Teeth studded her eyelids, the twisted geometry of her limbs
April 2, 2018 10:43 AM Subscribe
In response to YA author Gwen C. Katz examining an author's claims about his facility with writing female characters, writer/podcaster Whit Reynolds proposed a Twitter game: Describe yourself the way a male author would.
This pairs nicely with the Internet's earlier bit of fun regarding an abominable parrot of a character.
This pairs nicely with the Internet's earlier bit of fun regarding an abominable parrot of a character.
Several comments did mention "I'd be invisible," but some of them ran with the idea anyway:
She was forty but could have passed for a year younger with soft lipstick and some gentle mascara. Her dress clung to the curves of her bosom which was cupped by her bra that was under it, but over the breasts that were naked inside her clothes. She had a personality and eyes.
She stood in front of the mirror & ran her hands down her naked body. She could be beautiful. If only she was ten years younger, twenty pounds lighter, & had larger breasts. She sighed. She should have paid for a boob job instead of all that ice cream. But it was too late now.And they don't stint on the racism, either:
As she moved her strong cocoa body gleamed as if calling to the country of Africa. Her chocolate waist moved like an alluring siren calling me to crash on the rocks of her brown buttocks.posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:11 AM on April 2, 2018 [39 favorites]
Yeah, I fall in the fat + middle aged = invisible category, myself.
Also of interest: Maria DahvanaHeadley asking women writers to describe themselves, and Annalee Flowers asks people to "describe yourself like a feminist/womanist author would."
posted by rewil at 11:13 AM on April 2, 2018 [7 favorites]
Also of interest: Maria DahvanaHeadley asking women writers to describe themselves, and Annalee Flowers asks people to "describe yourself like a feminist/womanist author would."
posted by rewil at 11:13 AM on April 2, 2018 [7 favorites]
soffara
@soffara8
She had not read my novel. She'd never read Infinite Jest. She rolled her eyes out at my name dropping Knausgaard. Though her breasts swell with promise under her cardigan, my boner died a quiet, resentful death.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:31 AM on April 2, 2018 [58 favorites]
@soffara8
She had not read my novel. She'd never read Infinite Jest. She rolled her eyes out at my name dropping Knausgaard. Though her breasts swell with promise under her cardigan, my boner died a quiet, resentful death.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:31 AM on April 2, 2018 [58 favorites]
The Card Cheat: I legit think that sentence might have been in a book I read last year. (The narrator was not intended to be a sympathetic figure in the least.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:34 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:34 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
writer/podcaster Whit Reynolds
"Writer / podcaster / cat tweeter" is the full description from the article. Her cat Emma is lovely.
(Her tweet this morning: Yes buckle in new followers for a lot of powerful Cat Content.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:38 AM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
"Writer / podcaster / cat tweeter" is the full description from the article. Her cat Emma is lovely.
(Her tweet this morning: Yes buckle in new followers for a lot of powerful Cat Content.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:38 AM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
I could not even with this. I found it deeply painful to an extent that surprised me.
I can think of nothing I'd less like to do to myself than put me into the headspace necessary to internalize that view of me to the point that I could recreate it. I was so hurt to see so many women I know doing it with relative ease.
posted by crush at 11:45 AM on April 2, 2018 [16 favorites]
I can think of nothing I'd less like to do to myself than put me into the headspace necessary to internalize that view of me to the point that I could recreate it. I was so hurt to see so many women I know doing it with relative ease.
posted by crush at 11:45 AM on April 2, 2018 [16 favorites]
Khaw writes Lovecraft-style horror, for anyone wanting some context on the post title.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:51 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:51 AM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
Several comments did mention "I'd be invisible," but some of them ran with the idea anyway:
Ashley Nicole Black's made me really happy, "As round as she was loud, she immediately filled the room. My first thought was that I didn't want to fuck her. My second thought was even more disturbing, she didn't seem to care. She contemplated the roundness of her own boobs and contributed something to the meeting. I missed it."
