These horrific, sexist, racist paragraphs - screenshotted and shared for posterity by James Smythe, to whom we are all indebted - are the work of one Liam O’Flynn, a writer and English teacher. Evidently, they come from his book Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English, and are intended as examples of good writing.
UM.
Dear white male writers: DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. IT IS SUPER GROSS AND FETISHISTIC AND ALSO TERRIBLE WRITING. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
Like I just. “Her virility-brown eyes -” WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? How can you have an “Amazonian figure”ON a “wafer-thin body” when “figure” is a word that describe’s a body’s shape, and Amazonian means pretty much the DIRECT FUCKING OPPOSITE of “wafer-thin” in the first place?
What the shitting fuck does ANY of this mean, apart from “I am only nebulously familiar with the concept of women and completely at a loss if I can’t compare their various bodyparts to jewels, animals and footstuffs”?
STOP
GO TO WRITING JAIL
GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200
Did no one else notice the second paragraph is about a dog
It’s not, though? That’s what makes it so terrible. Like, he’s literally describing a “native” with “crescent shaped eyebrows,” “oxbow lips” and a “complexion” with a “saffron tint”, someone who doesn’t have “a saccharine voice or retro clothes” - all of which are qualities that dogs can’t possibly have. If the final reference to Labradors is meant to indicate a joke - that he’s been secretly describing a dog the whole time - then not only is he edging into serious bestiality territory (“candy-sweet lips”) while also evoking some very ugly racism (”native”), but he’s using descriptors that literally can’t and don’t apply to dogs in the first place, not even ambiguously, which makes it a terribly constructed joke.
The final line, which has no contextual attachment to anything before it, reads instead like a metaphor comparing himself and the woman to pups in a pound. Even if that line is meant literally, it implies that the narrator himself is also a dog, which - again - makes no fucking sense, given the earlier descriptors. Plus, he explicitly says that he thinks the “nuzzling” is “a custom of her people”, which… at absolute best, he’s describing a fucking werewolf and just hasn’t bothered to make the supernatural element clear, and at worst, regardless of whether he’s describing a dog or a woman, he’s deliberately evoking bestial comparisons between animals and women of colour in order to make it work.
Either way, it’s a burning trashfire paragraph and I want to go BLEACH MY EYES.