The violence of creative men shows up in their books in the way that women are flattened into sex organs and made into metaphors for male longing, suffering, or redemption. For centuries, literature has been populated by female characters whose most vivid trait is how their bodies move in the presence of men. It’s not just a joke on social media. It’s a symptom of a deep cultural pathology.
Some male writers don’t seem to know how to describe a woman without describing her breasts; not just once, but obsessively, absurdly, even poetically. Philip K. Dick, a cult hero in science fiction, wrote in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: “She has breasts that smile.” In We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, he claimed, “Her breasts pulsed with resentment.” Jeffrey Eugenides, in The Marriage Plot, doesn’t do much better: “Her breasts, of which she was normally proud, had withdrawn into themselves, as if depressed.” Even more bizarrely, Edmund White in The Married Man describes “full breasts that visibly strained at the breastbone like two puppies pulling on their leashes in slightly diverging directions.” It seems, at times, easier for men to describe the behavior of a woman’s breasts than the woman herself — as if her body precedes her mind, and her function in the story is to be felt or fantasized about, not understood.
Haruki Murakami, one of the most widely translated and admired contemporary authors, consistently portrays women as surreal,
sexual, and shallow. In novels like Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84, women rarely possess depth or motivations of their own. Instead, they appear suddenly, offer cryptic insights, have inexplicably intense sex with the male protagonist, and then disappear, often literally. Their existence hinges on mystery and eroticism, and they’re used to move the male character toward spiritual realization. In Murakami’s world, women are not people; they’re portals to self-discovery.
But this flattening of women isn’t just a modern literary tic; it’s inherited from revered forefathers of the literary canon. Ernest Hemingway, often praised for his sparse and powerful prose, consistently wrote women as passive participants in men’s lives. Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms famously declares, “There isn’t any me. I’m you,” erasing her own selfhood in service to the man she loves. Hemingway’s women rarely offer resistance or have arcs of their own, they reflect the male hero’s struggle and then quietly exit, often through death. Their passivity is framed as virtue and their silence as grace.
Take John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men which is a novel taught in classrooms around the world. The only significant female character in the novel is known as “Curley’s Wife.” She doesn’t even get a name. Instead, she exists to tempt and flirt with Lennie, the male protagonist and then to die. Her death at the hands of Lennie is framed as inevitable, and is treated as a consequence of her beauty and vanity.
“She had it coming,” the text implies. While Steinbeck wrote more complex women in other novels, Of Mice and Men is the one schoolchildren read and the message it sends is clear.
Or consider John Updike, whose women in books like Rabbit, Run exist solely to reflect and absorb the distress of his male anti-heroes. Their interiority is shallow at best, often reduced to bodily functions or irrational desires. David Foster Wallace described Updike’s writing as a kind of “literary wet dream,” where women are beautiful, emotionally unhinged, and always somehow available. There is little empathy in these portrayals, only a need to process male anxiety through the bodies of women.
This flattening of women isn’t limited to the living. Edgar Allan Poe’s literary legacy is soaked in yearning for dead or dying women. Those pale, perfect, and voiceless creatures. Lenore. Annabel Lee. Ligeia. Women in Poe’s work are not people; they are muses and obsessions. Beautiful, fragile, idealized… and disposable. Poe mournes his women like spilled ink, they are nothing but placeholders, the spit on his finger so he can flip the page.
These are not isolated cases. They are symptoms of a tradition where women are dainty creatures with heaving breasts, accessories to male meaning. They’re described in terms of how they taste, how they smell, how they appear under moonlight, how they make men feel. Rarely how they think, how they rage, how they choose. Literature, the
thing that teaches us empathy, has so often denied women that very humanity.
What makes this worse is that these books aren’t buried in dusty corners. They’re classics. Taught in schools, adapted into films, revered on syllabi. When these books dominate bookshelves, they don’t just shape reading taste, they shape politics and real life expectations.
Boys grow up reading about overtly sexualized women that are an instrument for self development, while girls grow up seeing themselves reflected in smiling breasts, in or corpses that exist to move a plot forward.
Before the cries of “not all men!” echo across the room, let’s be clear: of course, there are male writers who have created rich, multidimensional women. Think Anna Karenina, Lisbeth Salander, Lady Macbeth, Hester Prynne. These women are flawed, complicated, unforgettable. Their stories are driven by desire, trauma, intellect, ambition. The least interesting thing about them is how they look.
The tide is changing. Slowly. Readers are more vocal, and writers more self-aware. There are men who write women with complexity, anger, dignity, joy. But the legacy of those who didn’t still looms large.
The task for male authors is not simply to “do better,” but to step outside the gravitational pull of their own ego and genuinely imagine someone else’s universe.
Until then, we’ll keep reading… and rewriting.
