I saw a comment pop up a while ago, which is an observation I have seen not infrequently: that most male authors don't write women very well.

Conversely, while there are certainly female authors who don't write men very well, this failure does not seem to be as widespread and rarely as horrifically bad as the more egregious male offenders.

Analyzing why that is would be an entirely separate post and not entirely related to books, though I am sure there will be some discussion of it in the comments.

So, I want to talk about authors who write the opposite sex well, and those who... don't.

I am a kick-ass superhuman killing machine with a genius IQ. Also, I have sex with anything that moves and I marry my rapist.

Finding male authors who are terrible at writing women, like I said, is not difficult. It may be more difficult to list men who are especially good at writing women. What I find particularly amusing is those who think they write women well, and whose fans will defend their "strong female characters," because all you need to have a strong female character is a chick who can kick ass. There are plenty of contemporary examples, but I'm going to mostly cite authors who are safely dead. Robert Heinlein is a classic example of this: his female characters were interesting, I will give him that, and they did kick ass, but you have to be pretty unperceptive not to notice that every one of Heinlein's female characters from Podkayne to Friday is a skeevy blow-up doll waltzing out of his wanking dreams.

(Heinlein still beats Asimov, though. At least Heinlein's ladies actually did things.)

Outside genre fiction, I have carped about Charles Dickens before, whom I love but who had a Victorian stick up his ass when it came to women. And since Anthony Trollope could write complex, multi-faceted women who spanned the spectrum from conniving harpy to kind-hearted and virtuous to self-possessed and independent:

The one most essential obstacle to the chance of success in all this was probably Lady Carbury's conviction that her end was to be obtained not by producing good books, but by inducing certain people to say that her books were good. She did work hard at what she wrote—hard enough at any rate to cover her pages quickly; and was, by nature, a clever woman. She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good. Had Mr Broune, in his closet, told her that her book was absolutely trash, but had undertaken at the same time to have it violently praised in the "Breakfast Table", it may be doubted whether the critic's own opinion would have even wounded her vanity. The woman was false from head to foot, but there was much of good in her, false though she was.

and even Leo Tolstoy in batshit crazy Christian socialist rant mode had some grasp of both the plight and the mental faculties of women, it's not as if male authors writing back in Olden Days were incapable of representing women with some perspicacity.

Hanging out with sexless, closeted old men helps keep my mind off of chest monsters.

What about women who write men poorly? The worst offenders here are probably romance writers, and since I don't read that genre, fewer examples come to mind, but what little Mercedes Lackey I've read featured very flat male characters without much personality compared to the female ones. I am a big Harry Potter fan, and Rowling's portrayal of male characters is not terrible, but it's not great either; pretty much all of them are rendered safely sexless, and to be honest, Harry never quite seemed like a real boy to me. The writer who left the biggest impression on me for her completely one-dimensional male characters, though, was Suzette Haden Elgin. I really did like a lot of her science fiction, and I know that the Native Tongue trilogy was largely a thought experiment in feminist linguistics, but I never read a single male character in any of her books who wasn't a knuckle-dragging ape. Even her one "good guy," Coyote Jones, is mostly kind of inoffensively clueless.

But for sure, it's a lot easier to think of male authors who write women badly and women who write men well than it is to make an opposite pair of lists.

All of that being said, knowing whether the author is a man or a woman very likely influences a reader's perception of the author's opposite-sex characters. I suggest taking the Guardian's V.S. Naipaul Test. Granted, that's just asking you to guess the gender of the author of a single snippet of prose, and not at all like guessing whether a fully-developed character seen throughout the course of a novel was written by a man or a woman, but it is worth wondering how many "obviously" bad representations of men or women would be as obvious if one read the book believing the author to be a different gender.

I think most people reading a Heinlein novel, even with no knowledge of the author, would have no problem guessing "This author is totally a dude." But if I'd read Harry Potter thinking that the author was James K. Rowling, would I have still thought that Harry didn't quite ring true? I am not 100% certain.

What say ye? Recommend (or bash) away in the comments!





Previous Saturday Book Discussions.