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Maytag posted:He's writing about despicable men doing despicable things in a despicable setting and suffering for it. He's not glorifying or advocating any of this behavior, in any way. We're not arguing that he is.
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Feb 9, 2012 01:36
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I'm ok with women being spiritually inferior because I think it's been well established that the Gods of the Bakkerverse are huge dicks. That was just one of many arbitrary moral absolutes in that passage anyway. Apparently snakes are more holy than pigs, for example.
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Feb 9, 2012 02:09
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General Battuta posted:We're not arguing that he is. I didn't say you were, and none of my previous comments were directed at you. Chill out.
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Feb 9, 2012 02:11
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Maytag posted:As for the "you should be thinking about it right now" thing, I don't think he owes an explanation to anyone. Yeah I don't think he does either, especially if it's something that's there to be thought about and is as central to the world setup as he says. Honestly much as it is a truly terribly idea to mix it up with people who have no interest besides pushing the misogyny angle on him, I can't reallllly blame him for it if only because I'm the sort of person who would do the same loving thing. He really ought to chill though. Talking about other people's arguments is weird. neongrey fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 9, 2012 |
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Feb 9, 2012 02:22
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Maytag posted:As for the "you should be thinking about it right now" thing, I don't think he owes an explanation to anyone. He doesn't owe us anything, but if he wants us to read the book a different way, he should probably provide an alternate reading. Just saying that there is an alternate reading and he either can't or won't explain what it is isn't going to change anyone's mind. If he wants people to see a non-misogynistic reading, he needs to offer one rather than just say "trust me, it's there". Just because I think they support a misogynistic reading doesn't mean that they're bad books, or that Bakker is a misogynist himself, or that my reading is automatically the One True Reading, it just means that I haven't seen another reading of the same issue (e.g. that the suffering of men when "their" woman is raped or abused gets more screen time and therefore seems more textually important than the suffering of the women who were actually raped or abused) that seems more convincing to me. Just to grab a random example: Esmenet gets raped by the Inchoroi maybe halfway through The Darkness that Comes Before, deeply violated in three distinct ways (raped by a literal demon, having her reactions manipulated to enjoy it, and then being made to betray someone she loves). There's exactly three internal reactions from her about this event: 1 - What have I done? 2 - I survived, Akka. And I did not survive. 3 - So like my daughter. Even when she's just been literally raped by a demon, the very first reaction to it that she has is "Oh no I just gave up Achamian". Then she spends two paragraphs thinking about Achamian. Then her second bit of internal dialogue is also about Achamian. It's not until the third bit of internal dialogue a page and a half later that we get a reaction that's actually entirely about Esmenet and the lovely life she's been forced to live because she's a woman. Then, in the very next section, we get almost four pages about how much it hurts Achamian's feelings that a woman he likes and feels possessive towards is forced into prostitution to survive. The issue isn't either that Esmenet gets raped or that she's a prostitute, I'm willing to write those both up to plot, setting, and the point he's trying to make with them. The issue is that the when Esmenet has been abused or has her generally lovely life described, the first thing the text points us at is how this might affect Achamian. Unfortunately (for my desire to see him present an alternate reading, at least) I don't think he's really addressed things like this, outside of a sort of blanket acknowledgement that people could read the book as a whole as misogynist. I really was hoping he was ready to offer a different/better explanation of what he meant than I've seen him provide, particularly when he said that he was explicitly trying to wrestle with some of those same issues in that book.
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Feb 9, 2012 02:36
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Maytag posted:He's writing about despicable men doing despicable things in a despicable setting and suffering for it. He's not glorifying or advocating any of this behavior, in any way. Seems like a "These are the negative consequences" kind of thing to me. Are people not allowed to do this?
