What do female writers think about males writing from a female POV?

[MillieDynamite]

Found two sites on a quick internet pursual.

Gender Analyzer

Gender Guesser

 

[Bubo_bubo]

Fond two sites on a quick internet pursual.

Gender Analyzer

Gender Guesser

Hmm. I copied in one of the chapters of what I'm writing currently (with a close, subjective 3rd POV, and female MC) so these results are at least not discouraging. (ETA and a small part of it was in fact from the perspective of a male character).
View attachment 2171660View attachment 2171661

 

[MillieDynamite]

Hmm. I copied in one of the chapters of what I'm writing currently (with a close, subjective 3rd POV, and female MC) so these results are at least not discouraging.
View attachment 2171660View attachment 2171661

I ran, just now, two stories through both of them. First, the opening word pages of each story, then a page further into the story. Oddly they checked out as female on the opening on one, and male in the second, and the other reversed the results. Running the full through, it said the writer was a woman. Rather strong as a woman in one story, the BDSM story was female but not as far toward female as the first.

The results aren't exactly scientific, or I don't think they are, but they give a sense of the tone of the story.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

I ran, just now, two stories through both of them. First, the opening word pages of each story, then a page further into the story. Oddly they checked out as female on the opening on one, and male in the second, and the other reversed the results. Running the full through, it said the writer was a woman. Rather strong as a woman in one story, the BDSM story was female but not as far toward female as the first.

The results aren't exactly scientific, or I don't think they are, but they give a sense of the tone of the story.

Yeah, for sure.
At least the results don't slap me in the face with my maleness.

 

[oggbashan]

In the past I had put two of jeanne_d_artois' stories and two of og's through the gender checker.

jeanne's were slightly female; og's slightly male but probably both were within the margin of error.
I tried again with one of jeanne's - 56% female. Success!

 

[MillieDynamite]

I prefer Gender Analyzer to Gender Guesser. It's more precise in the estimate without the weak male, weak female, and conflict sometimes between the formal and informal scores since it only vies the one score. But hey, that's just me. I'm sometimes a fucked up person. "They're good guessers, I guess."

 

[ElectricBlue]

The results aren't exactly scientific, or I don't think they are, but they give a sense of the tone of the story.

The results are bollocks. The last time I did one of those gender text things, I dropped the same chunk of text into the box, ticked it as fiction, it came up with male. Ticked the exact same text as business writing (or whatever the alternative was) and it said female. Or vice versa, it was so useless I've forgotten which way around it was. It didn't know its arse from its elbow.

 

[MillieDynamite]

The results are bollocks. The last time I did one of those gender text things, I dropped the same chunk of text into the box, ticked it as fiction, it came up with male. Ticked the exact same text as business writing (or whatever the alternative was) and it said female. Or vice versa, it was so useless I've forgotten which way around it was. It didn't know its arse from its elbow.

I don't find any choice you can make for the type or genre of the text on either site I'm looking at.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't find any choice you can make for the type or genre of the text on either site I'm looking at.

I can't recall the site I found. But since it gave two bob each way on identical text, it didn't seem to have much veracity, let alone usefulness. Anyway, I've had both men and women think I'm a woman, based on my writing, so that's good enough for me, that I don't need to fret about it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I can't recall the site I found. But since it gave two bob each way on identical text, it didn't seem to have much veracity, let alone usefulness. Anyway, I've had both men and women think I'm a woman, based on my writing, so that's good enough for me, that I don't need to fret about it.

Gender Analyzer wasn't loading for me, but with Gender Guesser if you use your browser's "view source" option you can look under the lid to see how it works.

TLDR: Somebody analysed a bunch of documents to find words that are used more often by male authors than by female authors or vice versa. Gender Guesser has a list of 25 words (separate lists for formal and informal writing) with numbers attached to indicate how strongly male or female they are. It goes through the text sample looking for words from those lists, and adds up their scores to rate the document overall.

So if you want to make your informal writing score "female", throw in lots of "actually", "because", "but", "everything", "him", and "so". For "male", use lots of "as", "good", "now", "some", and "this".

I suspect this is not so much about "men like these words, and women like those words" and more "men are more likely to be writing this type of document, and women are more likely to be writing that type of document, and those two types of documents naturally have different vocabularies". So a woman writing an economics paper might be read as "male" simply because she's using the vocabulary of a male-heavy field, and vice versa for a man writing about teaching.

The researchers who did the analysis did try to allow for that kind of effect by classifying documents by genre, and balancing male/female within each genre, but I'm not convinced that the classification of "genre" would've been nuanced enough to completely remove it.

