“Men writing women” is such an obnoxious occurrence that there are whole subreddits, listicles, and even articles on college websites complaining about it.
I particularly like that last link from Emerson College explaining three key issues with men writing women, which I’ll highlight now:
Objectification. Men write entirely about women’s bodies and not about their personalities.
Weird sexual language. A lot of men apparently do not understand how women work sexually, despite supposedly having sex with them.
Their existence centers around men. The women are always love interests, married to a different man, daddy’s little princesses, or a sexual antagonist for the male hero.
Though I am a lesbian, I like men (platonically); I wouldn’t write a whole series with prominent male characters if I didn’t. Harsh as I might sound here, I’m not a man-hating harpy. I say everything here as some tough love.
I want men to do better in all ways, including writing. So let’s examine some of the ways you can avoid being accused of this heinous crime.
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Do not discuss breasts. For any reason.
This is one of the major elements that gets men called out as misogynist pigs, and it’s so easy to fix, so I don’t know why y’all haven’t just done it already.
I read David Guterson’s East of the Mountains as a teen and absolutely loved it. There really weren’t any women in the book, so I didn’t know that David Guterson is kind of a creep. I only realized this when I read Our Lady of the Forest where every single woman, no matter their relationship to the protagonist, had to have a full overview of their chest meat, often multiple times.
Again, it wasn’t like the protagonists were sleeping with all of these women. Guterson just felt like the only way to differentiate the female background characters was by what kind of breasts they had. Including a very young character who I believe wasn’t anymore than 16, and who everyone had to mention had small boobs. Eww????
As of now, I think there is only one reference to a love interest’s breasts in the entire Eirenic Verses – which is going to be 10 books, by the way.
Before you complain that “oh, well, you’re a woman, you don’t look at boobs” … remember, I am a lesbian. I sure do admire an attractive bust. I may sometimes wax poetic about them – just not in my books.
So go through your draft. CTRL + F to find any breast references (including synonyms). Remove it. Immediately. Find something else to discuss.
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When discussing a woman’s physique, focus on the face and any unique identifiers.
Descriptions of women from male writers often sound like they’re describing a porn star. You’ll see something like this:
She had a lean, taut body with perfectly round breasts that jiggled softly with each step. Her waist was so small that he could easily wrap his hands around it with a little extra space, but her hips flanged like a Coke bottle.
Ew. I could keep going on but it would make me a bit nauseous.
And the very worst male writers will even include hip, waist, and bust measurements as if this is at all useful or important. It’s not, really; these authors just want to get their male audience horny by making up numbers that sound good. But are usually physically impossible.
The thing is that this doesn’t help us visualize her in any depth. That is because most normal people look at someone’s face first.
Said author didn’t even say anything about the female character’s … well, anything but her body. We don’t know her hair color, eye color, facial features, height, weight, anything. Everything above the boobs is a blur.
All we know is that she looks pretty fuckable by Western standards. And this isn’t a very interesting description anyway; it doesn’t stick with us.
Let’s look at an example from my most recent book, What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, where Mordrek describes his love interest Juliska during their first meeting.
“My name is Juliska Sygnis,” a gentle voice told him. “I’ll be taking you to our meronym in Vercingetorix.”
He jerked his face to the woman, eyes wide. In his fragile state, she was the most ravishing dame he had ever seen. Snow-white hair that curled at the edges like wings; dark eyes and pale skin; a blue robe cinched with black at the waist. If he could speak with any coherency, he would have told her she looked like an angel.
Mordrek doesn’t mention her body at all except to say what she’s wearing. Amusingly enough, he defaults to the simplest color descriptions, as men tend to do. No “sapphire” here, just blue and black.
Instead, he focuses most of her attention on her fascinating hair: pure white with curling ends. It is this, not her cup size, that makes him say she looks like an angel.
Later on in the book, he talks about how he loves her crooked teeth. This is something that makes her less than perfect, and therefore it makes her memorable.
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You can write sexual encounters with women without objectifying them.
I do not think there’s anything wrong with writing sex scenes in fiction. But part of the reason that people don’t like sex scenes is because they are often far more explicit than most are comfortable with, and they treat women like a Fleshlight.
If the scene is written from a man’s perspective, there’s not really much about what the woman is thinking or feeling. We don’t get the sense that she is enjoying it; she doesn’t say anything funny, make weird noises. The POV centers on how the man is enjoying thrusting into his partner and how he likes the way her body looks.
Rarely does the woman take agency and flip things around, getting dominant with the man. She’s quiet and receptive, or she just moans and accepts what he is doing.
And, of course, there are even more depictions of how hot she looks while she’s getting railed.
In a healthy relationship, most people aren’t really thinking about the other person’s body while they are having sex. They are thinking of how good it feels, wondering if their partner is enjoying everything, worrying about their sexual performance. Their visual focus is likely going to be on the partner’s face to watch their expressions (if they’re in missionary), or on whatever body part they are currently pleasuring (if they’re doing something like oral).
Think about the woman’s feelings during the sex act and deprioritize bodily descriptions, especially in the thick of things. You can talk about their body while they’re undressing – and you should, particularly if this is the first time the two are being intimate – but once the lights dim and the two are in bed, it’s time to think about emotions.
