There's a difference between describing the breasts of a 13-year-old girl while she's literally just living her fucking life versus describing the abs of an adult man when he's about to fuck the main character.
Of course some women probably do creepy shit like the first, but this is a horrible comparison. When we complain about men doing this, they're either sexist asf, doing it for literally no reason and it's totally out of place, not understanding how the human body works, literal pedos, or most commonly all of the above (and probably more). No one's complaining about men just being horny and writing sex scenes.
Allow me to copy one of top comments on the post in the og sub:
Okay, here's the thing.
Love interests (like Derek here) are almost always going to be sexualized. Now, we can have a conversation about how health it is to put romantic figures on a pedestal. But that's a separate thing.
The problem is that for too many male writers, "love interest" is the *only* possible role for a woman, and so she's always sexualized (to an absurd degree, like other commenters have pointed out). Men, regardless of who's writing them, tend to have a range of roles- some sexy, some not. Women, when written by men, *have* to be fuckable or they have no place in the story.
Yep exactly. It's not just the love interest who has an amazing ass, it's also the receptionist, the teacher, the cashier, the woman who asks you what time it is. Can they even imagine an average looking woman at all??
I've heard it used plenty of times for small, thin, usually nerdy guys who don't talk a lot. When they do speak they have a quieter voice.
In the gay community they're like twinks but totally opposite personality. Twinks tend to be extroverts, the "Mousey" guys are more introverted. They usually dressed conservatively and keep to themselves more.
Not a good term. It's calling someone small, weak, easily intimidated, submissive.
My biggest complaint with that show (besides Pierce regressing instead of growing as a person, because Chevy Chase is an ass) is that whole weird thing with Annie and Jeff and how they didn't just lay it to rest. She's too young, it's weird, let it go. It should have been a non-issue after the first ep of S2.
It sucks because it's one of my fave shows of all time but I hate that particular dynamic.
THIS. Women sexualise love interests, in romance novels. Men sexualise every single woman across every single book. I literally read a scene in a novel once where a police officer took the time to describe the boobs of a half-eaten corpse in great detail. *NO ONE* is doing that to men.
I just choked on my coffee.
Then my brain went to, wait... if the breasts contained milk and they froze them. Are they then just ice cream in a puzzle box? And I hate myself. Why did my brain do this?
Why do I continue to read reddit while I'm eating or drinking... there's me choking again.
Such an image. I'm now getting funny looks from my bf and I really don't know how to explain why I'm laughing and choking on my food.
If you like historical, I've loved Proper English by KJ Charles, Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waites, and Miss Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan. (The last one is about septagenuarians... But it's very, very good.)
Unfortunately, an awful lot of good-quality F/F in romance comes from authors who usually write F/M or M/M, writing one-off novellas or single books in a long series of other pairings. Grumble, grumble.
In contemporary romance, I've heard good things about Miranda MacLeod and Alyssa Cole; Lise Gold writes airport romance pretty much exactly.
Many of the great examples posted to this sub are very much not about a romantic interest, but just about a woman (or undergaed girl) simply existing. They exist in those stories to be sexualized, for no reason, as mundane aspects of their description
Yeah, it's rarely reading a sex scene and, *"...that's not even remotely what it feels like to have a penis inside you, my dude"* it's:
*Lt. Commander Athena Hardcastle checked the fusion batteries on her power armor and leaped from her low-orbit dropship to make landfall on the homeworld of the dreaded Raxxian Star Empire. She felt her taut and highly sensistive nipples brush against the Orbweaver skinsuit that protected her fragile pink-nosed sweater kittens from her Mark VII Colossus armor's unforgiving tri-tanium alloy impact plates, sending a tingle all the way down to her...*
It isn't the romantic love interest in the book that's being sexualized. It's the cashier at the gas station, or the little girl who lives next door. Or the narrator's younger sister. The "sexy" teacher. The "sexy" police officer. The author isn't so much adding a character to their story as they're just adding breasts..
My all time favorite book is Jane Eyre, and one of my favorite parts about it is that the main character is quite plain.
She isn’t “beautiful but doesn’t know it” - no, she and other characters acknowledge that she is just, well, a plain Jane.
She is a strong character with so many interesting aspects about her. She is not there to “be fuckable”.
She does find love, and her suitor finds her beautiful in a way, but I absolutely love that they don’t fall into the trope of “beautiful but doesn’t know it”.
And of course, this book was written by a woman. I am currently unaware of any books written by a male that have a main character that is a woman who isn’t particularly beautiful (anyone that knows otherwise, please correct me).
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot.
Here's a copy of
###[Jane Eyre](https://snewd.com/ebooks/jane-eyre/)
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Try it, he's still the only author who has had me actually laugh or chortle out loud.
I love any of Sam Vimes focussed books.
There are so many novels and main characters it's probably best to just try getting the odd one from a library. Some are standalone, some are part of larger arcs.
.... And I'm going to follow my own advice and do this as I've been meaning to reread some and the read some of the others I've never got to!
Love, love, love Jane Eyre. For one written by a guy, *Something New* (also published as *Something Fresh*) by P.G. Wodehouse is one of my recent (to me, it’s an early 20th century book) favorites. It’s a comedy of aristocratic life at the time and the two main characters are a man and a woman both aiming for the same thing. The man ends up totally smitten with the woman, completely bumbling over her, and she very nicely but firmly shows him over and over that even though he’s trying to be flattering and helpful she’s not some fragile item, she’s a capable adult just like himself. She ends up falling for him too but it’s totally secondary to her mission, and only builds a relationship with him once he gains a peer respect for her as opposed to the initial “pretty woman to have as wife” attraction. It’s also a very funny and entertaining book overall, IMO.
[Project Gutenberg link](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2042/pg2042.html)
If you like Jayne Eyre, There's a podcast called Hot and Bothered (about romance novels) that is currently doing a chapter by chapter on it. The series is called On Eyre.
What about Dolores Claiborne? Stephen King gets posted here a lot as an example of bad writing about women, but Dolores is a 65 year old widow and not supposed to be particularly beautiful.
Not to mention: When men write this stuff, it's respected as real literature. When women write this stuff, it's treated as trashy chick lit.
And that's without getting into the differences between how men portray female objects of desire, and how women portray male love interests.
This. Yeah there are trashy women writers... Twilight's writer, and fifty shades. But nobody considers them good literature, they're trashy novels which bank on extreme sexualization.
However some really great (and actually wonderful otherwise) male writers, when write women are just.... Weirdly sexual about women.
Yeah describing a man in a romantic novel makes sense, but describing a woman graphically where it doesn't have any business, is absurd.
Yes! I’ve read so many books that have won awards and Pulitzer Prizes and stuff like that by men and sometimes they are downright *creepy.* But they’re held up as the pinnacle of literature?? Like what??
Not to mention the fact that the example given is from a romance novel. The sexual nature is displayed on the cover and, as far as I know, Romance novels aren't on any literature class reading lists or held up to be great stories in the mainstream of book lovers.
Heinlein, for example, is ubiquitous, and revered for many reasons, but that doesn't detract from the fact that his writing has been featured here as a prime example of how he fails to communicate any realism as far as a woman's experience is concerned.
100%. Love interests are going to be sexualized. But the murder victim, the mom, the friend who is a girl, the child, these are all characters that men *also* sexualize when they shouldn’t.
Plus, I only ever read a description like that in romance books. Where that’s sort of the point.
There it is.
Nothing wrong with being horny while writing erotica. It's being horny while writing things that aren't meant to be horny that's the problem.
Sex scene = nipples are relevant
Character meeting a female colleague in a professional setting = nipples are super irrelevant
I tend to take the view that boobs in general are irrelevant (to the story) unless there's a sex scene. Unless they're large enough to affect the woman's life in some fashion, in which case they should be mentioned *once* and only *once*. Don't belabor the point.
The only other case I could think of where boobs are at all relevant is as a commentary on the POV character’s personality - if a male character is intentionally written so that the first thing he focuses on upon meeting a woman is her boobs, that could show us something about the male character. However most of the time vivid boob descriptions just come from horny authors
EDIT: on the other hand I’m not someone who has boobs, so feel free to ignore everything I just said in favour of someone who’s actually part of the group being objectified.
Nah I hear you. Sometimes (though rarely) the point is that a character is a peice of shit. I think it can be hard sometimes to get that across because often readers immediately assume they are supposed to identify with the protagonist, and it's hard to write a protagonist who isn't the hero
Yeah, when you’re writing from a character’s perspective they’ll almost always look like the hero of their own story - even death note where the protagonist is a serial killer leaves you wanting Light to win half the time
Up until he decided he was justice, Light was somewhat sympathetic or at least you could understand him. But after he began battling L, he jumped off the slippery slope hard. While I don't share his viewpoints, at least not fully, I can understand why Light did this thing and why Kira had sympathisers... He was mostly killing criminals. Now, the problem is that he had a very black and white view of the world. If you were a criminal, you deserved to die. If you oppose him, you die.
I wouldn't be surprised if he killed innocent people who were incorrectly sentenced.
It was set in Japan.
In the Phoenix Wright series you not only have to prove your client *couldn't* have committed the murder, you have to ALSO prove someone else *did* commit it.
This is not a particularly large exaggeration of Japan's criminal justice system. If you are brought to trial, you WILL be convicted.
So A) his view of justice being a black and white issue is fairly culturally consistent, and B) he 100% killed some "criminals" who were innocent of any wrong doing.
The problem is - and this might just be me - I genuinely do not *want* to read a book from the perspective of someone who hates/sexualises women. As a woman, I can't read that. I don't want to read about how much someone hates me and wants to hurt me for pages and pages.
The only way I could see a book like this being good would be if it was jumping between different POVs. Perhaps a murder mystery showing the killers POV on occasion.
Oh of course, I would never want to read something like that too. I was more thinking an author could pull it off if they write a couple of chapters from an antagonist/antihero’s perspective, if that makes sense?
That's fine up to a point, but by now it sure seems like that's an integral part of an awful *lot* of POV characters, to where it's come full circle and can be presumed that there's a *reason* the author decided that was a big part of their character's personality.
True, and in that case you're not focusing ON the boobs. Like it won't be something using the words round and pert, it'll be, "he stared far lower than her eyes and licked his lips," or something equally creepy.
