In English Literature class, we were given the task of writing a “love story” for homework. After the teacher had marked our work, he went round the class handing it back to us in turn and I noticed a distinct pattern. The girls were mostly getting As, Bs and Cs. They were getting comments from the teacher such as: “Good dialogue, imaginative, interesting characters, well done, good description, original writing” etc.
He was giving Fs, Es and Ds to most of the boys and as he went along he said these comments about the boys’ work: “Sexual fantasy; sexual fantasy bad spelling; rape fantasy with no intelligible dialogue; rape fantasy; sexual fantasy, questionable anatomy; boringly unrealistic sexual fantasy; no that’s not how you unclip a bra; breast obsessed; please check an anatomy book; you have no chance with that celebrity; what you’ve written would be illegal in real life; you have only told me about that woman’s bottom and nothing else about her character.”
As a girl, I found this funny and sad at the time. It’s like most of the boys only saw women as scantily clad breasts on legs.
Fast forward about 20 years and I discover many male authors of erotica writing non consensual rape fantasies with bizarre metaphors involving breasts and questionable physics. It is sad, terrifying and tragically hilarious to read fictional depictions of women written by some men. The females in these stories have paper thin personalities, are young and have attractive hair. Some male authors seem to have fantasies of sexually assaulting women on the bus, in the library or at the shopping centre and the women secretly enjoying it or begging the men to have intercourse with them in public places. People could argue that this is fiction, but I have never known any women in real life who would want to be abused in this way. Most worry about unplanned pregnancy, disease or trauma caused by a man doing this. These works about women by some men are completely tone deaf to the sexual abuse that many women have had to endure on public transport, public places and on campuses. These works were probably written by men and for men who like to imagine women (especially young women wearing short skirts and “panties”) not resisting sexual assault and begging for more. It is like these men were trying to understand women’s behaviour and anatomy from a bad anime. Some of the stuff male characters do to women in these stories would be physically and biologically impossible. These men seem to forget that there are stools in public or campus libraries to stand on, so women can stand on these to get a book down from the shelf. Some men seem to think that women have to stand on tip-toes revealing their knickers and thighs to reach for a book without using a stool or a ladder. Why? Reality is not like this. Most women know what a stool or ladder is and can stand on one to reach a book. No women ever seem to wear trousers or sensible clothing in these “erotic” stories: they either wear revealing dresses or skirts. Disturbingly, in these stories the man assaults the woman and/or tears her clothes off of her within about two minutes of meeting her with little to no meaningful dialogue. Also there is text about men taking women’s silence as a “yes” in the stories. What about consent, friendly dialogue and affectionate gestures? Either that or there are fictional women enthusiastically leaping onto the man after just meeting him, even when they are sober and it’s the middle of the day in a public place.
It is like some men are projecting their short-skirted, large breasted, willing “waifu” fantasies onto women they meet. Pathetically hilarious and utterly terrifying. Many female video game characters are also typecast in this way.
So sadly not much has changed since my English teacher marked the boys’ ethically questionable “love stories written as breast obsessed sexual fantasies” in class.