Use your Theory of Mind to consider how the other character is feeling, then match that to dialogue or action. Then remove any breast descriptions that may have slipped in during your writing fugue.
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Ensure that women are defined by something other than their relationships to men.
Of course, if you have a mixed cast of men and women, the women will relate to men in some form. They could be lovers, friends, relatives, enemies, or whatever.
But they have to have something beyond this – something for them alone.
In the first three books of the Eirenic Verses, we know Cerie Korviridi through her relationships with Uileac (her older brother) and Orrinir (her brother-in-law). She is a child and young adult in these books, so of course she doesn’t have much of her own going on just yet.
Still, we see that she does have things outside of them: namely, High Poetry and the High Poet Society. In Pride Before a Fall, we see her studying with Uileac and Orrinir, who are attempting to help her prepare for her big research paper, and we also get to see her recite a poem she wrote for a festival.
China Mieville, noted male writer, is excellent with this. All his female characters have their own goals and purposes, even if they are in relationships with men. They take active roles in the plot, they have hobbies that don’t necessarily align with others in their lives, and they solve problems the men around them weren’t able to.
In Perdido Street Station, Lin is essential to the plot; most of it wouldn’t have happened without her. She is displayed as both confident and scared, willing to take risks but terrified of the consequences. We also learn more about her strange upbringing, her species’ history and culture, and how she feels about the discrimination she faces.
I also don’t remember him ever discussing breasts in any of his books, and he is an extremely successful author. If he can do it, so can you.
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Explore the female character’s motivations and beliefs.
Let’s return to Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson for a minute. One of the characters, Tom, is going through a contentious divorce with his ex-wife after he intentionally paralyzes his son during a logging accident.
Despite the fact that he is the sole cause of this tragedy, Tom is painted as a martyr figure with a bitch of an ex-wife who is determined to make his life difficult for no reason. All the women around her are also portrayed as terrible people out to get poor ol’ Tom.
We have no idea what his wife thinks about anything. In fact, she’s so forgettable as a character that I don’t even remember her name, and I’m not bothering to look it up either. Her sole purpose is to be an antagonist for Tom who he also wishes he could fuck again.
And every woman in the book is like this. All of them. They are all viewed through the men’s eyes as flat, two-dimensional characters who exist to sexually torment or steal from the men.
This is rampant misogyny, no question about it. And Guterson is not trying to make a statement about misogyny either; he’s actively participating in it, with no hint of authorial dissent.
If there had been a single male character who actually treated women as humans and not fuck toys, we could discern that Guterson doesn’t agree with his characters and is trying to portray something about the state of society.
But no. He spends more time discussing logging and setting the atmosphere for this Pacific Northwest town than he does exploring any woman’s motivations, beliefs, or passions.
Look at your female characters and compare their motivations to what you have provided for the men in your book. Write it all down if you have to. Does the woman have any goals? Are those motivations as interesting as the men’s? If not, work on that.
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If you hate women, don’t write about them.
You likely don’t expect a female author to tell you this, but if you don’t want to write about women, you don’t have to.
There’s no reason you have to put women in your book unless you want feminist brownie points – which you won’t get, because your book is misogynistic.
Some of the most successful books by male authors don’t have a lot of women in them. I love Moby Dick, but it has approximately one woman in it. The whaling ship is entirely populated by men, and the only woman Ishmael interacts with extensively was a female innkeeper at the beginning of the book.
Of course, I’m not saying Herman Melville was a misogynist, though we can argue about that based on his biography if we want. He just didn’t put any women in his book because he was talking about a mostly male-dominated profession. Other books I enjoy, like Remainder, also prioritize men with only a few female background characters.
Is it kind of douchey, given that women are half the population? Yes, it is. But not every book in the world has to include every single type of person or focus on every possible experience.
People may not like your book if it doesn’t have women in it, and they may complain that you didn’t pass the Bechdel test, blah blah blah.
A lot of my books also don’t pass the Bechdel test, btw, particularly the ones with male POVs. The Bechdel test is a simplistic determination of whether women are prioritized in storytelling and was never meant to be some litmus test of Good Woman Writing.
So you don’t have to write a feminist anthem. But readers will like your book even less if you refuse to portray women in a sensitive and compelling way.
No women in your book = moderate readership, decent reviews, a lot of people may not even comment on the lack of women.
Objectified and useless women in your book = everyone but raging misogynists will hate it.
While I always encourage all writers, of any gender, to experiment and try new things, you’re also not obligated to write about anything you don’t want to.
If writing women feels like pulling teeth to you, then I’m giving you permission not to do it. I probably won’t read your book, but losing my readership isn’t the end of the world for you or anyone else.
But, you might find that you can have a more engaged audience and higher readership if you work hard to improve your female characterization.
Work with female beta readers when you’re done. Ask them specifically to address the female depictions in your work. Listen to their suggestions without judgment or defensiveness.
I do understand that writing about people you don’t fully understand can be very challenging. Only a few authors are able to capture the nuances of numerous human experiences in their stories, such as Michael Ondaatje and David Mitchell. I’m not good at writing characters who are very unlike me, and most authors aren’t.
However, trying something new is always worthwhile. It will get easier the more you do it – and you may find you grow as a human being, too.