Anyone got any more ideas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUrqUWNcSOg


buttgammon

That article is a fucking disaster. We're all used to lazy journalism that copies and pastes stuff from Twitter, but there's hardly an original word in there. It would also be helpful if they at least used some examples of stuff male writers had actually written to highlight the point, rather than just pasting in some imaginary responses.

Quote from: Wet Blanket on April 04, 2018, 07:35:47 PM
I try to stay out of the gender wars but as a literary sort I find this particular strand of ya-boo men very annoying. There are loads of subtly drawn female characters written by men in literature: Molly Bloom, Alice out of Alice in Wonderland, Anna Karenina, Bathsheba Everdene, Lisbeth Salander, Daisy Buchanan...

If the female characters are badly drawn it's probably because it's a bad book, and there are plenty of bad bestsellers written by women. I haven't read any of the 50 Shades books but I doubt Mr Grey is a tour-de-force deconstruction of male psychology.

(I thought Adrian Mole was pretty well observed, although I've never read any of the later ones where he's a fully grown adult)

Completely agree with this post.

I've heard these arguments about male writers and female characters repeated numerous times in the last few years and they seem reductionist at best; surely bad writing and gender politics are separate issues. I worry that we've reached a point where we can't conceive art as coming from a place other than someone's direct experience, which means that (for example) a man cannot write about a woman's experience because he has not had the experience of being a woman. But what about creativity, nuance and empathy?

Molly Bloom is a particularly good example. There are some equally reductionist arguments from other perspectives which claim that Joyce uses her (and a different kind of language when writing her soliloquy) to express an intrinsic difference in the feminine. I don't think it's as simple as there being a completely different mode of writing that gets to the crux of female identity, but that's not to say Joyce doesn't write Molly well. While some of the arguments around her character are not entirely convincing (it's been suggested that she is some sort of discharge of feminine energy that escapes the masculine structures of conventional punctuation, grammar, prose etc; I get the point but there's more to her than that) I think she's a brilliantly nuanced character. There is definitely something in the idea that Joyce writes women differently, but I don't think it's done in as crude a way as is sometimes suggested.

newbridge

No need to get defensive, seems like the point is clearly to parody a certain type of male writer. I don't think any of these tweets are presuming to criticize Tolstoy's ability to write characters of either gender.

Or Joyce for the matter, although Molly Bloom strikes me as a terrible example of an artfully developed female character. I don't think she was supposed to be. The secondary characters in Ulysses only exist as reflections of the author-dual-protagonist.

Bhazor

Quote from: buttgammon on April 04, 2018, 11:58:25 PM

I've heard these arguments about male writers and female characters repeated numerous times in the last few years and they seem reductionist at best; surely bad writing and gender politics are separate issues. I worry that we've reached a point where we can't conceive art as coming from a place other than someone's direct experience, which means that (for example) a man cannot write about a woman's experience because he has not had the experience of being a woman. But what about creativity, nuance and empathy?


Except of course no one is stopping anyone from doing anything.

Icehaven

Yeah I saw this and thought it was a bit pointless and weird to make up examples of men writing about women then going ''Look how men write about women!'' That doesn't really help make the point in the same way using actual examples would. Of course it's another debate entirely as to how deliberately exaggerated some of these made-up examples are, and wether or not laying it on too thick is just using humour to make the point or actually detracts from the argument. There's plenty of real examples out there, anyone who reads has seen them, why not call them out instead of inventing some?     

Wet Blanket

Quote from: newbridge on April 05, 2018, 01:23:54 AM
No need to get defensive, seems like the point is clearly to parody a certain type of male writer. I don't think any of these tweets are presuming to criticize Tolstoy's ability to write characters of either gender.

Or Joyce for the matter, although Molly Bloom strikes me as a terrible example of an artfully developed female character. I don't think she was supposed to be. The secondary characters in Ulysses only exist as reflections of the author-dual-protagonist.

Whatever you think of its effectiveness, Mollly Bloom's soliloquy is hardly of the 'she had red hair and big tits' school being lampooned here. Qualifying it with 'not the good writers, obviously' is moving the goalposts a bit isn't it? Bad writing is bad writing, whether or not the author swings a tallywacker. I don't think either gender has the moral high-ground when it comes to genre fiction.

