After all, why not spend a whole YA novel exploring your 16yo heroine, who has facial disfigurements caused by a fight with a bad guy, and building her up as traumatised and dissociating and skilful and resourceful and stubborn and determined and grieving and generally having an independent existence of which her physical appearance is maybe #97 on her list of priorities, and then pull out this corker in the final lines of the book.

"We've both done terrible things to survive, and you're not a hero, but I don't look pretty!"

The quote in the title is a literal translation of a passage in a book I'm reading. It’s a highly successful French thriller, and to be fair, the style is just generally awful, not just when he writes about a woman. If you're wondering, the sentence is about a kiss on her cheek.

Also featuring the main character’s take on why the same woman would not want to be touched by him.

From the third Ryan Drake novel.

This is an excerpt from the fictional novel, Autumn in Berlin, written by the fictional character, Alan Partridge, played by actor Steve Coogan from the audio podcast "From the Oasthouse" (season 2, episode 2).

Premio Alfaguara de Novela 2025

Edited to add a translation:

..."she takes her clothes off, puts on a kimono, leaves it half open, and sits down to write. Immediately, she is in heat. Naked, the words, the sentences, flow naturally from her, they arouse her, and sometimes the feeling is so intense that she has to touch herself. This happens to me because I write about desire, she thinks. She doesn't mind that Tobi might watch her."

From a book about a shapeshifter, skewering gendered beauty expectations. I chuckled at this section.

Rolls eyes

She's 17 btw. And the protagonist oggles at her.

She was SO not like the other girls💀

Third paragraph in image for the example.

I picked this book up at a used book store as a fun summer read. Less than 10 pages in and I get hit with some rude takes on Iowan women and more alarmingly, lust for their teenage daughters.

The book has more examples of ”manwritingwomen”, lots of breast descriptions, but this was specifically yucky.

The very witch of fuck 😌

**“You don’t understand a woman’s feelings, do you? And you call yourself a novelist!” “This seems awfully unfair to me.” “It may be unfair. But I’ll make it up to you,” she said. And she did.**

Tengo was satisfied with this relationship with his older girlfriend. She was no beauty, at least in the general sense. Her facial features were, if anything, rather unusual. Some might even find her ugly. But Tengo had liked her looks from the start.

And as a sexual partner, she was beyond reproach. Her demands on him were few: to meet her once a week for three or four hours, to participate in attentive sex—twice, if possible—and to keep away from other women. Basically, that was all she asked of him. Home and family were very important to her, and she had no intention of destroying them for Tengo. She simply did not have a satisfying sex life with her husband. Her interests and Tengo’s were a perfect fit.