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Ooh that’s interesting. Would you say there’s anything noticeably different about the content of the works of the suspected imposters? Do they write for an explicitly female audience and follow all the expected tropes and story beats, or is there something in their works that makes them seem more gender neutral / more from a male perspective?
When you read enough of them you start to notice clear patterns and differences between how men and women write stories. Broadly speaking: Men tend to subordinate emotional states to the plot; women tend to subordinate the plot to emotional states. Male plots have a beginning, middle, and end. Female plots are episodic.
I think it's helpful to think of symbolic logic like a vanishing or focal point point. In artistic imagery, many parts of the image converge on one point over the horizon, the vanishing point. This focal point might be occupied by an object or view being emphasized. A vanishing point might also be empty space. But, fundamentally, there is a "center" that allows us to understand the center, the periphery, convergences and divergences. Literature works the same way. In literature, the meaning of a work converges on some idea or ideas. The symbolic logic of a story might even point toward some conclusion that is unstated in the text itself.
Look at Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam". Everything converges on one point, the image of God reaching his outstretched hand to Adam's slackened hand. We could write forever about every possible interpretation of every element in the composition: God is clothed and Adam is naked; Adam and God are both reclining in the same direction, down to Adam toes mirroring God's; God's celestial chariot is in the shape of the human brain; etc. etc. etc. But obviously the center is about the connection between God and Adam, the hand outstretched and the hand slack, everything is oriented toward one point. If you want to "understand" The Creation of Adam, you have to interpret everything in reference to that one point.
(Well, you don't have to, you can do whatever you want. But my contention is that this is essential to cognition, it's what "meaning" means at all. The Creation of Adam is understandable as more than a collection of random colors and atoms in space, it has a shape, it has a form. These are not just culturally arbitrary constructs, they can be as objective as 2 + 2 = 4. Maybe a future culture won't understand long flowing gray hair to be an obvious sign that this is God. But the symbolic logic is inherent in the painting independent of the culture that observes it.)
Look at Rothko. Rothko's painting tends to be extremely abstract, I won't pretend to draw deeply specific forms out of it. Rothko unlike Michelangelo could be described as "random colors and atoms in space". But they aren't random, at least, that's not how cognition works. There's still a sense that putting everything together draws out a form that has some kind of meaning. I'll use "Multiform No. 9," since it's on Wikipedia and I can quote directly:
You can stand in front of Rothko and feel something, abstract colors and shapes converge on something. Maybe you feel boredom, maybe your interpretation of feeling and sense is vastly different from mine. But the process of how to interpret something are still a one-to-one match for cognition itself. It would be coherent to argue, for instance, that Multiform No. 9 is a portrait, because the lone black shape in the center is starkly different from every other shape, and that this individuation is essentially personhood as such. Whatever else we want to say about Multiform No. 9 can be put aside as flimsy and therefore unimportant here, but this is basically how interpretation works, which is how thinking works.
(A similar idea is that any piece with a sharp horizontal division between upper and lower halves is essentially showing the horizon or the sky. Consider Rothko's "Orange and Yellow". That's the basic shape the sky make when you try to reduce it to a kind of essence, the contrast between the ground and the sky. It's such a strong pattern that anything shaped in two pieces starts to become "the sky," even if there's no literal reason why this should be so, even if you make the colors so unlike the actual sky. Similarly I seem to remember a photo going around after the war in Ukraine broke out that deliberately saturated a field of wheat against the sky until it was yellow and blue like the flag -- because that's what those shapes mean, it's as inherent as Bouba and Kiki.)
Look at Catcher in the Rye. This is even more complicated and it becomes hard to say anything serious about a few hundred pages in just a few sentences. But Catcher in the Rye is a pretty easy case for exposing some of the machinery of how symbolic logic works. The central image of the book, so central that it becomes the title, is the "Catcher in the Rye". Holden Caulfield imagines himself catching children running through a field of rye before they fall off a cliff. It's hard not to interpret this as concerning innocence and protecting the innocence of children. And so it forms part of the evidence for the interpretation that Holden Caulfield might have been sexually abused -- even though there's nothing in the text that explicitly says any of this. It's a kind of vanishing point that converges out of frame.
I have detoured far away, forgive me, but now I can get back to stereotyping men and women.
Male logic tends to converge on one symbolic point. Female logic tends to converge on several different points (which is the same as saying it might not converge at all).
The structure of all romance plots is fundamentally the same: Will they or won't they? Two people meet, they encounter obstacles and fall in love, then they get together.* That's the story. Once they are happily together the story is over, there's nothing left to tell. A lot of romances might add some B plot so there can be a bit more to flesh out (Romeo and Juliet therapy-talk confront their parents ). But fundamentally the story is the shape of the relationship, because it has to be.
Look at The Notebook. Boy meets girl, they fall in love. Then they overcome some obstacles (they break up, they lose touch during the War, girl becomes a woman and is engaged to someone else, they reconnect, she runs away, etc.). But fundamentally the story ends when they have overcome all obstacles to truly consummating their relationship. In fact, the story is really contained within a framing device where they're both old and she has dementia and he is trying to remind her who he is. But symbolically it's the same thing: their love in the past resolves symbolically at the same time their love in the present resolves.