Funcrusher

Quote from: newbridge on April 05, 2018, 01:23:54 AM
No need to get defensive, seems like the point is clearly to parody a certain type of male writer. I don't think any of these tweets are presuming to criticize Tolstoy's ability to write characters of either gender.


But what type of writer is this? Do they write literary or genre fiction? What genres? An easy way to identify who we're talking about would be to name some writers, but there are no names. It's just 'male writers'.

And it wouldn't be difficult for me to drop into the library and pull out some examples from the romance section of women writers objectifying men.

buttgammon

Quote from: Bhazor on April 05, 2018, 01:35:04 AM
Except of course no one is stopping anyone from doing anything.

I don't think anyone is stopping anyone from doing anything, but I think if we're reaching a point where a taboo is forming in relation to people trying to write beyond their immediate experience, then that's a problem. Not a problem for censorship, but a problem for literature.

Quote from: Funcrusher on April 05, 2018, 08:55:37 AM
But what type of writer is this? Do they write literary or genre fiction? What genres? An easy way to identify who we're talking about would be to name some writers, but there are no names. It's just 'male writers'.

This is precisely my problem - without specific examples, it becomes "men can't write about women well," which is bollocks, as opposed to "x, y, and z male writer do a bad job of representing female subjectivity," which is completely true.

Bhazor

#15
Quote from: buttgammon on April 05, 2018, 10:04:29 AM
I don't think anyone is stopping anyone from doing anything, but I think if we're reaching a point where a taboo is forming in relation to people trying to write beyond their immediate experience, then that's a problem. Not a problem for censorship, but a problem for literature.

Authors being made to go "Hang on a second, are my secondary characters horribly lazy generic borderline insulting stereotypes? Wait! Do these tweets apply to... ME!?!?" Truly the nightmarish dark age of literature is upon us.

buttgammon

Quote from: Bhazor on April 05, 2018, 10:21:42 AM
Authors being made to go "Hang on a second, are my secondary characters horribly lazy generic borderline insulting stereotypes? Wait! Do these tweets apply to... ME!?!?" Truly the nightmarish dark age of literature is upon us.

That's really not what I mean at all, but I think you're well aware of that. The question I've heard asked several times recently (and not just on the childish BBC article above) is whether people ever can truly write beyond their immediate experience; at a time when our idea of experience seems to be becoming increasingly reduced to generic traits (do all women have the same experience of being a woman?) I think this is a dangerous idea. Literature shouldn't have limits based on experience. What it should have is some kind of quality control.

paruses

#17
The problem with responding to this kind of thing is that it is very easy to come across as defensive when really the issue is with the article and with the setting of the underlying challenge not the subject matter.

A better title for the article would be "Women write parodies of varying quality based on an imagined male writer's work and some don't even do that they just supply an outline of how that writer treats women" and the underlying challenge should be "new twitter challenge: describe yourself as you imagine a very specific type of male author would. This author should write two dimensional female characters in a style that is at odds with your outlook and is in the thriller genre".

And while I liked the high breasts / high cheek bones one I don't really understand why the male character suddenly asks where she is from originally - either we have not been given the information that the female character has a heavy Slavic accent, in which case his question is fairly reasonable, or this is part of his character (which I assume would be fleshed out in the rest of the book). Oh, and as this is America then don't they always describe themselves as Scots-Irish or whatever regardless? I mean, it would be very odd for me to suddenly start talking about nineteenth century Welsh tin miners if someone asked me where I was from but it seems par for the course in the States. Maybe it's just that the contributor is fed up of being asked that (it looks like she has a Ukrainian flag plastered all over her twitter profile).

I don't think I would enjoy the company of the original challenge setter.

gilbertharding

Would it help anyone if we took a book at random and reversed all the genders? Just gave them different names/pronouns. I don't know the answer...

There was a thing on Front Row this week about Romantic Fiction post #metoo. Someone decided that they'd make their heroine 'stronger' somehow, and she said one of the things that change affected was how much more of a dickhead her male character became. Or something. I was barely listening.

gilbertharding

I thought this thread would feature more Martin Amis than it has up to this point though.