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Feb 9, 2012 03:04
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Do I think these are things worth talking about? Absolutely. I don't think he deserves vitriol from people who don't understand what he's writing. I don't think he should be wasting his time addressing these things. Again, not directing this at people in this thread. Maybe his explanations aren't doing it for you, but give the guy some credit- spend some time on his blog. The dude really engages his fans and puts a lot of time and thought into those interactions. And he still manages to publish. gently caress you, GRRM. TouretteDog posted:The issue isn't either that Esmenet gets raped or that she's a prostitute, I'm willing to write those both up to plot, setting, and the point he's trying to make with them. The issue is that the when Esmenet has been abused or has her generally lovely life described, the first thing the text points us at is how this might affect Achamian. Let's flip this and consider all the time Achamian spends wandering around thinking about her and what she means to him. Also, her thinking about Achamian isn't pointing at how it will affect him, it's pointing at how important he is to her. Which is kind of sad because every other guy in this world pretty much sucks, and the one guy who's better than them is adequate at best.
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Feb 9, 2012 03:16
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TouretteDog posted:Unfortunately (for my desire to see him present an alternate reading, at least) I don't think he's really addressed things like this, outside of a sort of blanket acknowledgement that people could read the book as a whole as misogynist. I really was hoping he was ready to offer a different/better explanation of what he meant than I've seen him provide, particularly when he said that he was explicitly trying to wrestle with some of those same issues in that book. This is also what I was hoping. I've actually requested it from him a few times on his blog but he's been pretty squirmy about it.  Maytag posted:Maybe his explanations aren't doing it for you, but give the guy some credit- spend some time on his blog. The dude really engages his fans and puts a lot of time and thought into those interactions. And he still manages to publish. gently caress you, GRRM. I think I've been subscribed to his blog via email update since it opened, so I've definitely been spending time there. This is one area where I've pressed him a lot, and I'm impressed: in our last interaction he said he'd think about writing up an essay in which he talked about what he thought he'd done wrong re: writing women. I don't, personally, really think you can flip things around and look at how Achamian thinks about Esmenet. Achamian is tortured nightly by his dreams, and he's also eternally damned, but he's a powerful man who gets to make powerful decisions, and when he's brought low by the Scarlet Spires he's able to free himself by his own ingenuity and power. Esmenet, trapped as she is by her society, doesn't have the same liberty. savinhill posted:I agree with this wholeheartedly and wish I could articulate my thoughts as well as this. I just hope Bakker doesn't take these social activist trolls seriously and let it affect his writing. I would actually love it if he took this criticism to heart! He says he listens but there are a few specific things I think he could to really answer his critics and tamp down on that crawling discomfort some of us have felt. I really want to be able to read his challenging story about a deeply patriarchal, messed up setting full of evil people and rape aliens while knowing that the author has mastered his presentation of the issues and the characters they effect. It would only take a few strides in the text and they wouldn't impact his stated mission at all. We're not objecting to his world, remember -- even Requires Only Hate likes Lolita, a book about a monstrous man. It's the execution people have qualms with. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Feb 9, 2012 |
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Feb 9, 2012 04:56
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Achamian is a powerful man who's trapped and mocked by society thinking he and his kind are crazy. Dude's got his own issues. He's raised up by Kellhus. Esmenet is raised up due to her intelligence (for breeding ahem) by Kellhus. Nobody's really winning in these books.
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Feb 9, 2012 05:27
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It's not an issue of what happens so much as how it's depicted and how the characters and their inner lives are handled in the narrative. There's no problem with bad things happening to characters, or even with bad things happening specifically to women characters, even bad sexist things. It's all in the execution. I used to think that a female Dunyain would be a really interesting character, but I think they're just used for breeding or something like that. I'm not sure we really have any information.
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Feb 9, 2012 05:32
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I guess we'll have to disagree then, I'm not seeing these big issues that have everyone so worked up. I mean I can see how someone would approach this and think there were issues, I just don't approach it that way.
