It’s a challenge for every serious writer of fiction: how to write convincing characters of the opposite sex.* Some writers can pull it off, some — even eminent ones — can’t. James Joyce is still getting props for the way he got into Molly Bloom’s dirty, dirty mind; Tom Wolfe was nearly laughed out of the sorority by some critics when he wrote a book from the point of view of a college student named Charlotte Simmons. (And it’s not just men who get accused of not being able to think outside their own gender: an essay in Salon not long ago suggested that Girls creator Lena Dunham “can’t write men.”)
We can add one more name to the long list of male authors who can’t write women: The fellow who calls himself fish_finger on Reddit.
The other day, Mr. Finger posted what he claimed was a true story about some women at his workplace who had been passing around a list of their male colleagues, rated “hot or not” on the customary 1-10 scale, and covered with crude sexual comments about them. The comments about the hottest guys, he wrote,
incited rape and were seriously disturbing. One female forwarded it onto HR and the rest of the department, but no action has been taken. HR have said it was just a joke and should be forgotten.
So far, it sounds unlikely, but it’s at least within the realm of the possible, allowing for a bit of the typical Men’s Rights exaggeration.
The trouble came when someone asked Mr. Finger what the comments were like, and he replied with this:
Yeah, I think it’s pretty safe to say that no woman in the history of the universe has ever uttered, or set down on paper, either the first or third comment in that list. I’m pretty sure women don’t sneak around in the alleys behind the houses of handsome dudes with turkey basters in hand, rifling through the trash in hopes of finding discarded condoms with still-viable sperm swimming around inside of them.
These aren’t comments from actual women. These are Men’s Rights myths come to life.
Naturally, the folks in r/againstmensrights are having a field day with this one. And while most of those in r/mensrights are taking Mr. Fingers completely seriously — his post got nearly 700 upvotes, and the most heavily upvoted responses to these allegedly real comments urge him to take the company to court — there are even some there who can see it’s a fake.
Still, Mr. Finger doesn’t seem like a typical troll. His account is four months old, and he seems to spend most of his time on Reddit talking with utmost sincerity about pet rats.
But he has posted previous comments in r/mensrights about his workplace that have the same air of unreality about them. In one, he claimed to have gotten in trouble “for not being courteous to a females colleagues request that only females sit next to her and men must not be within 10m [of] her desk.”
He got 86 upvotes for that one. How many offices are big enough to make this even possible?
As best as I can figure it, Mr. Finger is both a sincere rat lover and a sincere Men’s Rightser; it’s just that he apparently thinks the best way to advance Men’s Rights is to tell tall tales about men being oppressed.
That, in itself, is not all that surprising; the Men’s Rights movement is built on imaginary oppression.
But what is a little more surprising is how willing other MRAs are to accept the completely unbelievable comments he claims are from the women in his office as real. Are they really that out of tune with how women actually think?
Do they have so little empathy and understanding that they actually think the women sitting next to them at work not only look at men as little more than walking repositories of genetic material — but that they would rather steal their sperm from the garbage than have sex with them? That they think these women think of sex in terms of “engulfing” men’s penises?
Apparently for a lot of Men’s Rightsers the answer is yes.
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*Gender is obviously more complicated than the traditional gender binary; I am talking here mostly about cis men and women trying to write from the point of view of cis women and men on the opposite side of the binary.
@GNL
In addition to the fact that this blog is about mocking misogynists, insults are always acceptable so long as they aren’t bigoted and/or abusive in nature.
There isn’t even an implicit judgment cast on men as a group throughout the article. So you’re full of shit.
Genderneutrallanguage(gnl?)
How exactly did he insult and disparage *men*? I’m pretty sure being a man doesn’t make you an MRA asshat who believes in idiotic things like sperm jacking from dumpsters.
Wait, Genderneutrallanguage wasn’t joking? Wow.
no, GNL has shat in threads here before. They are never joking.
WeeBoy: I don’t know what it was in the shampoo which caused the pain, but it wasn’t nettle. Nettles sting because of a specialised cell. That cell falls apart a couple of hours after the nettle is cut.
