Issue 13 - MALES

Observation
Distrubly

One of the many "clever" observations I've heard made about men is that we're willing to go fight in a war, but unwilling to go get a bikini wax. I'd like to take a moment to remind the reader which one you're allowed to bring an automatic weapon to.

Writing the Elusive “Male”
elisefey

My first thought upon seeing this topic was: what the heck do I—an uber feminine girl with a soft-spot for character driven romance—know about males? Men are a bit of an enigma to me at times and the hardest characters for me to write by simple virtue of having a completely different realm of experience. Anything I could possibly have to say on the subject would be irrevocably skewed toward my feminine perspective. Indeed, so many modern women writers create male characters that are so ridiculously unbelievable and inconsistently masculine that it’s become a pet peeve of mine (there are also many authors who don’t do that, and I love them for it). Then it hit me: that’s what I can write about—the challenge every author faces when writing a character of the opposite gender.

In the movie “As Good as it Gets”, Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) describes writing realistic female characters as follows, “First I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”

I’m afraid that when I read the majority of writing (published and not) that this mentality of “the other gender makes no sense” prevails on all sides; flooding literature with female protagonists that women can’t relate to and male protagonists that men can’t relate to. Ultimately limiting our audiences to primarily one gender and producing a bunch of poorly crafted characters (not to mention perpetuating unrealistic expectations of gender roles and behaviors).

So I had to think about it—what makes a character, regardless of gender, believable to me? The answer was surprisingly simple: consistent motivation and style. No one does anything without a reason, a goal in mind, something to motivate their behavior. Similarly, everyone has a style for approaching obstacles to their goals; some characters are task oriented and some are relationship oriented (there are more styles, I’m sure, but these are the two main differences I notice between male and female characters). Basically, if your character is doing something just because it makes a great scene or moves the plot without any real progress toward that character’s personal goal or outside of that character’s style… you have a problem.

Relationship driven characters are going to base their goals and actions around their emotions and the perceived emotions of the characters surrounding them. They are usually concerned more with emotional intimacy and its various forms (a fear of or desire for) than accomplishing something tangible like completing a quest or pulling off a bank heist or finally beating the crap out of the school bully.

Essentially, they will be able to tolerate it if they lose the job, are captured by the enemy, lose the magical artifact, etc., as long as everyone’s feelings are sufficiently addressed and intimacy is accomplished or maintained. The “I don’t care how miserable things are, as long as we’re together” mentality. A romantic plot or subplot is by default a relationship driven storyline that will feature at least one relationship oriented character. That’s what romance is: a search for an intimate relationship.

It might be too obvious to say that the majority of believable female characters are relationship oriented. Not all, but most. But some relationship oriented characters are just plain annoying because they never get anything done and end up sabotaging everything the other characters are trying to accomplish because she (or he) just wants to sit around and melodramatically angst in a nice little pity-party. Acknowledging a character’s drive makes them more sympathetic and consistent as long as they are not limited in scope as a result.

Being a bit of a girly girl, I tend to be slightly more relationship driven myself, so I tend to write more relationship oriented characters and plots. That tendency makes it more difficult to write task oriented characters (generally my more masculine characters). Task driven characters will put aside emotions in order to accomplish the task. To a relationship driven author and/or reader, this behavior can seem mean and pointless. Thus the profusion of male characters, written by female authors, who oscillate unrealistically between extreme sensitivity and extreme or violent harshness. The author fails to acknowledge the character’s task and task oriented nature in her desire to revel in the drama and emotions. Don’t let yourself lose sight of the character like this!

My most successful male characters have always been task driven. Even though their task may have been formulated with the intention or purpose of furthering a relationship’s intimacy, it is still approached as an activity that must be accomplished rather than an examination of emotions. Emotions get in the way of the task for them. Feelings have to be set aside for a while in order to get things done; they can be picked up again later.

Basking in the emotional ins and outs of a relationship is not high on the list of the task driven character’s preferred past times. They want to be doing something. Of course, if you never acknowledge the emotions of a task driven character they’re going to seem as shallow and one-sided as the whiney overly relationship driven character. Male characters who never feel anything can become boring; they lack passion and fail in emotional intimacy, even when it’s their primary goal (which it almost never is unless you’re writing a romance). There is interest to be found in the conflict a task oriented character experiences between his feelings and the task he prioritizes above those feelings—in how he manages to deal with or ignore those feelings for the sake of the task. A brief flicker of emotion can make the task more meaningful. Strangely, the same interest can be found in the relationship driven character struggling between her responsibilities and emotions.

