Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man? By Guest Author @JennyTwist1

Welcome back guest author Jenny Twist with another amusing and thoughtful post.  If you enjoy it, why not check out some of her previous essays on this blog, including the ever-popular The Earth Mother Rules!:

Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man?

By Nik Cyclist from Bangkok, Thailand -
Chaophraya River 

We were lost in the back streets of Bangkok. The heat   was oppressive, the smell rising from the canals was   overpowering and what little street lighting there was   failed to illuminate more than a small circle around   each lamppost. It was all too easy to imagine sinister   oriental bandits lurking in every alleyway. I was, quite   frankly, terrified. 

 But my husband, supremely confident in his own   navigational skills, consulted his map, with the rather   dubious assistance of the nearest street lamp, then  triumphantly led us to the restaurant.

It beats me how he does it! To me maps bear only a passing resemblance to reality. Indeed, it seems whenever I have to consult one, reality is invariably upside-down or sideways.

My husband, like most men, seems to be constantly aware of where he is in relation to the rest of the world and is able to relate it to a larger picture. I, on the other hand, like most women, am only really aware of my position in familiar places. I know my home, my workplace, where I do the shopping, etc. and am familiar with the routes linking these places, but I have only the haziest idea of how they fit in with the larger reality.

It would appear that the ability to read maps is gender-related. Most men seem to be able to do it without difficulty. Most women prefer to use landmarks.

There are other abilities, too, which seem to me to be gender-related. Men can run fast and efficiently, throw balls straight and hard, park cars in small spaces. Women can multi-task, find things and empathise.

Of course we can all be trained to do any of those things, but it seems to me that there are inherent abilities which are stronger in one sex than the other.

Why should there be these differences and does it matter?

I think the reason for the differences is as old as mankind itself. Primitive man had little choice about division of labour. Since at any given time a significant proportion of the young women in the tribe would be pregnant or nursing, it must have been the men who did most or all of the hunting and it therefore made sense for the women to look after the homestead.

If we look at the skills required for the two tasks, we will see that they are quite different. To hunt effectively, you require a good understanding of a large area of territory and to know where you are within it. The ability to run fast and throw accurately goes without saying. And it is essential to be able to concentrate on the job in hand. The hunter can not afford to be distracted by his surroundings. He has to be able to focus on the job in hand. And he has to keep communication simple and unequivocal. It is essential that every word or hand signal has one meaning and one meaning only. It would be disastrous to interpret ‘Lion behind you!’ as ´Did you remember to bring the lunch?’

To run a homestead effectively, however, requires an entirely different set of skills. It is much more important to know your home area in great detail than it is to have an awareness of the territory around it. Ability to run and throw is of limited value. And, instead of focussing on one thing at a time, it is important to be aware of and controlling several things at once. Even a housewife in very primitive times would have several tasks running simultaneously - preparing food, watching the fire, supervising children, etc. As for communication, straightforward verbal language is fine for adults, but when it comes to dealing with children too young to have developed speech, it is very useful to be able to read their body language in order to understand what they need.

In other words, the human race has spent hundreds of thousands of years developing spatial skills in men and developing empathy in women. It is hardly surprising that these abilities persist in modern society, even though their relative usefulness is now less apparent.

It has, however, left us with a problem of communication between the sexes. Women are so used to reading and interpreting body language that not only do we regularly fail to understand when men miss our signals, but we have developed a whole system of communication which allows us to say one thing whilst meaning another.

Consider, for example, how a woman behaves when she is not feeling very well. She expects people
around her to be aware of this, without her having to spell it out for them. If somebody asks if she is feeling OK, she is very likely to reply, “Yes, I’m fine” leaving it to be understood that she is not fine, but being very brave about it. Another woman will see this immediately and sympathise. A man is very to likely to say, “That’s all right then” and walk out, leaving her frustrated and upset. She may well be left with the feeling that the man is insensitive and/or uncaring.

