Jesus fucking Christ. Okay.

A few considerations:

"Where I'm going" is that the two points are only a contradiction if you claim that women cannot share any traits at all. This was not claimed - only that there was significant variation in their character. Certainly there are commonalities. One such suggested commonality is that they are more intolerant of variation than men.

Further:

Of course this is not a claim about 100% of women. There are no such claims that are substantive beyond the trivial. According to the research of the lovely Sarah-Jane Leslie at Princeton, generic statements like "sharks are dangerous" are not to be understood as talking about some statistically significant number. Hell, perhaps its even a small percentage - shark attacks are really quite rare. Rather, they talk about one of three things: a typical characteristic ("ducks lay eggs" - consider male ducks), a statistical majority ("cars have radios") or particularly striking/dangerous characteristics ("mosquitoes carry the WNV" - true of less than 1%). Moreover, it's not important which one it is. We accept generic sentences equally in all three cases - unless you're anally retentive/socially inept and insist on unnatural precision in casual conversation.

So the statement "women are varied" should be interpreted though this lens.

Now, why say women? Obviously the implicit comparison is with men. Women are more varied than men are. This comes with some caveats, beyond that of the typical caveats of generics described above.

Consider the domain of discussion. We're talking in the context of literary characters. In this case, "women are more varied than men" should be interpreted as meaning, given the context of what I said prior to that sentence, "women have more varied opinions about what women typically are like than men have about what men are typically like". If we consider a gender's opinions about itself at least somewhat authoritative, this suggests women themselves are more varied than men. But again, this variation is quite specific: we're talking about variation within the domain of typical characteristics, not variation of the gender overall. We're not interested in outliers here. Just the norm.

Finally, this all applies to the second statement as well. It should be clear now, I think, why the first statement does not preclude the second, which is also subject to the same caveats surrounding generics.

Cachai?

On a more personal note, might I suggest in future that requiring such precision of concepts in casual conversation is both inappropriate and generally considered an indicator of conditions such as aspergers and autism. Generally, much of what I described above is understood by people immediately when they read generic statements. It's an interesting area of study, but not so much for discovering new things as for making explicit the intuitions we already possess. I shouldn't have had to do this.

Now, if you start talking about standard deviations so help me god I will fetch a baseball bat.

 

I'm fine with both. Looking at my bookshelf I've got a few series with female protagonists and I can't say I like them any less than the others.

 

That's really all I was asking. The difference between "ducks lay eggs" and "black people steal" might escape you, but I became curious if you meant to include "some", or if you were a misogynistic asshat. I thought it highly unlikely(I said as much), and I certainly don't have any stake in the matter, which is why my question was decidedly not accusatory. Though my suspicions of you having an entirely unwarranted sense of self-importance were definitely confirmed.

My motive was curiosity, and if you wish to take offense to that, then it is entirely your concern.

Bravo, however, on wasting time filling a post with distracting nonsense.

 

I'm not really 'modern' in my views, as I tend to discriminate more readily than the average Joe. I believe there are strong differences between the majority of males and the majority of females, and that these differences are just fine, and we shouldn't try to enforce equality where it's not necessary. Artificial, enforced equality is a bad kind of oppression in my eyes.

That said, my views on gender roles really have little to do with literature and my experiences of it. I think reading any story with a primary protagonist leads me to associate myself with the main character, and that's a lot easier for me when that character is male. I've read a few novels with female protagonists, and they were okay, but nowhere near as engaging as those with males.

For much the same reason I can't stand slash or yaoi, because it grates too harshly against my own sense of self, meaning I just can't put myself in the character's shoes and become emotionally invested in what I'm reading.

Now, if a story's focus wasn't centered on just one character and involved many different perspectives, I wouldn't have a problem with female or homosexual characters, since I could just relegate them to 'other' in my psyche and pick one of the other narratives that I can relate with as my own personal 'main character'.

 

I don't think Taure is a misogynistic asshat. I do think he has some very strange notions about women. And a lot of people in this thread don't read widely enough.

 

Today we learned: DLP is full of useless twats with no ability to filter statements through anything less than 100% literal terms, thus starting pointless arguments over sentences like "Fire is wet.", "I just kicked my cat like a fucking soccer ball." and "Stupid ten year old cunt, she deserved to be raped like that."

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go throw my sister down some stairs, oppress some minorities, artificially spread aids to black homosexuals, and impregnate a cousin somewhere near Tennessee. (Which is the clue I am lying. I would never do that. Tennessee is a terrible place. D: )

Seriously, does no one know how to read something and not assume its meant exactly as its written? I mean fucking hell, if it was DLP would be on 9 million watch sites, 85% of its memberbase in a mental hospital doped out of their minds to prevent violence, and the other 15% attempting to bring the gladiatorial games back (now with 500% more violence, rape, and murder!).

