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Bakker LIV - Soul Sphincter


.H.

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I'm not arguing per se. I just see it differently.

Everyone keeps talking about the crusades, and sure there are some similarities there- holy relics/site(s), religious conquest ,etc. That's an event. I've always seen Earwa as analogous to the ancient Mediterranean and surrounds, ie: Scylvendi - Scythians, the waning Nansur Empire - Hellenes, etc. Sumer, Babylon, and so on. Stratums of society, technological levels, whathaveyou, Bakker's Three Seas much more closely parallels classical antiquity rather than medieval, imo, and so too his treatment of women. You and I, we seem to be viewing Bakker's influences and representation across a remove of anywhere from 1500 to 2000 or so years and, beside the Whale Mothers, no matter what he says [trust here has become an issue] Bakker's treatment of women isn't remarkably different than back then. Sad, but true.

So what ultimately got my goat was Bakker's choice to make womens' inferiority an ontological truth. Why? Oh, see how deeply provocative I am. It's not the capricious heel of men that keeps women down, see, it's the Gods'. And Bakker... well, anyway, this steppe is well trod. 

I was willing to follow if I thought he had a point [shrugs] but turns out almost all of it was just wankery.

 

ETA: ffs

ETA II: ah, fixed it

 

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I suppose, but then I have to wonder what actual difference such a miniscule distinction actually is. I mean, the only observable variance I see between Bakker's depiction and reality is that the former, in effect, absolves men. 

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Absolves? I'm not so sure about that seeing that Cnauir went insane due to homophobic attitudes and toxic masculinity in his culture. If no one cared that he was gay or a "weeper" as long as he can still fight, then he would have been okay(or about as okay as a Person of War can be). Proyas was in similar situation to Esmenet and yet SHE is spared while he is hung out to dry. The point is that patriarchy can be just as damaging to men as it is to women. However, I don't think Bakker conveyed that very well.

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Men still have choices though. Like Proyas could have raped that girl in Shimeh, but chose not to. I know choices don't come in a vacuum, but the point is that while being a product of your environment can shape you, it doesn't always mean you have no choice.

And really, can the Judging Eye be fully trusted? That quote might have been something Mimara was taught to believe. As for men "shining more brightly", that could just be her own personal preference.

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3 hours ago, Dora Vee said:

Men still have choices though. Like Proyas could have raped that girl in Shimeh, but chose not to. I know choices don't come in a vacuum, but the point is that while being a product of your environment can shape you, it doesn't always mean you have no choice.

And really, can the Judging Eye be fully trusted? That quote might have been something Mimara was taught to believe. As for men "shining more brightly", that could just be her own personal preference.

Eh, this is getting close to the horror and suffering of the Bakker and Women threads, but Bakker did state many times about how in his world Men are eh, I'm not sure what the word is, ontologicaly better  as stated above maybe.

And obviously we are never going to see eye to eye on the history thing, which has also been argued to death.

Edited to make sense, maybe

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1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

but Bakker did state many times about how in his world Men are eh, I'm not sure what the word is, ontologicaly better  as stated above maybe.

I've never seen that, but maybe he thinks that Earwa is crapsack because of it?

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7 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

Absolves men of womens' lot, it surely does. Liberty withheld cannot be done so jealously, or maliciously, if it was God-given, non?  

 

And it's an interesting point that dovetails one of Bakker's actual real-world beliefs - that men are not responsible for being rapists, for being violent, for being competitive, because it is entirely their genetic makeup which determines that. That there exists no way to educate or change the culture which will deny these fundamental truths, and while those truths suck, we can't ignore them. 

(this is, to put it finely, complete and utter bullshit from a scientific perspective, but it is one of the things Bakker believes). 

8 hours ago, JEORDHl said:

You and I, we seem to be viewing Bakker's influences and representation across a remove of anywhere from 1500 to 2000 or so years and, beside the Whale Mothers, no matter what he says [trust here has become an issue] Bakker's treatment of women isn't remarkably different than back then. Sad, but true.