There are people who use nettles as food (I think nettle soup is sort of dull, but that’s me, and I’ve been told of some dishes that sound good). Nettle also makes great yarn/thread (better than flax) but they have to be harvested by pulling them out by hand (you need the roots) and that means mucking about with them while they are alive, and can sting.
Which is why flax was the plant of choice.
I was required to get a urethral swabbing once… after the kidney stone it was the most painful thing I’ve ever had. The only reason I didn’t puke on the doctor was that I was too busy trying not to pass out.
GNL: . You then dedicate the rest of the post to insulting and disparaging men.
To paraphrase the MRM, we don’t hate men, we are anitpathetic to the MRAs/PUAs/Misogynists of the world.
Some of whom are (GASP!) women. Ie. Susan Walsh, GWW/Sunshine Mary, et al., and they get mocked too.
Fatman: No, GNL was not joking. GNL is noun, not a gerund.
“You then dedicate the rest of the post to
insulting and disparagingmockingmenmisogynistic gobshites.”FTFY
I’m sorry to learn of fellow rat people amongst the MRA’s. I think they would quake before my fiercely independent female alpha pi-rats. ARRGH.
Is the list real or not? I will say that I once knew of a die-hard fan of a well-known rock band who somehow discovered the New York address (or at least, what she believed to be the address)of one of the band members and talked of snooping through the trash out front of that building. But speaking as another woman, I could list several levels of ethical and hygienic wrong with that. Even if there is a specific person in that office with that kind of lack of boundaries, I would hope the MRA’s aren’t using this as an example of how women think in general, though I suspect some of them are.
What did GNL want us to educate MRA/PUA types on anyway? The first paragraph of the OP talks about how hard it is to write imaginary characters of the opposite gender. Did he want David to teach fish_finger how to write better imaginary misandrist women?
I think this calls for…. RANDOM STORY TIME!
How did that song go again?
“At the end of the day you’re another day older”
Becca’s upstairs neighbor had been up watching a damn movie until four in the morning. She knew this because she had spent the first hour convincing herself that someone would make a noise complaint, the next thirty minutes making a noise complaint, and the rest stairing at the clock in her room fervently wishing for something to explode. You would think the police would do something after the 6th complaint about the same person, but apparently nobody in this shithole complex gives a damn about noise. At least it covers up the sound of rats chewing away the walls.
In the morning Becca would awaken to the sweet toll of loud thumping from below, alerting to her fact that she had been sleeping forty-five minutes into her hour-long alarm. Sometimes there would be yelling. Becca particularly enjoyed the yelling.
Awake and energized, Becca would throw herself off her bed and attempt to drag herself to the bathroom. Sadly this would result in her hair making an unscheduled appearence underneath her hands, so that when she finally made the effort to stand up she would be yanked ceremoniously back to the ground. After this, she would regard herself in the mirror as she would strip down, turn on the water, and proceed to take the world’s shortest shower. That’s right, the hot water was out.
A quick scramble for clean towls, clean panties, cleanish bra, her job’s uniform, a cup of cold coffee, and something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike toast and she would be ready to tackle the day.
It’s times like these that made Becca wish she had grabbed a nice man when she had the chance.
That’s right, a man. Becca was 29, almost 30. Her biological clock had all but tocked out, and all the men around her were evolutionarily designed to desire younger women. She needed some of that sweet, sweet child support. Maybe then she could move out of this hell and onto something bigger. A mansion, maybe. That sounds good. A mansion with a grand staircase at the entrance, a solid gold fountain (Becca just loved gold for some reason), a grand outdoor pool, and a cadre of manservants in leopard-skin speedos, all oiled-up and hunky and…
Err, where was she? Oh yeah… to the office.
One short (hour-long) transit in a bus that smells only mildly of urine and she would arrive. At this point, Becca might crack her first genuine smile of the day. Not because she liked her job or anything, oh no, fuck this whole company. No, her smile would signal another day she might be able to spend chatting away with her girlfriends in HR.
Last week they passed around a list of the hottest guys in the office (nobody really spectacular, though some of the guys in the higher-paid positions did seem oddly attractive). They’d even write little notes to each other; they got rather scandelous at times. Becca would spend all day flipping between facebook and boys. She wasn’t worried about being fired; affirmative action means that the company must keep her employed no matter what. Basically, if her boss does check up on her, the worst she would get is a slap on the wrist.
At the end of the day, she would check out of her job and once again head back to her apartment. Once the bus smelled like yogurt. That was an interesting day. Uniform off, food cooked, dinner sniffed curiously and eaten hesitently, and it would be time to sleep before Becca knew it. Just as long as her upstairs neighbor would decide to give the movie marathon a miss.
As Becca laid her head down, snuggled beneath both-eaten covers, she paused and reflected on the day. This had to stop, and Becca had a foolproof plan that would rake in the money. It involved a turkeybaster and a garbage can. Maybe she could work out the details with her friends in HR tomorrow. They’d been mentioning this thing called “Feminism,” maybe she should look into that.
Huh… I apologize to fish_finger, it is in fact quite hard to write female characters. Oh well.
@kirbywarp, No, you were pitch perfect — All Women Are Like That. 😀
Meanwhile, over on AVFM, I’m rubbing my eyes – did I really see this there? http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/study-reveals-female-rape-victims-enjoyed-the-experience/#comments
Beautiful. Is “dinner sniffed curiously and eaten hesitantly” a cat reference?
…“for not being courteous to a females colleagues request that only females sit next to her and men must not be within 10m [of] her desk.”
Ah yes, “females and men”, one of my (least) favorite MRA tropes
@katz:
It is if you want it to be! (It wasn’t when I wrote it, but the story could definitely use more cat references)
@Crumbelievable:
It’s not just MRAs. The same thing is all over reddit. Basically, MRAs never say anything new… they just collect all the shitty things men say and do into one place and double-down on it.
Scarletpipstrelle… Holy fuck…. I’m not even going to click on it because I’m in a bad mood right now.
Has David seen this?
That AVFM piece is basically a troll piece by Paul; he makes up stuff and “footnotes” fake studies and then at the end he says, see, look, I made stuff up, that’s what feminists do all the time!
Whe he wrote it — it’s from 2011 — I didn’t want to dignify it with a response. Maybe I should have, but his “point” was so idiotic I didn’t feel like it. Especially since his real point is to anger feminists and upset rape victims and then pretend he was only making an intellectual point.
I don’t even… His point is terrible/stupid. Jesus.
>>>Did it ever even occur to you that the proper response to ignorance is education, not insults?
Mistaken Liberal Axiom 1: “All social conflict stems from lack of education.”
(Even though you’re just a reactionary asshole trying to use their Mistaken Axioms against them.)
MRAs aren’t uneducated. They know full well what they want and where they stand. They oppose equality because they benefit from the status quo. People don’t discriminate against other people because they are ignorant of the damage they do, but because they benefit from the damage they do.
Insults is the least damaging thing that MRAs deserve.
To be fair, most MRAs know squat about feminism. Well they think they know a lot, but they don’t.
“Meanwhile, over on AVFM, I’m rubbing my eyes – did I really see this there? http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/study-reveals-female-rape-victims-enjoyed-the-experience/#comments”
So…his point is that feminists care about rape culture for ulterior motives i.e. they’re just sexually repressed?
I’m honestly confused. What kind of “intellectual” point is he even trying to make?
Yeah auggzillary, it’s not like “educating” them is going to help though, because they don’t listen anyway.
Course: Education for fish_finger
Instructor: Life (asst: Decent Human Beings)
Syllabus:
1) You should not make up things about women in order to make it seem like women are evil.
2) Lying more convincingly is no better than lying in as hilariously transparent a way as you have here.
3) You are terrible.
4) Never use the word “whilst” in porn, it’s a buzzkill
5) When writing out your personal fantasies and pretending they were written by a lady it’s very important to remember to gender your pronouns correctly. For example, “can anyone tell him where he lives” is confusing to readers. Is the guy going to raid his own trash for used condoms? Is he suffering from amnesia?