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Feb 9, 2012 13:33
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Maytag posted:I guess we'll have to disagree then, I'm not seeing these big issues that have everyone so worked up. I mean I can see how someone would approach this and think there were issues, I just don't approach it that way. Which comes back to the larger point that -- assuming you are (like myself) a guy -- you and I can afford not to approach it that way (and even be so calm and intellectual about this particular discussion), you and I never have to deal with misogyny first-hand. Which I why I think it's so important to be critical about things like this, we've got our own biases to deal with. If that's not a warranted assumption, then my apologies  So to stick to the text, and just to put you a bit on the spot (since you're being kind enough to engage the questions directly): Esmenet gets raped by a demonic entity that was heretofore only rumored to exist, is literally tortured with pleasure to betray Achamian, and then has a flashback in which it's shown to us the readers that what happened to her was basically Achamian's fault: the man who claimed to love her, knew that anyone he was associated with would get questioned if Inrus died, and went to her anyway. Add to this the fact that she's been serially abused by men who have used her in one way or another for her entire life. In short, Esmenet is comprehensively hurt from every conceivable angle, and yet the only things she's really allowed to think deeply about immediately following her horrific rape are all related to whether or not Achamian will be ok. Does this really not seem to you like her experience is being downplayed as less real and significant than Achamian's?
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Feb 9, 2012 14:36
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Wouldn't that sort of depend on the character? There's no telling how someone will react to the situation Esmenet experienced. Perhaps the world is so deeply patriarchal/misogynist that her response would have been the general reaction of 99% of the females in the world? Women have been taught to value men over themselves so much that even when they're raped they think it is a lesser issue than how it will impact whatever male is 'dominant' in their life? In that case we end up back at the setting being the cause rather than the author. It has been a couple years since I've read the books so I also forget how much Esmenet knows at that point. After she has survived and feels somewhat sure of her continued existence perhaps her first thought is that now Achamian's life is in danger? That doesn't seem too outlandish.
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Feb 9, 2012 17:33
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I don't think that it's impossible to explain away any particular case -- though I would need to give it more thought and I'm not as good at this as TouretteDog. For me, at least, I think Scott is cognitively and consciously very pro-woman, but that he's made subtle mistakes due to his privilege, which tend to be apparent as a pattern more than in individual scenes. For example, I noticed while reading the first three PoN books that his female characters felt different than the males, that the narrative looked at them with a different, slightly more male perspective, that they seemed deeply concerned with the male characters and less so with themselves, that they were defined by sexual relationships and as objects of sexual interest or rape by men, blah blah blah we've been over this. I thought to myself: 'this is interesting, but it is probably a product of the setting. Women in this setting don't get to do much other than define themselves by sex and childbirth. They need to relate to powerful men in order to survive.' Then I read Neuropath, and a lot of these patterns about how female characters were written persisted in a present-day setting. All the major female characters in Neuropath relate to the male protagonist through sex, cuckoldry, and rape. At this point I had to say 'okay, Scott does not write female characters this way entirely because of the setting'. Now, of course, in Neuropath he wanted to talk in part about how we handle sex, rape, and violence today, especially in the context of thrillers; but nonetheless the reading of his work as possibly misogynist was reinforced just by his failure to break the pattern even when it became possible to do so in the setting. I got to read White-Luck Warrior after Neuropath, and I wasn't surprised to find that when two female characters finally get a chance to step up as powers in their own right, they both continue to be defined by sexuality. I see the symbolic power in Empress Esmenet's return to a whorehouse and her concern for her children, but the real clincher was Serwa's eventual metamorphosis into a sort of pre-emptive cuckold object in order to motivate Sarweel. Again, a powerful female character became important not simply on her own but as a sex object for a man. When I started reading the series I thought that Bakker would write, say, a female Dunyain as a very different character from Esmenet or Serwe. Now I'm not so sure. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Feb 9, 2012 |
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Feb 9, 2012 17:52
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Yeah, I'll give him that much, he just does not write women all that well (I know other people I recommended the series too, while they weren't bothered by textual misogyny, just could not stand how the women in it were written). I think if he were better at it, a lot of the so-called misogyny in the text would be seriously mitigated, because it seriously does not help.
