Writers and Gender

[VonDondu]

[QUOTE=fable](I once heard Herbert give a live lecture chortling over the way he carefully measured and applied geological instruments to formulating new planets for his fiction, and couldn't help wondering, "Who the hell cared?")[/QUOTE]
(raises hand shyly) Uh, I did. I read all of the appendices to Dune, and in my naivete, I even looked for copies of the books he "quoted" from in the hope that he had actually written them.

Even so, my own preconceptions lead me not to believe that a woman would have provided as much background documentation for a novel as Frank Herbert did. However, please don't get me wrong. I don't attribute that sort of difference between men and women to anything innate in their makeup; rather, I attribute that sort of difference to people's tendency to conform to expectations.

Whenever people try to write fiction, I think they try to write the way they think they're "supposed" to write, and they try to make their stories sound "the way they're supposed to". As a result, female writers end up writing "female fiction", and male writers end up writing "male fiction", based on the "templates" they are using.

Personally, I happen to mimic a lot of the things I read (although I try to keep it to minimum on here, partly to preserve my own style of posting here, and also out of respect for the individuality of others). Sometimes after I've read a particular author, I have a tendency to imitate them the next time I write something. Perhaps the reason why the particular style of writing I use here is so "forceful and direct" is because I'm imitating the male textbook authors who influenced my writing style in college. (Although I happen to think it's more of a "textbook" style than a "male" style.)

As for whether or not someone cares about Frank Herbert's attempts to substantiate the new worlds that he created, I suspect that's merely a matter of personal taste.

On a related note, I have gotten a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of reading The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. I think she writes with a feminine style and sensitivity that could not be duplicated exactly by a man. She also has a truly unique vision of her own work, and no one could tell the story of Harry Potter and his friends as well as she can. But I have to admit that I find her work frustrating at times because of, shall we say, technical problems. For example, there's no way that her days and dates could be correct if she's using a standard earthly calendar. If she wanted to use accurate dates and days of the week, it wouldn't have been difficult to look them up, but she admits that didn't want to be concerned about things like that. She also can't seem to make up her mind about things such as how many students there are at Hogwarts and how old the various characters are--she's very inconsistent. I'm sure that a lot of her readers say, "Who cares?" Well, I do. The size of the facilities at Hogwarts (which would be determined by the approximate number of students) and the size of Harry's peer group seem very important to me because they shape Harry's life at Hogwarts. But J. K. Rowling apparently doesn't see things that way.

I wish that J. K. Rowling would create appendices for her work, but she likes to keep her secrets to herself (like a woman, in my opinion), and she leaves it to, in her own words, her "clever" readers to create their own Harry Potter repositories of knowledge and speculation. She gets a big kick out of it. If she were a man, I suspect she would take offense at some of the errors and misunderstandings and jump in to make a bunch of corrections (like a man, in my opinion).

I don't think there's much basis for comparison between J. K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Frank Herbert, since they have written novels in completely different genres, but I'll make such a comparison, anyway. If Douglas Adams had written the Harry Potter novels, the dates would have been accurate and some of the humor would have remained the same, but most of the action would not take place at Hogwarts, and the central focus would not remain on Harry Potter due to Adams's love for digression, distraction, and irony. If Frank Herbert had written the Harry Potter books, everything would have been "scientifically" correct (especially the magic--he would have created a rational scheme to explain how it works), and the books would have been stuffed with appendices, perhaps not including rosters of students, but probably including detailed descriptions of the Hogwarts curriculum (which I personally believe is in need of serious revision if the purpose of "the best school of magic in the world" is to give its students the best possible education). If J. K. Rowling had written Dune, there would have been no appendices, and Paul would have been treated more like the adolescent he was supposed to be. If she had written The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, many things might have remained the same, but the characters would have been fleshed out a whole lot more, and there would have been some sort of overarching struggle between good and evil rather than the "we'll never know the truth, anyway" sort of attitude. I'm sure that most of the differences between those particular authors stem from their individuality rather than gender differences, but perhaps their gender has helped to shape their styles and their outlooks in some way. Why wouldn't it have done so?

