I’ve noticed that whenever a piece of fictional media is touted to be “female-led” in terms of the creative team, oftentimes the characters are very much stand-ins for the creators/writers and reflect them in ways that don’t necessarily fit the setting (assuming the setting is not based on a location from the creator’s childhood, which tends to be the case). Even for non-female led projects, it is pretty easy to identify when a character is written by a woman vs a man (Outer Worlds has a character named Parvati that was basically a self-insert that the writer, Kate Dollarhyde proudly bragged about, for example), as they all speak and think from a modern day lens, regardless of whether it is appropriate for the setting or for what the character should be.
Contrast this with male writers who are able to write men and women from different perspectives in a way that attempts to match the setting, and I can’t help but wonder if the ability of perspective-taking is a masculine trait, which could also explain why modern entertainment runs into the issue of incompatible character identities within a setting or very unimaginative characters and settings in general. I expect this to become increasingly common as more and more women (and men embracing feminine traits) enter entertainment industries across all mediums.
Though perhaps this is an issue of increasing mental illness across the board instead. A YouTube video by David Stewart about how terrible of an idea writing a character as genderless is brought up a different perspective, that increasing mental illness (autism in particular) could be a cause for the inability of people to identify with characters that don’t look like them (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-i_2kRnSsX0&pp=ygUNZGF2aWQgc3Rld2FydA%3D%3D)
I’m not sure whether there is a definitive explanation, maybe it is a combination of many different factors, but I think it isn’t unreasonable to theorize that women are less capable of perspective-taking compared to men in general.
I still think the jack nicholson line from As Good As It Gets is the harshest red pill disguised as a “joke”.
“ I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”
This might be the biggest truth bomb in movie history.
I thought of the exact same thing as I read this post.
Women are more susceptible to in group bias which leads them to hold more left ideology due to it being collectivist in nature.
This is also a product of environment too since there are a LOT of female writers for Manga I respect and do excellent work in a field that is highly competitive and meritocratic. The West has removed that filter by installing diversity directives that removed the blocks that gatekept people out but meant those that had talent became successful.
Women in the west have less perspective because we treat them like kids, like Africa Americans, immigrants etc if you don't provide consequences and make everything easy for them, don't be surprised if they begin to believe the world revolves around them and then that perspective is reflected in their work.
The difference between compassion and narcissistic sympathy is the ability to tell someone they’re doing something wrong and to stop or face consequences. Women used to be more compassionate, because they were treated the same in turn. The victim complex has killed compassion and made narcissistic sympathy the norm for women and in turn every other “victim class” as the oppressed can do no wrong, and the oppressor no right.
Women are solipsistic and unable to think in any abstraction that doesn't involve a representation of themselves in it.
Narcissistic sympathy, they can’t exist in a world that doesn’t begin with them
Which is to say, they habitually project.
The Girl Boss leads seem to be tanking so these writers aren't wooing over female audiences either. Captain Marvel is the only one I can think of that was a hit (allegedly), and we all know that it had a huge boost being where it was in the MCU. Maybe I'm too dialed out to notice others that are doing well, but overall, they don't seem to be.
It also was a landmark "Girl Boss"' movie in that the trend accelerated a lot after it, especially within the MCU. It's much more tiresome and predictable now, even to a lot of normies.
Yes.
Full stop.
Women can't introspect (in general), which means they can't figure out why what is happening to them is happening to them. This also means they can't properly evaluate input versus output... these two things combined means that most women are stuck in a OODA loop that might as well function like the Wheel of Fortune.
I don't think so. There are few female writers whose stuff I like and who write good characters in books.
What you see is imho more of a product of them being shit writers, because they get their positions not due to merit, but due to being women. And no one is willing to challenge their writings / ideas. Women would not "backstab" each other like that (they reinforce the "Yeah, girl power!" narrative) and any man who dares to challenge a female writer has been fired years ago.
Yes, despite women being "more agreeable," they seem to be less empathetic in the context of argument.
Women are evolve to deal with known quantities. H. P. Lovecraft could never be a woman writing about things beyond our comprehension that even considering them can cause total madness.
Characters like Johan Lieber are beyond them because they cannot understand men and how far we can go into light, darkness or indifference.