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Feb 9, 2012 17:55
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On a totally different note I'm not sure I've ever expressed how loving awesome the magic in this series is. I know there's a lot to be said for magic as a subtle, restrained influence on the plot, like in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf isn't casting fireballs and poo poo everywhere. But the idea of magic as a nuclear option that really shapes the balance of power across the whole setting just appeals to me. I love how the different Schools are described, how they relate to each other, how they work in combat. I think Scott's really good at battles in general, and I love the wide-lens Iliad-style narrative he uses in battle scenes, but sorcery in particular is just fun to read.
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Feb 9, 2012 18:05
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I would say it is my favorite part as well, that or when Kellhus does ridiculous things like defend the battle standard in the second book (I think). That scene is one of my favorites because of the way it is told, the general (Conphas?) is interrogating one of his subordinates and the guy is basically in a state of shock. When Achamian goes berserk against the Scarlet Spires, the end of book three when Kellhus "speaks with three voices" changing a communication spell into a transportation spell and then destroys all of the remaining Cishaurim (sp), etc.
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Feb 9, 2012 18:42
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Lyon posted:Perhaps the world is so deeply patriarchal/misogynist that her response would have been the general reaction of 99% of the females in the world? Women have been taught to value men over themselves so much that even when they're raped they think it is a lesser issue than how it will impact whatever male is 'dominant' in their life? In that case we end up back at the setting being the cause rather than the author. That's definitely another way to read it, but putting that against other episodes (like the one that General Battuta gives above), as well as just looking at the raw volume of ink spilled on the reactions of men to "their" women being assaulted versus the reactions of women who were actually assaulted, leaves me less inclined to accept it as a strong one. I'd find it more compelling if that reaction was shown to be specific to Esmenet and her upbringing. If Bakker was trying to make the point that she's so incredibly beaten down by her culture that her reactions are invisible even to herself, I think he failed when he put all of the women into the same position and not either a) having even one of them be self-aware enough to recognize it, even in passing, or b) going so laughably overboard with their collective (self-)victimization that it became obvious that he was doing it deliberately. In other words, if that's his tack, he really (in my opinion) needs to write one woman who's unapologetically strong, not a sex object, not beaten completely into submission, and is entirely willing to validate her own reactions to things, just to let us in on the joke. Anyway, I think Battuta's take that he's probably trying to address these questions with good intentions while being a bit hamstrung by not quite having fully worked out his own issues with privilege and patriarchy. I give him full credit for trying and being ambitious in taking these topics on, though, and it's not like I think I could have done much better. And yes, magic as WMD is a cool conceit that I'm surprised more authors haven't taken a swing at.
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Feb 10, 2012 03:13
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General Battuta posted:I don't, personally, really think you can flip things around and look at how Achamian thinks about Esmenet. Achamian is tortured nightly by his dreams, and he's also eternally damned, but he's a powerful man who gets to make powerful decisions, and when he's brought low by the Scarlet Spires he's able to free himself by his own ingenuity and power. Esmenet, trapped as she is by her society, doesn't have the same liberty. That's the reason why you CAN flip things. Or you would like that a writer wrote about a fictional world where a male and female characters are exact, perfect mirrors to each other? Why fiction must be about wishful thinking and ideal worlds of fairness and equality? And why if they are not it means a writer is ENDORSING what he's depicting? The argument is not about whether Esmenet has as much power as Achamian, but why in that context it's plausible she has it. And whether or not her not having that kind of power makes legitimate accusing the writer of misogyny.
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Feb 10, 2012 04:44
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General Battuta posted:I think Scott is cognitively and consciously very pro-woman, but that he's made subtle mistakes due to his privilege, which tend to be apparent as a pattern more than in individual scenes. His privilege? What's Bakker's "privilege"? Being a writer?
