Oh, thanks! THAT’S it…
As I was typing from decades-old memories I was wondering “Do I have this right?”
I gotta say, while I wasn’t as into Bloom County as some other comic strips, I did really enjoy the whole concept of the characters knowingly performing their roles: going on strike in some earlier story arcs, auditioning for roles in other well-known comic strips near the end, etc.
Bloom County is fucking amazing. I always loved it because Steve Dallas looked almost like a cartoon version of myself (in appearance, not personality!) As a kid and teenager and still to this day I have always loved Bloom County, Doonesbury, and Opus and Bill. It’s a pretty logical step up from Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes to those strips, they all sort of traded in the same idioms and symbols, and the extremely dry humor carried over. It always amazed me that cartoonists could not only draw the same characters with such consistency, but also maintain the same characterizations over so many strips.
I also loved The Far Side, but that’s a bit different since it was single-panel and didn’t involve ongoing stories.
Sometimes I really fear that this style of comic is a dying art and will not survive computers and the internet in the long term. As many webcomics as there are out there, and many of them are really funny, I’ve never been visually impressed with any of them as I have been with old-school penmanship.
You’d like the premise of “Portraits of His Children” by George RR Martin, about an author visited by live versions of his most well-known characters, the first a teen nymphomaniac into older guys. Of course, it gets dark after that.
My author-friend Mary Sue says this isn’t remotely true. And she should know. She’s the smartest, most beautiful woman around.
Or they think they are awesome writers, or they wish they were awesome writers…
I was reading the Mowgli thread, and thinking about Neil Gaiman, who in his heart believes that his is a better author than Kipling or C S Lewis. It’s a fairly harmless vanity, that has contributed to a great deal of enjoyment by many people.
How did Joan Aiken have such a male voice?
It’s been a long time since I read anything by her, but I don’t think it was because she spent words describing women’s bodies.
The vain in
The main
Aren’t Jane
Or Wayne
But the twain
Am I being unfair or prejudiced when I say that the photo of her on Wikipedia shows her with a stereotypically masculine facial expression as well? Even when I know that I’m a man who has some very feminine facial expressions?
(“Lady looks like a dude” needs a different tune than Aerosmith gave its converse.) 
I am pretty stupid, but man…I must be lost.
Is this thread about romance novels written from the POV of a female, regardless of the sex of the protagonist? If so…why does anyone care, exactly?
Seriously, I probably shouldn’t even have commented, but I read through the thread trying to understand the outrage, as minimal as it seems, and I just don’t get it.
If you’re looking for outrage here, I don’t think you will get it.
No, it’s about the tendency of many male authors to shoehorn descriptions of certain female body parts into things that really do not require it. Especially stuff in a non-romance novel, written from a female POV. For example, the character’s getting out of bed, and there’s a description of the way her breasts are moving, or the way the fabric of her skimpy nightie rubs over her nipples. It’s just not something women generally think about, when they’re not actually trying to be sexy. I wake up in the morning and I’m thinking ‘Need to pee’ and ‘Want coffee’, and running through what I need to do that day, not about how my tits are jouncing as I stretch.
You can read an entire series of non-romance books by most female authors without ever discovering their female protagonist’s breast size, but it’s something many male authors apparently consider an integral part of every female character. Something to be brought up and dwelt on at every opportunity, and these same guys apparently regularly think they’re actually understanding women, really getting inside our [del]cleavage[/del] heads.
FoieGrasIsEvil, imagine a book with a main, male character written like this:
“Mike stretched every inch of his muscular, 6’2” frame before getting out of bed. The silk sheets felt great on his naked, bronze-colored skin. He got up and put on a pair of boxers, his larger-than average junk pressing lightly against the fabric. It was going to be a good day, he could feel it.
He walked into the kitchen, yawning, the hard muscles of his thighs and calves still loosening up. He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror, his shoulder-length blond hair a wild tangle around his handsome, blue-eyed face, and realized he looked a bit of a mess."
