Compare and contrast

[hawkwing_lb]

Kate Elliott (kateelliott), "Looking for women in historically-based fantasy worlds."

...[W]omen found ways to accomplish plenty of “things” big and small, personal and political. Maybe they did it behind a screen, or around the corner, or in the back room or in a parlor, or ran the brewery they inherited from a deceased husband, but they did all kinds of stuff that was either never noticed or was elided from historical accounts. So much of our view of what women “did” in the past is mediated through accounts written by men who either didn’t see women or were so convinced (yes, I’m looking at you, Aristotle, but you are but one among many) that women were an inferior creature that what they wrote was not only biased but selectively blind. Even now, in “modern” day, so much is mediated by our assumptions about what “doing” means and by our prejudices and misconceptions about the past.

Foz Meadows, "The Problem of R. Scott Bakker."

Or, to put it another way, Bakker writes:

-for an exclusively male audience,
-in the male gaze,
-using sexualised evil commited by men against women,
-in pornographic detail,
-in the apparent belief that rape is an inevitable part of male psychology,
-with the deliberate aim of omitting strong female characters

and doesn’t understand why feminist readers characterise him as sexist and misogynistic; or, at the absolute least, not feminist. Indeed, the idea that writing positively both for and about women is integral to being a feminist writer seems never to have occurred to him.

And interesting juxtaposition on my reading list this morning, don't you think?

Comments

[oursin]

Hmmm: - as a defence for writing lots of creepy sexualised violence, this is possibly even worse than the guy who claimed that the amount of SV in his series of books on an evil future empire just reflected what happened When Empires Went Bad, since historically all empires declined in a blaze of orgies and torture. I think he may even have cited Gibbon (obvs not having read his voluminous tomes).

[hawkwing_lb]

And people say feminists hate men. It seems to be fairly obvious that men hate men. ("Rape module"? I mean really? And you have pretensions to philosophY?)

...Obviously.

I am finding it hard to think of empires that declined in orgies, etc. that failed to have orgies and torture at their height. Or at least folks claiming that other people were having orgies and getting all the fun.

[oursin]

Feminism: the radical notion that men are, or at least can be, rational human beings and not slaves to their testosterone.

[hawkwing_lb]

Indeed.