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Man here.
One of my favorite crime writers is Karin Slaughter.
I've read dozens of stories written by men where a character remarks on how badly jailed child molesters are treated by their fellow prisoners.
Slaughter is the only one who pointed out that it was most likely because a lot of the prisoners had been abused as children and it wasn't a case of righteous anger as much as it was abuse victims getting the only revenge they could.
Sorry if off topic.
That's an interesting perspective. I was thinking of style when I wrote this but hadn't really dwelled on content.
It's one of my pet theories that marginalized people while better suspence and horror because our life experience is more stressful, on average. I believe a more visceral understanding of stress and real life horror helps create that kind of depth in writing.
Pretty much every stand up comic does jokes about how only traumatized people feel the need to be funny all the time.
Let's face it we're all traumatized in some way
I think it's about the support system you have.
You'll meet people who grew up in extreme poverty who are kind and stable, and people who grew up with plenty but are still unable to become adults.
As a gender queer guy with social anxiety I often find myself empathizing with aspects of how women describe the social burden and hyper awareness of other people's emotional states. The sort of obligatory people pleasing written into the rulebook of life for women.
It seems like the things I struggle with clinically are in certain ways, kinda just a part of the female-socialized experience of the world a lot of the time, and that sucks.
Its interesting but would make sense that that might distort one's writing voice, I hadn't heard or considered that before
I heard that we do. Using the word "just" is a good example. I pretend I'm a mediocre white dude while corresponding, and it seems to take care of it for the most part. 😉 It's crazy what habits we've unconsciously picked up...
You too? It's weird how my writing changes when it's from the perspective of a male character. Never thought of applying that to my regular communication. I should.
Boldly misstate facts! Misinterpret communications in your favor! Pretend someone didn't give you information! It's fun 😊
There are probably learned habits, sure. We also read things differently depending on how we gender the author, so it can be complicated to analyze.
When I think about this subject, I remember James Tiptree Jr ( which was the pseudonym for Alice Bradley Sheldon).
A quote I got from wikipedia about her:
There was speculation Tiptree was a woman, however, based partially on the themes in her stories. In 1975, in the introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, a collection of Tiptree's short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote: "[i]t has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."[19] Silverberg also likened Tiptree's writing to Ernest Hemingway's, arguing there was a "prevailing masculinity about both of them—that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss."[19]
It's funny that he focused on the themes rather than the style. I wonder what women should think about in his world.