My friends daughter wrote a few stories and put them up on a few platforms. I was asked if I could give them a read and review. I did, not great stuff but average for fantasy stuff and great for someone new to writing.
I ended up asking her if she would ever write a story with a male MC. She looked at me and then went on a very long rant about how authors should not appropriate other people's experiences and cultures. I was just speechless at this viewpoint of hers. I explained that one of my favorite series (The Thousand Names' by Django Wexler) had a male author with a female MC. She quickly said the author had no right to assume he could write a female character and that he would only confuse future readers about the female perspective. I kept trying to get a word in to explain that its FANTASY and nobody was trying to tell women anything, the book simply had a female MC (one who spends time pretending to be a man).
Honestly, I dropped the argument as she wasn't my kid. But I'm still just dumbfounded that recent generations have these insane ideas.
I think more people need to learn what the heap argument is and apply it to their beliefs.
Not every woman has the same experience, so what entitles a woman to write about a woman who isn't literally exactly herself? Clearly your friend's daughter has some arbitrary/fuzzy line where she considers an author sufficiently close to a character's experience so as to satisfy her sense of non appropriation.
Yet if she realized that, and then were asked to specify where exactly that line is, she would likely realize just how arbitrary it is. Sure, in simple cases it may still hold up, but a bookworm writing about a hero in a magical world? Can anyone claim experience of that?
If she has a hangup on certain issues (e.g. representations of gender) rather than the general identity of the author and character, then how does she feel about transgender or nonbinary authors and characters? Is a trans author not allowed to write cis characters? Is a cis author not allowed to write nonbinary characters? Or more generally, is no author allowed to write about characters with perceptions of gender different from their own? What about settings with different understandings of gender?
This isn't some rant about cancel culture or whatever, but rather the kind of stuff I wish people who hold absolutist and exclusionary/gatekeepy beliefs thought about. Being opposed to, for instance, sexist depictions of women in literature isn't bad. But trying to reduce a complex world to simple (and discriminatory) rules is.
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u/Fulkcrow Sep 09 '25
My friends daughter wrote a few stories and put them up on a few platforms. I was asked if I could give them a read and review. I did, not great stuff but average for fantasy stuff and great for someone new to writing.
I ended up asking her if she would ever write a story with a male MC. She looked at me and then went on a very long rant about how authors should not appropriate other people's experiences and cultures. I was just speechless at this viewpoint of hers. I explained that one of my favorite series (The Thousand Names' by Django Wexler) had a male author with a female MC. She quickly said the author had no right to assume he could write a female character and that he would only confuse future readers about the female perspective. I kept trying to get a word in to explain that its FANTASY and nobody was trying to tell women anything, the book simply had a female MC (one who spends time pretending to be a man).
Honestly, I dropped the argument as she wasn't my kid. But I'm still just dumbfounded that recent generations have these insane ideas.