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We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)
What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.
To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.
Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!
This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.
I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.
(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)
In my experience, when filtering large numbers of applicants, the best process is to have each member of the committee bring some shortlist of candidates they like (using whatever method they wish) to the first discussion then proceed to discuss the merits of any candidate who makes everyone or a certain number of people's short list and ranking those candidates for progression.
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This sort of thing endlessly frustrates me, and I guess I'm glad I'm not the only one. If we're gonna be like that, why do we have to waste so much time pretending that words have meanings, or that we have reasons for doing things other than "I like it because I like it, because I said so"? I believe Nietzsche complains about this also.
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For the most part, I agree. At some level, everything is about signalling; playing status games; etc. Probably this very post is just an echo of a successful point made by some hunter-gatherer ancestor sitting around the campfire on the plains of Africa.
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"Cyberpsychosis" sounds much broader than AI psychosis to me. It could just as easily refer to people getting radicalised by lunatic conspiracy theories shared by human actors.
It's actually the term for when you've had so much cyberware installed that you experience severe psychological symptoms.
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I feel really lucky to have been disabused of female purity early on.
I had a younger sister on the highschool varsity volleyball team. I was a senior, I was classmates with many of the very attractive and tall senior players. My sister was one of two sophmores on the varsity team. They won states that year, it was not a shitty team. But boy did they love to talk about shit. Any juvenile male thought of 'huh i wonder what the hot girls are talking about, maybe its how they really want some good dick or something' got so disabused that year. No, they weren't talking about dicks, they were talking about their shits. The big ones, the liquid ones, the frequent ones, the smelly ones, etc. I had to beg my sister to stop talking about her team gossip. One of the best parts of going to her games was looking at all the beautiful buts in spandex. But it was completely ruined. All I could think about was them talking about their latest dumps on the ivory throne.
No, it wasn't some psyops to get me not interested in her teammates. Sister would have set it up if it was viable. She told me when her classmates her age had crushes on me. A real caring sibling. I still get along great with her.
Nowadays I have three daughters. They stink, they shit, they pee, I've changed so many diapers, and wiped poop out of a vagina so many times. Sorry if that is graphic for people without female daughters. It just becomes this weird fact of life. Once they get past one the shits get real gnarly and you want them getting potty trained asap. Of course my daughters fought it until 4.
Sorry why am I talking about shit so much? Its a default human experience. And its also like the first thing any self conscious female will want covered up in their characters. I think we should have a shit test for female characters. Can they talk about taking a shit for a few sentences, even just as an internal monologue. If yes, they are a real person. If no, they are fake barbie dolls.
Dear Sir, if you are wiping excrement out of your infant daughters' vaginas, I heartily and urgently recommend you take them to a doctor because that is not where excrement is supposed to exit - think possible fistulas!
If, on the other hand, you mean "small babies are very messy when evacuating their bowels and excrement gets into places you would not think possible", then yes. But that applies to boy babies as well.
The specific baby issue he's talking about is much less of a thing for boys. Their secondary orifice that you really want to make sure isn't getting feces in it is much smaller and more removed from the primary expulsion orifice.
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Ya I don't know how it gets up in there so often. Had to deal with diarrhea the other day and it was like a spray on shit bikini.
And ya it applies to boy babies as well, but the post is about a female literary shit test. I'm not doubting that many male characters can think and or talk about shit.
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There are plenty of works in which the male characters could not plausibly talk about taking a shit. Can you imagine LotR with an aside about the logistics of Gandalf having to go Number 2 while fighting the Balrog?
Ultimately, fiction more often than not wants to show humans as they would like to be, not as they are. If humanity could reinvent itself according to its ideals, it would probably not poop.
(It's often downright jarring when fiction that otherwise has no pretense to cynical realism does involve defecation. I remember being jarred when Soukou Akki Muramasa's protagonist made sure to take a dump before getting in his robot armour.)
I don't have my copy with me, but the (hilarious and highly recommended even to non-writers) How Not to Write a Novel does indeed have a discussion about why characters in novels don't go to the toilet, why this isn't a problem, and why your character should not go to the toilet in front of the reader either.
A Palme d'Or-winning movie features some plot-critical bowel movements, tbh.
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That specifically would be silly, but I can imagine Fellowship with an aside about how discomfited the hobbits are (or aren't? Bywater to Frogmorton looks to be an 18 mile stretch with no rest stops...) to be "roughing it" in this sense too. I even think some of Fellowship and the Two Towers might actually be improved by a brief mention of how careful the fellowship tries to be after they realize they're being hunted and tracked, or of how much easier orcs' disgusting habits make tracking those.
