Who knew women with bodies could also be funny?
Hilarious ladies on Twitter are having a whole lot of fun with a challenge that asked them to describe themselves the way a male author would.
Late last week, young adult author Gwen Katz was reading a Twitter conversation sparked by #ownvoices, a hashtag created to recommend YA and children’s books about “diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.”
While reading the conversation, Katz stumbled upon one male author who insisted he could write female characters authentically.
Katz proved that the anonymous writer was incredibly clueless by posting a few lines from his novel. It read:
“I sauntered over, certain he noticed me. I’m hard to miss, I’d like to think – a little tall (but not too tall), a nice set of curves if I do say so myself, pants so impossibly tight that if I had had a credit card in my back pocket you could read the expiration date. The rest of my outfit wasn’t that remarkable, just a few old things I had lying around. You know how it is.”
Whitney Reynolds, the host of a podcast called “I Haven’t Seen That” caught wind of Katz’s post and posed this question on Twitter: “describe yourself like a male author would.”
Needless to say, the responses were excellent. Women wrote descriptions inspired by authors such as George R.R. Martin (“Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest”), Jack Kerouac (“Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious”) and many, many, many others.
Here is a sampling of their poignant brilliance: