Bakker and Women II

[Shryke]

[quote name='Kalbear' post='1687849' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.05']Because that's the central point and not at all what I was talking about?

Okay, we'll put it more bluntly. Why does God need to be sexist? Why is this part of the basic package but not (for example) racism, or shrimp?[/quote]

Because "God", as defined in Earwa, is written by the author (who lives in our world) and is loosely based on God in a pre-modern time in our world. Where God would be a reflection of the sexist culture that existed at the time.

Thus, God in Earwa is sexist because God in Earwa is based off pre-modern societies in our world and their conception of God. And since those cultures were sexist, God in Earwa is sexist.

[Shryke]

[quote]The same thing occurred to me. Although I can see Bakker and Shryke and so on feel that Bakker's overall literary goal justifies the particular position of women in Earwa, it is frustrating that they don't seem to realise why so many of us are disturbed by the result. The protests of women (and men) in these threads are ignored, or dismissed as 'missing the point'. It gets to the point where I start to wonder (getting paranoid here tongue.gif ) if it is because we are 'only women'. It is bizarre that some people cannot see why it should be a significant issue.[/quote]

I can see why it would be disturbing. I can see why reading about rape or murder or suicide or sexism or racism or abuse or a bunch of other stuff would be disturbing.

I just don't see why that would matter when it comes to enjoying a book. I figured, considering the audience of ASOIAF, disturbing wouldn't be that big an issue.

[Sophelia]

[quote name='Shryke' post='1687857' date='Feb 16 2009, 02.20']I can see why it would be disturbing. I can see why reading about rape or murder or suicide or sexism or racism or abuse or a bunch of other stuff would be disturbing.

I just don't see why that would matter when it comes to enjoying a book. I figured, considering the audience of ASOIAF, disturbing wouldn't be that big an issue.[/quote]

You're confusing two different types of disturbing. There's the visceral level when reading scenes (e.g. reading about a particular murder or rape or whatever), that's what you're talking about. I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about being disturbed by the author's choices in terms of the messages the book is conveying, and the effect in the context of the genre and media in general.

It's like the difference between being disturbed by reading battle scenes versus being disturbed that a book seems to glorify war.

[Kalbear]

[quote]Because "God", as defined in Earwa, is written by the author (who lives in our world) and is loosely based on God in a pre-modern time in our world. Where God would be a reflection of the sexist culture that existed at the time.

Thus, God in Earwa is sexist because God in Earwa is based off pre-modern societies in our world and their conception of God. And since those cultures were sexist, God in Earwa is sexist.[/quote]Okay.

What point does this serve?

[Shryke]

[quote name='Kalbear' post='1687869' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.36']Okay.

What point does this serve?[/quote]

Ask the author.


He wanted to write "a classic modern tale turned upside down".
He wanted to challenge the way fantasy mostly just creates modern worlds that adhere to our assumptions about the nature of reality.
He wanted to generate discussion.
He just felt like it.
I don't know.

[Finn]

[quote name='Triskele' post='1687879' date='Feb 15 2009, 18.46']Part of why it entertains me is because it has parallels to human history. If women were glorified in the series to some extent that it did not at all resemble human history then I suspect that some people would say "Ah, I don't care for Bakker. Far too much of a fantasy."[/quote]

I think what many in the thread are saying is that women are so abject in the series that it no longer resembles human history. The problem certainly isn't that the series is overly realistic when it comes to gender.

[Finn]

[quote name='Triskele' post='1687924' date='Feb 15 2009, 19.44']I can accept that.

I just highly doubt that the author did exactly what he meant to. I bet he meant to show a society that is sexist. I bet he didn't have any idea that he was going to receive this kind of reaction for one aspect of his story that was way down the list of things he was going for.[/quote]

I dunno. I think if you make women "objectively inferior" in the world you create, you're hoping to cause a stir. I think Bakker would prefer that more posters call this move "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking," but I also think he knew he was shaking up a hornet's nest.

[Shryke]

[quote name='Finn' post='1687927' date='Feb 15 2009, 22.53']I dunno. I think if you make women "objectively inferior" in the world you create, you're hoping to cause a stir. I think Bakker would prefer that more posters call this move "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking," but I also think he knew he was shaking up a hornet's nest.[/quote]

"Shaking up a hornet's nest" is just another way of saying "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking".

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

[quote name='Kalbear' post='1687849' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.05']Okay, we'll put it more bluntly. Why does God need to be sexist? Why is this part of the basic package but not (for example) racism, or shrimp?[/quote]I can't remember which satirical pundit said it, but to paraphrase: "If your God hates gay people, chances are so do you." God must be sexist in Earwe, because the people of Earwe are sexist.

