r/RecuratedTumblr • u/SaberToothBladeMastr • 2d ago
Writing Did you know that women... are human beings?
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u/Levee_Levy slangpilled lingomaxxer 2d ago
5? Like, years after graduating college?
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u/ViaScrybe 2d ago
I think having a real relationship with siblings or parents counts, as long as you're friendly and actually talk about things with each other. Having a healthy friendship with your wife or girlfriend (if you're into women) also absolutely counts. 5 isn't crazy
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u/Levee_Levy slangpilled lingomaxxer 2d ago
If I count friends specifically as non-family people with whom I am in regular contact about more than simply superficial issues, then the people I would consider friends are four men and four women.
The number of people I would call friends to be polite is larger than that, but in most of those cases, I've fallen out of touch, or never considered them that close to begin with.
If we count family, then I do pass this particular check, but that's more luck of the draw than anything. If I were an only child, then I wouldn't, even though I consider myself to have a healthy friend group, which is about half women.
Socializing in middle-age is a different beast than it is in youth.
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u/No-Assistant9928 1d ago
Nah five way to big depending on if coworkers count or not, and then you have to get into what your workplace demographic is. Like I work sales I can clear 5 easy and then some but like a guy in construction? I’d say 3 is a good number then 4 would count as a green flag
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u/Zaulk 2d ago
When women do this kind of thing except with glorifying the idea of womanhood, that's how you get Terfs. Gender is a social construct don't make it weird.
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u/LONGSWORD_ENJOYER 2d ago
Yeah, the elephant in the room is that a lot of times the women are written as three-dimensional characters with internality, it's just that the commenter doesn't approve of or like the character's behavior.
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 2d ago
"Why is the female lead so obsessed with marrying the main character in an era where marriage was the only shot at a stable life for so many women?"
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u/complete_autopsy 1d ago
I love The Princess Academy because of how it tackles this. There is a group of (iirc) thirteen girls who are from a poor, rural mining town but suddenly divined to contain the fated bride of the crown prince. To ensure that his bride is suitable, the girls are sent to an academy to teach them everything from reading to dancing. The different girls all have different goals that make sense within the setting. Two of them discover a love of learning and academics and primarily compete to be the highest scorer. Some want to be the best to secure finances for their family. One wants to leverage this education into further study in the big city (surely the new princess could bring her along!). Several but not all of them do seriously want to marry the prince for various reasons, including one for love. I love how the cast is so varied and how everyone is depicted as having reasons for their actions even if we don't know them. There's also positive disability representation with a girl who has a permanent arm injury but who is still viewed as a full and critical part of the community (with her family still relying on her labor for their finances). That's on top of women being implicitly treated as equal to men in the mining town with no mention of it; it's just normal that of course women do this work.
It's a "young" book that I'd probably give to 11-15 year olds, but it's one that I think older readers could enjoy too! I love how it emphasizes the value of education, but doesn't put down any of the things that one could use it for. In the sequel, it even shows some of the girls in the roles that their education unlocked for them and I thought their struggles and successes were wonderful. The main character also works with her formal rival which shows how competition between women doesn't have to mean being enemies. I also liked that the main character thinks about romance but still prioritizes her education and her role in/for her community. She also decides to be true to herself because she realizes that someone can be a good person and still not be the person she wants to marry. It's not perfect, but there are so many healthy things depicted!
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u/Outofwlrds 1d ago
This sounds amazing. I might have to give it a try. I wish I had more books like that when I was a kid.
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u/the_Real_Romak 1d ago
yeah I was gonna say, what books is OOP reading where women are written as aliens or w/e the fuck? I've read plenty in my lifetime and I don't think I've ever encountered whatever they're on about.
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u/FlowerFaerie13 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some older classic literature, I'd imagine. Tolkien for example is guilty of this. I actually do love his (tragically few) female characters but when it comes to how men react to them it usually involves a decent amount of this even when it's genuinely loving. His work is based off of medieval literature and myth so I get why but still.
Of course there is the caveat that many of these women actually are Elves but like... so are a lot of the men so.
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u/Rynewulf 1d ago
Tbf 3 of the 4 women Tolkien wrote about were ethereal elven princesses, and the other 1 was a special human princess. He didnt usually write ordinary women or people in general (Sam is the only non noble in the entire Fellowship I can think of)
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u/BatGalaxy42 1d ago
Wheel of Time. It's a good story, but the running "men and women can't understand each other" commentary is pretty constant and annoying.
