The phrase “written by a woman” broke out on TikTok earlier this summer to describe men who were respectful, kind, and devoid of fear of femininity.
In contrast, the phrase “written by a man” gained importance to describe female characters written through the male gaze. Male authors have been accused of writing women as one-dimensional beings with little development compared to their male counterparts. Women written by men are also notorious for being described in vivid, unnecessary detail.
Discussions of men written by women and women written by men have been brewing on TikTok for months, inspiring a meme in which users crossed the gender dichotomy.
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On TikTok, the #menwritingbywomen tag has 20.2 million views and #writebymen 45.4 million. The trends open up bigger discussions about the unrealistic and imprecise way in which female characters are written, which has been discussed on the internet for decades.
The most recent iteration of the debate started at BookTok, a limitless online book club of readers and writers who use the app to promote novels, discuss new readings, and fantasize about fictional men. For many on BookTok, male love interests written by women writers represent the ideal of a man for women – they are eloquent, multifaceted, and even when flawed, they are willing to recognize the flaw in their ways, ultimately to compromise shut down. Men written by women as described by the BookTok inventors don’t have to be heroes, but they do have rich storylines.
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Think of characters like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Outlander’s Jamie Fraser, who are often mentioned in TikTok videos by users fantasizing about men written by women. These love interests are not the center of the stories in which they exist, but unlike most female love interests written by men, they have their own motives and characteristics outside of the protagonists’ own development. They are not necessarily feminine, but their masculinity is not rooted in toxic standards.
In one of the earlier examples of this March trend, TikTok user merhiddlesbatch joked that she hates men but still adores men written by women. She used photos of Mr. Darcy, Laurie Laurence of Little Women, and the Hot Priest of Fleabag – all fictional men playing a love interest in stories of female writers – to prove her point.
Fictional men just hit differently.
Photo credit: tiktok / merhiddlesbatch
The Hot Priest by Fleabag is a prime example of a man written by a woman.
Photo credit: Tiktok / merhiddlesbatch
However, male writers are notorious for their lackluster attempts to write women and are often viewed as pathetic without contact with women.
While TikTok users raved about men being written by women, other creators made fun of how men continued to write women. And in late July, TikTok users began mocking the sexualized, unrealistic portrayals of women in pop culture by sharing tropes like sneaking out of bed at a one-night stand, sleeping in a full face in makeup and lingerie, and the tropics reenacted the discovery of feminism.
The scenarios range from mundane to dramatic, but every TikTok user’s sketch skewers the way so many female characters are written in movies, TV shows, video games, and books. The creator zhannared played as a woman, written by a man who was having breakfast, and danced seductively through her kitchen while mixing pancake batter. YouTuber xowiejones, who portrayed herself as “a woman taking a bubble bath written by a man,” posed in the tub with a full face of makeup, carefully placed foam, and dozens of candles. Game developer and streamer Morgan Ling placed shells on her chest to parody the gravity-defying outfits and to reveal outfits that female video game characters wear to fight.
Female characters are notorious for wearing revealing, impractical costumes.
Photo credit: tiktok / riotmormori
With this ingenious outfit, Ling parodied female characters written by men.
Photo credit: tiktok / riotmormori
“It’s a pretty common meme that women use in some games [are] They basically wear a bra and panty set compared to their fully covered male counterpart, “Ling said in an Instagram DM.” If you’re mostly sexualizing female characters and lacking diversity (body shape, race, etc), women can feeling like they ‘have no representation and often feel objectified. “
As a woman who works in the male-dominated gaming industry, Ling is very aware of how games are geared towards men. While she found that games portray female characters more realistically, it is a “hard truth” that female characters exist because of their sex appeal.
On the flip side, men written by men often have rich backgrounds, complex motifs, and unique character development arcs that are endowed with nuances and personalities that female characters are not. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has long overlooked its female characters unless they’re hooked up with a man for a last-minute romantic subplot, which causes criticism of the franchise’s poor representation efforts.
By contrast, women written by men have plagued literature and human history beyond.
From the earliest forms of storytelling to the novels that line modern bookshelves, female characters are viewed as predominantly one-dimensional when compared to their male counterparts. Jonathan Franzen, an award-winning writer hailed as the greatest writer of his generation, described one of the main female characters in his 2010 book Freedom as “remarkably taller than everyone else, also less unusual, also measurably dumber”. Freedom has received critical acclaim, but it also sparked backlash with how quickly the literary world flatters white male writers.
In a 2013 Atlantic play, novelist Sally Koslow theorized that patriarchal standards for literature may be responsible for the sub-par female characters written by men.
“By default, women have an easier time trying to create characters of the opposite sex than men,” Koslow said. “Because we’ve read tons of literature written by men all our lives.”
When male writers write female characters – even in rare, otherwise well-written examples of female characters such as those in Stephen King’s novels – their focus on describing a woman’s appearance is often bizarrely detailed and inconvenient.
The r / menwritingwomen subreddit, where Reddit users share excerpts of biologically impossible sex scenes and ridiculous descriptions of female characters, was founded in 2017 and grew to a community of 486,000 readers who are fed up with ridiculous descriptions of female bodies. Users often criticize King for his fixation on breasts.
Describing women’s bodies in excruciating detail – regardless of relevance to the plot – is so universal that it inspired a 2018 Twitter meme.
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That’s not to say that men aren’t quite capable of writing women, or that women don’t write flat, over-sexualized male characters. As the Hairpin noted in a 2013 essay, “It’s not impossible to find good female characters in the books of male authors … it’s just harder than it should be.”
The phrase “written by a woman” was especially popular in the anime TikTok, where users highlighted popular shows like Fullmetal Alchemist and Black Butler as examples of rounded male characters created by female artists.
But the phrase received a new wave of criticism when TikTok users started describing male characters who weren’t written by women, as well as real celebrities.
In a video titled, “Men Are Made By Women In My Opinion,” TikTok user madelyn.mp4 listed popular creators like Bo Burnham, Kurtis Conner and Markiplier as men written by women. Another video tagged #menwritingbywomen posted by kcrowley48 described Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet and Hozier. TikTok user Brittanyleighball captioned a video of her boyfriend serving breakfast in bed: “My guy was definitely written by a woman” and added that she “really hit the jackpot.”
They are not written by women just because you think they are hot.
If anything, the trend proves that online culture continues to idealize white men. Having a large female following doesn’t mean men are infallible, and as predominantly straight white men, these “men written by women” likely have some problematic views on racism, misogyny, and sexuality. Burnham even addressed his past comedy routines in his latest special – and the painfully low bar for white men.
“They’re not written by women just because they think they’re hot,” TikTok user Conniedont said in an angry TikTok in June. In response to a comment that stated that the phrase describes what women find attractive, Conniedon did not add, “I am talking about the term ‘written by women’ when it is applied to real men. I think it is dangerous thing to stand on a pedestal. ”
Tabea Bussmann, a photographer who went viral for her cinematic depictions of women written by men, doesn’t believe that fictional men and women are actually as black and white as the trends they’re joking about. Still, she likes that the trend is imposing some reality on influenceable young viewers.
“That’s just a stereotype to make fun of,” Bussmann Mashable said in an Instagram DM. “It’s also important to show young women that you don’t have to behave like that.”
Regardless of who is writing whom, if you are writing a character of a gender other than yours, it is probably just the best course of action to try to interact with someone of that gender in real life first.
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