The Waves: How a Man Writes Women Protagonists
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate senior producer Cheyna Roth is joined by author and Slate editor Dan Kois to talk about men writing women. Dan’s new book, Vintage Contemporaries, is the coming of age story of Em and the two women who had a meaningful impact on her life. Dan and Cheyna talk about how Dan wrote true to life female characters without falling into the #menwritewomen trap, why he told a story with female characters, and how to navigate the tricky world of writing characters of the opposite sex.
In Slate Plus, how the HarperCollins strike is impacting women.
You can find the HarperCollins Bookshop link here.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Waves. Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and this week putting pen |
| 0:19.3 | to paper. Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't |
| 0:23.6 | get off our minds. And today you've got me, Shayna Roth. I'm a senior producer here at |
| 0:28.1 | Slate. In 2018, hilarity ensued when writer Whitney Reynolds posted a challenge on Twitter. Describe |
| 0:34.9 | yourself like a male author would. Anyone who is at all familiar with the popular Twitter account |
| 0:40.7 | Men Right Women or has read the works of Jonathan Franzen, for example, knows where this led. A creative |
| 0:47.0 | writing professor wrote, she was thin in a bony, non-sexual way. But she seemed nice, so I sent |
| 0:52.4 | her a copy of my manuscript. Here's another. She walked toward me with the confidence of how |
| 0:57.4 | attractive she probably was 15 years ago. And one woman simply wrote, she was a lesbian. This |
| 1:04.4 | challenge was obviously referring to a pretty specific cis heterosexual male writer, but it has |
| 1:10.0 | always made me wonder, can men write female main characters? Should women write male characters |
| 1:15.2 | in the first person? And more than that, is it possible in either scenario to be gripping and |
| 1:20.0 | honest? Because obviously you can do whatever you want, but will you be successful at it? As the |
| 1:25.3 | years have gone on since 2018, we've had a lot of discussion in the literary community about who |
| 1:30.1 | gets to tell what stories should white people write main characters of color? What is the gate |
| 1:35.5 | keeping standard? And a lot of this goes back to marginalized voices previously not having the |
| 1:40.7 | opportunities to write these stories for themselves that their white counterparts have always enjoyed. |
| 1:46.8 | And that this can lead to a lot of trauma porn. Hello, the 2020 American Dirt Scandal. |
| 1:52.4 | But the question of writing different sexes of women getting into the minds of men and vice |
| 1:56.8 | versa hasn't been explored quite as much. And as someone who loves to write, but can never quite |
| 2:01.5 | seem to get her male characters to jump off the page, I wanted to explore this. Luckily, |
| 2:06.5 | vintage contemporaries just came out. It's the coming of age story of a woman and two other |
... |
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