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Feb 10, 2012 04:49
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^^ Being a white male. It's pretty comical to think Achamian has any liberty. It's pretty comical to think anyone has any liberty in this series. What comes before... I think if Bakker wrote some strong self-actualized woman at this point, he'd still have people dumping on him. Maybe we can look at the aforementioned Esmenet scenario as her being stronger than any of the men in the series, putting aside her hurt and self-concern, and showing a caring nurturing side in worrying about Achamian. She's been hurt her whole life, what's one more incident to her? But Achamian's pretty weak a lot of the time, so she's right to have concern that he's screwed.
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Feb 10, 2012 04:51
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Abalieno posted:That's the reason why you CAN flip things. I think you should go back and reread the discussion. You're arguing against a phantom here; no one has asked for this. The fact that endorsement is not the same as depiction is patently obvious. I know I, at least, have definitely said this, and I'm pretty sure I said it in exactly those words. e: Yeah, here, let me just quote myself for you quote:I don't think the worlds Bakker depicts, as full of rape and institutionalized oppression as they are, are misogynist. They're honest (or at least, they make an argument rather than spinning a fantasy). quote:I don't think the setting - as full of rape aliens and institutionalized oppression as it is - is particularly misogynistic. If anything I think its brutality is influenced by the Bible. quote:I agree pretty strongly with what TouretteDog is saying. I personally feel that the books are both interested in examining misogyny and also unintentionally misogynistic, which is a pretty pickle to be in. On the one hand, PoN is all about depicting and criticizing a horrible world in which the patriarchy has total control and women's lives are miserable. This is written on purpose to make a point. quote:I think it's important to remember, in discussions like these, that 'misogyny' isn't a total condemnation; it's not a seal you put on a work to write it off. Something can be a little misogynist, it can contain misogynistic overtones, it can be full of both positive and negative things about gender. quote:We're not objecting to his world, remember -- even Requires Only Hate likes Lolita, a book about a monstrous man. It's the execution people have qualms with. quote:It's not an issue of what happens so much as how it's depicted and how the characters and their inner lives are handled in the narrative. There's no problem with bad things happening to characters, or even with bad things happening specifically to women characters, even bad sexist things. It's all in the execution. Hopefully clear now.
General Battuta fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 04:54
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Nope, you keep saying the problem is execution but you never define it and instead keep pounding on the same accusation without justifying it. "Execution" means nothing on its own. It's an accusation without an argument. The same as calling someone misogynist without having a proof of it but merely a suspicion.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:06
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That post was attempting to clarify that I did not feel, as you said, that Bakker needed to write a world in which male and female characters are exact, perfect mirrors to each other, and, furthermore, that I did not think that he was endorsing what he was depicting. Does that make sense? If it does, I can move on to quote the part of my argument where I explain my qualms with his execution. e: Serwa is almost pretty decent but she is also defined by sexuality in relation to a male character, and Psatma is a constant rape victim vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv General Battuta fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 05:08
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Maytag posted:^^ Being a white male. Bakker has already wrote some strong woman characters in Serwa, who runs probably the most powerful sorcery school that's saving the Great Ordeal's rear end all the time; and Psatma, the head of the Yatwer Cult that's been tearing apart the empire. Also Esmenet herself basically went head to head against Maithenet, a guy trained as a Dunyain and with the power of the church behind him, and she won. How does this not make her look strong and intelligent?
