Androgyny

Tilda Swinton was one of the first people I thought of when I found out what androgyny is. Of course Virginia Woolf and Samuel Coleridge weren't talking about physical androgyny, but Tilda's androgynous all the same. It's eerie. 

Virginia Woolf was convinced that Coleridge was right: a creative mind should be androgynous. A writer shouldn't just write from the point of view from which they have always biologically seen.

I think Nicholas Sparks's writing is DEFINITELY androgynous. Let's think about it for a second: who goes to see his movies? Women. Who reads his books obsessively? Women. Who swoons over the male lead in the stories? Women. What is Nicholas Sparks? A man. For a man to write in such a way that women spend oodles of money going to the Friday night premieres for his movies and buying hardcover copies of his books, he must be pretty in-touch with his feminine side.

The Notebook was Sparks's BIG break (even bigger than the movie Message in a Bottle, which came out in 1999) was 2004's The Notebook, which is still a movie that girls freak out about. For Nicholas Sparks to appeal to women on such a deep level, and for him to have written so passionately about a young couple is amazing. Noah is every girl's DREAM, and Allie acts just like most of us girls would have. 

Even though Sparks doesn't possess the kind of androgyny that Virginia Woolf would've approved of (she probably would have found him mediocre at best...I know I do), it is definitely a kind of androgyny that strikes a chord with women everywhere and with many men's feminine sides.... If Sparks wasn't an androgynous writer, none of his books would have become the sensations that they are.