From the OTHE SIDE R OF THE DESK
Gender stereotyping limits our reading experience no matter where it comes from, argues literary agent Piers Blofeld
Piers Blofeld
AGENT OPINION
When people want to be rude about Stephen Fry one of the things they do is describe him as the stupid person’s idea of an intellectual. I was reminded of this formulation while reading an article by Rhiannon Lucy Coslett in the Guardian about how bad male writers are at writing women. The tone of it was very much, when men create female characters they are very much the stupid person’s idea of a woman.
She even quoted a spoof sentence which apparently went viral in 2016 to amplify her point: ‘She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.’ Now there’s clearly no point in taking too seriously this kind of article especially one with almost nothing in the way of either examples or analysis, but it is a point of view that matters because it is – or the received wisdom is that it is – a widely held perception.