Culture

Why Are Male Authors So Unnecessarily Horny When They Write About Women?

This is a petition to ban men from using the words "supple breasts" ever again.

by Michelle Rennex  1 March 2021
men writing about women horny

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There seems to be a common problem with men in the literary world: none of them seem to have any idea how female anatomy, or how women in general, work.

Really, whenever there’s a description of a woman in a book, you can instantly tell whether a man wrote it based on just how unbelievably horny the text reads. But beyond being horny as hell (and strangely fixated on the concept of boobs, in particular), these descriptions of women rarely ever make much sense.

Take this excerpt of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, for example. Eugenides, for some strange reason decided to write about sadness in women causing “depressed breasts” that “withdraw into themselves”… as if boobs operate the same way as a turtle retreating into its shell to protect itself.

Now beyond proving he has zero clue on how breasts actually work, Jeffrey Eugenides clearly thinks that women think about their boobs a lot more than we actually do.

I think I can safely say that no woman has ever had the thought to check whether their breasts had retreated into themselves right after breaking down in tears. In fact, I have never checked if my breasts have been “depressed” ever in my life, simply because it isn’t a thing.

Male writers just seem to have a strange obsession with talking about breasts whenever they can, whether the scene is sexual or not. But it’s rare to see any writers talk about the state of dicks in their stories, especially during crying scenes where Eugenides’ gave breasts an honourable mention.

Why aren’t authors telling me whether cocks are feeling melancholic? How are we meant to go about our days without knowing if a character’s penis is jovial or glum?

Honestly, this constant referral back to the female body in instances where it doesn’t make much sense to, just proves that male authors have a default setting of… incredibly horny. Plus, it shows how men write for other men instead of detailing authentic experiences for women to enjoy, and exposes just how little these authors know about how the female body works or what women desire.

Of course, this is a generalisation. There have been many male authors who have been able to set aside the horniness, and write about women in respectful, and anatomically correct, ways. But the world just never seems to be in short supply of horrific excerpts of men writing about women with only two things on their mind: titties and vagina.

Just look at Men Write Women on Twitter and Men Writing Women on Reddit, two pages dedicated to sharing these hilariously dreadful examples of male authors projecting their horniness in their work, for example. Or the Bad Sex in Fiction Award that honours “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”, which, naturally, most often is given to a male author.

“3 and a half milliboobs per handful” from r/menwritingwomen

But this isn’t to say that women can’t write about women in less-than-ideal ways. It’s just men let their otherwise good work be overshadowed by ungodly levels of horniness far too often.

Take this excerpt from David Burr Gerrard’s The Epiphany Machine, for example, where Gerrard shares the most unsanitary and unrealistic sexual encounter probably ever documented.

Gerrard writes about the female character, Rebecca, “shoving every appropriately-sized vegetable in the kitchen inside herself” before “rubbing her (by then quite juicy) vagina… on the centre of the glass coffee table”.

If that wasn’t already horrific enough, Gerrard then continues the tale and shares that Rebecca is eventually able to “get herself off” by “rubbing her clit up and down the long turquoise spine of a coffee table book about Majorca”.

Like the woman was some kind of rabid horn-bag, the author then makes the male character be Rebecca’s saviour by having him preventing her from “putting her pussy on each individual page of the book” because he was “extremely aroused… and concerned about paper cuts”. What a hero! Thank God for men and their big brains!

But while these excerpts are funny to read, YA author of What I Like About Me and You Were Made For Me, Jenna Guillaume, explains that this horny writing is actually a wider problem that stems from the objectification of women.

“The women in these stories are objects on which men project their own obsessions, fantasies, and hang-ups,” Guillaume told Junkee. “It’s the result of a culture that centres the male gaze and in which so many narratives are told from a cis white male perspective.”

Guillaume goes on to explain that while most of us are forced to accept this perspective, cis white men rarely have theirs challenged in the stories they consume, and so don’t feel the need to seek out different points of view in their own writing.

“When it comes to writing them it seems somewhat of a challenge to put themselves in the shoes of others,” Guillaume explained. “They’re nevertheless heralded by a culture that is still dominated by the tastes of men like them.”

“When men write gross sex scenes, often it’s a part of ‘prestigious’ literary fiction that wins awards. Meanwhile women write good sex scenes in romance — stories which centre women and the female gaze — and it’s dismissed as trash,” Guillaume continued. “It’s misogyny plain and simple.”

“It’s a novel concept, but women need to be written as people, and as women — and often male writers don’t achieve either of these standards.”

Michelle Rennex is a senior writer at Junkee. You can follow her at @michellerennex.