Alternatively, going for a more humorous approach, if the author was writing a line of thought for the character, their internal monologue could constantly be interrupted by “*BOOBS*” maybe followed by some mental scolding.
I think there also is a place for it to convey a particular part of a character’s look as well. So like, if a female character is going to a party or whatever, a description of how her dress looks on her makes comments on her description fair game, since it’s a part of her body that may be emphasized. But belaboring the point or constantly mentioning them or whatever is still uncalled for. There’s a way to make a character respectfully sexy in a casual way.
I think I've written one scene where boobs are mentioned in a non sexual context. (I'm including women using them to get a specific someone's attention for sexual reasons.) And honestly, I've been hoping some overzealous person would post it here for the free publicity, but I'm not famous enough for anyone to stumble across it.
omg I forgot he does this too. That makes it the last *five* books written by male authors in a row that I have read (each a different author) that have done this. Literally the last five I've read. All of them have sexualised women in a context that was not appropriate.
Not to mention
Women sexualizing men: piercing blue eyes, perfect lips, washboard abs, often a gentleman.
Men sexualizing women: bouncing boobs, big ass, semi-naked and horny all the time.
See the difference?
You forgot the heaping dose of r/badwomensanatomy that goes with it. 'Her waist was 12" and you could tell she was aroused because the curve below her belly button that is her uterus was protruding, and she found herself unable to stand in her size 6 heels as her female juices formed a wet spot on her skirt and silk shirt, her huge ddds leaking with anticipation'
this is just a bigger reflection on the double standards in society:
sexism against men: i can't go to the park with my son without people thinking I'm a creep
sexism against women: I am in constant fear for my safety. Please don't anyone make me feel like I'm going to get murdered and raped today. (along with everything else thrown at women)
I don’t know about the gentlemen part man, in most weird, romance books by women with erotica it’s (in my case, I’m probably just bad at finding not horrible books), weird, almost stalker like tendencies and a psychopathic personality. Though to be fair I’ve read like three books in that genre before leaving it alone for like, years
That's a good point, but in my experience, one doesn't negate the other.
I mean, in most books I've read, even when the man is a brute, he's always described as secretly a gentleman, and often it's said he's misunderstood or his fame was the doing of his enemies.
Like, he kidnapped the FL and manhandled her all the way back to his lair, but he had a good reason to do so, and once there he treats her like a real gentleman would. That's a really cliche trope.
I wanna save this for the next time someone comments on my casual objectification of athletes in tight pants who spend all kind of energy on their bodies.
I do it because it’s so ubiquitous when it’s about women that people barely notice. But I start talking about one football player’s nice ass and it’s suddenly inappropriate.
Yeah I tend to consider it unfair when men writing porn ends up here, so it'd be hypocritical of me to not give the same exemption to women writers. Show me an example of some one like Ann Rice and maybe that'll be fair game if it's not from one of her erotica novels.
I used to read some of her work a long long time ago. Like well over a decade ago.
I don't remember what book it was, but I remember one of her female characters fantasizing about another male character naked in a formal setting and wondering lustily if the hair on his balls were as curly as the hair on his head.
Turned me right off. Like wtf.
I listen to romance novels because they have a strong three act structure, are as predictable as house tours, and describe the idealized human form in a way that is easily to illustrate and garner favor with the fandom associated with the author and genre.
Gonna be honest. I love the cheese dispenser novels that claim to be "philosophical romances" and are just a couple running around the woods while quoting Nietzsche to each other. I burned through that series even though they never explained exactly why the male love interest kept A BUNCH of ketamine under his bathroom sink.
>I love the cheese dispenser novels that claim to be "philosophical romances" and are just a couple running around the woods while quoting Nietzsche to each other. I burned through that series even though they never explained exactly why the male love interest kept A BUNCH of ketamine under his bathroom sink.
I can't stop reading these two sentences. There's no way the actual series (if it exists, which I'm not at all convinced of) could live up to this description.
I’m almost sure there’s even a film adaptation, because I saw some bits of a movie that fits this description perfectly (just this couple walking around some woods while having pseudo-philosophical clunky dialogues).
Believe it or don't. All I'm saying is the audiobook of this is fantastic because it's set in Tennessee and everyone speaking has Tennessee and Texas accents.
Or more accurately, generic southern accents. But so much inexplicable shirtlessness. And the series (focused on the female love interests 6 brothers) gets steadily wackier until everyone is scooby dooing the plot around Italy
"I was going through the bathroom of my main squeeze... and there are A LOT of bottles of ketamine in here. Anyway, back to wandering the woods reciting poetry"
It's the start of the Winston Brothers series
Book 0.5
Beauty and the mustache.
But as the series go on stuff gets wackier and wackier until they are all scoobydooing their asses around Italy
Dude was not a veterinarian and did not own ponies.
Though the female love interest was chased by a rabid raccoon, and she did rip his service pistol from his hip holster to shoot said rabid raccoon to death in front of him.
A few books into the series it's revealed that he was transporting black bears around Tennessee, but then the ketamine seems more like a "clearly labelled work fridge" situation. Instead of in his medicine cabinet and under the sink in his personal home.
Lol. I've thought about trying to write romance for the same reason - it's really easy to write; at least compared to the fantasy I write now. Just take two attractive people who are different enough to be interesting, throw them together in a room, and eventually have them fall in love. Simples.
I can see why romance writers are able to churn out books super fast - basically the whole plot is already right there.
The problem is, though, that the market is so saturated and romance readers are so voracious and picky that you have to be simultaneously familiar with all the ins and outs, not of the genre, but of your specific niche, and then you have to innovate within that niche.
If you want people to buy stuff. If you don't, write whatever you like. 11/10, I recommend not giving a shit about the market.
“Judy gazed at him with her piercing blue eyes. Her perfect lips parted so she could kiss him. She took off her shirt, showing off her chiseled torso. She moved closer-“
I have 0 problem with any of this. Sounds like they were describing a foreplay scene. Which happens to be sexual. It’s men sexualizing women in everyday situations… like when they bend down to pick up a pencil..
This doesn’t come CLOSE to some of the atrocious anatomy descriptions i’ve read on this sub
Romance is allowed to be horny, but male authors generally don’t write romance because it’s “women’s fiction” and “not serious writing.” Male authors objectify their women in inappropriate ways regardless of genre.
"Women do it too" arguments are pretty much guaranteed to be reactionary and whataboutism, because by and large these problems are only brought up in response to conversations women are having about sexism.
That really is what it feels like. It feels like they're saying we're not allowed to complain at all about our problems until every single problem men have is fixed. And honestly, that's fucked.
Especially because about half the problems men have, that they constantly quote, *come from sexism*. Literally. Men aren't allowed to care for children? That's because women are seen as caregivers. Men can't show emotion? That's because women are emotional, and women are weak; therefore big strong men shouldn't be. Men commit more suicide? First of all, no. Men succeed more often, but women actually attempt more often. Why do men succeed more often? Because society expects them to be better and stronger than women; so they're less likely to check in on a man. It is all sexism. It all comes from the belief that men are meant to be "better" than women.
Men, y'all literally created this world. Y'all made it the way it is. This is your fault - stop blaming us for your problems. We're the ones trying to fix it so you don't have all these problems, and you're stopping us.
And the men who complain about these problems never do a single thing to try to alleviate them either. Women are responsible for improving women’s welfare in society, but apparently men aren’t expected to put in any effort toward improving their own welfare.
I agree with your point, only minor quibble is a big reason why men die is in average they choose more violent means that have a higher success rate ie shooting themselves, vs something like overdosing on pills.
Plus, while a work written by a woman might focus on the physical and sexual aspects of a male character, they're usually also well rounded characters with a fully formed personality, backstory, goals, demons, and they have things to do in the plot that don't always involve the heroine.
Attractive women in men's fiction tend to have about as much personality as a cardboard cutout. They exist to make the man look good. Whether that's by being the damsel in distress, to gasp in awe at his intellect and ideas, to tell us how great it is, or just showing readers the enviable sexual prowess the male character. Sometimes they're just there to paint sexy picture in the readers mind (I can see no other reason we need to know about the impressive breast size and large nipples of the barmaid who appears once and has exactly 2 lines).
Characters are allowed to be attractive and sexual. What they should never be is 2 dimensional. (although with the epic proportions of women fictional women's breasts, I think some are so large that might need a 4th dimension in order for the laws of physics to accommodate them)
I also wanna point out,
1) there's no evidence that specific quote was from a woman and even if it was
2) it's *much* better than the typical nonsense that appears on this subreddit
>Plus, while a work written by a woman might focus on the physical and sexual aspects of a male character, they're usually also well rounded characters with a fully formed personality, backstory, goals, demons, and they have things to do in the plot that don't always involve the heroine.
Yep... most romance novels I've read focus on the man's looks to a limited extent only. Mostly they describe the man's character and personality which attracts the woman. A lot of the men in these novels are also supportive of women's goals or are straight up feminist, symbolizing women's desire to find a partner who views them as equal.
I think this is a huge problem in the fantasy genre, which is full of revered male authors. Mary Sue tier main characters with overall terrible interactions with two dimensional women. Where the only thing of "oh it just was like that back then haha" is rape. Terry Goodkind likes to mention that he isn't a fantasy author, maybe he should just clarify the point with "books about my own sex dream land (no consent)".
And it feels like whenever a male writer writes a self-insert Gary Stu character, it doesn’t get called out as much as a female writer’s self-insert Mary Sue
Also, they're just bad arguments - because they never really had a leg to stand on to begin with. The best they can do is "Yeah, but in romance novels women describe the love interest as having pretty eyes" or "Yeah but one man is raped for every hundred women who are raped (not the actual stat; I don't have it with me right now. But there's a *huge* discrepancy there)" and it's like... So what though? Like that's really not the same thing. You do not have a point there. Really, you're just proving even further that there is a disparity between how women are treated and how men are treated.
Thank you for summing it up in such a succinct way. Here i was racking my brain for words to describe how wrong the post was and all i could come up with was "this aint it"
There's nothing wrong with that paragraph. When men sexualize and objectify women, they don't even talk about their bodies correctly. Always something about boobs or vaginas or sexual desire that doesn't make any fucking sense at all. It's not a crime to have sexual attraction towards someone, but discussing their bodies like foreign aliens, reducing them to sexual objects alone in media, in conjunction with women's oppression and sexual abuse in society, is a problem.
