Is it dangerous for women to write with an awareness that they are women?

Is it dangerous for women to write with an awareness that they are women?

Whoa, hold up. Is it dangerous? This question makes it sound like the world is going to end or someone might lose their life if a woman writes a novel with a clear and distinct understanding that she is indeed a woman. How could this be dangerous?

Now this makes me asks, well could we not say the same thing about men? Could I not turn the tables and say, well is it dangerous for men to write with an awareness that they are men? I’m not a feminist, but I do think that men and women should have equal rights and be on the same level, so what makes it so bad if women can write with an awareness that they are woman when men have been doing it for years?

And what does it mean exactly to write with an awareness that we are our own sex? That’s just like saying it’s dangerous for a white man to write with an awareness that he is a white man or a black man or (thrown in any kind of self-defining characteristic here).

In the end, there is nothing dangerous about writing with an awareness of one of your self-defining characteristics. We all have them. We all have a sex. We all have a race, etc etc etc. There is no escaping that and it’s bound to work its way into our writing as well.