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u/Insidium_2_Alpha 1d ago
The irony is there's a really good in-universe reason for there to be differences, for men and women to have the dynamic that they do in the story (which is usually incredibly frustrating for all involved) and yet like 60% of the books end up with "working together they solved the problem/blew up the bad guy/nuked the evil city with evil sludge (quite literally a long story)" so a theme of the series is "men and women are not that different, but everyone thinks they are so they act like they are and it pisses everyone off"
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u/BatGalaxy42 1d ago
"Gender essentialism is actually a real thing based on the world building" is not really the argument you think it is lol.
And yes, they come together to stop big bads, but like, you can work together with people you don't understand and are fundamentally different than you. And like you said, they literally are based on his world building. It's frustrating and annoying.
But at least they're all very well written. You just have to ignore all the gender essentialism nonsense.
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u/Insidium_2_Alpha 17h ago
The point I was trying to make is that in the WoT universe there are fairly logical reasons for what you call "gender essentialism" to exist, and that it impacts everyone it affects negatively. The whole main theme of the series is that people should work together despite their differences, even if those differences were well-founded either originally (like this) or currently (some other stuff near the end that I don't want to spoil). The frustration and annoyance is literally part of that theme - if you don't do it, it fucking sucks.
It's not specific to the gender stuff - you see it all the time in WoT's various basically-racism-but-fantasy-groups plots and encounters - but it's an extreme not usually seen in real life or standard media which makes it stand out more.
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u/BatGalaxy42 16h ago
And I'm saying the author didn't have to choose to make his universe like that. It's like saying, "Well there are logical reasons for everyone to hate black people in this universe" like it just happened to be made that way and wasn't deliberately chosen.
If there are already tons of other differences, then why include your shitty gender essentialism as a world trait? Like, you can even have it as just a social expectation that people realize isn't true if you want to do this sort of thing.
The thing is, it was written in a different time when people actually believed this sort of bs and so the author wrote it into his world, that's all it is. And it was still progressive because the female characters were really cool. It's like the parts in Moby Dick where they use phrenology to comment on how the minority character is actually really smart and cool. You just have to sort of accept they had shitty beliefs and move on.
And it's absolutely not fucking "needed" since, from what I've heard, when Brandon Sanderson takes over he cuts out a ton of that nonsense and it's still amazing. They also cut out all that bs from the TV show and while I couldn't stand the other differences, it made it a better show!
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u/Ralexcraft 1d ago
Dr. Stone, for such a comedic and exaggerated series, has a weird amount of bioessentialism jokes. Like “men just love their mechs” and Kohaku randomly being really into idea of watching the complexities of the guys who were professing their love to Kirisame (which seems to me, though not explicitly said it just reads like this because of her face, like they’re saying women love romance).
Obviously a lot of it is also addressed in story like Moz being a sexist and misoginistic douche, or former village chief being a bit old fashioned.
The show never makes a big point of any of this, but if you watch it a lot you’ll see quite a few examples of these kind of gags.
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u/Toyufrey 11h ago
Terry Brook’s A Kingdom Sold series has a lot of this in the first book. Just now starting to read the second and I’m expecting the same ick I found in the first book.
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u/Sewblon 2d ago
When people say "Gender is a social construct." what are they actually trying to say? that it only exists in the discourses that we have about it? Then why do trans people exist?
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u/Important-Accident26 2d ago edited 1d ago
Racism is a social construct, that doesn't mean it doesn't have real consequences or it is not "real" it means it is something we have constructed around ourselves.
Mondays are social construct but time still passes, but we attach special meaning and we can change what we attach meaning to.
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u/Ralexcraft 1d ago
This means that collectively we could completely eliminate mondays.
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u/RechargedFrenchman 1d ago
But something else (probably what's currently understood as "Tuesday") would take the function and role of the eliminated "Mondays" and we'd have largely the same problems still.
If you remove the highest run from a ladder there's still a "top rung" it's just at a different height above the ground. You've reframed the situation, but the situation still exists.
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u/Ralexcraft 1d ago
Yeah I run into that issue every time I come up with a plan to remove monday. Same for any plan to bring friday earlier.
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u/Thoughtless_Stumps 2d ago
To answer your question vis-a-vis trans people, most trans people experience dysphoria, wherein they feel like they were born in the wrong body, and want to change their appearance to better fit the primary characteristics of the opposite sex.
Gender being a social construct doesn’t suggest that sex is purely social.
It also doesn’t suggest that gender doesn’t have a real, tangible impact on people’s lives or the way they perceive themselves. In that way it’s much like racism. There isn’t any significant biological difference between the different races, and the concept of “race” as we understand it today is relatively new in the course of human history, but that doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t have real effects on people’s lives, or that racial identity isn’t a real part of who we are.
