Reading Lists
Everything We Learned About Women’s Anatomy from Male Authors
Wait, you think women keep their credit cards WHERE?
Last year we all had a good time describing ourselves like a male author would (sample text: âI had big honking teeters, and I thought about them constantlyâ) and even created a handy chart for generating your own prurient prose. But honestly, male authors never needed our help, and they carried on regardless of mockery. Since May, the Twitter feed Men Write Women has been collecting the most egregious examples of the real deal: testosterone-fueled metaphor, icky plot points, and narrators who donât appear to have actually talked to a woman for fifteen minutes, let alone lived as one.
You can learn a lot from spending some time with this Twitter feed, not least that you might be a better writer than you think. (âThese are published authors,â the Men Write Women curator hastened to emphasize via email. âSomeone wrote that and thought, âhmmm you know what? This sounds like a Very Real Description of a woman.'â) In particular, though, you can gain a lot of insight into female anatomy. Hereâs what we now know about women, thanks to male authors:
Their breasts point directly upwardâŚ
âSmall breasts pointing skyward like surface-to-air missilesâ
âŚand also to each sideâŚ
âLike two puppies pulling on their leashes in slightly diverging directionsâ
âŚwhile laughing?
âHer breasts were laughing things that were firmly in placeâ
Instead of hair like other mammals, they are covered in clitorises! Clitorides? Clitorati?
âEvery follicle on my arms and legs becoming a tiny clitorisâ
Inside theyâre just one big labyrinthâŚ
âEverything about [men] was more direct, their insides werenât the maze womenâs were, for the pee to find its way throughâ
âŚculminating in a live rabbitâŚ
âBut from her underpantsâŚan affectionate warm rabbit came springing, a kicking wet autonomous warm animalâ
âŚthat they use to store credit cards.
âThe girl had a tiny purse tucked into her vagina, just big enough to hold her driverâs license, a credit card, and a few bucksâ
Taking all of this into account, I have compiled the following sketch of A Woman, According to Male Authors:
Listen, we donât like this any better than you do, but until male authors get their acts together, this is the artistic vision of women weâre stuck with. Fellas, we beg you: read an anatomy book. Preferably not one you wrote.