I have to say I'm truly perplexed by the film critics who say that the new movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is weak on characterization, when in my opinion it has fleshed out the characters and explained their motivations in a way they books never did. So to me, the movie offers the best of both worlds: fleshed out characters, as well as events that bounce them back and forth between improbable places where they are completely out of their element. I suspect that Douglas Adams had help with that from his co-screenwriter.


[QUOTE=fable]If women in scientific professions were to write sf&f today, I suspect some of them might take pride in doing as Herbert did. And presumably give boring lectures about it, too.[/QUOTE]
Yes, women are just as capable as men at developing elaborate schema and giving boring lectures about them. But I have yet to see a female science fiction author write in the same style as Frank Herbert. (Please point one out to me if you know of one.)

[jopperm2]

Vonondu, will you marry me?

@fable, you're just too much of a female reader to enjoy manly appendices like those of Dune. j/k But I, too cared and I cursed you out loud for having the chance to even be in the same room as the man. I like nonfiction a lot more than fiction though so I dig fiction that is written like nonfiction. I think that's why I like to read sourcebooks for PnP RPGs.

[fable]

I'm sure that most of the differences between those particular authors stem from their individuality rather than gender differences, but perhaps their gender has helped to shape their styles and their outlooks in some way. Why wouldn't it have done so?

Because a really good modern author usually transcends such categories as gender and economic class, in my opinion. Aldous Huxley doesn't write "like a man," and Helen Waddell doesn't write "like a woman." When I read Joyce, Colette or Camus, I'm reading an author whose sex couldn't be guessed, but whose mask adopted for that purpose could lead one to envision any number of people of any given time.

On a related note, I have gotten a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of reading The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. I think she writes with a feminine style and sensitivity that could not be duplicated exactly by a man.

How do you mean? Because I find nothing extraordinary in Rowling, at all. I could understand praise for the author's facility, or her ability to write in a vein first popularized by Dic!ens and later adapted ever so well to fantasy by Mervyn Peake, but what's sensitive or written in a feminine style in it? Unless, of course, you agree that "feeling" words are automatically feminine, and "informational" words are masculine. Which contributes nothing substantive to discussion, since they're arbitrary labels, without factual support.

Yes, women are just as capable as men at developing elaborate schema and giving boring lectures about them. But I have yet to see a female science fiction author write in the same style as Frank Herbert. (Please point one out to me if you know of one.)

Thanks the gods nobody has, because personally I never did like his style. He italicized all mythic references in his Dune books, and had to show us in great detail just how many cross-currents existed in any get-togethers among groups of characters. Subtlety was not a Herbert trait. I can't say that this over-plain, in-your-face style is one I've seen exactly the same from anybody else, though Asimov used to go to extraordinary lengths to justify some of his pet hobby horses on robotics. But again, I think that's an academic trait, not a gender one. Cherryh always struck me as another didactic author who over-emphasized issues of importance to herself, and wrote in a plain style that added nothing to narrative.

[VonDondu]

[QUOTE=fable]On a related note, I have gotten a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of reading The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. I think she writes with a feminine style and sensitivity that could not be duplicated exactly by a man.

How do you mean? Because I find nothing extraordinary in Rowling, at all. I could understand praise for the author's facility, or her ability to write in a vein first popularized by Dic!ens and later adapted ever so well to fantasy by Mervyn Peake, but what's sensitive or written in a feminine style in it? Unless, of course, you agree that "feeling" words are automatically feminine, and "informational" words are masculine.[/QUOTE]
I wasn't referring to word choices. I don't have time to write a literary review, but what I had in mind concerned the author's viewpoint, I suppose. Consider this analogy. Suppose two different authors visit a curio shop that is filled with all sorts of wonderful objects and a colorful assortment of visitors, and then they go home to write about their observations. If one author was a man and the other was a woman, I suspect that they would choose to emphasize different things. For example, a man might write about a useful gadget and its long, interesting history, while a woman might focus on an eccentric old man with a pipe who picked up an old piece of jewelry, held it pressed to his chest for a few minutes, and shed a mysterious tear. That's what I mean by viewpoint. I think that J. K. Rowling focuses on things that a woman is more likely to look at than a man, while she tends to ignore a lot of things that might be of more interest to a man. It's a subtle thing, and my observations are somewhat arbitrary. But show me a male author who has focused so much on things like candy and pastry.

