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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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