posted by gladly at 12:01 PM on April 2, 2018 [73 favorites]
Ashley Nicole Black's made me really happy, "As round as she was loud, she immediately filled the room. My first thought was that I didn't want to fuck her. My second thought was even more disturbing, she didn't seem to care. She contemplated the roundness of her own boobs and contributed something to the meeting. I missed it."
posted by gladly at 12:01 PM on April 2, 2018 [73 favorites]
Someone else flipped the meme in question to ask people to describe themselves the way a feminist author would, and Sigrid Ellis did so for a few notable authors.
posted by dinty_moore at 12:30 PM on April 2, 2018
posted by dinty_moore at 12:30 PM on April 2, 2018
God, the thing I hate most about the experience of doing this exercise is the fundamental self-deprecating nature of these characters. They're always, always immaculately, easily beautiful, cool with whatever nonsense a male character lobs at them, and chill with everything. They are never wary or scared or offended. But they don't know they're beautiful, either--they don't treat it the way many traditionally beautiful women I have known do, like an irritating characteristic that summons a lot of unwanted attention. They always have to have something they want to be better, something they're insecure about, something they don't like about themselves so as to communicated feminine vulnerability.
Blech.
posted by sciatrix at 12:46 PM on April 2, 2018 [12 favorites]
Blech.
posted by sciatrix at 12:46 PM on April 2, 2018 [12 favorites]
Thanks for posting this, I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. It made me think of the Guyliner's comments on the Guardian Blind Date column. There's a question in the column asking the woman on the date what she thinks her date thought of her. The Guyliner points out that heterosexual women often say something like "Probably that I talked too much" - deeply depressing.
posted by paduasoy at 12:50 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by paduasoy at 12:50 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
I don't know why this is so difficult for male authors to do. I mean, yeah, writing a really interesting, believable character with complex motivations whose gender affects her experience in the world--that's hard. Good characterization, in general, is hard. But just avoiding the sort of stupid, cliched, obviously clueless shit these tweets are making fun of? That is not a high bar.
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 1:15 PM on April 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 1:15 PM on April 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
I don't know why this is so difficult for male authors to do. I mean, yeah, writing a really interesting, believable character with complex motivations whose gender affects her experience in the world--that's hard. Good characterization, in general, is hard. But just avoiding the sort of stupid, cliched, obviously clueless shit these tweets are making fun of? That is not a high bar.
I wonder if part of it is that many sexist male authors only read books by other sexist male authors so they honest-to-God believe that this is what good female characters are like because they just legit have no point of reference outside that bubble.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 1:20 PM on April 2, 2018 [39 favorites]
I wonder if part of it is that many sexist male authors only read books by other sexist male authors so they honest-to-God believe that this is what good female characters are like because they just legit have no point of reference outside that bubble.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 1:20 PM on April 2, 2018 [39 favorites]
But just avoiding the sort of stupid, cliched, obviously clueless shit these tweets are making fun of? That is not a high bar.
You would think so, but it relies on those writers being able to conceive of women having internal lives that aren't centered around whether they're arousing the men around them. Guys who write like this are betraying the fact that they're the kind of men whose first assessment of any woman is whether she's fuckable or not.
posted by haruspicina at 1:30 PM on April 2, 2018 [22 favorites]
You would think so, but it relies on those writers being able to conceive of women having internal lives that aren't centered around whether they're arousing the men around them. Guys who write like this are betraying the fact that they're the kind of men whose first assessment of any woman is whether she's fuckable or not.
posted by haruspicina at 1:30 PM on April 2, 2018 [22 favorites]
I started reading YA again and started with Marie Lu's Legend trilogy. I very much appreciated how June is not having it with the leering that people do with her lol, and no emphasis on talking about what her body looks like. She's 15 years old in the story, jeez!
posted by yueliang at 1:33 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by yueliang at 1:33 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
One look at her and I flashed on one of those old yo mama jokes -- so fat, it takes two trains, a plane, and a bus to get to her good side. But that good side was between me and her hot friend. I mentally calculated how many minutes of buttering up (heh, butter) it was going to take, and started the itinerary. I gave her my second best line of patter, feeling only a little guilty for giving the slug a false hope. Inexplicably, just as I was almost hitting my target time, she checked her watch. "What are you doing?" I asked.posted by Karmakaze at 2:06 PM on April 2, 2018 [27 favorites]
She shrugged, and said, "trying to calculate how many minutes of talking to me you think you have to do before moving on to my hot friend."