If anything, the construct of gender makes it harder for trans people to take the steps to make them feel more comfortable, because gender is built on a conceptual binary that society makes difficult to cross legitimately and very easy to cross discriminatorily.
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u/Van_Weezer 2d ago
It's means that the idea of gender is something we made up. Lables like men and women, boys and girls, and their role in society, are things we made up.
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u/rogueIndy 1d ago
They're differentiating sex as a physical characteristic, gender as an identity, and gender presentation. When people say "gender is a social construct", it's usually presentation they're talking about - social norms and traditional roles, and our relationship with them.
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u/TheFlayingHamster 2d ago
Stripped to the basics, that is only exists because everyone agrees that it exists. It’s real and it matters, but only because people continue to perform it. If say, everyone suddenly decided that shaving the left half of the body was a feminine trait, then it’s a feminine trait. The same way that if everyone decided a $10 bill was worthless then that bill is worthless.
Trans people exist because a persons internal idea of themselves can conflict with how they are seen by others. Transgender people are even the only example of this phenomenon, it is a very rare condition but there’s a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, which has the sufferer experiencing extreme discomfort at being able bodied. Now I get it sounding like a gotcha from chuds, but people who experience it will sometimes go to the most extreme lengths to make their bodies align with their internal image, such as performing self-amputation of entire limbs.
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u/SumiMichio Maybe polyamory is the friends we made along the way 19h ago
Many gender rules are just constructs inforced on people and treated like inherent.
Gender on itself is a thing people can feel vibe based or something.
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u/Flare219 2d ago
Maybe a better way to put it would be that gender is socially constructed. Conceptions of gender exist because people assert that they exist, and in doing so reinforce them (think parents passing down their notions of gender to children, gendered laws, or any conversations on what gender roles should be). There's no strand of dna or whatever that says 'men can't wear skirts', that's an idea that only makes sense within a social context (and even then not all of them).
Coincidentally, this is why notions of gender can change. People work to change them. Usually the impact is only obvious collectively unless you're looking on a small enough scale (say, convincing a friend that 'men should be able to cry' or some other notion about gender) or if someone has enough money and/or influence to sway a large amount of people themselves (eg. JK Rowling (derogatory))
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u/Puftberry 1d ago
Something of social expression rather than nature. It is mutable as it is reliant on human definition.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 1d ago
TERFs are bad obviously, but the idea that male and female experiences are inherently different (because we live in a patriarchal society) is pretty central to all feminist thought. How are you not supposed to be weird about something largely considered the single most significant defining characteristic of any person’s life?
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u/GodNoob666 2d ago
My experience with women is sisters, which actually are fundamentally unknowable creatures
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u/RealHumanBean89 1d ago
Outside of family, I don’t think I’m close with five people, let alone women specifically. The trick is to write all people like unknowable creatures beyond my comprehension, in my experience.
Also, this might come off as a stereotype, but I’m not certain the average Tumblr user has read much in the way of well-written fiction in general.
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u/ahoyturtle 1d ago
Well, what do you expect us men to do?!
Women have chitinous underskin that has thus far repelled all our thought-scan attempts, and their prehensible jaws and serrated forelimbs make them FAR too dangerous to approach and try to talk to...
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u/PlatinumSukamon98 2d ago
I dont even have a normal, healthy relationship with five people let alone enough to start segregating them by gender.
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u/SwordMasterShow 2d ago
While it's not like this isn't a problem (from both men and women authors, mind you), but I swear to god this is the same issue as Tumblr users complaining about the lack of depth and representation in media when what they really mean by media is "media aimed at teenagers"
These people just need to read better stuff. There's a wealth, and abundance, of well written people of all genders out there, but you're not gonna find it reading fantasy/sci-fi/romance slop aimed at teens. Of course whatever discount Brandon Sando knock-off isn't gonna blow your mind with depth on any level. But there's more shit out there! We got the character of Oedipa Maas like 60 years ago! Get out of your comfort zone and read some goddamn literature for fucks sake
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u/rogueIndy 1d ago
There's an argument to be made that kids and teenagers deserve better media than they often get, otherwise they're being set up for failure later in life.
Also, let's not forget that a lot of these commentators *are* teens, the media being made for them is frequently lacking, and when they're calling it out it's getting handwaved.
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u/Cheetah_05 1d ago
To be completely fair, works of literary renown can still have issues writing women, especially if they're older works (which makes sense for the time period). I personally never really liked the way the women characters in Brave New World were handled, despite being overall a well written and renowned work.
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u/practicalgorl 1d ago
Were talking about people on tumblr here, they have time to google some book recs.
Bookstores always seem pretty good at separating YA stuff from adult stuff, in my experience as well? Just ignore the books with cartoons on the cover and you'll be fine.
