There is a particularly distasteful trend that I've seen time and time again in books, and it seems to show up particularly in thrillers and mysteries, though no genre is truly safe from it. And while this isn't solely a male author problem, my fellow men are largely the ones I see doing this time and time again.
What is it, you ask? Sexualizing the descriptions of characters (and particularly femme characters) when that is not the point of the scene, and it often goes completely counter to the impression you want your reader to have of what's going on. It's the equivalent of watching a thriller, seeing an interrogation start in a dimly-lit police station, and instead of the tense soundtrack you'd expect to hear, cheesy funk from a porn movie starts playing.
It undercuts the story you're trying to tell, is what I'm saying.
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| Seriously, guys... you need to paint the right picture with the proper colors, here. |
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What Perspective Are You Showing Us?
Full disclaimer here, I am in no way against sexy, spicy content in stories. I got my start on the current leg of my career writing romance and erotica, after all. However, it's important that you use the right tool for the right job, and that the words you're putting on the page are done so with specific intent.
And this isn't just Men Writing Women... but a particular subset where anything involving femme characters is inherently sexual, and that is always front-loaded in a way that undermines the surrounding story.
As an example of what I'm talking about, femme fatales are a staple of the mystery genre. Whether it's the beautiful client who walks into the private eye's office one hip at a time before trying to wrap him around her finger, or the stunning Hollywood widow who clings to our detective in a way that feels more amorous than scared, we see that sort of thing in a lot of stories. However, the role of the seduction in these stories is often a double-edged sword, meant to cloud the investigator's judgment, and to make the reader second-guess what's happening. Are these women actually interested in him, or are they trying to manipulate him? Or is it some combination of both? How can we know where the truth ends, and performance begins?
However, there are stories in this genre where every time a femme character is described, it's done so with rigorous attention to her body, and the thoughts of the male character (or sometimes just the narrator) being projected onto her. Now, perhaps this is being done to show the inner workings of a character's mind, but when this particular method of description doesn't have a greater purpose in the story, it feels exploitative. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is when we get a Tolkien-esque description of a woman's body that just goes on and on, only for us to find out she's dead, and these are the thoughts of the investigator looking at her corpse.
This sounds like an obvious no-no, but it's cropped up more than once in published novels I've held in my own hands. Because unless you're revealing that the character observing the corpse is a closet necrophiliac who is trying to do his job without letting anyone around him figure out what's going on inside his head, this is just tasteless. The same is true when we have our attention drawn to every waitress, secretary, and passing young woman on the sidewalk, getting a description that focuses only on their physical attributes, and how desirable they are in the eyes of the observer, usually breaking away from the rest of the scene entirely just to let the reader know that if this were a movie, all the background extras would be very attractive.
At best, this is distracting. At worst, it reduces your cast of characters to nothing but a collection of body parts, making it hard for readers to actually grow attached to anyone in the story they're trying to read.
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| She was getting handsy with me... too handsy... I lost count after seven. |
They key to avoiding this is to go more than just skin deep, and to try to paint a portrait of characters we see in a way that really sticks with the reader, and that is more than just a collection of physical features and a list of their current wardrobe. Does this character have a commanding presence, are they soft-spoken, or do they have any physical tics? Do they have an accent, do they move in a way that suggests a background in dance, martial arts, or the military? Are there prominent scars, tattoos, or other things that might give a hint about who they are, and where they've come from? Are they abnormally large, or unusually small?
Most importantly, however, authors should avoid what I'm going to dub Selkie Descriptions. For those not familiar with the myth of the selkie, it's a shapechanging seal that can take on the form of a beautiful woman (there's another version of the myth where she's a swan, as well). When a man sees the selkie discard her animal skin, he steals it, and forces her to marry him. The similarity with dozens of other myths of supernatural creatures who look like beautiful women is this; they're by themselves, minding their own business, and then a man decides that her existing while being attractive is clearly meant as a temptation for him, and everything is in service to their beauty, his desire for it, and nothing else.
None of this is to say you cannot have characters, scenes, or descriptions which are sexy... but they need to be intentionally sexy. You need to decide that this is how you want your readers to experience a particular character, a particular scene, or even a particular piece of dialogue. Not only that, but often there's going to be contrast as we find out more about a character, or see them in other situations. As an example, finding out that the quiet librarian is a stripper on the weekends, and seeing the difference between her onstage persona and who she is in her regular life, should have a contrast in feeling and description, whichever side of her we meet first.
People, and stories, tend to have multiple facets. You can shape and carve them however you want to best tell the story... but consider what you're writing, and the way you're writing it, especially when it comes to the femme characters in your cast. Because no matter how solid your action, or how intriguing your mystery, if it reads like a fan service comic script, your story is going to suffer for it.
You can still do it, if that's the vision you have. Hell, you might even lean into it as a parody, or a spoof of genre conventions. But you need to be doing it on purpose, with both eyes open, rather than just falling back on sexualized descriptions and stereotypes that are just going to be sour notes in your story.
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