I don't see that it would add anything: the Three Hunters have no issues tracking the orcs; Aragorn even comments that they seem to be going out of their way to hack things to the ground for no reason other than enjoying destruction and that the trail is clear.
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Characters in novels do sometimes make reference to going to the bathroom, but the scene isn't typically described. And characters mentioning shitting their pants after some terrifying event happens too. The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
Oh, sure. I'm not wanting to know how Tolkien would have described defecation, just whether it should have logically had some impact on the story that was ignored because not intending to describe it led to not even considering it. Off the top of my head: Is the mood turning even more dour because after the Black Riders nobody wants to risk wandering far enough away to get some privacy? Is Frodo's departure in the Breaking of the Fellowship considered unremarkable because they have been in the habit of wandering far enough away for privacy?
I'd say that's the problem. They're tracking the orcs because of Merry and Pippin's capture; it's a horrible time for comic relief (or bathos, if it comes off as comic accidentally) to ruin the tension. There's no safe place to comment until like half a dozen chapters later when the characters are safe and getting each other caught up, and at that point there's no reason for more detail than a quick euphemism about "the smell" or maybe at most "leavings".
The mountain wind carried the cold breath of Mordor, and the two travelers crouched in the lee of a broken stone, their cloaks drawn tight against the gathering dark. Before them, far across the ashen plain, the Eye of the Dark Lord burned like a wound in the sky.
"Do you know, Master Samwise," said Frodo, his voice low and grave, "in all the long leagues since the Shire, I have never once felt the weight of our burden so keenly."
Sam laid a hand upon his master's shoulder. "I know it, Mr. Frodo. The Ring is a terrible thing to bear."
"No, Sam, I meant my bowels. Three weeks of lembas and nothing else. I haven't gone since the Emyn Muil."
A silence fell, deep as the roots of the mountains. "Well," said Sam at last, "that'd be the waybread. Very binding. My gaffer always said a body wants a bit of cabbage."
"There is no cabbage in Mordor, Sam."
"No, sir. Nor a proper privy, neither." Sam gazed solemnly across the blasted land. "I've been meaning to say, I walked off behind that rock yesterday, and I tell you, the whole world was dark and full of terrors, and I still felt watched."
"By the Eye?"
"By Gollum, Mr. Frodo. He was right there."
Frodo closed his eyes. Somewhere upon the plain, the Nazgûl screamed, and neither hobbit could say, in that moment, whether the sound had been in the sky or in the quiet, unhappy rumblings of his own gut.
"We must press on," he said heavily. "The fate of Middle-earth depends upon it."
"Aye," said Sam, rising. "But sir, as they say in Bree, if you're to climb a mountain, it's best to relieve yourself before you go up."
And the Quest, which had endured the Barrow-wights, the Mines of Moria, and the Pass of Cirith Ungol, paused as the most perilous errand of all came to pass
I hate this, but not nearly as much as I love it.
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Apparently GRRM made up for all the lack of Tolkien talking about going to the latrine where there is no latrine. Yet another reason I am heartily glad I gave up on reading the SOIAF with the first volume, back in the before days when it was first published.
Unprecedented foresight and wisdom.
After getting burned by the Wheel of Time series, my "never start a fantasy series unless it's finished" rule has spared me from several much-hyped series that look like they will never be finished (GRRM and Rothfuss immediately come to mind).
You and a lot of other people. Larry Correia often rants about how badly this has ruined the market for new epic fantasy authors, though for some reason he blames GRRM rather than Jordan.
Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.
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To be fair, Jordan was well aware he might not be able to finish the series himself, and planned it carefully and left all his notes so another writer could do the job. ( @RoyGBivensAction ).
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I have male peers who got freaked out by the mere mention of periods. Growing up with two sisters within six years of my age, it quickly becomes just a fact of life.
Funnily enough, back in the halcyon days of 2007-12 when Advice Animals were all the rage, many lulz were had at Foul Bachelor Frog, which chronicled the disgusting things single men when they're at home by themselves. When the distaff counterpart Foul Bachelorette Frog came out, I actually found it weirdly heartening to learn that single women can be exactly as disgusting as single men, which is not at all the impression you'd get from how women are portrayed in most pop culture.
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This is something I've thought about a lot and talked about it with my wife. I'm very surprised how every woman I've been with has always talked about their "boobs". And my wife even refers to them primarily as boobs when talking about anatomy with my daughter. The first time I heard her say this to my daughter, I said, "please, let's use the correct term: gazongas".
