I was reading with interest this article in the New Yorker about women parodying male writers’ blazon (a word I just learned!) of their female fictional characters.
Anyway, it made me think of a terrible book I recently read, Darkfever, the first in a series of urban fantasy novels by Karen Marie Moning.
The book is written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist, a southern belle named MacKayla Lane. Throughout the novel, “Mac” relentlessly praises her own physical attributes in what struck me was a very male point of view, constantly referring to the perfectness of her body, and repeatedly referring to her breasts and how beautiful and big they are.
I wondered whether this Karen Marie Moning book might actually have been written by a man.
Wow, a woman being vain about her body…imagine that!
(I’m not saying women are uniquely vain…I’m pretty sure men and women are equals, in the main, when it comes to that trait.)
A lot of fiction writing is wish-fulfillment by the author. I mean, if you actually stop and think about it for a minute, it makes sense as something that would motivate people to write fiction. Either they think they’re awesome, and project that onto their characters, or they wish they were awesome, and project that onto their characters.
The quoted portions don’t align with the premise that women are parodying men, since they are both male authors. It would be an interesting discussion to have.
The passage from Saul Bellow is the sort of brittle, pretentious literature that makes my soul hurt. It’s not even a case of the male gaze, although that is certainly present, but mostly it’s a very obvious type of ennui-laden fiction that exhausts me just to think about. It conjures pictures of alcoholic upper class people lying about like exhausted greyhounds in the heat, occasionally rousing themselves to move on to the next source of amusement, before collapsing again.
What that has to do with the “squirrel who likes to fuck” is beyond me. At a guess, it’s a jarring phrase, and was used by the author and the OP, for shock value.
Karen Marie Moning is a woman, if that was the question you wanted answered.
Men look at women. We look at their bodies. We think about their body parts sexually. There are tasteful ways to write about this, and there are tasteless ways to write about it, but the idea that male writers should just, like, never do it, is ridiculous.
Men objectify women. Women objectify men. People objectify each other. You know why? Because we are objects. We are all literally objects.
If that is in response to my comment, I never said that men should not look at women, or that they should not write about it. For that matter, women look at men, and they write about it. I thought the OP was misleading, and the quotes derogatory.
So here’s my question, and I seriously ask it: do serious female writers write about men’s bodies in similarly objectified ways as commonly as serious male writers do about women’s?
The tweets are a straw man. It would be as if a male author, imagining how women think, wrote, “I gazed upon his dark red Lamborghini Murcielago, his diamond cuff links, his six-foot-five stature, and all I could think was how fat his bank account must be and how much I could spend out of it per year.”
No, certainly not in response to your comment, but to the gist of the New Yorker.
There’s certainly no one-size-fits-all picture of human sexual attraction and behavior, but I would say that, in the main, men are more interested in women’s bodies, women are more interested in men’s character traits. The poster above jokes about a parody of a woman describing all of a man’s status objects (and certainly there would be some women who would be really into that) but I find that the stereotype of female heterosexual writers objectifying male characters, is to idealize traits like “mysterious”, “bad boy”, “wild”, “dangerous”, etc. The cover of the book might provide a hunky visual supplement to the text, but the characterization of the guy is really where it’s at. (It might describe his body too, but not in isolation of his character traits.)
I’m not sure if women are biologically less interested in male bodies than the reverse, or just more conditioned by society to not talk about it as much. Maybe some of that conditioning is fading away. I certainly hear plenty of cheeky talk from women about the likes of Jason Momoa, Idris Elba, or Channing Tatum. But males seem to fetishize individual parts of a woman’s body more. Women seem more “big picture” oriented.
My point is that Moning’s style strikes me not as a vain woman but as the style of a man noting what he appreciates about a woman’s body.
The quoted portion wasn’t meant to illustrate that point, merely to introduce the general subject. The link is there for the following. At least one other magazine has extensively analyzed the New Yorker piece. Feel free to look it up and have that discussion here.
I know that she purports to be a woman and ghat she purports to have written this terrible book. I am amusing myself with the idea that one or the other is untrue.
I’d say yeah, though you’d have to qualify who you would call serious. Patty Briggs’ Mercy Thompson goes on and on about her husband Adam’s looks and rippling musculature in every book. Charlaine Harris’ characters do so as well in various series of hers I’ve read (and she’s really big on male hair). Those are the first two female authors that come to mind for me, but as they’re genre authors maybe you don’t see them as “serious.”
In general, women can be as bad as the men. Once Marti Noxon joined “Buffy” James Marsters was topless and chained damned near every episode. :rolleyes:
What’s described sounds like what, back when online games were written, was the clear and evident sign that a female character was inhabited by a male player.
To female players. Other male players would be too busy drooling over the descriptions of busty, green-eyed redheads to stop and think. The rule was “if it sounds like someone you might actually see in the supermarket, it’s probably an actual woman; if it sounds like someone you might see in the brown-paper-covered mags, it’s a guy.”
At one point there was a female player who eventually revealed it was a guy who, with the help of his girlfriend and because of a bet between them, had been passing as a girl. The first thing he’d had to do in order to pass was accept a description for his character which did not have anything “big”, “humongous”, “luminous” or of an unusual color. And BTW: the girlfriend had won the bet (yep, people do treat you differently if they think you’re a man or a woman).
So long as the genre isn’t “romance novel” of the sort that might get titled “The Cocky Cock-up” I’ll accept it.
I’m also wondering how much is the author’s objectification of the gender and how much is the author telling us about the character’s way of thinking. “Professor of Desire” is about a character who is extremely insecure, especially about sexuality, and his inappropriate behaviors. That character’s thoughts about women he meets is key to telling us about that character and not held up as “normal.” Saul Bellows Henderson is I think supposed to be someone who is finding things wrong with what he has, is dissatisfied; that is a driving force of the character. Of course that plays out in how he views those he is physically attracted to.
Identifying a female main protagonist as focusing on male characters’ physical features as objects is also defining the character, but in our society usually is making a different sort of comment about the character than a male protagonist’s focus on body parts does. Maybe it reflects the way the author thinks about men too, I dunno. But I’m guessing that usually a female protagonist describing the body of the male character is setting her up as strong and sensual while male characters who do so are often revealing some insecurities.
I thought the women’s tweets were funny. We’re all used to the default voice and eyes being those of a man. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a woman author could convincingly project a masculine perspective to describe women, if she’s trying to appeal to male readers.
Every time I see the title I think “So, male authors get to gaze on women character bodies? I think my career as a writer just started!”
I’m flashing back to a latter Bloom County “Where Are They Now?” strip, where the sexist frat-lad Steve Dallas has become a comic book artist. When one of his pin-up pages is held up, and he’s asked “Why do all the women look like Dolly Parton in Zero-G?”, he explains “Yeah, none of us dated much in high school…”
She does have a wikipedia page as well as a website.
ETA: Which I see you already linked to. I think the answer about your query is she started as a romance novelist, so her descriptive passages no doubt are common in the genre and help work sell.
Nitpick: I think you’re mixing up a couple of strips where Steve Dallas is looking for a new “job” appearing in a comic strip/comic book, not drawing one. The “every woman in these things looks like Dolly Parton in zero gravity” quip is from when Dallas is explaining to Opus why he’s considering comic-book work.
