Active and Passive Male Characters

[TheRedChamber]

A comment by @pinksilkglove on the 'writing for women thread' has gotten me thinking:

For me, make sexy men. The vast majority of male characters on lit are totally limp. They're bland and boring. There is a severe lack of confident male characters who can turn on a woman or take her. Male characters very seldom initiate or elevate the (sex) action. They seem to sit around and wait for the skanky unicorn ho to climb them. The vast majority of male characters are subby by default, and by that I mean that they're not really genuinely subby, they just default to sub because they have zero skills/game and/or are very lazy, and even the minority of stories where the man is fairly hot, the woman invariably does most or all of the heavy lifting, which is especially disappointing (for me anyways and I know a number of other women feel similar).

I didnt want to derail the other thread with this and I think its an interesting discussion especially as this hits home pretty hard with my writing.

Firstly, while I hope everyone can enjoy something in my stories, I'm writing for myself first and not overly trying to tap into female fantasies (though I am somewhat bi). I also have a strong line in shy nerdy guys - just like me, in fact, only much much luckier. I'm not really interested in stories about hunky confident men who get laid every night going out and getting laid again tonight (in some new and well plotted way).

I can argue that women acting in flirty, quirky, adventerous or just plain sexually aggressive ways is part of male fantasy - it makes her sexy and that's what's important.

Still a lot of my stories do involve men who are very passive. It was a core concept for my series of China Kiss stories which all followed the pattern of shy Chinese girls deciding they were fucking the MCs *tonight* (which goes to show you can never subvert one trope without walking slap bang into another one). From the female teacher passing notes to the MMC in seminar to drunk female students grabbing random guys off the dancefloor, my girls do a lot of the running. My recent tennis story had my male MC sleepwalking into relationship disaster by only ever following the suggestions of others - I think it works, it was partially intentional but I did get comments (inbetween the usual LW backlash) that said the character was 'weak' and they werent exactly wrong

Looking over my 60 stories, this does seem to come up more often than not. Interestingly this doesn't happen so much in my LGBT stories (well, havent gotten round to an actual B story yet...). One lesbian by paragraph two declares that she 'makes shit happen' and the story confirms this. In another pair of stories, the FMC does sail the seas of great coincidence a lot of the time and has a more adventerous partner, but still has a pivotal moment each story where she decides she's 'making it happen'. In contrast, most of my gay stories are based around MCs hitting a known and seedy hookup spot to hook up. Which is kind of odd because none of my straight MMCs would ever start a story going to a club with the strong confidence of scoring (even though I as the author could always make that happen with ease)

So, what does everyone think? Does this souod familiar from anyone elses writing? Do female authors end up with passive Im not sure that its a huge problem in any one particular story, but having identified a trend Im going to be chewing over how to do something different.

 

[SimonDoom]

I completely understand PSG's point, and I understand yours as well. While many of my stories are written from a woman's point of view, I think most of my stories are written more to please men than women, because I'm writing to please myself, most of the time. POVs and personalities vary, but I have some mom-son stories that are something like what PSG describes. There are a few good reasons for that. One is that most of my stories are not that long, say up to 15,000 words, and I'm not really interested into delving into personality or background more than is necessary to propel the action. The other is that a male character who is a little bland might plug into a greater variety of people's fantasies than others.

I can see how from the point of view of a woman reader it would be more desirable to write about a man whose sexual appeal lies in being interesting, rather than just blandly handsome and sexy looking.

 

[mildlyaroused]

It's hard for me to say, because I think generally that all of my characters are somewhat passive. This goes for erotica and also for my main writing. A common piece of writing advice you'll come across is to write active characters: make your characters drive the story. My characters drive stories, but normally the world is happening to my protagonist, rather than my protagonist happening to the world. The moments of character tend to come not just from active decisions, but from long reactionary passages or moments of introspection.

