William Gibson is a legendary writer, and the visions he creates are meant to catapult us into possible futures (and pasts because they are possibly the same thing given the collapse of time). Yet for all of his skills and incredible turns of phrase, his male protagonists get laid a lot. They in fact oversexualize nearly everyone, and this war that rages in them–hormones vs. common sense–remains a theme throughout his work. Call it nature vs. nurture. Call it a boy writing girls. I’m content with calling it a field study on what I want to avoid in my own writing.
I’m not trying to lie about what men are. Men, of my generation at least, are driven by sex and false ideas about the female relationship to such. I grew up through the era of girls gone wild, where the assumption was that every girl was not only obtainable, but desired to be desired. That sense of thinking powered a host of men to gawk and gape at women, sexualizing them from the moment they touched the screen. The younger the better it seemed back then. I remember seeing the young Olsen twins and wondering what the hype was about. I watched Full House. They were not objects of desire. Yet when they turned 18, people lost their minds. The same for Emma Watson. The same today for the twin college basketball players who made all that money not playing basketball, the one teenager who dances on TikTok, and the LSU gymnast who isn’t a top athlete on her team but the most well known college gymnast (yet I don’t know any of their names).
All of this leads me to the precipice of what Gibson struggles with. He writes beautiful women and he makes it seem as though there is always a sexual tug between them and the protagonist. But why does this need to be the case? I don’t think I need it to be, and for my writing, I want it to be something different. Not sure what it looks like, but I know what it doesn’t look like.