These horrific, sexist, racist paragraphs – screenshotted and shared for posterity by James Smythe, to whom we are all indebted – are the work of one Liam O’Flynn, a writer and English teacher. Evidently, they come from his book Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English, and are intended as examples of good writing.
UM.
Dear white male writers: DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. IT IS SUPER GROSS AND FETISHISTIC AND ALSO TERRIBLE WRITING. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
Like I just. “Her virility-brown eyes -” WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? How can you have an “Amazonian figure”ON a “wafer-thin body” when “figure” is a word that describe’s a body’s shape, and Amazonian means pretty much the DIRECT FUCKING OPPOSITE of “wafer-thin” in the first place?
What the shitting fuck does ANY of this mean, apart from “I am only nebulously familiar with the concept of women and completely at a loss if I can’t compare their various bodyparts to jewels, animals and footstuffs”?
STOP
GO TO WRITING JAIL
GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200
tag yourself i’m the two beryl-green jewels in the snow
if her ears frame her nose do they like, grow directly beside her nose? how does she see from them?
*facepalm*
“
Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English
“
lovers of english
oh my goddddddd
i can’t get over this fucking post
“I loved her nebulous, eden-green eyes which were a-sparkle with the ‘joie de vivre’. They were like two beryl-green jewels melted onto snow.”
1. what the fuck is joie de vivre
2. melted jewels?
3. beryl green
eden green:
WHICH ONE IS ITTTTTTTTT
@laughlikesomethingbroken “Joie de vivre” is a French phrase that literally translates to “joy of living”, while it IS one of those phrases that gets used in English in this context it is SO EXTRA AND UNNECESSARY OH MY GOD. Don’t use French to make yourself sound sophisticated when you’re NOT
I don’t know where to even START. Curvilinear waist? Sugar candy-sweet? What the FUCK are seraph’s ears? Voguish clothes? What the everloving fuck is “constellation blue” supposed to mean??? Like forget the objectification, this writing is horrifying enough before we even get to the embedded sexism
seraph’s ears are ears that you can’t see bc they’re hidden behind her 6 wings
Oyster white teeth?
holy purple prose batman
Female writers do this too. Have you read a Mills and Boon novel? Have you read high school girls’ yaoi fanfics?
Uh oh, we were focusing too much on how a grown man is selling this shit and not enough shitting on teenage girls. Egalitarians here to put an end to that shit.
Guess what? I’ve read A LOT of Harlequin novels and a LOT of fanfic and I have never ever seen anything this horrible at description.
Also, none of those stories were trying to hold themselves up as high examples of the craft
You guys here is the description of the book on Amazon.
If this is the description I cannot think how bad the inside is.
I never ever want to hear anyone make fun of fanfic writers again
NEVER EVER
Lord god almighty. I’ve been feeling really down about my writing lately, but this is a confidence boost. 8I
As well as the sexism, racism, purple prose, and general nonsense… “The moons delicate light”? At least learn to use apostrophes correctly before setting yourself up as a writing expert, good lord.
“You will find that this book will transform the way you think about descriptive writing.”
pigment-less octopus found via remote operated vehicle northeast of Hawaii’s Necker Island by NOAA scientists on the Okeanos Explorer on 2/27/16 at a depth of 4,290 meters.
Most important lesson I learned in the past year is, don’t let anyone turn you cruel.
No matter how badly you wanna give the world a taste of its own bitter medicine.
It’s never worth losing yourself over.
NTs, DO NOT tell autistic people this. You don’t get to decide what we are fine with in terms of our senses. Let’s do spicy foods for example. Say I decide to order some chips and salsa at a restaurant and I find that the salsa’s kind of spicy, but I can handle it. Now let’s say I go back to the same restaurant a week later after a stressful or anxious day. I order the chips and salsa, but when I get it, I find I can’t handle the spiciness of the salsa because the conditions of the day are different than when I got the chips and salsa before. If I ask for the waiter to take the salsa back, are they gonna tell me “but you were fine with the salsa last week, so you should be fine with it now”? Of course not. They’d most likely take it back.
Likewise, just because an autistic person is fine with something once doesn’t mean they’ll be fine with it EVERY SINGLE TIME. Maybe they were having a good day. Maybe they had more spoons. There are a ton of reasons why they were okay with it then. But it doesn’t mean they’re fine with it every time. It’d be the equivalent of you going into a jewelry store, getting your ears pierced because you wanted to, and then the next time you go into that store, they try to pierce your ears again because “you were fine with it last time, so you should be fine with it now.”
If an autistic person, or just anyone with Sensory Processing Disorder tells you they can’t handle something at that moment in time, respect that.
On top of it, just because we can handle one thing doesn’t mean we can always handle something similar. For example, I can bake chocolate chip cookies. Because I can bake chocolate chip cookies, is anyone gonna suddenly assume I can bake a ten-layer cake with peach frosting and vanilla fondant in the shape of the Fleur de Lis? Probably not. (I mean, that’d be pretty awesome if I could, but no, I cannot bake such a cake at this current moment in time.) If you can handle getting blood taken, can you handle getting a tattoo? You were fine with getting blood taken, so you should be fine with getting a tattoo, right? No, not always.
And whatever you do, DO NOT just throw someone who has SPD into a situation that you know will overwhelm them. (I’m looking at you, Whitney Ellenby.) If you want them to be able to handle it, help them cope with it and take it a little bit at a time. We are people too, and as such, consent applies to us as well.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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