Writing Like the Big Boys

By now, if you haven't heard VS Naipaul's newest idiocy about how women cannot write, then essentially what happened was Naipaul made a giant ass of himself by saying that he can always spot the writing of a woman and that it is always inferior. (Fun quiz to see how Naipaul-esque you are... I ended up with 8-10... not bad.)

Sigh.

It's guys like this that make me just want to shout "women of the world, in case there was some sort of question as to whether or not this was the prevailing sentiment of men, I don't think I'd be wrong to say it… well it is, but we're not all douche bags! Just most of us!"

I love many authors who happen to have lady parts. Some of the best horror writing, science fiction, and fantasy (all largely considered male-dominated fields) are women. Women have been doing great things in fiction, far well and beyond the typical anachronistic "women are all overly sentimental" schtick that Naipaul is yodeling to no one in particular. I dare anyone to say that after they read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. You want fucked up shit galore without the "sentimentality" of Jane Austin? Fucking go read that book.

I think that that's the biggest shitburger here. Naipaul is going back to this trope that women are essentially all the same. This sense of the feminine hive-mind is so engrained into guys like this that they are stuck into thinking women are all writing fanciful romances about Doctor Six-Pack with a nice ass, bedding the bedraggled mother of four who doesn't have time for make-up anymore. Like, you know, all women really just want to read about hot dudes who love their spouses or sexy-time partners. Right. Because no woman would ever want to read about explosions and/or espionage… or BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. (Seriously, great frikkin book.)
Meanwhile, it is believed some men are sentimental, others are into action and violence… some are just x, y, or z. (There is also a lot of impressions from women that seem to illicit a similar trop among men that we are all indeed misogynistic… which gets us into something of a circular argument, so I will leave that be for the time being.) Women, according to Naipaul, are pretty much all slaves to their mood swings. I guess because of estrogen. Estrogen and periods. And mushy lady brains.

This is all just to say that I would like to stand in solidarity with my lady-author friends. Y'all are great. I've read enough about 30-something men with unfulfilling sex lives to last me a while. Now let's all get back to doing what we do. Namely, writing.

My newest novel is about a doctor with six-pack abs…