Look at "Red, White, and Royal Blue". This was gay romantasy schlock that got a big-budget Netflix adaptation (Umma Thurman was in it). Essentially, the son of the President of the United States and a prince of England fall in love after being forced into diplomatic work together. Enemies-to-lovers, classic schlock. Naturally it has to be kept secret. They break up, they get back together, they overcome obstacles, etc. etc. Emotionally, the romantic arc ends when they are discovered by the public, they confront the prince's homophobic Queen Mother (grandmother), and they truly, finally, come together. Happily Ever After!
Well, no, the story continues. The movie adaptation leaves off there but the book does not. The book is full of a continuing B-plot concerning the upcoming 2016 Presidential election. The president, the protagonist son's mother, is the first female President, a Democrat, and she runs against this brash political Republican outsider who is not even pretending to not be an expy of Donald Trump. Throughout the book the protagonist works on his mother's re-election campaign and is convinced, against all odds, despite what everyone else tells him, that Texas could finally flip blue. So the end of the novel comes not at the end of the Will-They-Or-Won't-They, it comes at the end of the election when the protagonist's mother wins re-election after Texas flips blue. This codicil has virtually nothing to do with the core romantic plot of the novel, which is ostensibly the whole purpose of the story being told. But I'm sure it's very emotionally satisfying and cathartic to the probable readers of "Red, White, and Royal Blue," who probably near-unanimously want their American politics-themed romance to include an emotional victory for not-Hillary Clinton.
If it wasn't obvious from my characterization, The Notebook was written by a man, and Red, White, and Royal Blue was written by a woman.
I find this pattern to be fairly consistent: Male stories converge on one symbolic point. Female stories converge on multiple symbolic points, which is the same as saying they only converge emotionally.
As a final example, consider The Lord of the Rings. Famously, it is a story full of many twists and turns, stories-within-stories, poetry, odd-ends, etc. etc. The ending of The Lord of the Rings isn't even when the Ring itself is destroyed, as the plot continues for a good while longer up until the Scouring of the Shire: The four hobbits return home and find home overrun with evil, which they then purge. It might be said, isn't this a separate story, isn't this just like the end of Red, White, and Royal Blue? But I would argue that it's not, the arc of The Scouring of the Shite recapitulates the arc of the rest of The Lord of the Rings as a whole: men saving a fallen world. The symbolic logic of The Lord of the Rings, in fact, is consumed with the world more than the characters within it. Because the world is a vehicle for God, the world is vast in service to emphasizing the will of God. It's the story's vanishing point: God is basically never discussed at all, and yet the story doesn't make sense without Him. All the sub-stories and tangents, which otherwise don't have a purpose, in fact reflect exactly what Tolkein wanted to say -- the world is mysterious and vast because there's a higher order in it.
So I'm not just saying that women are more emotional or that their stories have tangents or that girls are yucky and gross and they have cooties. I'm saying that their stories converge as emotional experiences, not as logical stories.
For some other examples of this: Saltburn, Tales of Genji, Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, Anne Carson's poetry, Willa Cather, Triumph of the Will, To Kill a Mockingbird, Twilight. Even Harry Potter, which is a very well-plotted story with a great deal of symbolic coherence, has that damned epilogue so we all know how to feel after all.
Somebody else could probably adduce examples of very male plots that don't appeal to women at all because they don't cohere emotionally in a way women find satisfying. Master and Commander?
I've written a lot here now (far more than I intended to), but hopefully this answers the question. I find this difference between men and women to be very consistent, even when it's hard to put into words, even when specific examples can be found going both ways. But men and women write very different stories, I think it's been very easy for me to train this sense by reading romance novels. And when you have a strong-enough sense of it you can look at airport romance novels written under pseudonymous pennames and you can say, if it walks like a man, and quacks like a man...
*(The small percentage of romance stories that don't end happily are usually born of the author's need to feel that they are writing something "serious," that romance is somehow beneath them.)
This was amusingly illustrated by a pasta that’s decades old now. It even features alpha widowhood and political cuckholdry from quokka’d do-gooders:
Below is the result of a writing assignment given by an English professor from the University of Colorado. A “tandem story” was to be written by two students, one male, one female.
The story was to be compiled in alternating paragraphs via email, with CC’s to the professor. There was to be no communication between the writers aside from each successive email. The story would end when both participants agreed a successful conclusion had been achieved.
Rebecca (PINK) Gerry (BLUE).
THE STORY:
(first paragraph by Rebecca) At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
(second paragraph by Gerry) Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic, tea-drenched bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to GeoStation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
(Rebecca) He died almost immediately. But not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who ever had feelings for him. Soon afterward, Earth stopped pointless hostilities toward the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read online one morning. The news simultaneously excited and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no cell phones, no Internet to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at the beauty around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
(Gerry) Little did she know she had less than 10 seconds to live. The wimpy peaceniks who’d pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for hostile empires determined to destroy the human race. Just hours after the passage of the treaty, alien ships were on course for Earth with enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. Their lithium fusion missiles entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, was rocked by the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.
(Rebecca) This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent geek.
(Gerry) Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other FUKING TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm an air headed bimbo who reads too many romance novels!"
(Rebecca) Asshole.
(Gerry) Bitch!
(Rebecca) FUCK YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!!
(Gerry) In your dreams, ‘Ho. Go drink some more fucking tea.
(Rebecca) I hate you. Don’t ever talk to me again.
(TEACHER) A+ I really liked this one."
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