I was once talking to a man about a book I was writing. The book was dual alternating POV between the male lead and the female lead. I was struggling with my ability to write the male POV (point of view). This man told me, “There is no such thing as male POV.”

But is that really true?

To answer this question, let’s break down exactly what we’re talking about.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, fiction is the study of human nature, so regardless of what gender POV we are writing from, it needs to be realistic. If you’re a man writing from female POV, it would behoove you to understand female human nature to do that. The same goes for a woman writing male POV.

99% of my job as a writer is empathy.

This is especially important when it comes to my POV characters regardless of whether they're male or female. The reader will be riding around in the character's head hearing their thoughts and experiencing all their emotional conflicts. I have to understand all of those in order to portray them accurately.

I’m a woman, so if I’m writing a first-person male POV description of a guy having sex with a woman, obviously I have never experienced that and I never will experience it.

I have to rely on empathy, put myself in the male character’s position, and imagine the sensations he would be experiencing, the emotions he’d be feeling, and the thoughts that would be running through his mind.

The other 1% of my job is observation. I have to describe the body language cues that I would be seeing if I was actually in the room watching these characters interact.

I’m reminded of the famous quote from the movie, As Good As It Gets. The main character is a male author who writes romance. He’s asked how he writes female characters so accurately. His reply: “I take a man and I remove logic and accountability.”

I don’t think any sane person would argue with the statement that women are more emotional and men are more rational. This is not to say that women are devoid of rationality any more than men are devoid of emotion. Both of those statements would be ridiculous and we all recognize this.

Both sexes struggle to remain rational in emotionally charged situations. That isn’t gender specific.

Because of the physical intimidation factor in male-male interactions, it’s harder for men to make themselves vulnerable and express emotion to other men.

When women make themselves vulnerable and express emotion, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s expected.

When men make themselves vulnerable and express emotion to other men and they get rewarded for it—either through praise, support, encouragement, empathy, or through physical touch—the bond that’s created and the trust that’s established between these men is far in excess of what would be possible between two women or between a man and a woman.

For this reason, men are much more reluctant to walk away from their significant male relationships simply because they’re so much harder won.

We need to understand this when we set out to create our fictional male characters (and to understand real-life men). Take romance fiction as an example—although this argument holds true for any genre where we’re dealing with male characters—which is all genres.

The barrier to a man going forward with a particular romantic relationship will often be some conflict he has with another man. The other man could be his best friend, the woman’s brother or father, the man’s boss, or some other man whose relationship he values too much to sacrifice.

The man has to resolve this conflict with his significant male counterparts before he can move ahead with the romantic relationship. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect him to discard his significant male relationships for any woman no matter how much he loves her.

These conflicts and tensions need to be resolved in a way that strengthen the man’s character. This is the only way we’re going to create a satisfactory outcome where the man will move forward happy, satisfied, and confident in his future romantic outcome.

The woman manipulating, coercing, or otherwise pressuring the man into walking away from these male-male relationships does not strengthen him or the relationship. It weakens the man and it undermines the romantic bond.

Doing this in fiction would create an unrealistic scenario where the reader would not believe that this relationship could survive long-term—because it wouldn’t survive long-term.

Women value strength in a man, so it’s critical that any scenario we develop in our fiction strengthens the male lead and doesn’t weaken him.

If you doubt that women value strength in a man, you only need to look at the romance market to see that this is true.

The romance fiction market is hands down the biggest, most lucrative fiction market second only to porn. I’m not going to touch on porn, so we’ll take the romance market as our guide to what women are really shopping for in a man.

The romance market offers a very specific type of male role model to its consumers. This male role model is strong, dominant, and authoritative. He has very clear, firm boundaries and he isn’t afraid to enforce his authority, especially with the woman in his life.

Women might say that they want a sensitive New-Age guy who worships the ground they walk on, gives them anything they want, and sympathizes with a woman’s menstrual complaints, but that isn’t what women are consuming and it isn’t what they’re fantasizing about.

I would advise any man reading this who might be wondering what women are looking for to take special note of this. Stop listening to what women say they want and look at what they’re actually consuming.

If a man is a billionaire and he lacks these qualities of strength, dominance, authority, and the ability to enforce clear, firm boundaries, a woman won’t be attracted to him. Women might say they want a man who makes a six-figure income, but if we look a little deeper, we’ll see that money isn’t as important as these other qualities.

If a man has money but lacks these qualities of strength, dominance, and authority, she won’t love him and she won’t respect him. If a man makes himself an ATM machine to give her all the money she wants to go shopping all day long, but he lacks the ability to stand up for himself and demonstrate his strength, she’ll despise him, she’ll cheat on him, and she’ll do everything in her power to tear him apart.

Men also value strength in other men, but not in the way most people think. It’s time we put to rest the old myth that men are somehow less effective at expressing their emotions and vulnerabilities than women are.