It...well, it kind of was. Again, Homer had better representation of women in the Iliad and the Odyssey than PoN does - and that's not exactly a bastion of particularly enlightened storytelling. We have a whole lot of historical record of women in antiquity times, especially Greco-Roman times, and their power - as well as them being much more present. From a purely practical perspective women in older times always took a pretty big part of things because you can't easily enslave women without having a whole lot of excess food/shelter/wealth. Women certainly didn't have the same kinds of rights that they should have, and it sucked, but that's a far cry from not having any royalty, any businesswomen, any religious figures, etc. 

And again, Bakker specifically stated he made it worse than the real world, and was surprised that it wasn't more obvious. 

Now, you can ignore one of those things, but you really can't ignore both. We've gone through how PoN was not particularly realistic with respect to the lack of women or their representation in the past, and we did that before, but when the author also says 'yeah, I did that deliberately' and 'I did that because I couldn't do objectively inferior racism or I'd never get published', well, it's a lot harder to ignore. 

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1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

And it's an interesting point that dovetails one of Bakker's actual real-world beliefs - that men are not responsible for being rapists, for being violent, for being competitive, because it is entirely their genetic makeup which determines that. That there exists no way to educate or change the culture which will deny these fundamental truths, and while those truths suck, we can't ignore them. 

(this is, to put it finely, complete and utter bullshit from a scientific perspective, but it is one of the things Bakker believes). 

Ugh. You know, I think I already knew he believed that. Rings a bell or two, and despite the repulsive assumption begs a closer look. We're told that women are inferior. Not because men deemed them so. Not because a religious or philosophical text said so, even if all three of the former do. No. The God(s) willed it, and so it's fundamental. Sacrosanct. I don't recall reading anything particular in the text that shouted out that women were less than. Sure, Esmenet was lauded often, by Akka, by Kellhus. But the whole thing feels suspect. If she stood out from other women it was, as you say, only due to their absence. 

Which by the way, is something quite common from antiquity. The absence of women, I mean, of which Bakker's interpretation is reflective. Look at Athens, for example [I often got the Athenian vibe, especially from Serwe's flashback to her rape by the head of her Household] Of course women were there. Wives, daughters, business owners [but not of property] artists, writers. Slaves. Yet prior to the early seventies very little scholarly attention was given to their lives, so little wonder they felt invisible. That changed of course but even in Athens, arguably one of the brightest lights of the ancient world, it was clear women had a bad fucking beat, man.

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3 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah but the point is in Bakker the women are clearly not there.

You've become like an Exalt Obfuscate in our last few interactions, Rich. Unpack that for me.

What do you mean?  

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(this is, to put it finely, complete and utter bullshit from a scientific perspective, but it is one of the things Bakker believes). 

Oh, it certainly is. It's also insulting. It also made me think that he's most likely a misandrist rather than a misogynist.

As for women being "invisible", maybe he's just not comfortable writing women. *shrugs*

 

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16 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

You've become like an Exalt Obfuscate in our last few interactions, Rich. Unpack that for me.

What do you mean?  

I'll just quote kal here.

Bakker did say that he made things deliberately worse for women, and that was a point - that in a world where things were literally as what people thought they were back in the day, it would actually be that much worse. When women are objectively spiritually less than men, when people can see this as a fact the same way they can weigh two things, things are actually even worse than they are now. 

And it wasn't (just) about women being exceptional (though the story is about exceptional people in general, and it's weird that there were no exceptional women that weren't whores) - it was women simply not even appearing to exist in the story. Again, we compared it to things like Tolkien and Homer and as sparse as the representatives of women were in those stories they were still far more in abundance than Bakker's world. As I said back then - where are the queens, the ladies in wait, the businesswomen, the farmers, the religious, the nurses, the handmaidens? And what we get of those is basically Istriya, who turns out to be, well, completely horrible in all ways as far as representation, including not actually being human

It's weird not having women in places like this at all because, well, they tend to exist in normal society, they find ways of actually being human and being represented, even when not having equality. This is especially true for what Bakker modeled the first series after - the Crusades - where there were a whole lot of women present throughout the history as major roles, and he removed them. 

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Yeah, I read that already. There's little to disagree with beyond the 'modelled on the Crusades' bit. The Holy War shares a likeness but was told in a distinctly Homer-like style. Add the general atmosphere and societal make-up and there's very little elsewise that's even remotely similar to a medieval setting.

Anyway.

It's an astute observation, to be sure. But I'm not sure how Kal's words speak to your point, Richard. :p

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