Prior to dating my first real girlfriend and hearing her always refer to them as boobs, I thought that the "correct" thing to call them were breasts. I thought of boobs in the exact same category as tits, melons, and funbags.
But every woman I've been with has basically always called them boobs, and never breasts, unless they're talking to a doctor - they consider breasts to just be a clinical term. Personally, though, I see no real reason why tits should be considered crass, but boobs should be considered the correct casual language.
As for generational effects, at least my wife claims that her mom always said boobs, too.
Bouba(booba?)/kiki effect. "Tits" sounds harsh and therefore rude in a way that "boobs" does not.
(Generally, euphonics seems to be one of those elements of language taboos that divide people harshly: some find it obvious that some words are intrinsically offensive due to how they sound, while some find the idea to be insane and suspect the former must be arguing in bad faith. I remember having an argument here long ago about whether "troon" should be considered a neutral term for the trans, with my interlocutor insisting that the it's only disapproved because leftists don't want to let their enemies have words for things.)
It is deliberately an insult, right? Not a neutral alternative pronunciation of "trans".
A while back someone here used it as a generic term for "to go crazy and become deranged". Taking the opposite view that it happens to apply to trans people but could be used to smear anyone the writer thinks is crazy.
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Generally I'd say that in English, the more germanic/Old-English something sounds, the earthier and rawer the tone. The more Romantic, the more austere and polite.
Thus troons/trans, cunt/vagina, shit/excrete, fuck/copulate, etc. Nigger/negro have the same root I know, but at least in the modern day the Latin niger is usually pronounced with i-as-in-eye, and a soft g. That may be to stop it sounding less like the slur, of course.
How much of that is due to the romance influence being concentrated in the upper classes thanks to the Norman invasion?
Much of it, and of course because for 400 years classical education has been an indicator of the upper classes. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive.
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Isn't cunt Latinate too? I think it's really more about the the sound itself; out of my quick-and-dirty list of similar slurs, few are actually Germanic (what words with that pattern even are, apart from moon?).
You would know better than I, I'm afraid, but I'm interested to learn.
I considered that but assumed that the association was Germanic/Anglo -> short and harsh (German tends to sound harsh to English ears) not the other way round. It's quite possible I was mistaken, and the 'nigger' pair backs up your hypothesis since obviously they are both latinate.
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Who pronounces it this way? The classical way is /niger/, the Vatican way is /nidʒer/, if I'm not mistaken.
Perhaps nobody. I am a poor linguist. I was thinking of e.g. Nigerian.
Ah, I was thinking of Gaius Pescennius Niger.
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“Troon” simply is a slur, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there. Has nothing to do with phonetics. It’s just… that’s what it is. I don’t have a complete theory of how a word becomes a slur or what makes a word a slur, but, we can recognize them when we see them.
“Trans person” seems to work perfectly fine to me as a neutral term.
I generally say "transexual" since I think it's stupid that transgender replaced it for no real reason other than (IMO) to create more hoops for people to jump through.
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I don't think you need a complete theory to recognise patterns and the effect they have on listeners. Troon works as a slur for the same reasons coon, goon and loon do, octoroon got its ending, and why the boon part of baboon is such a staple in racist terminology (the only other one that probably comes close is "chimp", with gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, gibbons and all the other well-known primates basically being unheard of), and the long tubular-mouth oo in the middle might well be a human universal gesture of mockery.
(Even the memey zoomer-coomer-doomer series of neologisms is generally at least somewhat mocking. Noob also established itself globally with that particular pronunciation, in defiance of the normal English -oo-/-yoo- distribution.)
FWIW I've heard black women called "sheboons" on 4chan for years now and my dumb brain didn't piece together thst it was derived from baboon until reading your post.
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Tits/teats are animal parts. (So are 'breasts' with a side of medical textbook; men already understand this re: 'penis'.)
Tits are for cows (and before you say 'but it's not meant like that', consider what 'cowtits' means).
Chickens have breasts.
Humans have boobs. Uniquely, the word 'looks like' the object.
(For the others, 'melons' is ambiguous and bears a mandate on size; 'funbags' does that and is fundamentally unserious, as are 'gazongas' [and 'vajayjay']. 'Boobs' and 'tits' have diminutives these words lack.)
Tits are a type of bird.
As is the booby.
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So are boobies.
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I enjoy bird watching over a drink in my local bar. I am particularly pleased to see great tits.
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Tits was a serious mathematician.
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I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the term cowtits.
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