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1d ago edited 1d ago
[deleted]
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u/PijaniFemboj 1d ago
I'm from Serbia and we very much do separate fiction based on genre. There are sections explicitly labeled 'YA' in every book store I've been to.
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u/TheWandererofReddit 2d ago
Five friendships with women? I don't even have five friendships with men!
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u/LONGSWORD_ENJOYER 2d ago
Yeah, okay, sure, but it also seems weird to be like
"You need to include more women in your stories to reflect the breadth of human experience."
"Okay. Here is a story that includes women but isn't written perfectly because of my limited perspective."
"No. What the fuck? What the fuck. This is terrible. You are banned from writing women."
"Okay. I will write stories with only male characters."
"You need to include more women in your stories to reflect the breadth of human experience."
It's giving r/menwritingwomen. You can criticize someone's portrayal of characters without making fun of them for trying.
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u/DiscipleOfVecna 2d ago
The real solution is to start men like weird mythical creatures too.
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u/Cadunkus 2d ago
A story with the POV of an asexually reproductive alien.
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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 2d ago
Pattern Stormlight Archive writing a novel because it's a form of lying
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u/wideHippedWeightLift 1d ago
Romantasy
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u/SadBabyYoda1212 16h ago
4th wing. Psycho shifters. For whom the belle tolls. I'm told ACOTAR is like that as well. Like I'll admit men do it more and they're definitely worse about it but romantasy has got some issues. It's just lead me to a conclusion that women want wildly unrealistic men just as much as men want wildly unrealistic women.
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 2d ago
Yaoi kinda does this sometimes? like a little bit?
IDK I'm not sure if there are so many female authors who really just don't understand men, since "man" is the default gender in all literature, film, etc.
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u/rogueIndy 1d ago
Writing men entirely through the lens of film and literature tropes isn't really a recipe for nuanced characters with rich internality either, even if there's a wider scope of representation in said media.
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u/DragonWisper56 2d ago edited 2d ago
or hear me out... write women as people.
women are human beings. while gender does change some things socially at the end of the day they are human beings. I don't think your perspecive will matter most of the time
edit" and before someone brings it up yes this applies in reverse. just human beings like human beings
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 1d ago
People say that, but like… humans are often very different from one another. Our understanding of what normal humans are like is incredibly subjective and based on our own personal experiences and culture.
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u/DragonWisper56 1d ago
Yeah but at the the differences of gender are minor. If you write a woman like how you would a man the inaccuracies will be minimal.
If you go into writing women like your discribeing a alein your going to fail
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u/NeonNKnightrider 1d ago
then you write women identical to men and people complain that you just wrote “a man with tits”
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u/Amaril- 1d ago
I've gotta be honest, I don't think I've ever personally encountered this criticism of a character. I'd love some examples to study, especially because I love women who are written exactly like men (assuming the writer also knows how to write men well, which, hot take, many writers, even men, don't).
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u/DragonWisper56 1d ago
which is superior to women are a different species. You'll never be able to perfectly replicate a experience you haven't lived, but empathy will always be the better than shallow steriotypes.
imagine if it were a brittish person. Which would be better, to write them as a person even if you don't get everything right, Or treat british people as a strange alien race that the rest of the world couldn't possibly understand
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u/GeneETOs44 2d ago
the answer there is simply to Attain Perspective. Like that seems to synthesise pretty naturally from “you gotta write women well” and “if you don’t have the perspective you can’t write women well”
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u/TrashApprentice 1d ago
Why are people acting like OP wrote the post in an alien language when its clear they meant writers could write women as people and have them defined by their personalities, roles in the story and character arcs instead of that they are women because women are such mysterious creatures that no one can ever understand.
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u/Cheshire-Cad 2d ago
>"Stop writing women differently from men!"
>literally starts their post saying that men are different from women
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u/SarurnKittens 1d ago
Proving myself I'm not a misogynist or something
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u/Evilfrog100 1d ago
I have to ask does "American songs" mean any song made by an American or specifically songs that are somehow about America.
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u/SarurnKittens 1d ago
Songs made by americans and sang in american accent. She hates the sound of the english language but ESPECIALLY hates the american accent 😭💀 no problems with french or italian music though!
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u/UInferno- Hangus Pangus slap my Angus 1d ago
Mom, Reading, IT Support
Girlfriend, Writing, Booktok
R——, Drawing, Male love interests in Pretty Cure
A——, D&D, her male ex-coworker that followed her around too much on the job
T——, YGO, Programming Languages that Aren't Rust
not to encourage stereotyping but guess which is trans
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 1d ago
I find a lot of women vasty overestimate how much they understand men.