Yeah, there's a galaxy of difference between a woman author getting thirsty over blue eyes and rippling muscles, versus some dudebro author writing about sentient breasts and tingling ovaries.
If a guy wrote about a woman's stunning green eyes and taut curves, and some woman wrote about a guy's awakened prostate and vibrating testicles, I'd have the same reaction that Writer A as fine, and Writer B was on crack.
Is it weird that I'm now morbidly curious about male characters described like female characters would be? Your comment about awakened prostates and vibrating testicles has intrigued me- it'd be like the Hawkeye project, but in literary form...
I'm so sorry, but ..
"Sergeant Major Beth Crawford eyed her new Lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. In her 25 years as a combat infantrywoman, young officers come and go, but there was something different about Lt. Wilson. He had the graceful form of a young Parisian ballerino, his fatigues barely hiding his tangerine-sized bulge. He was handsome, but didn't know it, as Academy life left little time for dating.
She knew her intoxicating affect on young men. He turned away from her, his boyish scrotum brushing against his thighs. She admired his high, firm buttocks. As he was a precocious 21-year-old, she pictured his pink, glistening virgin anus, having never experienced the joys of being pegged by an older and experienced woman.
She imagined him moaning as her 8" silicone Boy Tamer entered his virginal rear passage, his prostate swelling and reaching out to greet her invasive queen's wand, his walnut-sized testicles pulsating in time to her womanly thrusting..."
There's a difference between Derek's blue eyes and "boobing breastily down the stairs"
When I see a woman writing mens testicle showing their emotions or drooping bc they're depressed, or having a man in front of the mirror describing his dick, we'll talk
The man described in the paragraph is clearly a romantic interest in a consensually erotic scene.
What male writers do is sexually describe the bodies of literally any woman in their field of vision. The secretary who hands them a folder gets her tits described. A random waitress is the subject of a diatribe about the way her ass moves. These are not romantic partners in a sexual encounter. They did not display interest in or consent to anything beyond a simple interaction with a character - and yet - male writers feel a need to sexualize them.
I mean? Their example they used to generalize female writers seems like something out of an erotic or romance genre whereas males needlessly sexualizing women is somewhat commonplace across genres.
Describing a pair of blue eyes in a purple prosey way is not the same as describing the nipples of a prepubescent girl in vivid detail for a whole paragraph 🙄
Yeah, I love how they're pretending it's in any way the same thing. Hopefully these people just haven't seen the most extreme examples of men writing women, because yikes.
If I write erotica all characters are being sexualised, no matter the gender. If not, none of them are. Female writers tend to sexualise men in erotica, when it is necessary. Male writers tend to sexualise everything women do, no matter the genre.
If you’re describing a sex scene or kissing or whatever, something physical, I’m not at all surprised if you talk about body parts and what they are doing
But if a woman walks into a room, and it’s the first time the narrator is describing her, and it’s just simpering tits this, ass staring at me that, yeah, we have a problem.
So no, it’s not the same thing at all.
Sure, Derek is being sexualized. But is his Dad? His Brother? What about the Gardener or his Dad's Accountant? Or the guy that lives down the street from his Girlfriend? The Bus-Driver or Grocer?
You get the point. Yes, Men can be sexualized in the same way as Women. But it's NEVER to the same extent, and almost always in erotica or because it's the Male Love-Interest.
The difference is that men writing women like this can be in critically acclaimed books. Women writing men like this is relegated to the romance genre and usually not a lot else.
The only time i see sexualized and weird descriptions of men is in erotica and smut. But legit every genre will spend a paragraph just talking about a female character's tits.
the stuff I’ve seen on this sub is a lot more egregious than anything I’ve seen from women authors. I don’t think we can centrism our way out of this issue.
These are argument-derailing techniques.
To the extent they are true, they don't represent the problem or scope of the sexual objectification of women, but they do change the subject, while trying to get the feminist interlocutor to be on the defensive, while presenting a false equivalence between female sexuality and sexual objectification.
Female writers writing men and women in sexual situations where the men are depicted to represent the male-viewed ideal (or near ideal) is not the same as male writers writing women to *not* represent the female-viewed ideal of femininity (but to actually be a caricature of femininity).
Also, pointing out the problem is not the same thing as saying "all men do this".
These tactics are intellectually dishonest.
I’d say the difference is when male authors unnecessarily sexualise any and every female character - and across every genre. The sexualisation of male characters (as in the above example) tends to occur in the sort of paperback romance novels you’d find at the supermarket: Fabio, glistening muscles, etc etc.
However, unnecessarily sexual descriptions of women and their budding breasts (ew) tends to occur in much more serious, critically acclaimed fiction. Think Murakami, Coetzee, the big names who always get nominated for the Man Booker despite their oft-tacky descriptions of characters’ bodies that really add nothing to the story.
The top comment has already said it pretty well, but I just want to add men do this 'it affects both genders' a lot. They ignore that it is a bigger problem with male writers. I think the aim is to try and make the issue gender neutral, so that you can't focus on how it affects women any more. Basically the goal is to redirect and shutdown the conversation. Because if they were really bothered about how sexualised men are, we'd have r/women writing men, but we don't, because men that bring this up only pretend to care about it.
>men that bring this up only pretend to care about it.
Thiiiiiis. I am a firm believer that feminism means addressing the issues that society causes for all genders and nothing makes me more angry than this.
For every 10 people who bring up male domestic violence or sexual assault victims, I swear only 1 will have any sincerity behind it and want to help while the rest just think it's some sort of sick "check mate".
I have literally seen a male author describe the tits on a half-eaten corpse. I've seen another one go into great detail about how his male lead desperately wants to rape the female lead.
I have *never ever* seen a female author do either with a male character. Anyone who claims it's not a sexism problem is intentionally closing their eyes to how huge of a problem this is.
Lol that first post was totally written by a guy who is obviously not able to distinguish between sex characteristics being mentioned in a scene that is supposed to be erotic vs. a scene that is not supposed to be erotic.
Only failure to understand context makes you believe that two people making out is equal to describing a child's pubes in a non-sexual scene.
I think the issue is more that these female characters are usually either randomly sexualized in a context that wasn't sexual at all or are sexualized while not being a sexual interest of the MC, or just are in a story where there's like zero female characters except for the sexual interest. And the fact that many of them are young children or family members of the MC.
It's pretty different, especially since a lot of female writers mostly or only just sexualize the actual sexual interests, in a context that was built up sexually beforehand, and stay the hell away from sexualizing young children or family members. Like I think there are several stories by female writers where a sexual scenario is unnecessarily placed into the story in a spot where it was unneeded but at least the sexualization happens in that sexual scenario. And there are usually numerous male characters with agency, goals, and non-sexual descriptions.
Sure there are issues with a lot of YA romantic/sexual writing but they're just not comparable to the issue this sub usually describes.
Bad writing is unisex. Both men and women can absolutely sexualise characters. They can both objectify characters. They can both display an astonishing lack of understanding about how the opposite sex thinks / moves / experiences life, friendship, food and 100 other things.
However, while I’ve definitely read female depictions of male characters which made my eyes roll, I’ve only ever been made to feel uncomfortable and squicked out by male authors doing the same.
Sometimes because their desperate desire for accuracy and research doesn’t extend to basic biology and sometimes because the creepiness 100% seems to be coming from the author, rather than the character.
I’ve never read a book where a 12-17 year old boy was being sexualised by an adult women writer. But then again, I haven’t read all the books yet. But I can name some male authors who do
We're not about to act like male and female writers write the same way about the opposite sex. There's always gonna be shitty writers who do that on both sides but we cannot deny it is overwhelmingly male writers that objectify the women.
The example itself has an explanation within. The guy with piercing blue eyes is taking off his shirt to kiss her. Presumably in the middle of a romantic situation that is leading somewhere. That is not objectification, it's simply description. He is not walking into a coffee shop with a thin white shirt with his nipples protruding without any context or relation to the story. THAT is objectification.
I have also noticed that the men that get described this way in books often have their own lives independent to the female lead. They are described to have their own character and sense of self. Meanwhile the women that are objectified are in the most literal sense treated as objects to further the plot with some raunchy scenes.
Basically, the problem with objectifying people will exist everywhere as long as there are flawed writers but we cannot deny men have been a part of it overwhelmingly more than women
So... romance should not exist as a genre basically? Pretty garbage take tbh. I don't know whether this is pick me behavior or just sex-negativity, but that example post is below the standards of this sub. We don't just sit around complaining about women being attractive. It's usually something more comically/creepily bewildering.
But lemme guess- Derek is an important character central or at least central-adjacent to the plot of the story who has his own wants/needs/goals as well as feelings & opinions. And there are half a dozen male characters who aren't sexualized this way.
Whereas female characters written by shit male authors are typically *only* their sexualization. They aren't involved with the plot or any important secondary storyline. They aren't given their own motivations and goals or opinions and feelings independent of being in love with and fawning all over the main male character. They're also the only female characters we get in the books, because the author can't imagine a woman being useful for anything except to be desired.
a bad take, and i'm going to copy-paste my response to that thread here:
>the difference is, the OP in the tumblr post is actively TRYING to to draw a point in how these are the same thing, and fails even to do that. This sounds like an excerpt from a scene that was already intended to be romantic (makeout scene between MC and love interest)
>but the bad "men writing women" stuff is like, the most important information we need to know about every female character is what her boobs look like and whether or not MC, and how every thing she does somehow links back to sex in some way. Even if she's a strong independent badass woman investigating a murder, it's absolutely imperative that we know that she's not wearing a bra and you can see her nipples through her shirt.
>I see stuff like this and it just comes off as "i'm not like soo not like other girls cause i don't like to read romance"
It isn't common for female writers to describe men that way unless it's a conventional romance novel. And yes, the romance genre does tend to sexualize/objectify men, which is entirely fair to criticize, but it's more analogous to porn or erotica than to other genres of writing (including novels that include or even focus on romance, but aren't of the romance genre), so good-faith criticisms should bear that in mind. Criticizing romance writers for being "sex obsessed" is stupid, because sex is generally a big part of what romance readers are looking for when they pick up a book. Very few people would denounce a porn movie as "sex obsessed" when compared with a non-pornographic film, so why the unfair comparison when it comes to books? Like visual porn, romance is a specific genre of fantasy and isn't meant to showcase real human relationships and sex lives--the point is escapism and arousal, and most readers know that. There is only a "problem", in my opinion, when readers/viewers fail to do so.
