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I can't agree. I don't think there's anything in principle that would prevent a woman from writing a truly superior work, but as a matter of fact, all of my favorite works from both "low" culture and "high" culture are overwhelmingly written by men.
If we just selected a woman and a man off the street entirely at random, then maybe you could convince me that there's a slightly better than 50/50 chance that the woman will be a better writer? But I'm not really concerned with the average case. I prefer to spend my time among the "old world giants", as you call them, and their contemporary spiritual successors.
A lot of people in this thread have been echoing the same sentiment and something bothers me about it.
The entire history of literature, the entire history of philosophy (not just the rarefied heights of logic and metaphysics, but all of the parts of philosophy that bring us down to earth too, ethics, politics, the investigation of the human soul), the entire history of what could be called Western humanistic thought, was forged almost entirely by men. Every artistic movement, every advance in the representation of the human psyche be it in word or image, every political ideology to command how people should organize themselves, all of the most probing examinations of the state of the human soul in its various historical epochs... virtually all men. Clearly there has never been a shortage of men who were deeply interested in people. Would Freud's work exist if Freud wasn't interested in people? Would Nietzsche's work exist if Nietzsche wasn't interested in people?
This very forum too. We, mostly men, gather here to discuss people doing people things. The motivations of people, the destiny of people, the norms that bind people.
Granted, we may be able to draw a distinction between being interested in people-as-things vs people-as-people. Maybe wanting to understand the general principles and patterns that govern people, wanting to use individual people as a means of accessing the universal, is a people-as-things approach, while gossiping about how your friend Sally wants a divorce from her husband Dave is a people-as-people approach. But then you would have to declare that essentially the entire history of literature and philosophy is not indicative of any particular interest in people per se, on the part of the authors. That seems very odd.
Joyce's Ulysses is crude and churlish? Ulysses is not elaborate or fancy or eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind?
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I noticed that further up in the thread you also said you experienced more anxiety than the male average as well. Both of these traits are outside the male average, in a more feminine direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a slight correlation among traits like this.
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How many Joyces contend for an average Hugo?
Every second-tier female fanfic writer is invested in her characters' feelings and thoughts and dedicates a big part of the work to spelling that out.
Men, like I said, have other avenues to express their core interests.
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