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

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, positing that male brains have a "rape module," saying you write only for men, and then playing "more feminist than thou" strikes me as rather unfeminist, to be honest.

(I don't think anyone's saying you only have to write positively about women, forever and ever? Just that if you write negatively, with lots of sexualised rape and whatnot, it's a little odd to be complaining when people react negatively. But hey, who'm I to talk?)

[katallen.livejournal.com]

Okay, you're going to have to explain to me why imagining that there's a biological reason for rape culture strikes you as unfeminist, admittedly I don't spend much time studying feminist culture but I'm fairly sure that the idea 'all men are rapists' has a fairly solid track-record in feminist writing/thought (including a subsequent but unconvincing distancing phase).

I also can't see why writing for men is any different from writing for any other niche market/marketing niche. Thrillers tend to be aimed at a male audience. But then I'm well aware that I'm not writing for the best-seller audience (and there's some evidence that men like my writing more than women do) -- I'm certainly not particularly keen on writing for the predominantly female audience who read Twilight. Is it unfeminist to know to whom your writing style appeals?

Things is, one of the main reasons I write SFF is because I can recontextualise a difficult and emotive subject and then ask questions like 'what if?' -- did you ever read the initial chapters of 'Made'? Thematically it gets involved with war, war crimes, rape and slavery. I know some people believe they already know the all the answers to these kinds of subjects, and that their moral superiority is unquestionable -- but so did a lot of Romans.

(How many books written 'positively' do I have to get published before I can complain when someone makes an irrational personal attack? And for how long do I have to buy into whatever dichotemous definitions of positive and negative are being proposed before I can simply write truthfully? And, in boring repetition, why do these guys get to tell me what/how I should write about women and what audience I should be writing for?)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

If I thought that there were biological rather than cultural/situational reasons for rape, I would have to become a caped crusader dedicated to the extermination of the human race. But that's me. I'm mostly finding Bakker's response to criticism (which is to say he is a better feminist than everyone else and anyone who disagrees is stupid, essentially) to be remarkably disrespectful of his audience.

Since as a reviewer, I don't get to complain publically (publically is important; privately is different, among friends) when people make irrational personal attacks, I think writers should let their writing speak for them. People are going to interpret books in different ways and have different reactions. Some of those reactions may well be "Shit!" and screaming. Publically and loudly.

(Foz Meadows isn't talking about Bakker's books, as far as I can tell: she's talking about his opinions as stated in comments on his blog. I've only read the first of Bakker's books, and ten pages of another: they're very much guy books with a weird and skewy approach to sexuality in general.)

I'm not prescribing for anyone, Kat. And I can't answer for anyone else. But when you put your work out into the world, I think it's very much a "You pays your shot and takes your chance," situation.