In other words, remember that there’s a reason for the behavior of your characters and it’s not usually that they’re just plain crazy-pants by virtue of being the opposite sex. Go find that reason. You know, unless they’re crazy-pants…

Making Things Work
Disturbly

In the kingdom of Fallopia, all was bliss. Ruled by the wise queen Uteressa, the people knew only prosperity and peace. Slavery and hunger were unknown to them, and crime was but a distant memory. They idled away their days cultivating their fields, engaging in fine arts, and practicing White Magic. Even with the animals they lived in harmony, their diets composed principally of fresh fruits, granola, and liberal amounts of soy cheese...

But discord would come to their world; across the mountains lay the empire of Scrotos, a bleak, warlike land where the spires of the nobles' castles loomed over the squalid slums of its downtrodden people. There, the warlord Phalos cast his gaze upon the peaceful kingdom, and let slip his army to wage war on the Fallopians with gunpowder and steel. Fueled by testosterone, beef jerky, and the urge for conquest, they began the march to battle, with the goal of slaughtering and enslaving the population of their happy neighbor.

As a premise for a fantasy story, this one, as horrible as it is, is merely slightly exaggerated. The cliché that it illustrates - that a patriarchal society will be inevitably imperialist, warlike, and despotic, whereas a matriarchal one will be peaceful, egalitarian, and utopian - has been showcased in more published novels than I have the space or desire to name, as well as a completely disproportional number of stories on fictionpress. I can recognize where it arises, from the gut feelings and preconceptions that modern, politically-correct society harbors about men (we're stupid, aggressive, disconnected from nature and spirituality), but even so, I must say it bothers me more than any other fantasy cliché. But I don't take particular issue with it because I find it insulting as a male, or because, as a student of history, I find little basis in the idea that a nation or province with a woman as a leader will be more peaceful or prosperous than otherwise (as some light reading on the tenures of such females as Indira Gandhi, Catherine the Great, Isabella I de Castile, or Elizabeth Bathory should illustrate); rather, as an aficionado and writer of speculative fiction, I'm offended that it's just so crass. A fantasy story where the world was built on such a premise, where two competing social systems are contrasted as starkly good and evil with no comparison or moral ambiguity whatsoever, lacks subtlety and dramatic tension, in my view.

But the real bitch in all this is that such treatment ruins what has the potential to be a great starting point for a work of fiction. Disregarding the musings of Margaret Murray and her ideological heirs, anthropology has never found evidence of a truly matriarchal society, either in history or those tribal cultures who've retained the same customs since the stone-age; in the absence of knowledge about what such a culture is or was like, it's our domain, as writers, to speculate on what it might be like, to imagine what merits and flaws it may possess. But, when most treatments neglect to include the latter (flaws) and portray a paradise such as the land of Fallopia, an interesting premise is wasted.

So, how can you write a story where the fairer sex is in the driver's seat without crashing the whole damned car? One option at your disposal is to use a little technique I like to call "taking a dump in the box of chocolates". What this means is keeping in mind that by and large, most people's lives are neither blissful, nor too horrible to be borne; most of life is mixed of good and bad, and to make your reader to relate to your story and become engaged in it, the world you build should reflect this.

As an example, in Gail Dayton's The Compass Rose, most of the dramatis personae hail from a culture where women hold political power, where virtually every form of sexuality is encouraged and freely expressed; polygamy, homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, with absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever. The society she portrays, as nice a one to live in as it might be, made for a story about as intriguing as the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders' website. The setting might have been more interesting if the author had envisioned these social customs entailing some kind of inherent, realistic problems; rampant venereal disease as a result of constant casual sex between strangers, for example, or complex legal disputes arising over the issue of inheritance when someone dies in a family unit composed of three women, two men, and six children (which Miss Dayton presented as a functional family model in her book; it's not without reason I liken her dreadful novels to GLAD propaganda). I happen to be a great fan of the law of unintended consequences, and like to see it applied to make customs that are basically good ideas have negative outcomes; maybe a culture where the abolition of slavery puts a kingdom at economic and agricultural disadvantage to its neighbors, or one where a longstanding practice of religious tolerance has led to a disproportionate percentage of it's population practicing the Dark Arts. Or you could go another route, saddle your realm down with an outdated feudal system, and chalk it up to that old standby, Tradition.

