I am reading gone with the wind at the moment. It is a book I have picked and never gotten very far a couple of times in the past due to various reasons, lack of interest never being one. As a teenager I would have been completely taken on by a character like Howard Roark in fountainhead or Rhett Butler in this book. And to some extent even Ashley Wilkes. My gut feeling is that it takes a woman to write, imagine, describe & build a strong male character like these. [Let us not argue over whether a man can write it or not. He possibly can, trying hard to think like a woman but he may not choose to ... dwell on all the fine details that women tend to. Possibly different ones. Or wait, let us argue.]

Now I suspect it is an impossible character, quite removed from reality & existing in works of fiction only. They sure make an interesting read.