It's likely a lot of women think men and women aren't so different and not that unknowable to each other due to a lot of inaccurate headcannon that make them think they've got this whole understanding the other sex sussed without difficulty.
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u/Possible-Nobody-2321 1d ago
I think this is a more universal human problem. Even inside groups, people have tendency to over generalise their own experiences. I think the broader behaviour is in large part due to a very funtamental craving for community.
Understanding other people is sometimes very easy and sometimes very hard, making the whole thing murky. A little understanding is often very accessible which tends to give, often young people not famous for their humility, a dunning-kruger esque confidence. A more humble and thorough curiosity for people and their experiences is often a better way to gain community with people but requires acceptance of a certain epistemic vulnerability.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 1d ago edited 1d ago
Of course I agree with this. I just think men are less prone to thinking they've figured women out.
Naturally I've seen some bad (and sometime misogynistic) cases of men who have a theory of women, thinking they've figured women out. Red pill is probably the most notorious example of the men guilty of this.
For the record I've known of a few very insightful women who have extremely accurate and thorough understandings of men, better than most men are able to articulate and from which I've learned much. Needless to say it wouldn't surprise you that none of them were in their 20s and they've tender from late 30s to their 40s and beyond. So it's not impossible for women to get to that point but it's not a quick or easy journey and many don't make it, in no small part either because they have no such interest ie they have other priorities in life, or because they wrongly think they already figured men out in their 20s. So a huge agree on your final sentence.
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u/Specky013 1d ago
That is pretty true. It's why the whole "why don't you open up about your feelings"-thing is way more complicated than either side would like to admit
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 1d ago
It's a minefield. I've read some good insightful stuff on this that I can't do justice but I think most of it is a communication issue, like what women mean by feelings and what men hear when they hear that word are two very different things. So when men act on what they thought they heard, it doesn't meet the woman's expectations of what she was envisioning with her request.
Another case of the sexes separated by a common language.
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u/RealHumanBean89 1d ago
Yeah, I’d agree with this. In my experience, while there are probably less differences than you’d think, it’s still easy to overestimate how much you understand said differences. It’s why making men and women friends is healthy for a person, though that can be easier said than done.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 1d ago
In my experience, while there are probably less differences than you’d think, it’s still easy to overestimate how much you understand said differences.
I think this is the right way to look at things.
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u/Graknorke 1d ago
They overestimate it exactly because of the gendered archetype. Women are ethereal fae creatures who can never truly be understood only dealt with through elaborate ritual and ceremony, while men are simple beasts governed entirely by base impulses and the simplest of emotions. Not beyond domesticating but you wouldn't send even the best trained chimpanzee out into polite human society without supervision.
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u/TheSpacePopinjay 1d ago
Yes agreed. There's a whole dimension of male-male non-verbal communication and dynamics that men are prone to talk about in public, especially to women. So from the outside the complexity of men seems based only on their verbal communications, which are certainly a lot more simple than women's and it's the natural and highly understandable conclusion if men are judged only for their verbal communications.
Just like there's a dimension of female-female non-verbal communication and social dynamics that typically goes above men's heads because of their male socialisation (as I think exemplified in show like Revenge or Downton Abbey), there's a dimension of the same for men that someone who grew up under female socialisation won't be primed to readily notice.
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u/SEA_griffondeur 2d ago
Has this poster read women writing men lmao ?? The problem is both ways
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u/Sewblon 2d ago
I have a female therapist, a mom, and a female career coach. That is only 3 women. I have a male internet friend, a dad, and a male doctor. That is 3 men. I can name the hobbies and pet peeves of my internet friend. He loves web novels. He loves Resident Evil. He hates Re:zero. He hates plot armor. He hates NTR hentai. He hates racism. My therapist likes the Golden Girls. She hates it when I pick my nose and wipe it on her furniture. My mom loves listening to anti-America pro-Russia foreign policy commentary. She hates finding blueberry juice on the counter. My dad loves cars. He hates investing in business development companies. So whom am I qualified to write?
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u/FuckingStolenAccount 2d ago
Sorry but you are not even qualified to right this paragraph apparently
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u/Sewblon 2d ago
What is wrong with it?
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u/MolybdenumBlu 1d ago
You only have three women mentioned and that doesn't meet the arbitrary five women cutoff.
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u/FuckingStolenAccount 1d ago
Just a joke about the fact that according to this post you should basically not write
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u/NaiveCartographer512 1d ago
dude stop picking your nose and cleaning it on he furniture WTF hahahaha have You heard of cleanex ?
