I can totally understand if someone did it on purpose, but not without actually being aware of it.

It never ceases to amaze that there are fans of ‘speculative fiction’ who can’t speculate beyond Euro-centric fantasy worlds where white dudes have all the power.

So — yes — I very much see your point.

In fact, I’ve seen a couple of reviews of Cold Magic, written by men, which basically say “it took me a little bit to get past reading within the first person point of view but after I got used to it, it was fine.” I see that as a valid statement about adjustment.

I do hope that in the fullness of time people can simply identify with people. But I’m also aware we have a long way to go.

THanks for your thoughtful and perspicacious comment.

And I’d just like to point out that Harry Potter was written from the POV of, initially, an 11 year old boy. Not that 11 year old boys can’t have libidos, but it’s still very different from the POV of a sexually-mature, sexually-experienced man. And Twilight is only noticeable because it is an exception to the rule, and comes across as a 14-year-old girl’s fantasies of what sex is all about.

As you know (Bob) there’s an odd place in that slipstream where writers are writing partly in and partly out of the sub genre which can create some disjunctions in expectation. So the flip side ends up being that place where the reader’s expectations aren’t met–if, indeed, they have a fairly set basket of expectations (although obviously not everyone does).

This made me laugh. And yet rings so true!

As you already know, so I won’t bother to elaborate, there is an entire theory about who needs to know what about what. Not to mention variations on your example above when students are given an exercise to “imagine themselves as the opposite sex” and the girls, by and large, write up reams of things while some significant percentage of the boys are stumped. That’s a sad indictment of our culture, to my mind.

Again, I think the main problem lies when, as writers, we don’t think fully about whose eyes we are seeing through and what they would be seeing.

No one has told them how to shape their characters’ interiorities, thus they are creating what they *think* that sounds like. It would seem that by default there is most definitely a distinct male gaze and a female gaze.

-gf

But I appreciate the compliment muchly. I absolutely loved the accessibility and yet penetrating insight of your essay.

I should remark that your experience of writing from within a self-imposed, tightly constrained 3 pers PoV sounds very similar to mine. As I write within the SF intrigue/epic line, it is often a kind of extra burden that I bear for my own reasons, not those of the field. But I often reflect how, if our genre eschewed such short-cuts and sloppiness as what you have put under the interrogation lights in your piece, we might begin to shed even more of the “paraliterature” reputation that goes back to the days of Gernsback.

Hey, a guy/gal can wish, right?

Really like your essay (I’ve not responded at this length, or with this degree of effusion, with anything blogged or FB’d before), and I enjoy our exchange here.

Best wishes and I’ll Be Watching for Your Name!
Chuck Gannon