Since I'm a trans woman and twitter does not befit me, I'll play here:
"I saw her across the room, striking yet saggy. My groin begged me to fuck her. My eyes disagreed. My groin won. I approached her, eager and angry."
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:11 PM on April 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
"I saw her across the room, striking yet saggy. My groin begged me to fuck her. My eyes disagreed. My groin won. I approached her, eager and angry."
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:11 PM on April 2, 2018 [11 favorites]
"One violet eye like Elizabeth Taylor. The other one was Gary Busey-blue."
I haven't hurt myself that much laughing so hard in a long time!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:55 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
I haven't hurt myself that much laughing so hard in a long time!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:55 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
It's sort-of interesting to think of what male writers you've read who DON'T write women this way. There are some! But it's pretty hard to come up with them, compared to the vast sea of Dudes Writing Books For Money that write shitty-ass women characters with boobs that they think about a lot.
(My favorite bad-male-writer trope is men writing impossible childbirth, and then googling the author and finding out he's married and has children born since 1980. YOU WERE THERE IN THE ROOM, HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW BABIES ARE BORN?)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:31 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]
(My favorite bad-male-writer trope is men writing impossible childbirth, and then googling the author and finding out he's married and has children born since 1980. YOU WERE THERE IN THE ROOM, HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW BABIES ARE BORN?)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:31 PM on April 2, 2018 [8 favorites]
"But they don't know they're beautiful,"
Why is this a thing in so many songs? It's more like, every woman ever gets told how awful and ugly she is even if she's a model so of course she thinks she's hideous, really.
If I was doing this, the "I didn't want to fuck her" would cover it, throwing in "Also she looked smarter than I was so I hated her." Whee.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:44 PM on April 2, 2018 [9 favorites]
Why is this a thing in so many songs? It's more like, every woman ever gets told how awful and ugly she is even if she's a model so of course she thinks she's hideous, really.
If I was doing this, the "I didn't want to fuck her" would cover it, throwing in "Also she looked smarter than I was so I hated her." Whee.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:44 PM on April 2, 2018 [9 favorites]
Credit should be given to MeFi's own cstross who uses this as a tongue-in-cheek superpower for the character 'Mo (Bob Howard's wife). She knows that once a woman reaches middle-age she becomes effectively invisible to pretty much everyone. She uses it well. Just to clear it is not presented as a general advantage. It just has use during the climax of a Lovecraftian espionage thriller.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:57 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:57 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Forget describing childbirth. MENSTRUATION. Only ever mentioned as a plot point (no baby, painful cramps with bad timing) and almost always as a one or two time, completely unavoidable inconvenience with few modern exceptions (Varley!) ... even 5,000 years in the future.
Ugh.
posted by tilde at 12:11 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ugh.
posted by tilde at 12:11 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
once a woman reaches middle-age she becomes effectively invisible to pretty much everyone.
except for all the other women her own age and older, who are everywhere in real life but in this trope don't count and don't matter. this is always the understanding implicit in the complaint and it kills empathy so fucking hard.
if people who like to say this really mean that mature women are co-conspirators in this and refuse to see each other, just like men refuse to see them, that claim needs more discussion than it ever gets.
posted by queenofbithynia at 5:23 AM on April 3, 2018 [11 favorites]
except for all the other women her own age and older, who are everywhere in real life but in this trope don't count and don't matter. this is always the understanding implicit in the complaint and it kills empathy so fucking hard.
if people who like to say this really mean that mature women are co-conspirators in this and refuse to see each other, just like men refuse to see them, that claim needs more discussion than it ever gets.
posted by queenofbithynia at 5:23 AM on April 3, 2018 [11 favorites]
sort-of interesting to think of what male writers you've read who DON'T write women this way
Or women writers who do, usually in genre fiction.
