Even if it hurts other people?
I’m not so sure.
(ETA thanks for coming out of lurking to post. Sorry for giving you a hard time. 
)
yes even it hurts other people. art challenges people. sometimes it hurts. sometimes it heals.
So, boobs…
Oh come on now. Ever read the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series of urban fantasy by Laurell K. Hamilton ? She is constantly describing in tiny detail what Blake is wearing and how hawt she is, and how no man/werewolf of vampire can resist her charms. The first few books are actually not bad, until she turns into Anita Blake: Vampire Fucker, and a type of soft porn with very explicit sex- which kinda ruins the whole concept in my opinion- but not in the opinion of millions of her mostly female fans who love that and the hot sex scenes. Hamilton is not the only one, of course.
Yeah, let us be fair. If as a male writer you feel the need to mention the females breasts, then make sure you mention six pack abs or rock hard chest or something on the guys. Or just don’t- unless you are writing bodice ripper romances, etc, in which case, of course you need to.
I wish I could remember the writer, but there was a SF/Fantasy book series a bunch of us read and discussed in the mid-70s. The author couldn’t resist describing the mammaries of every single female character.
So we’d discuss the books by saying “Did you get to the part where Perky Breasts discovers the old letter?” “Oh, yeah, and she’s trying to hide it from Pendulous Breasts!”
How about this description of a waitress?
You can tell I don’t get out much. And it’s not because I’m not pretty. I am. I’m blond and blue-eyed and twenty-five, and my legs are strong and my bosom is substantial, and I have a waspy waistline. I look good in the warm-weather waitress outfit Sam picked for us: black shorts, white T, white socks, black Nikes.
Fifth pagagraph in Dead Until Dark, first of the Southern Vampire/Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris.
Boobs may not be the heart, but they’re close to it.
I tried to read The Rivers of London series on recommendation (even though urban fantasy is not really my bag) but couldn’t get past Aaronovitch’s constant characterization of women by sexual characteristics and assumed proclivities (e.g. a “dangerous lesbian”). The thing is, I’m fine with it in hard boiled fiction like Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, or James M. Cain. Mildred Pierce basically starts out describing what a sex bomb the eponymous character could be, but it is appropriate because it is a pertinent characteristic of the character (with everyone encouraging the conservative and newly divorced character of Mildred to use her physical assets), and in general the genre is all about the “male gaze” and how it hobbles the characters from seeing the facts (see The Grifters or The Big Sleep). The problem isn’t describing the physical or psychological characteristics of the character; it is sexualizing characters that aren’t actually engaged in using or expressing their sexuality because it is gratuitous and distracting.
Stranger
One area that’s come up a lot lately is that you shouldn’t use food terms to describe skin color, especially for POCs. (So don’t give a black person “chocolate” skin or “skin the color of cafe au lait” or whatever.)
Here’s a representative blog post, but there are lots of them out there.
An author, of whatever gender, needs to create a world in the readers mind. if it is germain to the story, sexual attraction between charactors might very well be elucidated upon, including physical attributes of the parties involved.
whether it be an ample bosom or a rock hard pectoral muscles.
What about using skin color to describe food? Can you order a coffee that is a Desmond Tutu with just enough cream to make it a Lou Diamond Phillips?
I remember reading some bad fiction book with a scene of a foreigner interacting with an English speaker. His dialog was in broken English, which made sense as he specifically never was taught the language and only picked it up on the job. That was fine, what wasn’t fine was his INTERNAL dialog was also represented in broken English.
This thread is making me want to read all my books and stories again and make sure I didn’t talk about boobs…
I don’t read trashy writing from men or women. (And GoT filled me with loathing from the first 3 pages). But I’ve sometimes read the small short romances I can buy in the supermarket – which are almost entirely written by women, always have a female protagonist, told from the female view, are tightly edited and tightly written – and often mention breasts and nipples.
I fell into the genre when I realized that sometimes the plot was exactly the same as one of the classics of English romance literature, and the writing was equally good – just shorter and not as original.
Anyway, that’s by the bye. I just wanted to note that ‘hardly every’ any mention of breasts in ‘women’s writing’ is overly reductive.
I don’t think each example isolated from the others is bad, but if everyone is mainly interested in what you’d expect they’d be interested in, then it would feel like it is stereotyping. In addition to being boring. As a reader, I’d like characters to be slightly more complex than they appear to be if you had to reduce them to what you’d expect from stereotypes, but not everyone should be so against the grain that it looks like quirkiness for quirkiness’s sake.
Romance novels are a whole different beast, though. Physical attraction is a major factor in the story.
Personally (and maybe because I write romance) I don’t mind a little physical description, even if it’s lustful (assuming it fits the character.)
I’ve got a writer friend whose work I love. He writes hardboiled detective stuff. Some of our members are beating up on him a bit for every female character being hot. I don’t mind. I think it’s kinda funny. But I do think they are correct when they say these female characters need to have more depth.
I’ve heard the Dresden books are bad for this. I only have read the first one. I’d love to read a detective novel where an unsightly lady walks into the office with a big case. Okay maybe that would go wrong. I just think it would be a fun subversion of the femme fatale trope.
Not boobs, but one of yours mentioned thighs. Ha.
But Spindown was a good read.
Thanks very much for the kind words about Spindown! And now I’m going to have to go check the context for the thighs…
I was teasing you. It was like the briefest of comments about a character, that was all.
Edit: Hips, not thighs. Whatever.
My books don’t mention boobs at all! Of course, they don’t have a lot of sex scenes and the ones they have usually fade to black or talk a lot about auras, but yeah. If it’s not a romance novel (which I don’t read because I don’t generally like them) it doesn’t need boobs, or (as my narrator refers to them), “willies and bottoms.”