I was once talking to a man about a book I was writing. The book was dual alternating POV between the male lead and the female lead. I was struggling with my ability to write the male POV. This man told me, “There is no such thing as male POV.”
But is that really true?
To answer this question, let’s break down exactly what we’re talking about.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, fiction is the study of human nature, so regardless of what gender POV we are writing from, it needs to be realistic. If you’re a man writing from female POV, it would behoove you to understand female human nature to do that. The same goes for a woman writing male POV.
99% of my job as a writer is empathy.
This is especially important when it comes to my POV characters regardless of whether they're male or female. The reader will be riding around in the character's head hearing their thoughts and experiencing all their emotional conflicts. I have to understand all of those in order to portray them accurately.
I’m a woman, so if I’m writing a first-person male POV description of a guy having sex with a woman, obviously I have never experienced that and I never will experience it.
I have to rely on empathy, put myself in the male character’s position, and imagine the sensations he would be experiencing, the emotions he’d be feeling, and the thoughts that would be running through his mind.
The other 1% of my job is observation. I have to describe the body language cues that I would be seeing if I was actually in the room watching these characters interact.
I’m reminded of the famous quote from the movie, As Good As It Gets. The main character is a male author who writes romance. He’s asked how he writes female characters so accurately. His reply: “I take a man and I remove logic and accountability.”
I don’t think any sane person would argue with the statement that women are more emotional and men are more rational. This is not to say that women are devoid of rationality any more than men are devoid of emotion. Both of those statements would be ridiculous and we all recognize this.
Both sexes struggle to remain rational in emotionally charged situations. That isn’t gender specific.
Because of the physical intimidation factor in male-male interactions, it’s harder for men to make themselves vulnerable and express emotion to other men.
When women make themselves vulnerable and express emotion, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s expected.
When men make themselves vulnerable and express emotion to other men and they get rewarded for it—either through praise, support, encouragement, empathy, or through physical touch—the bond that’s created and the trust that’s established between these men is far in excess of what would be possible between two women or between a man and a woman.
For this reason, men are much more reluctant to walk away from their significant male relationships simply because they’re so much harder won.
We need to understand this when we set out to create our fictional male characters (and to understand real-life men). Take romance fiction as an example—although this argument holds true for any genre where you’re dealing with male characters—which is all genres.
The barrier to a man going forward with a particular romantic relationship will often be some conflict he has with another man. The other man could be his best friend, the woman’s brother or father, the man’s boss, or some other man whose relationship he values too much to sacrifice.
The man has to resolve this conflict with his significant male counterparts before he can move ahead with the romantic relationship. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect him to discard his significant male relationships for any woman no matter how much he loves her.
These conflicts and tensions need to be resolved in a way that strengthen the man’s character. This is the only way we’re going to create a satisfactory outcome where the man will move forward happy, satisfied, and confident in his future romantic outcome.
The woman manipulating, coercing, or otherwise pressuring the man into walking away from these male-male relationships does not strengthen him or the relationship. It weakens the man and it undermines the romantic bond.
Doing this in fiction would create an unrealistic scenario where the reader would not believe that this relationship could survive long-term—because it wouldn’t survive long-term.
Women value strength in a man, so it’s critical that any scenario we develop in our fiction strengthens the male lead and doesn’t weaken him.
If you doubt that women value strength in a man, you only need to look at the romance market to see that this is true.
The romance fiction market is hands down the biggest, most lucrative fiction market second only to porn. I’m not going to touch on porn, so we’ll take the romance market as our guide to what women are really shopping for in a man.
The romance market offers a very specific type of male role model to its consumers. This male role model is strong, dominant, and authoritative. He has very clear, firm boundaries and he isn’t afraid to enforce his authority, especially with the woman in his life.
Women might say that they want a sensitive New-Age guy who worships the ground they walk on, gives them anything they want, and sympathizes with a woman’s menstrual complaints, but that isn’t what women are consuming and it isn’t what they’re fantasizing about.
I would advise any man reading this who might be wondering what women are looking for to take special note of this. Stop listening to what women say they want and look at what they’re actually consuming.
If a man is a billionaire and he lacks these qualities of strength, dominance, authority, and the ability to enforce clear, firm boundaries, a woman won’t be attracted to him. Women might say they want a man who makes a six-figure income, but if we look a little deeper, we’ll see that money isn’t as important as these other qualities.