Someone could do "How would aging neckbearded writerly utili-kilt manperson be described, were he subjected to the treatment women get in his books?" Sadly the semi-accurate and self-deprecating but slightly-more-competent stand-in for the author is already a trope in fiction.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:37 AM on April 3, 2018
Or women writers who do, usually in genre fiction.
Someone could do "How would aging neckbearded writerly utili-kilt manperson be described, were he subjected to the treatment women get in his books?" Sadly the semi-accurate and self-deprecating but slightly-more-competent stand-in for the author is already a trope in fiction.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:37 AM on April 3, 2018
Misogynists who write from the POV of a woman do so by describing their fears of what women think of men.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:23 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:23 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]
It's sort-of interesting to think of what male writers you've read who DON'T write women this way. There are some!
Sean Stewart's book Mockingbird is not only one of my favorite books, but it has a fantastic female lead character who rings very true to me.
I'm fat and old, and kind of have been for most of my life, so I think at this point I'm background character #4.
posted by PussKillian at 7:46 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
Sean Stewart's book Mockingbird is not only one of my favorite books, but it has a fantastic female lead character who rings very true to me.
I'm fat and old, and kind of have been for most of my life, so I think at this point I'm background character #4.
posted by PussKillian at 7:46 AM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
if people who like to say this really mean that mature women are co-conspirators in this and refuse to see each other, just like men refuse to see them, that claim needs more discussion than it ever gets.
I mean, yes? I expect internalized misogyny means this happens a lot. The same way that a lot of women fall into the "I'm not like Other Girls" trap.
People are very good at assuming that they are (or should be) the exception to the rule (whatever the rule is). They are interesting, perceptive, knowledgable, attractive, and deserving of attention. All those other people though...
posted by Secret Sparrow at 8:11 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]
I mean, yes? I expect internalized misogyny means this happens a lot. The same way that a lot of women fall into the "I'm not like Other Girls" trap.
People are very good at assuming that they are (or should be) the exception to the rule (whatever the rule is). They are interesting, perceptive, knowledgable, attractive, and deserving of attention. All those other people though...
posted by Secret Sparrow at 8:11 AM on April 3, 2018 [5 favorites]
"But they don't know they're beautiful,"
Why is this a thing in so many songs? It's more like, every woman ever gets told how awful and ugly she is even if she's a model so of course she thinks she's hideous, really.
TL; DR I think it's far healthier for a young person to believe they're more attractive than they are than for a young person to believe they're less attractive than they are.
(In an ideal world, would our appearance matter to us? Maybe not. Probably not. But we're only human, and we have eyeballs that are connected to our brain-boxes.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:27 AM on April 3, 2018 [16 favorites]
Why is this a thing in so many songs? It's more like, every woman ever gets told how awful and ugly she is even if she's a model so of course she thinks she's hideous, really.
- Spend entire childhood being told every day in excruciating detail how ugly you are
- Spend teen years and young womanhood knowing that you're still horribly ugly no matter what your pictures or reflection look like, because surely the *entire world* couldn't have been wrong your entire life, even though you’ve grown out of your baby fat and grown into your outsize limbs; sink deeper into depression and low self-esteem
- Develop outward signs of middle age, see old pictures of self, think, “Hey, why did I think I looked bad there? What I wouldn't give to look like that again!” Hear from old acquaintances who have endless stories about people who had crushes on you back then *but never said anything about it* and say things like “The most beautiful thing was that you didn't know you were beautiful,” which is like saying “One of the top ten things that made you want to kill yourself every day was one of your greatest virtues,” even if that's not their intention.
TL; DR I think it's far healthier for a young person to believe they're more attractive than they are than for a young person to believe they're less attractive than they are.
(In an ideal world, would our appearance matter to us? Maybe not. Probably not. But we're only human, and we have eyeballs that are connected to our brain-boxes.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:27 AM on April 3, 2018 [16 favorites]
The Underpants Monster, I feel that so hard. I was very lucky that my family told me I was beautiful. But I was incapable of believing them, because the media didn't, because I could see how different I was than the bird-boned girls in my class. (Who, I would later learn, never could believe in their own looks either.) And this made me so vulnerable to the first boys who -- well, this is a story you probably all know as well. A woman who doesn't believe in her own value is a woman who will believe that a particular man will deign to give her all that value that she craves, if she obeys him. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, "Not Knowing You're Beautiful Is a Tool of the Patriarchy."