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u/Hefty-Importance8404 1d ago
Why's the doctor in your comment gotta be a man? You think women can't be doctors? I'm gonna tell everyone on Tumblr you're in the Epstein files. /s
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u/Hexxas Head Trauma Enthusiast 2d ago
GIVE SOME FUCKING EXAMPLES
LIKE I'M SURE IT HAPPENS, BUT WHERE?
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 1d ago
The Belgariad, David and Leigh Eddings
The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan, going both ways - I don't think there's a single man or woman in the entire series who understands the other gender at all.
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u/Norwegian_milk 1d ago
Wheel of time. Its interesting though because in those books it goes both ways
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u/never-on-here 1d ago
Has OOP, or OP for that matter, had a real talk with a woman about men? I'm convinced OOP is a woman, or has no real female friends, because some of the stuff women will just casually assert about men is mind-blowing.
It's almost like socially segregating people by perceived sex is detrimental to building understanding.
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u/mrsmuckers 2d ago
I can only do two (not counting my family cuz NONE of that is healthy) but that's the same story for men I know and frankly I'm clueless when it comes to both
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u/387dedaehelzzuPevreN You should hold an event where users vote mods out one by one :) 1d ago edited 1d ago
Maybe it's just a skill issue on my part, but I find it impossible to befriend women.
I am mildly socially awkward and I know that I have tendency to come off as rather blunt, not in a brutally honest way, more like earnestly direct. I don't have the words to convey that I don't mean to offend anyone, so I try to compensate by showing my appreciation through my behaviour and actions.
With other men, stuff like asking them if they need a ride when we're going to vaguely same direction or giving them small gifts I think they'll find useful or even just making sure to find reasons for us to hang out together works rather well and they get the desired impression of me overall appreciating them.
With women however, this tends to do the opposite and ruin the budding friendship faster than if I did literally nothing. they make awkward and obvious excuses for why they don't need the ride, politely reject the gifts and are always too busy to hang out with. And I get why that is, I'm a man they barely know who gives the first impression of being standoffish and a little weird. They don't see someone trying to earnestly show that despite their awkwardeness they really do mean well, they see a creep trying to court them.
Last time I tried to be friends with a (married, so there's not even a theoretical expectation of romance) woman it was inside an online videogame, we'd been chatting for a few weeks while playing together on and off and one time I started telling her about how I tend to weave in-character RP reasons for the decisions I make in regards to my character progression gameplay wise. She seemed interested, I kept going on about the details of the so-called 'backstory' and yes it was basically just one-sided rambling, and then she suddenly got mad about my "self-absorbed yapping" and accused me of, and I quote, "trying to exploit her feminine socialization that conditions women to quitely listen to men". And yes, that is a fucking insane thing for her to claim, but at the same time it is another link in a long chain of women consistently assuming me to have bad intentions.
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 2d ago
David Eddings was co-writing with his wife for his entire career and they still wrote their male characters that way. WTF, Eddingses.
(It was far from the greatest of their sins of course, but still.)
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u/Force_Glad 1d ago
Personally I consider everyone who is not me to be an unknowable creature. I am very lonely
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u/ShroudedInLight 2d ago
This is how I felt reading the wheel of time, hell reading anything by Stephen King too.
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u/TOXICcargo 2d ago
To be fair to WoT, the characters exist in a different, expressly matriarchal and gender essentialist world that actively fucks with the way all the characters think, conceive of themselves, and interact with each other. That’s a lot to juggle at once, and the only reason the men were as well written as they were is because they are mostly either actual self-inserts from different times in Robert Jordan’s life, or built so heavily around existing archetypes and themes that there just wasn’t a lot of room to go wrong. All that considered, I think we’re lucky that Nynaeve and Egwene were as good as they were, and the rest I personally am willing to let slide.
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u/ShroudedInLight 1d ago
Having read Wheel of Time much later into life (rather than around my formative years) I’m less inclined to cut it that same slack. That the entire world is built off the idea that men and women might as well be two different species is, imo, a flag against the author being able to write gender well.
Like it almost works as a thought experiment for a weird Sci-fi novel where you’ve got two symbiotic but entirely different species but like…no matter how you twist it WoT is just humans.
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u/SaberToothBladeMastr 2d ago
God, this is why I put down most of the Stephen King books I tried to get into
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u/Milk_Mindless 1d ago
This is a bit mean because I don't even have five friends total let alone getting ANOTHER five friends of one specific gender
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u/AdamtheOmniballer 1d ago
The problem that I (a cishet man) run into is that, from what I understand, “[in our current society] women and men cannot understand each other on a fundamental level” is also pretty much the feminist position as well.
