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: “I had big honking teeters, and I thought about them constantly”) 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 don’t 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. (“These are published authors,” the Men Write Women curator hastened to emphasize via email. “Someone wrote that and thought, ‘hmmm you know what? This sounds like a Very Real Description of a woman.'”) In particular, though, you can gain a lot of insight into female anatomy. Here’s what we now know about women, thanks to male authors:
Their breasts point directly upward…
“Small breasts pointing skyward like surface-to-air missiles”
…and also to each side…
“Like two puppies pulling on their leashes in slightly diverging directions”
…while laughing?
“Her breasts were laughing things that were firmly in place”
Instead of hair like other mammals, they are covered in clitorises! Clitorides? Clitorati?
“Every follicle on my arms and legs becoming a tiny clitoris”
Inside they’re just one big labyrinth…
“Everything about [men] was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through”
…culminating in a live rabbit…
“But from her underpants…an affectionate warm rabbit came springing, a kicking wet autonomous warm animal”
…that they use to store credit cards.
“The girl had a tiny purse tucked into her vagina, just big enough to hold her driver’s license, a credit card, and a few bucks”
Taking all of this into account, I have compiled the following sketch of A Woman, According to Male Authors:
Listen, we don’t like this any better than you do, but until male authors get their acts together, this is the artistic vision of women we’re stuck with. Fellas, we beg you: read an anatomy book. Preferably not one you wrote.
