Respectfully, many Native Canadian societies are matriarchal with female as the neuter character Miqmaaq and Ojibwa are two that spring to mind. The Cree language has no gendered pronouns whatsoever and the language is structured that one cannot have a male/female distinction.

It’s more difficult for me to write a female character as neuter because I don’t think of her as neuter, so I have to go to the effort to neuter her to my own satisfaction. At least, that’s the theory - I don’t ever actually do it.

I am waiting to see what AJH has to say about this, and then I will no doubt comment further, but I do question whether you’re really assigning your characters to neutral roles based on gender. What you do seem to be saying is that they have to have sexual relations to be noticeably gendered. Personally, I can’t say I’d ever be able to look at Aragorn as gender-neutral even if he never had a lustful thought regarding Arwen (and Tolkien certainly preferred that he didn’t). But he is born to be King. Not Gender-Neutral Ruler. His approach to life is distinctly male. (And I am not, by the way, referring in any way to the lovely Viggo M. I read the books nigh on thirty years before the movie came out.)

There is no reason women cannot have adventures in fiction, and I personally think it’s more fun to give them a chance. Each to his own, of course (note gender-neutral pronoun; cannot give it up because of subject not agreeing with verb sort of thing; none of your modern “they” nonsense). I also can’t see how it takes extra effort to write a female character, especially to a female author. Inappropriate sometimes, quite likely. But more difficult?? How? Why?

Resisting temptation to babble on (probably in very female fashion), I echo AJH’s comment about different angles of light. Thank you, indeed.

If there’s nothing particularly female (by this very loose definition of female) in the character’s future, he ends up male. That doesn’t mean that he can’t fall in love on the side, or that gender-neutral events won’t happen to a female character in the course of the story. Mrs. Croft served a particular function in Persuasion - she wasn’t just a random proto-feminist tossed in for gender balance.

Mine is just a gender version of the principle that only the facts vitally important to the story should go in it. Does this scene need to be there? Does this character need to be female? If the answer is no, I’m not going to put in the extra effort to make her so. I write science fiction, so if I want to change the sexual politics of the world I change them explicitly.

I can’t, however, agree with your position about male being the gender-neutral choice for narrative. Indeed, one of the problems is that literature imposes its own narrative structure on reality. If you look at history - social history - there are hundreds of different narrative possibilities. Even Ruth - whom you mentioned - leaves her country for love, but for the love of her mother-in-law, and the great declaration “Whither thou goest I will go ….thy gods will be my gods …where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried …the Lord do all this to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me” is made to her mother-in-law. Caterina Sforza, in the Renaissance, pioneered biological warfare in her great defence of her castle by sending papers impregnated with plague germs to Alexander VI. I once saw a Cape Horn medal (awarded to those who round the Horn under sail) that had been awarded to someone who went round the Horn while being born. No-one appeared to remark on where the medal was which her mother should have had.

The point, actually, is that women in real life have had a rich, complex, infinitely interesting narrative existence far from limited to (though encompassing) the limited roles you suggest. By assuming the “Male is gender neutral” narrative role, you seem, with respect, to be abandoning many narrative possibilites. And the more writers abandon them, the more that putting non-standard female characters into fiction, such as Mrs Croft from Persuasion who had “crossed the Atlantic 4 times,and have been once to the East Indies and back again; and only once, besides being here and there about home - Cork and Lisbon and Bermuda. But I never went beyond the Streights - and never was in the West Indies. We do not call Bermuda or Bahama, you know, the West Indies” becomes impossible because it looks like such an act of gender politics, when it is simple fact. Smollett and Austen wrote about women at sea in Napoleonic times; Forester, Pope and Kemp never. And when O’Brien does it, it seems often to have the air of self-conscious daring, of cocking a snook, that he has when he writes about sodomy or drug taking.

And that, I believes, exemplifies why for me, in writing fiction I believe neutrality is impossible, certainly for the author. By adopting one position it assists in making it so. And the historical truth becomes something one can no longer write, because if one did “it would be condemned as an improbable fiction.”

Longer discussion of the interesting points raised by you at my livejournal.