Here are the word lists, for the curious:

// positive=male, negative=female
var DictionaryInformal = new Array();
DictionaryInformal['actually']= -49;
DictionaryInformal['am']= -42;
DictionaryInformal['as']= 37;
DictionaryInformal['because']= -55;
DictionaryInformal['but']= -43;
DictionaryInformal['ever']= 21;
DictionaryInformal['everything']= -44;
DictionaryInformal['good']= 31;
DictionaryInformal['has']= -33;
DictionaryInformal['him']= -73;
DictionaryInformal['if']= 25;
DictionaryInformal['in']= 10;
DictionaryInformal['is']= 19;
DictionaryInformal['like']= -43;
DictionaryInformal['more']= -41;
DictionaryInformal['now']= 33;
DictionaryInformal['out']= -39;
DictionaryInformal['since']= -25;
DictionaryInformal['so']= -64;
DictionaryInformal['some']= 58;
DictionaryInformal['something']= 26;
DictionaryInformal['the']= 17;
DictionaryInformal['this']= 44;
DictionaryInformal['too']= -38;
DictionaryInformal['well']= 15;

var DictionaryFormal = new Array();
DictionaryFormal['a']= 6;
DictionaryFormal['above']= 4;
DictionaryFormal['and']= -4;
DictionaryFormal['are']= 28;
DictionaryFormal['around']= 42;
DictionaryFormal['as']= 23;
DictionaryFormal['at']= 6;
DictionaryFormal['be']= -17;
DictionaryFormal['below']= 8;
DictionaryFormal['her']= -9;
DictionaryFormal['hers']= -3;
DictionaryFormal['if']= -47;
DictionaryFormal['is']= 8;
DictionaryFormal['it']= 6;
DictionaryFormal['many']= 6;
DictionaryFormal['me']= -4;
DictionaryFormal['more']= 34;
DictionaryFormal['myself']= -4;
DictionaryFormal['not']= -27;
DictionaryFormal['said']= 5;
DictionaryFormal['she']= -6;
DictionaryFormal['should']= -7;
DictionaryFormal['the']= 7;
DictionaryFormal['these']= 8;
DictionaryFormal['to']= 2;
DictionaryFormal['was']= -1;
DictionaryFormal['we']= -8;
DictionaryFormal['what']= 35;
DictionaryFormal['when']= -17;
DictionaryFormal['where']= -18;
DictionaryFormal['who']= 19;
DictionaryFormal['with']= -52;
DictionaryFormal['your']= -17;

 

[MillieDynamite]

Actually, this makes a lot of sense, because, well, he is such a dude. But, everything isn't as it seems. So, I don't know, you know, if it's as good now as some of us think. Because so many of us don't adhere to this at all. Then again, WTF do I know?

 

[ElectricBlue]

So if you want to make your informal writing score "female", throw in lots of "actually", "because", "but", "everything", "him", and "so". For "male", use lots of "as", "good", "now", "some", and "this".

That's just... odd. No wonder the algorithm gets so confused. I had zero idea that a male, apparently, doesn't construct sentences with "but", but what would I know, because actually, everything points to the opposite.

I'm even less convinced than I was before. I do hope these jokers didn t get paid too much for this stuff!

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's just... odd. No wonder the algorithm gets so confused. I had zero idea that a male, apparently, doesn't construct sentences with "but", but what would I know, because actually, everything points to the opposite.

Not never, but less so than women, according to that research.

I am just speculating here, but (ha ha) I can guess at some reasons why e.g. "but" might be more commonly used by women:

The usual role of "but" in a sentence is to signal that we're positioning two conflicting ideas/factors/beliefs against one another, e.g. "Study A found that decriminalising drug use reduces crime rates, but Study B found no effect".

For a public servant in the Health Department, or an academic studying public health, it's their job to do that kind of balancing. Their job is to consider all relevant factors, weigh them up, and give impartial advice that reflects the totality of the evidence.

But a politician commenting on the same issue, their job de facto is usually to pick one side of that issue and make as strong a case as possible for the side they've chosen. That's likely to involve focussing on the information and factors that support that decision, and minimising the ones that oppose it. If I'm an MP opposed to decriminalisation, and I read that advice, I'll probably be saying "Study B found no effect" while trying to avoid any "...but Study A..."

MPs are mostly male; public servants are majority female, and I think public health academics skew female too. So if you were to analyse political commentary on that kind of issue, you might find women using "but" more often - not because they're inherently fond of the word, but just because of differences in what they're writing.

One could probably construct similar rationalisations for many of the other words in those lists. But again, this is just speculation on a possible explanation. I'm only defending it at the level of "not necessarily implausible".

 

[Paligirl]

it seldom...unless the author is Really Outstanding (Arthur Golden-Memoirs of a Geisha..) comes off as authentic.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Somewhere, out there, in the pale moonlight, is a site with a list of all the more femine and masculine words, as in words used primarily by each sex.

 

[MsNatalie99]

Write who and what you wish. The important thing is to do it with sensitivity.

Research. Just do some research. Read stories by women authors. Read about what they say it feels like to have a penis slide into a vagina. With search engines you can find out the answer to just about anything.

Personally, I think people exaggerate how hard this is. With a modest imagination and a little effort I think one can do just fine in writing a story from the perspective of a completely different person.