[fable]

[QUOTE=VonDondu]I wasn't referring to word choices. I don't have time to write a literary review, but what I had in mind concerned the author's viewpoint, I suppose. Consider this analogy. Suppose two different authors visit a curio shop that is filled with all sorts of wonderful objects and a colorful assortment of visitors, and then they go home to write about their observations. If one author was a man and the other was a woman, I suspect that they would choose to emphasize different things. For example, a man might write about a useful gadget and its long, interesting history, while a woman might focus on an eccentric old man with a pipe who picked up an old piece of jewelry, held it pressed to his chest for a few minutes, and shed a mysterious tear.[/quote]

Social stereotyping. If it had been my wife and I, she would have raved about a hardware gadget, while I would have dwelt on the guy and the jewelry. (Did you notice its shape, like a faceted tear? The dark red coloration, like heart's blood? The tattered hat he wore, as though it had been drug through five miles of mud on a stormy night? And what did he mutter when he held it close in his calloused hands, and why did he fumble for something in his right vest coat pocket that he never withdrew?) In so far as we embrace stereotyping, we tend to find it, because we recondition our senses to see that which confirms it.

[jopperm2]

Perhaps your wife has a more masculine personality than you.

[fable]

[QUOTE=jopperm2]Perhaps your wife has a more masculine personality than you.[/QUOTE]

Jop, all you're doing is repeating the stereotyped definitions of what constitute "masculine" and "feminine" behavior. Is a love for hardware really masculine? Oh--then the fact that nobody drooled over it 50 years ago means no men were masculine, right? Or if that changes with time, who establishes the factors that become masculine in a particular era?

[jopperm2]

I realize that, and I"m sure you realize I only said it for the point of argument. What I mean though is that society defines words like masculine and feminine just like they define liberal and conservative. Since society has defined what masculine is as something specific, if you are opposite that in one respect, then you are feminine in that respect.

Not that that's bad or really says anything other than society(or at least American society, I'm sure it's less so elsewhere) has labeled an aspect of you as feminine or masculine.

Honestly if I were hanging around the shop with you and you said somthinglike this:

(Did you notice its shape, like a faceted tear? The dark red coloration, like heart's blood? The tattered hat he wore, as though it had been drug through five miles of mud on a stormy night? And what did he mutter when he held it close in his calloused hands, and why did he fumble for something in his right vest coat pocket that he never withdrew?)

I would probably say something like this: "Man, you're starting to sound like a chick!"

I wouldn't mean any harm by it, but in that one sentance I would have summarised this whole conversation.

[fable]

[QUOTE=jopperm2]I realize that, and I"m sure you realize I only said it for the point of argument. What I mean though is that society defines words like masculine and feminine just like they define liberal and conservative. Since society has defined what masculine is as something specific, if you are opposite that in one respect, then you are feminine in that respect. [/quote]

I would disagree. This isn't a cultural definition of masculine and feminine at all; that's in the dictionary. It's a pop definition, and like most such, inaccurate and useless.

Honestly if I were hanging around the shop with you and you said somthinglike this: (Did you notice its shape, like a faceted tear? The dark red coloration, like heart's blood? The tattered hat he wore, as though it had been drug through five miles of mud on a stormy night? And what did he mutter when he held it close in his calloused hands, and why did he fumble for something in his right vest coat pocket that he never withdrew?

I would probably say something like this: "Man, you're starting to sound like a chick!"

First, I would point out that I would never say that. It's not conversational English, but literary in nature. And in any case, I would have to shoot you.

Which, I suppose, would be a very masculine thing to do. If you follow pop definitions.

[Tower_Master]

Wow. When I looked in this thread for the first time, I thought it said, "Wrists and Gender" - that made absolutely no sense!

[Magrus]

Oh wow, that makes tons of sense to me...but I read it write the first time so I'm fine.

[Cuchulain82]

[QUOTE=fable]It's a pop definition, and like most such, inaccurate and useless[/QUOTE]
Language, like music, is vulnerable to change over time. IMO, just because a word has a pop definition or connotation doesn't make it useless. In fact, many modern authors (Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan, Faulkner, even Hemmingway) were relatively "pop" in language and style.