Another path you can take is to transport the premise whole to a new environment. The anime series VanDread starts off with a military transport vessel from a planet inhabited entirely by men being taken over by pirates from a planet composed entirely of women, the two planets having been engaged in a longstanding war (the populations reproduced through cloning and artificial insemination, respectively, if you're curious); the battle of the sexes made literal. When the pirate vessel is attacked by a mysterious third party, the two groups have to work together against a common enemy. While the series eventually became really weird, with mecha battles, a shamanistic subplot, and the revelation that both planets and many others were founded as organ farms for the people of earth (it's anime; the story is more or less obligated to get convoluted and strange at some point), the initial episodes, where the two genders work through what amounted to total ignorance of one another to learn to interact with each other, were fascinating. The same battle of the sexes idea could be worked into something interesting in a wide variety of settings and genres; perhaps a post-apocalyptic world where two cultures have arisen after men went and destroyed civilization with a nuclear war; one, patriarchal, the other matriarchal and violently feminist, laying all of the mistakes of the past on men and determined not to repeat them. Another treatment might feature an alternate history where imperialistic conquistadoras came to the Americas and opened up a big can of genocide on the Indians to convert them to the one true Goddess; a plot like that, which takes all of our stereotypes and preconceptions about the two major genders and inverts them, might even make for a pretty damn good read.

So, to wrap this up: The idea of a peaceful, utopian queendom coming under attack from the man-centric manocracy has long been grist for the mill of shitty fantasy stories; but that doesn't mean that there's no merit in exploring the possibilities of a world where the folks in charge lack the Y chromosome, or the idea of the battle of the sexes on the large scale doesn't have potential. Like Light and Dark, Hot and Cold, Male and Female are two opposite polarities; where there're two extremes, there's always the potential for conflict, and conflict is after all what drives a story. By going off the beaten path and doing something innovative with the concept, learning the fundamentals of sound world-building, and keeping in mind that not all men are Attila the Hun and not all women are Susan B. Anthony, you may even be able to craft a good one. But ultimately, you have to acknowledge that life doesn't flourish under extremes. Just as flora and fauna are most abundant where temperature and humidity are at an equilibrium, it takes the contributions of both sexes, working in harmony, to allow a culture to... you know... not suck.

...

I really need to find a chick to help me with those sweeping, poetic summaries and crap.

Men as Scum: A Tentative Look at Mate Selection
Burnt Bread

Last week in the company of a tasty fillet mignon at an open, water front restaurant I could not help but overhear the chatter of two exotic, long legged birds perched at a table nearby.

“Men are scum,” one says to the other while taking an angry stab at her salad.

“Completely,” agrees the other before elaborating furiously on the point. “Twice I’ve caught my boyfriend eyeing other girls on our dates. It’s tragic!”

There’s nothing wrong with looking, says my mignon innocently.

“We stay out of this,” I whisper back. Across the table, my own dinner partner makes an attempt to break the awkward silence.

Is it true? Are men scum? In a particularly memorable social experiment, males in a heterosexual partnership were separated into two groups and asked to fill out questionnaires regarding their satisfaction with their current relationship. In one group, they filled out the questions, handed their responses in and continued with their lives. For the other group, the sneaky experimenters hired an exceptionally beautiful woman to walk by at the beginning of the session, and made sure all the boys got a good look at her. When the results were collected, they found that the second group rated themselves to be significantly less satisfied with their current relationship than the first. In the words of the lady at the restaurant, “he’s just here until the next piece of ass comes along.”

Men are scum, so it would seem.

It would take a bold scientist to accuse women as being equally flighty. Initial attempts at replicating the study with a female population and a male actor failed to show a difference in satisfaction ratings. Then, after a brief period of thumb twiddling, a psychologist interested in the evolution of mate selection suggested that for reproductive reasons, males and females probably valued different characteristics in their target mate. For males, reproduction is easy so all he has to do is invest... er... himself in females that look capable of carrying his child, hence the general preference for younger (higher fertility) and prettier (doesn’t look diseased) females. Following that concept, reproduction is comparatively costly for females so they should search out a dependable mate who is likely to stay around and provide for her and the offspring.

