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).

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

OMG, I just went and saw the Bakker comments to the Foz Meadows article. Actually, I could not even finish the second. Off to wash my eyes w. soap.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

You know, the idea that to be a feminist writer you have to write positively for and about women had never occurred to me either -- writing feminism for a feminine/ist audience might be said to be preaching to the choir, and writing about women for women is simply targetting the majority of the reading audience. I have to presume that writing positively about women doesn't mean writing every female character with only positive qualities (or all positive with just one humanising flaw - like most modern stereotypical protagonists) because then you pretty much can't explore any serious themes or questions and the women characters become even more boring (and there are a lot of whiny, mean, unsympathetic, boring female characters in fiction written for women).

I've never aspired to be a Feminist writer but I am becoming disturbed at the way that feminism is being redefined so that I'm not allowed to call myself feminist (or even female, given that I *know* what a tomboy grin looks like -- yeah, been kicked out of the girl's club before).

Actually you can take that as beyond disturbed... I'm getting just a bit irritated. Why do these guys get to define me?