Men, please don't write women this way

I feel as if you're absolutely, totally determined not to understand this.

 

you might be more awesome than matwolf

 

Cassandra woke up and stretched, feeling the pull from her sore muscles. Maybe she'd overdone it at the gym the day before, but it was worth it. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She stretched down this time, savouring the burn in the backs of her legs.

She dressed quickly for work. Didn't matter what she wore to get there, since she was just going to peel it all off when she was on the stage.

 

Why the comparison between being preoccupied with someone's body and racism?

I agree with you that the passage was obviously satire, because to be anything else would be bad writing, but I fail to see any connection to racism?

 

More randomness.... (it's like I found an old flash-drive full of things I'd totally forgotten about)

Back when I was a pothead during university days, the sensation you describe above was one of my favorite things to enjoy while baked. After work (I was a server in a steakhouse) I would smoke myself silly and sit up against the sofa, on the floor, and stretch that divine hamstring stretch. It got to where I could lay flat on my own lap, to the amazement of all.

 

OK, I'm going to attempt this from the actual girl's point of view, before I abandon ship. The following will obviously reflect the fact that I have more interest in dressmaking than anything approaching erotica.

Cassandra woke to the sun pouring through the slatted blinds. She stretched her arms, yawning, then climbed out of bed to roam through her closet. All the best tippers were expected tonight, so this was not a night to purely please herself.

Big Dave liked skin all the way down in back, but Mick liked a cleavage view. Margo (of Margo's Textile Fantasies), despite her genius with a needle, had yet to create a single dress that could satisfy them both. The girls needed serious infrastructure to get them standing to attention, and that called for coverage in the back.

Compromise, compromise. Big Dave was the better tipper, so she slid into the yellow sequined number that flirted with rear cleavage, and chose a bra that would offer Mick a nipple showcase as a consolation prize. Boys should learn to share, after all.

 

I've never read Jack Reacher, but when you read about his chest, do you get the impression that the narrator/author is obsessed with it? If so, I'd say it's the same issue as we see with the boobed-boobily example - it's essentially authorial intrusion. Instead of being in the POV of either the character or of a neutral narrator, we're in the POV of someone obsessed with chests.

Jack Reacher woke to the warmth of the sun on his massive chest. He stretched and his pectoral muscles stretched with him, long and glorious in the morning light. He sat up and lifted a shirt over his head, then tugged it down over his 50-inch chest. Tight, but that was okay; let everyone know what they were dealing with. His torso was ready for anything. His nipples pushed through the thin fabric, but there was nothing feminine about the display. His chest made it clear that he was a man. A man with a huge chest.​

 

So can we now have examples of this irksome "boob obsession" from published books? Or other "real-life" examples of Men Writing Women Terribly? (or is that too mean?)

 

Sure. George RR Martin did it with Daenarys. He was disgustingly in love with her (and actually did write about her boobs).

 

I'm only a few Dany chapters in... But I'll keep an eye out for any potential boobielicious transgressions.

 

I'm gonna be honest here guys, boobs are a red herring. Even during sex they're awkward to play with...

 

I haven't read GoT, but it, and the breast problem, were referenced in a Cracked.com article:

 

Yup, it should read something like this: "Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest -- and it was annoying. Do these barbarians expect me to go riding without proper support? Dany thought grudgingly. Just because they're small doesn't mean they don't wobble in an irritating fashion."

Kidding aside, that sudden description of her breasts threw me off. Like, seriously? Where the hell did that come from? I don't know if it because I'm a woman, but it would've never occurred to me to make a note of the character's breasts in that context. Even though we discussed here boobs aren't the same as dicks, to me this would be akin to writing: His small balls moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki kilt.

 

There's a list of male-gaze examples at *WARNING* *WARNING* TVTropes...http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MaleGaze

In terms of men writing women terribly/poorly/strangely, I've been frustrated lately in my reading of modern fantasy novels in which the male authors include one totally kick-ass woman... and leave the rest of the women completely out of the scene. The Powder Mage series is where I first noticed it, I think, but then once I noticed it there I found it was almost ubiquitous. We've seen this in critiques of Rogue One: (I haven't seen the movie) where the MC is female and kick-ass, but almost all of the backing soldiers and other cast members are still male. It's not boob-obsession, but it's definitely a weird view of the role of women...

 

James White in his Sector General novels. These novels are otherwise terrific in the way he explores the why of each alien species encountered by the doctors and nurses at the Sector General hospital, these encounters often being first-contact scenarios, but every time he introduces Nurse Murchison... good grief. Even the wiki entry on Murchuson is tainted by her voluptuous breastiness:

In his early books (first publication in 1962 for this series) he also falls into the cliché of nurses are women and doctors are men. He kinda' tries to fix this later in the series by suddenly fast-tracking Murcheson in the Pathology Department to a doctor of pathology. In the series pathologists and diagnosticians are the demigods of Sector General. But... by the time he gets to this it's a bit of a day late and a dollar short dynamic, and even when she trumps her hubby, Dr. Conway (the usual center of attention in these stories), as regards rank and position, she's still described as a boobalicious "space hottie".

 

We should also be discussing the flip side, how badly some women writers portray men in fiction.

Truth is, we like being objectified, in fact most of us find it flattering. Women writers need to quit being so modern and treat men like the dogs we are.

 

As a bear man, I am insulted.

 

Well, to be honest, let's tackle that....

