If We Wrote Men Like We Write Women

[jimhines]

Posting these without comment…for now. Curious what people’s thoughts and reactions will be. -Jim

While Mr. Douglas was speaking freely on a subject he knew little about, Jane C. Henshaw, LL.B, M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neo-pessimist philosopher, was sitting by her pool at her home in the Poconos

Comments

[mt_yvr]

One of the best self-awareness moments came from Julie Czerneda asking me to make my protagonist male rather than the female I'd made her. So I did by changing pronouns. Read it.

And realized how horrifically sexist I'd been writing.

She cried constantly. Cooooonstantly. It felt weird to do as a guy and I had to sit with that for a looong time. Best single review I saw of the story was someone complaining that he seemed to cry a lot. Since I'd had to face what it looked like prior and how a child at the age and in the situation he was in would be terrified... I left in a lot of the crying. So for me seeing that complaint hit that spot of "yep, that's what I wanted".

There were other things as well but the crying was the big clue-by-four that woke me up to really look at how I'd been doing it.

[jimhines]

I had a very similar experience rewriting a story for Sword & Sorceress years ago.

[mt_yvr]

See that's a conversation that would be interesting to have publicly. How we fell down with this kind of thing. Not so much to talk about what went wrong, though that's important, but to add a dimension to the conversation. I sometimes wonder if people think anyone who asks for better, for change, for this kind of thing just ... appeared, fully formed.

We got it wrong. We still get it wrong. And we fix when we run into the problems.

A conversation about the times we did wrong and how we fixed it would be interesting as much as "don't do this" conversations are.

[jimhines]

That's part of the potential follow-up to this blog post :-)

[mrs_norris_mous]

Well I recognise Stranger in a strange land.

[rosefox]

Heh, I was just thinking today about what it would be like if newspapers wrote about cis people the way they write about trans people. "Secretary Clinton, a cisgender woman who uses the pronoun 'she' and prefers to be called 'Mrs.', is the first cisgender woman to be a major party's nominee for president."

[ethelmay]

It was years before I realized that "the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead [or should I say "redhedde"]" was a trope from porn.

[reedrover]

This was a fun read, though it actually didn't bother me in the macro. In the micro, I find I have a strong gender bias about the use of the word "beautiful." If a boy is described as "beautiful," I think Arrows of the Queen and instantly label that boy as evil, rather than concentrate on his physical presence.

It's a fun exercise to consider the gender biases attached to the words "beautiful" and "handsome." If I read the description "handsome woman," I think of someone who is delightful to look at, well-groomed, and evidencing a strong self-assurance. If I read the description "beautiful man," I think of vampire porn.

Also, in case you are going for completeness - I think you have a typo in your swapping in the last story - She felt the heat starting up his neck.

[jimhines]

D'oh! Thank you, fixing that now.

[ethelmay]

Also, is there any special reason you changed "Harshaw" to "Henshaw"? Or is that just a typo? (Note: my father was once engaged to a woman named Janie Harshaw. Her mother was acquainted with Heinlein, who likely copied her surname for Jubal.)

[jimhines]

Nope. Just random name changing.

Though the "Hen" part of that could have some unfortunate associations...