In a similar study as those mentioned above, but replacing an attractive male actor with a successful looking one (business suit and all), females were found to rate themselves less satisfied with their current relationship after exposure to the successful, and quite possibly caring, smart, funny and available man who knew how to put the toilet seat back down (see ‘halo effect’).

Does proving that women are every bit as fickle as men make the male species any less scummy? Or perhaps now they are equally scum-like. Is it ok to use evolutionary psychology to explain away scummyness? Many questions remain unanswered. I, for one, know to think twice about trying to be rational with gossiping ladies.

Of Genders and Ralers
Sakka Fenikkusu

Gerda Lerner once defined gender, in her novel The Creation of Patriarchy, as the “costume, mask, a straitjacket in which men and women dance their unequal dance”.

First off. Ms. Lerner, your name sounds far too similar to the word ‘gender’. It’s creepy. Like some weird anagram, except the remaining letters are ‘raler’, which doesn’t really make much sense no matter how much you shuffle it around. You weird gender raler, you.

Secondly, she’s kind of right. Most gender differences are simply social constructs. No male behaves exactly as most men are ‘supposed’ to; the same goes for females. The only real difference between these two is thousands of years of conditioning – that, and, y’know, genitals.

Every human being on the planet is different. With that in mind, it’s impossible to truly set ‘roles’ for each gender to conform to, as every individual will interpret this role in their own unique fashion. With no standard of normal, there’s really no way to measure how male or female someone is.

Still, most people perceive others around them very differently based on their sex, me (and most likely you) included.

So, how can this be translated into writing?

Simply play around with gender.

Try writing a small third-person scene with a character you’ve been working on for a while. If you can’t think of anything for them to do, make them participate in a mundane and somewhat normal task – going to the supermarket, preparing a dinner, walking a dog, but try to reflect aspects of their personality as they do this. Make sure that they stumble upon someone else at some point in this scene and interact with them at least briefly.

When you’re done, reread what you’ve written. If you wish, edit it, but keep an unedited copy just in case. Then, ask yourself some questions about your character.

Do they behave the way that you believe that people of their gender should act? Are they overly macho if male, or incredibly emotional if female? If they don’t behave like most people of their sex, how are they treated by others? How do they treat others who don’t follow strict gender roles?

Then, here comes the fun part.

Go through your work and change ALL of the gender pronouns to the opposite. If they’re male, make them female, and vice versa. Do the same for the character(s) they interact with along the way. Make two versions, one with original gender pronouns and the second with your merciless sex change. Read both. Has something changed about these people?

If you’re feeling exceptionally adventurous, eliminate gender completely. Make your character an ‘it’. What does this do to the piece? Does it strengthen or weaken it in your eyes? Does it provoke new thought on this character?

Sex isn’t an issue to be solved. It’s something to be relentlessly pondered. So, allow yourself to do so. As a matter of fact, you should spend so much time thinking about it that you procrastinate off everything you have to do and become an overweight, forty-eight year old bum sitting on your mother’s couch and shoveling cheese puffs into your mouth while you watch whatever TV shows they have in the future.

HA.

Yeah, okay, I’m done. Seriously. I know I’m not funny. It makes me sad, too.

Writing tip: Enter the Wolf
Solemn Coyote

Enter the wolf. Mangy and bristle-maned. Yellow teeth glinting in the low light. Lips pulled back in a fear smile. “What big eyes you have,” he says.

You’re not sure what it is exactly, but there’s something about him you just can’t trust. Maybe it’s the way he keeps running his tongue along the edge of his muzzle, cleaning away the meaty flecks clinging to his fur. Maybe it’s the way he lies half in and half out of the covers, leaning in towards you across the bedspread (he breathes like a bellows.) Maybe it’s the polka-dot nightcap he’s wearing. Your grandma’s favorite. It’s tough to place why, but you don’t feel comfortable in the room with him.

“Yeah, they’re pretty big,” you say, stalling. Edging for the door. “They do that sometimes when it’s dark. Or when I’m about to have a stomach ache. I should go get some tums.” You back-step hurriedly through the bedroom door and lock it behind you. Then you go to the kitchen and call the woodsman.

