Yes, men are better writers



Do I need to say that there are great female writers? Maybe I do, because you don’t know me, and I might just be a misogynist arsehole. And do I need to say that there are boatloads of very bad male writers? No, you can just go to your local bookshop and peruse the new releases to prove that to yourself.

‘Good writing’ does not emanate from the penis but it does emanate from material conditions. Writing takes time – great swathes of clean, empty time, unsullied by children or housework or deep worry about money or skincare routines. To be a writer is to be selfish enough to grab time and spend it churning words around, even though you are not getting paid very much, hardly anybody cares about what you’re doing, and even fewer people think that it’s any good.

Men are better at being selfish than women. They are better at it before the having of children, but they really come into their own after the having of children. While women generally see the immediate needs of the shorties as taking first priority, men are able to keep themselves as the focus and so spend less time and energy bringing up children.

Generally. Do I need to keep on saying generally?

Do most women with creative dreams think that there will be such an unequal distribution of the labour of childrearing before they have children? I doubt it. They are just in love: that state of deranged optimism that makes one think that the will of the romantic couple is stronger than the dominant ideology and market conditions. But once the shorties begin to arrive, it becomes clear that both parents can’t simultaneously get away from the children in order to earn money or write great art or get drunk in the pursuit of material to write great art about. So in the end, it’s the more selfish one that gets out the door first.

So if you want to be a female writer, and you don’t have enough money for a full-time nanny, then it’s probably best to not have children. Or, if you do have children, you might want to give them up, like Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell did. Either that, or you could be a terrible mother, like Jean Rhys, and write fragmented narratives about the essential torment of trying to look after another human being when all you want to do is drink and write and have complicated sex in an attic somewhere. That is, unless you can find a partner will actually share or take the burden of childcare while you pursue a ‘career’ that is at worst laughable and at best poorly paid, one that requires most of your emotional attention and the vast majority of your time. Give me their number if you do find someone like this – and I will steal them away in the most unfeminist of ways.

Actually, if you’re heterosexual, it’s probably best to avoid having a partner at all, especially one that you live with, because you know that you’ll just end up using your time washing his underwear or listening to his stories about how people don’t understand him. Having no children and no partner will not put you on par with those male writers who have wives to clean up after them and look after their children, but it least you’ll be in with a fighting chance. But there’s also a fair chance that you will end up being incredibly fucking lonely. Especially if it turns out that you’re not really a very good writer at all, just a selfish person with a little talent. If there’s one thing our culture cannot abide, it’s a selfish woman who isn’t talented and really, really, really ridiculously good looking.

All I can say is, thank god for cats.

Do I need to say that these are not choices that men have to make? That men take the idea that they are the absolute centres of their life and that their talent is the most important thing as facts? And do I need to say that if we all became as selfish as male writers, we’d end up with plagues of rats pouring from our unclean homes and a whole generation of extremely fucked up kids?

I’m not here to badmouth selfishness. It is absolutely necessary … but not available to everyone. The answer to the underrepresentation of women’s stories in the literary world is not to give prizes for women’s writing or to introduce quotas for literary magazines. That’s putting the money in at the wrong end of the process, and will probably just end up rewarding women who have greater amounts of leisure time anyway, while producing writing that is bit shit and/or relentlessly middle class. As a solution, it seems more like giving grants for women so they can have time off their actually-very-important work of looking after children and houses and other people’s egos. Such work shouldn’t and can’t be abandoned: to value the life of the artist over the traditionally feminised work of caring is dumb patriarchal romanticism.

Of course we need more stories about women’s lives, written by the people who actually live them, so that women’s work can be allowed to be a viable site for artistic practice and aesthetic reflection. In other words, we need to make it possible for women to be a little more selfish, just for a while.



Helen Addison-Smith has been previously published in journals such as Island, Hecate and refo, and was featured in Overland's first e-book Women's Work. She's a reformed chef and a persistent single mother.

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  1. Wow – this is just nasty. I was trying to find out why men are better novelists and all I get is a torrent of man-hating and anti-family vitriol. I hope you don’t show this stuff to your kids.
    Thanks for helping to make the world a better place.

    • AHAHAHA you wanted to look up “why males were better” and got something ‘man-hating’ instead of ‘woman-hating’. That’s hilarious!

  2. Ugh, what a sexist article!
    I’m a female writer and part of being a writer, is living. You won’t make a good writer if you’re stuck away in your attic plonking away at your keyboard. You need to live a little, and writing for woman means living as a woman and then penning those wonderful insights you glean from being a woman.

    And romance fiction is the top seller nowadays. Who writes romance the most? Women. Unless you’re like those chauvinistic pigs who consider romance less literary than other genres.

    Yes, and I agree with Alexander. I live with a very unselfish man who often puts the needs of his family before his own whereas I can get buried in my little writing hole and forget everyone else when I need to.

    • You don’t have to be a chauvenist to determine that romance is absolutely inferior, and constitutes the fluff and guff of all literary output.

  3. Doesn’t sound like kathy is up for sharing her partner with you Helen….I didn’t find your article sexist, I thought it was subjective and funny and angry. Your writing is intense and easy to follow and well structured. Children bring so much deepening and wisdom. I don’t think men are better writers. My favourite writers are female.

  4. Hi Helen, I’m only commenting because nobody (except Mary Baxter) seemed to get your article and I just wanted you to received a little internet back-pat. So, yes, it was funny and cranky and true. Thank you.

    Ps. Omg Kathy, you are SO shit.

  5. So, in essence, men are better writers because:
    1. They have more time.
    2. They are not distracted by their kids.
    3. They don’t do as much household chores as women.

    OK, female prisoners should be great writers then, since they are not often bothered with all the challenges listed above.

    So, are female prisoners great writers? Are they as good as men?
    I believe everyone knows the answer to that question.
    The premise of your article is full of holes, ma’am.

    Good writing takes imagination, powers of observation, disinterestedness, persistence, consistency, focus, and discipline, among other things.

    You don’t need a huge amount of time to be a good writer. A mere 1 hour of dedicated writing per day is often enough.

    Even if all you type is 30 words/minute, you’d have 1800 words in an hour, and 54000 words in 30 days. A few stretch of time added here and there could turn anyone into a writer in 90 days.

    The secret is not “lots of time”, but in being organized.

  6. When women get older they don’t have kids anymore lurking about. Why not write when they are older? People live so long now sometimes. Women are objectified and sub-human in a lot of advertising and media. If mostly men are writing screenplays, this contributes to the dehumanization and sex object status of women. Also, men will write things men like to watch. TV, and movies and video games are so masculine now a days. It’s like for men by men. If I watch TV from some foreign countries, it’s much better, more appealing to me as a woman.
    Finally, I would like to say that books written by women from my experience are much better and more entertaining for me by far. When a woman writes, I feel a greater connection to the main character, like I am telepathic. I feel like I am a part of the story. When a man writes, it feels cold and distant like I am watching something far away.

  7. People say that they enjoy the cranky tone of this article. Cranky is when you slept poorly. Cranky is when you stub your toe one-too-many times. Cranky can be solved with a cup of coffee, some self-talk, and time relaxing. Bitterness is a mindset that is slowly cultivated. Crankiness can be a symptom of bitterness, but the root remains the same. This article may have started out funny and relatable, but it ended up just being bitter and spiteful.

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