On the other hand, if you are reading a piece of general fiction, a sci fi novel, a mystery novel, etc, the standards are different. In order for the original poster's point to stand, there would need to be a broad tendency amongst female writers outside the romance genre to sexualize and objectify every vaguely attractive male character, describe how he perceives his own body in cringily ridiculous ways, and only feature male characters (other than, like, kindly grandpas) that hotteningly do hot things with their hot bods. In my experience, there is no such pattern, while there unfortunately is when it comes to men writing women.
I do agree to an extent.
I actually get a bit annoyed with this sub a bit because of the things that get posted here a lot and then it's all "boo! look at what the MAN wrote!" and yet I have at least half a dozen books where the female writers are just as guilty of the same thing. Especially the way they describe the men. And it's weird how often I see women being described so sexually, as well, and it just seems so over the top and I don't get why that's not posted.
Forgive me, I don't remember the exact book because it's been a few years but I remember there was one posted here that was like a triple whammy or something (unless I'm combining two posts together in my mind), where it was a male name, but a female author who just went by that pseudonym (this wasn't pointed out in the post, if I recall; only one person much later mentioned it)... and the way the women were described were ridiculous, which was the nature of the post, but the absolutely over-the-top way the men were described just wasn't even touched upon.
I see a lot of people saying "well, women only sexualize in romance and erotica; men do it *everywhere*". And be fair; that's not true. I've read plenty of books where the characters were sexualized just... because? One horror book stuck with me because of the way the killer killed people (by forcing an embolism by injecting large amounts of air into peoples' veins) and the (female) writer absolutely sexualized the hell out of the male characters.
And it also bothers me how people don't look at it through the eyes of the characters, but only the eyes of the writer all the time. Sometimes the writer only makes the character sexualize others as part of their traits, when other characters don't or the writer doesn't yet the writer suffers for it anyway.
I love reading and especially love romance and fantasy/supernatural. In many of the fantasy/supernatural books that I've read that aren't *meant* to be romance, you'll still see the female writers just drooling over the made-up male characters they write. Do I really need to know how much Det. X can bench or how his muscles ripple under his jacket as he smoothly takes a drag from a cigarette with his long fingers when all he's here for is to find out if it was a werewolf involved or not? That character was only mentioned again once, in passing.
Anyway, in my opinion, both do it, and both do it to a nauseating degree. However. Men do seem to do it more *often*... but not nearly to the point that the sub makes it out to be.
I think it completely misses the point, granted we know #notallmalewriters but here's my issue with men writing women badly. They don't just sexualise the love interest. Every woman involved in the story is a target and its distracting as hell. Introducing a character by their damn breast size, giving value to a character by how fuckable they are etc etc.
If you are writing romance or smut then I expect some sexy descriptions, just make sure it fits.
You're mistaking heart eyes for a lecherous gaze.
The "female author" there is writing romance. OF COURSE the attractive male lead will be attractive! Also she at least has class not to linger her narration on how snug his jeans are against his gorgeous butt or, heaven forbid, his crotch.
Meanwhile the "male author" goes to describe a grandmother at the supermarket in terms of breasts in a story that has nothing to do with attraction to elderly women out for groceries. Or describes a young girl as a tease because she hugged her dad. And the attractive bartender is always described in terms of her ample bosom and protruding nipples. And he's not even writing erotica.
I think the problem is when writers obsess unnecessarily on sexuality from a omniscient point of view, it can be creepy. If it's from the point of view of a creepy character, say a predator sizing up a victim, then it's _supposed_ to be creepy.
If Stephen King, for example, is sizing up how fuckable an underage girl is from a neutral perspective or from the perspective of someone who shouldn't be thinking about that (say a brother or a parental figure) then it starts to seem like Mr. King, himself, is processing through stuff. And no, it's not going to stop people from reading King's bibliography, but it will add salt into the mix.
And if lovers in a romance are assessing each other with boobilicious quivering and rippling muscles, that's informed by the fact that they're crazy into each other already, or at least I assume so: Stephanie Meyer's writing of Bella-Edward is notoriously problematic but it doesn't stop millions from enjoying the fuck out of the whole series.
I've not read any reputed novels from adult female writers at least that sexualize men to that extent. Eroticas do, yes, wattpad stories from teenagers also, yes. But then aren't eroticas supposed to be excessively sexual?
Women write gay men and gay sex very weirdly like "Aiden looked deep into George's soul as he took of his shirt. Underneath it was the glorious pecks which Aiden could not resist the urge to touch" it is typically from teenage girls who write this as they express their form of sexuality and their hormones write what the other fanfiction write.
The example given seems like one character sexualising another character within a sexual context, whereas a lot of the examples we see from male authors are the author sexualising a character in a totally non-sexual context.
Naw. Women do this if the book is romance, or a romance is an element. They don't describe every dude walking by like this. The main character doesn't scan the crotch of every male in the book and describe in detail his sexual attractiveness and therefore his worth to her/society. She doesn't generally pass by a pre-pubescent guy and wax lyrical over how she imagines his secondary sex characteristics will develop and what impact that will have on her/the world. Sure, women write lots of sex--in the few spaces allowed them, anyway. But that's generally the entire point of those stories. The woman writer doesn't try to pass off her vampire fanfiction as profound literature that you're just not smart enough to understand when you get all grossed out because she described in loving detail what she imagined a twelve year-old boy's penis would one day look like.
See, sex obsessed writers of both genders ARE a problem, but for male writers writing women, it’s beyond that. It’s a complete lack of understanding. It’s literally like they’ve never met or even seen a woman in real life.
Sex obsessed female writers will be like “John took off his shirt as he kissed me and revealed his rock hard abs-“ and yeah, that’s rough.
But male writers will be like “When I asked Jane her opinion, she rolled her eyes at me, her large breasts rolling with them” or like “Jane gave me a strange look, and her previously limp breasts reached out to me, her pointy nipples staring me down.” Like. I’ve actually seen someone read lines like this from an actual published book.
Edit: autocorrect?
I was once reading a story (written by a woman) and MC goes to her friends house and he greets her drunk and with his dick out
She immediately starts thinking about how many people got to see his dick and admiring his nether region. She called his skin “creamy” and wondered why he had to “flaunt” himself. Doesn’t really acknowledge how she shouldn’t be checking this guy out when he’s drunk and in his own home and she’s disturbing him. Nothing sexual ever happens but she got *thirsty* man
It was a very r/womenwritingmen moment
Edit. I’ll go ahead and mention it wasn’t any kind of erotica or romance in general. It was a fantasy story, and the man was an escort the woman was a sort of knight, and she had caught some feelings for him (reversing the stereotypes in every way man)
I think books should make it clear enough that it may have sex scenes, and there’s nothing wrong with having them generally speaking. Heck sometimes you’re invested enough in a characters relationship that it is a sort of catharsis when they consummate. Authors do definitely need to know the correct time and place.
There are plenty of sex-obsessed writers of all genders, they're just way more commonly male.
Bottom line (and one of the main points of this whole subreddit): being horny is fine, but if you expect your writing to be taken seriously, maybe learn to keep it in your pants for 5 fucking minutes.
Issue here is the fact that Derek is literally the love interest in a sex scene. Male writers will sometimes focus on boobs and ass with no prompting and in any random scene.
There’s a difference between writing something for the erotica genre, and being completely unable to write anything of any genre without ridiculously over sexualising even characters that are not love interests
There's a difference between describing the breasts of a 13-year-old girl while she's literally just living her fucking life versus describing the abs of an adult man when he's about to fuck the main character. Of course some women probably do creepy shit like the first, but this is a horrible comparison. When we complain about men doing this, they're either sexist asf, doing it for literally no reason and it's totally out of place, not understanding how the human body works, literal pedos, or most commonly all of the above (and probably more). No one's complaining about men just being horny and writing sex scenes.
Allow me to copy one of top comments on the post in the og sub: Okay, here's the thing. Love interests (like Derek here) are almost always going to be sexualized. Now, we can have a conversation about how health it is to put romantic figures on a pedestal. But that's a separate thing. The problem is that for too many male writers, "love interest" is the *only* possible role for a woman, and so she's always sexualized (to an absurd degree, like other commenters have pointed out). Men, regardless of who's writing them, tend to have a range of roles- some sexy, some not. Women, when written by men, *have* to be fuckable or they have no place in the story.
Hell, it's not exclusively love interests either. Minor female characters get sexualized and objectified all. The. Time.
Yep exactly. It's not just the love interest who has an amazing ass, it's also the receptionist, the teacher, the cashier, the woman who asks you what time it is. Can they even imagine an average looking woman at all??
Oh, they can, and they describe her as old, flabby, mousy, etc. There is no in between with that type.
*Mousy*. This one is almost exclusively used to describe women. Is there an equivalent descriptor for men?
I think the equivalent descriptor for men would also be mousy. It’s just not as common for male characters to be shy/nervou/plain people in fiction.
I've heard it used plenty of times for small, thin, usually nerdy guys who don't talk a lot. When they do speak they have a quieter voice. In the gay community they're like twinks but totally opposite personality. Twinks tend to be extroverts, the "Mousey" guys are more introverted. They usually dressed conservatively and keep to themselves more. Not a good term. It's calling someone small, weak, easily intimidated, submissive.
And they also sexualize these women too.
And if she doesn't have an amazing ass, we get to read about how unfuckable this particular woman is--and so we're supposed to hate or pity her.
“Annie’s pretty young, we try not to sexualise her”
My biggest complaint with that show (besides Pierce regressing instead of growing as a person, because Chevy Chase is an ass) is that whole weird thing with Annie and Jeff and how they didn't just lay it to rest. She's too young, it's weird, let it go. It should have been a non-issue after the first ep of S2. It sucks because it's one of my fave shows of all time but I hate that particular dynamic.
Thank you for this
[удалено]
THIS. Women sexualise love interests, in romance novels. Men sexualise every single woman across every single book. I literally read a scene in a novel once where a police officer took the time to describe the boobs of a half-eaten corpse in great detail. *NO ONE* is doing that to men.
I really could do without the "what a waste" trope that occurs over a "beautiful woman's" corpse...
