399 replies to this topic

[Shryke]

Prince Alexander, on 13 April 2012 - 01:47 PM, said:

Well, as I noted, some/many do pull it off. Bakker is good, but he is not as good as those who do. I think that's pretty obvious - there wouldn't be such polarized reception if he was clearly awesome at delivering his message.

I don't see how that follows at all. And what do you mean by "good" anyway? This doesn't really make much sense.


You also criticized him for the very attempt at delivering a message, not for doing it badly in your first post. Completely different arguments.

[Datepalm]

This reminding me of this review of Jay Lake's Green, which seems like it's doing something similar to Bakker, (I've read this review, so i'll never actually be reading the book) but in a cruder way, thats maybe more illustrative of what i'm trying to criticize with Bakker: (Yes, I want to stop talking just about Bakker all the time.) The whole disconnect between what is shown and what is told, and Books With A Message, and demonizing what the author thinks is the male readers response to make them a better feminist:

relevant bit:

Quote

Lake's demonisation of male sexuality and valorisation of lesbianism reaches its height in the confrontation against the Big Bad. The villain has captured Green and the catgirl Dancing Mistress, and is getting ready to cut them both into pieces so that he can reclaim the last shards of the power he needs to become a full on god. How do Green and the Dancing Mistress get out of this situation? Why they les up! And the truly stupid thing is that it works. It works so well that the Big Bad actually stops torturing the two of them to death and – I shit you not - sits down and starts masturbating. Here's how it plays out:

I crawled back up to nuzzle her face. “Oh please,” I moaned, “kiss my thighs.” My voice would have had the Lily Blades falling out with laughter, but Federo just echoed the moan.

He was the rankest of boys.

Facing Federo as I sprawled on the floor, I ran my tongue across my lips. Mistress Cherlise had shown me a number of such little bits of playacting that would arrest a man's attention.

The Dancing Mistress gripped my thighs hard and kissed me back and forth along the inner line of each leg, working down towards my knees. When she reset her grip to my calves and eased herself further away I nearly shrieked. Instead I rolled slightly to my left so Federo could see my right breast.

He wasn't looking any more. His eyes were closed, his back arched in his chair as he stroked himself very hard. Outside, thunder rolled almost continuously.

If this was just stupid, I'd let it go. But it's not just stupid, it's stupid and it's sexist. And just to be very clear, to say for the third time something I am sure I will say again, I don't mean that it's “reverse sexist” or “sexist against men” I mean it's sexist. It's an offensive, patriarchal stereotype which harms women far more than it harms men.

The attitude expressed in the passage above, and repeated throughout the whole of the book, is that male sexuality is intrinsically corrupt, fundamentally violent, and ultimately controlled by women. While men (white men at least) are morally responsible for all of the evils in Green the practical responsibility lies always with women. When Green returns to Copper Downs, it is revealed that after she killed the Duke, the Factor's house where she was trained was destroyed, the remaining Mistresses killed, and the girls who were kept there raped to death. And who was responsible for the girls being raped to death? Why they were of course! Once the Duke was dead, there was nobody to restrain the guards, and so they did what all men will naturally do when faced with beautiful women, they raped them until they died. “Because of their beauty” as Green herself puts it.

Edited by Datepalm, 13 April 2012 - 01:57 PM.
formatting of the quote

[Lyanna Stark]

Reek, on 13 April 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

With Bakker though, he is making it so obvious, so difficult to ignore, that it HAS to be recognized by the reader.  I don't think he is so much concerned about pushing a particular platform of feminism (whatever that word/concept even means anymore) and is more just attempting to get people to recognize that some of the tropes of the novels they admire are not really very flattering to real women out there.

Well, this is the thing. I am ambivalent about this too. Sure, hanging naked women is nasty, brutal rape is nasty, stoning whores is nasty. But that's not really a feminist statement as such, or even a feminist commentary. I'm not even sure Goodkind would consider that good stuff and he's pretty ideologically vile.

If I look at what I think and feel about the women in Bakkerland, and how they come across, this is where it gets interesting. If we look at women_as_a_group in Bakkerworld, they are extremely sexualised, and they all use sex as a way to get by in the world. The queen mother incest rape alien is about as sick and twisted as a human creature can possibly be, even before she became an alien. Before that she was just an incest rapey mother. Serwe is a shallow, vengeful tit who has sex with all and sundry and only knows one thing: how to use sex. Lastly, we have Esmenet, who is also a vile, horrible human being, who has sex with all and sundry (including rape aliens and she liked it) and she sold her own child into slavery. I'm not sure a description of three women could be more offputting, nor much more sexualised.