It’s when an author spends a lot of time on minor physical details, instead of developing a character through, you know, characterization. When men are writing about women, they often focus on the kind of physical details men tend to think about regarding women, rather than treating them as average human beings. People liken this to wish-fulfillment on the author’s part, or even mental masturbation. What really woke me up to the ridiculousness of this written from the inverse perspective were some a passages written by George R.R. Martin. The equivalent in comic books is how every woman is drawn with the body of a stripper, with a skin-tight costume to match. In that genre men are pretty much just as unrealistically depicted, though that’s hardly a positive. (Deadpool 2 even pokes fun at this trope, by having one of the male characters even say “When have you ever seen an overweight superhero?”)
In defense, I say that it’s because it’s part of the way men think about themselves.
That is, it’s not just because men think about women that way.
I am aware of the way my penis rubs against my pants and my body. Pretty much every time I move, including when I get up in the morning. I am aware of it’s size: it gets bigger and smaller, and squashed and strangled as a result.
and here is what cracked.com had to say:
article_22462, 6-things i learned having my penis surgically removed
Like a lot of things, I think it’s a mix of nature and nurture.
Yes, society conditions women’s outlooks on many things. But biologically, women are going to have a different approach to sex because the consequences of sex are different from them. It’s hard to tease out what, exactly is nature and what is nurture because people are complicated and many experiments that would help answer those questions are unethical.
However, it is likely that women are going to want mates that are healthy because in the human species a mate supplies resources to a woman - in hunter gatherer days that took the form of meat or obtaining foods that required strength or risk to get (climbing trees for honey or certain types of nuts, for example). Being tall and muscular are indication of a man being healthy and capable (and also getting enough to eat). Having a good provider could make a huge difference in the survival of a woman and her children. So big, strong, healthy men probably are something that women are attracted to for biological as well as social reasons. But a woman would also want a mate that’s loyal (so his resources go to her and her children rather than spread all over, or entirely absent), who is brave (will defend her and her children with his strength), and who is not abusive towards her. In reality, of course, women have to put up with less than perfect men, just as men have to put up with less than perfect women.
Our society is less shaming of women who admire good looking men than it use to be, so you get a more frank expression of it. But the notion that women are more “big picture” than men is not false - personality, loyalty, and so forth really do count.
Also, women might want to have sex with amazing physical specimens, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they consider them husband material - the old “women want to fuck James Bond, but they marry Morry the Accountant”. It’s not proven (I have no idea how you’d even go about that) but given patterns in other animal species its certainly possible women lust after gorgeous men because they want the genes, but marry a “good provider” because they and their children want to eat on a regular basis. Of course, now we have women who don’t need a “good provider”, they have enough resources and wealth to raise a family on their own… in which case maybe such women do seek men more for their looks than women who are less well off.
It’s complicated But women admiring/gazing upon/lusting after amazing looking men doesn’t rule out all the other things women may or may not be looking for in a man. Just as the fact that so many men do lust after women who are stereotypically sexy doesn’t rule out men also valuing intelligent conversation or a mutual interest in the same hobbies. Back in hunter gatherer days a man would likely value a woman who was strong and able to find a lot of food because the fact is he wouldn’t always have a successful hunt and having a woman who could provide him with food on those days was pretty damn important. (In fact, a LOT of food sharing went on in hunter-gatherer societies, it was the only way for the group to survive long term)
^ This.
Although there are women who write with surprisingly male gaze - the Anita Blake series being the one that comes to mind. Laurel K. Hamilton is definitely a woman, but from the beginning Anita Blake the character was always talking about how inconveniently big her boobies are and it just goes from there. She has trouble carrying a gun or getting a holster because her hips are soooooo curvy and she’s sooooo petite she has to get the holsters custom made. Then, after the series turned into bad fan fic porn it’s all about her vagina and the big penises it accommodates and… well, if I didn’t know the author was a woman I’d assume it was a pimply faced nerd in mama’s basement writing what he thinks would be the ideal action girl, typing with just one hand.