Anyway, both the male and female characters I write tend to be fairly passive. They don't drive plots. But I think they both tend to do enough to warrant sex: they are kind, they are generous to one another, and there is usually something more thematic going on than just a general state of horniness. Usually. Rather than men or women being passive, my writing generally leans towards the POV character being passive, whatever their sex. I wrote a story which switched between the male and female point of view with each page break, and the POV character was usually the one on the bottom. Which meant the 'passive character' in a scene alternated sexes.

I don't necessarily think having a passive character is a bad thing: rather, writing an empty character is a bad thing. If a man or a woman only exists to have sex with the protagonist, that is boring from a storytelling perspective (it might still be hot, that's up to readers). It just so happens that most of the time these purely horny stories are written to appeal to men, so most of the time the person who is passive ends up being the man (whose perspective we follow, and who the woman throws herself onto). Though I'd argue these stories generally portray men and women as equally hollow. Even if the woman is initiating the sex, she's no more interesting than the man.

 

[mrs_mackenzie]

Because society sees the male partner as the one who initiates and drives sex, a lot of men seem to have fantasies about situations where the female partner subverts that and does the initiating and driving. Then they take the more passive role in the encounter. It makes sense, because that subversion is what makes it sexy.

From a woman's point of view, though, the way this is often portrayed in porn or media generally is that it becomes the female partner's role to do everything for him, instead of with him. She gives him a blowjob, then fucks him, then sucks him again, then takes a facial. He's barely participating. It's as if all the woman needs to enjoy herself during sex is to please her partner, and her own pleasure is either irrelevant or comes incidentally because 'his cock is just so big!' And this rubs uncomfortably up against societal expectations for women to look after men and do whatever men want.

It's a lot sexier to me to have a sexual encounter where both partners are actively participating, giving and taking. But in the end, sexual fantasies aren't real life: it's perfectly acceptable to write stories that cater entirely to the male fantasy.

 

[Erozetta]

My characters tend to have a push and pull dynamic. No one lords power over the other at all times. Both will have moments of aggressive desire during the story.

Things like a submissive woman biting a guy's thumb, lip, or shoulder while he's trying to dominate her, or an otherwise shy guy pinning the normally dominant woman he's been interacting with to a wall with an intense kiss.

I tend to like a little role reversal/bratty behavior play. It gives an element of enhancing the chase between characters for me.

People aren't all one thing or another. They can be both active and passive at different points and I think that's a fun thing to engage with.

 

[RetroFan]

Loving Wives fans absolutely love stories about passive men - i.e. men who sit by passively while their wives have affairs with more dominant men and do nothing about it.

 

[NotWise]

My most popular story is a Romance where the man moves the action, and the woman is a deserving object of desire. In other stories it's sometimes the man who moves the action and sometimes the woman.

@pink_silk_glove's reply on the other thread probably represents a lot of women's views. In the most general terms, what heterosexual women find attractive in men is their masculinity, and what heterosexual men find attractive in women is their femininity. Both "masculinity" and "femininity" can describe a wide range of characteristics, but a lot of people are going to respond to the stereotypical characteristics.

I can think of quite a few reasons why erotic readers and writers might trend toward passive male characters and active female characters, especially: it may provide an erotic element they don't get in real life, it usually avoids the consent line, it seems normal when the characters are an older woman and younger man. I'm sure there's more.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

It's more complicated than simply playing the "Male fantasy" card.

As Mrs_Mackenzie points out, we tend to think of men as the initiators of sex, but that misses something important.
Men can ask, but ultimately women are the gatekeepers of sex.
One of my male friends made the observation that as a male he goes out to a club HOPING to get lucky. Women go out to the club and DECIDE if they are going to have sex. It's a very different dynamic.
Who has the most sex? Gay males. Why? Because men are always down for sex, and when your pool of available partners is always down for sex...

So, if we are writing erotica, and we want to get on to the action, particularly in shorter stories as Simon mentions the easiest way is to write the gatekeepers as more willing to open the gates.
The alternative is to have male Casanovas who can seduce any woman at a glance, and people get just as worked up about that trope.

And women carry a lot of societal baggage around about sex and the accompanying hangups.
"Good girls don't do that...", slut shaming and the like. I enjoy stories with confident women who are past all that.