This is patently untrue. We’re here to study human nature as it really is, not to perpetuate myths about the way people operate. Perpetuating myths won’t give us a clear understanding of human nature such that our fiction portrays people realistically.

The truth is that men express their emotions all the time. 99.8% of the time, men express their emotions appropriately. It’s absolute BS to suggest that men are somehow stunted, backward, immature, or incapable of expressing their emotions. Men are perfectly capable of doing so.

It’s also a myth that men express their emotions differently than women do. The old saw men and women don’t take each other’s emotions seriously because they aren’t expressed the same way is nonsense.

Let me give you an example. Imagine a man says to a woman, “It really made me mad when you flirted with that guy right in front of me.”

A man could say this in a perfectly rational, neutral tone of voice. He’s still expressing emotion and he’s doing it appropriately.

A woman who doesn’t take this seriously because he isn’t screaming and crying hysterically is just plain heartless. This is a function of the apathy in our society where people find it convenient to ignore the pain, humiliation, and outrage of those closest to them.

We can prove this easily by reversing the genders of the individuals involved. Now imagine a woman saying, “It really made me mad when you flirted with that girl right in front of me.”

Imagine the man ignores her statement and brushes it off by saying she couldn’t be serious because she wasn’t screaming and crying hysterically. We could easily see that he was only making a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that he doesn’t give a damn about hurting her feelings.

The same is true in reverse. The woman saying that the man’s feelings are invalid because he stated them rationally and calmly is simply her way of excusing her own callous disregard for his pain and anger.

Conversely, if a man blows off a woman’s emotional expressions because she’s being more demonstrative and histrionic than he would be in the same situation, this is also a convenient excuse for him to ignore what she’s saying and the impact of his behavior on someone he’s supposed to care about.

This goes back to my previous statement about empathy. If we truly care about the other person, we’ll recognize the validity of their emotional expressions no matter how they are expressed.

If a man (for example) expresses emotion rationally and logically, the manner in which he expresses them doesn’t invalidate the fact that he is expressing them.

Dismissing his statements by saying he’s somehow immature or underdeveloped in his ability to express himself is a cruel distortion of the fact that the listener simply finds it convenient to ignore his feelings and needs.

This leads to the other part of our quote from, As Good As It Gets. Are women somehow incapable or averse to taking accountability—in relationships or in anything else?

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who embrace and seek out accountability and responsibility and those who do the opposite.

High-level, high-achieving businesspeople and entrepreneurs actively seek out and take on additional accountability and responsibility. They take on far more accountability and responsibility than the average person. These businesspeople actually thrive on loading themselves with as much accountability and responsibility as they can possibly shoulder.

Then there are the people who do the opposite. These people shun accountability at every turn, even when it would benefit them to accept it. These people go out of their way to shift accountability to others whenever possible.

These people actively deny their own agency in their lives, consistently place the responsibility for their lives on others, and complain loudly when some other person doesn’t provide them with the outcome they could easily get for themselves if they only took the trouble to proactively strive for it.

This distinction between the two kinds of people isn’t gender specific, either. I’m sure we all know people of both genders in both camps. There are plenty of high-level women entrepreneurs and businesswomen who take on massive amounts of responsibility and personal accountability to achieve their goals.

We also know plenty of men who do the opposite, make endless excuses about their lives without taking any steps to improve their situations, and blame everyone else for their circumstances.

In the end, in fiction as in life, so much depends on empathizing with another person, putting ourselves in their position, and understanding the world and the situation from their point of view.

This is a learned skill. If we do it in our fiction, we’ll start to do it in real life, too, and that will improve all our interactions across the board.

We can only benefit ourselves and others by increasing our understanding of how they think and feel. Our ability to do that depends on listening, observing, and taking as valid all their communications, whether verbal or nonverbal. This is how we show that we truly care and want what’s best for them. This is how we should be treating everyone, especially those closest to us.

All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. I am Jewish.

I am what is called halakhically Jewish, which means I was born from a Jewish mother. Judaism is passed matrilineally and my mother was Jewish. Therefore, I am Jewish.

I was not raised Jewish. I was raised in the Catholic Church. My mother converted and my siblings and I were raised Catholic.

We visited my maternal grandparents and occasionally celebrated Jewish holidays with them, but no one ever told me in so many words, “You’re Jewish,”—not in a way that I could understand what it meant. I didn’t find out I was Jewish until I was twenty-six.

A series of events led me to make this discovery. The first thing that happened was this. I was in the public library browsing the books when I discovered a book titled, Blood in the Face. It’s an exposé, later made into a documentary film, about the Neo-Nazi, white supremacist movement in the US.

I started reading this book, and in the process, I read some of these people’s rants against the Jews. My first response was, “There’s something in this. There must be something about Judaism that makes it special.”