If it's meant to show that we should feel sympathy even with strongly sexualised women, sure, but the incentives are few to do so since they are all described as being so truly awful and so despicable, and in a different way than the male characters. Few of the male characters are described as so deeply flawed and off putting.

Plus there is a random threesome with Kellhus, Esmenet and Serwe which always made me go completely WTF.

[Sci-2]

Quote

The whole disconnect between what is shown and what is told, and Books With A Message, and demonizing what the author thinks is the male readers response to make them a better feminist:

Yeah, I've read that review -> Green seems like a pretty flawed work.

Datepalm (and others), what works do you think successfully delivered a feminist message whether through a dystopia such as The Handmaiden's Tale or a more positive examination of feminism?

[Prince Alexander]

Shryke, on 13 April 2012 - 01:51 PM, said:

I don't see how that follows at all. And what do you mean by "good" anyway? This doesn't really make much sense.

The good ones are the ones who, IMO, don't cause a polarized reaction we can clearly observe in case of PON. And to clarify, I'm not arguing about his skill as an author, which is entirely subjective. This is similar to arguing about what constitutes a good teacher: well, obviously a good teacher is the one whose students have 100% knowledge of material after completing the course. In case of Bakker, about 50% (and that's probably being generous), "got" his message. The rest think it's a pile of poop.

[Shryke]

Prince Alexander, on 13 April 2012 - 02:08 PM, said:

The good ones are the ones who, IMO, don't cause a polarized reaction we can clearly observe in case of PON. And to clarify, I'm not arguing about his skill as an author, which is entirely subjective. This is similar to arguing about what constitutes a good teacher: well, obviously a good teacher is the one whose students have 100% knowledge of material after completing the course. In case of Bakker, about 50% (and that's probably being generous), "got" his message. The rest think it's a pile of poop.

That's a function of the message, not the author though.

This is like saying you are a bad biology teacher because the christian scientist kids in the back still don't believe in aspirin.

[ericxihn]

Lyanna Stark, on 13 April 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

Few of the male characters are described as so deeply flawed and off putting.

Overall your post gave me a lot to think about, but this line seemed off. I mean Cnaiur, Conphas, Xerius?  I mean Bakker's characters are interesting because of how deeply flawed they are.

[Datepalm]

Books that deal with gender-feminism-etc more or less explicitely (and well, IMO):

Firethorn - Sarah Micklem
God's War - Kameron Hurley
Left Hand of Darkness - Leguin (which doesn't actually have a single woman in it!)

And I could write a really long list of books that aren't really about feminism, but are feminist, in the sense that they're not sexist and make me think that women are people the way men are people, which I can then, with my very own brain, apply to the world I see around me and come to my own conclusions about what is and isn't sexist. (and all of them have men in them, and many have sex scenes, and they have unsympathetic women, and patriarchal societies, and some have prostitutes and rape scenes too.)

[Prince Alexander]

Shryke, on 13 April 2012 - 02:12 PM, said:

That's a function of the message, not the author though.

This is like saying you are a bad biology teacher because the christian scientist kids in the back still don't believe in aspirin.

I see your point, but I'd argue that the good teacher would know how to still give something to the few exceptions. And of course you're right, there are always exceptions. But those exceptions shouldn't be 50% of the audience. Even if the teacher/author/messenger's intentions and message are noble, they are simply in the wrong place/context/medium to deliver it, and in fact would do more bad than good trying to.

Edited by Prince Alexander, 13 April 2012 - 02:21 PM.

[Lummel]

Left hand of darkness does have a woman in it.  Although admittedly she does appear for only a couple of lines a few pages away from the end as one of the human ambassadorial team.

The Dispossessed by LeGuin is also very interesting with regard to gender relations.

[Shryke]

Prince Alexander, on 13 April 2012 - 02:21 PM, said:

I see your point, but I'd argue that the good teacher would know how to still give something to the few exceptions. And of course you're right, there are always exceptions. But those exceptions shouldn't be 50% of the audience. Even if the teacher/author/messenger's intentions and message are noble, they are simply in the wrong place/context/medium to deliver it, and in fact would do more bad than good trying to.

How do you know it's 50% of the audience? And why is that the cutoff?

Not every book or movie or TV show or painting or song or whatever works for everyone. There's nothing wrong with that.

[Reek]

I disagree that the men in the series are not as flawed as the women.  To me ALL of the characters in Bakker's books are not just just deeply flawed, some of them are down-right despicable people.

The thing is though, they are all shaped by circumstance.  They were all offered choices (at least they think they were offered choices) and the choices they made are what made them into the despicable people that they are.

