What this situation needs is more unicorns
In honour of the anti-fan letter I got last night, suggesting that I could not possibly write believable male characters because I was (gasp) a girl, I am doing the only thing my gender allows and am channeling my anger into pink unicorns:
And in a brain explodey twist to this story, it turns out that the pink unicorn was drawn by a man.
Oh no, (clutches pearls) what will become of our gender paradigms now?
By believable male characters, he/she/it probably means one that likes women….. 😉
Ah no, this was from a gay man. I think he means ‘one who is more like me.’ But not every man can be the same as every other one, and I tend to think that forcing everyone into only two boxes (‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’) has done terrible things to all of us over the years.
Seriously! Was this attack aimed at your characters in particular (in which case it is complete poppycock–and that word may appear in the story I’m currently writing) or all of us misguided female m/m writers?
Strangely I’m sure there are male writers who write female characters and female writers who write male characters. I’m guessing that’s fine as long as they are straight characters, right? We’re just not ‘allowed’ to write gay characters. Pfui!
I’m climbing aboard that pink unicorn and riding it to that rainbow that I’m apparently not allowed to cross.
(Wow, I’m really angry on your behalf, can you tell?)
It came as a critique of a character in False Colors. Though, having thought of it, I’m not sure how a criticism of one (out of three) of the heroes for being too feminine can be extrapolated into a belief that, as a woman, I could never understand the mysterious creature that is a ‘real man.’ Were the other two heroes ‘feminine’ too? We will never know, but I suspect from their absence in the letter, they were left out because they weren’t.
And I’m sure you know that this is hardly the first time any of us have heard these opinions, and it won’t be the last. It was just the first time, for me, that someone took the trouble to write to me to patronize and put me down in person. I’ve learned to just walk away from the debate on line, but having someone (metaphorically) come over to my house on purpose to insult me made a difference.
Well if we all thought that way, British people would only ever write about British people, Indians about Indian people, and 50 shades of grey would never have been written.
Also it completely ignores the existence of people like me who consider ourselves genderqueer – all the people who straddle the many dividing lines of the world.