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0 pointsculi3y ago0 comments

here you go

https://old.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/

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3 comments · 1 top-level

claudiawerner3y ago· 2 in thread

A subreddit full of literally cherrypicked examples of men badly writing women characters doesn't say anything about the general case, never mind any particular case.

culiOP3y ago

Well I was *hoping* you'd pick up on many of the tropes of male-written femme characters brought out in that sub were applicable to the character mentioned above.

But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:

https://baos.pub/what-happens-when-men-write-women-b89bf325c...

I admit I'm not very familiar with the Monkey Island series but literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article for it points out that the primary purpose of this character is to be the primary love interest of the (male) protagonist

Bonus, here's some really fun visualizations that I think you'd enjoy regardless of whether you agree with me or not :)

https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/

https://pudding.cool/2017/08/screen-direction/

https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/

claudiawerner3y ago

Thanks for the last three links; it's interesting to see data analysis like that, even if I disagree on some of the presentation and the claim in the first link that even women readers dislike the presentation of women characters in books. Straight romance books saturated with tropes, in many cases far more explicitly than even porn, are massively popular among adult women.

My point is that if you comment "A female character written by a man" as an inherent mark against something, that's still a fallacy no matter what statistics say. If you had comments about Monkey Island in particular, then it would have been best to just say that, rather than directly say that no man could ever write a good woman character.

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