“My breasts felt like two empty sacks.”
- Molly, Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry
I’m a big McMurtry fan, but I do prefer when he’s writing from a male point of view. Here he writes from Molly’s point of view. She’s lying on her bed missing her sons, who’ve been gone off to war. She’s contemplating her breasts. I can imagine what McMurtry, as writer, might have been thinking after he made the decision to write part two from a woman’s point of view. “Now, what’s it really like to be a woman? How would a woman feel? I know. Women have breasts. I bet women spend as much time thinking about their own breasts as I spend thinking about women’s breasts. Better put in something about having breasts.”
My question is: Do other women think this way generally about having breasts? If I were lying on my bed missing my hypothetical sons, I think my own anatomy would be the last thing on my mind. But, as just one solitary owner of breasts, maybe I’m the anomaly. Maybe other women think constantly about their breasts, as stand-ins for emotional states. “My breasts felt droopy that day. This reflected my generally blue mood,” or “My breasts felt perky at the party, it was a really good party.”
What do men have that might serve as the masculine analogue for a sexualised breast? I figure it’s testicles.
Let’s try the same but from Gid’s point of view. We’ve heard from Gid for the entire first half of the novel. He spent a good portion of that time feeling lonely, too.
“My testicles felt like two empty sacks.”
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Larry McMurtry,said no one ever
George R. R. Martin has a tendency to do the same thing:
Right now I’m reading a book from mega-selling fantasy author George R. R. Martin. The following is a passage where he is writing from the point of view of a woman — always a tough thing for men to do. The girl is on her way to a key confrontation, and the narrator describes it thusly:
“When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest …”
That’s written from the woman’s point of view. Yes, when a male writes a female, he assumes that she spends every moment thinking about the size of her breasts and what they are doing. “Janet walked her boobs across the city square. ‘I can see them staring at my boobs,’ she thought, boobily.” He assumes that women are thinking of themselves the same way we think of them.
- Cracked
Tell me, are there things that women writers consistently get wrong about the physicality of being a man?