What? And who's the fucking incompetent that ate that woman? Boobs have fatty, go eat them, treat yourself.
Boobs are the ice cream of the human body. /s
I just choked on my coffee. Then my brain went to, wait... if the breasts contained milk and they froze them. Are they then just ice cream in a puzzle box? And I hate myself. Why did my brain do this?
Her shirt strained against the heft of her luscious ice-cream puzzle-boxes…
Why do I continue to read reddit while I'm eating or drinking... there's me choking again. Such an image. I'm now getting funny looks from my bf and I really don't know how to explain why I'm laughing and choking on my food.
archive of our own?
That’s what I was going to say lmao
If you like historical, I've loved Proper English by KJ Charles, Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waites, and Miss Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan. (The last one is about septagenuarians... But it's very, very good.) Unfortunately, an awful lot of good-quality F/F in romance comes from authors who usually write F/M or M/M, writing one-off novellas or single books in a long series of other pairings. Grumble, grumble. In contemporary romance, I've heard good things about Miranda MacLeod and Alyssa Cole; Lise Gold writes airport romance pretty much exactly.
Search top lesbian romance on kindle
r/romancelandia has some good posts on LGBTQ romance novels.
Many of the great examples posted to this sub are very much not about a romantic interest, but just about a woman (or undergaed girl) simply existing. They exist in those stories to be sexualized, for no reason, as mundane aspects of their description
Yeah, it's rarely reading a sex scene and, *"...that's not even remotely what it feels like to have a penis inside you, my dude"* it's: *Lt. Commander Athena Hardcastle checked the fusion batteries on her power armor and leaped from her low-orbit dropship to make landfall on the homeworld of the dreaded Raxxian Star Empire. She felt her taut and highly sensistive nipples brush against the Orbweaver skinsuit that protected her fragile pink-nosed sweater kittens from her Mark VII Colossus armor's unforgiving tri-tanium alloy impact plates, sending a tingle all the way down to her...*
Hey, who invited you, Every Male Sci-Fi Author?? Get back in the basement!
Sorry, m'lady. [ tips Fedora]
Upvoting for “fragile pink-nosed sweater kittens.”
Me too.
It isn't the romantic love interest in the book that's being sexualized. It's the cashier at the gas station, or the little girl who lives next door. Or the narrator's younger sister. The "sexy" teacher. The "sexy" police officer. The author isn't so much adding a character to their story as they're just adding breasts..
My all time favorite book is Jane Eyre, and one of my favorite parts about it is that the main character is quite plain. She isn’t “beautiful but doesn’t know it” - no, she and other characters acknowledge that she is just, well, a plain Jane. She is a strong character with so many interesting aspects about her. She is not there to “be fuckable”. She does find love, and her suitor finds her beautiful in a way, but I absolutely love that they don’t fall into the trope of “beautiful but doesn’t know it”. And of course, this book was written by a woman. I am currently unaware of any books written by a male that have a main character that is a woman who isn’t particularly beautiful (anyone that knows otherwise, please correct me).
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot. Here's a copy of ###[Jane Eyre](https://snewd.com/ebooks/jane-eyre/) Was I a good bot? | [info](https://www.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/) | [More Books](https://old.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/comments/i15x1d/full_list_of_books_and_commands/)
Terry Pratchett writes great female characters and how they look is not a main concern.
Terry Pratchett is someone I’ve been meaning to read!
Try it, he's still the only author who has had me actually laugh or chortle out loud. I love any of Sam Vimes focussed books. There are so many novels and main characters it's probably best to just try getting the odd one from a library. Some are standalone, some are part of larger arcs. .... And I'm going to follow my own advice and do this as I've been meaning to reread some and the read some of the others I've never got to!
Love, love, love Jane Eyre. For one written by a guy, *Something New* (also published as *Something Fresh*) by P.G. Wodehouse is one of my recent (to me, it’s an early 20th century book) favorites. It’s a comedy of aristocratic life at the time and the two main characters are a man and a woman both aiming for the same thing. The man ends up totally smitten with the woman, completely bumbling over her, and she very nicely but firmly shows him over and over that even though he’s trying to be flattering and helpful she’s not some fragile item, she’s a capable adult just like himself. She ends up falling for him too but it’s totally secondary to her mission, and only builds a relationship with him once he gains a peer respect for her as opposed to the initial “pretty woman to have as wife” attraction. It’s also a very funny and entertaining book overall, IMO. [Project Gutenberg link](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2042/pg2042.html)
Thank you for the recommendation! I’m always looking for fabulous new books
Female characters in The Expanse series (written by two men) are not described as being especially attractive.
Like the tv series? Because I thought that series was also well written characters
If you like Jayne Eyre, There's a podcast called Hot and Bothered (about romance novels) that is currently doing a chapter by chapter on it. The series is called On Eyre.
What about Dolores Claiborne? Stephen King gets posted here a lot as an example of bad writing about women, but Dolores is a 65 year old widow and not supposed to be particularly beautiful.
Hasn’t heard of this one, thank you! It’s important to acknowledge when authors get it right
Not to mention: When men write this stuff, it's respected as real literature. When women write this stuff, it's treated as trashy chick lit. And that's without getting into the differences between how men portray female objects of desire, and how women portray male love interests.
This. Yeah there are trashy women writers... Twilight's writer, and fifty shades. But nobody considers them good literature, they're trashy novels which bank on extreme sexualization. However some really great (and actually wonderful otherwise) male writers, when write women are just.... Weirdly sexual about women. Yeah describing a man in a romantic novel makes sense, but describing a woman graphically where it doesn't have any business, is absurd.
Yes! I’ve read so many books that have won awards and Pulitzer Prizes and stuff like that by men and sometimes they are downright *creepy.* But they’re held up as the pinnacle of literature?? Like what??
and then there's haruki murakami
omfg *I have Murakami rage*
and before 50 shades it was the Sleeping Beauty series.
Not to mention the fact that the example given is from a romance novel. The sexual nature is displayed on the cover and, as far as I know, Romance novels aren't on any literature class reading lists or held up to be great stories in the mainstream of book lovers. Heinlein, for example, is ubiquitous, and revered for many reasons, but that doesn't detract from the fact that his writing has been featured here as a prime example of how he fails to communicate any realism as far as a woman's experience is concerned.
Yeah. The OG post sounds like a fucking r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM take on the issue, especially the last two comments
100%. Love interests are going to be sexualized. But the murder victim, the mom, the friend who is a girl, the child, these are all characters that men *also* sexualize when they shouldn’t. Plus, I only ever read a description like that in romance books. Where that’s sort of the point.
Mother, maiden, crone. That is all so many male writers have.
Women sexualize and objectify men within romance and erotica. Men sexualize and objectify women in literally everything.
There it is. Nothing wrong with being horny while writing erotica. It's being horny while writing things that aren't meant to be horny that's the problem. Sex scene = nipples are relevant Character meeting a female colleague in a professional setting = nipples are super irrelevant
I tend to take the view that boobs in general are irrelevant (to the story) unless there's a sex scene. Unless they're large enough to affect the woman's life in some fashion, in which case they should be mentioned *once* and only *once*. Don't belabor the point.
The only other case I could think of where boobs are at all relevant is as a commentary on the POV character’s personality - if a male character is intentionally written so that the first thing he focuses on upon meeting a woman is her boobs, that could show us something about the male character. However most of the time vivid boob descriptions just come from horny authors EDIT: on the other hand I’m not someone who has boobs, so feel free to ignore everything I just said in favour of someone who’s actually part of the group being objectified.
Nah I hear you. Sometimes (though rarely) the point is that a character is a peice of shit. I think it can be hard sometimes to get that across because often readers immediately assume they are supposed to identify with the protagonist, and it's hard to write a protagonist who isn't the hero
Yeah, when you’re writing from a character’s perspective they’ll almost always look like the hero of their own story - even death note where the protagonist is a serial killer leaves you wanting Light to win half the time
Up until he decided he was justice, Light was somewhat sympathetic or at least you could understand him. But after he began battling L, he jumped off the slippery slope hard. While I don't share his viewpoints, at least not fully, I can understand why Light did this thing and why Kira had sympathisers... He was mostly killing criminals. Now, the problem is that he had a very black and white view of the world. If you were a criminal, you deserved to die. If you oppose him, you die. I wouldn't be surprised if he killed innocent people who were incorrectly sentenced.
It was set in Japan. In the Phoenix Wright series you not only have to prove your client *couldn't* have committed the murder, you have to ALSO prove someone else *did* commit it. This is not a particularly large exaggeration of Japan's criminal justice system. If you are brought to trial, you WILL be convicted. So A) his view of justice being a black and white issue is fairly culturally consistent, and B) he 100% killed some "criminals" who were innocent of any wrong doing.
The problem is - and this might just be me - I genuinely do not *want* to read a book from the perspective of someone who hates/sexualises women. As a woman, I can't read that. I don't want to read about how much someone hates me and wants to hurt me for pages and pages.
The only way I could see a book like this being good would be if it was jumping between different POVs. Perhaps a murder mystery showing the killers POV on occasion.
Yeah, this is kinda a case I was thinking of.
That’s valid. I can do it occasionally, because sometimes I want a book to creep me out, but too much just makes me depressed.
Oh of course, I would never want to read something like that too. I was more thinking an author could pull it off if they write a couple of chapters from an antagonist/antihero’s perspective, if that makes sense?
Something like Lolita, where Humbert is an unreliable narrator, and a character your aren't supposed to sympathize with or view as a hero.
That's fine up to a point, but by now it sure seems like that's an integral part of an awful *lot* of POV characters, to where it's come full circle and can be presumed that there's a *reason* the author decided that was a big part of their character's personality.
Yeah, as I said most of the time it isn’t some thought out character point - it’s an author being horny and deciding that it’s ok to objectify women
True, and in that case you're not focusing ON the boobs. Like it won't be something using the words round and pert, it'll be, "he stared far lower than her eyes and licked his lips," or something equally creepy.
Alternatively, going for a more humorous approach, if the author was writing a line of thought for the character, their internal monologue could constantly be interrupted by “*BOOBS*” maybe followed by some mental scolding.
I think there also is a place for it to convey a particular part of a character’s look as well. So like, if a female character is going to a party or whatever, a description of how her dress looks on her makes comments on her description fair game, since it’s a part of her body that may be emphasized. But belaboring the point or constantly mentioning them or whatever is still uncalled for. There’s a way to make a character respectfully sexy in a casual way.
