DP54Cover - Deadly Pleasures

An An Unsuitable Unsuitable Job
Job
For or a a Man
Man
by y Andr Andrew Andr w T TTaylor
T lor
Here are a few traveller’s tips from the
exciting world of literary transexuality. Readers who
are men will find lots of handy hints. Readers who are
women will be able to contemplate some of the many
things men don’t understand about women.
One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that if
you’re a man who wants to write women characters who
are even halfway plausible, you have to listen to what
women say. Real women. This is true in two senses. First,
and most obviously, you have to listen to how women talk
among themselves, when men either aren’t there or are
somehow part of scenery. At my Pilates class, for example,
I am sometimes the only man among ten women. At first
they were a bit wary of me, then I became a sort of token
male, then a mascot like Paddington Bear, and now they
don’t really notice me as long as I keep my mouth shut.
Just shut up and listen. One evening, I was sitting in the
Senior Common Room of an Oxford college, listening to
the conversation of three highly qualified, high achieving
women. Were they talking about Wittgenstein? The third
law of thermodynamics? No. They were having an animated
discussion about painting their toenails. Real men,
on the other hand, generally chat about manly things such
as last night’s football on the telly, lawn-mowers you can
actually sit on, transferring memos to your iPhone via
Bluetooth, etc.
Incidentally, the differences between the sexes
are often discernible in dialogue -- and not just in what they
talk about, but how: many women speak in the conditional
mode, as if cautiously advancing a suggestion or intention
in a manner which will allow it to be withdrawn. Men
blunder in. Men grunt. Men tend to speak only when they
feel they have something to say, not that it’s always worth
listening to.
But there’s another way in which I’ve found it’s
useful – well, to be brutally frank, vital – to listen to what
women say. This is when they mention something concerning
one of my women characters. A female member of my
family or friends clears her throat and says “Well, Andrew,
just a small query about that woman character, but have
you ever thought of….” Now if you translate that into
Standard English Manspeak that would come out as “I just
cannot understand how you can be so stupid as to think that
a woman would…” Fortunately, many women have to a
fine art the technique of the tactful suggestion, so essential
to preserving the fragile shell of masculine self-respect.
(Women know instinctively how vulnerable we men are:
even Arnold Schwarzenegger is crying somewhere deep
inside.)
Deadly Pleasures
33
So, now for a few general observations on writing
from the point of view of a sex other than your own.
First, it’s often much harder than we anticipate. It’s
easy to make the fatal mistake of assuming that
because you know individuals of the opposite sex
reasonably well, you actually understand how they
work. But that’s simply not the case. Men and women
live in parallel universes: they overlap, of course, and
the degree of overlap varies enormously. But it’s
frighteningly easy in fiction to make women behave as
men.
The second point is that it’s not just men who
suffer from this problem dealing with the other sex’s
viewpoint. Women are equally prone to what is either a
failure of the imagination or a bit of wishful thinking or
both. It’s noticeable that when women write from a man’s
point of view, the man in question tends to be sensitive,
agonised and frightfully articulate about his feelings. In the
world of crime fiction think of Tey’s Allan Grant, Ngaio
Marsh’s Alleyn, Sayer’s Lord Peter. Two out of three have
nervous breakdowns, which is significant, because it allows
them to talk about their feelings, which men, especially the
British with their Stiff Upper Lips, don’t usually do in public
or even in private. Campion is the most lifelike of those
Golden Age heroes, if only because Allingham scrupulously
guards his emotional privacy, which is exactly what
a public school-educated chap like Albert would have
wanted; alternatively perhaps she merely knew her limitations.
Nor is it just the Golden Age authors who give their
men those womanly characteristics. Patricia Highsmith’s
Ripley, for example, is preternaturally alert to other
people, how they act, what they wear. Often you have the
sense that a woman is looking out of Ripley’s eyes.
Women often forget that in physical terms the
majority of men are only really sensitive about one small
area of their body. No prizes for guessing which. Another
common source of error is how a character responds to his
or her physical appearance. When a real man looks at his
reflection in the mirror he tends to like what he sees - that
beer belly is [a] sign of maturity, and gosh look at those
rippling muscles, not bad, eh? - he tells himself, and after
all he knows that women like a man of experience
(probably because his mother told him so when she was
trying to cheer him up after his first girlfriend dumped him).
On the other hand, when a man-created-by-woman is in
front of a mirror, there’s none of this glow of confidence.
Instead he’s a mass of insecurities: have I cut myself
shaving? Is that a spot coming? Is my tie straight?
When men write about women, they often concentrate
on externals to remind you of the femininity of
their characters: thus breasts, which are invariably large,
will bounce; periods flow; you get a lot of information about
the inconvenience of wearing tights and having to wax legs.
As you’d expect, men are also big on wishful thinking when
the women they create are involved in sex. (Women should
always remember that it’s hard to overestimate the amount
of wishful thinking that men bring to the subject of sex.) The