Masculine and feminine are gender indicators, not necessarily indicators of sex. I know how much you believe in stereotyping by gender and gender roles Fable (that is to say... not at all!) but I think that Jopp is hinting at a widespread social truth. Just because masculine/femine terminology isn't academically convenient to define/identify doesn't make the terminology useless or invalid.

[fable]

[QUOTE=Cuchulain82]Language, like music, is vulnerable to change over time. IMO, just because a word has a pop definition or connotation doesn't make it useless. In fact, many modern authors (Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Brautigan, Faulkner, even Hemmingway) were relatively "pop" in language and style.[/quote]

I didn't say the definitions of masculine and feminine were current, I said they were pop, a very different thing. For example, a pop definition of masculine might include the sentence, "A person who enjoys playing around with hardware," while this isn't a current definition, at all; and a pop definition of copper might include "Cures arthritis" because quite a few people believe this thanks to pop self-help books, but it certainly isn't a current definition. I don't want to get dragged into a separate discussion on these authors you mention, but Hemingway used slang words. He didn't use any words indicating a belief in psycho-babble and pop BS--and it isn't a case of pop words, but pop meanings, that we're discussing; a very different matter. At a guess, he would in any case have bellowed with laughter and uttered a few good filthy curses at the pop definitions that many words have, today. He was a very spare writer, who used words to mean exactly what they mean.

Masculine and feminine are gender indicators, not necessarily indicators of sex. I know how much you believe in stereotyping by gender and gender roles Fable (that is to say... not at all!) but I think that Jopp is hinting at a widespread social truth. Just because masculine/femine terminology isn't academically convenient to define/identify doesn't make the terminology useless or invalid.

Cuchulain, I'm perfectly aware of the difference between a "true" meaning and a "culturally true" meaning; there's no need to condescend. The terms in question are invalid if the meanings are false. That they embody cultural beliefs (which can be said as much for the fairytales in the Histories of Herodotus, which he said were inaccurate but revealed much about the people who told them) is irrelevant from a viewpoint of addressing the simple issue of truth: is a writing style capable of being called masculine or feminine?

No, without outside references that are strictly cultural, it is not.

[Cuchulain82]

[QUOTE=fable]Cuchulain, I'm perfectly aware of the difference between a "true" meaning and a "culturally true" meaning, so please don't condescend to me. The terms in question are invalid if the meanings are false... is a writing style capable of being called masculine or feminine?[/QUOTE]
Fable, you're so worried about condescension- don't take this the wrong way, but lighten up! You, of all people, know that anything (and everything) that gets posted here is fair game for critique. "Useless" is your word, not mine. You said that masculine/feminine is "a pop definition, and like most such, inaccurate and useless". I disagree with that assertion and provided authors whose works indicated that at any given time, "pop" expressions/language can be critical to the understanding of a work, making pop far from "useless". If you had used another expression, like "difficult to define" or "confusing", then things might be different...

[QUOTE=fable]I didn't say the definitions of masculine and feminine were current, I said they were pop, a very different thing...I don't want to get dragged into a separate discussion on these authors you mention, but Hemingway used slang words...He was a very spare writer, who used words to mean exactly what they mean.[/QUOTE]
I agree that we could both go back and forth all day citing "pop" vs. "non-pop" literature and never get anywhere with the discussion. However, part of what makes authors like the Good Dr. Thompson and Richard Brautigan so transcendent is their incredible ability to use pop terms and words and still create wonderful literature.

[fable]

[QUOTE=Cuchulain82]Fable, you're so worried about condescension- don't take this the wrong way, but lighten up! [/quote]

Then don't try to teach me Intelligent Thought 101: "People sometimes use words with popular meanings instead of their real ones, kids!" Come on. Treat me as intelligent enough to figure that point out, and you won't get my reaction.

You, of all people, know that anything (and everything) that gets posted here is fair game for critique. "Useless" is your word, not mine. You said that masculine/feminine is "a pop definition, and like most such, inaccurate and useless". I disagree with that assertion and provided authors whose works indicated that at any given time, "pop" expressions/language can be critical to the understanding of a work, making pop far from "useless". If you had used another expression, like "difficult to define" or "confusing", then things might be different...

