Writing a woman well as a man can be very hard and when it fails it can tell you a lot about that man. The same is BTW true of any minority or subculture that man is not part of.
One good advice: When you start to build a character from a minority or subculture first write the bits that are not (stereo)typical. Just hobbies, likes and dislikes, how they(…) spent their time alone, relationship with parents. That kind of stuff. Only then add the more difficult elements. That way you begin thinking about them as a person first and can avoid the problem of focussing on stereotypes or sexuality too much.
It is not wrong of course to observe and describe other human beings in a sexual way, most of us are sexual beings and often sexually motivated after all but it is wrong if that is the only way you can deal with an entire gender.
It’s difficult, because cheese is useful to fascinate a woman. I suppose that getting a whole gorgonzola cheese wheel could be an interesting way to start a date btw.
I like breasts, quite a lot. But if I’m writing something, I wouldn’t focus on a woman’s breasts in her description, unless it’s explicitly going to be pr0n, or the male narrator is a real horndog. (How often are lesbians so interested in breasts, by the way? Or are they? Inquiring minds want to know!)
I’ve given it multiple tries, with and without the rind, on crackers with jam, and just about any other way people have recommended it. I just can’t get myself to like it any more than I can get myself to like horseradish (I know, get the torches and pitchforks).
Yet it still isn’t as ridiculously grotesque as the thing she’s making fun of, somehow. I think the full grotesquerie requires not seeing the object of the writing as fully human or being able to empathize with them. A problem too many male authors have, writing about women, but female authors don’t have, writing about men.
Even heterosexual teenage me would be reading these authors, thinking, “Dudes, there’s something wrong with you and your breast fixations.”
And it wasn’t just that the male authors were fixated with breasts, but that they had their female characters also being weirdly, constantly conscious of their breasts as they went about their lives. If you flipped it and made it about men and their penises, it becomes obviously, howlingly laughable, but the authors apparently couldn’t do that.
Yeah. A friend pointed out that even when not fixated on breasts, male authors make the women’s appearance a big thing, compared to their male characters. One example was in The Martian. Men, men, everywhere men, and we really have no idea what they’re wearing at NASA, but introduce a female and we get the full run down.
I liked how Akady Martine, in a Desolation called Peace, segued from foreplay, to this Interlude, Probably a technique borrowed from horror movies.
IN all the vast reach of Teixcalaan, it is an honor for a young person sworn to the Six Outreaching Palms to be selected as a medical cadet for the Fleet: the Fifth Palm, medicine coupled close with research and development, is the second-most difficult placement to achieve within the Ministry of War. And thus it is a greater honor still to serve on an active battlefront before the completion of one’s mandatory years of training, and perhaps a further honor yet to be allowed, under no supervision but the watching eyes of Weight for the Wheel’s security cameras and biohazard containment detection algorithm, to clean up the remains of an alien autopsy.
Most of the winners of the “bad sex in fiction” awards have been male.
A few female writers have been recognized-- Nichola McAuliffe and Nancy Huston. Not sure if the decision to exclude erotic and pornographic works unconciously limits exposure to the romance genre.
Even when male authors write hilariously phallocentric narratives, they still don’t write about dicks the way they write about breasts, so flipping it results in something obviously weird, even for that context.
His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don’t say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It’s difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It’s hot and damp, and then, Christ; it’s amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as…
“As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?”
