: Re: A critic made a comment that my female character sounds like she was written by a man I'm a man. Working on my sci-fi novel. It's meant to be a light-hearted heist caper. My main character

@Ann1701686

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This critique is valid and it’s not exactly your fault, here is why:

Implicitly, your character “swears, makes pop culture references and sexually objectifies men” without fear. There is a phrase used by feminists:

Men are afraid of being laughed at; Women are afraid of being killed.

This discusses the reality that women experience far more risk doing ordinary activities than men do—go to a party and have a drink, might be drugged; walk home alone, might be raped and killed; get promoted at work, suffer harassment for years from a man who thinks she doesn’t deserve it.

For your character to get to the point she is (in a society anything like ours), she would have had to wade through so much pain and fear that you as a man have not experienced. The female experience is so alien to the male experience that we miss the evidence of that fear even in our interactions with women we are close to—it takes a lot of work to start recognizing it.

If your character isn’t affected by the scars of such a life, then she has lived with male privilege which doesn’t make sense. Try adding in uncertainty, (unintentional) passive aggressive destructive talk from other women, (unintentional) passive aggressive destructive talk towards other women, anger, ptsd, and difficulty reacting strategically in response to casual sexism. This will be hard to do but will remove some of the male privilege from your character.

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