3d ago

Writing other genders is hard, but sometimes people nail it

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I have no idea what’s going on here. Is there some intricacy about the English language I’m not getting?
- It's a reference to a meme about how male authors often describe female characters. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/breasted-boobily
  
  My favourite use of this meme was in a recent episode of Tor's cabinet of Curiosities. The episode was talking about Wikipedia's lewdest editor. There was a famous Wikipedia editor who was a little too obsessed with creating hundreds of new very detailed wiki pages about super specific boob-related topics. About half way through the episode about the career of this editor, Tor started a sentence with "As he breasted boobily across Wikipedia...". At that instant I felt the had meme achieved full power. I had to pause the video and bask in the beauty of it.
  
  Yet no one is talking about how my testicles testily testiculate down the stairs.
  
  For some reason sweaty hairy ballsacks a aren't quite as erotic. It's more of smelling thing with those and less visual. I'm sure you can find some smut describing the scent in gratuitous detail.
  
  I never knew that. Thanks!
  
  This is how I always perceived breasts, I can see nothing wrong here.
- There's an old meme of male writers writing women like 'she breasted boobily down the stairs' as in shoehorning it in. Even one of my favorites, Gene Wolfe, did this in Shadow & Claw, although it might have more to do with the character of the protagonist in those books
- I forget who did it but someone wrote that phrase in their book. Theres a LOT of books that try to be "fancy" with their writing and use old or non standard English to do so.
  
  Tumblr user scottbaiowulf wrote this phrase as a parody of over-sexualization of female characters in literature.
  “Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”
  
  For some reason, I had never seen the last 3 words from that quote. I just did a spit take and now coffee is up my nose.

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