By David Futrelle
The lady literary world is reeling from the revelation that some doofus on Reddit will no longer read books written by women.
The official announcement of this new no-lady-book policy was posted earlier today on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
Adding to the horror: it turns out that many of EMIYA18’s colleagues on the MGTOW subreddit also have “no books by lady authors” policies. (Except maybe that “Wrinkle in Time” book, that was cool.)
“I was like that even before MGTOW,” admitted TheDevilsAdvokaat.
A lot of women’s literature just seemed revolting. The attitudes, the ideas were nonsense and shitty.
There are very few women authors I have actually enjoyed; (So few I cannot even remember their names – I think there was one by a woman who wrote “detective” stories about a roman named Flavius set thousands of years ago). Most of them have weird notions of how the world works and males and females.
Obviously the good gentlemen of the MGTOW subreddit have much-less-weird notions about men and women and pretty much everything else.
Their “men” in particular seem two dimensional and seem to have no life or desire other than trying to please the woman in their life. Also, the most important thing in the book is a relationship between two people. It doesn’t matter if the entire universe is finally collapsing into a central black hole; the most important part of the book (And the most words) will be about some stupid relationship between the female protagonist and one or several men.
Yeah, I really hate that part in the Jane Austen book when the giant alien spiders are covering the earth in their radioactive webs and Emma is like, “Heathcliff, forget the spiders, I want to talk about us and that time you mansplained intergalactic time travel to me because tee hee I’m a girl and I don’t care, wait why am I talking to you, Mr. Darcy is much richer, bye boy, GIRL POWER!”
Ok to be honest I haven’t read any Jane Austen books.
Others agreed: Lady books are all about dumb lady things. “[M]ost of the time, feminine litterature is always about ma rights and ma vagina,” Maxentirunos sniffed. And he’s right: 60% of the time, feminine litterature is about vaginas every time.
And forget about getting any advice from a lady book unless it’s about tampons or something. “I can’t read anything written by a woman anymore about general life advice,” noted TopherOHoolihan.
Maybe if they are covering a specific topic okay, but if its supposed to be a book of wisdom- only men are wise
But it was a MGTOW Redditor called laptopdragon who took it to the next level, noting that he doesn’t even like hearing women talk.
I detest many womens voices on the radio.
especially the raspy, scratchy or whiny voices, and when they they say things:
like
you know
uhm
etc.
actually, it’s anyone with those shitty untrained lack of quality speakers that are on a speaking platform. fuck them and their agenda.
Damn those bitches and manginas pushing their insidious “like” and “you know” agenda!
In conclusion, all attempts by human females to communicate are bad. Happy Sunday!
I wonder if the OP morons have read any James Tiptree, Jr.?
She was one of the most creative and fundamentally brilliant science fiction authors of the 20th century, sometimes called one of the most “macho” sf writers of the 60s and 70s (before anyone knew her identity), and definitely one of the most badass people ever to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case may be).
On an earlier thread, someone mentioned The Screwfly Solution, which was also one of her stories — albeit under a different pseudonym (Raccoona Sheldon).
God, I love her work.
…but if the dumbfucks want to deprive themselves of her amazing body of writing because she’s a feeeeeeeeeeemale, I’m sure she would have heartily approved.
Fucking philistines.
Since we’re on the topic of male writers writting male books for he-men, may I warmly recommend any book written by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell and Isak Dinesen?
The Great Gatsby by F. Susan Fitzgerald is another example. Hardly any plot at all! Someone gets run over, there’s a big party. That’s about it.
How about if the books is about being a better person in general? I mean, I side eye the entire self help genre because of how it tends to have a victim blaming undercurrent, but if a book is decent, it’s really just teaching you to self administer cognitive-behavioral therapy. So it’s kind of like saying female therapists should only have female clients and male therapists should only have male clients.
Also, given that women are so often the ones harmed the most when men are shitty people, we actually often have some pretty good advice on how to be a better man. If more men were willing to listen to and trust a woman, we wouldn’t be living under the Trump regime right now. In fact, a lot of men are still saying things along the lines of “how could we have known it would be this bad?” when Hillary warned us correctly about every shitty thing he would do. Not just her. Most of the people who tried to warn the country were women. You men just gaslighted us.
So yeah, it wouldn’t kill you to listen to women sometimes.
@Bystander, I read essentially the same sentiment in the incels whine cellar – “woman keep telling us it’s our personality. It’s not our personality, it’s them.” No, it’s not us – they really need to do something about their worldview and their personality. Sometimes people on the outside have a better view of the whole picture.
@Everything is Permanent But Woe:
…aaaand just like that, said book lands on my to-read list for this summer.
I mean, if I’m going to be manless (as usual), I may as well do it up right.
Also, as a side note to one of our other drive-by/newcomer posts: Most of the self-help books I’ve read by men were trash. Impractical, victim-blaming, pie-in-the-sky trash. Women did it better.