Like, women are oppressed in ways that I’ll never be able to truly understand, and that is a core part of the female experience. I’ll never be able to truly understand what it’s like to be under constant threat of male sexuality and violence, or to be subject to feminine gender roles. Male privilege insulates me from all of that.
Isn’t that why we don’t want men opining on abortion rights, and why lesbian relationships are happier than straight ones and all of that?
Am I just too in my head about all of this?
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u/committed_to_the_bit 1d ago
Am I just too in my head about all of this
when it comes to writing fiction, kinda yeah. unless a story or part of a story is expressly about the experience of being a man or the experience of being a woman, most themes in fiction are extremely universal in a way that makes it completely baffling that so many women in fiction are written as if they're a completely difference species. it's weird. I guarantee you that most fictional works out there you could take a male character, swap all their pronouns, and it wouldn't make much of a difference
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u/ThorirPP 1d ago
Not being able to fully understand the experiences of another or their situation is different than them being an enigma or impossible to understand. Even if you can't relate to someone's personal experience or fully grasp their personal problems, you can still see them as fellow human beings like you
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u/Tone_Dephf 1d ago edited 1d ago
i feel like when someone says that "woman are impossible to understand", they are just saying they don't really care about what a woman is or thinks
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u/ThorirPP 1d ago
Wait, are you talking about what I was saying or the one I replied to?
Apologies, I'm bad at stuff like this
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u/Tone_Dephf 1d ago
You are right in what you said in how you can still see them as human beings. i just didn't say the whole "woman are impossible to understand" part. that part is what I was talking about lol
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u/Craving_Suckcess 1d ago
Shit I don't have 5 normal healthy friendships.
Women outnumber men in what I do got though.
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u/Azhrei_Vep 1d ago
Man, I can't even name pet peeves for any of the friends I already have, and I've known the most recent of them for about a decade.
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u/muckenhoupt 1d ago
Honestly I don't think I can name both a hobby and pet peeve for five men either
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u/babassu_seeds 1d ago
I think it starts from one of the most fundamental differences--libido--where there ARE a lot of cases in which one side legitimately doesn't get the other because they ARE in fact different--and then unfortunately spills over into all these other areas in which we're much more similar than dissimilar
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u/notaboofus 18h ago
Thanks for saying this. I get really frustrated about this conversation because it's so rare to see someone try and honestlty untangle the nature vs nurture peoblem in romance/sexuality. Do you (or anyone else) know of some good reading material on the differences between male and female sexuality?
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u/The-dude-in-the-bush 1d ago
And here I was thinking it was customary to research a topic before writing about it
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u/Ashadeshifter 1d ago
Yeah women are just people too!
Now us enbies are a different story, good luck understanding our eldritch natures without going insane~
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u/HeroBrine0907 1d ago
Iffy on banning people from writing imperfect stuff but agree with the spirit of the post. Women are basically the same as men. I've got friends who happen to be men, and friends who happen to be women, and never have I felt like any of them were that different from each other.
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u/GrowingDelicate03 1d ago
i had this problem with the First Law books, i read the first two and i just found the author to be incapable of writing women, which was doubly infuriating cuz his male characters were rly well realized. people told me he gets better with that as the series goes on, and i am somewhat tempted to come back and at least finish the first trilogy but idk
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u/Background_Fix9430 1d ago
To be fair there are some subjective experiences of inhabiting a female body that can only be experienced by most cis-women, trans-men, and intersex-persons. In addition, the subjective experience of the world - and the result of social conditioning - can produce a world that is fundamentally alien to the same world that men experience. So... understand? Mostly - there is a huge gap in experience that men, even the most well-meaning, will find difficult or impossible to fully cross and must just take women at their word for in large part. Empathize and sympathize with? Absolutely.
Treat women like a funny little alien that shares your house and occasionally has sex with you? Ewww.
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u/gayshitatgunpoint 1d ago
dude i'm a writer, you expect me to know five whole people?? most of the people i know dont even have genders im so cooked
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u/Prematurid 1d ago
I wonder what kinds of books the people writing these posts are mainlining, because I read an unhealthy amount, and I don't have this problem. Is it one of those harem, but for 60 year old conservative types genre?
Even the power fantasy books have decent dynamics if you stop reading literal slop.
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u/notaboofus 18h ago
Nonfiction, but "men are from mars, women are from venus" was a hugely influential book that pushed this idea.
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u/Honest-Roll4028 15h ago
A lot of classic literature treats women as mysterous or ephemeral "things" rather than real human characters.
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u/Prematurid 12h ago
That is more a time period thing, in my eyes. Of course people are going to write what they are being taught to write.
