My Gender Envy as a Writer

Being an Author Versus Being a Female Author

By Bianca Llerena

Although it was one of my favorite pastimes since childhood, writing never had anything to do with who I was or that I was a girl. What mattered was the characters and places I thought of and wrote about. But more recently, realizing that maybe I want to pursue a writing career and publish books in the future, I’ve gained a bit of gender envy for male writers.

I’ve always had a fondness for more classical writing, complex and realistic literary pieces that criticize our abrasive society. Some of my favorite pieces of literature are written by J.D. Salinger, John Kraukauer, Joseph Heller, and George Orwell. While the novels of these authors are objectively remarkable pieces of literary history, I feel like part of why I am so drawn to them (and emulating them in my own writing) has to do with the grit they emit as men, who, in the 20th century fought in wars and sat in front of typewriters with calloused hands.

Books like “Catch-22,” “Into the Wild,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “Animal Farm” are some of my favorites, because, aside from how well they are written, I don’t think about the author when I read them; the book itself is the piece of art. Being a male author seems so timeless, so powerful, and experienced: the standard. The way I see it, male writers are just writers. 

On the other hand, brilliant female writers like Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Harper Lee are seen as brilliant not only because of their literature but because they wrote them as women. Society tends to lock women who write into a category that says female writers can only write about female pain. Yes, women hold these unparalleled experiences that should be shared with the world, but so much more literary beauty can emerge from the removal of such categories.

What you can write about changes because your audience perceives your writing differently, even and especially if it's subconscious in the subject matter.

With writing and publishing (thankfully and rightfully) becoming so much more accessible to women in our modern time, the aesthetic of suits and wars is lost. Obviously, good writing is good writing, and gender, in this specific sentiment, can be seen as an aesthetic that, depending on your audience, can help or hurt how your writing is read. I’ve learned that how I write is fiction in itself, and I am free to emulate the aesthetic that I feel helps me write with the most proficiency. But maybe it isn’t fiction, but the illusion of fiction that gives me the confidence and the motivation to keep writing. So in my head, as I write, I sit, suit and tie, with calloused hands in front of my dimly-lit typewriter.