Re: The Ideal YA SF novel

In article <1142843529.651783.37630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<c.motbey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

r.rice@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

<snip "girls will read boy characters but boys won't read girl
characters">

Is this particular to an age range? I'm thinking that adolescents
might not want to identify with a female protagonist because they are
going through a phase where they are trying to establish their gender
identity, and having female characters that act a lot like males might
be hard for them. Older or younger males might not have that issue.

Presumably, female readers would also have a phase somewhere when
they're trying to establish their gender identity.

Well, yeah. Not being a woman, I can't really *compare*, but I did
experience with some ferocity the enforcement efforts devoted to
boys who were seen as less than 100% male. I don't remember similar
efforts to destroy the female equivalents.

Anyway, I think for much of high school one would see a certain
amount of hostility towards anyone who admitted the ability to
empathise with girls in a classroom. Possibly seniors might be
different, but to a certain extent that depends on the social
dynamics of the school: how invested the boys are in maintaining
behaviour that after several years has become comfortable. I would
*think* that at an all-boys school, where empathy for girls has
*zero* immediate benefit in terms of romantic success (as opposed
to the *minimal* benefit it has in co-ed schools, far as I ever
noticed), this aspect of the dynamics would be unfavourable. Also,
I'd think an all-boys school's students probably do a lot of defining
a group identity as exclusively male - the all-male dorm I lived in
for my first two years of college certainly did - which would tend
to invest one's ideas of manliness with a certain groupthinkness
even beyond what they might already have.

There's an alternate hypothesis: due to the whole "male is default"
thingie, women are accustomed to being to a certain degree invisible in
popular culture. If they didn't learn to deal with a male lead
character, they'd have a severely constrained choice of cultural
references.

Boys, OTOH, are accustomed to being the default assumption, and are
therefore less likely to have developed a talent for cross-gender
empathy. The whole thing maintains itself via a feedback loop.

Also true.

In general, whoever's on top is known for less ability to understand
who's not than vice versa. Women writing better men, blacks writing
better whites, etc.

ObSFnally, I'm beginning a reading project devoted to Marion Zimmer
Bradley, and I was going to post a post about the first story in
<The Best of> same, which opens with a character who's married but
repeatedly described as a "girl". The opening *lines* show her
husband misstepping on bad pavement, and thinking not "gee, I'd better
walk with more care" but rather "gee, I'd better warn the girl" and
taking her arm. But as it turns out, the alleged "girl" turns out
to solve her husband's problem despite his best efforts.

This is, perhaps, a bad example; I find both of these characters
plausible, but mostly in a sort of "I'm glad we've moved beyond
that now" way, not as people I can imagine actually meeting. I'm
not sure what a *good* example would be; I don't normally think of
current writers as having the gender issue much at all, at least as
regards straight men and women. (Cue exceptions.) God knows Miles
Vorkosigan in <A Civil Campaign> is painfully familiar, but surely
there are male writers who get women too now, no? But the reputations
of James Schmitz and of James Tiptree before her unmasking show how
aware even *male* readers and writers were that their women were often
poorly written.

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: NEWSWEEK article on Gail Simone
    ... female characters are always considered "lesser" than the male ... Two younger female sidkicks and a random member of the same group as ... Robin was killed but Batman only had his back broken - and got better. ...
    (rec.arts.comics.dc.universe)
  • Re: Levelling whilst afk
    ... Alassaria - Level 61 Female Night Elf Feral Druid. ... Kathelone - Level 60 Male Draenei Enhancement Shaman. ... but you're missing experiencing Horde content! ... I'm not leveling the 9 horde characters ...
    (alt.games.warcraft)
  • Re: Female characters
    ... and wishing it to be clear to the listener that they're not male. ... It may be a bit similar to RPG figurines, where the female ones often ... male, one adolescent, have just created CoH characters and are ... In their first game, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Do cgi movies hate female leads?
    ... it was male lead (the group is named after the male ... Probably because fart-joke movies don't work as well with female leads. ... they create NEW characters all the time. ...
    (rec.arts.animation)
  • Re: Obsessive Interest in Railways
    ... At school we had a test where we had to sort a list of names and some kind of scores into male and female, then do some maths to show that the girls were better than the boys. ...
    (uk.railway)