Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. Until they learn (or at least try to learn) how to write about female subjects in a way that does not purposefully weave paternalistic generalizations into every paragraph, I propose a moratorium on this stagnant approach to literary writing.

b_b:

The author is griping about journalism, but conflates that with misogyny. Journalists simplify, stereotype and generalize for a multitude of reasons. A scientist can't read scientist journalism without picking out all the things that are incorrect, and an athlete probably has a hard time with the sports page. What this author is doing is cherry picking examples to generalize that men don't know how to write about women (she says explicitly that she knows she's doing that, so that makes it ok, apparently). In doing so, she's proving my point while damming herself as no better than those she is impugning. You want to make a point that "people do X"? How about presenting some data.

posted 4068 days ago