Once he got into his stride, Terry Pratchett wrote women absolutely as well as a woman could. His Witches books are classics for a reason.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:47 AM on April 3, 2018 [12 favorites]
Once he got into his stride, Terry Pratchett wrote women absolutely as well as a woman could. His Witches books are classics for a reason.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:47 AM on April 3, 2018 [12 favorites]
This specific twitter thread response to the original request posts a bunch of actual female character descriptions by famous male authors that are blatantly awful.
The worst (in my opinion) is a Jonathan Franzen character saying, "I'm a little squirrel who likes to fuck." I've specifically avoided Franzen because people I trust said to do so, but I didn't realize it was that bad.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 9:29 AM on April 3, 2018 [9 favorites]
The worst (in my opinion) is a Jonathan Franzen character saying, "I'm a little squirrel who likes to fuck." I've specifically avoided Franzen because people I trust said to do so, but I didn't realize it was that bad.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 9:29 AM on April 3, 2018 [9 favorites]
I remember coming across a twitter thread of people writing male character descriptions the way men typically write female characters. It was also brilliant.
As for menstruation, I have occasionally considered a movie snippet I'd like to see. A lush Hollywood mansion bedroom, and a powerful woman wakes up. Suddenly, she moves her hands up from under the sheet and there is blood. The camera pulls back, and there is more blood. She sighs and says something like "dammit, pre-menopause bleeding is such bullshit." It's only a bit later she notices the horse's head.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:58 AM on April 3, 2018 [6 favorites]
As for menstruation, I have occasionally considered a movie snippet I'd like to see. A lush Hollywood mansion bedroom, and a powerful woman wakes up. Suddenly, she moves her hands up from under the sheet and there is blood. The camera pulls back, and there is more blood. She sighs and says something like "dammit, pre-menopause bleeding is such bullshit." It's only a bit later she notices the horse's head.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:58 AM on April 3, 2018 [6 favorites]
I always wanted one of those amazingly effective CSI-show blood sensors picking up blood on a woman's clothes causing a detective to go into the "Aha! Clearly you are guilty and immediately washed your clothes to hide the evidence!" routine only to find out that the suspect just had a menstrual mishap and rushed to the washing machine because otherwise it'll set and the blood will be twice the pain to wash out.
It's either that or finding a whole string of "how to get blood out of..." searches on a teenage girl's computer history and deciding it's incriminating, especially as the girl gets evasive about it when pressed. Finally the one female detective takes her aside for a moment, they have a soft conversation, and the detective comes back and says the suspect is clear, "...also, kid, just remember to get it into cold water as quickly as possible. That'll solve half the problem right off."
posted by Karmakaze at 2:10 PM on April 3, 2018 [11 favorites]
It's either that or finding a whole string of "how to get blood out of..." searches on a teenage girl's computer history and deciding it's incriminating, especially as the girl gets evasive about it when pressed. Finally the one female detective takes her aside for a moment, they have a soft conversation, and the detective comes back and says the suspect is clear, "...also, kid, just remember to get it into cold water as quickly as possible. That'll solve half the problem right off."
posted by Karmakaze at 2:10 PM on April 3, 2018 [11 favorites]
/supply aside
They sell Hydrogen Peroxide in spray bottle containers now. Not quite purse sized, but backpack/gym bag sized. More effective than cold water.
posted by tilde at 2:44 PM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
They sell Hydrogen Peroxide in spray bottle containers now. Not quite purse sized, but backpack/gym bag sized. More effective than cold water.
posted by tilde at 2:44 PM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
TL; DR I think it's far healthier for a young person to believe they're more attractive than they are than for a young person to believe they're less attractive than they are.
posted by The Underpants Monster
My parents tried to get me to believe this, and I did until I was about 11... then I got it very forcefully knocked out of me by social feedback. I still remember being that kid who felt so positive about her appearance.
