Sex doesn't have gatekeepers. It has two or more consenting participants, any of whom can say no at any time.
...which makes them gatekeepers. What did you think that term meant?
The extreme prevelence of the male gaze, and other male oriented phenomena, and the fact that the vast majority of popular media, advertisement, etc is either directly made by men, or directed and/or produced by men (ie, the particulars are controlled by men) means that our cultural pov treats the male perception and mindset as default. We all grow up watching, reading, listening to and being expected to sympathise and empathise with (mostly white, straight, cis) men. That has improved in a lot of media, but recently enough that we all still grew up under those conditions, unless we grew up disconnected from western popular media.
I'm not questioning this. I'm questioning [MENTION=61529]seebs[/MENTION]' claim that "women are not putting any special extra effort or research into writing men convincingly". The cultural expectation that we sympathize with male characters does not imply that women do not have to put any special extra effort into it. Indeed, the
complaint about this cultural expectation, the call for more female characters, is usually based on the premise that they
do. Hell, the first problem with the claim is just that it speaks of "women" (and "men") categorically, without quantification. Let me make a counterclaim that is a little more precise and, I hope, does not strike anyone as wildly radical: many women find many men to be puzzling, just like many men find many women to be puzzling. Now let me expand on that with another claim that may be a little more contentious: the people who
don't find their opposite numbers puzzling are the ones who are better at looking past sex and recognizing that the same basic emotions, desires, and motivations are pretty much common to all humans. (And then there are people like me who are equally oblivious around everybody.
)
If aliens used western (and especially American) pop culture to try and understand us, women would be much more of a mystery once they actually got here and met us, than men would be.
I honestly doubt they'd notice the difference.
Do you have a dog or cat? Is it male or female? Its behaviors are informed by its sex, to be sure. But they are much, much,
much more informed by the fact that it's a dog or cat. Male dogs chase squirrels; female dogs chase squirrels. Male cats scratch posts; female cats scratch posts. And so on. And there's a wide variance for individual personality, as well. Now, to the animal itself, its sex and the sex of other members of its species is a really big deal (especially if it's not spayed or neutered). But from our outside perspective... not so much. That's where alien scientists would stand with regards to us, unless like in
Star Trek they bear a fantastically improbable resemblance.
We notice (and even invent) differences between men and women because we're hard-wired to be hypersensitive to them.
They don't because they aren't.
