On Easter Sunday, the writer and podcaster Whit Reynolds ripped open a Pandora’s box of secondary sex characteristics when she challenged her Twitter followers to “describe yourself like a male author would.” The responses—of which there are now thousands—don’t so much display a unifying theme as a unifying shape or curvature:
Reynolds’s crowdsourcing was inspired by the young-adult novelist Gwen C. Katz, who noticed a fellow-writer complaining online about #ownvoices, a campaign started by the author Corinne Duyvis to increase the number of “diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.” The complaining writer was vaunting his talent for summoning female interiority on the page; Katz replied by posting quotations from his book, parts of which shake out through the eyes of a female protagonist, who may be the Tinder generation’s Jane Eyre.
“I sauntered over, certain he noticed me,” she recounts. “I’m hard to miss, I’d like to think—a little tall (but not too tall), a nice set of curves if I do say so myself, pants so impossibly tight that if I had had a credit card in my back pocket you could read the expiration date.” She throws her prey “a sultry flick of the eyelashes . . . to reel him in.” But her true superpower is her uncanny ability to see inside the skulls of men, as when she mind-reads a dude at a bar. “Pale skin, red lips like I had just devoured a cherry Popsicle covered in gloss, two violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Dark hair curled slightly. And, of course, my boobs. I had them propped up all front and center.”
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