{"id":8417,"date":"2009-08-05T14:49:47","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T21:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8417"},"modified":"2009-08-05T14:49:47","modified_gmt":"2009-08-05T21:49:47","slug":"can-men-who-editors-think-are-women-write-convincing-male-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8417","title":{"rendered":"Can Men (Who Editors Think Are Women) Write Convincing Male Characters?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From Nihlistic Kid<\/a>, Here’s some editorial comments on a story by author Bev Vincent. The story was written from the point of view of a male protagonist. These comments are all from the same editor:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite a challenge for a writer of one sex to explore writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. Bev Vincent has not done a convincing job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man”<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I can\u2019t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every <\/em>Sunday afternoon to talk to their family\u201d [Emphasis his or hers].<\/p>\n

\u201cMost men don\u2019t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man\u2019s perspective.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The thing is, Bev Vincent is a man. The editor just assumed Bev was female, based on the name, and then projected all sorts of nonsense the editor “knew” about how women write on to the manuscript. Bev comments<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard female writers talk about gender bias in the industry before, but it\u2019s always been an abstract concept to me. Not something I\u2019ve ever experienced. Oh, sure, people often think I\u2019m female based on my name\u2014it\u2019s a common enough mistake, which I\u2019ve had to deal with all my life. I like to tell the story about how I was almost assigned to the women\u2019s dorm at university. However, I\u2019ve never before had an editor criticize my writing based on a false assumption concerning my gender. Or make blatantly biased statements about the male perspective. […]<\/p>\n

I pause here to note that this was the most autobiographical story I\u2019ve ever written, and all the things that the editor complained about were my real observations and my real thoughts cast into the mind of a fictional character participating in fictional events. I did, in fact, call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to my parents, while they were still alive.<\/p>\n

To compound his or her arrogance, the editor claims that my prose is \u201coverly elegant,\u201d which is presumably his or her way of saying that a man would never write or think in elegant terms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a funny story, but it represents two kinds of sexism, both worthy of concern.<\/p>\n

First of all, there’s the obvious sexism against female writers. (Was this incident only about prejudice against writers who with protagonists who aren’t of the same sex? No, it was not; the bit about “overly elegant” wasn’t about cross-sex writing, it was about discrimination against a writing style that is perceived as feminine. Criticism of female writers for being too “elegant” or “flowery” is, I’m told, a cliche that female science fiction and fantasy writers encounter often; and although the language is nice, the underlying gender politics are recognizable from decades ago, when Poul Anderson said “[Science fiction] remains more interested in the glamour and mystery of existence, the survival and triumph and tragedy of heroes and thinkers, than in the neuroses of some sniveling fagot.”<\/span><\/p>\n

And there’s also obvious sexism against men here, who — at least, in this editor’s estimation — are rather limited in our ability to be loving towards our families, to appreciate nature, or basically to have an emotional life significantly deeper than a turnip’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Nihlistic Kid, Here’s some editorial comments on a story by author Bev Vincent. The story was written from the point of view of a male protagonist. These comments are all from the same editor: \u201cIt\u2019s quite a challenge for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-sexism-hurts-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}