The Advice on "How to Write Men" is so Bad Male Authors Don't Use it Either

I saw an article on "how to write from the male perspective" on Twitter, and it's haunted me since. The advice was gender essentialist--men aren't as driven by their emotions (but they're also competitive and want to be in charge which is... somehow... not driven by emotion....), they don't think about things as deeply as women, women say 20,000 words a day and men say 7,000, men are fixers while women just want to talk about their problems,* etc etc. The same tired refrain where people unwittingly put forward the idea that men are stupid. What really blew me away though, were the comments. From some guy saying it offended him when women wrote men because they did it wrong, to women saying that women writers wrote "effete" men, to a heartbreaking comment from a teenage writer who said that she preferred to write men because women were unfathomable and too bitchy.

But one made me raise my eyebrows: men and women can write women, but women can't write men.

Growing up the questions were always "how do I write authentic-sounding women?" Often from other women because we grew up in a world that catered to men--we've all read books by men, about men, for male readership. Getting a handle on "how men think" was easy because it mirrors how society thinks. But write women? Nobody told us how to do that, and we were all clearly not representative of women because we weren't like those other girls. Still, the idea was, writing men is easy. We all know how to think like men because that's what we've all had to do to get by. Now the pendulum has swung the other way: women? Pfft. Easy. Men? There's your ineffable enigma!

Here's a decent representative of the genre. Apparently I'm a man? In fact a lot of this advice has made me question everyone's gender identity. They're not bad points--for specific people, and it contains many generalities that apply only according to broad populations (similar to "women are short, men are tall" true on the average, untrue when you talk individuals). Further, if you already know what's backed up by studies and keeping in mind that a lot of these are culturally bounded, it's a good list for "how people do things differently."** Like women recalling the spoken word (because women are taught to use language more than men, as children), judging character is more a matter of privilege (marginalized people have to be aware of what people with societal power over them are feeling, this goes for men and women), men don't conform to society's rules about sex? Talk to some fundamentalist Christians. Also see how much women are punished vs. men--if you had a society that punished men as brutally as women for breaking social norms, you'd see conformation to the rules. It's not that bad, though, once you take into account that it's more a dissertation on "how the privileged speak vs. the marginalized."

Out of curiosity I started looking for advice on writing the male perspective.

What I found was... not good.

A lot of:
Men don't think, they do. They're hunters! They wanna be in charge!
Men don't think about things. This was a distressingly common theme.
Men don't notice their surroundings beyond the relevant or extraordinary.
Men don't notice anything. Basically.

One article fascinated me. It wasn't the advice, it was describing a creative writing class with men and women. One story, written by a man, had a male MC who took in all of his surroundings. The men in the class knew, right away, that he was the bomber in question but all the women were like "what!?" That this MC noticed his surroundings made him suspicious, and this was a cue by the author to his male (of a specific background) readers that this was a character with nefarious plans.

What interested me wasn't someone giving advice that falls along sexist lines--it was that the other men reading it felt this way, too. These men, in a creative writing class, read enough books with slipshod worldbuilding that noticing things is out of the ordinary.

And here I thought I was an unspecific writer: "he slipped into the crowd." What kind of crowd? Where did it come from and why is it there? Did it conveniently materialize? What a paperthin world, it's so obvious these things happen because the author needs them. "There was stuff on the table." C'mon Sam, you can't just say "stuff"! Notice the details a little more! I did a ridiculous amount of research on clothes for these books, too, because Morgan would notice, given that clothing is a huge signifier of class/power/origin (and if you want to say "men don't notice clothes" like it's inborn and not a cultural artefact, I want to see you argue the top radio hits where guys talk about clothes). This was an uphill battle throughout the Morgan books--because Morgan is far more observant and better able to gauge the temperature of a situation than I am. He's a bit like Sherlock, if Sherlock had grown up poor and kept an eye out for bullies as a kid. Clearly Sherlock was also written by a woman. Didn't Doyle know that men don't see details?

The men in the class criticized one story (by a woman) where a male character noticed the eye color of his roommate. They thought this was creepily intimate. Which made me wonder: how do men recognize other people if they refuse to look at each other? Eye color is a readily discernible feature--I spot eye color from across a conference table, which is well outside my (large, given how often people invade it and disagree) personal comfort zone. Basically these guys were like "I'm so afraid of being considered gay I won't even look at another dude."

Especially funny since off the top of my head, the only time I can remember an eye description is from Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books when Harry describes Johnny Marcone as having "green eyes the color of dirty money." Whoa, Harry, no homo! Doesn't Butcher know that real men don't see each other's eyes? I never realized the homoromantic subtext before! I'll keep a weather eye out from now on.

Basically a lot of the advice on "how to write men" makes me wonder--why bother? You have a protagonist incapable of worldbuilding because he doesn't pay attention to his surroundings so you can't describe a city/fashion/patterns/people so you're left with... what? I suppose this means GRRM doesn't know how to write men and that he's female-brained because he describes clothes and surroundings. Also J.R.R. Tolkien hid behind initials because he was secretly a woman. Have you read his books? Details galore! Obviously he doesn't understand men at all.

G'lawd. It's almost like masculinity is defined by being "not feminine," so as femininity expands the boundaries of acceptable masculine performance describe a shrinking island, so small that men aren't allowed to be fully realized people anymore, lest they be infected with girl cooties.

Not to mention that women can't ever do anything right, but no one remarks when men do the same thing.

And, most importantly: Men, like women, are individuals.

*The science is pretty bad since "how much do people talk" is dependent on situation. e.g.: in a setting with mixed men and women, men tend to dominate the conversation and use more words. Further, I'm bugged to no end by "men want to fix things, women want to talk." Me? I'm a cis-woman. I'm a fixer. Most of my female friends are fixers. My mother is a fixer, who often cries "what do you want me to do!?" when I go to her at my wit's end in need of someone to listen. My dad, on the other hand, will listen. The "don't fix, just listen" arises when there's a problem that can't be fixed. 80% of my advice is "some people are jerks/fighting their own demons/want to watch the world burn. All you can do is keep your distance." These are not situations with fixes. I've had men come to me with situations with no fixes when they need a shoulder to cry on, too. I've had more men ask "what does it mean!?" than women when recounting the minutiae of an interaction. The whole "men are fixers, women just want to talk" conversation completely overlooks that there are fixable problems and not, that some people want solutions and some want to vent and at least in my experience, there's no breakdown along gender lines except that women are often put in social situations with no "fix" more often.

**I've been paying a lot of attention to this because I've seen a bunch of people say that food really tells you a lot about a culture. ...I can't tell you anything about food because all I care about is whether it keeps me from feeling hungry and I want it to be not gross. I've also had to work on my fashion chops because that's another huge cultural signifier. I? I do not pay that much attention. It's almost like the stereotypes are bullshit or something.