Neil wrote:
All that I've read suggests that men and women both respond to dangerous lifestyles in a pretty similar way. And a way, incidentally, that is generally not reflected in fanfic - crude humour, cruder practical jokes, behaviour that in more comfortable surroundings would be taken as outright nastiness, sarcastic putdowns, emotional silence, and apparently inappropriate or tasteless responses to shocking situations (laughing at corpses, for example). These are all coping strategies developed by people who desperately need coping strategies.
While I agree, based mainly on what I've read (though going to an awful lot of HIV meetings, perhaps one meets a similar kind of stress), most of this is rarely or never seen on screen... We see sarcasm and emotional silence, but very little of the rest. Certainly less crude/tasteless than your average office, a lot less language too. (In fact, one of the obvious differentiating factors between my 'real Tavia MS' and the B7 characters in my piece is the swearwords-to-content ratio.)
Tavia
PS The repetition of food in Patricia Cornwell is almost certainly (IMO) coincidental, everything in those novels repeats, as one realises if one reads several of them back to back.