Can Men Write Women?

An Essay Review

Photo by Chris Spiegl on Unsplash

On Sunday, Bo restacked a post by Like Other Girls on Neil Gaiman and the Issue with the Men Writing Women Discourse. I recommend you read the original piece, as I think she put good effort into her exploration of the subject. I also encourage you to consider Bo’s observations in his note.

I’ve run across this particular conversation on Instagram amongst the romance readers and writers that have congregated over there, and I’ve seen bits and pieces of it in Pinterest pins and Reddit threads. I’ve never engaged with it directly, but always found it slightly hypocritical in the smutty romance context since the current modus operandi in smut lit is the complete objectification of men and an over emphasis on particular expressions of physicality and masculine appearance.

Accusations of hypocrisy aside, the larger questions of men writing women, women writing men, objectification, fantasy and the innocent bystander have been turning over in the back of my mind for a while and I do enjoy a good conversation.

Overall, I enjoyed this particular read. I think the author put good effort into her exploration of the subject and if you continue into the footnotes and comment section she continues to express nuance and maturity in her handling of the matter.

She frames her work around three questions: “Is there some sort of line dividing Writing Women Well and Writing Women Badly, and does every male author sit firmly on one side or the other? And, further, can we accurately judge how a man treats women from the way he writes women characters?

To answer her questions in reverse, I don’t think we should try to judge how a man treats women from the way he writes female characters. This gets into the whole ‘can we separate the artist from the art’ debate, and beyond it - can we know the author’s character and values based on how they write? I believe this leads us into artistic straight-jacketing and will harm art, broadly speaking. Artists need to be able to delve deeply into things that might not be reflections of their own values or experiences as they probe into both human experience and human mythos.

As far as the question of can a man write a female character well - this, right here, is a million dollar question. I really appreciated her definition. It was clear and to the point and can be easily utilized as a framework for criticism:

When I ask the question “Can men write women?", I am asking if they can write women as complex human beings, WITHOUT:

• Unnecessarily sexualizing them

• Condescending to them

• Idealizing them

• Demonizing them

My next question is twofold: is her framework

a) too broad?

or

b) is the scope of the examined work specific enough to assess whether or not women are being written well?

Initially, I framed part (a) as “broad enough” with the underlying consideration being “broad enough” to cross genres, since my impression of the books she references does just that, but ultimately, I’m not confident with this particular line of thought I had been heading down. Instead, I think “too broad” makes more sense. For example, demonizing women and idealizing them. Both of these can be used as tools to direct narrative and they can be done poorly, but I would also argue they can be done excellently, whether you are seeking to create a morality narrative or simply exploring human complexity as it is.

Don’t condescend to female readers. Hard agree. There is no real nuance here like in the other two.

But the first, this one I think is perhaps the trickiest.

I think the author’s word choice of ‘unnecessarily’ was well chosen, because it allows for some exploration of the nuance that sexuality demands, and, perhaps more critically, it allows us to start reaching for that subliminal space where male and female expressions of sexuality start crossing lines of communication.

She does specifically criticize Martin’s gratuitous sexualization, which would imply that sexualization can be done well. I thought that perhaps she was going to offer a consideration for expression of female sexuality viewed through the masculine lens and how this communication between different perceptions could cross each other well. But when she criticizes Prachet’s love interest being written as a sexy enigma, I kind of came to a screeching halt.

To be clear, I don’t think the original essay is saying that men shouldn’t write about female sexuality - I think she is objecting to distilling the complexity of the female experience to a trope.

I’m going to push back, however. Partially because I love this trope, but also because sometimes a woman simply is a sexy enigma in the life of a man and I don’t think its wrong for a man to enjoy the fantasy if that is the dynamic of the interlude. If they have something long term, obviously he should be investing himself in learning her and knowing her, but the point of novels isn’t to always cover the expanse of a relationship. Sometimes the novel simply indulges in these tantalizing tropes. And I don’t think this is misogynistic.

Can women not be sexy enigmas? Can we not enjoy this facet of our lives and still be whole people? Amelia Adam’s seductive post The Dominant Submissive¹, among others, are written by women all celebrating their experience as sexual beings in relation to themselves, in relation to the lovers they take, the spouses they marry, and the experiences they seek. This is an aspect of the female experience and it makes sense that male authors would take a stab at it.

I would argue that if a male author is writing diversely expressed female characters across his work, then inserting these tropes - such as the sexy enigma - is absolutely within the realm of writing female characters well.

If that was the only female character he ever wrote (as in repetitively), I would argue that he failed to write women well. If every female character he wrote was nothing more than a trope, here to tantalize but never to be known in all her complexity, I would argue that he failed to write women well. Within female expression there is much diversity and so long as a man is intentional to develop the maturity to explore that on the whole, I’m a happy reader.

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As a side note on boobs, since they are regularly a point of contention between female readers and male authors: If you are writing for a broad audience and not writing male targeted erotica, please cut down on the mentions of things like boobs. Or make equal references to random boners and veins and man sweat so that we’ve leveled the playing field. Too much of any of that and it's obvious the author is indulging himself and not considering his audience or the character he seeks to portray.

1. I know that my readers come from a wide range of backgrounds, including religious backgrounds with certain restrictions. As a courtesy heads up: there is a suggestive photo at the opening of this essay.