Can male writers properly express female characters and their emotions?

[Abaddon]

What? Maybe..but only the dorky female/open female. His good characters on television are intellectually open and talkative. Whedon can't portray someone's inner throughts through images, he just puts characters in situations.

And that girl in Serenity annoys me as much as any character in that movie. She's written as an awkward girl begging for sex. That is just to appease all the balding browncoats of the world, it's so pathetic.

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

 

[Galactus]

Personally I think Stephen King has written some strong female characters in novels like Dolores Claiborne.

 

[Outsiderzedge]

It's recently come to my attention that women may read and watch programmes from this genre and probably feel that they are being misrepresented.

This might come down to the fact that a lot of the writers perhaps are males and may not know what's what when it comes to putting across female emotions and their motivations to do certain things.


As i've tried to discover in another thread recently, there seem to be no or very few stories of mothers becoming superheroes and how they have had to adapt their roles as being a parent and also crimefighting and so forth. Perhaps the reasons this is so is due to the fact that the male writers feel that they can't properly capture what it is to be a mother. Even another older thread of mine seems to give the impression that being a stay at home parent may not be as stressful as what a 9-5 job may be by some members.


Certainly in the films a very large proportion of the females shown on screen tend to be one sided and very flat and less dynamic than their male counterparts. victims, vixens, weak, sex figures, silent assassins, revenge driven, lead by men, anti men.


i know it's strange to want to look at things the way they are from a woman's perspective but it would be nice to know if this demographic thinks of what they are getting.

It's one of the reasons i really wish Dew and other ladies break it into the industry but i hope she doesn't get typecast as a female realist writer but then that would inevitably bring the future follow up to this thread asking whether woman can really portray males and their emotions well but i feel this thread is a long way off.

so in the mean time i will just try and deal with this.

All women are not the same, so being able to write a certain female character well does not mean you can write any female character well and, vice versa, not being able to write a certain female character well does not mean you can not write any female character well.

Writing a character well, male or female, is not difficult if you know the character before hand. The question shouldn't be whether one can write the opposite sex, but can one write a person they do not know.

 

[8Ball2/JanG5]

I meant he can't mesh images and contexts with a character. In other words, everything in Serenity is set up like a T.V. show, not a film. This could have something to do with the low budget but still, he's just another director of actions and stories, not images. One should be able to place through montage and mise-en-scene a characteristic of said character under observation.

 

[Abaddon]

I meant he can't mesh images and contexts with a character. In other words, everything in Serenity is set up like a T.V. show, not a film. This could have something to do with the low budget but still, he's just another director of actions and stories, not images. One should be able to place through montage and mise-en-scene a characteristic of said character under observation.

I haven't seen Serenity so I can't comment on that,but I believe he's fully capable.

 

[8Ball2/JanG5]

Of what? hopefully his images which he never has had a chance to prove, because his writing is so hackworthy.

 

[Abaddon]

I disagree about the writing but ok.

 

[Hudson]

I find it funny that it's all men saying this.

What about the other way around? Can female writers properly express male characters and their emotions? It strikes me that's the question men are better suited to answer.

yup

Try and read Robin Hobb's Fantasy novels, very well written with I narrative with a male hero.

 

[Shuley]

I find it funny that it's all men saying this.

What about the other way around? Can female writers properly express male characters and their emotions? It strikes me that's the question men are better suited to answer.

Women can't write as good as men can.It's true.

 

[Odin's Lapdog]

What is odin's lapdog talking about in the first place. He says "in this genre." What genre? Anyway, i've seen plenty of pretty well written female characters, but then again I usually watch critically acclaimed movies.

Anyway, a movie by a female director who portrays men pretty well is Vegabond.

'this genre' as in the one that has all brought us to the hype

superhero characters in all forms of medium such as film, comics, books in animation.


I was trying to focus more on this genre but it seems the conversation has been more open.


a lot of people are saying i should be discussing whether or not female writers can truelly write men but i feel this is kinda irrelevant just based on the sheer larger proportion of male writers out there in all media, it's not likely that with all the different types of shows out there that men are going to complain about being misrepresented, hence why i've tried to kinda focus on the vice versa.

i hope this brings some insight, feel free to ask anymore questions if you need to.

 

[Odin's Lapdog]

All women are not the same, so being able to write a certain female character well does not mean you can write any female character well and, vice versa, not being able to write a certain female character well does not mean you can not write any female character well.

Writing a character well, male or female, is not difficult if you know the character before hand. The question shouldn't be whether one can write the opposite sex, but can one write a person they do not know.

but there is a difference in knowing someone and being someone though. There are plenty of things that go without being said or perhaps noticed in real life that people do and no matter how well you think you may know someone, if you don't see them in that situation then you'll never truelly know.

that's the strength of observation based comedians, especially race specific ones that pick up on behaviour they've been put under and put it out there knowing they can't have been the only one to go through this and that others probably know exactly what they are going on about.

here's throwing something out.

do you think a female white comedian could perform a sketch based on upbringings of black males in the 80s if she went and got all her background knowledge to a black audience?

heck, i will make it easier, do you think if she just wrote the sketch and gave it to a black male to perform that it would be as funny and insightful as if he had written it himself?

because on a parallel, that's really what i'm trying to get down to.

 

[Movies205]

I find it funny that it's all men saying this.

What about the other way around? Can female writers properly express male characters and their emotions? It strikes me that's the question men are better suited to answer.

Men are allow to answer questions about women and vice-a-versa, whether or not there opinion is bias is another story.

 

[Whirlysplat]

They can convey a female as a male sees them. So their observations would be right for just under 50% of the population.

- Whirly

 

[8Ball2/JanG5]

but there is a difference in knowing someone and being someone though. There are plenty of things that go without being said or perhaps noticed in real life that people do and no matter how well you think you may know someone, if you don't see them in that situation then you'll never truelly know.

that's the strength of observation based comedians, especially race specific ones that pick up on behaviour they've been put under and put it out there knowing they can't have been the only one to go through this and that others probably know exactly what they are going on about.

here's throwing something out.

do you think a female white comedian could perform a sketch based on upbringings of black males in the 80s if she went and got all her background knowledge to a black audience?

heck, i will make it easier, do you think if she just wrote the sketch and gave it to a black male to perform that it would be as funny and insightful as if he had written it himself?

because on a parallel, that's really what i'm trying to get down to.

Nobody can stay on your superhero genre because both men and women are portrayed archetypally in this type of fiction. It's not accurate, it's not a good genre for character development.