One integral thing about being female is that we don’t really think about our breasts very much at all. If we ever do, we never think about how we’ve “propped them up front and centre”. But it seems some male authors don’t realise this, as was piercingly highlighted on Twitter by young adult author Gwen Katz at the weekend, after a writer insisted he was “living proof that it’s possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist”.

Well. Obviously, it is possible. But not in this case. Here are just a few lines from the unnamed writer’s novel: “I sauntered over, certain he noticed me. I’m hard to miss, I’d like to think – a little tall (but not too tall), a nice set of curves if I do say so myself, pants so impossibly tight that if I had had a credit card in my back pocket you could read the expiration date. The rest of my outfit wasn’t that remarkable, just a few old things I had lying around. You know how it is.”

Do you want another quote? You want another quote. pic.twitter.com/JYfYZlYj6u — Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

Leaving aside the fact that allowing someone to read the expiration date on a credit card through your trousers could be financially inadvisable, Katz shares several descriptions of the character’s sexiness before we get to: “And, of course, my boobs. I had them propped up all front and center, in a perfectly ladylike way. Well, kind of. Okay, not really that ladylike.”

This all prompted a Twitter challenge: “describe yourself the way a male author would”. And the results are excellent. Jennifer Weiner gives us: “Her breasts entered the room before her far less interesting face, decidedly maternal hips and rounded thighs. He found her voice unpleasantly audible. As his gaze dropped from her mouth (still talking!) to her cleavage, he wondered why feminists were so angry all the time.”

Talia Lavin comes up with: “I had big honking teeters, just enormous bosoms, and I thought about them constantly as I walked down the street, using my legs (thick, with big shapely calves), but never not thinking about my enormo honkers.” And Maria Dahvana Headley goes for: “Her body was an hourglass meant for taking his time, but her mohawk concerned him. She had a lesbian look, & too many tattoos, in languages he couldn’t pronounce. Still, she’d written a stack of books. It was time for him to weigh in with his high school knowledge of Beowulf.”

The point of all this isn’t just to make fun of the “living proof” writer highlighted by Katz; no, he’s only the latest author to scale the whole mountain of male writers who get carried away when describing women, particularly their breasts. It’s not the first time a man has been called out for this sort of thing, and to be fair to Katz’s unnamed man, he’s hardly the worst offender.

There was George RR Martin’s description of Daenerys (“Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest”) to Jack Kerouac (“Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious”), and Paul Auster, who includes some “ample, poignant breasts”. And I’m not even going to quote the passage Lavin chooses from Updike, because frankly it makes me shrivel up a little inside, but it did remind me of this particular gem from Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick: “She had to sit on the toilet some minutes waiting for the pee to come. Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through.”

Writers, take note: breasts are not autonomous and women are not amazed by male urination. Men should not be scared to write women – they just need to do it well. Like Philip Pullman. Or John Green. Or Roald Dahl. Or Stieg Larsson. Or Ian McEwan. As a minimum, make sure that no stray breasts move of their own accord.