 

[SimonDoom]

There's another element to this, which is that as consumers we are accustomed to watching porn passively, often with a female model/actress performing for us while we presumably sit and watch, or using a toy that we can imagine is a part of us having sex with her. It's a fundamentally passive exchange, and I imagine for many the dynamic of reading an erotic story is similar. I get most turned on reading stories about women doing erotic and exhibitionist things. I'm less interested in the male character. The male character is usually there to influence the woman to be sexy in some way; I'm less interested in his agency in its own right.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I can see how from the point of view of a woman reader it would be more desirable to write about a man whose sexual appeal lies in being interesting, rather than just blandly handsome and sexy looking.

You'd be surprised how often we don't even get that. It is quite common for a story to not even describe the male physically much at all. A hair color (not even a style) and a (large) dick size and that's it. A male reader may or may not notice this as much as a female reader.

It just so happens that most of the time these purely horny stories are written to appeal to men, so most of the time the person who is passive ends up being the man (whose perspective we follow, and who the woman throws herself onto). Though I'd argue these stories generally portray men and women as equally hollow. Even if the woman is initiating the sex, she's no more interesting than the man.

They may be equally shallow, but a hot woman aggressively taking a boring unsexy man is less realistic than a hot guy aggressively bedding a homely girl. Women in general are a bit more (sometimes a lot more) choosy about men. It is how the female is naturally wired. Males (in almost every species known, and certainly in every mammal species) are always at the ready. Male and female fantasies reflect this. Women prefer to give themselves to a man who she feels is worthy of having her and men are largely about opportunity. This is not an indictment of men, it is just how mother nature programs us. We see it in the fantasies. In romance stories, the women want dashing charming respectable (doctors are popular etc) and in stroke stories the men take the shortest line from tab A to slot B - opportunity, literally getting lucky. What could be a shorter line than "out of nowhere skanky ho does EVERYTHING for him" ? There's nothing wrong with this, but it has zero nuance and it is the same dynamic as 80-90% of every other limp story out there so there is no originality whatsoever.

This is very prevalent, even in many well-written stories. Even when two characters are interesting enough and the narrative has drawn me in, once the sex starts it's disappointing when the woman pushes him down, the woman mounts on and the only initiative the guy takes is when she gives him an order. There is no balance in this and I see it all the time.

Let's compare aggressive woman climbs weak dude to aggressive man takes homely girl. The aggressive woman is always confident. I see this quote in men's profiles all the time "love a woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to go get it". What they are leaving out is that what they want the woman to want is limp boring 'me' (the guy, not me : P ). If the woman is that hot and that confident, she'll go bang Guy Pierce. Yet in these stories this boring guy who does absolutely nothing to even get her attention is somehow the target of this perfectly hot skanky woman. There is nothing wrong with this fantasy as a fantasy, but there's a lot wrong with it as a plot. There's nothing there. It is the most common thing you will find on lit, and it is not an engaging plot at all, and certainly does nothing to stir the imagination of women. Personally, if I'm gonna jump and climb a guy, he needs to be special, the guy who captivates the room singing and playing piano, the guy who leads the rebellion and is steadfast in his ideals. I want THAT guy, before any other girls get him. I'm not going to waste my time with some lump of putty at the pub who couldn't even be arsed to get off his barstool to play darts or snooker. So these stories are completely unrealistic. What about aggressive guy, homely girl? It's difficult to say because there are really none of those stories on lit. Even in the romance category, the men are so bloody respectful, these stories are so clinical, they lack passion. I would say that a hot confident guy going out to swoon an okay looking girl simply because he knows he can score and chuck her in the morning may not be a pulitzer plot, but it is more realistic than the other way around, and certainly more emotional for a woman to read even with the bad end. They're also probably the hardest thing to find on lit.

Maybe you guys could tell me but I suspect that it's porn. When I was a teen, the guys all wanted to be Tom Brady, Han Solo or James Bond. Now with point-and-click free porn they don't need such heroes. Porn has killed their imagination. Why work for pussy when a skanky ho could just get on her knees for no reason whatsoever? Straightest line between tab A and slot B. Porn provides that. How wrong am I guys?