Useless from a point of view of arriving at the truth, as in the context of our thread discussion, here? Yes. Useful as a barometer for establishing the beliefs of strange 20th/21st century Earth cultures? Sure. Which one of these two did you think I was referring to above when I wrote "useless, " above?

Back to subject: can anybody provide evidence where masculine and feminine, as defined in a dictionary, apply specifically to style of writing? Alternatively, does anybody want to provide evidence of different approaches to masculine and feminine writing, in the past?

[Cuchulain82]

[QUOTE=fable]Then don't try to teach me Intelligent Thought 101: "People sometimes use words with popular meanings instead of their real ones, kids!" Come on. Treat me as intelligent enough to figure that point out, and you won't get my reaction.[/QUOTE]
Hey, please don't get bent out of shape Fable. You know how much I repect your opinion- I've stated it repeatedly in the forums and while PMing you. That said, you aren't the only person reading a reply. I try to be as clear as possible because not everyone here has spent as much time as you have thinking about gender roles (as an aside, I freely admit that you probably know more about the subject than I do). Precision in language is what makes serious threads at SYM work so well.

Don't take it personally if I criticize your word choice. You said "useless", and the implication in your language wasn't that it was specific to gender terminology. You said it was "pop" and went on to say that it was, as such, "useless". It isn't an attack on you; I mean, you warned Jormund not to mistake critiques for attacks earlier in this very thread.

[QUOTE=fable]Back to subject: can anybody provide evidence where masculine and feminine, as defined in a dictionary, apply specifically to style of writing?[/QUOTE]
Off the top of my head I can think of the book I mentioned earlier- Gaia and God by Rosemary Radford Ruether. It was a feminist critique of Plato and parts of the Bible. I actually liked it alot more than I expected to, and thought she made many valid points about the duality that came from the masculine approach of the respective authors.

I googled "gender roles+literature" and got 2+ million hits- doesn't that mean that someone out there thinks that masculine & feminine have to do with literatue?

[frogus23]

I think that masculinity is clearly visible in many of the Great Novelists of the 20th Century brigade.

This is not a clearly thought out point, but I find a distinct similarity in the books I have read of John Updike, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, plus Lolita.

I noticed that, while they all seemed obsessed with the same type of character (the outcast observer of America), and masculinity as a theme, their works exhibit a trait which I recognise as masculine & patriarchal (a quality which is often the subject of resentment between men fixated on being men and their wives or children):

An egoistical need for dominance, perfection and mastery of the smallest detail. This is a trait I can't pin down with very good wording, but it is what is exemplified by desiring a bigger and better car (of which one knows the every working), or being an expert in the field, or being the best player on the field, or being willing to work over minutae to make the most complete colection, or knowing more than all ones wife and children, or being a big wheel in business due to one's unerring knowledge of the stockmarket.

Do you understand what I'm on about?

I think these things are plastered all over the works of these big male authors in their use of extremely obscure and extremely mundane words within each sentence (showing off, via obsession with detail, their mastery of vocabulary). Refusing to use a single sentence which is formulaic apart from in an ironic joke, thus demonstraing their primacy among sentence-smiths via obsessive knowledge of novel-writing of the past. Yet accepting a tried and tested shape (social commentary with psycholgical insights) in order to beg comparison to novelists past and present, and satisfy their glory.

EDIT: I'm not so sure I believe this after writing it....

[Cuchulain82]

Frogus... I'm on the edge of my seat- what don't you have the cojones to say?

(I'm a sucker for suspense )

[C Elegans]

Its the thread about the male domination of RPGs I think: http://www.gamebanshee.com/forums/showt ... p?p=537900

Thank you Dottie, that is indeed the thread about cerebral lateralisation and gender.

Different chapters are written by different scientists, but males are in a large majority in neuroscience, as in all science. Maybe I am biased, I should of course have picked a book edited by one female and one male scientist

The British lit class didn't include Virginia Woolf? She was a fine author in my opinion. And what about American writers Djuna Barnes (I liked her Nightwood[/i] as a teenager) or Sylvia Plath?