If a man has money but lacks these qualities of strength, dominance, and authority, she won’t love him and she won’t respect him. If a man makes himself an ATM machine to give her all the money she wants to go shopping all day long, but he lacks the ability to stand up for himself and demonstrate his strength, she’ll despise him, she’ll cheat on him, and she’ll do everything in her power to tear him apart.
Men also value strength in other men, but not in the way most people think. It’s time we put to rest the old myth that men are somehow less effective at expressing their emotions and vulnerabilities than women are.
This is patently untrue. We’re here to study human nature as it really is, not to perpetuate myths about the way people operate. Perpetuating myths won’t give us a clear understanding of human nature such that our fiction portrays people realistically.
The truth is that men express their emotions all the time. 99.8% of the time, men express their emotions appropriately. It’s absolute BS to suggest that men are somehow stunted, backward, immature, or incapable of expressing their emotions. Men are perfectly capable of doing so.
It’s also a myth that men express their emotions differently than women do. The old saw men and women don’t take each other’s emotions seriously because they aren’t expressed the same way is nonsense.
Let me give you an example. Imagine a man says to a woman, “It really made me mad when you flirted with that guy right in front of me.”
A man could say this in a perfectly rational, neutral tone of voice. He’s still expressing emotion and he’s doing it appropriately.
A woman who doesn’t take this seriously because he isn’t screaming and crying hysterically is just plain heartless. This is a function of the apathy in our society where people find it convenient to ignore the pain, humiliation, and outrage of those closest to them.
We can prove this easily by reversing the genders of the individuals involved. Now imagine a woman saying, “It really made me mad when you flirted with that girl right in front of me.”
Imagine the man ignores her statement and brushes it off by saying she couldn’t be serious because she wasn’t screaming and crying hysterically. We could easily see that he was only making a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that he doesn’t give a damn about hurting her feelings.
The same is true in reverse. The woman saying that the man’s feelings are invalid because he stated them rationally and calmly is simply her way of excusing her own callous disregard for his pain and anger.
Conversely, if a man blows off a woman’s emotional expressions because she’s being more demonstrative and histrionic than he would be in the same situation, this is also a convenient excuse for him to ignore what she’s saying and the impact of his behavior on someone he’s supposed to care about.
This goes back to my previous statement about empathy. If we truly care about the other person, we’ll recognize the validity of their emotional expressions no matter how they are expressed.
If a man (for example) expresses emotion rationally and logically, the manner in which he expresses them doesn’t invalidate the fact that he is expressing them.
Dismissing his statements by saying he’s somehow immature or underdeveloped in his ability to express himself is a cruel distortion of the fact that the listener simply finds it convenient to ignore his feelings and needs.
This leads to the other part of our quote from, As Good As It Gets. Are women somehow incapable or averse to taking accountability—in relationships or in anything else?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who embrace and seek out accountability and responsibility and those who do the opposite.
High-level, high-achieving businesspeople and entrepreneurs actively seek out and take on additional accountability and responsibility. They take on far more accountability and responsibility than the average person. These businesspeople actually thrive on loading themselves with as much accountability and responsibility as they can possibly shoulder.
Then there are the people who do the opposite. These people shun accountability at every turn, even when it would benefit them to accept it. These people go out of their way to shift accountability to others whenever possible.
These people actively deny their own agency in their lives, consistently place the responsibility for their lives on others, and complain loudly when some other person doesn’t provide them with the outcome they could easily get for themselves if they only took the trouble to proactively strive for it.
This distinction between the two kinds of people isn’t gender specific, either. I’m sure we all know people of both genders in both camps. There are plenty of high-level women entrepreneurs and businesswomen who take on massive amounts of responsibility and personal accountability to achieve their goals.
We also know plenty of men who do the opposite, make endless excuses about their lives without taking any steps to improve their situations, and blame everyone else for their circumstances.
In the end, in fiction as in life, so much depends on empathizing with another person, putting ourselves in their position, and understanding the world and the situation from their point of view.
This is a learned skill. If we do it in our fiction, we’ll start to do it in real life, too, and that will improve all our interactions across the board.
We can only benefit ourselves and others by increasing our understanding of how they think and feel. Our ability to do that depends on listening, observing, and taking as valid all their communications, whether verbal or nonverbal. This is how we show that we truly care and want what’s best for them. This is how we should be treating everyone, especially those closest to us.
____________
All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.