I like this thread because it shows that there are guys out there who are actually interested in what makes women tick sexually and use these ideas to give their characters (of any gender) more depth, and moving forward we can have some better stuff to read.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Because society sees the male partner as the one who initiates and drives sex, a lot of men seem to have fantasies about situations where the female partner subverts that and does the initiating and driving. Then they take the more passive role in the encounter. It makes sense, because that subversion is what makes it sexy.

From a woman's point of view, though, the way this is often portrayed in porn or media generally is that it becomes the female partner's role to do everything for him, instead of with him. She gives him a blowjob, then fucks him, then sucks him again, then takes a facial. He's barely participating. It's as if all the woman needs to enjoy herself during sex is to please her partner, and her own pleasure is either irrelevant or comes incidentally because 'his cock is just so big!' And this rubs uncomfortably up against societal expectations for women to look after men and do whatever men want.

It's a lot sexier to me to have a sexual encounter where both partners are actively participating, giving and taking. But in the end, sexual fantasies aren't real life: it's perfectly acceptable to write stories that cater entirely to the male fantasy.

Absolutely agree. And like you say, there's nothing wrong with this at all, but it's the same story told over and over and over and there's nothing in it for a woman to enjoy. We can't relate to these woman at all. It's 5 or 10k words of "why the fuck would she do him? She couldn't find anyone better than this turd?" It's not a good reading experience.

 

[SimonDoom]

They may be equally shallow, but a hot woman aggressively taking a boring unsexy man is less realistic than a hot guy aggressively bedding a homely girl. Women in general are a bit more (sometimes a lot more) choosy about men. It is how the female is naturally wired. Males (in almost every species known, and certainly in every mammal species) are always at the ready. Male and female fantasies reflect this. Women prefer to give themselves to a man who she feels is worthy of having her and men are largely about opportunity. This is not an indictment of men, it is just how mother nature programs us. We see it in the fantasies. In romance stories, the women want dashing charming respectable (doctors are popular etc) and in stroke stories the men take the shortest line from tab A to slot B - opportunity, literally getting lucky. What could be a shorter line than "out of nowhere skanky ho does EVERYTHING for him" ? There's nothing wrong with this, but it has zero nuance and it is the same dynamic as 80-90% of every other limp story out there so there is no originality whatsoever.

Here's another possible reason: The male reader doesn't want competition. He's interested in reading a fantasy about a hot woman, and if there's too much detail about how hot and fascinating the man is then it might be a boner-shrinker for some, because it makes it harder for the male reader to imagine it's him getting the woman, because he's not as hot, as rich, or as interesting.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Maybe you guys could tell me but I suspect that it's porn. When I was a teen, the guys all wanted to be Tom Brady, Han Solo or James Bond. Now with point-and-click free porn they don't need such heroes. Porn has killed their imagination. Why work for pussy when a skanky ho could just get on her knees for no reason whatsoever? Straightest line between tab A and slot B. Porn provides that. How wrong am I guys?

Ahh, I see that you're already there.

There's another element to this, which is that as consumers we are accustomed to watching porn passively, often with a female model/actress performing for us while we presumably sit and watch, or using a toy that we can imagine is a part of us having sex with her. It's a fundamentally passive exchange, and I imagine for many the dynamic of reading an erotic story is similar. I get most turned on reading stories about women doing erotic and exhibitionist things. I'm less interested in the male character. The male character is usually there to influence the woman to be sexy in some way; I'm less interested in his agency in its own right.

 

[SimonDoom]

Ahh, I see that you're already there.

Except I don't think porn is necessarily the cause. I think of porn more as one of the symptoms. The cause lies more in the inherent dynamic of the man as a consumer of an erotic fantasy in which the woman performs for him. Think of men watching a belly dancer in Medieval times. Same basic idea.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Here's another possible reason: The male reader doesn't want competition. He's interested in reading a fantasy about a hot woman, and if there's too much detail about how hot and fascinating the man is then it might be a boner-shrinker for some, because it makes it harder for the male reader to imagine it's him getting the woman, because he's not as hot, as rich, or as interesting.