Scrolled through all the comments to collect the names of female authors people posted for when I’m looking for my next read.
“On The Road” by Jacqueline Kerouac is another boring bunch of characters and unrelated events. It never really goes anywhere. The entire universe could be collapsing around them and they’d still be driving to Tijuana trying to get high.
I mean, it’s not like the entire point of fiction is to describe intimate human experiences through psychological observation or anything. Fiction is supposed to be about explosions, murders, and car chases.
It’s not like fiction is a good way to get out of your own head and experience the world from someone else’s viewpoint. No, it’s the novel-reading (and writing) feminists who live in a bubble.
It’s fascinating how, in their desperation to be far away from women and beta cuck cooties, MGTOWs keep ceding all the good stuff to us. Cats, properly cooked meals, and hygiene have all been declared off limits. Now we get to have novels too? Their allowable habitat is shrinking smaller and smaller.
Maybe if we lay claim to water, air, and sunlight, they’ll finally go away.
Swap the genders, and this would describe every MGTOW post ever.
And for some reason this topic reminded me of this exchange between Edmund Blackadder (e) and his dogsbody Baldrick (b) in an episode of Blackadder the Third (Ink and Incapacity)
Edmund had send Samuel Johnson a novel he’d written and had heard nothing..
E: The phrase, Baldrick, is “a case of sour grapes,” and yes it bloody well is. I mean, he might at least have written back, but no, nothing, not even a “Dear Gertrude Perkins: Thank you for your book. Get stuffed. –Samuel Johnson.”
B: Gertrude Perkins?
E: Yes, I gave myself a female pseudonym. Everybody’s doing it these days: Mrs. Ratcliffe, Jane Austen–
B: What, Jane Austen’s a man?
E: Of course — a huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush.
B: Oh, quite a small one, then?
E: Well, compared to Dorothy Wordsworth’s, certainly. James Boswell is the only real woman writing at the moment
Silly yes but this whole “I only read male writers” is silly too. Read what you like but don’t presume your taste equals revealed Truths
If we’re recommending feeeeeeeeeeeeemale authors, I’m going to wave a few names here:
Martha Wells – her Raksura series as well as her Murderbot series. Raksura if you prefer fantasy novels. Murderbot if you prefer hard SF novellas.
Lois McMaster Bujold – Vorkosigan series FTW. Though The Spirit Ring is a fun read, too.
Gail Carriger – for lovers of steampunk, try her Parasol Protectorate series.
Carrie Vaughn – Her Kitty the werewolf (yes, really) series is a fresh and original take on the tropes. Also try out her SF novel Bannerless, which is a post-apocalyptic tale.
Barbara Hambly – Anything with her name on it.
Oooh, recommendations!
Those among you who enjoy fantasy (which appears to be most of you haha) could do worse than get your hands on a copy of Sorcery and Cecelia (or, to give it its full title, Sorcery & Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country) by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. It’s highly entertaining.
Anything by Hilary Mantel, but especially Beyond Black
Anything by Gillian Flynn, but especially Gone Girl
Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson (it’s heavy going, but beautifully written. I think it’s about three people taking a train ride, but it’s hard to say because it’s extremely avant-garde)
I do actually have a fantasy novel for sale on Amazon Kindle/have a blog myself – but it’s got my real name all over it so I don’t want to post a link here in case I break out in MGTOW comments :/
If anyone is interested, perhaps you could get in touch through David – I seem to remember he said he would put people in touch (correct me if that’s wrong Mr Futrelle….)
Oooooh, what’s your novel about, besides fantasy?
And don’t get me started on that incoherent homoerotic stuff by Willa S. Burroughs. Nothing but wacky little vignettes.
Then there’s the icky girl works of Winifred Shakespeare
Ew. Sappy!
Only a woman would be silly enough to feature male characters gossiping. Men never gossip
Meanwhile, Amber Tamblyn just published a novel about a serial woman rapist of men. Apparently the inspiration for this was that she realized there are almost no truly evil female antagonists, so she thought she’d fix that. And she’s making very clear that people don’t pay enough attention to male victims. So, you know, all the things MRAs complain about.
Oh, except that it’s all done in the name of empathy. Right, carry on. Just a feeeeeeeeeeeeeemale doing what feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemales do.
Or should that be “feeeeeelmales?”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/02/amber-tamblyn-times-up-me-too-any-man-debut-novel
@Nequam: I love Kate Beaton but I guess we disagree on Wuthering Heights? I love that book, I honestly think EB intended for him to be a horrible person (even though he became that way through a horrible childhood), and even rubs it in our face that yeah he is horrible, he doesn’t have a heart of gold behind a rough surface. I don’t think she was secretly obsessed with how hot dark and brooding men are. BUUUUUT all we can do in modern times is obviously to speculate… 😉
Also didn’t like Pride and Prejudice actually. Mr Darcy came off as an asshole to me. You don’t get special cookies for being nice to your servants and not robbing someone of his inheritance, that’s a low bar to clear. And yet we are clearly supposed to think he’s a great catch at the end of the day.
