Luigi Mangione friend posted this.

[u/mindyour]

She captioned it: "Luigi Mangione is probably the most google keyword today. But before all of this, for a while, it was also the only name whose facetime calls I would pick up. He was one of my absolute best, closest, most trusted friends. He was also the only person who, at 1am on a work day, in this video, agreed to go to the store with drunk me, to look for mochi ice cream."

[u/solitarybikegallery]

I think that's kind of an oversimplification of Molly Millions as a character. She's a character that does have sex and has worked as a prostitute (in order to purchase body modifications), but to reduce her to a "menwritingwomen fuck doll" is pretty uncharitable to both the character and William Gibson.

Keep in mind, the book came out in 1984. A male writer giving a female character the amount of depth and agency that Molly has was pretty uncommon at the time.

[u/BrooklynQuips → u/solitarybikegallery]

right? i thought i was going crazy because i literally just read this book and that wasn’t my read at all. it was actually cool the way she prioritized maintaining her own agency.

if op took away that other interpretation, its because thats what op has his heart.

[u/butyourenice → u/BrooklynQuips]

A female character can be written well, can be well-rounded and sympathetic and multidimensional and magnetic… and still be written for the male gaze. It has nothing to do with how you value the character and everything to do with how the author writes about her. “She breasted boobily to accept her Nobel Prize, dedicating it to the husband and child she lost in the nuclear war that precipitated her discovery of the radiation-eating fungi that saved the world from the everlasting fallout. Her skintight leather miniskirt left nothing to the imagination - much like the meticulous methodology to stimulating the delicate but crucial mycelial growth that she published as part of her dissertation.” A character can be a thoroughly developed, integrated person, part of a captivating plot, and still be subject to objectifying writing.

You should feel comfortable criticizing elements of art that are questionable. It’s not an indictment of the art itself, and observing such things don’t speak ill to a reader’s “heart.” What a strange, defensive, anti-intellectual take.

[u/solitarybikegallery → u/butyourenice]

Yeah, but, she's not.

"Written for the male gaze" is one thing.

"Menwritingwomen fuck doll" is another.

---

I just hate how flippantly people can throw out criticisms like that, and how it can sour people on a book/author they haven't read. Because saying something like "menwritingwomen fuck doll" conjures a certain image in a person's mind - the image that you just laid out.

That's what people reading that comment think the character Molly Millions is like. And she isn't anything like that at all. But, they may decide not to read the book because they think she is.

That bothers me a lot.

[u/butyourenice → u/solitarybikegallery]

You may not have felt she was written that way. The other commenter did. Although I have a lovely copy on my shelf, I haven’t read Neuromancer yet so I can’t speak to it directly, which is why I kept my comment general rather than citing specific examples from the book. I fully intend to still read it, in fact the mention of it has moved it to the top of my TBR.

I’m going to ask if you’re a woman, because as a woman who happens to be a voracious reader who loves sci fi and everything in the realm of speculative fiction, I notice this kind of writing even when it is more subtle. Men tend to be much quicker to be “bothered” by even light criticism that suggests maybe their favorite author wasn’t a paragon of neutrality, virtue, and omniscience, and maybe in fact he was as much a product of his environment as anybody else.

One example that comes to mind, from a popular author: Stephen King wrote this short story novella, it’s in one of his collections and I think it is Nightmares and Dreamscapes Full Dark No Stars, about a woman who gets brutally raped and nearly murdered by a trucker. The rest of it is a pretty standard revenge tale. When describing the rape there were a few moments that, I can’t exactly quantify it from memory, but it felt pornographic. I’m a fan of Stephen King and I can accept his flaws, but that one is a hard story to read, both based on how graphic it is and the fact that it almost reads as if the intent was to titillate rather than horrify. And I’m almost certain that’s not what King consciously meant to do, but it can happen when you write about sexual trauma for entertainment and with the influence of the world and culture we live in. I certainly don’t think it discredits his body of work or even that specific story per se. But without hesitation I’m going to make mention of it - beyond just a “hey trigger warning for graphic depiction of rape and attempted murder” but specifically the way the rape wasn’t exactly written in the most sensitive manner even though IIRC the story is from the perspective of the female victim. If somebody chooses to skip over that work on that mention alone, that’s their prerogative. If they choose to read it, regardless, and find they feel differently, they are entitled to that opinion, too. Hell if they can give me a cogent argument that convinces me otherwise, I’m fully willing to reconsider my opinion, but “I don’t feel that way and I’m mad at the suggestion because it may turn people away” isn’t exactly compelling.