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Feb 10, 2012 05:08
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Why would you think Serwa's sexuality is a sign of victimization and not of strength? That just doesn't parse.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:16
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So we fall again in the same gut? Starting to count characters and scenes divided by sex? This is already a BIAS applied to observation. Even by using the same logic a "woman", so an "unprivileged" one, will approach stuff constantly in the shadow of a SUSPECT whenever she picks up a book written by a male white man. This is bias. Bakker says: "this just shows that she was reading to condemn – period – exactly the way humans are prone to do, regardless of gender." Do you pick up a book to enjoy it or because you're ready to condemn it for whatever you're going to find on the premise it's written by a male, white man, so someone guilty of privilege and discrimination? The problem is that you can't condemn someone on a SUSPECT. You need proofs if you want to start accusing people of racism and misogyny. You need solid arguments or it's all about randomly throwing poo poo because throwing poo poo is EASY (and quite effective).
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Feb 10, 2012 05:18
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Maytag posted:Why would you think Serwa's sexuality is a sign of victimization and not of strength? That just doesn't parse. I don't think it's as simple as victimization/strength so much as the tendency for women to serve as narrative objects more than subjects. Serwa's sexuality is written as a source of pain for Sorweel in order to motivate his character arc, turning him back towards the old gods. It's an instrumentality in the narrative, like the threat of cuckoldry in Neuropath or with Esmenet earlier in PoN. Serwa's sexuality is perceived both literally and narratively through Sorweel's gaze. Abalieno posted:So we fall again in the same gut? Starting to count characters and scenes divided by sex? I don't think I'm following your English, sorry. As a psychologist I am 100% in agreement with Bakker's arguments about cognition, heuristic bias, and self-confirmation. This is part of why I'm such a huge fan of the series.I don't mean this in a personal way abalieno but I don't think we can communicate clearly enough to have a productive discussion. I've read your comments on Scott's blog in the past and respect them, but I don't understand why you think we're trying to 'condemn' anyone. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 05:20
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General Battuta posted:
How the hell was Psatma a rape victim? If anything I would say she dominated and controlled people with sex.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:26
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savinhill posted:Dude, I think you have some problems of your own that you feel a need to find a sex related issue everywhere you look. Whoa, okay, if this is going to turn into an ad hominem discussion I'd rather back out. I'm uncomfortable discussing Scott rather than the text, and I'm definitely uncomfortable being discussed myself rather than the text. In the end they're just fantasy books, and I don't think it's worth making this an issue of the posters involved. I really love this series, I really enjoy analyzing the gender structure of all kinds of literature. I don't think that's a problem and I apologize if it's come across that way.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:30
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General Battuta posted:Whoa, okay, if this is going to turn into an ad hominem discussion I'd rather back out. I'm uncomfortable discussing Scott rather than the text, and I'm definitely uncomfortable being discussed myself rather than the text. In the end they're just fantasy books, and I don't think it's worth making this an issue of the posters involved.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:34
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That's okay. These are really complicated books and it's a really, really complicated issue, and one with a lot of emotional charge. It's tricky to express and defend an opinion anywhere between 'everything is fine!' and 'these books are sexist trash written by a sexist' (which is where Scott and acrackedmoon are pretty much camped out) without the debate pushing you out to one side or the other. Ironically, this sort of polarization is exactly the kind of psychology Scott's interested in and that Kellhus is always exploiting.
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Feb 10, 2012 05:39
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It's too bad he's wasting time arguing with the crazies when he could be here.
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Feb 10, 2012 13:13
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General Battuta posted:I don't think it's as simple as victimization/strength so much as the tendency for women to serve as narrative objects more than subjects. Serwa's sexuality is written as a source of pain for Sorweel in order to motivate his character arc, turning him back towards the old gods. It's an instrumentality in the narrative, like the threat of cuckoldry in Neuropath or with Esmenet earlier in PoN. Serwa's sexuality is perceived both literally and narratively through Sorweel's gaze. I thought that it was pretty clear that the episode with Serwa and Moenghus wasn't author fiat to drive Sorweel to where Bakker needed him, but a calculated effort by Serwa and Kellhus to put Sorweel where Kellhus needed him. Which means in this instance Serwa is using Sorweel, rather than Serwa being used by the plot. Does that make a difference? And I'm not sure where in the text it indicates that Dunyain females are just brood mares. I imagine pretty much all the Dunyain are simply paired up by genetic fitness in the same way we would breed horses or dogs, male or female.
