Thank you so much for engaging with this conversation!
@Rich.--Wow. You sound like the best dad I can possibly imagine.
@Brayati--I was thinking about your foster kids. I absolutely think that this might be at the heart of some of the gender differences that reflect some of the ways in which our schools might be failing young men. If women are recalling the abstract more easily, and men are "learning by doing" then having a character who is a doofus in some ways but signals their love by building a birdhouse or quietly repairing a bike can give your reader all the feels.
Tl;dr: deep thoughts on literature, representation, teasing, sports culture
A word about sports talk. Sports talk is a common lingo that we can use to talk to strangers, in the same way that the British talk about the weather. We aren't always watching it because we even like the game (although sometimes we have played it and find it exciting still). We are watching it so that we can open up conversations with strangers about a topic that is both neutral
and interesting. If I said that Barella is a better midfielder than Gundogan, I am signalling a variety of loyalties, a trove of statistics at my beck and call, and a willingness to put myself on the line, even if it meant teasing--because I would be wrong. In the right social circumstances--on the job, waiting in line, at a bar--this exchange of information could work the same way that it does when I meet my neighbor downstairs and inquire about her dog. It has now broken the ice and we get a sense of each other. Nobody will seriously hate me if I declare myself all in for a team that they don't like (although let's not push it. In the UK--please correct me if I am wrong--there are literally laws about whether you can cheer for the visiting team. El Salvador and Honduras briefly went into a military clash in 1969 over soccer/football). They might be disappointed in me for having bad taste, or they might find it something that non-personal that they can tease me about. ("So how are those Hornets doing? Are you still hurting from how the ball was stolen
right out of Zeller's hands? Boy that hurt my heart because I thought, Poor Jason. He's probably in hell right now because he's still a Hornets guy.")
At a certain point, we have a choice. After several hundred hours of enthusiastic discussion about this, we can either stagnate to this level, and have these reassuringly normal conversations that can distract us from the misery and tedium of our lives. Or, after a while, one of these friends becomes closer, and after building up our confidence and feeling of safety by talking about hockey statistics or golf stats (Full disclosure, there are some people who believe that
golf is not a sport. And I happen to be one of them, so I cannot
imagine people getting passionate about golf, but you do you. Weirdo.) suddenly things take that personal turn. It follows the same rule and pattern of the car confession. "Jesus, did you see the game yesterday? I was sitting there screaming at Crosby, saying TAKE THE SHOT, TAKE THE SHOT!" "It was painful to watch. I heard that they are trading in that guy from the Canadiens." "They need to do
something... Allison left me this morning." "Jesus man, what happened?" "I don't know. I thought we were happy."
Okay, a word about teasing, because I have a lot of thoughts in my mind.
Teasing is something we do, and girls don't. Girls, I hate to say this, go way more personal and way more vicious. If one girl said to another "Did you comb your hair with an eggbeater?" (Okay that was my grandma's expression, so I don't know if people still use it) it would be the kind of insult worthy of
Mean Girls level villains. Guys? Not so much. Even virtual strangers can tease me about impersonal things, and declaring my sports knowledge gives them that avenue, because very few people, when sober, will actually have anything more than a laugh about it. As friends become closer, teasing can,
very occasionally, take a personal turn, but don't get carried away with that. A close friend might make that comment about my hair with a laugh and I would be like, "Oh, wow. Does it look that bad?" And the next thing that would happen is that
that friend would be expected to do something. He's my friend. He has my back. He might tell me that there is a flat spot, or pick that piece of lint out. This is not an attack. It's kind of a constructive criticism that should be coupled with some kind of action. But there's a limit. Male friends can also be negative and try to diminish each other. Part of maturing is being able to suss out when people are teasing you because they like you, and when they are doing it because they dislike themselves and can't cope with it.
Also, that does not apply to LGBT people in the same way. Trauma has made us sharp, and there is a tradition of what's called "reading for filth." It's mostly done by very femme men, but I have seen it happen in other contexts as well. Think of it as a roasting that you are supposed to laugh at--once in a while--but afterwards, it is expected that the person who has just read you should behave in a warm or chummy way to prove that this was all genuinely in good fun. They'll buy you drinks, pat your back, gossip about others, and there can be a sense of camaraderie. Can be: there are some people who dislike it and find it unnecessarily vicious. I am one of them.
I think that one of the major problems that the OP was writing about is that there is simply less writing out there that is focused on men's internal lives. Much of the writing is by women, for women, and much of it echoes earlier writers. If I were fifteen, didn't like fantasy too much, look at the reading options. Let's say I wanted to read something that reassured me that, as an adult:
- that my friendships would be deep and meaningful.
- that I would recover from traumas (childhood and otherwise) in a psychologically realistic way
- that there was a path in which, via hard work, I would achieve my dreams, even if it meant starting at the bottom.
- that my self-worth was NOT predicated upon finding "the right" partner.