But I actually enjoyed the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie lol!
Y’all talking about kid books. I’m looking to read that “Brooding Hunx”.
@Dvärghundspossen: FWIW, Kate seems to think Anne Bronte was the only one who didn’t buy into the “bad boy” thing:
http://www.harkavagrant.com/history/brontessm.png
This reminds me of that thing I heard about blind auditions for orchestras. Previously, a lot of orchestras just looked and listened to the person auditioning, and they ended up hiring a lot of white dudes, because they were “the right person for the job”.
But when some of these same orchestras did blind auditions where they only heard the person play, and didn’t know their name or their gender or race, suddenly there was diversity in the orchestra. Hmmmmm.
I would love to be a fly on the wall when they discover that one of their he-man macho mayunly books was written by a woman with a male pseudonym.
Or hell, to see what would happen when they come across an author with a very gender-neutral name like mine.
Speaking of, I do have a book project on the shelf from many years back where I wrote about a prissy vampire dude who was used to living in the lap of luxury go into hiding in his crypt because his CEO thrall embezzled too much money to support his lifestyle, and threw himself from the roof in a fit of panic. Then the vampire goes into hiding, and when he pops back out, it’s a post-zombie apocalypse and now he has to learn how to actually be a “feral” vampire and he meets some humans and learns some empathy along the way.
I know that this was meant to be sarcastic, but can we talk about how she achieved the pinnacle of goth before goth was even a subculture?
I mean, she learned to spell by tracing the letters on her mother’s tombstone, she lost her virginity on said tomb, and she kept the calcified heart of her lover wrapped in a page from his favorite poem after his body washed ashore.
Like, I’m heartbroken I will never get to be that goth or romantic. Though I have talked with Kirby about keeping their skull in a lovely ornate glass dome on my bedside table should they die before me.
Women, the real fake news?
I imagine these guys are a step away from saying, “Women: Just Fake News.”
Congratulations, you just described a genre romance novel.
If you don’t want to read stories about people solving crimes, then don’t read mysteries. If you don’t want to read stories about aliens, spaceships, or robots, don’t read science fiction. And if you don’t want to read a story where the central conflict is about two people ending up together romantically, then don’t read romance! You’re not the audience! It won’t satisfy you! It’s not a book for you!
j: Kidbooks? Most of the works discused here, aren’t.
About relationship in novel:
Neither are all women writing romanceworks. (And not all romancewriters are women)
Characters have become more important in SF and Fantasy since the golden age, there are a few writters were the plot saves the fact that the characters are paperthin, but not that common anymore.
(Btw wasn’t that one of the points of New Wave vs Golden Age?)
I find it interesting that we have to fight the old fights again.
(Can Women wright SF or Fantasy was answered before probably all posters here were born, even if you believe that SF only started when Gernsberg did create the term)
I will just lazy link to a contest of SF and Fantasy works.
If you can’t find anythink to like here the genere is probably not for you.
Case in point, A Song of Ice and Fire. People like to talk about the dramatic plot points, but so much of the series (and the TV show too) is all about the characters and their relationships with each other. Not just romantic relationships, but familial, platonic, feuds and alliances between houses. In the Westeros forums there are probably more threads devoted to why people like or dislike characters, ships of different characters, arguments about who would make the best king or queen, discussions of character development etc. than there are about plot points. There is no way that series would’ve gotten so popular if readers didn’t feel so passionately about the characters. The plot and setting aren’t terribly unique. One of many fantasies about warfare in a land that is like medieval England but with magic. It’s the depth of the characters that makes it special.
I don’t even understand why people want more books that are just plot point a —> plot point b. I mean, easily digested formulaic stuff can be good if you just want to be entertained for a little without thinking. Those books have their place. But to be offended that all literature isn’t that? It’s bizarre to me.
Tangentially related to the discussion; the whole Twilight “saga” is in the free with Amazon Prime streaming section now. I’m kind of tempted to hate watch it. Should I? I never read the books. Only saw the first two movies. Was super drunk for the first one and the second one, I watched via Rifftrax. Perhaps I’ll try to see if I can get through it.
Uh…
@ Paradoxical Intention – Resident Cheeseburger Slut:
I would love to be a fly on the wall when they discover that one of their he-man macho mayunly books was written by a woman with a male pseudonym.
Or hell, to see what would happen when they come across an author with a very gender-neutral name like mine.
I don’t know for sure if it’s true, but I heard that Howard Hawks hired Leigh Brackett to work on the screen adaptation of The Big Sleep after reading one of her mystery novels and telling his assistants: “Hire this Brackett guy, he’s great!”