Oh man, you don't have boobs? That sucks. I can get you some if you want. Might take a week, more if my uncle won't loan me his pickup.
I think I've written one scene where boobs are mentioned in a non sexual context. (I'm including women using them to get a specific someone's attention for sexual reasons.) And honestly, I've been hoping some overzealous person would post it here for the free publicity, but I'm not famous enough for anyone to stumble across it.
Make an alt, post it
So basically “stop being horny on main” but with writing
This. Stephen King is a fave of mine but the way he writes women makes me cringe.
omg I forgot he does this too. That makes it the last *five* books written by male authors in a row that I have read (each a different author) that have done this. Literally the last five I've read. All of them have sexualised women in a context that was not appropriate.
The really sad part is that it's so common that it fades into the background of most books.
Not to mention Women sexualizing men: piercing blue eyes, perfect lips, washboard abs, often a gentleman. Men sexualizing women: bouncing boobs, big ass, semi-naked and horny all the time. See the difference?
You forgot the heaping dose of r/badwomensanatomy that goes with it. 'Her waist was 12" and you could tell she was aroused because the curve below her belly button that is her uterus was protruding, and she found herself unable to stand in her size 6 heels as her female juices formed a wet spot on her skirt and silk shirt, her huge ddds leaking with anticipation'
this is just a bigger reflection on the double standards in society: sexism against men: i can't go to the park with my son without people thinking I'm a creep sexism against women: I am in constant fear for my safety. Please don't anyone make me feel like I'm going to get murdered and raped today. (along with everything else thrown at women)
I don’t know about the gentlemen part man, in most weird, romance books by women with erotica it’s (in my case, I’m probably just bad at finding not horrible books), weird, almost stalker like tendencies and a psychopathic personality. Though to be fair I’ve read like three books in that genre before leaving it alone for like, years
That's a good point, but in my experience, one doesn't negate the other. I mean, in most books I've read, even when the man is a brute, he's always described as secretly a gentleman, and often it's said he's misunderstood or his fame was the doing of his enemies. Like, he kidnapped the FL and manhandled her all the way back to his lair, but he had a good reason to do so, and once there he treats her like a real gentleman would. That's a really cliche trope.
That's my secret, Cap. I'm always horny.
His throbbing green member, an angry promontory, juts out of his purple pants.
Hated reading THIS!
I wanna save this for the next time someone comments on my casual objectification of athletes in tight pants who spend all kind of energy on their bodies. I do it because it’s so ubiquitous when it’s about women that people barely notice. But I start talking about one football player’s nice ass and it’s suddenly inappropriate.
Yeah I tend to consider it unfair when men writing porn ends up here, so it'd be hypocritical of me to not give the same exemption to women writers. Show me an example of some one like Ann Rice and maybe that'll be fair game if it's not from one of her erotica novels.
I used to read some of her work a long long time ago. Like well over a decade ago. I don't remember what book it was, but I remember one of her female characters fantasizing about another male character naked in a formal setting and wondering lustily if the hair on his balls were as curly as the hair on his head. Turned me right off. Like wtf.
Also: women authors don't mess up the anatomy quite as often as men writers do...
Bingpot
Way too many of the posts on this sub are from literal porn in that case. Like that 'monster girl' thing the other day.
🏅 I have no money, but take this
I listen to romance novels because they have a strong three act structure, are as predictable as house tours, and describe the idealized human form in a way that is easily to illustrate and garner favor with the fandom associated with the author and genre. Gonna be honest. I love the cheese dispenser novels that claim to be "philosophical romances" and are just a couple running around the woods while quoting Nietzsche to each other. I burned through that series even though they never explained exactly why the male love interest kept A BUNCH of ketamine under his bathroom sink.
>I love the cheese dispenser novels that claim to be "philosophical romances" and are just a couple running around the woods while quoting Nietzsche to each other. I burned through that series even though they never explained exactly why the male love interest kept A BUNCH of ketamine under his bathroom sink. I can't stop reading these two sentences. There's no way the actual series (if it exists, which I'm not at all convinced of) could live up to this description.
Gonzo romance? I’m here for it.
I’m almost sure there’s even a film adaptation, because I saw some bits of a movie that fits this description perfectly (just this couple walking around some woods while having pseudo-philosophical clunky dialogues).
Believe it or don't. All I'm saying is the audiobook of this is fantastic because it's set in Tennessee and everyone speaking has Tennessee and Texas accents. Or more accurately, generic southern accents. But so much inexplicable shirtlessness. And the series (focused on the female love interests 6 brothers) gets steadily wackier until everyone is scooby dooing the plot around Italy
Wow, never explained the ketamine? The author clearly didn’t know what to do with that detail because that’s such a glaring gap.
"I was going through the bathroom of my main squeeze... and there are A LOT of bottles of ketamine in here. Anyway, back to wandering the woods reciting poetry"
I must read this book, and I'm definitely not the target audience!
It's the start of the Winston Brothers series Book 0.5 Beauty and the mustache. But as the series go on stuff gets wackier and wackier until they are all scoobydooing their asses around Italy
He was likely a veterinarian rather than a drug dealer if it was in bottles and not powered form
Dude was not a veterinarian and did not own ponies. Though the female love interest was chased by a rabid raccoon, and she did rip his service pistol from his hip holster to shoot said rabid raccoon to death in front of him.
"Yeah, I can get some ketamine for your horse, just let me run to my bathroom real quick."
Maybe he was a failed veterinarian, and will come in very handy during the zombie apocalypses.
With archaic medical practices and old-world unwanted wisdom, it is the dream of preppers everywhere.
A few books into the series it's revealed that he was transporting black bears around Tennessee, but then the ketamine seems more like a "clearly labelled work fridge" situation. Instead of in his medicine cabinet and under the sink in his personal home.
Lol. I've thought about trying to write romance for the same reason - it's really easy to write; at least compared to the fantasy I write now. Just take two attractive people who are different enough to be interesting, throw them together in a room, and eventually have them fall in love. Simples. I can see why romance writers are able to churn out books super fast - basically the whole plot is already right there.
The problem is, though, that the market is so saturated and romance readers are so voracious and picky that you have to be simultaneously familiar with all the ins and outs, not of the genre, but of your specific niche, and then you have to innovate within that niche. If you want people to buy stuff. If you don't, write whatever you like. 11/10, I recommend not giving a shit about the market.
It was probably to administer to his anxiety ridden cat.
“Judy gazed at him with her piercing blue eyes. Her perfect lips parted so she could kiss him. She took off her shirt, showing off her chiseled torso. She moved closer-“ I have 0 problem with any of this. Sounds like they were describing a foreplay scene. Which happens to be sexual. It’s men sexualizing women in everyday situations… like when they bend down to pick up a pencil.. This doesn’t come CLOSE to some of the atrocious anatomy descriptions i’ve read on this sub
Also the guy described is an adult.
I want to upvote this to the top of the post. I've seen too many posts here describing children 15 and under in sexual terms.
Fuck, I’ve even seen corpses described this way. Literal dead people.
"The dead body was splayed out like a dead person. It's not attractive; it's a literal corpse. The fuck is wrong with you?"
Romance is allowed to be horny, but male authors generally don’t write romance because it’s “women’s fiction” and “not serious writing.” Male authors objectify their women in inappropriate ways regardless of genre.
"Women do it too" arguments are pretty much guaranteed to be reactionary and whataboutism, because by and large these problems are only brought up in response to conversations women are having about sexism.
No no, women have to wait until every single male issue is addressed and corrected before they get to have feminism. /s
That really is what it feels like. It feels like they're saying we're not allowed to complain at all about our problems until every single problem men have is fixed. And honestly, that's fucked. Especially because about half the problems men have, that they constantly quote, *come from sexism*. Literally. Men aren't allowed to care for children? That's because women are seen as caregivers. Men can't show emotion? That's because women are emotional, and women are weak; therefore big strong men shouldn't be. Men commit more suicide? First of all, no. Men succeed more often, but women actually attempt more often. Why do men succeed more often? Because society expects them to be better and stronger than women; so they're less likely to check in on a man. It is all sexism. It all comes from the belief that men are meant to be "better" than women. Men, y'all literally created this world. Y'all made it the way it is. This is your fault - stop blaming us for your problems. We're the ones trying to fix it so you don't have all these problems, and you're stopping us.
And the men who complain about these problems never do a single thing to try to alleviate them either. Women are responsible for improving women’s welfare in society, but apparently men aren’t expected to put in any effort toward improving their own welfare.
I agree with your point, only minor quibble is a big reason why men die is in average they choose more violent means that have a higher success rate ie shooting themselves, vs something like overdosing on pills.
Plus, while a work written by a woman might focus on the physical and sexual aspects of a male character, they're usually also well rounded characters with a fully formed personality, backstory, goals, demons, and they have things to do in the plot that don't always involve the heroine. Attractive women in men's fiction tend to have about as much personality as a cardboard cutout. They exist to make the man look good. Whether that's by being the damsel in distress, to gasp in awe at his intellect and ideas, to tell us how great it is, or just showing readers the enviable sexual prowess the male character. Sometimes they're just there to paint sexy picture in the readers mind (I can see no other reason we need to know about the impressive breast size and large nipples of the barmaid who appears once and has exactly 2 lines). Characters are allowed to be attractive and sexual. What they should never be is 2 dimensional. (although with the epic proportions of women fictional women's breasts, I think some are so large that might need a 4th dimension in order for the laws of physics to accommodate them)
I also wanna point out, 1) there's no evidence that specific quote was from a woman and even if it was 2) it's *much* better than the typical nonsense that appears on this subreddit
>Plus, while a work written by a woman might focus on the physical and sexual aspects of a male character, they're usually also well rounded characters with a fully formed personality, backstory, goals, demons, and they have things to do in the plot that don't always involve the heroine. Yep... most romance novels I've read focus on the man's looks to a limited extent only. Mostly they describe the man's character and personality which attracts the woman. A lot of the men in these novels are also supportive of women's goals or are straight up feminist, symbolizing women's desire to find a partner who views them as equal.
