Mars and Venus - to the gender bending aspiring authors

Here’s a cool fact about Homo sapiens: Any two individuals share about 99% of their DNA.

That’s right—the only difference between you and Chuck Norris, or Martin Luther King Jr., or the Queen of England is a paltry 1% of your 2.9 billion base pair genome.

That remaining 1% is all we can observe with the naked eye. That remaining 1% will mean the difference between light skin or dark, heavy weight or light, tall or short, and depending on who you ask, it may even determine some of your mental faculties. Some would say it is the most important 1% of your genome, but those people don’t realise what messing with foetal developmental genes can do.

So, after spending a couple hours reading the Erotica forum, I wanted to share this tidbit with all of you gender bending aspiring authors:

Before you wonder if your depiction of the opposite sex is accurate or believable, remember that men and women have far more in common than you think.

Shattering your reader's suspension of disbelief cannot be attributed to your shortcomings as a "man" (if writing a woman) or a "woman" (if writing a man), but must be attributed to your shortcomings as a writer.

If you were to blend a man and a woman into a big molecular soup, you’d only find one substantial difference between the two stews: The ratio of testosterone to estrogen. Men and women have both hormones, just in different levels.

You’d both have comparable immune systems*, you’d both have the same enzymes unless one of you was lactose intolerant, and you’d both have comparable levels of every other hormone in your body.

Once again: At the molecular level—the only unchangeable facet of your body—the only thing separating men and women is a ratio.

So stop with the “men are from Mars women are from Venus” slop. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we’re all capable of experiencing the same range of emotion, regardless of the plumbing between our legs. The vast majority of the genome which makes reading Erotica even possible sits on 22 gender nonspecific chromosomes.

Many of the perceived differences between the sexes are learned behaviours, and not a result of your genetics. Take slut shaming for example:

Slut can mean a lot of things. If you see a woman who enjoys her sex and likes hitting on men, you probably think she’s a slut. Yet if you see a man who enjoys his sex and likes hitting on women, you just think he’s a man.

Why?

Short answer: It’s what you were taught.

Women have an entire portion of their anatomy dedicated to pleasure. Unlike men, they get a cluster of nerves at the clitoris which exists for no reason other than to induce orgasm. So why on earth would a woman ever feel shame for feeling something her body has evolved to feel? It's because there are some people in positions of power that feel threatened. The only way they feel they can secure their place is by putting other people down—and shaming an entire sex for their biology cuts the potential competition in half.

There is no scientific basis for this shame. This difference in behavioural coding is strictly societal.

Slut shaming is just scratching the surface. But any behavioural difference attributed to one’s sex and not one’s upbringing or personality or other gender irrelevant genetic factors does not address the fact that men and women both possess equal capacity to experience the range of human emotion.

And at the end of the day, that’s all we’re eliciting when we write, isn’t it?

-From your local frustrated pangender male, who is comfortable admitting he cries at Romantic Tragedies more than his female friends.



*Semantics—but the selling point of the mammalian immune system is its utter originality. The likelihood that two individuals exist on this planet with identical immune systems is phenomenally low. Nonetheless, one’s sex does not affect the coding of said immune system, and that’s what I’m getting at.

kuwisdelu said:

I can't say I've noticed all that much "men are from Mars; women are from Venus" around these parts.

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The mentality pops up every time someone makes an inquiry into the romantic preferences of the opposite sex--like we're all homogenous or something.

Also any time someone posts a generalisation of either men or women I start frothing at the mouth.

I'm having difficulty reconciling your well reasoned argument with a phrase like "mansplaining," a hurtful and frankly crude thing to call a pangendered individual. You might have better luck delivering your point without resorting to crass name calling.

My post was not directed at women--unless you are writing a POV man, nor was it directed at men--unless you are writing a POV woman. It was directed at writers.

I do not propose that men and women are psychologically identical. I proposed that the differences are not a result of our genetic sexes--but of socialization, as you call it. I cited slut shaming as an example of identical sexual behaviour across the sexes (men and women both like sex, alert the media) that's only perceived as different--and if writers were more invested in the mutual capacity for emotional response, they would not worry about writing POV characters of the opposite sex.

The point's well-taken, though. Maybe as writers, women will stop assigning their male characters masculing traits and trades like square jaws and jobs like 'mechanic' or 'firefighter' (though they're hot), and men will stop writing all women as buxom, long-haired strippers and whores (also hot).

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There's certainly nothing wrong with either of those tendencies. They go hand-in-hand with existing evolutionary imperatives--in other words, they're easy to like because you don't have to rationalise their absence (i.e. a smaller man's might or skinnier woman's fertility might be called in to question, even if recent medical advances or societal structures invalidate those concerns).

But the key thing is that our sex does not limit our ability to write these stereotypes, whether or not we choose to incorporate them. If you have an idea that requires you to jump in to the opposite POV, I say go hard!