Lessons from the trenches of r/womenwritingmen

All but one of the main characters in my latest project are women — all of them nuanced, Bechdel Test-passing, and (mostly) a joy to write. So maybe you can imagine how I felt when my absolute favorite character to write ended up being an insecure guy with too much to prove.

To be frank, he kind of sucks. He brash and entitled and has no emotional self-awareness to speak of. And to top it all off, he repeatedly failed upward, practically falling into jobs with greater and greater influence despite no one fully understanding exactly what he even does.

I wrote him to be an annoying little shit, and I fell in love with him. Because, despite being an annoying little shit, his smarmy attitude and impulsive behavior makes sense and drives the story forward, to the point where the more he started to recognize the consequences of his actions, the more interesting and exciting his story became. Will he learn and grow to be a better person, or will his past catch up to him and snuff him out?

When I felt like turning my brain off, I used to go to the subreddit r/womenwritingmen for a good laugh. Writers objectifying each other across the gender binary always floors me, but the worst offenders of women's terribly-written male characters come off as a checklist of fetishized toxic traits painted over with the author's favorite physical traits of a generic, sexy masculine man.

And there's nothing at all wrong with that! Women have been secretly getting off to romance novels for generations, and we will continue to for as long as we live.

But, hear me out: what if making male characters feel like real people, with backstories and secrets, who make mistakes and have regrets...could be hot, too?