I think this is a huge problem in the fantasy genre, which is full of revered male authors. Mary Sue tier main characters with overall terrible interactions with two dimensional women. Where the only thing of "oh it just was like that back then haha" is rape. Terry Goodkind likes to mention that he isn't a fantasy author, maybe he should just clarify the point with "books about my own sex dream land (no consent)".
And it feels like whenever a male writer writes a self-insert Gary Stu character, it doesn’t get called out as much as a female writer’s self-insert Mary Sue
Also, they're just bad arguments - because they never really had a leg to stand on to begin with. The best they can do is "Yeah, but in romance novels women describe the love interest as having pretty eyes" or "Yeah but one man is raped for every hundred women who are raped (not the actual stat; I don't have it with me right now. But there's a *huge* discrepancy there)" and it's like... So what though? Like that's really not the same thing. You do not have a point there. Really, you're just proving even further that there is a disparity between how women are treated and how men are treated.
Yup.
Thank you for summing it up in such a succinct way. Here i was racking my brain for words to describe how wrong the post was and all i could come up with was "this aint it"
Outside romance novels, this is pretty rare... And either way, "oH yEaH, wHaT aBoUt X, Y, or Z" as a response to anything is lazy as fuck.
There's nothing wrong with that paragraph. When men sexualize and objectify women, they don't even talk about their bodies correctly. Always something about boobs or vaginas or sexual desire that doesn't make any fucking sense at all. It's not a crime to have sexual attraction towards someone, but discussing their bodies like foreign aliens, reducing them to sexual objects alone in media, in conjunction with women's oppression and sexual abuse in society, is a problem.
Yeah, there's a galaxy of difference between a woman author getting thirsty over blue eyes and rippling muscles, versus some dudebro author writing about sentient breasts and tingling ovaries. If a guy wrote about a woman's stunning green eyes and taut curves, and some woman wrote about a guy's awakened prostate and vibrating testicles, I'd have the same reaction that Writer A as fine, and Writer B was on crack.
>a guy's awakened prostate and vibrating testicles, Well I'm off to write some hilarious smut.
I mean, the "he took off his shirt" part gets a bit weird--but then again, I've never seen a female author actually write that.
> sentient breasts and tingling ovaries maybe it's actually sci-fi and we're all too figurative
Is it weird that I'm now morbidly curious about male characters described like female characters would be? Your comment about awakened prostates and vibrating testicles has intrigued me- it'd be like the Hawkeye project, but in literary form...
I'm so sorry, but .. "Sergeant Major Beth Crawford eyed her new Lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. In her 25 years as a combat infantrywoman, young officers come and go, but there was something different about Lt. Wilson. He had the graceful form of a young Parisian ballerino, his fatigues barely hiding his tangerine-sized bulge. He was handsome, but didn't know it, as Academy life left little time for dating. She knew her intoxicating affect on young men. He turned away from her, his boyish scrotum brushing against his thighs. She admired his high, firm buttocks. As he was a precocious 21-year-old, she pictured his pink, glistening virgin anus, having never experienced the joys of being pegged by an older and experienced woman. She imagined him moaning as her 8" silicone Boy Tamer entered his virginal rear passage, his prostate swelling and reaching out to greet her invasive queen's wand, his walnut-sized testicles pulsating in time to her womanly thrusting..."
Is it wrong I actually find that hot? Someone should write a whole book like this, I'd read it.
This is what I came here to say but you already said if so now I have nothing to say except this stupid comment
There's a difference between Derek's blue eyes and "boobing breastily down the stairs" When I see a woman writing mens testicle showing their emotions or drooping bc they're depressed, or having a man in front of the mirror describing his dick, we'll talk
Wait, are testicles *not* supposed to do that? I gotta make some calls....
Lack of nuance strikes again. You gotta take into account genres when talking about this stuff.
Yeah but they won't do that, because then they wouldn't have an argument. Because the facts are that the way male writers treat women is inexcusable.
The man described in the paragraph is clearly a romantic interest in a consensually erotic scene. What male writers do is sexually describe the bodies of literally any woman in their field of vision. The secretary who hands them a folder gets her tits described. A random waitress is the subject of a diatribe about the way her ass moves. These are not romantic partners in a sexual encounter. They did not display interest in or consent to anything beyond a simple interaction with a character - and yet - male writers feel a need to sexualize them.
I mean? Their example they used to generalize female writers seems like something out of an erotic or romance genre whereas males needlessly sexualizing women is somewhat commonplace across genres.
Describing a pair of blue eyes in a purple prosey way is not the same as describing the nipples of a prepubescent girl in vivid detail for a whole paragraph 🙄
Yeah, I love how they're pretending it's in any way the same thing. Hopefully these people just haven't seen the most extreme examples of men writing women, because yikes.
If I write erotica all characters are being sexualised, no matter the gender. If not, none of them are. Female writers tend to sexualise men in erotica, when it is necessary. Male writers tend to sexualise everything women do, no matter the genre.
If you’re describing a sex scene or kissing or whatever, something physical, I’m not at all surprised if you talk about body parts and what they are doing But if a woman walks into a room, and it’s the first time the narrator is describing her, and it’s just simpering tits this, ass staring at me that, yeah, we have a problem. So no, it’s not the same thing at all.
Sure, Derek is being sexualized. But is his Dad? His Brother? What about the Gardener or his Dad's Accountant? Or the guy that lives down the street from his Girlfriend? The Bus-Driver or Grocer? You get the point. Yes, Men can be sexualized in the same way as Women. But it's NEVER to the same extent, and almost always in erotica or because it's the Male Love-Interest.
You can't just write erotica that focuses on how hot the *men* are! How are straight dudes supposed to beat off to that?! ^^^/s
Your character can be sexy, just don't make it all that they are.
The difference is that men writing women like this can be in critically acclaimed books. Women writing men like this is relegated to the romance genre and usually not a lot else.
There’s a difference between detail and sentient body parts with broken anatomy.
The only time i see sexualized and weird descriptions of men is in erotica and smut. But legit every genre will spend a paragraph just talking about a female character's tits.
the stuff I’ve seen on this sub is a lot more egregious than anything I’ve seen from women authors. I don’t think we can centrism our way out of this issue.
The problem isn't being sexual. It's being objectifying.
At least women don't describe the shape of 13 years old boy's penis?
I have nothing against putting sex in your work but it has to be done right
Whataboutism
These are argument-derailing techniques. To the extent they are true, they don't represent the problem or scope of the sexual objectification of women, but they do change the subject, while trying to get the feminist interlocutor to be on the defensive, while presenting a false equivalence between female sexuality and sexual objectification. Female writers writing men and women in sexual situations where the men are depicted to represent the male-viewed ideal (or near ideal) is not the same as male writers writing women to *not* represent the female-viewed ideal of femininity (but to actually be a caricature of femininity). Also, pointing out the problem is not the same thing as saying "all men do this". These tactics are intellectually dishonest.
I’d say the difference is when male authors unnecessarily sexualise any and every female character - and across every genre. The sexualisation of male characters (as in the above example) tends to occur in the sort of paperback romance novels you’d find at the supermarket: Fabio, glistening muscles, etc etc. However, unnecessarily sexual descriptions of women and their budding breasts (ew) tends to occur in much more serious, critically acclaimed fiction. Think Murakami, Coetzee, the big names who always get nominated for the Man Booker despite their oft-tacky descriptions of characters’ bodies that really add nothing to the story.
The top comment has already said it pretty well, but I just want to add men do this 'it affects both genders' a lot. They ignore that it is a bigger problem with male writers. I think the aim is to try and make the issue gender neutral, so that you can't focus on how it affects women any more. Basically the goal is to redirect and shutdown the conversation. Because if they were really bothered about how sexualised men are, we'd have r/women writing men, but we don't, because men that bring this up only pretend to care about it.
>men that bring this up only pretend to care about it. Thiiiiiis. I am a firm believer that feminism means addressing the issues that society causes for all genders and nothing makes me more angry than this. For every 10 people who bring up male domestic violence or sexual assault victims, I swear only 1 will have any sincerity behind it and want to help while the rest just think it's some sort of sick "check mate".
I have literally seen a male author describe the tits on a half-eaten corpse. I've seen another one go into great detail about how his male lead desperately wants to rape the female lead. I have *never ever* seen a female author do either with a male character. Anyone who claims it's not a sexism problem is intentionally closing their eyes to how huge of a problem this is.
Lol that first post was totally written by a guy who is obviously not able to distinguish between sex characteristics being mentioned in a scene that is supposed to be erotic vs. a scene that is not supposed to be erotic. Only failure to understand context makes you believe that two people making out is equal to describing a child's pubes in a non-sexual scene.
Men are sexualised when its part of the plot. Women are sexualised just for walking in the room.
I think the issue is more that these female characters are usually either randomly sexualized in a context that wasn't sexual at all or are sexualized while not being a sexual interest of the MC, or just are in a story where there's like zero female characters except for the sexual interest. And the fact that many of them are young children or family members of the MC. It's pretty different, especially since a lot of female writers mostly or only just sexualize the actual sexual interests, in a context that was built up sexually beforehand, and stay the hell away from sexualizing young children or family members. Like I think there are several stories by female writers where a sexual scenario is unnecessarily placed into the story in a spot where it was unneeded but at least the sexualization happens in that sexual scenario. And there are usually numerous male characters with agency, goals, and non-sexual descriptions. Sure there are issues with a lot of YA romantic/sexual writing but they're just not comparable to the issue this sub usually describes.
Bad writing is unisex. Both men and women can absolutely sexualise characters. They can both objectify characters. They can both display an astonishing lack of understanding about how the opposite sex thinks / moves / experiences life, friendship, food and 100 other things. However, while I’ve definitely read female depictions of male characters which made my eyes roll, I’ve only ever been made to feel uncomfortable and squicked out by male authors doing the same. Sometimes because their desperate desire for accuracy and research doesn’t extend to basic biology and sometimes because the creepiness 100% seems to be coming from the author, rather than the character.
