5 Tips on Gender

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1. People are people. Sooo why should it be, you and I should get along so -?  Uh, wait. Okay.  The biggest thing I see with gender in poorly done writing is that the worst of it manages to be both anti-male and anti-female at the same time.  (Case in point would probably be  Twilight, but it’s certainly not the only offender.  Hello, Lifetime!) The woman are passive idiots, incapable of asserting themselves, articulating their desires, or taking a proactive stance to pursue a dream or goal.  The men are brow-beating clods, unobservant, territorial, jealous, and possessive, and constantly attempting to measure their “assets” (physical or otherwise) against any other person (especially another male) they might encounter.  Both are usually closed off emotionally, or suffering some other horrible emotional dysfunction, completely disconnected from the needs of others, while simultaneously deluded into believing they know what’s best for that other.  In addition, their definition of value is usually consumerist at best: he girl wants to be pretty, the guy wants to be the best, etc. The reality of all this is twofold: first, if you switch the previous descriptions with the gender, you’re still annoyed, and second, both descriptions fail the protagonist test on just about every level.  They are not (or shouldn’t be) likable and are unequipped to move through the Hero’s Journey in a meaningful way.  TvTropes has a trope called 20 Minutes With Jerks, wherein a horror or monster film subjects the viewers to people and relationships that you hate in order to set up so-called “stakes” for the horror or monster to destroy.  (Cloverfield.. That is all.)  Gender should play no role whatsoever in whether a character is likeable or heroic. If it is, you’re probably somewhere in misogyny or Nazi feminist territory.  Men are not divine because they are men, and women are not right because they are women.  Your characters are human first.

2. Men are not wrong; women are not right. Good God, this needs to be addressed.   How many sitcoms have you seen where the wife is the steady, reliable one with perception, and the male protagonist is a whacky moron constantly getting himself into crazy schemes?  How many shows have you seen where the man who cheats is vilified, but the woman who cheats is cheered?  I hate stuff like this, because it takes me all of five seconds to reverse the roles and see how unfair both parties are being to each other.  Especially when it’s a situation like Man had feelings for Woman A, who rebuffed him, and Man moved on to Woman B, and now Woman A realizes she has feelings for Man and starts sabotaging his relationship with Woman B.  (Or  he Man is the one who’s doing the sabotaging against another Man.) I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t take that kind of dishonesty in a workplace, let alone a relationship.  Being a jerkface requires no gender.  Being right requires no gender.  Men are far too often the expendable gender, especially in primetime TV (which begs a serious question, considering that most TV writers are male, while most novelists are female.)  I’ve very often said that cheating is cheating and cruel is cruel.  When writing a character, it pays to look at the moral merits of their actions, rather than saying, “Oh, he’s a guy, he’d get away with this.”  (Or even worse, “Oh, she’s a girl, it’s okay.”) Gender roles are cliche’, and for the most, no longer a social norm.  If you start with a cliche’, you’re going to write yourself straight into a narrow landscape populated by paper-thin characters that nobody likes.

3. Cliche’ is the enemy. Maybe this is due to all the hype of dating magazines and sites and poor Internet advice, but cliche’ is the enemy of all writing, and writing the opposite gender probably suffers the worst for it.  It tends to go one of two ways: either the ideal, or the worst idea imaginable.  The ideal man in a romance weeps at sunsets, commits himself to changing for her, and is everything short of a mind reader.  Or he’s a beer-belly bastard who beats his wife  nd lays on the couch all day.  Woman are sluts who want it soooooo bad, or shrewy harridans constantly pecking their husbands to death.  I don’t care if you grew up in a house with people who were like the aforementioned: do not write them as sympathetic protagonists.  We will hate you.  Do research, perhaps start a social life, or indulge in something that improves your view of humanity.  If you approach a character as their gender, and not as a human, you will run yourself right into trouble.  Because somewhere, someone defied the rules.  “Men don’t ever share their
emotions.”  Really?  Keats did.  Byron did.  They may not have cried in front of a woman or another man, but they expressed their emotions. “Woman are controlled by their emotions all the time.”  I’ve got women soldiers and Joan of Arc to introduce you to. Really, human is human, and while there are differences between how men and woman approach something, it doesn’t deserve a cliche’.  That goes for making men act like women in the extreme, and women act like men in the extreme.  (Don’t even get me started on how gay relationships are portrayed by the ignorant; I’d bet my house that most yaoi fangirls have never even spoken to a gay person, let alone watched them in a relationship.  It’s about as blase’ as the heterosexual kind, trust me.)

4. Historical settings beg the question. I have to point out that gender roles have been pretty solid up until the last hundred years or so. If your setting has social norms for gender  roles, they have to be taken into account.  Not every woman was miserable under an arranged   marriage, and not every man cheated on his wife with peasant wenches.  (If you want to know  who probably had the roughest lot, it was probably the homosexuals; everybody hated  those.) The societal norms at the time were that "marriage for love" was ridiculous, whimsical,  snd impractical.  Keep in mind that in medieval Europe, a woman who didn’t marry or was willful  as considered scandalous, and yes, that includes the opinion of other women. (Hell, suffragettes were considered extremists in their time.)  Exploring the effects of such societal pressures on a character are makes for a timeless story, but a lot of people make the mistake of applying contemporary opinions to the time period. There was a reason that a woman’s virginity was so necessary in a feudal system; upper-crust society passed its inheritance through lineage, therefore there would be pressures on a woman to remain chaste, make a good marriage, and  ave enough kids to pass it on.  Duh.  Contemporary society lives about twice as long now and  doesn’t have the cultural norm anymore.  If you have a fantasy setting with similar norms as a  feudal England, than take that into account, too.  If you doubt how much women could pressure other women, look up any case of bullying that involved high school girls.  Seriously.  Even the boys say it’s better to be bullied by guys, because one doesn’t walk away with the kind of psychological scars catty girls leave you with.  (The sorts that hung themselves after leaving a farewell message on Facebook were pretty much girls being harassed by girls.) You are not anti-feminist or pro-male by having an arranged marriage that the character, male or female, is content with. Avoid applying a contemporary value system to a historical setting if you can help it.  

5. Consider your audience. Men statistically read and write less fiction than women. Most fiction is written by women for women.  I recently attended an SCBWI lecture about getting boys to read, and the number one turn off for boy readers was that the characters didn’t act like boys.  Boy readers liked exploration plots more than a make-friends plot, adventure rather than emotional landscapes, and a knowledge-is-earned plot more than a friendship-is-earned plot.  But, it didn’t matter if the lead was male or female.  They liked characters who acted in more male ways. If you don’t know what that means, read some sociology or psychology articles.  If you’re writing a gritty war story, populated by bitter, misogynistic characters, their POV is obviously going to corrupt any fair treatment of women the writer may attempt.  Same with a story told from a serial rapist’s POV.  On the other hand, men in romance get a pretty raw deal if they’re not perfect and sensitive, and in just about any genre men are treated as the expendable gender.  (You never hear about how great it is a book has a “strong, male lead that is a perfect role-model for young boys”, do you?  How many times have you heard that for girls, though?  Even Joss Whedon complains about it.)  Also, don’t make the mistake of thinking that your gender as the author means you can’t write the other gender convincingly;  Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth and George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire portray woman very well, and both J.K. Rowling and Meredith Ann Pierce have good, believable male leads.  Now, there are a LOT of societal factors even nowadays about male readership versus women readerships, and vice versa, and whether men will buy a female author’s work, and so on.   Really, it’s not worth bothering about.  You’re supposed to write the story first; keeping an ideal audience in mind while you do so.  If your work is good, it’ll find its way to that audience.