Yes, there is absolutely that and I know that it is true because I see the stark similarity in the stories to how guys act in chat. I wasn't going to mention it because I wasn't sure if it might push anyone's buttons but since you have mentioned it, I could go one further than boner-shrinker and say for many it's even no-homo.

But to put the shoe on the other foot, I've never heard any women on lit (real or otherwise) nor any of my female friends in real life say that they couldn't relate to a story because the lead female didn't look like themselves. I'm not saying that this makes women better than men, but it shows that their attachment to stories is more emotional than physical.

 

[NoTalentHack]

For me, it really depends on what the characters' roles are in the story. Hell, it depends on the story, for that matter; I think there's an argument to be made that the shorter the story is, the more "realistic" it is for the guy to be the "active" character, for all the reasons that other folks have listed, the "who dares wins" stuff and all.

However, for me, one of the biggest turn-ons is enthusiastic consent, and what's the most enthusiastic type of consent there is? The other person specifically saying, "I want X thing." Another is, as silly as this sounds, grown-ups being grown-up about shit: exchanging safewords, aftercare, even fumbling things a bit and recovering from them.

Maybe it's because, unlike most guys, I grew up reading romance novels for my smut fix instead of watching porn (because Texas), but the type of stuff I like to read/write tends to be sweeter and involves a guy getting a clear signal from a woman and then being varying levels of gently dominant. It's part of why I like friends-to-lovers so much as a trope: it skips a lot of the will they/won't they (which I find boring as shit, because of course they fucking will), but still gives me a base to work off of that allows for a connection between the two characters before they get down to fucking.

So, like @Erozetta (if not in exactly the same way), the active/passive characters in my stories go back and forth based on what their current role in the story is. A very, very typical one for me is "hey, we've been friends for months/years, but *thing changed* and now we're both available at the same time and/or obstacle is cleared and/or one of us has changed, so whaddya say?" And then, oh hey, it turns out they're both into *insert kink here* and/or gentle maledom.

Also, to go off on a tangent, I think this is part of why incest, especially sibcest, is very popular to write, beyond its popularity with readers. It gives a lot of shorthand that's very similar to friends-to-lovers with the added taboo aspect. My sole incest entry could easily have been "best friend's little sister friends-to-lovers" instead of "younger sister incest" with just a little retooling, honestly.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

My recent tennis story had my male MC sleepwalking into relationship disaster by only ever following the suggestions of others - I think it works, it was partially intentional but I did get comments (inbetween the usual LW backlash) that said the character was 'weak' and they werent exactly wrong

Your story was unique though. At first the lead male (Ben) was quite weak (sexually) but there were several other factors at play. For starters, your characters and your style were strong enough to keep me engaged. Then Ben does in fact live out that limp male fantasy where the woman just wants him and takes him with almost zero input from him at all, but then Ben's reaction to it was a huge payoff. The limp male fantasy was simply a device for his strong character development as he begins to assert himself in his relationship with his fiancee (Hanna). Not only was it was a great plot twist but it parallelled why he wasn't Hanna's perfect lover despite the fact that they both still cared deeply for one another. Whether you intended that or not, that's what made it interesting for me. I don't want to give spoilers but I thought that it was very well done.

 

[AG31]

I also have a strong line in shy nerdy guys - just like me, in fact, only much much luckier. I'm not really interested in stories about hunky confident men who get laid every night going out and getting laid again tonight (in some new and well plotted way).

Still a lot of my stories do involve men who are very passive.

I have a two-fold answer.

At the level of simple writing, disregarding whether it taps into my erotic tastes, since you identify with that sort of person you can probably do a good job of portraying them. Dig in deep and share yourself. That, for me, creates "authenticity."

At the level of erotic appeal, I find men who submit to something very erotic IF they are self aware and self accepting. As far as I can tell, this combination is not common in erotica. But that's what would turn me on.