I think the problem is that trying to frame the analysis of Bakker purely from a gender equality standpoint is missing the point.  Everyone in these books is getting screwed, not just the women.  People try to make the 'right' choices and it just makes their problems even worse.

I can understand that you can't sympathize with any of the characters (especially not the women) but I definitely pity their situations and hope that by the end they can find some kind of salvation/resolution to their crap lives.

Edited by Reek, 13 April 2012 - 02:27 PM.

[Prince Alexander]

Shryke, on 13 April 2012 - 02:25 PM, said:

How do you know it's 50% of the audience? And why is that the cutoff?

Not every book or movie or TV show or painting or song or whatever works for everyone. There's nothing wrong with that.

Of course I pulled the 50% number. That's just what I feel like a generous number based on the reception I've seen for his message.

And I agree with you there, not every work delivers right to every kind of person out there. I was just explaining how he lost me from the audience. Which is what I actually started out with - my own personal experience. Since we're arguing about it, I guess I wasn't very good at delivering that message.

[Sci-2]

Larry's old interview with Bakker

eta: put samples of the separate answers in different blocks.

Quote

With the recent elections, do you think a woman will ever be elected president of the US? Who would be your choice?

Great questions. Without a doubt I think this is the topic I take the most heat on, something which I see as ironic given that my initial concern was that I was being too overtly feminist!

Epic fantasy worlds are almost exclusively pre-scientific worlds, which is to say they're worlds where traditional authority, rather than public debate or scientific method, tells us what's true or false, right or wrong. What I wanted was an unsanitized epic fantasy world, one that was true to the brutalities and beauties of our own world before the Enlightenment. I thought the most honest way to explore our fascination with these worlds would be to look at them as they would really be. The culture of the Three Seas, as a result, is as misogynistic as western culture once was. Women are often treated as a sexual and reproductive resource. As Kellhus points out in TWP, when men cannot control their desires, they try to control the objects of their desires...

Quote

For me, the Kellhus/Esmenet dyad is one of the thematic cornerstones of the book. My big concern, and I think it's been borne out, has been that I'm simply being overly subtle.

One of the questions I'm interested in is, What happens to truths when they become instruments of manipulation? Kellhus enslaves Esmenet by emancipating her, by showing the 'truth' of the misogynistic culture she lives and breathes. In effect, he makes her modern. I have no idea how to answer this question, but it seems to me to be an important one.

If you believe that all values are simply social artifacts (which I don't, because I think this is tantamount to nihilism), then what we call 'women's rights' is simply an expression of changing technological and economic conditions. Given the way that technology increases productivity, the 'base economic units' of society become smaller and smaller. Just a few centuries back it was the village, then it became the extended family, then it became the nuclear family, and now it's becoming the individual. Every society in history rationalizes its economic organization in its belief-system, and our society is no different. So as the possibilities of female economic independence expanded, the more and more 'oppressive' the standing beliefs in the auxilary, familial role of females came to seem, and so the 'women's rights' movement was born. It's not that women are in FACT equal to men and always have been, it's just that their labour has recently become equally useful. There's no moral fact of the matter: just a social system spontaneously adapting its belief-system to better exploit its resources.

I see Esmenet, who is through and through the product of a society that subordinates women to men, as embodying this question. Is there a moral fact of her station, or is it simply the result of an arbitrary, socially grounded belief-system? How do here own decisions feed into this question? And how does the manipulation of Kellhus bear on the whole?

Her native intelligence, I think, is itself a powerful moral argument. It demonstrates her equality in fact.

Edited by sciborg2, 13 April 2012 - 03:30 PM.

[kalbear]

My suspicion is that this no longer applies; Bakker is a neurological nihilist who believes solely that biological and instinctual values govern all of us.

The problematizing he is wanting to do basically is asking what if sexism is entirely a biological construct, men cannot alter it, and humans are hard wired for it. Which is an interesting question, but is ignoring things like social dynamics, learned behaviors and environmental factors as well as all the science associated with social animals in biology.

[Lyanna Stark]

Ericxihn, on 13 April 2012 - 02:13 PM, said:

Overall your post gave me a lot to think about, but this line seemed off. I mean Cnaiur, Conphas, Xerius?  I mean Bakker's characters are interesting because of how deeply flawed they are.

The male flaws are of a slightly different nature though. Brutality, ambition, megalomania etc, all on a "larger scale", if you wish. And all these three men are described as extremely sharp individuals and they often draw clever conclusions to complicated problems. They may be corrupt morally and be too ambitious, but the female flaws are pettier, more shameful, more personal. They indicate weak characters, low inhibitions, no discipline and no understanding.

