I liked this, but you could tell a guy wrote it, the tip off was when the women (briefly) contemplates killing her girlfriend for for embarrassing her.
I read the story as the protagonist being vulnerable, insecure, and a bit unhinged:
> For one horrible second I contemplated killing her but that was wildly out of proportion and then I tried to pretend that I had only wished she was dead and then I just tried to forget about it.
The other (female, no less) characters in the story seem to agree:
> “Revenge?” She looked surprised. “I get something like… I don’t know, but revenge is a leap.”
Whereas you explained those same character traits by the author being a man, and thus sexist, and not knowing how women think. That line of thinking already contains two invalid generalizations, ie "this isn't how women think" and "therefore a man wrote this, because only men don't know how women think".
I guess this bothers me because it takes something I read as just about people being people and turns it into a gender/sexism issue, but the mere existence of the complaint itself reveals so much fractal sexism in the eye of the beholder that I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.
Have you considered that your POV is limited, and that a woman reading this story (and every other story) might have a different perspective than you?
> I wish I could go back and unread it, then I wouldn't have spent ten minutes writing this inelegant rebuttal.
You seem to be upset that someone had a different perspective. You might want to learn some emotional control techniques if you are this upset over an observation someone made.
Are you seriously asking 'stavros if he considered that other people may have sexist views and therefore his non-sexist view take is wrong?
I am asking Stavros to consider that Women readers may be hyper-aware of bad male writing due to its ubiquity. Stavros does not have this view and is upset that someone made him aware of their perspective. I am not a woman so I am not as aware of bad female writing, but when I consume media around women they are able to pick up on things that I would never have noticed.
Stavros' inability to understand something this basic means he either has a hard time understanding that people have different POVs, or is so entrenched in anti-gender politics that he can't even fathom a woman's perspective of being forced to read bad writing without getting upset about... (something??? I am not sure what).
This unconscious bias is mostly invisible to men, but very visible to women. Women realize acutely that they are being treated differently in social interactions or in portrayals in fiction. They have to experience it every single day so it becomes really obvious.
Now some examples of "Bad Writing" could be creating a Mary Sue, or having too much exposition. Neither of these have anything to do with gender.
"Bad Male Writing" would be a phenomenon that comes about as a result of subconscious bias that a man learns from growing up in a patriarchical society. Some examples of "Bad Male Writing" would be not characterizing women enough, spending a lot of time on their appearances, etc.
It sounds like what tipped OP off to the author being male was the irrationality of one of the female characters. To steal from another comment in this thread:
> I am blaming the author for producing a work that is just shallow in a gendered feeling way. Were the author a woman, they might have realized that women don't just do things randomly but instead, drawing on her past experience being a woman, that they usually have a backstory where these things originate from.
> How does gender add anything here?
It adds something to the analysis because men and women have different experiences and that informs their worldview.
The whole internet meme of men thinking about the roman empire is relevant here.
When men think about the Roman empire they think about the conquest, the logistics, the infrastructure, the engineering, the military tactics, etc.
When women think about the Roman empire they usually think about how horrible it must have been to live under it as a woman. Men (mostly) don't consider the difficulty of menstruation in a city without a sewer system. Or the danger of childbirth in a world without germ theory and basic hygiene.
There is an entire dimension to the roman empire that the male fantasy overlooks.
These aren't insane or radical concepts, most of this is "pop culture" feminism I have learned literally just by talking to women.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
The story was written by Conor Barnes. From his LinkedIn, well, see for yourself: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-barnes-b49833206/
Sure, there are women who keep spreadsheets like this, and sure, there are women who have outsized reactions. But none of the surrounding context feels reasonable or meaningful. It misses the reason why people keep spreadsheets like this (more to get a better understanding of themselves than to linearly rank their partners) and why someone might react so extremely or try and get revenge (they had already been through some atypical situation that made them this way or otherwise, for example; nearly any explanation would do but we're not given one).
It's not just that the author is male. It's that the author is male and is making contrivances that don't feel realistic, that could feel more realistic after some sort of consultation with either a more experienced writer or just like a woman or whatever. The characters are just cardboard cutouts that move a story forward and that doesn't make for a good read.
And is it really sexist to point out (especially in combination with the above) that the author is a man when the whole story is intended to be a relationship between two women, a kind of experience that the author is unlikely to have personally had?
I took the story as satire, with the over-the-top reactions of both the spreadsheet-maker and the spreadsheet-reader. I don't know why the spreadsheet-maker made the spreadsheet, but I also don't know why Romeo and Juliet fell in love, beyond "otherwise there would be no story". Your points are reasonable, it's just that I enjoyed the story as satire even with these elements.