I tend to think there are actions that could be classified as masculine and feminine and both genders do both types. Perhaps the genie classifies things like this but I don't think that's bad if you look at its results as you write in a masculine manner as opposed to you are a man. It's basically just assigning gender roles.

I am not sure of exactly what the terms masculine and feminine are used in the English language. I personally tend to avoid terms I find imprecise, so I rarely use them. In Swedish, maskulin and feminin is mostly used to denote physical features that are related to innate physical differences, for instance primary or secondary sexualisation features such as having a beard or having an hour-glass shaped body form. It is not commonly used to denote gender role characteristics such as a certain behaviour or way of thinking. In Swedish, you would not say that a writer has a masculine or feminine style, you would use other expressions. However, if you use the terms simply to denote gender role characteristics, I suppose you can use them in the same way as you use terms as "fashionable" or "unfashionable", that is the term denotes something in a specific context, but exactly what it denotes changes with time and culture.

Applying the use of terms I described above, I could assign many SYM-members' posts as "masculine" or "feminine" according to how well they fit gender stereotypes in my culture. If all SYM:ers posted a photo of the clothes they were wearing and I read some fashion magazines, I suppose I could assign a lot of photos to the category "fashionable" or "unfashionable" according to current clothing fashion in my culture.

I personally have mistaken two men on this forum for women though I won't reveal who publicly. Don't want to offend them.

Offend them? Why would it be offensive if anyone believe you were the other gender (especially not if I was hitting on you ), unless they see you? I wouldn't be very happy if you thought I looked like a man, but how well my posting style fits into somebody else's gender role stereotypes would not bother me the slightest.

Since society has defined what masculine is as something specific, if you are opposite that in one respect, then you are feminine in that respect.

This would not be true in Sweden, since masculine and feminine only covers very limited human features. A big man with a very hairy body and large arm muscles might be described as looking "masculine" but that does not mean all other men look feminine, it just means that they look normal whereas this "masculine" man looks like an extreme. It is not viewed as positive or negative to be masculine if you are a man. From a sexual attraction viewpoint, it might be negative to be masculine if you are a straight woman, since that would imply you had no waistline, big square jaw (as you get from male sex hormones), hairy legs, a visible moustache, etc.

Obviously it would be useless to apply current sociocultural gender role stereotypes to another time or another culture. It would, in my opinion, be quite useless to apply gender role characteristics to writing since all writers, just like all people, would have features that suited both categories as well as features that didn't suit any of the categories.

Freesearch dictionary gave the following defintion of masculine and feminine:

masculine - having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for men
feminine - having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for women

In this sense, I guess you can say that for instance sir Philip Sidney wrote in a masculine way. He was extremly eloquent, he expressed a lot of inner emotional suffering for his love, he could rhyme well and he expressed the virtue of friendship - all which were desirable characteristics for a man of his social class in the society he lived in. But doesn't say a lot more to describe him as a Renaissance writer rather than a masculine writer? Does anyone think the terms masculine and feminine are relevant or describe something meaningful in terms of writing and literature?

[VonDondu]

[QUOTE=dragon wench]I have been noticing, as I've thought about the books and authors I like, that the vast majority are male.... I have not made deliberate choices here, I am motivated by an author's style, intelligence, insight, wit and the book's content. But it is a trend I've observed in my selection of reading material.

...I am curious at why I seem prefer male authors over female. The reasons are probably numerous and complex. Maybe it is because I tend to be fairly tomboyish in my general outlook on things, so perhaps I just identify more readily with a male perspective.

Or perhaps, in the case of the less modern writers it is also that often women did not have the same types of wordly exposure and experience that their male counterparts frequently enjoyed...[/QUOTE]
Since you asked those questions, it is apparent that you believe there's a perceptible difference between the way that men tend to write and the way that women tend to write. You attribute this difference to differences of perspective, general outlook, worldly exposure, experience, and so forth. I've said pretty much the same thing--men and women tend to be interested in different things and sensitive to different things. I also added that people try to make their writing sound the way they think their writing is "supposed" to sound. If an author has been encouraged throughout his life to maintain a masculine viewpoint and he has, by choice or not, conformed to that expectation, then I think it is likely to affect his style of writing.

