The Twitter Account “Men Writing Women” Is a Hilarious Look At Some Seriously Sexist Prose

Ever pick up a book or a script, get to a description of a woman, and immediately go “oh, a man wrote this” because the description is just too sexist or completely anatomically impossible? The Twitter account Men Writing Women has your back, calling out all the grossest descriptions of women they can find in literature and screenplays. 

The account points out painfully bad descriptions of women from major books, as evidenced by the tweets above. While there are plenty of men who’ve written excellent female characters, there is an over-abundance of men who write women based on their physical appearance. They sure do love talking about boobs. Seriously. It’s boob central. All boobs, all the time, which is not a great way to establish character, as a woman’s character comes from her actions not her chest.

Yeah, it’s not great. The account points out these deeply flawed portrayals of women, including some truly horrifying imagery about women and sex, because women are really only good for sleeping with your male hero, am I right writers? (This is a joke. I feel the need to clarify as sarcasm translates poorly on the Internet.)

The only sad part about this account is thinking “wow, a man got paid to write that a horse is like a vibrator, or that someone can store a purse in their vagina, or that complimenting a woman by saying she has her mother’s breasts is a good thing.” People talk a lot about how women have to make great art to be taken seriously, and that’s even more disheartening considering how much bad art men have made. These are examples of such bad art. Seriously, imagine thinking these descriptions are good or sexy.

Men Writing Women is a hilarious account, and the person running it does a great job of making sarcastic and humorous commentary on these disheartening posts. But wow, a lot of men really do not know how to write women, huh? I know this might come as a shock, but women are more than their physical beauty or their breasts, and you can describe a female character without sexualizing her. Or talking about her mother’s breasts. It’s possible.

I’ll leave you with a particularly bad piece of writing that highlights the male gaze from known “feminist” Joss Whedon and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Wonder Woman script. Men writing women indeed.

(image: Pexels/Twitter)

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Kate Gardner

Kate (they/them) says sorry a lot for someone who is not sorry about the amount of strongly held opinions they have. Raised on a steady diet of The West Wing and classic film, they are now a cosplayer who will fight you over issues of inclusion in media while also writing coffee shop AU fanfic for their favorite rare pairs.