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Twitter Is Letting Us in on All the Infuriating, Ignorant #ThingsOnlyWomenWritersHear

Complete with complaining manchildren!
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Vivian Kane
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Published: Apr 18, 2017 06:16 pm

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One of the great things about Twitter and its hashtags is that we all get an opportunity to hear about others’ life experiences we’d never know firsthand, as well as find camaraderie in venting about our own shared life experiences. Take, for example, Joanne Harris, the writer of Chocolat, who was musing over all the things she and other women writers have heard that we never see being applied to men.

So she came up with the hashtag #ThingsOnlyWomenWritersHear. The phrase caught on like misogyny wildfire, encompassing all the things women writers hear that presumably never come up for male writers. Starting with the very distinction itself.

Women writers (who, yes, can just be referred to as “writers,” believe it or not!) constantly hear assumptions about their work based on their gender.

 

As well as assumptions about their audience:

And their abilities.

Then there are the questions about that husband/boyfriend/family and how they feel about her work:


Women often come up against a general disbelief that this could be their job.

 

Which, by the way, is a real job, even when a woman holds it.

It wasn’t long before the #WhatWoCWritersHear started trending, shining a light on a whole other set of misconceptions and insulting attitudes.

Oh, and if you were wondering where are all the victimized manchildren complaining about their persecution/being left out of the conversation, don’t worry! They’re here. Because, of course:

 

This thread may be the perfect encapsulation of, well, pretty much everything:

For the record, intersectional feminism is in no way based in flattening out women’s or humans’ experiences or ignoring those that don’t apply to everyone equally. In fact, that kind of thinking is probably the biggest criticism of “white feminism.” That’s just one tiny piece of information out there on the internet, available to anyone who wants to learn about the experiences of others. (Which clearly doesn’t include that guy and his ignorant ilk. For everyone else: enjoy the hashtags!)

(image: Shutterstock)

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Author
Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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