This comment bothers me, because here I was, reading this story, not generalizing about what gender does what, just seeing a character with flaws, and then your comment comes along and makes it not just about the gender of the character, but the gender of the
author as well. Your comment alleges that it's obvious that a man wrote this character (this sounds sexist to me), because only a man can write a bad female character (this also sounds sexist to me), and the character is bad because no woman thinks like this (I don't know what generalizing something over three and a half billion people sounds to me).
I read the story as the protagonist being vulnerable, insecure, and a bit unhinged:
> For one horrible second I contemplated killing her but that was wildly out of proportion and then I tried to pretend that I had only wished she was dead and then I just tried to forget about it.
The other (female, no less) characters in the story seem to agree:
> “Revenge?” She looked surprised. “I get something like… I don’t know, but revenge is a leap.”
Whereas you explained those same character traits by the author being a man, and thus sexist, and not knowing how women think. That line of thinking already contains two invalid generalizations, ie "this isn't how women think" and "therefore a man wrote this, because only men don't know how women think".
I guess this bothers me because it takes something I read as just about people being people and turns it into a gender/sexism issue, but the mere existence of the complaint itself reveals so much fractal sexism in the eye of the beholder that I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.
I read the story as the protagonist being vulnerable, insecure, and a bit unhinged:
> For one horrible second I contemplated killing her but that was wildly out of proportion and then I tried to pretend that I had only wished she was dead and then I just tried to forget about it.
The other (female, no less) characters in the story seem to agree:
> “Revenge?” She looked surprised. “I get something like… I don’t know, but revenge is a leap.”
Whereas you explained those same character traits by the author being a man, and thus sexist, and not knowing how women think. That line of thinking already contains two invalid generalizations, ie "this isn't how women think" and "therefore a man wrote this, because only men don't know how women think".
I guess this bothers me because it takes something I read as just about people being people and turns it into a gender/sexism issue, but the mere existence of the complaint itself reveals so much fractal sexism in the eye of the beholder that I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.