Developing the opposite gender

IMO I always figured it was the personality that made a person who they are; not their gender. You could be a girl and still love to play video games; and you could be a boy and still love to do ballet.

 

This is true, but I think you need to consider their gender when writing about it. Perhaps not the first example since many girls like video games, but I would think the male ballet dancer has experienced at least some mockery in his life for taking part in a 'girly' hobby. That will affect his feelings about ballet, even if it doesn't stop him doing it.

 

And where is all this "Heavy Science"? The majority of the stuff I've come across have been inconclusive or hardly universal.

 

You can also have a woman rescue a woman, or a man rescue a man. The various clones in Orphan Black rescue each other (and Felix) all the time.

 

I agree with others that you should write a female character like she is a person, and the person you want her to be for your story. But the same time, women do have a different wiring compared to men, in general.

I thought about this recently for a story I had a female character, who I wrote as a person without thinking about gender, but gender did come to mind during a particular scene where she chooses to seduce a male character. The seduction scene I came up with her is kind of aggressive on her part, and I wrote it for a woman's approach because the way a man would seduce a woman if it were reversed may not work the same way with the opposite sex. Or maybe it might, but the woman would probably think it was humorous if a guy used a method that was more suited for a female, and the woman would be seduced by his humor, where if it were a man being seduced, he would probably not find it funny, but just turned on.

That's just one example that came to mind where I had to apply a different type of wiring.

 

All but one of these refer to the science of how the brain actually works, not how a person is raised, not societal training, none of that. All of these articles, except the Daily article, refer to communication between the two hemispheres of the brain in men and women. They refer to synapses going in different directions. Actual scientific differences in how the brains work. The article from the Daily covers studies in tendencies of thought process between men and women and refers to several studies. Is this enough science or would you like more?

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differently
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/men-women-different-brains1.htm
http://dailylounge.com/the-daily/entry/science-proves-what-we-already-know-men-and-women-think-differently
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131202161935.htm

Personally, I would refer to the how stuff works article. It covers these differences then goes in depth about how similar we are as well. It's a very rational outlook instead of the heavy handed science of the others.

And here's one scientific discovery that men and women literally see things differently. It is an in depth look about how vision between the sexes works differently and why.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/

 

I really struggle, writing in a women's point of view. Which is why i have always had help from my female friends telling me, or more accurately giving their opinion, on how a character should have acted in a scene.

Go with the flow, and more importantly, listen to the feedback from the opposite sex. It gets easier to write their point of the view the more you write. (like everything in the writing and none writing world )

Regards
Mike

 

[tongue-in-cheek]
Yeah, for one, a woman can ask a man to join her for a cup of coffee in her hotel room at 3 am, and not only that, she can do it during an elevator ride. Sure, a man can do that too, but then there will be blood.
[/tongue-in-cheek]

I feel sorry for you guys. For the most part, the dating game is friggin brutal to you.

 

I just read them all (rapidly, I admit) and I don't see anything in there that would guide character development. For example, the fact that men are, on average, better at spatial processing and sensorimotor speed, doesn't tell me anything at all about a specific male or female character. (Does that mean that my top-of-the-percentiles performance on that spatial visualization test that they used to give in high school was "unrealistic"? No. Because average means...average.)

Neither does the fact that women (on average) see color better or the fact that men (on average) track fast-moving objects better. Neither does the fact that our brain architectures are different--and in fact one of the articles that describes the differences makes the point that our different brains use different ways to do the same thing.

Men and women are socialized very, very differently in our society; that is far more likely to result in character differences, IMO, than any biological difference.

 

We can debate the science on this for hours but @ChickenFreak is right on the basic substance. I'll take it a step farther and say that at some level the science is irrelevant because our characters AREN'T REAL. When it comes to the debate over whether we should empathize with or care about our characters, I always come out on the side that says we should. My characters are very real to me in my head, I feel for them when they hurt...but at the end of the day I still know that's my brain playing tricks on me. Not only do I not really know my characters (I just see the highlights of their lives after all), I know deep down that really they are false fronts - I CAN'T know them because they really DON'T exist beyond my mental highlight reel.

Why put all that in a thread about gender that gets into the biochemical makeup of male vs. female brains? Because your characters don't have brains! They don't have biochemistry! They're essentially text-based animatronics propped up to create the ILLUSION of a real person to the audience, and there's a big difference in how you wire an animatronic display and how and how an actual human works. Building a character is less about hacking their brain than using them to hack the READER'S brain, and we do that using techniques from the arts, not the sciences.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that building a convincing female character is different in some ways from building a convincing male character - in part due to societal expectations, but then again what is art if not an expression of one's view of society. However, the basic toolbox is the same. Figure out who they are, what made them, what they want, what their internal conflict is - and how all that shapes how they talk. Gender is certainly one of the inputs to consider, but also age, culture, location, parentage, etc. No two characters are going to behave exactly the same if you're a good writer - because you're building the robots and your job is never to program two of them the same way, and you should do that on purpose - but at the end of the day all of them start with the same frame and then you layer over it.

Now, the one place where biochemical differences between the sexes manifest most strongly in fictional behavior is the area of romance and sexuality (and note I used the word sex rather than gender here on purpose since we're talking about physical traits). I lack certain levels of estrogen and and other hormones associated with the female reproductive system, and as such I have no clue what it feels like when those chemicals flood your brain. But the answer to that issue in writing isn't to research gender differences from a scientific perspective - it's to hand my female-POV romance scene to a female reader, preferably one who also writes, and ask her if it feels real. This, by the way, is how you handle writing any experience you don't understand - not just gender but also class, race, culture, even hobbies and interests.

That's a long monologue - but the point is that we here are in the business of creative writing, not science, and as such our art is best served by using the tools of that art...words and feelings...not data (And I say that as a data-nerd writing soft sci-fi).

 

The book I am currently finishing is about two boys. I am female. I find it easy to write about the opposite gender as long as I know all the basic and biological facts. It all depends on personality. Let's say you have a female character who is extremely weak and shy. In that situation, I would mix it up and write one part about her doing something strong. It's always good to remember to mix it up and surprise your readers.