So I started reading up on Judaism. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary because I had already learned most of it from my Catholic upbringing. I knew the Bible pretty well and nothing I read really grabbed me as particularly special.

A few years later, I was browsing in the library when I discovered Julius Lester’s book, Love Song.

Julius Lester is an African American professor at Amherst University. He started out as a professor of African American Studies and later converted to Judaism. He decided to teach a course on the historical relationship between African Americans and the Jews. To do this, he had to do a bunch of research on Judaism just to find out what it was all about.

He ended up converting to Judaism and Love Song is his conversion story.

Anyway, I had moved back to California at the time and I was staying at my parents’ house while I went to college. I checked this book out of the library and my mother saw me reading it.

That’s when she told me, “You know…..you’re Jewish.” It was the first time I fully realized that I was Jewish and what that actually meant.

This led me on a long journey and I eventually wound up in an orthodox community where I met my children’s father and we got married. We lived the orthodox Jewish life for many years.

So what went wrong?

It started out very subtly where I would get a repulsive effect whenever I’d read anything Judaism-related. I wasn’t repulsed by Judaism itself. I would just get this powerful sense whenever I read about Judaism or listened to a lecture on Torah or anytime I was exposed to Jewish thought.

Some part of me would think, “This is all wrong.” What I heard and read didn’t match my version of reality.

It took me years to figure out what was wrong about it. The burning question in my mind became: if this is wrong, what’s right? If this isn’t true, what is?

Once I figured it out, I had to go through many more years of searching, study, and reflection before I put together what I really believed. This was one of the crucial factors that led me to write the Proof For the Existence of God. The Proof became a way for me to collate my train of thought, to justify and substantiate my version of reality, and to present what I actually believed to be the truth.

So what’s wrong about Judaism?

The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit.

Dualism is the belief that there’s a right vs. wrong and never the twain shall meet.

Seen another way, we could characterize dualism as the belief that God is over there on the left and the mundane, “fallen” world is over there on the right. They aren’t the same and they never will be. There’s an unbridgeable gap between them and there’s no way for the “fallen”, ordinary, human world to ever attain the holiness or perfection of God.

Non-dualism, by contrast, is the belief that good vs. evil, God vs. man, holiness vs. the mundane are all part of one universal whole. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Proof is a non-dualistic belief system.

Most people see Judaism as a purely dualistic belief system and there’s a very good reason for this. The vast majority of Biblical, Talmudic, and every other kind of Jewish material reinforces this. The entirety of the Bible is specifically constructed to present this dualistic worldview. Every single facet of Jewish education reinforces it.

The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit. People go their entire lives living orthodox Jewish lives, studying Judaism in minute detail, and never finding this non-dualistic heart. I would be very surprised if any Jewish person would be able to tell me off the top of their heads where this non-dualist heart is located in the thousands of volumes of Jewish literature.

This is the problem. If we have to go looking for the truth buried under thousands upon thousands of stories, ideas, volumes, lectures, and lessons, then we have a serious problem. Some people might come to the conclusion that this system was specifically designed to deceive us and to actively stop us from finding the truth.

I met a man once and we got talking about this. He lives in my town, but he was born and raised in a strictly orthodox Jewish community in Perth, Australia. He attended Jewish schools and received a strict orthodox education all the way through school. He grew up believing he would become a rabbi.

When he graduated, he attended Aish HaTorah, which is a big rabbinical college in Jerusalem. While he was there, everything fell apart. He dropped out of school, left Israel, and completely turned his back on Judaism.

At the time we were having this conversation, he had a little six-year-old son. The father was not raising his son with Judaism at all. The father told me that he didn’t think Judaism had anything worthwhile to offer his son. That is an incredibly damning condemnation.

This man’s parents raised him in a strictly orthodox home. His entire social circle growing up was orthodox Jews attending the same schools, the same shuls, and spending all their holidays and Sabbath meals together.

Imagine what his parents must think—now that this man is grown and he doesn’t think any of that offered him any value—nothing worth passing on to his own children. I can’t think of a more damning condemnation than that.

We had this conversation just a few weeks after I completely walked away from Judaism and this man asked me, “What happened? What went wrong?”

I repeated what I said above. “The non-dualistic heart of Judaism is buried under mountains of dualistic bullshit.”

He said, “I studied for twenty years and I never found it.”

This is absolutely criminal. There is no justification for this at all.

Can you imagine spending twenty years studying, searching, yearning, hoping, and praying? This belief system promises the answers to the most pressing questions of our lives. Finding these answers is our most fundamental need as human beings.

People have even been willing to sacrifice their very lives to belong to something that gives their lives this kind of meaning. This belief system promises all of that, but it never delivers. This man studied for twenty years, only to walk away empty-handed.

