Why I like male authors more than female ones: does gender matter?

Oscar Wilde, a man of ideas; though also a man of relationships, for he had a scandalous few.

And no, it’s not because I think guy authors are hot. (Most of the ones I like are either old or dead).

I noticed this a short while back: my favourite authors have tended to be male. Not meaning to sound snobby here, but as a teenager of the Twilight era I never got into the type of young adult novels marketed towards female teenagers (and hence were written largely by females). I found them…emotionally dragging? It’s a little hard to describe, but to me Twilight read like one big sigh. As a partial tomboy for most of my life, stuff like vampires and werewolves seducing airheaded teenage girls didn’t quite line up with me.

Of course, Stephanie Meyer is in no way representative of all female authors! Strangely enough, I really enjoyed Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, although Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) wanted me bash my head against my desk for being so slow and depressing.

So why do I like male authors more? I feel that male authors get straight to the point, instead of beating around the bush and using half a 500-page book to describe a girl staring at an overly-pale guy. I also tend to like their writing style more; it’s a little more structured and simpler––again, getting straight to the point. But most of all, I think it’s because most male authors (that I’ve read) write about ideas, whereas female authors tend to like writing about emotions or relationships. As important and interesting as emotions and relationships are, I am a person of ideas, so perhaps that’s why male authors appeal to me more. Of course, there are many female authors that don’t fit into this stereotype. I for one was pretty intrigued by Ayn Rand, and Muriel Barberry’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a magnum opus thoroughly divulging both ideas and relationships.

Ayn Rand, a philosopher.

Again, I need to stress that there is nothing wrong with female authors. I’m just talking about my personal taste, and I want to pitch the question of whether people agree that there is a difference between male and female authors. I know it’s dangerous to say this in our egalitarian society today, but we can’t ignore that there is a difference between men and women and how they think. Men think differently than women. Writing is your mind incarnate on paper and words, to some degree. Therefore, would men inherently write differently than women?

Do you tend to enjoy male authors or female authors more? Do you think there is a significant difference between how men and women write?

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Twilight book covers imageAyn Rand portrait Oscar Wilde portrait: public-domain