Enter the woodsman, patron saint of flannel. He has arms like redwoods, big enough that you wouldn’t be surprised to see a highway running through one. He also has strong legs, and an axe slung on his back. He smells of pine and simpleness. You like him immediately.

“Excuse me, sir,” you say. “I know you’re pretty good at trees, but how do you feel about wolves?”

“Wolves?” His brow wrinkles. Which looks magnificent, really. It just keeps going, crinkling all the way down his forehead. When the woodsman thinks, he thinks hard. “I’ve never liked ‘em much. A wolf ate my lunch one day. Just up an’ snatched it off’a the stump it was restin’ on. Why’re you askin’ about wolves?”

“Well, there’s one upstairs. It kinda likes pretending to be my grandma.” The woodsman opens his mouth to speak, but you just keep right on going. “Which is a little weird, really. But I thought I’d humor him. Maybe he’d get bored of it. But, no. He keeps asking to read me stories or tuck me in or make me cookies. I didn’t know wolves made cookies, but I don’t think they could be half as good as the ones my grandma makes. You can have some when she gets back.”

The woodsman’s eyebrows rise up his forehead like levitating caterpillars. “Your gran’s not around?”

“Well, no…”

“Come on!” He grabs you by your wrist and pulls you through the open front door into your house. “Which way’s the wolf?”

You point, and he half-drags you upstairs, down the long hallway, to the locked door of your grandmother’s bedroom. “What are you going to-?” you start to ask, but you’re interrupted when he kicks the door in.

You don’t think that’s very nice of him. I mean, it’s not like it was his door in his house and you’re sure that he’ll pay for a new door but still…Why is it that all the men you know have such poor manners?

The woodsman doesn’t appear to be thinking much about manners. From across the room, he locks eyes with the wolf, which sits bolt upright in bed. With a kind of quiet menace, the woodsman draws his axe from the sheathe on his back. The wolf quivers. “Hold on now! I didn’t eat anyone you know!” The woodsman doesn’t listen to him, just brings up his axe and then brings it back down, turning the wolf into a wolf rug, out of which your grandma rolls. You wonder vaguely how she got in there.

-

Perhaps you’ve heard that story before (though probably not the way I tell it.) You know all the basic plot points, and maybe a few of the different endings. Have you ever wondered what it’s about, though?

Well, wolves of course. And strapping Canadian lumberjacks (in the forests of Germany.) It’s also about young ladies wearing bright clothing in the middle of the woods. Now, why ever would they do that?

Little Red Riding Hood—like a lot of the fairy tales recorded by the brothers Grimm—is a moral story. It’s about a young woman who wears provocative clothing in dangerous places and catches the eye of an unpleasant male. That male tries to pretend he’s friendly. He acts nice…ish, in a creepy sort of way. And he dresses up as a woman. But he doesn’t have the young lady’s best interests at heart. He mostly has his stomach at heart.

So when things go sour with the wolf, Little Red is forced to turn to an honest tradesman to save her from the jaws of sin. Which he does more or less admirably, depending on which version of the story you read. The moral in all this that the original author was trying to get across is very puritan. It says: “don’t dress up pretty or go to clubs and dance with strange men who claim to play the guitar. Don’t kiss boys that you’ve only dated once. And never, ever trust a man who lies in your bed and says he’s your grandma. He’s probably planning to eat you.” It also says, in slightly smaller text: “you should date a nice, respectable guy with a trade you can rely on. And you should go on several dates before you let him kiss you.”

Now, I’m not saying I agree with this. I don’t. But, there are one or two things you can take away from the Red Riding Hood Story. The first is that one of the easiest ways to turn a man into a monster is to take away his self-control. Think about it. That’s pretty much what werewolves are, plus claws/fangs. The second is that, seen from the perspective of the other gender, men have a certain amount of mystery to them. That mystery can be either good or bad, romantic or scary. In the case of the wolf, not knowing enough about his intentions was dangerous. But sometimes finding out what a person is like can be a positive thing. They might be a little bit wolf and a little bit woodsman. It’s the mix that makes things interesting.

And so, to close this mini-lesson in folk tales, I’d like to suggest that when you’re writing males in your stories, give them a bit of mystery. Don’t write them off as one thing or another right from the start. Let your other characters discover what they’re like over time. They’ll be a whole lot more natural that way.