This is not an insult, they are just more connected to their animalistic part and if you are genX or older you have the exp to see how fast their bodies and minds adapt to the ever changing rules of procreation. We men are more spirit than flesh and this is why we are better on making worlds and characters.
Imagine a prelegal society where lethal combat and inter-village marauding are constant threats.
There's a strong survival advantage for men who are able to model other people's mental states. Understanding what motivates the man who might be about to kill you will help defuse many tense situations and might give you the edge when defusing isn't possible.
There's no comparable survival advantage for women. A woman in this setting can't hope to interact with deadly men as a peer: she doesn't need to understand men, she just needs to either escape them or obey them, or she will suffer whatever consequences they choose. Seeing other people as stereotypes might in fact be an advantage: treating all scary men the same is probably safer than trying to figure them out as individuals.
Why invest the effort when you know it won't change the outcome?
This is the last frontier of basedness.
Despite it being an accepted fact for all of human history before the last 150 years or so which society was built around, very few people, men or women won't cling to the delusion that men and women are equals mentally.
They will accept that men are, on average, larger and stronger than women, then completely tie themselves in knots not acknowledging the truth when you point out the brain is a physical organ that is affected by the same biological systems which cause men to be physically stronger than women. More oxygen due to larger lung capacity, larger blood volume, etc.
They will point to the pseudoscience of psychology to use "flatter bell curves" in an attempt to explain away the lack of women at the top of any purely mentally competitive or creative endeavor or any activity requiring innovation. When honestly assessing reality shows that the average men are better at every task, including the "emotional" or "nurturing" activities like child-rearing, and counseling, at which women are purported to be superior.
To write a character from a completely separate perspective requires a certain kind of selflessness. To suppress all your own thoughts and preferences that might leak in, and let the perspective the character might have take the reins of your mind unimpeded by your own subjective values.
Turns out one of the sexes maybe has a greater proclivity for selflessness and objectivity than the other.
Certain writers take what happened to them, and regurgitate it on screen in a way that is both annoying and off putting.
Let me give you an example of what I believe is going on.
It'd be like a shower thought after the fact, that you have to hear about, that you don't care about, that someone else was so bitter about that they felt the need to mouthpiece a piece of fiction to feel better about some interaction they had days or weeks or years ago, depending on how bitter they are about it.
This is hypothetical, but I think I'm at least partly right, based on how it always goes down this way.
It's basically the 'and everybody clapped' but on the big screen. And, for reasons I still don't understand, no one has felt the need to tell them to fuck off and maybe see a therapist about it, and learn to let go of the small stuff.
It feels important to them, so it must be important to you.
I think its more of an immaturity thing than a gender thing. ask a 12yo boy to write some adventure story - he'll write a stand-in too. Perspective-taking comes from experience and experience comes from having the world not match your expectations of it. Some coddled people get very little of that.
Fucking Pavarti. That explains it. They ruined a perfectly good Kaley stand-in with the stupid asexual lesbian shit.
Women don't need to see things from others perspectives because their world literally revolves around them. They are like proto-narcissists. The lack of accountability they experience in their lives means that they do not see themselves at fault even as they apologize. This is not the same thing as being considerate, rather it is more like crocodile tears.
I watched Angelina Jolie's 2011 film "In the Land of Blood and Honey" recently.
Jolie supposedly wrote and directed everything herself. It's a story about rape camps during the Bosnian war.
I went in to the movie knowing it was a Jolie joint and having my expectations tempered as a result.
The movie was mediocre and starred all Yugoslavian actors.
But TBH, even knowing this was a Jolie vanity project in advance, I wouldn't have known after watching it.
I suppose the counterargument could be to what degree the final product was ghostwritten.
This is interesting. If true, it might just be a property of the women who enter such fields and are hired for them.
Just responding to the title at face-value, without the context of the body, men are perfectly capable of missing the bigger picture IRL. For every entrepreneur busting 70 hour weeks for years on end until they reach success, you have 30 wagies busting the same hours for table-scraps, whether it's software engineering or construction. Women are sometimes vindicated for bailing out of absurd scenarios where men (some) are too prideful and manipulable to say no in time.
Relate that to imaginative awareness as you will.