All three of those things sound pretty great and reasonable, right? Okay, name three books in which women accomplish at least three of these objectives, AND pass the
Bechdel test. I'll bet that you can name ten without breaking a sweat.
Now do the same for a boy. Ask yourself how old these titles are. If you are thinking about
Johnny Tremaine, or
The Three Musketeers, think about how dated these books are. Does this pass that same Bechdel test? Probably not. And for those of you who were like,
Harry Potter! Harry Potter! remember that this hypothetical boy isn't into fantasy. He wants a realistic depiction in which an ordinary young man without superpowers lives a life that resembles the life he wants. Most of the books that are marketed toward young men fail this test. Is Jack Reacher recovering from traumas? Are his friendships, ultimately, meaningful?
Not convinced? Recently, out of curiousity, I googled "books for young men" and almost all of them were books that young men
should read to make them better men: attentive listeners, non-sexists, anti-racists. It was very prescriptive. It was predicated on the idea that these young men need to be lectured to. Doing the same for young women I found a lot more fiction books. That means that many of these same lessons are distilled, often inadvertently, into the characters they read. Studies have shown that when we read, our brains are often flashing with the same distress or pleasure as if these were real situations. In other words, our emotional centers are not processing that there is a difference between these people, and the brain therefore takes a lesson from it. (It's an old study from the early 2010s, but there's an article about it
here). If you didn't learn how devastating molestation can be to the victims because you had a wonderful family, reading Vladimir Nabukoff's
Lolita can give you the first glimpses of insight. If you want to understand why someone would be so constrained by honor that he must forsake even love for it, Edith Wharton's
The Age of Innocence can help. If you want to look at the frustrations that LGBT people feel about queerbaiting and representation of gay people in the media, then Britta Lunden's
Ship It can give you that extra flash of insight. Looking at how trauma can play out in the wake of a school shooting? Well, Eli Easton's
Boy, Shattered is both a psychological profile of people coping with this trauma in varying ways and a beautifully written story of self-acceptance. It's also marketed towards women and LGBT youth.
If I were a young, straight man, I probably wouldn't read pick it up--not due to anti-gay sentiment, but because I would want to see something that
I could resonate with. That's why I am still waiting to read
The Kite Runner. I
know it's a great book. Everybody says so. And there will be a moment in which I say, "I really want to experience life through the eyes of these people." It hasn't happened yet. But that's why we have TBR lists.
A lot of representation of men is done by women who haven't gone through the trouble of understanding men. This is especially true in MM. I've read some wonderful books, and I have also read some books in which one character thinks and acts like a girl, and the other thinks and acts like a bad romance novel hero. Eighty percent, and probably more, of these books are written by women, for women. (Yes! Really!)
Personally, I try not to mind it. If I don't like it, I remind myself that this author is not writing for me. After all, why would they? Statistically, gay and bisexual men are a pretty scant portion of the population. There are ten or twenty times more female readership for this genre than for me. But periodically I
do get irritated, because she has two gay people acting the same way in public that a straight couple would. No. Even as an adult, I would never kiss or hold hands in public with my husband without being EXTREMELY situationally aware. I don't really fear that people are going to attack me in the streets, but by the time we come of age, most of us have had a lifetime of being nervous about this. Even today, anti-gay microaggressions still persist. Every LGBT person has internalized that, and most of us want to not face a barrage of them. Fewer people will coo and say "Isn't that sweet" if we kiss in public. At best, many turn their heads in embarrassment. At worse, I've seen some sneering and some muttered comments about public decency. These are my experiences, and they are not universal--but when I see writing that doesn't take this into account, I am reminded that this is a woman writing out her own fantasies, going to her own happy places, and that the women who are reading this are not getting the kind of empathy-building books that you close and say,
Wow. I got something out of that.
Again, I don't mind this. I just have a much stricter diet. Certain writers I can't read because they are recycling their own fetishized gay people as characters. And probably they have many gay friends
of a certain kind. Some people just attract a certain kind of personality types to them, and they write within their comfort zone. So I am trying to write outside that comfort zone, even if it means writing some LGBT characters as negative people from time to time. Being a minority does not mean that they get a free pass. It just means that I have to be more careful about balancing out other representations of that same minority. In the book I am working on right now, there are six characters who are part of this community. Four are good, one is weak and anxious about protecting his future, and then one is deeply negative. I know that I will get a lot of clapback about that one who is negative, but to idealize a group of people as always good and noble simply because decades of prior representations have all been negative is a reductive and deeply fetishized vision of who LGBT people are. That doesn't mean that I like writing LGBT villains. I won't do it unless there are also a
lot more LGBT heroes on the other side to provide more nuance.
If I had to generalise about guys, I'd say a reticence to share feelings is probably the defining trait (if there is one) – I think Jason is spot on to say that. I certainly see it in my male friends who are variously struggling with too many kids, not enough time, failing marriages, and unfulfilling careers – the usual stuff. And I see it in myself.
