I've been writing, working on a story. It's going...okay. I'm hoping to wind up with something usable.
There are a lot of things that might be problems for writers in these conditions. There's the fact that it becomes difficult to imagine any kind of casual social contact when all that's being officially discouraged. Also it can be hard to concentrate on a fictional world when time has been de-structured.
The story has a female protagonist, or two. Some people also have overwhelming difficulty writing about the opposite sex. I don't think I'm one of those people, not now. There are species that have pretty extreme sexual dimorphism in their genetic makeup. Hardly any of these species are mammals, much less primates, and I don't think we're the exception on that. Yes, there are observable differences in behavior, but I think most of that is down to the different kinds of social networks that boys and girls grow up in. As for hardwired biological differences, well, a man who believes that because women are able to bear young that they'll always be soft and maternal is setting himself up for heartache.
There are a lot of things that might be problems for writers in these conditions. There's the fact that it becomes difficult to imagine any kind of casual social contact when all that's being officially discouraged. Also it can be hard to concentrate on a fictional world when time has been de-structured.
The story has a female protagonist, or two. Some people also have overwhelming difficulty writing about the opposite sex. I don't think I'm one of those people, not now. There are species that have pretty extreme sexual dimorphism in their genetic makeup. Hardly any of these species are mammals, much less primates, and I don't think we're the exception on that. Yes, there are observable differences in behavior, but I think most of that is down to the different kinds of social networks that boys and girls grow up in. As for hardwired biological differences, well, a man who believes that because women are able to bear young that they'll always be soft and maternal is setting himself up for heartache.
2 comments:
It's good to be keeping up with imaginative world no matter what the current general circumstances. Somehow or other people will continue to live their lives despite temporary interventions imposed by governments and other authority figures. Only time will tell just how long the current disruption will last but I have faith it will end, albeit with some changes.
I don't know if you've read Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, but because I read it again fairly recently myself I was reminded of the society she envisaged that was composed of an ambisexual populace that had never known war. It's a fascinating story and since LeGuin was one of the first major authors to imagine how this difference would affect a culture it seemed relevant to what you've written here. She wrote an essay in 2016 reviewing her thoughts about the book - a couple of which I'll share.
Why did I invent these peculiar people? Not just so that the book could contain, halfway through it, the sentence "The king was pregnant" - though I admit I'm fond of that sentence. Not, certainly not, to propose Gethen as a model for humanity. I am not in favor of genetic alteration of the human organism - not at our present level of understanding. I was using it as a heuristic device.
Because of our lifelong social conditioning, it is hard for us to see clearly what, besides purely physiological form and function, truly differentiates men and women. Are there real differences in temperament, capacity, talent, psychic processes etc.? Only comparative ethnology offers any evidence on the matter, and the evidence is incomplete and often contradictory. How to find out?
One can send an imaginary, but conventional, indeed rather stuffy, young man from Earth into an imaginary culture which is totally free of sex roles because there is no, absolutely no, physiological sex difference. I eliminated gender to find out what's left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human.
I really don't like the current politically correct attitudes that dictate only a member of a particular group or clan or whatever can be justified in writing (or taking acting roles) based on their personal experience. It doesn't take much reading to discover that men have been writing about women and women have been writing about men for a very long time - and often, but not always (! goes without saying), successfully too.
Great and even good writers don't pander to popular unexamined assumptions.
Keep up the good work.
Life will resume and go on. The question is whether things will get even more generic and preprocessed in the future. That's what I don't want to see. All the more reason to stay creative in whatever way you can, I suppose.
Leguin was brilliant. I've started reading The Dispossessed, and while it presents a lot for you to wrap your head around I think I'm getting into the rhythm of it. While you must have sent the book - much less picked it out - before I had written this blog post, it addresses many of the same lines of thought. The debate over whether women have any place in a laboratory for one thing. It's also eerily resonant in some other ways. Reading the word "quarantine" in the early pages gave me kind of a jolt.
I'm all in favor of authors from previously neglected groups getting the chance to speak for themselves. But there's also a place for empathy which, being an intangible, tends to be forgotten and/or discounted nowadays.
Thank you. I'll try. I'll also try to examine my assumptions and everyone else's.:)
Post a Comment