# (no subject) *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 22 Oct 2006* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Hmpf MacSlow *22 Oct 2006, 16:44* I was away for a couple of days; I was going to add something in the misogyny discussion but going through the replies posted in my absence now, I see that my points have already been made by others: Muskrat said: > I'd also like to agree with Hmph when she says: >> I'd say the differences between >> men and women are somewhat (or, depending on which depiction we're >> actually talking about, often even *hugely*) exaggerated. > Oh, yes. Absolutely. I've met men who love children and women who > genuinely can't stand the little bastards. Theodore Sturgeon wrote > a book called "Venus Plus X" which touches on this theme. > > I think the any differences that may exist are amplified > by people's desire to see themselves as part of groups > with defined roles and behaviors, rather than just another > dumb human. Aside from childbirth and castration most behaviors > can be found somewhere in both men and women. Nathan Spears: > At 05:48 AM 10/20/2006, you wrote: > I agree with you that our emotions and our thought-processes may not > be as different as they have been portrayed. Our experiences, > however, are far more divergent than the tools with which we process > them. I also believe that the best women writers, generally being > more empathetic and observant, can create better male characters > than male writers create female characters. So, to sum it up: There probably *are* differences, but I don't think they're bigger or of a substantially different quality than those between people with different lifestyles or different cultural backgrounds. And a writer, whether male or female, should ideally be both perceptive and gifted with a high degree of empathy if he or she wants to write about people, so they should be able to write a person of the opposite gender just as well as they should be able to write a person who is in some other significant way different from themselves. I don't subscribe to the idea of the female mystique, and in fact find it quite annoying if people suggest there is something fundamentally incomprehensible and perhaps even sort-of-magical about women. Of course, not all writers even *want* to write primarily about people; the assumption that good characterisation is central to good writing is a side-effect of the triumph of the 'modern' (19th century based) idea of the novel. There are writers whose main focus lies elsewhere, and that is perfectly legitimate - I'd argue that with Wolfe, his focus is certainly more on ideas/philosophy than people, and Tolkien, to give another example that's already been mentioned here, was more interested in history, linguistics, and possibly even geography (LotR is definitely more of a love letter to landscapes than it is a story 'about people') than he was in people. I love both, and I'm *not* reading them for their characters. >>> David Lebling wrote: >>> I can't think of a female soldier in BotNS > I would assume ********he's******** thinking of Foila, who is indeed > a sympathetic and > likable character, a soldier recovering from wounds(?) in the Pelerines' > hospice. (She's the prize in the story-telling contest, but turns the tables > on the contestants by entering and winning.) This is in _Citadel of the > Autarch_. > > -- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha Yes, I meant Foila. But I'm female, please. I may deny that there are great differences between the genders, but for all that, I still identify as a woman. *g* - Hmpf (going back into lurking mode now) --- "You broke metaphysics. Fix it." - Triangle & Robert ---