the objectification of women by male writers

a muse's tribute or a misogynist's tool?

Edgar Degas

We call it passion when men write depraved, perverted and grotesque things about women. We excuse it as artistry, drape it in the language of inspiration, and name the women muses. How often does the muse look like a human being? How often does she breathe, bleed, and exist beyond the words that cage her? In these tributes, women are stripped of their autonomy, reduced to curves, eyes, a smile that lingers like an aftertaste—things to be consumed. Take Vladimir Nabokov and Lolita. To read Humbert’s narration is to wade through a swamp of grotesque justifications and manipulations, all masquerading as poetic prose. Dolores Haze—her real name, seldom used—is consumed entirely by Humbert’s gaze. She exists only in pieces—her thighs, lips, and innocent aura. Nabokov’s brilliance as a writer does not absolve the narrative of its complicity. Although Lolita as a book is well-written, there are moments when I realise that Nabokov had to sit down and think of these sorts of thoughts and ideas to write and portray a convincing pedophile character and it makes me uncomfortable thinking about it. What irritates me regarding Lolita is that many readers often emerge more captivated by Humbert’s cleverness, supposed doomed love story, smooth prose and wit than by her suffering. There’s Charles Bukowski, whose women are almost always bodies before they are people. They are the raw material for his vices, reduced to their ability to inspire lust or loathing. In his work, women’s individuality and identities drowned beneath a tide of crude descriptions. Their values lie in their proximity to his chaos, their utility in reflecting his self-perceived genius.

What is this compulsion male writers have to carve women into caricatures, to mould them into objects of desire or disdain? Is it fear? Is it the need to control what they cannot understand? Or is it simpler than that—an unchecked entitlement, that belief that women exist to be written about, to be dissected and devoured? Swallowed whole?

When male writers attempt to elevate women, to place them on pedestals, the result often feels hollow. The muse is a pedestal’s prisoner, frozen in place, worshipped not for who she is but for what she represents. The muse is not a woman. She is a reflection of the male writer’s ego, a tool for his expression, a mirror that flatters him while erasing her. We, as readers, as a culture—continue to romanticise this dynamic. We celebrate the muse as though she is a tribute, forgetting it can also become theft. To objectify is to simplify. It is to render something—someone—smaller, less complex, less real. Some male writers do not seek to understand women; they seek to claim them. It is a colonisation of identity, a way of asserting dominance over something that cannot speak back. When women do speak back, when they resist this objectification, they are dismissed as hysterical, ungrateful, or worse, uninteresting.

What happens when women write about themselves? When the muse finds her voice? The result is often startling, electric, and unsettling in its honesty. I think of Sylvia Plath, whose confessional style in poetry refuses to be anything but raw and real. Her women are not muses; they are forces of nature, full of rage and longing and uncontrollable life. I think of Toni Morrison, who writes about women with such depth and dignity that they leap off the page, fully realised and fully human. The difference is agency. Sometimes, when women write about women, they allow their characters to exist beyond the gaze, to inhabit the world as subjects rather than objects. There is no need for pedestals, no need for flattening or fetishising. Instead, there are complications, contradictions, pain, joy, reclaiming pleasure, and humanity.

There is also a lot of hypersexualisation of women in stories written by men, described in intricate detail that borders on fetishisation, their bodies dissected with clinical precision while their minds remain elusive. I am not dismissing the talent of many of my favourite male writers, but some of them make worlds that often deny women the same depth and dimensionality they often afford to men. As a woman, the issue is not merely the depiction of desire but the flattening of female identity into tropes—the quirky muse, the tragic lover, the mysterious femme fatale. These female characters often feel like figments of a male dreamscape. It is part of a long tradition of male writers that craft women as objects of fascination rather than subjects of their own stories, a tradition that feels increasingly anachronistic, weird and insulting to us.

Even here on Substack, I raise an eyebrow whenever people praise certain essays or male writers who, after browsing through their work, and reading a couple of articles, realise that they are not necessarily good writers—they are just articulate when it comes to voicing their disgusting thoughts. And people always come up with something to defend them—that it is actually satire or that the man is bringing up an important issue. What disappoints and saddens me at times, is when I see women defending men writing about wretched things regarding other women. Last year, a man on here wrote an essay justifying pedophilia and it broke my heart going into the comments and restacks, and seeing that it was mostly women supporting him—women claiming he writes well. Yes, writing is subjective, but to say that a grown man writing horrendous things about teenage girls makes him a “good writer” is debatable.

This is not to say that every single male writer cannot write women well. Some do. But it requires a breaking of old habits, a willingness to see women as they are rather than as they’ve been taught to see them. It requires humility and an acknowledgement that women’s lives and experiences are not accessories to the male narrative. There is a reason why people praise “men written by women,” it is a reclamation of depth and empathy, a reversal of the objectified depictions for women in male-authored stories. We call it passion when men write depraved, perverted and grotesque things about women. Maybe it is time to call it what it really is—laziness, arrogance, and fear. Maybe it is time to demand more from the stories we consume, to hold writers accountable for the worlds they create and the women they erase. Maybe it is time to let the muse step down from her pedestal and walk away, free to tell her own story.

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“Men are experts in misogyny; after all, we invented it.” — Jonathan McAloon