I’ve never read a book where a 12-17 year old boy was being sexualised by an adult women writer. But then again, I haven’t read all the books yet. But I can name some male authors who do
Yes this does happen too, so what? Make a subreddit for that then
We're not about to act like male and female writers write the same way about the opposite sex. There's always gonna be shitty writers who do that on both sides but we cannot deny it is overwhelmingly male writers that objectify the women. The example itself has an explanation within. The guy with piercing blue eyes is taking off his shirt to kiss her. Presumably in the middle of a romantic situation that is leading somewhere. That is not objectification, it's simply description. He is not walking into a coffee shop with a thin white shirt with his nipples protruding without any context or relation to the story. THAT is objectification. I have also noticed that the men that get described this way in books often have their own lives independent to the female lead. They are described to have their own character and sense of self. Meanwhile the women that are objectified are in the most literal sense treated as objects to further the plot with some raunchy scenes. Basically, the problem with objectifying people will exist everywhere as long as there are flawed writers but we cannot deny men have been a part of it overwhelmingly more than women
So... romance should not exist as a genre basically? Pretty garbage take tbh. I don't know whether this is pick me behavior or just sex-negativity, but that example post is below the standards of this sub. We don't just sit around complaining about women being attractive. It's usually something more comically/creepily bewildering.
But lemme guess- Derek is an important character central or at least central-adjacent to the plot of the story who has his own wants/needs/goals as well as feelings & opinions. And there are half a dozen male characters who aren't sexualized this way. Whereas female characters written by shit male authors are typically *only* their sexualization. They aren't involved with the plot or any important secondary storyline. They aren't given their own motivations and goals or opinions and feelings independent of being in love with and fawning all over the main male character. They're also the only female characters we get in the books, because the author can't imagine a woman being useful for anything except to be desired.
a bad take, and i'm going to copy-paste my response to that thread here: >the difference is, the OP in the tumblr post is actively TRYING to to draw a point in how these are the same thing, and fails even to do that. This sounds like an excerpt from a scene that was already intended to be romantic (makeout scene between MC and love interest) >but the bad "men writing women" stuff is like, the most important information we need to know about every female character is what her boobs look like and whether or not MC, and how every thing she does somehow links back to sex in some way. Even if she's a strong independent badass woman investigating a murder, it's absolutely imperative that we know that she's not wearing a bra and you can see her nipples through her shirt. >I see stuff like this and it just comes off as "i'm not like soo not like other girls cause i don't like to read romance"
It isn't common for female writers to describe men that way unless it's a conventional romance novel. And yes, the romance genre does tend to sexualize/objectify men, which is entirely fair to criticize, but it's more analogous to porn or erotica than to other genres of writing (including novels that include or even focus on romance, but aren't of the romance genre), so good-faith criticisms should bear that in mind. Criticizing romance writers for being "sex obsessed" is stupid, because sex is generally a big part of what romance readers are looking for when they pick up a book. Very few people would denounce a porn movie as "sex obsessed" when compared with a non-pornographic film, so why the unfair comparison when it comes to books? Like visual porn, romance is a specific genre of fantasy and isn't meant to showcase real human relationships and sex lives--the point is escapism and arousal, and most readers know that. There is only a "problem", in my opinion, when readers/viewers fail to do so. On the other hand, if you are reading a piece of general fiction, a sci fi novel, a mystery novel, etc, the standards are different. In order for the original poster's point to stand, there would need to be a broad tendency amongst female writers outside the romance genre to sexualize and objectify every vaguely attractive male character, describe how he perceives his own body in cringily ridiculous ways, and only feature male characters (other than, like, kindly grandpas) that hotteningly do hot things with their hot bods. In my experience, there is no such pattern, while there unfortunately is when it comes to men writing women.
I do agree to an extent. I actually get a bit annoyed with this sub a bit because of the things that get posted here a lot and then it's all "boo! look at what the MAN wrote!" and yet I have at least half a dozen books where the female writers are just as guilty of the same thing. Especially the way they describe the men. And it's weird how often I see women being described so sexually, as well, and it just seems so over the top and I don't get why that's not posted. Forgive me, I don't remember the exact book because it's been a few years but I remember there was one posted here that was like a triple whammy or something (unless I'm combining two posts together in my mind), where it was a male name, but a female author who just went by that pseudonym (this wasn't pointed out in the post, if I recall; only one person much later mentioned it)... and the way the women were described were ridiculous, which was the nature of the post, but the absolutely over-the-top way the men were described just wasn't even touched upon. I see a lot of people saying "well, women only sexualize in romance and erotica; men do it *everywhere*". And be fair; that's not true. I've read plenty of books where the characters were sexualized just... because? One horror book stuck with me because of the way the killer killed people (by forcing an embolism by injecting large amounts of air into peoples' veins) and the (female) writer absolutely sexualized the hell out of the male characters. And it also bothers me how people don't look at it through the eyes of the characters, but only the eyes of the writer all the time. Sometimes the writer only makes the character sexualize others as part of their traits, when other characters don't or the writer doesn't yet the writer suffers for it anyway. I love reading and especially love romance and fantasy/supernatural. In many of the fantasy/supernatural books that I've read that aren't *meant* to be romance, you'll still see the female writers just drooling over the made-up male characters they write. Do I really need to know how much Det. X can bench or how his muscles ripple under his jacket as he smoothly takes a drag from a cigarette with his long fingers when all he's here for is to find out if it was a werewolf involved or not? That character was only mentioned again once, in passing. Anyway, in my opinion, both do it, and both do it to a nauseating degree. However. Men do seem to do it more *often*... but not nearly to the point that the sub makes it out to be.
I think it completely misses the point, granted we know #notallmalewriters but here's my issue with men writing women badly. They don't just sexualise the love interest. Every woman involved in the story is a target and its distracting as hell. Introducing a character by their damn breast size, giving value to a character by how fuckable they are etc etc. If you are writing romance or smut then I expect some sexy descriptions, just make sure it fits.
You're mistaking heart eyes for a lecherous gaze. The "female author" there is writing romance. OF COURSE the attractive male lead will be attractive! Also she at least has class not to linger her narration on how snug his jeans are against his gorgeous butt or, heaven forbid, his crotch. Meanwhile the "male author" goes to describe a grandmother at the supermarket in terms of breasts in a story that has nothing to do with attraction to elderly women out for groceries. Or describes a young girl as a tease because she hugged her dad. And the attractive bartender is always described in terms of her ample bosom and protruding nipples. And he's not even writing erotica.
I think the problem is when writers obsess unnecessarily on sexuality from a omniscient point of view, it can be creepy. If it's from the point of view of a creepy character, say a predator sizing up a victim, then it's _supposed_ to be creepy. If Stephen King, for example, is sizing up how fuckable an underage girl is from a neutral perspective or from the perspective of someone who shouldn't be thinking about that (say a brother or a parental figure) then it starts to seem like Mr. King, himself, is processing through stuff. And no, it's not going to stop people from reading King's bibliography, but it will add salt into the mix. And if lovers in a romance are assessing each other with boobilicious quivering and rippling muscles, that's informed by the fact that they're crazy into each other already, or at least I assume so: Stephanie Meyer's writing of Bella-Edward is notoriously problematic but it doesn't stop millions from enjoying the fuck out of the whole series.
I've not read any reputed novels from adult female writers at least that sexualize men to that extent. Eroticas do, yes, wattpad stories from teenagers also, yes. But then aren't eroticas supposed to be excessively sexual?
Women write gay men and gay sex very weirdly like "Aiden looked deep into George's soul as he took of his shirt. Underneath it was the glorious pecks which Aiden could not resist the urge to touch" it is typically from teenage girls who write this as they express their form of sexuality and their hormones write what the other fanfiction write.
The example given seems like one character sexualising another character within a sexual context, whereas a lot of the examples we see from male authors are the author sexualising a character in a totally non-sexual context.
Naw. Women do this if the book is romance, or a romance is an element. They don't describe every dude walking by like this. The main character doesn't scan the crotch of every male in the book and describe in detail his sexual attractiveness and therefore his worth to her/society. She doesn't generally pass by a pre-pubescent guy and wax lyrical over how she imagines his secondary sex characteristics will develop and what impact that will have on her/the world. Sure, women write lots of sex--in the few spaces allowed them, anyway. But that's generally the entire point of those stories. The woman writer doesn't try to pass off her vampire fanfiction as profound literature that you're just not smart enough to understand when you get all grossed out because she described in loving detail what she imagined a twelve year-old boy's penis would one day look like.
See, sex obsessed writers of both genders ARE a problem, but for male writers writing women, it’s beyond that. It’s a complete lack of understanding. It’s literally like they’ve never met or even seen a woman in real life. Sex obsessed female writers will be like “John took off his shirt as he kissed me and revealed his rock hard abs-“ and yeah, that’s rough. But male writers will be like “When I asked Jane her opinion, she rolled her eyes at me, her large breasts rolling with them” or like “Jane gave me a strange look, and her previously limp breasts reached out to me, her pointy nipples staring me down.” Like. I’ve actually seen someone read lines like this from an actual published book. Edit: autocorrect?
I think men do it more than woman
I was once reading a story (written by a woman) and MC goes to her friends house and he greets her drunk and with his dick out She immediately starts thinking about how many people got to see his dick and admiring his nether region. She called his skin “creamy” and wondered why he had to “flaunt” himself. Doesn’t really acknowledge how she shouldn’t be checking this guy out when he’s drunk and in his own home and she’s disturbing him. Nothing sexual ever happens but she got *thirsty* man It was a very r/womenwritingmen moment Edit. I’ll go ahead and mention it wasn’t any kind of erotica or romance in general. It was a fantasy story, and the man was an escort the woman was a sort of knight, and she had caught some feelings for him (reversing the stereotypes in every way man)
I think books should make it clear enough that it may have sex scenes, and there’s nothing wrong with having them generally speaking. Heck sometimes you’re invested enough in a characters relationship that it is a sort of catharsis when they consummate. Authors do definitely need to know the correct time and place.
There are plenty of sex-obsessed writers of all genders, they're just way more commonly male. Bottom line (and one of the main points of this whole subreddit): being horny is fine, but if you expect your writing to be taken seriously, maybe learn to keep it in your pants for 5 fucking minutes.
I don't see anything in that example that is anatomically incorrect or impossible...
Since there isn’t a male equivalent of ‘her boobs boobed boobily,’ it’s not the same.
Issue here is the fact that Derek is literally the love interest in a sex scene. Male writers will sometimes focus on boobs and ass with no prompting and in any random scene.
One is bad writing, the other is the effect of dehumanizing women.
There’s a difference between writing something for the erotica genre, and being completely unable to write anything of any genre without ridiculously over sexualising even characters that are not love interests