Books written from what I’d call a “female gaze” are not too common, but if I had to suggest one it would be the Sharing Knife series by Louis McMaster Bujold - the main character is a young woman in a frontier style society (with fantasy elements thrown in) that I think really does tell the tale from the female POV. When I’ve told people that and they’ve read it I’ve gotten feedback that it wasn’t as different as they expected. Well, no - because men and women DO have the same outlook on quite a few things - but it does have some subtle differences. Fawn doesn’t think about how her shirt brushes her nipples when she wakes up in the morning, but she DOES over how to handle menstruation while on the road. As one example.
I get what you’re saying but James Bond is a bad example to use. The reason why women want to fuck James Bond (in the movies, I mean, obviously he is not a real person) isn’t just because he’s handsome, it’s because he’s also super smart, charming, talented, etc. James Bond would be the perfect catch for a woman - post-retirement, anyway. It might be fun to be his girlfriend for a while while he’s doing the spy thing, but it would quickly turn to terror on a regular basis, so it would take a certain kind of woman to live that life.
This scenario has real-life parallels. Women marry Naval Aviators or Air Force fighter pilots, for instance, because they want a life of adventure and traveling all over the world and getting to watch their badass husbands do badass shit and wear cool uniforms and get pats on the back from everyone. Then what happens when they get shuffled around to a bunch of shitty duty stations, and then eventually sent into combat, and the wife knows that every day her husband could die a horrific death? The Right Stuff, by the late Tom Wolfe, discusses this in detail.
The Red Pill types would call the strategy you describe, “alpha fux, beta bux.” And their perspective would be that Morry the Accountant just shouldn’t get married at all, because if women want to fuck James Bond, well, it’s easy enough to look and dress like an ersatz James Bond if you’re making bank as an accountant, so why not just play the field? However, it’s a different story for Morry the underemployed web programmer. Hence, those guys are often full of negativity and frustration over this very issue, and their online echo chamber doesn’t help.
Sure, you can look and dress like James Bond, but it isn’t just looking the part. As you note, Bond is also smart, charming, talented… Morry the Accountant could purchase a custom-tailored suit, a fantastic haircut, drive an amazing car,get coaching to be more charming, etc. but you can’t purchase intelligence or personality or some forms of talent.
The whole “alpha fux, beta bux” also ignores the fact that there are plenty of men who don’t want to really be James Bond, they actually happy to have a steady, low-risk job, wife, family, and so forth. If the “beta” reproduces successfully (even with a Bond cuckoo or two in his collection of children) then he’s still a Darwinian winner. Given that he sticks around, there’s a decent chance his kids are more likely to grow to up to be successful than Bond’s by-blows. The “alpha fux” strategy relies on fux with a lot of different women in hopes a few of those instances result in children. The Beta one is fewer fux but more surety the results of those fux will grow up and have children in turn. They are both legitimate strategies and humanity is a species that employs both strategies.
Now that you mention Anita Blake, I do recall that there were a lot of detailed descriptions that seemed like odd diversions from the story. Somehow it didn’t stick in my mind as being so laser-focused on describing her breasts and ass, but maybe my mind just decided to spare me by wiping much of those memories.
Wasn’t there something early on about how she had to choose her brassiere very carefully in order to accommodate her firearms or something?
I don’t think I made it that far in the series.
This is exactly the kind of idea I was trying to communicate.
It’s an interesting puzzle for a writer—how do you communicate one character’s attraction to the physical beauty of another character in a way that is specific enough to be believable and relatable to the reader, but doesn’t go so far as to just constitute a catalogue of the writer’s personal fetishes?
And if at least one purpose of a work is to be sexually arousing (in part, perhaps) in the context of a story, then to what extent should a writer think about appealing to the tastes of a wide range of possible readers? Or is that too difficult a task? Should the writer just dive in and satisfy his or her own personal tastes?