Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and this week putting pen to paper.

Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds,

and today you've got me, Shaina Roth, I'm a senior producer here at Slate.

In 2018, hilarity ensued when writer Whitney Reynolds posted a challenge on Twitter.

Describe yourself like a male author would.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the popular Twitter account,

men write women or has read the works of Jonathan Franzen, for example,

knows where this led. A creative writing professor wrote,

she was thin in a bony non-sexual way, but she seemed nice, so I sent her a copy of my manuscript.

Here's another.

She walked toward me with the confidence of how attractive she probably was 15 years ago.

And one woman simply wrote, she was a lesbian.

This challenge was obviously referring to a pretty specific cis heterosexual male writer,

but it has always made me wonder, can men write female main characters?

Should women write male characters in the first person?

And more than that, is it possible in either scenario to be gripping and honest?

Because obviously, you can do whatever you want want but will you be successful at it.

As the years have gone on since 2018 we've had a lot of discussion in the literary community

about who gets to tell what stories should white people write main characters of color? What is the gatekeeping

standard? And a lot of this goes back to marginalized voices previously not having the opportunities

to write these stories for themselves that their white counterparts have always enjoyed.

And that this can lead to a lot of drama porn.

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