 

[Unblemished]

Passive, even bland leads aren’t really a gendered thing IMO. They’re just the male versions of all those romance heroines who meet their Prince Charming; boy or girl or whatever else, we’re all still people, and the idea of a gorgeous stranger turning your life upside down is a pretty basic fantasy.

Whether said gorgeous stranger is a rich, handsome doctor with the physique of a Greek god or a cute, quirky Manic Pixie Dream Girl just depends on the target audience.

As does the exact nature of the passive hero; look at Bella Swan attracting a hot vampire and a hot werewolf despite being just a normal girl and all the knockoffs that that spawned, then look at those hundreds of anime where the lead is an interchangeable cardboard cutout surrounded by squabbling colour-coded love interests. Heroines being fought over by guys who could have anyone they want but inexplicably only want them, nerdy dudes who describe every hot woman they meet as totally out of their league but still end up getting drooled over by them anyway, etc.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with all that. Tropes and fantasies exist for a reason, and there are authors who can make it work. It can be tiresome when they’re phoned in and sometimes you want something with a bit more depth, and find yourself annoyed that a given character is orbiting some boring protagonist when they could do so much better in a different, better series…but such is life.

And I certainly don’t think it’s porn warping male minds to no longer like Bond movies. They still make Bond movies, and if anything the dawn of the internet has built a disturbing subculture of male influencers who try to sell themselves as powerful, aggressive ‘alpha males’ while teaching young men to behave in deeply weird ways.

 

[AG31]

The other is that a male character who is a little bland might plug into a greater variety of people's fantasies than others.

I can see how from the point of view of a woman reader it would be more desirable to write about a man whose sexual appeal lies in being interesting, rather than just blandly handsome and sexy looking.

I've made a case for "simple erotica," in part, for what you say about plugging in. I don't want to be distracted from the eroticism by character and history. I know this runs counter to the stereotype of women wanting relationships in their erotica. But I've been counter to a lot of stereotypes in my life. But it's probably a small niche.

 

[AG31]

Here's another possible reason: The male reader doesn't want competition. He's interested in reading a fantasy about a hot woman, and if there's too much detail about how hot and fascinating the man is then it might be a boner-shrinker for some, because it makes it harder for the male reader to imagine it's him getting the woman, because he's not as hot, as rich, or as interesting.

This is exactly why my stories don't involve relationships with women, although sometimes women are present. I don't want the competition.

 

[MillieDynamite]

For my writing, passive and active (aggressive) characters are dependent on how many characters are in the story. Generally, if there are only two, one is aggressive, and the other is passive. The characters, the more variation I have on those two traits. Of course, if a man or woman is aggressive, it also hinges on the type of story it is.

 

[Not2Pervy]

Worth noting that in age difference pairings the older person, unless they are very old, has to take on a more passive role for the story not to become problematic (or NC/R).

 

[SimonDoom]

Worth noting that in age difference pairings the older person, unless they are very old, has to take on a more passive role for the story not to become problematic (or NC/R).

I'd say this is often true in incest stories, but it doesn't have to be true of all "May-December" relationships.

There's no such thing as a relationship based on a perfect power balance, and there doesn't have to be. As long as the story involves consenting adults, there's nothing wrong with having a more powerful older character exerting influence a younger and less powerful character. This is the way the world is.

 

[Voboy]

Worth noting that in age difference pairings the older person, unless they are very old, has to take on a more passive role for the story not to become problematic (or NC/R).

DEFINITELY worth noting.

A lot of my earlier (and some of my later) stories involve this kind of dynamic, often with an explicit power imbalance, and since I'm not usually that interested in victimization? My alternatives are to make the younger partner (male or female) code as "more active" or the older partner (male or female) code as "more passive," or a mix of both. Sometimes I did a good job achieving that balance, sometimes not, and of course there are a number of variables that go into whether the resulting story "worked" or not.

To me, the stories I've written in which the woman is more active read more naturally than the ones where my male characters have been the aggressive ones. That's to me; the stories seem to do well here regardless. I don't think that implies anything about stories in general; I just think it reflects my own predilections when I write.

Oddly, that doesn't really reflect my preferences in real life. Funny how that works.