Writing: Women vs Men as Main Characters

This was something I meant to mention during the Men Writing Women post I did last week, but it got lost in all the other thoughts I was writing at the time and I only remembered it after I hit "post." It came up during the panel, sort of a tangent.

One of the things that came up was that most people like character-driven stories, that without the character for them to connect to, the story by itself wouldn't necessarily be interesting enough to keep them reading. So, this brought up in my mind the question: Do we write female characters because we can "safely" delve into more emotional turmoil, more visible emotional turmoil, with a woman character than a man? In our society (it even came up on the radio station as I was driving to work yesterday), it seems to be more acceptable for women to cry and show their deeper emotions than it is more men. Men aren't supposed to cry. They're supposed to be strong and suck it up and bury those emotions deep and not let them out or let them show and FORGE ONWARD! Whereas a woman in the same situation is allowed to show how emotional they are, to let it all out and share it with the world (and thus the reader), and then FORGE ONWARD! So does this mean that having a woman as a main character makes it easier to have a more character-driven story?

I don't necessarily agree, but it's an interesting question. Why are there so many urban fantasies with women MCs rather than men? (I bring this up, but I think this is true not because of the emotional question but because of the market/audience for that type of book.) I don't agree because I have written books with male MCs and I certainly hope that those books are still very emotionally involving and character-driven in nature. However . . . I would say that it's harder to write a male MC and get the emotional drive across, because you can't let them cry at the drop of a hat or anything like that. Which is wrong in the long run, but it's the nature of our society (as the radio station discussion proved). The male MC can't kill people in the battle and then the minute the fighting ends burst into tears over all of the life that's been sacrificed to win the day. Now, he can find that a friend died during the battle and grieve over the body . . . but pushing that grief to tears might be a little much. So I think it's harder to get the emotional turmoil of the male characters across, because you have to make that emotional turmoil internal somehow for men, while the women have more external outlets for those emotions. (I'm not saying there is no internal turmoil for women, just that there's more visible external indications of that than are allowed for men.) And if we agree that it's harder to show the turmoil externally for male characters, that makes making the story more character-driven harder in some sense.

At least in theory. As I said in the Men Writing Women post, none of this thought process actually occurs when I sit down to write. I don't consider any of these things while actually writing. The characters show up and they tell their story and they all have emotional turmoil and when all is said and done, it's my job as the writer to get that emotional turmoil across whether the character is male or female and to make the story character-driven. And I have to admit that one of the biggest struggles for me as a writer is to get that emotional turmoil across. When I first started writing and getting feedback from other aspiring writers (at online workshops and such), I was weakest in the area of emotional development of the characters. I had to work very hard at showing the emotions rather than just not including them (focusing on the plot and not the character), and then later on, just telling the reader the emotions rather than showing them. (I think that's the road for most people: ignore the emotions and focus on plot, then try to do the emotions but end of telling the reader what they are rather than showing them, and then the breakthrough to how to show the emotions rather than telling them.)

BTW, this is the part of the panel where we started talking about doing the character-driven story for other types of characters, like aliens (who wouldn't think and react emotionally the same way as humans). At this point, at a question from pbray who was in the audience, we were talking about when the characters would be treated equally, and I said that eventually we'll be writing novels from the alien's POV and we'd find out that as the alien ripped the head from it's human victim it was really crying inside. *grin*

In any case, thoughts on this? Do you think it's easier to write a character-driven story if the MC is female? Are men harder to write because of society's restriction on not allowing men to cry (except in certain situations of course)? Would the alien really be crying on the inside as it dismembered the annoying human parasites that have invaded its ship? Curious authors want to know!