Quote:
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When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles.
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Lol. I would posit, at least in my case, that males would find it harder to recall or could not answer, because they don't care about those kinds of details!
No matter what the PC Police say, men and women generally think differently. If you have a man and a woman sitting in a restaurant with conversations going on around them, the man would normally be able to remember generalities/bits & pieces of
all the conversations, while the woman would be able to get most of the details of a
few conversations. Likewise, if you ask about details of the plot I'd bet you'd get more males remembering than females. Ask about details of the characters and I would think more females would remember more accurately.
That is why I agree, as has been stated earlier, that men would generally prefer plot driven stories and women generally prefer ones which are character driven. But I don't think gender has any bearing on an authors ability to tell a story from either perspective. Certainly an author might be more comfortable writing in one mode or another - and might start their career writing in that mode, but their ability is determined by their level of experience, not their sex.
I think I have been reading more female than male authors lately, because my daughter handed me a book that she and her friends were reading (something about sparkly vampires) and I got hooked on the genre. Before that I was reading a lot of books by a male author (L. E. Modesitt, Jr.), because those were the series I was on. Before that I read a lot of J. K. Rowling because that was the series I was reading to the kids...now I'm re-reading J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobit/Rings books because the Hobit movies are coming out.
I never once thought or felt like I should or shouldn't read any of them because they used initials instead of their names or because they were male or female - never even entered my mind...