How to avoid being sexist in your writing...

I believe you to be a friend

Deos the woman character have any redeeming qualities? Does she care about anything besides men?

Tell her you like the story the way it is.

>Deos the woman character have any redeeming qualities?
Depends on how you want to look at it. Her motivations if you want to call it that, are that she is a writer, so she tries to force human "situations" so that she can be inspired to write. Being naturally a good looking woman, seduction is the easy way. By the way, this is a novella, and it's nowhere near finished, so i could change a lot of stuff.
>Does she care about anything besides men?
She doesn't care about men, she's an young overachiever and she's naturally seductive. The story isn't even about her, though of course she plays a big part, it's about the virgin guy's delusions.

What if i get #metoo'd?

Just tell them that's who you are and these are the things you like. They can point a finger at you but they can't change who you are.

By redeeming qualities i mean qualities that you yourself admire in other people and aspire to have. Tenacity, self-improvement attitude, principles and values, you know, stuff like that. If she is the only major female in the story and has only negative (or neutral) traits like selfishness, manipulative behaviour, lack of self respect then I would see why that mighy seem sexist. I mean, you might not have intended it, but the result still might be like that. Reverse the sexes. Say, there is only one important man in the story and he is written as bitter, violent and lazy.

>Say, there is only one important man in the story and he is written as bitter, violent and lazy.

Attached: Margaret_Atwood_13768.jpg (1000x693, 79K)

Cont. Wouldn't you suspect that the author had something against men?

The only prominent male character in Lolita is a twisted pedophile. I guess that makes Nabokov a misandrist now

>Reverse the sexes. Say, there is only one important man in the story and he is written as bitter, violent and lazy.
I'd say that he was a bitter, violent and lazy man. I wouldn't call it a sexist story. With most people you're going to encounter, you'll only catch a glimpse of their "true" self (whatever that may be), so sometimes, you meet people at the wrong time, and they seem to have no redeemin qualities what so ever. I don't think this is even the case for this character, for i haven't finished writing her yet. And in the story in question, she appears only when interacting with the virgin guy (who's the main character, and remember that narration seems to bend towards the pov of the character no matter how much "godlike" it is) and in a few scenes i've thrown in to maybe hint that she actually wants this guy (she doesn't, i'm just being ambiguous). I wouldn't classify her as a "manipulative bitch who wants to destroy people", i'd just say she recognizes her beauty and think its fun to use it to create human "drama".
>Cont. Wouldn't you suspect that the author had something against men?
No.

Make it read like a deconstruction. Using an unreliable narrator, as anons above me have suggested, is one good way to work in this direction. Show him being unsure about it. Show him committing to believing in what may be a delusion because he's that desperate. Make her sympathetic to him, too. Like, she's manipulating him, but she's conflicted about it.
Sorry if this is shit; I'm literally writing this in the shitter at work.

I guess you either misunderstood my post or Lolita

I think the only good rebuttal to your professor's opinions is that the work isn't sexist, but rather is "about sexism".

You don't need to overhaul your manuscript. Just tweak it around a little. It's tragic, in a way, that the beautiful and intelligent love interest can't emotionally connect to anyone; you could portray her as being even more trapped and neurotic than the main character. Great beauty wasted, etc.

>being born in the 21st century
>might not be underaged
these are weird times

I only now realized i wrote that, it was meant to be, "writing in the 21st century". But it doesn't matter anyway, i was born in 97, pratically 21st century.

This is made up and you are gay.

I'm heterosexual and it's unfortunately real.

>And that i should know better being born in the 21st century.
Get the fuck outta here

Ignore your professor. I'm absolutely baffled that feminists can speak broadly about how men wield power, but shut down any conversation about how women wield power by schreeching "Sexism!"

Just add a "good woman" who does charity work and is really smart and maybe black and they won't say anything

it's done to death. that's where her disappointment is. there are other, more interesting dynamics to explore, or at least more interesting variations on the theme to test.
op, have you read lightning rods by helen dewitt?

The fact that there are some women that manipulate men through sexual games is a fact of life, so simply making that observation isn’t sexist in of itself. It would only be sexist if you said that all women were like that.

If it’s narratively relevant, perhaps you could say something about why some women feel the need to do this and do so in a way that doesn’t outright vilify them. That seems like a reasonable middle ground.

Sounds like her journal would be shit anyway.

Fuck women desu

Your professor is a censor.
She wants to censor any stance that doesn't fit the narrative. You could write a book about men being sexual manipulators and she would be clapping with joy.
Fuck her. Fuck college. Break free and write whatever the fuck you want.

women using their sexuality to manipulate men *is* the narrative, you dingbat

Pretty true. The femme fatale is a trope older than Homer, and could use more variation. I think OP could work around the ambiguity of the seduction. Does the woman think she's manipulating the man in her office, or does she think she's doing something else? Is it entirely in his head?

I recommend you read the third section of Jonathan Franzen's Corrections (after the short prologue and long first chapter) for another interesting variation on this. A father's clinical depression leads him to suspect that his wife and children are conspiring against him. I loved it, and it may give you some insight into other ways to tell this kind of story.

maybe like 500 years ago, people have been memeing about how pure and wonderful women are since at least the early 19th century

She's right, you know. You're a chauvinist. Also major projecting--we can tell you're a virgin. She probably laughed when you left.

Is it really a narrative if it's just an observation about a common social phenomenon?

Could be both. In fiction, its an incredibly persistent trope and stock character.

Stock characters exist because some behaviors are very common.

Stock characters exist to reinforce story dynamics. Every Shakespeare play has a clown, but it's not because there are a lot of clowns in real life. It's because when you write a play, there's a clown. Same with heroes and villains.

I find it funny that in the actual story, she at first doesn't even notices that she's "seducing" him (because she isn't). I wasn't exactly going for Femme Fatale but i can see why you see that way. The story is much more about a 22 years old virgin and his delusions, than the female "seducing" him. It's kind of a parody that slowly becomes a tragedy (in a gogolian way).