Women get the write stuff wrong too!
At the Primadonna literary festival in Suffolk, the TV presenter Sandi toksvig is set to chair a discussion on how men write about women.
She is, she says, looking forward to ‘seeing if we can find the finest example of truly awful writing about women’.
I’m sure she’ll be delighted to be offered one or two choice examples. how about this: ‘Men flipped over her nipples.’ Or this: ‘Sprawled in front of a spin drier, wearing nothing but a pair of white cotton briefs and sneakers, her cropped hair thrown back as she chugalugged a can of Diet Coke, her pierced nose with the chain stretched across her face and running down her lip, Celestia came across on the page as an unmistakably classy piece of ass.’
But wait! Oddly enough, both these dire passages were written not by men, but by women. the first comes from hollywood Divorces by Jackie Collins. the second is from Swan, the only known novel by the supermodel Naomi Campbell.
the prolific Danielle Steel proves that, just like men, women can also get their words in a terrible muddle. ‘She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco,’ she writes in her novel Star (1990).
It may disappoint Sandi toksvig to discover that some of the most truly awful writing about women is by women themselves. this is because bad writing, like good writing, is universal, and transcends gender.
take this: ‘When Linc wanted to, he could handle a woman in bed exactly the way he knew they all craved.’
had a man written this, Sandi toksvig would have rightly condemned it as bullish and misogynistic. typical man! But in fact it is also by Jackie Collins, who then takes her readers into the bedroom in order to show Linc’s expert way with women: ‘“You got great tits,” he added, expertly unclipping her bra and flinging it across the room.’
A French academic called Catherine Millet created a sensation in 2001 with her autobiographical confession the Sexual Life Of Catherine M, which the distinguished critic edmund White described as: ‘One of the most explicit books about sex ever written by a woman.’ Yet to me it reads as if it were written by Sid James. In one all-too-memorable passage, Millet writes of the special pleasure she takes in sticking her naked bottom out of a car window and imagining it ‘as a balloon popping out of the car, ready to detach itself from the rest of my body and fly away’. If Sandi toksvig believes that women are necessarily more sensitive than men when it comes to writing about female sexuality, there is plenty of evidence to disabuse her. ‘Now he was lifting her right leg, holding back the inside of her thigh,’ writes Jilly Cooper in Riders, ‘...It was like an express train going into a tunnel.’ Similes may fail, but a more straightforward approach can also disappoint. In his Boardroom Mistress by emma Darcy (2004), we learn that ‘ She made him feel as a man should feel. essentially male.’ e.L. James has cornered the market in writing about sex as though it were a painful cross between dental surgery and bobbing for apples. ‘I moan into his mouth, giving his tongue an opening’, she writes in Fifty Shades Of Grey. ‘ he takes full advantage, expertly exploring my mouth.’ Other female novelists have proved similarly ill at ease with bodily parts. ‘ he encircled her hand with his arm’, noted Marion Zimmer Bradley in her novel endless Voyage (1975). ‘his feet slammed into Alayn’s knees and knocked them both to the floor’, wrote Katharine Kerr in Snare (2003).
EYES present a particular problem. ‘ She threw her eyes upon the walls, and saw their shattered condition,’ observed Ann Radcliffe in her acclaimed Gothic novel the Mysteries Of Udolpho (1794).
elizabeth Peters’ Crocodile On the Sandbank (2008) includes more on the peculiar mobility of the female eye: ‘With a desperate effort I wrenched my eyes from the hypnotic glare of the snake. I rolled them toward the door. I dared move no further.’
Finally, Ursula Bloom, in A Voyage Of Discovery, tells us that ‘Marjorie would often take her eyes from the deck and cast them far out to sea’.
If poor Marjorie ever wants her eyes back, she might be forgiven for sending for a man.