“Men Writing Women”: 50 Times Male Authors Proved They Know Next To Nothing About Women (New Pics)

There's this thing called the Bechdel Test. Many might already be familiar with it, but here goes: in 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel came up with her personal criteria for whether or not she was watching a movie. She listed three main requirements:

1. The movie had to have at least two female characters;
2. The two female characters had to interact and talk to each other;
3. And this conversation had to be about something other than a man.

Naturally, many audience- and critically-acclaimed films failed her test, among which were the original Star Wars trilogy, Blade Runner, and even Breakfast at Tiffany's. But today, Bechdel agrees that her test might be too rigid and a disappointingly low bar for movies and books to pass.

Just because there are two women talking in a movie about something other than men doesn't automatically make it impressive or culturally significant. "If you think about it, they're pretty superficial criteria," Bechdel told NPR in 2023.

"It would be easy to make a movie that fulfilled them in name but kind of missed the point. There can be movies that completely fail the Bechdel Test that are great feminist movies or at least have a feminist perspective." She names the movie Fire Island as an example. "The men talked about women writers in the movie," she said. "The whole movie was based, like, on a Jane Austen plot. So I thought it was pretty feminist in its way."

In trying to explain this deficiency demonstrated by male authors, many people revert to simplistic generalizations. "Men just aren't able to empathize the way women can," they say. "They can't just put themselves in the shoes of a woman and read her mind!"

But there's a lot of sexism in such sentiments. Aside from not giving men enough credit for being empathetic, it also ignores the historical side of publishing: perhaps women just had more insight into the male psyche because most of the books they read growing up were written by men?

At least this is what columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett suggests in her opinion piece for The Guardian, too. "It isn't that these male authors are unable to empathise, it is that they haven't bothered, or needed to," she writes. "How could they know, when we are only really near the beginning of exploring its depths ourselves in (published, respected) writing? Do we expect telepathy?"

"So much of femininity is unspoken," Cosslett continues. "Moving through the world as a woman, the way you are viewed and treated, your emotions, your approach to your body (not to mention its private, shameful functions and rebellions) involve subtleties and complexities that are often unarticulated, even sometimes between women themselves."

That's not to say that all women protagonists written by a man are bad or insufficient. Leo Tolstoy created one of the most tragically complex and compelling portraits of a woman in literature in Anna Karenina. Gustave Flaubert criticized how 19th-century French society reduced women to wives, homemakers, and etiquette-obeying ladies in Madame Bovary.

Some male authors get undeserved criticism for their portrayals of women. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, gets a lot of flak for having written Daisy as a shallow socialite in The Great Gatsby. But some readers might forget to consider the context in which Daisy lived. She may as well have been a prisoner of the societal expectations and values she'd been brought up with.

Beauty and social status are the most important things to her because she has been conditioned to think these are the only qualities that matter in a woman. But that doesn't mean she's not intelligent or observant – it's only one of the masks she's putting on. She even says she hopes her daughter will be a fool because she believes "that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

But let's not say that only men don't know how to write compelling characters of the opposite gender. Women write unrealistic male characters, too! They mostly come from the romance genre. Romance book fans: how many times have you come across the trope of the tall, dark, and brooding hero and the heroine who "fixes" him (think Fifty Shades and many YA male protagonists)?

At the same time, there are plenty of examples of women writing complex, compelling male characters. J.K. Rowling was able to write from the perspective of a male from childhood to adulthood and did it pretty accurately. Even early English novelists Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë wrote their female characters as full of contradictions, not just on the good/bad and dreamy/mean scale.

What are your favorite examples of men writing women badly, Pandas? Have you ever come across a description so ridiculous you couldn't help but laugh out loud? Share the wildest examples with us in the comments! And if you'd like to see even more cases of men failing to write women, check out our previous articles about the "Men Writing Women" subreddit here, here, and right here!