Where I don't think that people necessarily exaggerate the difficulty, I do believe it can be done. A man can write as a woman, and a woman can write as a man. I just believe for it to be done convincingly, or at least relatively convincingly, the author has to put in the work. They have to ask questions, and allow their characters the challenge the way they think. I've never been straight, nor have I ever been a woman. So I think it would be difficult for me to write in either of those two mindsets, but I have read Works where it was done successfully before. However, it requires the author putting in the work, trying to be respectful to the demographic they're attempting to represent.


After all, if it's not possible, then why even ask or bother?

 

[gunhilltrain]

My fetishes are certainly ones that will upset some people. I guess I should just get used to it .

That's probably why, among other things, most of us on Lit. It helps to get out various inner thoughts that we otherwise wouldn't be able to express. But as I said, don't expect everybody else to get it.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I think the best stories would come from authors who can mix, match, and extrapolate from personal experiences. After all, how many virgin celibate priests could write a heterosexual sex scene with feeling?

In deference to Simon, research can do a lot to prepare when writing a new scene. But I think Hemingway found that living life to the fullest gave his writing the extra sparks of experience when needed.

That's kind of amusing, because on another site I have a virgin celibate priest who is seduced by one of his young female parishioners. And he is quite surprised at how quickly he folds.

So how would I know what this priest and the woman would do and think? I don't, so I made it up. It helps to be a lapsed old-school Catholic (1960s) myself, so I had that to rely on. (The stories - its a series - take place in 1957.)

 

[gunhilltrain]

Somewhere, out there, in the pale moonlight, is a site with a list of all the more femine and masculine words, as in words used primarily by each sex.

Except, I'm sure there is no such list. So if I write a story from a first-person female point of view (I think I've done a few on different sites), then now do I know what I'm doing? I try to make it plausible, but I'm mostly just winging it. Either the readers buy it or they don't.

 

[ElectricBlue]

it seldom...unless the author is Really Outstanding (Arthur Golden-Memoirs of a Geisha..) comes off as authentic.

I'll take that as a compliment, then. I've had a number of women swear blind that I'm a woman writing women, to the extent that they comment about it when they discover I'm male.

Generally speaking, authoritative sweeping statements are unwise, or at least, wobble a lot .

 

[ElectricBlue]

Public servants are majority female, and I think public health academics skew female too.

That statement surprises me, Bramble. I'd have thought - without seeing the numbers - that the Oz public sector (State government, anyway) would still be majority male, at least in the agencies I've worked in - justice, transport, infrastructure. I'd have said there's still a glass ceiling, but could well be wrong, when all departments are counted.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That statement surprises me, Bramble. I'd have thought - without seeing the numbers - that the Oz public sector (State government, anyway) would still be majority male, at least in the agencies I've worked in - justice, transport, infrastructure. I'd have said there's still a glass ceiling, but could well be wrong, when all departments are counted.

I expect there's some variation between agencies, but these days both Fed and Vic public service are about 60% female. I haven't looked up the other states, but I guess they'd be similar. Even at senior exec level, federal has recently hit 50% female. Broader public sector for Vic (includes e.g. state school teachers) is around 68% female, don't know for federal.

Sources here, there are breakdowns by occupation but not by agency as far as I spotted on a quick skim:

https://www.apsc.gov.au/publication...egy-2021-26/building-data-gender-equality-aps https://vpsc.vic.gov.au/html-resour...-visuals/employee-work-status-gender-and-age/)

I think one of the biggest factors there is that public service jobs are often open to things like part-time and flexible working hours arrangements, which is great for people with parent/carer responsibilities, both of which often fall on women.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think one of the biggest factors there is that public service jobs are often open to things like part-time and flexible working hours arrangements, which is great for people with parent/carer responsibilities, both of which often fall on women.

Thanks for that. I most recently worked in a transport and infrastructure agency, heavy engineering oriented (road, rail, tunnels and bridges), with a predominantly male project and engineering staff - hence my query.

 

[PermanentlyAroused]

My wife is not a writer, yet has so many stories to share.

We are just exploring the prospect of writing some long form stories, but it would be me writing them.

It makes me feel a bit inauthentic, even if I might be writing under her supervision. So don't know whether I should do that or not?

 

[Enigmatique_69]

I’m told that I can be quite in touch with my female side (by people who never read Club Emily I guess), but what do women writers think when they read a work where the narrator is a female, but the author is a male?

All of my work is like that. Does it grate? Do you think “why the fuck does he think he can express what having my clit licked feels like?”.

I kinda worry that I am overlaying what things feel like from a male POV onto my female protagonist. Not that I am wholly against overlaying my female protagonist of course!

This is a great post. I have just written my very first story and was deathly afraid that my male POV would not be conveyed properly. I think the writer has to become the character in a sense, to make them come to life. IMO, keeping in mind, that I am a virgin writer.