That is absolutely inexcusable. No wonder this man doesn’t think Judaism has anything of value to offer his son. If a cult did that, we would all know what to think. And this is one of the world’s major religions.

I told this man, “I know where to find this non-dualistic heart. I can tell you where it is if you want to know.”

He said, “Don’t bother. It’s too late.”

He was absolutely dead right. If we have to look that hard, then the system is deliberately rigged to hide that kernel of truth. If one sentence of truth is hidden among millions of others that discount that kernel of truth, then the system is deliberately deceptive.

We see this all the time in Jewish literature. Jewish tradition states point blank that the esoteric mystical secrets of Kabbalah shouldn’t be taught to anyone under the age of forty.

This is the worst kind of gatekeeping. This is saying that only people of a certain age or education level or intelligence level should have access to a true understanding of how the world works. Only a certain chosen few should have the information necessary to interact correctly with the world so that they can attain happiness and fulfillment.

This attitude is absolutely criminal. It robs people of years of happiness and renders their lives meaningless and not worth living.

Compare this to Buddhism, Taoism, and other belief systems that make a point of teaching non-dualistic thinking to three- and four-year-olds. Non-dualistic realities are taught right out of the gate. They aren’t hidden or buried or wrapped in countless stories about fictional characters and tales of God’s vengeance against evil-doers.

The fact that the non-dualistic heart of Judaism is in there at all is an insult to the seeker. If the system is going to be that difficult to navigate and so intentionally misdirect the seeker’s efforts, just leave the nugget of truth out entirely. Putting one sentence in there hidden under millions of other sentences is a slap in the face.

Are you wondering by now what this non-dualistic heart is? Some of you reading this may be Jewish. Some of you may be orthodox Jewish. Some of you may have studied Torah every day for decades.

The simple fact that you don’t know where this heart is proves my point. If I have to tell you, then that proves this non-dualistic heart isn’t obvious enough. The system is designed to hide it and to stop the seeker of truth from finding it.

Judaism does more than surround this heart with meaningless misdirection and distraction. The entire Jewish system of thought is designed to stop people from having a direct, one-on-one relationship with God. This is the foundation of dualistic thinking and the whole system of Jewish education is built on ingraining dualism as the dominant way of thinking.

The Jewish tradition teaches that Moses was the only person ever to see God face to face, which is crap. Each of us can and does meet God face to face all the time.

Compare this to Christianity which teaches that basic belief in God is based entirely on a one-to-one relationship with God. Read any Christian material or listen to any Christian advice. Prayer in the Christian world means, “sitting with God”, “bringing your problems before God,” “asking God’s advice,” and, “listening to God’s voice speaking to you.”

Christianity is entirely geared toward bringing the believer into a personal, intimate, daily, communicative relationship with God.

This kind of personal, intimate, reciprocal relationship with God isn’t even on the program in Judaism. Judaism doesn’t teach it. Judaism doesn’t emphasize it. Judaism doesn’t reinforce it in any way. As far as I can tell, Judaism doesn’t even mention this relationship as an important element of spiritual practice.

Prayer in Judaism means reciting passages in another language. For anyone who isn’t fluent in Hebrew, these passages don’t mean a thing. We aren’t supposed to understand them. We’re only supposed to recite them.

The same goes for the dietary laws, the specific garments that orthodox Jews wear, their daily and weekly practices, and all the details of the hundreds of laws they have to observe. The value doesn’t come from assigning them any meaning. The value is found in simply following the rules for their own sake. If they’re meaningless to you, that doesn’t matter.

While I lived in this orthodox community, I spent a few days staying with a disabled woman who belonged to the community. We were sitting at her table eating dinner one night when she started bemoaning the fact that she couldn’t walk to shul for services.

Orthodox Jews don’t drive on Sabbaths and special holidays, so most orthodox Jews live within walking distance of their community shuls. This woman was too disabled to walk, so if she wanted to go, she had to drive which meant breaking the rules.

If she followed the rules and stayed home, she became more isolated from the community which made her feel alone and unvalued. She also felt that staying home was a violation of the rules that called for her to attend services. She was in distress because she felt that there was no solution where she could fully embrace her desire to live an orthodox life.

I told her she should do whatever made her feel closer to God. If driving to shul for services made her feel closer to God, then she should drive. If staying home made her feel closer to God, then she should stay home.

Religions, spiritual paths, and belief systems have one job—to bring us closer to  a sense of meaning, holiness, and personal, intimate connection with our Divine Birthright. If a religion, spiritual path, or belief system isn’t doing that, it isn’t doing its job. It’s making our lives harder than they need to be and the system is useless to us. We would be better off without it.

Then we would be free to seek this intimate relationship with our Divine Source without something standing in the way of a process. The process would come naturally to us if that barrier wasn’t blocking our way.

God Bless You All.

​All posts on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann.
You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.