How to balance male protagonist sensitivity to women
My MC is an assassin by trade and has a military background - sniper, Special Ops, etc. He was raised partly by his sister after their parents died in a car accident. He normally listens to her as she is often right and the long habits of a lifetime are very hard to break.
He sees his female coworkers predominantly as coworkers and is moderately surprised to find some of them regard him differently.
He has wit, education and sophistication. He drives very nice cars, loves the finer things in life. He has a passion for marksmanship and has been in training since childhood, which set him on the path he took.
He shows courage and is a gentleman. He still listens to his sister and always heeds the advice of others when it is in their field of expertise.
He has resolved to wait to look for love until after he retires as he envisions some Ms Right running for the hills when the conversation turns to profession. He would rather tell such that while he has a chequered past, that is the past.
I have been writing this for a year and have just shy of seven hundred pages of the adventures of my assassin. I see him clearly, but wonder if I might not be running the risk of men reading it, putting it down thinking some woman wrote it and just doesn’t get it.
My question to the gents out there is how best to balance a well brought up gentleman assassin and avoid the ‘written by a woman’ feel?
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2 answers
Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series addresses this issue in an interesting way. The main character, male, single, and in his late twenties in the start of the series, very much notices the looks of the women around him. That is, the stories are narrated in first person, and whenever a new female character is introduced, we are treated to a "male gaze", sometimes with "the MC's pants suddenly being too small".
At the same time, half those female characters are supernatural beings who would make the MC's life very unpleasant given half a chance (or very pleasant and very short), and the one character who could potentially be a Romantic Interest - she's a good friend, but first she's seeing someone else, and then she says no, and he cares about her as a friend - that's enough. So, while the MC notices the women around him as attractive, this particular thought doesn't translate into action. Personally, I find this approach very realistic. I mean, I notice attractive guys. Doesn't mean I go making a fool of myself every time a good-looking man passes by, right?
Since you mention your MC believes no "Ms. Right" would date him due to his profession, you can give some room to his regrets on the matter. He might come to interact with a woman he might have loved (or thinks he might have), but he wouldn't even flirt with her because he "knows" how it would end. Or he might feel a pang of jealousy observing a couple kissing under a street light. Cyrano de Bergerac, in Edmond Rostand's eponymous play, mentions how he feels when he sees couples walking in a garden, and "knows" he can never have that, being as ugly as he is.
Which all comes down to, your character is not looking for sex right now, he might not see it as a possibility right now, but that doesn't mean he can't ever think about it, in one form or another.
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One alternative is to let him indulge in sex without love or romance. Especially in modern times, there are at least some women that want the same; there are apps for that.
for example the vast majority of adults that marry do not marry virgins, and do not marry their first sexual partner. That has been true for me and all my family and friends I know about, and even my female friends that are gay. (USA, I can't speak for other countries). There can be exceptions, of course, I just don't know any.
The point is that it is not unusual. As post-pubescent teens multiple evolutionary mechanisms are pushing hard for us to have sex and reproduce, including by brain manipulation causing us to be more rebellious, impulsive and emotional than we are reasonable, patient or rational; thus much more likely to ignore consequences and "live in the moment". This agenda succeeds. There's research! Sex and Youth, by Bob Altemeyer, a Manitoba university psychologist, "Secret Surveys" of 1st year college students, average age 19, thousands of subjects spanning twenty-four years. (The "Secret Survey" is a clever way of guaranteeing the respondents anonymity in their answers.)
75% of women engage in masturbation at a mean age of 14.2; and 73% (by age 19) have had first sexual intercourse, at a mean age of 16.2. For men, masturbation is again the youngest age (99%, mean age 13.1), but only 53% (by age 19) had engaged in sexual intercourse, those at a mean age of 16.6. 85% had engaged in sexual petting of some sort or another.
Your male protagonist can be eschewing romance, without getting rid of sex altogether. Without being explicit you can suggest he resorts to masturbation to relieve sexual tension, with or without pornography (approximately 100% of men have been masturbating since puberty).
Or perhaps that he has sexual pick-ups away from home, or is reasonably skilled at finding women seeking casual sex, either using modern Internet apps or the old-fashioned way, in bars.
Personally I find the idea of a man waiting until he is forty or fifty to have sex extremely implausible, and not in a good way. Meaning, I don't think this situation would indicate any mastery of self-control in a man, but something more akin to a mental illness, a phobia, or denial of homosexuality, or religious obsession, or some other psychological problem. I think the drive is too strong, particularly in the ages between puberty and 28 years.
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