I read a lot of M/M erotica, and that's also what I write, but a vast amount of this selection of reading is written by women. When you delve into the spec-fic side of things, I am often disturbed at the level of violence that is present. Too often, as I'm reading up to "the good parts" there's a whole lot of beating the shit out of each other before the bow-chica-wow-wow gets into gear. I'm like, is this what these writers think about gay male relationships? I've never once laid a hand on my husband that wasn't either completely neutral (come here, your collar's messed up) or to entice him into some fun under the sheets. This pulverizing of one another that suddenly turns into locked lips and griped cocks is foreign and disturbing to me. These same novels do also tend to hyper-masculinize the men, since they are Fantasy and Sci-Fi, into either Conan the Barbarian type sell-swords for Fantasy or genetically modified super-soldier types for Science Fiction.

 

The fantasy books by male authors I've read as of late have had a pretty good cast of both men and women (Joe Abercombie, Brent Weeks, Brandon Sanderson, Andrzej Sapkowski), but I think I've seen this One Kick-Ass Woman trope in movies... Then again, those scripts might as well have been written by women as I can't remember for sure.

ETA: This is different, but in one Brent Weeks' novel I was a little confused when one of the female characters, who has a crush on the main protagonist, drools after him when he bursts into the room and starts beating the shit out of some random mook (it was something like that). I was like, really, this person showed no signs of being turned on by violence... Or does the author think women in general love rippling muscles that ripplingly extend into a devastating punch and proceed to crush other people's faces in? Maybe I was overthinking it.

I can imagine it's been more common back in the day, but I was rather wondering how common a complaint it is nowadays, especially in the mainstream.

Come to think of it, I have this SF book called Freehold by Michael Z. Williamson, published in 2004, and I think he made these POV slips as well where the focus was on the woman's boobs or curves even when the scene was written from her POV -- for no apparent reason. But it's an unbearable, ridiculous book in many, many ways.

I'm somewhat familiar with the concept of 'male gaze'. To be fair though, a description berated for malegaziness might as well be a paragraph out of Helen Walsh's Brass and it's actually a bi-sexual woman's gaze that's hypersexualizing and objectifying herself as well as the women around her -- unfortunately it looks exactly the same and comes across just as random and gratuitous.

 

Yeah, I've noticed that...

I feel like m/m, especially the higher heat kind, is a strange world. It really is a sort of reversal of the usual males-objectifying/misrepresenting-females structure. Not all writers, of course, just like all male writers don't objectify/misrepresent female characters.

My current release is classified as m/m, and it's romantic (and a bit steamy) over the full series, but the first book doesn't have anything more than an acknowledgement of mutual attraction. Reading the reviews of it has been interesting--there are quite a few reviewers actually WARNING readers about the lack of steam, others arguing that it's justified (as if this is something that requires justification), etc. Now, part of the problem may be marketting - the book is being pushed to the traditional romance markets, is listed on Amazon (third choice, but still there) as romance, etc. But the readers (male and female, as far as I can tell) are certainly noticing and reacting to the lack of sex/romance.

 

In The Blade Itself by Abercrombie, there's only one female POV characters and she's not introduced until half-way through, right? I can't really remember the secondary female characters - were there any? (I checked the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Law and there are several whose gender isn't mentioned... so MAYBE they're female, I can't remember. But of the one confirmed female secondary character, her main listed characteristic is her relationship to a male character and her status as a woman: "sister of Collem West, bored with her station in life and what is expected of her gender.")

I've only read The Black Prism by Weeks (didn't care for it so didn't continue) but from my SPOILERY! Goodreads notes on that book: " Come on, male writers! It's not enough to give female characters some skills - you have to make them make sense, too! Don't set Karris up as a super-disciplined leader of a crack team of hyper-devoted bodyguards and then have her stalk off and abandon her charge behind enemy lines because he cheated on her sixteen years earlier, especially when they've been broken up for all that time! Don't make her so stupid she can't recognize the man she loved, or tell him apart from his brother (not twins, just brothers) to whom she was engaged, just because the guy put a scar on his forehead to match. Every OTHER character who'd known the two was apparently banished from the Chromaturgy in order to avoid detection, but Karris? Who's slept with both of them and is in love with one of them? Nah, she won't notice. No problem."

I've only read Mistborn by Sanderson, and from my Goodreads notes: "And I'm pretty tired of this weird form of "strong female character" we get where only ONE woman is at all three dimensional or even really present, and of course she's only useful because she has super-special magic, not because she's smart or disciplined or well-trained or anything. Essentially the only way for a woman to be a meaningful character in a lot of fantasy is if she's MAGIC. Blech."

Not saying that my way of reading these authors is the only way, but they were definitely problematic for me. (Don't think I've read any Sapkowsi).

ETA: I just found a response from Abercrombie to charges of sexism (well, misogyny) in his work, at http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2008/03/11/misogynist-moi-3/ - especially interesting if you read right to the bottom! Good for him!

 

Then there's Dinosaur Erotica.
I stumbled on to that genre a few years ago after typing, "Paleontology-Fossils-Dinosaurs" on audible.com, hoping for a recent release of something to do with evolution, and/or dinosaurs. Had no idea that some women had become so dissatisfied with men. That said, you would be amazed at what a velociraptor can do with his tongue. I love some of the book covers on these things, they've replaced the highlander in a kilt with a roguish dinosaur.

Dino Porn, what will they come up with next.

 

So that's why the diplodocus from the National History Museum is going on tour...http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/exhibitions/dippy-the-dinosaurs-going-to-move.html