Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility

Nathan Spears · 20 Oct 2006, 03:48 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

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From: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:48:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility
Message-ID: <20061020034847.86128.qmail at web54409.mail.yahoo.com>

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 Wolfe could probably create more strong central female characters, but perhaps he feels that he would be writing a male character in a female body, not because he doesn't believe there are strong women, but because he doesn't know how to write them well, and would revert to the strengths he is familiar with.

I did think that many of the women in Castleview were convincingly spun.

----- Original Message ----
From: Daniel D Jones <ddjones at riddlemaster.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2006 4:59:22 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility

On Thursday 19 October 2006 15:42, Hmpf MacSlow wrote:
> >Any realistic man knows that he does not understand what it is like
> >to be a woman - portraits he paints of her are from the outside looking
> > in.
>
> Actually, as a woman who has spent most of her life reading books
> written by men, from a male perspective, and hasn't found that
> perspective mind-bogglingly alien, 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. Neither our
> emotions nor our thought processes seem greatly different to me. Of
> course, I can only go by what I know from literature, movies,
> conversations with members of the opposite sex... but I'd say that's
> quite a corpus of evidence.
>
> Sorry, that was OT, I know. Just a personal pet peeve.

It seems not all women agrees with you:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/09/14/bamen14.xml&site=6&page=0

As the above will almost certainly get mangled by email, this is the same 
page:

http://tinyurl.com/mkela
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