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Feb 10, 2012 18:56
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Maytag posted:I think if Bakker wrote some strong self-actualized woman at this point, he'd still have people dumping on him. No doubt, but at least that would make it clear that he's writing women 'badly' as a deliberate stylistic choice, which would go a long way towards supporting the contentions that he did it that way to make a point. But if he's deliberately writing the misogyny into it, then it's still misogynistic, and he's trying to walk an exquisitely fine line: if he means that misogyny to make some rhetorical or thematic point, he has (my opinion) really failed to do so. Maytag posted:Maybe we can look at the aforementioned Esmenet scenario as her being stronger than any of the men in the series, putting aside her hurt and self-concern, and showing a caring nurturing side in worrying about Achamian. This would be a much stronger argument, I think, if 1) it really was just more of the same abuse, rather than being raped by a literal demon while being forced to feel pleasure and betray her lover, 2) she had had actually reacted to it with something other than a brief one-sentence vomit before she started fussing over Achamian, and 3) that connection had been made more strongly in the text. She doesn't even connect this with her past abuse until the very end of the section, when she sees the little girl who reminds her of her daughter, and it's a really, really oblique connection. The notion that "a woman's strength" is in being nurturing and caring is another facet of cultural gender bias. If Bakker really was trying to show her as being strong in this way, he's still depicting 20th century patriarchy in his quasi-bronze-age fantasy. General Battuta posted:It's tricky to express and defend an opinion anywhere between 'everything is fine!' and 'these books are sexist trash written by a sexist' (which is where Scott and acrackedmoon are pretty much camped out) without the debate pushing you out to one side or the other. Yeah. For my part: the books are fun and contain some interesting meat on the topics of free will and theories of mind, considered separately from issues of gender, sex, and privilege. But at the same time being white/cis-male means I can afford to set aside those issues, I can see how people who have to actually deal with sexism/misogyny in their daily life would be much less charitable (though I still think acrackedmoon just felt cantankerous at the same time that Bakker stuck his chin out and dared her to take a swing). When it comes to the issues of sex and gender, I think they're an ambitious but ultimately failed experiment. The fact that he's trying to examine these issues by a vaguely reductio ad absurdum approach means he has to write a lot of deeply sexist stuff, and his privilege and the setting all get tangled up together and it's hard to parse out what's intentional and what's not. Even minor failings are hugely magnified. On the flip side, dissecting just how they failed is both interesting and informative, so even as a failed experiment I think they're worth discussing critically.
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Feb 12, 2012 05:07
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OK, six posts in three months about a single review on another site? This is just getting silly. And he's really not doing himself any favours by constantly referring to the Thai woman criticising him as 'the Dude'.
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Feb 19, 2012 12:34
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Peter Watts, another one of my favorite authors, has gotten involved too. I wish they'd just read Requires Only Hates' reviews, nod, take away anything useful they can, and move on. This looks unprofessional. Requires Only Hate would've done the one review of Bakker and moved on if it weren't for this.
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Feb 19, 2012 14:53
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General Battuta posted:Peter Watts, another one of my favorite authors, has gotten involved too. And he referred to acrackedmoon as a 'rabid animal'. Classy.
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Feb 19, 2012 15:06
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The solution is for the two to collaborate on a new book so bleak and misanthropic that it drives their critics to suicide.
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Feb 19, 2012 15:24
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Watts was pretty classy throughout, to be honest. He gave a great deal of leeway to Crackedmoon when she appeared on his blog and only wrote her off when she proved to be a completely worthless person who only wanted to score cheap personal points. But yeah, they both should have left that awful website well alone and just ignored it. Never respond to negative criticism, and only respond sparingly to positive.
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Feb 19, 2012 19:05
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