> And is it really sexist to point out (especially in combination with the above) that the author is a man when the whole story is intended to be a relationship between two women, a kind of experience that the author is unlikely to have personally had?
I'll reuse the same example, do we need Shakespeare to have attempted suicide with his 13-year-old lover before he could write the play?
Romeo and Juliet fall in love for some very grounded, realistic reasons. They are adolescents, which are known to be particularly susceptible to falling in love, and also doing it with someone your parents don't like is extra hot, and so on.
And the way the story plays out requires some suspension of disbelief (wait, how did they get married if the royals would forbid it?) but it is always explained in a way that at least feels like it logically follows (oh, the Friar believes secretly marrying the two might bring peace; funnily ironic that they then should die instead).
Shakespeare did not have to experience these situations in order to portray them. When they start to get over the top and imaginative we at least feel like we started from some sort of grounded position, so it isn't so hard to suspend our disbelief. The entire play is building up to this ultimate tragedy and it earns it.
This contrasts with the other work, which does not set up anything before attempting to claim a payoff. The characters just are the way they are, things just happen. They don't have to be explained or have reasons that follow, because it's just satire.
I am not blaming the author for taking creative license in the way that Shakespeare did in describing the suicide of a pair of romantically involved individuals. Nor am I blaming the author for being a man. I am blaming the author for producing a work that is just shallow in a gendered feeling way. Were the author a woman, they might have realized that women don't just do things randomly but instead, drawing on her past experience being a woman, that they usually have a backstory where these things originate from.
If you like stories like this, don't let me yuck your yum. But also it is good to take the time to more deeply think about a work and what it means, why the characters act the way they do, why the author produced it in the first place.
Basically, I can see why you find the writing bad, I'm just not sure I agree on whether it would be better if the characters were men.
However, I've also talked to people (to women!) on the subject of these dating spreadsheets, and found those discussions to be way more nuanced and interesting than the puppet show the original work's author put on. So disregard my POV (and theirs, and everyone else's) if you like, but I find discussing the actual experiences had by affected individuals to be way more interesting than whatever game the rest of y'all seem to be playing.
Also, man or otherwise, the original work fails in terms of like, plain literary merit. The fact that a man wrote it only comes up because a woman would have been unlikely to make so many mistakes and to have put up so many extraordinarily shallow characters if she were working with lived experience.
I think a lot of what men might consider "soft skills" in the bedroom (pun intended) would not only transfer to a lesbian context but have more salience there.
I too found this work to feel a little weird, for the same reason as GP. It feels like a story told the way a man might experience it, but with a woman's voice and tone. Less believable still is the way it goes on and on, with the protagonist trying to turn herself into a perfectly scoring example. I get that sometimes it's okay because otherwise there would be no story, but I don't buy the motivation or the end result in combination and that really makes it hard for me to read.
I've actually heard of this particular thing (spreadsheets of dating partners) already and the way it was presented to me it seemed pretty reasonable. It's hard to know what you value in a person, so for your own benefit you might try listing a few scores and see which ones match up most strongly with how you feel about someone. Maybe you care deeply that someone knows how to cook, or maybe you think their music taste matching yours is of the utmost importance. It's kind of hard to figure out otherwise. I don't really feel it's quite like an attempt at a linear ordering / sorting of people as much as it is for one's own benefit.
All in all, I kind of wish the author had spent more time consulting women on how their relationships actually work, even if it means the story might never have been written.
Women sometimes viciously attack each other over petty things like wearing the same dress.
Just because women in your circle have restraint doesn't mean they don't have urges.
Meanwhile this character, with whom we are intended by the author to empathize with and who otherwise is portrayed as a normal (though exceedingly neurotic) human being, briefly has the urge to murder.
It just kind of feels like it doesn't follow, is all. Anyone can have urges but I'm not quite buying this character having that urge without a little more explanation.
(and to be clear: I reject this premise, because without the work making it clear that this specific woman feels this specific way, it feels like the work suggests that we should just accept that any woman might feel this way without serious provocation or a serious backstory and I don't)
There's a whole YouTube genre of documentaries and true-crime-vlogs dedicated to the topic of "women who kill". A woman I know likes watching these, which is how I got to overhear some of the things talked about, so believe me, women can kill for whole host of reasons, many of them far more absurd on the surface than being listed in a spreadsheet.
And so do men, by the way. It's not a gender thing.
And if you don't believe me, feel free to watch some of those videos, or read up on the investigations they cover on your own.