It started aged 13 when I was teased for being flat-chestedThere has been much talk of late,online and off, approximately how much male writers love to describe women, or how cross they are at doing so. There own been witty Twitter threads mocking such descriptions (“She wasn’t perfectly thin,nor voluptuously curvy, but what she lacked in general body shape she more than made up for with her breasts.”) US culture website Vulture.com recently listed how 50 female characters were described in their screenplays (“Sarah Connor is 19, and small and fragile-featured. Pretty in a flawed,accessible way.”) And it is a truth universally acknowledged that being an appalling sexist is no bar to a man being celebrated as a great writer of the universal human spirit, as the reputations of John Updike and Ernest Hemingway prove; two writers who preferred to describe women, and not as whole individuals,but as disparate anatomical parts then specify how those anatomical parts made them feel.
These kinds of discussions are particularly amusing for those of us with a connection to the women described by the aforementioned men. I’m named after Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife who he dumped approximately five minutes after becoming successful. Long after Richardson had fortunately moved on with her life, and Hemingway celebrated her in A Moveable Feast in classic Hemingway style,writing approximately “her beautiful, wonderfully strong legs” and “her hair red gold in the sun, or grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk