Dear Male Writers: Stop Doing These Embarrassing Things

We all love the way social media has torn apart Men Writing Women and we probably love Women Writing Men Like Men Write Women even more (I know I do).

Unfortunately, even with the daily threat of excerpts from any book being splashed across twitter and instagram to be laughed at, some authors (male authors) persist in writing incredibly painful and clichéd scenes about women.

I give to you a list of some of the most common, egregious and downright baffling scenes men insist on coming back to over and over, despite how embarrassing they are for all involved. This won’t be so broad as “don’t be sexist” and “don’t objectify women”. I have provided very specific examples so if your pen ever starts moving in that direction, you can stop it in time.

For anyone who missed the Men Writing Women memo, please do yourself a favour and stay well away from the hideously overdone and laughable scenes outlined below.

A woman admiring her naked body in front of a mirror

I know. What better way to get inside the mind of your female main character than to get her alone, vulnerable, reflecting (literally and metaphorically). But you also really need to drive the point home that she’s incredibly hot, am I right? You don’t want people reading this book to think she’s just a normal woman. Time to get her alone in the bathroom… alone with her naked body!

So here is the male gaze written from a woman’s point of view. Naturally, she gets out of the shower, dripping wet and all hot and steamy. She stands in front of the mirror and scrutinises her body. One wonders how she finds time to get all those aliens blasted if this is her morning routine, but let’s not interrupt. She needs to assess her flat stomach, her tight thighs, the pinkness of her nipples and largess of her breasts. She probably needs to compare those body parts to food. Milk enough? Ripe? Surely plump and tantalising…

“She sees this every day,” whispers the entire female readership and a large portion of the male readership. “It’s not new to her,” they continue. “She probably just needs that mirror to check her wounds aren’t infected and get on with saving the planet…”

“No!” cries the terrible male author. “She’s not a normal woman — you must understand! This one is a beautiful woman!! She never gets infections! Except internal ones that make her flushed and tragic and more beautiful. She cannot help but be entranced by her beautiful figure that she has seen every day of her life! And yet… and yet… she, as the owner of this body, does not really understand its power…”

Which leads me to my next point.

She doesn’t know how hot she is

Okay, so, for all the men out there who need to hear this: beautiful women know they’re beautiful.

Do you want to know how they know that? Because they are told every day of their lives. Whether it’s their parents, the kids at school, the owner of the local grocery store, the agency who offers her a modelling contract, the annoying moron on the street who says things like, “smile beautiful girl! It might never happen!” and she thinks to herself, “it just did, you moron”. She knows.

Other than being told outright that she is beautiful, unless this woman is blind, yeah, she can actually see it. She owns a mirror apparently. And believe it or not, women, especially those who can sniper a top assassin from a rooftop six blocks away, can judge their own looks in comparison to those around them, unless of course they have more important things to do than compare themselves to other women, like maybe, stopping the biggest heist of gold bullion in history.

The question is then, why do men want women to be ignorant of their good looks? Why is the ideal woman totally unaware of how she is admired by all those around her? Why is the ideal woman (in these dreadful books) lacking in self-confidence?

It makes her vulnerable. It mades her needy. Specifically, it makes her need men. She needs a man to sweep in and tell her she is worthy. She needs a man to show interest in her because her self-esteem is so low she can never be truly independent without him.

Most importantly, if she knows how beautiful she is she might want a man on her level. On the other hand, if she is blissfully ignorant of her worth, it leaves space for that average-looking man of average wealth who is just an average writer, I mean, uh, character of some sort, who is in no way a stand-in for the writer of the novel.

In a nutshell: women of low self-esteem are vulnerable and that makes them desirable to men who write terrible female characters who don’t know how attractive they are. Just please stop writing characters like this.

Comparing women to sunsets, oceans, winds and so on.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No. Please don’t. Not unless you’re Shakespeare. That sort of thing was all well and good four-hundred years ago, but times have changed.

If your character is “more radiant than one-thousand sunsets”; if she is “as unpredictable as the stormiest of storms in the Bermuda Triangle”; If she is “as sultry aszzzzzzzzzzzz…”

Oh. Sorry. I feel asleep for a moment there leaning on my ‘Z’ key.

It’s old. It’s done. It’s harried. It’s dehumanising. It’s tacky. It’s a boring shortcut.

Describe your character properly. Give her a personality.