[quote name='Kalbear' post='1687869' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.36']Okay.

What point does this serve?[/quote]Over and over and over again: alienation for the sensible modern reader from the world that was.

[quote name='Finn' post='1687919' date='Feb 15 2009, 22.37']I think what many in the thread are saying is that women are so abject in the series that it no longer resembles human history. The problem certainly isn't that the series is overly realistic when it comes to gender.[/quote]I think that part of the problem is that some authors go to such great lengths to show the places in which historical women had freedoms and were not oppressed that there is a romanticizing of the woman's place in these pre-modern societies. Honestly, I would probably categorize Bakker's work as being extra-consciously anti-Romantic Fantasy (i.e. Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce), in which an ideal modern world society is projected backwards into the past.

[quote name='Shryke' post='1687932' date='Feb 15 2009, 22.57']"Shaking up a hornet's nest" is just another way of saying "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking".[/quote]Not always. More often than not, it is used to mean that someone is being plain stupid.

[AverageGuy]

[quote name='Finn' post='1687927' date='Feb 15 2009, 22.53']I dunno. I think if you make women "objectively inferior" in the world you create, you're hoping to cause a stir. I think Bakker would prefer that more posters call this move "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking," but I also think he knew he was shaking up a hornet's nest.[/quote]
Women and sorcerors. And possibly others. It's of a piece with the imposed, objective morality to make the reader react to their own morality. I tend to see it as one of his three main themes, along with determinism and skepticism. Of course, all three themes bug me, but I still like the books...

[Guest thebadlady]

[quote name='Shryke' post='1687932' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.57']"Shaking up a hornet's nest" is just another way of saying "challenging" and "edgy" and "thought-provoking".[/quote]


[url="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3a%6ffficial&hs=2fb&ei=AvqYScjpJoLqNLqsnIMM&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=challenging+edgy+thought+provoking&spell=1"]Trite words full of tripe[/url]. *yawn* Or...being an asshole to get attention. Rush, Coulter, Franken and many others have been there done that. Being edgy by being sexist is like being a thought provoking racist. There comes a point where you don't care what is being said because its so absurd.

I crap on your Bakker/Martin comparisons. The entire ASOIAF series centers around one horrible incident - Elia Martell's rape (and Lyanna's supposed rape). Two supposed, with only one actual rape - yes there were more during AFFC, but they were mentioned as a sideline of war, not graphically described. Bakker would have no books if he didn't rape everyone. Its seriously disturbing, not challenging, edgy or thought provoking. But a man who agrees with Dick Cheney probably isn't going to agree with any logic other than what is self serving.

Seriously, saying these books are thought provoking or in anyway intelligent is like saying you like abstract theatre. You *say* you like it, but you really don't understand why the actors are throwing rotten cabbages at you. You just agree its quite wonderful because you don't want to be the first person to say the Emperor has no clothes on. Pseudo-intellectualism at its ugliest.

[Shryke]

Your posts continue to be a valuable contribution to the thread.

[Guest thebadlady]

I already had a tasty xlovex and a bit, so I am mellooo,

to the point where I am going to kick back and play mafia wars while waiting people to come in and do the expected - just walking the line between saying what they really think and making lame excuses for how this series does not , in fact, suck rather badly. Go off and try to do the author's work for him. Explain away his hardon for rape, his use of rape as a plot device, and why the circle of boy raped, to strong man raped and reduced to naught, then the boy out raping. What a fucking surprising circle of violence.


With 2, maybe 3, authors, the forum is turned to nice when they post. The rest of them stayed away, and for a good reason. This Is Not Going To End Well. Basically(if I am on too many layers here, just let me know), people have a hard time coming up to a published author and say not only does your shit suck, but its offensive and disturbing. So that nice instinct colours how any posts will be made. But we know this!! Bakker doesn't want honest opinions! He wants RESPECT for his SERIOUS shit.


Now I need to make bets about who is going to grovel and suck cock and who is going to stop stepping around the bush (yeah...sorry about that, just a bit of rape in the bushes - totally off screen tho!! and give it a thumbs down.

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

Sorry, Ro, I'm going to have to choke down some author cock here. I don't think the books suck shit. They're not my favourites, by any stretch, but I've read the first three plus Neuropath and I'll buy TJE when I can. If I were at home, I might reread the first three with this debate in my mind, as I think that might give me a different reaction to them, rather than finding them just kind of ... meh.

I don't think Bakker's a would-be rapist any more than I think he's out to subjugate women, and I do think it's unfair that you imply that he is.

[Shryke]

It's good to know no one can enjoy the series, but can only fake it to suck up to the author. I'm glad we cleared that up.

