Known for her predominantly male characters, Hinton explained that while growing up she was a tomboy. “I had no identity in the female culture,” she said candidly. “I didn’t think like a girl, so it’s always been easier to write from a male point of view.”There are a number of things about this quote that irk me. Firstly, I'm not sure why anyone assumes that it's difficult for a writer to take on another perspective, male, female or Martian. That is pretty much the point of novel writing. If a writer is good, then his or her characters, whether or not they share the same chromosomes as said writer, will be compelling and realistic.
Secondly, I do understand what she means by female culture - that culture of ponies, pink, princesses and other p-words that we girls are socialized to like - but it's a mistake to assume that said female culture is inherent or biological. I know I wasn't born loving pink and rainbows. In fact, I still don't particularly care for either of those things (I've never been a fan of the colour pink; ask my parents). And what does it mean to "think like a girl?" If she's a girl, and she's thinking, then she's thinking like a girl. I'm not a biologist and I don't know whether or not the claims that men and women process information differently are actually true. I do know, however, that not all girls - or all boys, for that matter - think in the same way. That's why we have such difficulty agreeing on the Radical Feminazi Agenda.
Jokes aside, and my love for Hinton's novels aside, I do think this is somewhat troubling, and indicative of much larger trends in YA and adult fiction in general. I've heard Hinton's novels praised because they are about "boy" things - fights and violence, "greasers," brothers, etc. People seem to assume that boys need to read about things they can immediately relate to in order to be interested in reading at all. Girls, however, are not extended this luxury. As girls, and therefore the "second" or "other" sex, we are always expected to sympathize with and understand the experiences of the dominant culture, i.e. male experiences.
(Side note: in the same way, the typical white, middle class North American experience is assumed to represent all North American experience in movies, books, television, and so on, unless these movies, books and television shows make a conscious effort to subvert this or highlight other aspects of experience. And there are plenty of people who think of, say, Toni Morrison as a "black female author" rather than just an "author" because she writes about experiences which are not those of the majority.)
A quick look at pop culture will tell you this. Movies about women are "chick flicks," even when they do not contain the stereotypical shoes, shopping and Cosmopolitans that Sex and the City unleashed upon the world. Take Sunshine Cleaning, which I recently saw. It stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as two sisters starting up their own business. Yes, it's funny, but not with the kind of broad comedy that usually characterizes a "chick flick" - pratfalls, misunderstandings between the female lead and the male object of her affection, etc. Furthermore - spoiler alert - neither of the two women ends up with a man at the end of the movie. And yet I've heard it labelled a "chick flick" even though it adheres to none of the conventions of the genre. It just happens to be a movie about women.
It's the same with books. I never read Anne of Green Gables or the Little House on the Prairie series in grade school. I did read The Outsiders, however. It's genuinely a wonderful novel that I think all children can relate to. But obviously someone thinks that not all children can relate to Anne of Green Gables - despite the fact that it's about the power of imagination and spunky characters who often break the rules, two aspects of the typical boy experience, at least according to the media. But AoGG is about a girl, and boys don't want to read about that, right?
I've gone on something of a tangent here. Anyway, I've been thinking on and off about fiction and gender for weeks now, inspired by the comments on this post I wrote a while ago about speed dating for book lovers. In the article I dissected for that post, someone called men who read fiction "a bit girly." Really? I mean, according to statistics that I have seen cited over and over but don't have the energy to find right now, it is true that more women read fiction than men.
But is there any evidence at all to suggest that this is innate and caused by actual sex differences? Women read fiction because fiction is "feminine," since it's not the manly truth? Please. Up until perhaps the mid 20th-century fiction was written for and by men. There has always been a subversive, "trashy" subsect of popular literature written by women - the Gothic novel of the late 18th century, or Eliza Haywood, for example - but the vast majority of fiction has been more "masculine" than anything, as it was written by men. Are we going to start claiming that Hemingway had a feminine mind because he wrote novels? What is a feminine mind anyway?
I don't know when or how this happened, but it does seem obvious to me that recently fiction has become very, very gendered as feminine. We are told that boys don't like to read, especially not books about girls, and instead of encouraging boys to read more "girly" books and, perhaps, develop some empathy for characters who don't exactly resemble them, we just say, oh well, fiction is for women. Is it any wonder that chick lit is so reviled in the publishing world? It's for those icky women-folk. Men wouldn't touch frivolous literature with a ten-foot pole - oh, wait. Except for this, and this, and this.
There are a lot of issues to unpack here but those are some preliminary (despite their length) thoughts from me.
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