If we are engaging in "social stereotyping", I see nothing wrong with that. I think it's useful to learn different ways to tell men and women apart. I'm not saying that a man has to act a certain way, and I'm not saying that women always act a certain way, and I'm not saying that a person can never exhibit traits normally associated with the opposite gender. I'm talking about making empirical observations and guessing probabilities.

For example, if I see two toddlers from the back and can't tell by their appearance whether they are male or female, I might resort to other clues to tell which gender they are. If one of them is playing with a doll, I would guess that the child is a girl. If the other one is playing with a firetruck, I would guess that child is a boy. I'd say the probability would be about 90%. Of course, I would agree with anyone who argued that it's impossible to tell with certainty whether a child is male or female by looking at the toys he or she is playing with. But I hardly think it's a mistake to apply probability and statistics to the question. If that's "social stereotyping", so be it.

It is true that men can engage in so-called "female behavior" and women can engage in so-called "male behavior", which blurs the distinctions that we perhaps like to make between men and women. But does that mean that there's really no such thing as "male behavior" and "female behavior" since both genders are capable of behaving exactly the same way? My instinct says "no". I think that it is perfectly acceptable to use the term "female behavior" to describe behavior that females are far more likely to engage in than males, and it is perfectly acceptable to use the term "male behavior" to describe behavior that males are far more likely to engage in than females. I don't believe in any inviolable gender norms, because I believe that people in general are capable of exhibiting qualities that we normally attribute to the opposite sex. But if we have any hope of telling the two genders apart, I think we have to make a distinction between male and female attributes and behaviors.

If we can't make a distinction between male attributes and female attributes, then there's no point in trying to tell the sexes apart (except perhaps when we're getting married or trying to reproduce). Think about the consequences of that. For example, it means that we would judge all people, both male and female, by the same standards of beauty. It means that, physical attraction aside, people would find members of either gender equally attractive in terms of personality, mental attributes, and aesthetic characteristics. It means that the same methods of teaching would work equally well with both male and female students. And it means that we wouldn't describe one type of writing as "masculine" and another type as "feminine". If there were no such thing as "male traits" and "female traits", we'd go through life saying we just can't tell men and women apart, and it doesn't make any difference, anyway.

I think that's completely counter-intuitive, just because my experience tells me that men and women not only look different, they also act differently and think differently, whether it's by nature or whether it's by choice or whether it's because people try to conform to expectations. The differences between individuals are subtle and unpredictable, but the differences between men and women in large test samples are real. That's why we can use labels like "feminine behavior" and "masculine behavior" with a large degree of accuracy in our predictions. It certainly works wonders for advertisers.

When we perceive qualities in an author's work that make us think that it was written by a person who has the perspective of a man or the experience of a man, some of that is certainly influenced by what we expect a man to be. But I don't think that makes all of our own observations pointless. Trying to guess an author's gender by his or her writing style is kind of like guessing whether a child playing with a "girly" doll is male or female. If you can identify "male traits" and "female traits" in people's writing, then your guesses are probably a lot better than blind guesses. You won't be right 100% of the time, but would you be happy if you were right more than half the time?

To return to your original question, let's suppose that you can tell the difference between the writings of a male author and the writings of a female author. You ask why you prefer one over the other. Well, I think it's a matter of individual taste. Your own experience shapes the way you think a good book should read, so that's the way you judge a book. Perhaps in large statistical samples, women tend to prefer certain elements over others in what they read. Why else would romance novels sell better among women than among men? Why else does science fiction have a larger male audience than a female audience? Are we really "stereotyping" people when we look at survey results and then apply their findings? I just don't see it that way. I don't think that preferences in literature are hard-coded in the brain, and that's not what I'm suggesting. I think it was proper for you to ask other people why they might prefer male authors over female authors or vice-versa.
I think you're absolutely right when you say that the reasons why people have their own particular preferences are numerous and complex. if you want simple answers, maybe you should stick with simpler questions such as, "Why are there more Texans who prefer Coke than there are Texans who prefer Pepsi?"