Icehaven

Quote from: gilbertharding on April 05, 2018, 12:24:46 PM
I thought this thread would feature more Martin Amis than it has up to this point though.

That's because the article was about some made-up sexist writing rather than the real thing. 

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Bhazor on April 05, 2018, 10:21:42 AM
Authors being made to go "Hang on a second, are my secondary characters horribly lazy generic borderline insulting stereotypes? Wait! Do these tweets apply to... ME!?!?" Truly the nightmarish dark age of literature is upon us.
Oh, come on. Do you seriously think that's the other side of this argument?


gilbertharding

The thread title is also misleading in that none of the examples describe characters - just inaccurate anatomy (chiefly, unfeasibly animated chestal glands).

As others have said, there are shit books where men and women are equal victims of hack reductivism (from Characters to Characteristics, if you like - cheers).

I'm trying to think of the books I read (eg Maugham, Orwell, Greene, Waugh, Powell), and how they describe characters (if at all).

I guess those authors mostly left it to the reader to infer character from the things the person says or does, and the description from the narrator about how they do them. Sounds trite... Only if the character is a mere passer-by does the physical appearance form more than a small part of the picture. Of course none of the ladies in these books have anatomy at all.

Although the some of the writers I mention all seem to have problematic blindspots with regards to 'natives' and servant-class people of all nationalities... Sometimes in a book like Heart of the Matter the reader might believe there are only a dozen or so actual people in the entire Sierra Leone.

Fambo Number Mive

This example describes character, not  just anatomy:

QuoteShe had the quick compensatory mind of a woman who was not quite beautiful, but appeared so after a few drinks, when the light was just so, and the birdsong in the trees echoed across the chasm between her face and true beauty

gilbertharding

I wasn't really on board with the attacks on Game of Thrones. I mean, what do you expect?

But, yeah the thread where she looked up the word 'breast' in books by Roth and Kerouac is pretty breathtaking, given how many clever people seem to rate them. Not that I'd stick up for those writers either. Worst excesses of the nascent permissive society. "Ma's out, Pa's out, let's talk rude..."


Wet Blanket

I don't know why I'm choosing this hill to die on but...

Nearly all of those examples are of first-person male-perspective narratives from novels pointedly about fucked up men. I don't think it's fair to use deliberate explorations of men's basest impulses as indefensible examples of retrograde attitudes. There's something sort of philistine about complaining a Philip Roth character isn't a bastion of progressive values.

I didn't think Purity was a very good book, but that scene is clearly being played for laughs. In the world of the novel "I'm a little squirrel who loves to fuck" is taken as a mad thing to say. Surely, if you were really going to go into it, the ludicrously unsubtle parody of woke studentdom, vegan activist Anabel Laird, so misandrist she makes her boyfriend pee sitting down, is a much better example? But then presumably that tweeter hasn't read any of these books, just searched for contentious sounding lines to quote out of context.


gilbertharding

Quote from: Fambo Number Mive on April 05, 2018, 03:58:19 PM
This example describes character, not  just anatomy:

Barely. But what book is that from?

gilbertharding

Quote from: Wet Blanket on April 05, 2018, 04:02:30 PM
I don't know why I'm choosing this hill to die on but...


I think you're right. Although as you suggest, there's definitely a problem with that kind of thing in literature.

My Mrs got me the first Rabbit book (and Revolutionary Road... was she trying to tell me something?) a few years ago. Broaden my horizons from all the dead British authors I like... I was left thinking - and I hoped this was the author's intention, but doubt it - what an utter prick the main character was. Disgusting book.

Quote from: Wet Blanket on April 05, 2018, 04:02:30 PM
Nearly all of those examples are of first-person male-perspective narratives from novels pointedly about fucked up men. I don't think it's fair to use deliberate explorations of men's basest impulses as indefensible examples of retrograde attitudes. There's something sort of philistine about complaining a Philip Roth character isn't a bastion of progressive values.

i do actually agree with you, but that's twitter for ya