I agree that Terry Pratchett wrote women pretty well, especially the ways in which fat women are perceived externally and their inner reality, cf. Agnes, one of his witches. Because she's fat, she is perceived as jolly and cheerful, but her inner self (whom she calls Perdita) is much more interesting - bitchy, intelligent, perceptive. I find the books from her POV very hard to read even now, because they feel so accurate they're almost painful. Ugh, Maskerade... Ughhh.
I've recently been reading romance novels by a new-to-me author, Mariana Zapata which are interesting because the men are very clearly described - we know exactly what they look like and they are always very very good-looking - but the women, who are telling the stories, never describe themselves. I think we women learn to objectify ourselves as effectively as any man, so it's interesting when that aspect of the female character is very pointedly removed from the story. Rainbow Rowell does this too.
posted by Ziggy500 at 3:57 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster
My parents tried to get me to believe this, and I did until I was about 11... then I got it very forcefully knocked out of me by social feedback. I still remember being that kid who felt so positive about her appearance.
I agree that Terry Pratchett wrote women pretty well, especially the ways in which fat women are perceived externally and their inner reality, cf. Agnes, one of his witches. Because she's fat, she is perceived as jolly and cheerful, but her inner self (whom she calls Perdita) is much more interesting - bitchy, intelligent, perceptive. I find the books from her POV very hard to read even now, because they feel so accurate they're almost painful. Ugh, Maskerade... Ughhh.
I've recently been reading romance novels by a new-to-me author, Mariana Zapata which are interesting because the men are very clearly described - we know exactly what they look like and they are always very very good-looking - but the women, who are telling the stories, never describe themselves. I think we women learn to objectify ourselves as effectively as any man, so it's interesting when that aspect of the female character is very pointedly removed from the story. Rainbow Rowell does this too.
posted by Ziggy500 at 3:57 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
I always believed that the attraction to girls who don't know they're beautiful is that those girls are percieved as fuckable by guys who know that they are not at all beautiful and need to go for people who don't know their own self worth, unlike all those stuck-up bitches who think they're so hot and don't know what they're missing out on.
posted by donkeymon at 9:13 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by donkeymon at 9:13 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
In a similar vein, Vulture has a collection of how 50 female characters were described in their screenplays. It is largely similarly bleak.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:09 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:09 AM on April 4, 2018 [2 favorites]
I always groan when I see this formula in a romance novel:
“Her [1] was A but not too B, and her [2] was C without being overly D. Her [3], however, she had to admit, was far too E to be truly fashionable.”
(In which A, B, C, D, and E are all positive adjectives.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:39 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
“Her [1] was A but not too B, and her [2] was C without being overly D. Her [3], however, she had to admit, was far too E to be truly fashionable.”
(In which A, B, C, D, and E are all positive adjectives.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:39 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
If male authors described men in literature the way they describe women (Alexandra Petri, WaPo)
Raymond Chandlerposted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:41 PM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]
Marlowe was the kind of brunette who would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window, and only half the hole would be from heterosexual panic. The other half would be that look he gave you, under his hat brim, the kind of look you thought maybe you could cash in later in a cheap hotel room, before you saw the headache sticking out of his hip pocket.
Leo Tolstoy
Vronsky had once been beautiful. His hands, once white and soft, were thin and wasted from the labors of child-rearing, and his face appeared pinched and unattractive. His voice had acquired a querulous tone. His arms, once the right shape, were now the wrong shape, because of the passage of time and the moral degradation that came with it. There was a horse who suffered an awful accident, and Vronsky was like that in a way.
Homer
White-thighed Odysseus emerged from the water freshly bathed and glistening with oil /
His skin glowed like the dawn sweeping in on his swiftly sandaled feet /
The goddess beheld him with rapture
@Johnny Wallflower - I have a thing for Greek mythological figures being objectified like that, because I also think that everything about that period is super, super gay and I imagine it's a gay man writing that. I just find all of this hysterical.
posted by yueliang at 11:03 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by yueliang at 11:03 PM on April 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
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(I never could buy one of those "this is what a feminist looks like" T-shirts because the point of those is that they are supposed to elicit surprise.)
posted by Countess Elena at 10:57 AM on April 2, 2018 [39 favorites]