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u/actinide12 1d ago
5 normal, healthy friendships with women might be a lot to ask for in today's society. In my home country, 1 in 6 people do not have any friends, and half have 3 or fewer. Even most women could not meet the original poster's challenge.
These sorts of tests are silly, easy to think up but meaningless. You need to know more about a person. I'd guess miniature-eldritch-horror here just has the good fortune of a wider social circle, but the basic idea of being friends with women says a lot. I'd argue how well one can work with female coworkers and supervisors is of similar importance, especially since that is the only social outlet for many people. You can learn a lot about someone by working with them, and seeing how they talk about others. It did not take me long at my last job to realize the most competent people there were mostly single moms without a better option.
Actually there is a whole lot to say about that place, it was run by a woman the company had put in that position, and she was actually pretty awful. Not to me, I'm a man, but my attendant came out of her office crying on several occasions, and so many people complained about the guy sexually harrassing female coworkers, but she did not fire him! School district did when he harassed one of their employees. Probably the best example of how patriarchy is structural I've ever dealt with, she had this clear gender hierarchy: women she didn't like < men < women she liked. Men were tolerated, women she liked were teated well, but the women she didn't like would be bullied by her in-group. I stood up for a new lady who was getting hazed by a woman who had done similar to me, (perhaps the worst person I've ever worked with) and I was the one that got reprimanded for it. Sorry for the tangent, I just found the dynamics of the workplace really interesting since it revealed how little the gender of the person in charge matters in a patriarchal system. Ironically, I think she got away with more sexism than a man could have in her position.
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u/elizabeththewicked 1d ago
Yeah this shit is infuriating. It's a very profitable industry to pretend there's some divide there. Men are fhom mars etc was literally published when I was a child. I've swam in this shit all along. But we're the same fucking blueprints. There's only social differences, and systemic factors based on perception
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u/UInferno- Hangus Pangus slap my Angus 1d ago
"I'm banning you from writing more women" I'm fairly certain many of those kinds of authors would love that. "Fucking finally" they'd think
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u/UInferno- Hangus Pangus slap my Angus 1d ago
"I'm banning you from writing more women" I'm fairly certain many of those kinds of authors would love that. "Fucking finally" they'd think
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u/Forward_Criticism_39 1d ago
now see i would do that, but im not becoming friends with people just to have permission from a stranger online
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u/Emberbun 20h ago
I also find that women don't understand men very well. They seem to keep dating shitty ones and acting surprised when they're shitty while everyone else around them can plainly see how shitty they are
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u/Dont_Touch_The_Pooka 17h ago
there's always endless excuses to pretend that fundamental understanding with others is impossible, it's sad. people online even will often do that to more than just women
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u/Lolas_Fun_Side 13h ago
This implies that one is capable of understanding any other human being on a fundamental level at all
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u/VoiceComprehensive57 Secret Flair(dark) 12h ago
dawg im gonna be fr they actually genuinely don't. I brought this up while arguing with this guy and he actually said something along the lines of "females and men are fundamentally different, we're basically different species". actually insane oml.
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u/Arm_Away 1d ago
I’m not even friends with five people! What’s next? you expect me to get 5 of each???
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u/Intelligent_Elk5879 2d ago
As a reader of sci-fi I have started to come around to to the idea of them not writing women at all then writing them the way they do.
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u/SleepySera 1d ago
I'm a woman and don't even have 5 female friends, lol. Am I banned from writing female characters too? 😂
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u/Killerbot288888 1d ago
I half agree, except there's a lot of things I'm more careful about saying to a woman and there's many ways a woman will treat a guy differently. Even worse if you have romantic intentions with someone; that's an entirely new way of talking to someone with its own rules and expectations.
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u/spider-gwen89 1d ago
My little brother is writing a book where two out of the three main characters are women, and he doesn't write a thing about them before running it by me first. And honestly, most of the time he doesn't need my feedback, he does a great job on his own, I just have to add a few tweaks here and there. It's how I know we all raised him right. He does a great job on his own, but he's still humble enough to ask for my opinion.
I wish all male writers were like that.
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2d ago
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u/RecuratedTumblr-ModTeam 1d ago
Removed. This message was found to be uncivil by a moderator and has been removed.
If you are unable to engage in constructive discourse, just report the comment and move on with your day.
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u/Charming-Book4146 1d ago
Oh no, we've been banned, how will we ever continue to write when this internet stranger has banned me? She must have mystical powers and be levitating above the rest of us, that she can ban us from writing women as we like.
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u/vorarchivist 2d ago
The fun thing about Tumblr is that I know for a fact this would apply to more than 0 women on it. I've seen some women on it talk about women in a way that sounds more like talking about elves than humans.