Although understandable, such a belief is unjust. It is not that men are insensitive or even that they are entirely illiterate in body language. Men can read signals, but they are generally less sure of themselves when it comes to interpreting and responding. The man in the example above is almost certainly aware that there is something wrong, but he has taken her reply to mean ‘I am not fine, but I don’t want to talk about it.’

This lack of communication is not only a shame and a misuse of what, after all, is a very valuable skill, but it can lead to quite dangerous misunderstandings. The propensity of women to say one thing when they mean another surely helps support the belief that when a woman says ‘no’, she means ‘yes’- used as a justification for rape throughout the ages.

Modern society has gone a long way towards dispelling that particular belief, but it has not done much to change the ways of thinking that led to its development in the first place.

I am not suggesting for one moment that either sex should adopt the other’s method of communication. But we could each understand how the other works and perhaps learn to employ a little of the other’s skills.

Empathy is extremely useful for identifying problems, but it is unspecific and open to misinterpretation. So we need verbal language to augment our understanding.

If women want men to respond sympathetically, then we need to be a bit more precise. If, instead of saying ‘Fine’, we said, ‘No, I’m feeling awful and I could do with a hug,’ we would be much more likely to get the right response.

And my advice to the poor Henry Higgins’s of this world, who remain baffled by their inability to understand women, would be - ‘Just give them a hug anyway. Nine times out of ten you’ll be right.’

About the Author:

Jenny Twist was born in York and brought up in the West Yorkshire mill town of Heckmondwike, the eldest grandchild of a huge extended family.

She left school at fifteen and went to work in an asbestos factory. After working in various jobs, including bacon-packer and escapologist’s assistant (she was The Lovely Tanya), she returned to full-time education and did a BA in history, at Manchester and post-graduate studies at Oxford.

She stayed in Oxford working as a recruitment consultant for many years and it was there that she met and married her husband, Vic.

In 2001 they retired and moved to Southern Spain where they live with their rather eccentric dogs and cat. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, knitting and attempting to do fiendishly difficult logic puzzles.

Since moving to Spain she has written four novels and numerous short stories.

In July 2018 she was awarded the coveted TOP FEMALE AUTHOR award in Fantasy/Horror/Paranormal/Science Fiction by The Authors Show.  

Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Man? was first published in An Open Letter to Stephen King and Other Essays (2014).

 

Do We Still Need Conventional Publishers? By Jenny Twist (@JennyTwist1)

It's always a great pleasure to hand over my blog to the wonderful Jenny Twist and today she contributes to my debate on self- vs traditional publishing.  This article is taken from her excellent collection of essays: 'An Open Letter to Stephen King and Other Essays'  

In the modern world of e books and print on demand it is all too easy to imagine that conventional publishing will lose its raison d’être. It is now possible to produce your own book for nothing. Obviously this is a great boon for authors, especially the vast majority who were unable to get accepted by a publisher. But is it really such a boon? What do publishers actually do for their authors?

Having accepted an author’s work, it is the publisher’s job to put it into publishable form, i.e. make sure it is properly edited and provided with good cover art

Few, if any, authors are competent to proof their own work. No matter how good you are at proof-reading it’s very difficult to spot your own mistakes. You see what you expect to see, what you know to be there. You knew what you meant when you wrote that sentence, so may not realise that it doesn’t make sense to somebody else.

The independent author wishing to produce work of a professional standard has to, therefore, employ a professional proof-reader. One way round the cost is for authors to proof each other’s work. This is in any case often the way small press publishers handle editing, using their own authors rather than employing a professional.

Cover art is something else again. There are, of course, authors who are perfectly competent to do their own artwork. Perhaps more than you think. Creative people are often creative in more than one field. And there are packages available, free, for applying lettering to your original artwork. So it can theoretically be done at no cost. But my own experience has been that a professional cover artist is indispensable. 

