So Narrative Form is the Masculine way...

I'm really just trying to figure this stuff out. I know there's more than just the standard Narrative Form type of story, but it sure ain't easy to find information about it! I've been searching today for things like 'Types of story besides Narrative' and 'Female Story form', and the pickin's are pretty slim. A few interesting parts of articles here and there, but nothing like the massive flood you find if you search for Narrative Story Form. This parallels the difficulty I've had trying to find out if the Individuation process is the same for women as for men (talking about Jungian Individuation). A few ideas are coalescing for a future blog post though.

Oh, and I'd say Lit Fic tends more toward the poetic or feminine side of the spectrum much of the time. But there's more to it than that. I'll get into it more in my next post on the subject.

I was looking strictly at the verbs themselves, and how they would be viewed in standard narrative form. This is one of the major ways of finding those 'weasel words' that mean you're telling rather than showing—he felt, he thought, he saw, he heard. These are entirely too passive for narrative, they constitute what's known as passive voice. And that's if the POV character is the one actually doing the seeing, hearing, etc! To be the one being seen and heard is far more passive.
It's not an action, it's having something done to you by someone else.

I understand the rest of what you said (I'll avoid calling it a diatribe ) but it's getting too much into men and women rather than the masculine and the feminine. Each of us has both modes available to us, and in fact usually we're operating under a blend of them. But for purposes of defining or studying, we can separate them into sets of characteristics. It's quite clear that the narrative form is based on the masculine imperative—taking action and trying to change the situation.

I'm interested in the fact that what I got form that video about the feminine gaze describes a completely opposite mode—the feminine approach. It doesn't even seem right to call it an imperative, since that seems to describe a call to action and conquest.

The feminine mode is more a mode of being rather than of doing. I've heard it said (and this is one of those sayings that equates the feminine with women and the masculine with men) that women are human beings and men are human doings, since women are valued simply for existing, while men to achieve status must accomplish and prove themselves.

The feminine is the mode of the Romantic poets, who saw themselves symbolized by an instrument known as the Aolean Lyre, which was played on by the wind. They make beautiful, natural music (their poetry) when strummed idly by the random hand of nature herself. And what they wrote was inward-oriented—long musings on an idea or a feeling rather than a story with characters and action and a plot.

Now of course at times some action would find it's way into their work. Absolute purity exists only in theory, not in this dirty, mixed-up thing called reality we live in.

Narrative story always includes elements and passages of interiority, of telling rather than showing. And even the most inward-looking, languorous meditation on the fine subtlety of feeling will include some plot, action and character. But separating them theoretically in order to study the 2 different modes does enable us to understand them better, and it helps shed light on each of them.

As with so many of these 'dichotomies', this one seems to come down to the active, linear and progress-oriented left brain (the conscious mind) and the placid, tranquil, diffuse right brain (the unconscious). I believe this is why the Narrative approach is teachable while the feminine approach is intuitive and must be discovered through quiet meditation.

"Similarly, stories that address the problems or conflicts that *she* wants them to address are "good", whereas the ones that don't are "bad"."

She never said that. I can see where it's easy to make that assumption, but it wasn't that kind of a video. Keep in mind, she also did a video on the Male Gaze, and from what I saw it wasn't just diatribe and condemnation.

She seems to be one of the good ones, actually trying to make sense of the differences between the feminine and the masculine rather than spouting off the spiteful rhetoric.

Here are the videos:

• Alice in Borderland Review | Male Gaze Theory and Feminine Perspective
• The Feminine Gaze & Transformative Stories

"my advice to you is stick with masculine and feminine in regards to terminology."

That's what I do, though at times I forget to specifically call it that. To me it's always clear that when people say "men & women" they really mean the masculine and the feminine, and I thought I had made that clear enough many times on the board that people would understand it's always to be assumed, but of course that can never be assumed. Now I always try to explain it.

Ultimately talking about the masculine in all of us and the feminine in all of us is the only way that really makes sense, and it's the clearest and most direct way. Otherwise you end up with things like "Women like this kind of movie—well, if they're feminine enough, but you know, some women are masculine. And feminine men will like it too I suppose." And the same goes for the other side too. It's too awkward and takes to long to say "Masculine men and masculine women" and on and on. So much simpler just to cut right to the chase.

Somewhere up there, you said something to the effect that "Maybe long ago people saw it this way the masculine and the feminine rather than men and women". I actually don't think most people ever did or will.

I guess I got this kind of thinking mainly from reading Camille Paglia. Her book Sexual Personae was foundational for me, and while I'm not sure she really used the terms in the same way I am here, my understanding of it grew originally from things she said in it. That plus my studies into psychology and philosophy have taught me to try to drill down and discover the real nature of what's under discussion, so as not to get side-tracked by surface irrelevancies.

She's the anti-feminist feminist and the anti-intellectual intellectual. My kind of woman!! She separates all this nasty anti-male rhetoric from real feminism, which really pisses off the vast majority of so-called feminists. So glad I discovered her when I did!