Sure, you could argue that these things are not the fault of the women, because society's oppression make women petty, shameful, weak individuals of no understanding and no discipline. But I think that's like trying to tie a shoe lace with a mallet (not to mention an unfair characterisation of women, even oppressed ones).

Another thing that Bakker suffers from is that he chose to use only three female characters, all extremely sexualised, all extremely despicable, while he is using far more and varied male characters, so we don't only get to see the morally corrupt overly ambitious ones. But we only get to see the whores, the child sellers and the incest rapists on the female side. We are sometimes told Esme is clever, but the difference is, we aren't shown that she is. She acts like an weak willed and wallowing individual throughout (complete with random threesomes for no reason).


Regarding the interview:

Quote

One of the questions I'm interested in is, What happens to truths when they become instruments of manipulation? Kellhus enslaves Esmenet by emancipating her, by showing the 'truth' of the misogynistic culture she lives and breathes. In effect, he makes her modern. I have no idea how to answer this question, but it seems to me to be an important one.

Amusing, since the issue a lot of people are taking with this is not Kellhus' manipulation, but that he's just some guy telling yet another woman what she should or should not think. Much like Bakker himself, really.

Besides, the whole scene is about as heavy handed as you can get and a proper facepalm moment, on par with the random threesome. Subtler writing would properly have served the purpose better of actually making people consider the manipulation vs truth, but that is not what you take away from it, unfortunately.

Edited by Lyanna Stark, 13 April 2012 - 04:57 PM.

[Sci-2]

I think the hard-wiring is part of Bakker's message, but I think if Bakker had become a nihilist-determinist he'd simply give up the game and write Jackie Collin type novels with some black semen thrown in.

I'm like Datepalm, though I was originally enthralled by the scriptural world argument. Now it seems largely non-applicable to real life.

The economic argument however is interesting: and how values shift around production/consumption of goods. Even sovereignty of body is co-opted into pornography/prostitution. I don't think it accounts for the entirety of the women's rights movement, not nor do I think of it as a novel argument.

However, looking at the challenges in the US regarding wage discrimination and sovereignty of body, this might be Bakker's most relevant point.

ETA:

Quote

We are sometimes told Esme is clever, but the difference is, we aren't shown that she is. She acts like an weak willed and wallowing individual throughout (complete with random threesomes for no reason).

This.

Edited by sciborg2, 13 April 2012 - 05:02 PM.

[Shryke]

Lyanna Stark, on 13 April 2012 - 04:43 PM, said:

Amusing, since the issue a lot of people are taking with this is not Kellhus' manipulation, but that he's just some guy telling yet another woman what she should or should not think. Much like Bakker himself, really.

Besides, the whole scene is about as heavy handed as you can get and a proper facepalm moment, on par with the random threesome. Subtler writing would properly have served the purpose better of actually making people consider the manipulation vs truth, but that is not what you take away from it, unfortunately.

????

That is the manipulation.

[Lyanna Stark]

What? Bakker doing it himself?

[Shryke]

Kalbear, on 13 April 2012 - 03:42 PM, said:

My suspicion is that this no longer applies; Bakker is a neurological nihilist who believes solely that biological and instinctual values govern all of us.

The problematizing he is wanting to do basically is asking what if sexism is entirely a biological construct, men cannot alter it, and humans are hard wired for it. Which is an interesting question, but is ignoring things like social dynamics, learned behaviors and environmental factors as well as all the science associated with social animals in biology.

He's not saying it's biological in the series though. He's saying it's metaphysical. It's a religious construct. It's just religion is correct (so far as we know)

His point in the interview is that, if one believes this anyway, values/morals/etc are products of our social system and are created to reinforce the structures that let it continue. In the real world, religion would be one of those. It's a way of codifying certain social structures within a framework that suppresses your ability to challenge it.

And the series proposes a world where, as far as we know, it's the opposite. Religion is correct in some fashion. And so that social structure in some sense precedes the society that uses it, rather then the opposite. And then asking what that means. What does it mean to be a force for women's equality in a world where women aren't equal? Kellhus and through him the modern world as we know it and the social structures of the pre-modern world are sort of switching place here. Instead of structures of inequality being imposed over an equal world to facilitate social order, we have a system of equality being imposed over an unequal world to facilitate social order (or, more specifically in this case, a specific goal)

He's saying if sexism is a fact, if it's "hardwired" somehow (though here not biologically necessarily) and can't be altered, what does that mean for all those other things you mention and more (social structures and such)