Discussion Question from a male CN webnovel reader to female readers

RE: my disdain for MBTI I was just having a fun lil goof, no need to get too down my dude. I mean, I don't fuck with people who put that shit in their twitter bios but I also don't fuck with people who think "liking Harry Potter" is equivalent to a whole personality, you know, when you have limited spoons for social interactions you gotta be picky with who you wanna engage with.

I didn't really want to make a huge long post patiently explaining how, even with chemical differences between male and female brains, differences between gender are largely social both because I'm lazy but also because you explained that a lot of your interest in this was "professional" a.k.a. in the capacity of wanting to write a grounded female character and not (entirely) academic. Reinforcing bIoLoGiCaL diFfErEnCeS would just be detrimental to the end goal of trying to write a female character because, as I said, it would just "other" us in your mind. The more you think about the biological gap, the easy it is to disengage, even subconsciously, men and women from the same species.

Also, I'm a student of "nurture" over "nature". For example, it's generally agreed upon that women are more empathetic and emotionally driven in their relationships than men. It's also proven that (usually heterosexual) men suffer higher rates of unaddressed depression and mental illness due to a lack of social support networks amongst friends*, and their (usually female) significant others do the bulk of emotional labour in their life by making up for the entirety of that social support network the men lack in their personal life. So what does this indicate? That women are inherently more emotional creatures and that men tend to have less emotionally open relationships due to biological differences in their brain directing the way they relate to others? Or that, actually, humans as a whole species are gregarious and need emotional support networks but men are socially groomed to be more emotionally reticent, with emotional openness being denigrated with terms like "pansy", leading to them becoming withdrawn, unable to open up about mental health issues, and completely relying on the women in their life to carry the weight of their psychological needs?

Even if you say "well due to the differences in the hormones produced in the bodies and minds of males and females, females tend to be more emotional animals just due to the chemical decoction going on inside them", which isn't an untrue statement, I emotionally eat every month when my Aunt Flo comes to visit and it's a fact, just simply leaving it at that is both simplistic and entirely uninteresting (and from the perspective of social issues, actively damaging, as "women are just more emotional than men" leads to the further dismissal of men's emotional needs and subconscious shaming of emotional hardship in men, leading to, as stated, higher rates of unaddressed mental illness in men). And approaching this from the perspective of both a writer and a voracious consumer of stories, it is always more interesting to understand the psychology of someone because of the cumulative life experiences and social structures they grew up in that led them to be that way.

Compare "why does Character act that way?"
A. They have a biological imperative to do so.
B. Well during their childhood they suffered through this trauma but due to their family situation at the time they were not able to talk to anyone about it, leading to the trauma becoming buried and using X behaviour as a coping mechanism, eventually as a way to cope, Character selectively chose to forget about trauma but this led to them never addressing it in a healthy and healing way, leading to them acting in Y behaviour as they struggled between the push and pull of the subconscious shame and trauma of the event versus the inner desire to move on from it while being afraid to admit to it ever happening, etc.

I know this is also simplistic, and biology can be just as interesting as the psychology of personal history, but in terms of narrative application, characters driven by story are more interesting that characters driven by biology.

If you have an academic interest in these things, I don't want to talk you out of it, I think it's cool to take an interest in these things as a personal interest and encourage you to continue to find resources, but can't help you myself as I don't have an interest in these things. Everything I say, I'm saying with the intent to approach it from the standpoint of a perspective and hypothetical reader of your work. You are not obligated to listen to me, I only intend to offer opinion, and you can take this as a thought exercise and nothing more.

 

1. I also personally prefer mbti to big 5, but because mbti hasn't been scientifically validated if you want studies it's under big 5
2. It's hard to tell what differences are circumstantial or not, but either way, even if a change is circumstantial, female characters will come off weird if they're written to circumstantial match men 100% unless you're writing a gender neutral society in which no one treats women differently. Women having deeper friendships might be circumstantial, but when the women in your novels have no real friends and only back stab each other to curry favor with a guy, that breaks immersion from the reader.

 

i understand what you mean.
and don't worry about me geting too down, i wasn't trying to be defensive. but i understand that reading text can be misleading. was just pointing out that people will try to describe others personality regardless like by comparing them to others etc'
so i said that MBTI is therefore a better alternative.
about wiriting a female charecter, i guess i'll do as you said. it's allso easier for me.
thanks again!

i'll keep your points in mind,
thanks !

 

Okay, possibly unpopular opinion here? A fair amount of women do act like they're portrayed in CN novels. But most definitely not all of them. If you're looking to write a good female character, just write a good character that happens to be female.
One analogy I heard about the way the male/female brain works: Male brain is like a waffle. You put syrup (content) into it and it separates into nice, neat squares, because apparently men categorize their thoughts more and tend to be more hyperfocused or specific. Women's brains are like spaghetti, put sauce on it and it goes all over because their minds are less rigid and hyperfocused, and women tend to be able to find better connections between different things or multitasking.
this may very well be a load of bull, but i hope it helps?

 

For me it's pretty straight-forward, really.

If I'm reading something that has stereotyped, bland and uninteresting female characters, I'll either...

A) Drop it because the novel has bad characters, and 90% of my novel enjoyment comes from the characters, not from the overall plot.
B) Continue reading it because it's Digimon and I'm a Digimon Completionist.

So uhn... Does it bother me? Yeah, sure.
Do I care? Not really, I'll just drop it because the story bores me and go to something else... I'll just rant about it if it's Digimon because I refuse to drop any digimon series, even if Yoshino is as developed as a plank in Digimon Savers.

I mean, there is a nigh-infinite amount of novels out there waiting to be read... If a novel doesn't develop characters properly, I don't really need to read it, do I? I can just search for a new one that has proper character development instead of plowing through a poorly written story, it's no big deal.

 

I get very annoyed. I tried to read some romances before (bc I read BL mainly) but mostly of them I gave up right after. BL novels also have a lot of shit about woman, sometimes even worse, but this novels usually hate and dont care about female characters so they just don't create many of them, to me is easier to read bl because there won't be too many females characters that I'll get annoyed to their history progression, the acceptance of shitty MC, they being dumb and "I'm/she's strong but also just a poor little girls, what could I/she do?" I read this phrase so many times. I swear.

 

Female characters portrayed like that always annoys me. It's like the author only interacted with one woman like that and thinks every other woman is like her.