 

I'm all in favor of the gladiatorial games. We can clear out Australia and fill it with criminals. Reality TV at its best.

 

I've only ever written male protagonists; Harry, Harry, Kote, Red and OCs. Then I started investing heavily in the main OF I'm writing. The one that I've planned out and care about deeply.

The main character in this OF is female and it's actually quite terrifying because you just don't know the female mind as well as the male one. You don't want to fuck up your character because as a writer, you end up loving your creations. You don't want to mess it up.

That's why I think it takes a lot of balls to branch out into female protags and part of the reason my own story is progressing at such a slow pace.

 

I'm with Seratin. I've written female characters before, but I'm always extrememly conscious of getting it wrong when doing so.

Part of the gender politics behind it all might be that, at least in The West, we've had 30 or so years of media (especially sitcoms and movies) showing us that men fuck-up all the time, and we're supposed to laugh it off, or laugh at the fuck-up itself. At the same time, women are supposed to be smart, serious, patient, forgiving and practical, and any who fall outside that tight definition are sluts, airheads, bitches or pycho-femdom lesbians.

The result of this is that when folks consume media (whether be books, movies, etc.) the expectation is that the female characters - at least the heroes - are going to be smart, serious, patient, forgiving and practical. If she is short any one of those traits, we refuse to accept her as a heroine. If, on the other hand, the character were male, we'd not only accept those traits, we'd revel in them and laugh.

The problem, then, isn't writing women - it's writing acceptable women. And unfortunately, sad as it is, what's acceptable for men and women is still wildly different.

Dream up any fantastical situation - wizard in the big city, space trader in the wild black yonder, thief in a medieval town, scientist opening a portal to another dimension, snarky bad-ass cop - five bucks says the majority picture a male in those roles more often than female.

It's not that we don't want to have female protagonists - hell, most of us, as shown above, don't care either way as long as it's well written - it's that we've been trained to expect (and, therefore, accept) a male protagonist as the default, and as such, most of us are not only more comfortable with males, we're actually uncomfotable with females.

I would love to write a story with a heroine main character - I'm just paralysed everytime I try to, because I'm sure I'm going to do it wrong. That's likely just due to the fear of being ripped apart by an actual woman convinced that I am doing it wrong, because I'm an insensitive and ridiculous male (which I freely admit to) but I have to remember there are probably a few women out there who would read the character and think, "she's perfect." The problem is that people (both male and female) who take offense to something are more likely to make their opinion known than those who like it.

 

I find that certain male types turn me off of a story just as well as certain female types do. Dresden, for instance, skirts that line. He is almost too male for me to stand reading about, and I get rather bored when it's just his thoughts. In the same way, a particularly lovelorn or bitchy or needy female character grates on me.

I think that overall, I prefer a female protagonist, but it's much harder to find, unless I want some Mary-Sue-esque crap.

When it comes to my own writing, I definitely have a much easier time writing a female character than I do male. I find myself unable to make the various male personalities truly distinct, whereas females, I find it easy to flesh out their personalities.

 

A lot of the time, I think I actually prefer reading books where the story is told from a male perspective. Two of the series I started reading recently had the first book told primarily from the perspective of a girl, and the second from the perspective of a guy. In both cases (and the books were about completely different things, and neither of them focused on the protagonist's gender as a huge factor in their actions, or contained much romance beyond side plots), I loved the second book much more than the first. I'm not sure if it's just the authors got better at writing or what, but I found them far easier to get into.

Many of the books I read with female protagonists end up with me pissed off at the main character for one reason or another (and this doesn't just apply to books. See: Alexandra Quick. Read the stories, still can't decide if I liked the character. xD).

There are exceptions, of course, but at least for the books I tend to pick up, it's much easier to like most male protagonists over their female counter-parts.

 

I don't really care much about the gender of the character I'm reading about, as long as the writing is good.
More important is the role of the character and the setting.
If it's about the smuggler with a heart of gold or the new magic user who has to rescue the world, I don't mind either way if it's a woman or a man.
I don't even mind romance from a female perspective, as long as it isn't the central subject of the plot.

On the other hand, I can't for the life of me get into stories about 'traditional' female roles. A mother defending her children or a girl forced into an arranged marriage? Sorry, can not really enjoy it no matter how well it's written.

 

And this is how we really end up with Mad Max.