Writers and Gender

[fable]

[QUOTE=VonDondu]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?" [/QUOTE]

Actually, true Texans prefer Dr. Pepper, but that's neither here nor there. Carry on.

[jopperm2]

@CE, I think I have read some Plath too but I don't really remember much about it. Not the others though. We focused on D1ckens, Shakespeare, the Brontes, that sort of thing. Most of which is not my style. I do like Shakespeare though.

In English(US version at least) Masculine and Feminine can mean having the physical characteristics or any other characteristic of that gender or its specified role(whether real or societally stereotyped). So one could say that being a firefighter, auto mechanic, or truck driver is a masculine job as those are professions predominately done by males and considered to be "manly" in a way.

[C Elegans]

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 personally don't think we need any special learning strategies to tell men and women apart.

However, generalising is part of humans way to learn things, so it's impossible to avoid although I wouldn't say it's necessary to stereotype in order to generalise.

Strange you didn't read Woolf. Of the ones you mention, I also like Shakespeare but not the rest.

So one could say that being a firefighter, auto mechanic, or truck driver is a masculine job as those are professions predominately done by males and considered to be "manly" in a way.

I see, it's a clear difference from Swedish. To denote behaviours or attributes related to gender role, other expressions that masculine and feminine is used. Personally I think it is convenient to use different terms to distinguish beetween physiological sexual dimorphism (biology term for innate physical differences between sexes) and gender role related differences.

[jopperm2]

You could use a different term in English as well by using male and female instead of masculine and femanine, but we like to keep things as confusing as possible. You do see male and female being used to denote different types of cable jacks and that sort of thing though.

[C Elegans]

[QUOTE=jopperm2]You could use a different term in English as well by using male and female instead of masculine and femanine, but we like to keep things as confusing as possible. You do see male and female being used to denote different types of cable jacks and that sort of thing though.[/QUOTE]

Yep, let's keep it as simple as possible! In Swedish, we use a term to denote sex when we talk about cable jacks, but that's the same term as when you refer to the sex of an animal or a plant. In English you can use male and female for both humans, other species or cable jacks, but in Swedish we use specific terms for non-human sex differentiation. I guess this is consistent with the Swedish inclusion of gender role in the terms commonly used to denote male or female in humans, so it does not suit animals or cable jacks. So in Swedish it would be:

maskulin/feminin: denote physiological, innate difference
manligt/kvinnligt: (a "kvinna" is a woman) denote gender including gender roles and behaviour
hane/hona: ("han" means "he", "hon" means "she") denote sex in other animals and plants, and cable jacks

[Georgi]

[QUOTE=fable]I think that's been changing over the last 30 years, HLD. People like Bradley, Cheryh, Vinge, LeGuin and a wide variety of well-known figures augur well for female writers in the sf&f genre. Mind, I don't think any more of their work than I do of their male counterparts for exactly the same reasons, but there's no getting around that they're extremely popular, and many have avoided the AD&D trap. Significantly, though, few of these writers actually deal with so-called "hard" science fiction, preferring the more speculative variety.[/QUOTE]

Just digging this thread up because I am about halfway through reading The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley, which (as I'm sure you know, @Fable, but for those who don't) is a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but told from the point of view of the women involved - Igraine, Arthur's mother; Morgaine, his half-sister; Gwenhwyvar, his wife. Now, I know that these days it's more common to find men writing from a female perspective, but I would really find it difficult to imagine it as having been written by a man.

[QUOTE=C Elegans]The British lit class didn't include Virginia Woolf? She was a fine author in my opinion.[/QUOTE]

This is kind of OT, but I thought I would throw it in anyway - in English Lit A-level, we didn't study Woolf, or probably many other more modern authors that one would consider worthy of study. We did a lot of Shakespeare, some Chaucer, some sci-fi authors and a book that I think was mid-90s called Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh, but really I am quite surprised by the kind of things we didn't study.

[fable]

[QUOTE=Georgi]Just digging this thread up because I am about halfway through reading The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley, which (as I'm sure you know, @Fable, but for those who don't) is a retelling of the King Arthur legend, but told from the point of view of the women involved - Igraine, Arthur's mother; Morgaine, his half-sister; Gwenhwyvar, his wife. Now, I know that these days it's more common to find men writing from a female perspective, but I would really find it difficult to imagine it as having been written by a man.[/quote]

I suspect that isn't a matter of style, though. Wouldn't you say it's the subject matter and point of view? And that's something that has been written by men, though only pseudononymously. I don't have a list handy at the moment, but some of the best known sofrporn romance novelists of the past (and present), writing from a woman's perspective, were men. They simpled taillored their books to meet the expectations of a particular audience; in this case, women.

So I guess what I'm suggesting is that no male wanted to write The Mists of Avalon, but they could have, since men have successfully written in other genres with a heavy American adult female point of view. Similarly, some women in the past have successfully written in genres associated with American adult male readers--such as Westerns, and hardcore science fiction. It's just not well known, because the authors didn't want the kind of notoriety it would bring.

[C Elegans]

[QUOTE=Georgi]This is kind of OT, but I thought I would throw it in anyway - in English Lit A-level, we didn't study Woolf, or probably many other more modern authors that one would consider worthy of study. [/QUOTE]

I am surprised - especially considering that when I was in primary school, Literature in class 8-9 included Woolf, together with Joyce, Elliot, Beckett, Williams, Steinbeck and others. Maybe that's because there is so little Swedish literature of world class

[quote="Fable]So I guess what I'm suggesting is that no male wanted to write The Mists of Avalon"]

I have not read neither The Mists of Avalon nor the Harry Potter books, but I tend to agree with Fable that an author with sufficient skill, male or female, could write in style that will fit societies and the readers expectations of what "male" and "female" should be.

Also among well known authors there are plenty of males who have written from a female's point of view - Ibsen, Joyce, Tolstoy, Zolá just to name a few - in a way that I would not think is a "male way of writing about females". On the contrary, these are psychological portraits of female human beings, including the gender role they are in. I would believe that if you can write in first person about a women as well as any female author, then you could also write in a "female" style (whatever that is).

The excellent novel "A suitable boy" is written by male Western-educated Indian author Vikram Seth, and the lead person in the novel is a young Hindu girl who falls in love with a muslim boy. The massive novel has a vast gallery of persons, but included is also a prositute woman whos internal world is extensively described from a subjective view. I would certainly think no female author could have created these characters better because they themselves were female.

[jopperm2]

Perhaps it is just that it takes a much more skilled author to write anything from a point of view so unlike their own and there are few of these authors.

[C Elegans]

[QUOTE=jopperm2]Perhaps it is just that it takes a much more skilled author to write anything from a point of view so unlike their own and there are few of these authors.[/QUOTE]

That is what I would believe. In my opinion, a vast majority of contemporary writers, regardless of what genre they write in, write about stereotypic characters in stereotype stories and also lack the artistic and stylistic skill. In Europe, there is even a genre called "I-novel" to denote all these writers who write novels about themselves and their own lives.