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“As the first rays of the warm morning sun hit her face, she stretches her body like a nimble cat ready to start its day and turns on her laptop with those long delicate fingers.” I think that’s how I’d describe myself right now if I were a Male AuthorTM.

Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy books written by male authors. But the truth remains that in my arguably long life as a reader, I have been forced all too often to read of a female character who is fully defined by the size of her breasts. These breasts play a huge (no pun intended) part in everything she does. Is she just going to walk down the stairs? Not anymore! Now she will trot down the stairs with her breasts jiggling merrily to the rhythm of the wind outside.

I have lost count of how many times I have gotten into debates over someone claiming to know everything about women’s anatomy and yet be so blissfully ignorant. If I had a rupee for every time someone told me that having a lot of sex makes the vagina loose, I could pay for all of their sex education classes that they so desperately need. 

I, for one, have always talked openly about how much it bothers me when comics, graphic novels or even novels for that matter describe women in a very anatomically incorrect way. Because have you really seen some of them? 

It is not enough that the female character has perky breasts, oh not at all. She also has to have really hard, erect nipples; hard enough to poke through some SOLID METAL ARMOUR because that’s just what metal does right? The nipples are too powerful, what is steel compared to the sheer power of them. Talking about these, there also seems to be a shocking lack of internal organs in our heroines. I guess the key to having superhuman strength and superpowers is having waists as narrow as seventeen inches that could barely fit a meter of intestines in them. And the best of all: the absolutely scantily clad female warriors who somehow don’t need any sort of bulletproof, armour or chain mail or any other protection from the oncoming blows while fighting. Not only that, they wear dangerously high heels while running around the city, trying to fight the villains and save the people. (I am looking at you Batgirl!)

For me, a character’s physical description plays a big part in the story. As a reader, I want to know if they are blond or brunette, if they are short, walk with a limp or have any noticeable tattoos. And I am sure that I am not the only one who thinks this way.

All of this comes down to one single question really. Can men write women? And to that I say; Why not? We have always known that a lot of research goes into any good book and that rings true here as well. As much as I have heavily relied on humour to convey all of my frustrations about how women are sometimes written, it is quite a serious topic to me. None of us wants to see female characters reduced down to sexual objects in literature, do we? (at least I hope so.) It’s all in good fun but maybe next time you come across something like this in your books or comics, take a second to think; would this really happen if they were real?