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I'm not so sure, I've never felt very "seen"(as the kids call it now) when reading how women tend to write men. There's investment in some kind of feelings and thoughts in the book but even that reflects a feminine view of the world. Like the opposite side of the coin of when men write women as if they were men who happened to have female bodies. I'm not so convinced that a woman putting more thought and investment into a male character they're inventing is going to produce a more realistically male character.
Is it just the type of thoughts and feelings on display that makes it feel foreign? Or is it the fact that it focuses on thoughts and feelings at all?
In a reversal of popular folk wisdom, Nietzsche identified emotion with masculinity and rationality with femininity. Which he was quite correct about.
Crying at a Hallmark movie is not emotion - or, it is emotion of a particularly diluted and domesticated type. Quitting your stable well-paying job for a one in a million chance at becoming a rockstar or a Twitch streamer or whatever, getting into a fight with a random guy at a bar because he looked at you funny, pursuing one woman to the point of self-ruin long after she made it abundantly clear that she’s not interested - this is emotion. And men are far more likely to engage in these sorts of activities than women are.
No, I'm aware I have emotions, I just think the inside view is significantly different from the outside view and women by necessity are not privy to the inside view for basically the same reason I find it difficult to describe to you or anyone the difference. To smash another culture war topic into this in a possibly doomed attempt to illuminate with heat look at the subtler difference between trans women and natal women or trans men and natal men - these are people to whom it's incredibly important to closely imitate the opposite sex and yet it seems very clear, at least to me, that it's an inauthentic reading. I find the men women write tend to be performing masculinity rather than simply being masculine(this is not to be confused with just overdoing the masculinity). I'm importantly not making the claim that men write women much better, I think the sexes are doomed to never really understanding the internal life of each other. I can usually quickly tell and author's sex by how they write men and I have heard and believe women have the complimentary ability.
I suppose I would say that I don't think anyone is privy to my inside view, man or woman, and therefore it's not a reasonable criteria to use when judging an author... there may be certain properties I share in common with a male author or male fictional character on account of our shared maleness, some view of sexuality or relationships maybe, but taken in isolation, these things tend to be essentially incidental properties, on the same level as saying that we both share five fingers and five toes. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel a deep spiritual kinship with someone.
In general my basic way of processing experience, the basic tactile feeling of my thoughts and sensations, the matrix of connections they form with each other (or don't form), is so remote from that of any other person I know of, fictional or not, that I am perpetually "apart" from others, perpetually "on the outside", and therefore I feel barely any more kinship with men as a group than I do with women as a group. Therefore let the author write of feminine men, and masculine women, and unrealistic realistic protagonists, and realistic unrealistic villains, it matters not to me because I will not be "seen" by any of them. All of them are equally arbitrary choices in the ceaseless procession of forms. Who am I to judge a character as "realistic" anyway? Who am I to say that man or woman must be such and such, to say that a male portrayed as having a "feminine" state of mind could not exist? In the most extreme case the author will invent a new type of psyche which has never existed before; but this is simply one of the principal tasks of the artist, to invent or discover new configurations of the soul which have hitherto gone unrecognized.
Can you really say that you're not the same way? Do you not simply fall prey to illusion when you look at another man and go "ah, he gets me" on the basis of one comment or action, or even a whole lifetime of comments or actions? Do you not both contain infinite depths that remain unrecognized and misrecognized? Give yourself some credit.
I feel this less with good male authors. Of course no one 100% able to grok someone else but there are pretty noticeable inferential gaps between the sexes, things others totally lack a frame of reference for and can't hope to understand. I can guess at, even guess well at what period cramps feels like or growing up with male attention you aren't prepared for feels like but I'm never going to truly on a gut level understand it and all the second third and fourth order effects that has on a person's psychology and it shows. The arrogance required to believe women or men can understand the general condition of the other sex is just preposterous to me. What you can gleam from behavior and inference is just not enough.
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