Original Sketch Final e-cover

I came across this when one publisher I approached would not accept submissions without cover art. I literally spent weeks trying to find the definitive picture of an angel for my book. I wanted a carved wooden angel – the kind of statue so beloved in village churches in Spain. I couldn’t find a single picture that conveyed what I wanted. Eventually, I did my own drawing based on a stone carving. And I still hadn’t a clue how to do the lettering! Luckily I was rescued from this task by having my manuscript accepted by another publisher. But the experience made me realise that I, for one, was definitely not up to the job.

One of the things that you might think publishers do for their authors is promote their work. Wrong. The publisher’s job is to produce a product fit for the marketplace and make it available to the public and booksellers. It is not part of their brief to do promotion campaigns. Even the big publishing houses do very little of this. In fact, they are unlikely to do anything at all unless you are already a celebrity. It’s one of those Catch 22 situations. The chances are the only thing they will do is produce a monthly newsletter. So there is very little advantage for the author in using the conventional route as far as promotion is concerned. You have to do your own anyway.

You can promote without spending any money at all, using social network sites, writing blogs and newspaper articles, doing interviews on local radio and organising book signings. All this is free but very time-consuming and it is a constant cry from authors that they have no time to write because they spend all their time promoting.

There is actually no way round this. Even if you spend vast amounts of money on advertising, you probably still have to do a fair bit of promotion work. You could be the best writer that ever lived but no-one will buy your books if they’ve never heard of you.

There is, however, one major advantage conventional publishing offers the author. It confers respectability. A conventionally-published author has been vetted, accepted and polished by a professional organisation. Many new self-published authors have great difficulty being taken seriously. Some review sites actually refuse to review independent authors.

And there is one further advantage of going the conventional route – the publisher deals with

the distribution through booksellers. Booksellers are usually quite happy to deal with publishers since they take the books on a sale or return basis and have nothing to lose. In order to offer the same deal the independent author has to buy vast numbers of copies of his own book and negotiate individually with booksellers. The financial risk is enormous, not to mention the time spent approaching each outlet.

But what has this change in the business done for the reader? Well, for a start e books are much cheaper than printed books and there are literally thousands offered free every day as authors vie to get the attention of readers. Great, isn’t it?

Well, yes, it is, but we now have the problem of what to choose. Thousands of them! Where do you start?

I have gone from downloading anything that looked vaguely readable, to restricting downloads, even free downloads, to books by authors I know to be good, or people I have been wanting to read because I have come to know them on the social networks.

I have become jaded with free e books because so many of them are really badly-written. Sorry, but I’m afraid it’s true. Most independent authors produce badly-edited, if not unedited work. Many, if not most, have only a passing acquaintance with good grammar. And, I’m sorry to say this, but the vast majority have no talent for writing. I have read some truly awful books in the last few years.

For every great writer who never made it out of the slush pile in the publisher’s office there are hundreds who should never have been in print in the first place. Whatever you may think of conventional publishing, it at least operates as a filter preventing the really bad authors getting through.   

Sooner or later the rush to get free books will die down and readers will begin to be more discerning. They will be prepared to pay for a book, provided they are confident they will be buying something of good quality. And this, surely, is where conventional publishing will come into its own.

If there is one area where conventional publishing can really justify its existence, it is in the provision of high quality books. I’m not talking about literature here. I’m talking about good, readable stories with well-constructed plots and believable characters, written in good, grammatically correct English.

Sadly too many publishers, especially in the small press, do not do this job very well. I am surprised at how many bad writers are being accepted and at how poorly their work is edited. In my opinion the only way the small press will survive is to maintain a rigorous standard of excellence, and that means no cutting corners. It means employing professional editors, rather than using their own authors to edit each other, a practice which only exacerbates the problem of taking on semi-literate authors in the first place. And maybe it means doing a bit more for their authors than just publishing their work, like providing proper marketing services.

Those publishers who do this will attract the best writers and will gain a reputation of excellence. And maybe conventional publishing will survive.