Daydreams

You know that one meme we've all seen.

No, not that one, the other one.

Oh I see, there are rather a lot of them, aren't there?

Well, in this case I mean the one where women were asking their menfolk how many times a day they thought about the Roman Empire, and then their jaws dropped as numbers that seemed too high to be probable returned.

Surely, the girls said, this can't be real. No one thinks about something weird and random that frequently.

Do they.

Of course we do. And now suddenly a great many men got to have a lightbulb event for how different you lot are. I mean of course they knew you were different before, they spend a lot of time thinking about that, too, but not thinking about Rome? This raises new questions and new possibilities.

I have seen all kinds of opinions of this; about how this is because Rome still holds such a deep seated place in our cultural imagination, about how Gladiator is a great movie and we should watch it right now, etc. Valid points, I'm sure, but I think it goes deeper than that.

I think that mens and womens brains are hooked into completely different streaming services. Womens channels are largely live TV, and men are tuned into the channel where they imagine their career in the roman legion, or the alternate history drama where their presence made the difference at Manzikert, or a great course presented by themselves on what the essence of maculinity is.

Now don't get me wrong, I know that women day dream, and I know they have an internal monologue, but I feel like when theirs spills over it is typically more closely tethered to reality. They've been running an algorithm on a social situation that played out earlier to figure out whether everyone likes them. Meanwhile the guy is trying to figure out how he would map the lead characters of Lonesome Dove to the heroes of ancient literature. Which flawed greek hero is most like Call? Are any of them Like Gus? How large of a wolf could I beat up?

I have a hare-brained hypothesis of a place I think this shows up. I have no real data, excepting vibes, but here it is:

I think that in Literature, women are superior at writing stories and dialogue that feel real, whereas men have a tendency to write things that are exagerated and idealized.

Hows that for a giant sweeping statement. But hear me out.

I'm going to give you a small but biased sampling. To try and make you entertain my conjecture. Please play along. NOTE: We are going to leave out Scripture and Shakespeare. It does not do to include works where the Almighty has taken a clear hand.

Start naming a list of great authors who are men. The first to come to mind. Did you have maybe, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Faulkner, Cervantes, Kafka, Lewis, Goethe, Twain?

'Where,' you puff up and ask indignantly, 'is Tolstoy?'

Perfect, now I can include him in the man list and not have you accuse me of putting my thumb on the scales by mentioning multiple russian authors. Haha.

Now the ladies: Austen, Eliot, Bronte, O'Connor, Christie, Alcott, Lee.

One set of these is clearly weirder and more esoteric than the other, and the other clearly has dialogue that is obviously more authentic, and tells tales that pass the realism test.

Women care more about what is real and present. Men care more about what is true abstractly.

I think that the differences in how men and women write probably has to do in the difference in how they daydream. I mean, Susanna Clarke tried to write something weird with Strange and Norrel, but what floors one is how natural it actually feels, and how flipping good the dialogue is.

That is my half-baked story, and I'm sticking to it.

And I suppose, in the end, we were probably meant to daydream differently. These things ultimately tying back to how we are different and complementary; almost as if designed to be that way.

Now if you don't mind me, I need to go stare out the window and think about Rome for a while.