[Jon AS]

[quote name='Arthmail']It's amusing how some people are given an example, and then immediately dismiss it.[/quote]

Since "some people" in this case amounts to me, let me try to articulate my reason for dismissing it. You already stated that it was a horrifically opressive society, but you can't just swipe that under the carpet and say 'but empowered women had nothing to do with that'. The exploitation of the Helots by the Spartiate elite is what enabled Spartan society to work in the way it did, and I posit that if Bakker had based his world on ancient Sparta, this thread would be entitled "Bakker and Race" and we would be having a lot of the same arguments we have now, only in a slightly different context.

[quote name='Arthmail']As for those that don't see the problem that many are having with the book, i think in a reversal of fortunes, i will simply say - you just don't get it.[/quote]

Oh, I do understand where you are coming from, but just looking at the back and forth between Kalbear and Shryke it seems pretty clear to me who isn't 'getting' it.

To reiterate: nobody is saying that the issues raised by the books are not [i]uncomfortable[/i], but taking offense at them and refusing to think about them because of this strikes me as narrowminded. Some people even prefer to take it a step further and accuse the author (and even the readers) of harboring all kinds of nasty thoughts and impulses. Which is actually quite funny, given Bakker's fascination with the human predisposition to make the world fit our preconceived notions.

[Arthmail]

I disliked pretty much everything about the series. From the characters, to the plot, to the thinly veiled allusion of the crusades. I have been nothing but critical of the work throughout this entire thread, not caring for Bakker's assertions about what he was looking to do, only stating for many what he failed to do.

That being said....

thebadlady: your posts have almost no merit, no actual purporse that adds anything at all to the discourse. I have disagreed almost completely with Shryke, DylanFanatic, and others who have found something to like within the books. But i am, at the least, willing to give the series another chance to try and see things as they do.

You have no interest in this though, do you? Far easier to simply throw around your anger in the hopes that enough bile will drive any interest others might have in discussing this topic so far down into the gutter that it begins to look like something off of .net. There have been any number of people highly critical of the books on this thread, myself included, as well as Ran, who have not "beat around the bushes", as you seem to think. Most realize, though, being of sound mind and body, that slinging a shit tonne of mud on a forum where you want to actually engage in discussion is usually a fail. Conflict resolution is not one of your strong points.

While i think the arguments for and against have mostly run their course, people see the series as they see them for the most part, i don't think that this sort of invective does anything at all to elevate this beyond a pissing match.

[MattD]

[quote name='Kalbear' post='1687849' date='Feb 15 2009, 21.05']Okay, we'll put it more bluntly. Why does God need to be sexist? Why is this part of the basic package but not (for example) racism, or shrimp?[/quote]
I think that because PON and ASoIaF share some similarities, especially at a surface level -- both are multi-POV fantasy epics, with settings based on actual historical periods, that appear to de-romanticize those periods and deconstruct some of the fantasy notions surrounding them -- there's the tendency, especially here, to try to see PON the same way we would ASoIaF. Thus a lot of the questioning in this thread dwells on matters of history and the story taken literally...and seems to miss matters of symbol and metaphor, which are a much more overarching element of PON than they are, or at least have yet been revealed to be, in ASoIaF.

One of the keys to understanding PON is understanding that Bakker's world is an attempt to literalize our mental hardcoding. That hardcoding is in a sense our "god"; also, that hardcoding is part of what makes us amenable to religious belief -- so no surprise that Bakker models his god's dictates on the scriptural doctrines of the most popular segment of our world's most popular religion (and re: your question about racism, in the Catholic church I don't think there are any racial restrictions on ordaining men, but no woman can be ordained).

And yes, you should be suspicious of this world -- that's the point! Isn't this what Bakker keeps on writing? We must be constantly suspicious of the world that our hardcoding, our god, inclines us to believe exists -- because it looks a lot like the world of PON.

If aspects of Bakker's world feel overstated, untrue, that's probably because anything less obvious would have made it more likely that readers would mistake it all for just a fun romp. It seems to me that Bakker has already signaled that he's aiming to challenge, if not outright invert, certain fantasy archetypes, such as the hero-savior. Maybe in future volumes (and I haven't yet read TJE) he intends to do the same with the idea of god-in-fantasy, as representative of our neurological hardcoding; given what he's said, it would surprise me if he didn't in some fashion.

Depending on what he does do in later books, sure, my opinion of all this may change. But casting final judgment of it all now seems to me a bit like trying to judge the moral complexity of ASoIaF after only reading the first half of AGoT.

That said, I do think that the complexity of this question is precisely in the tension between PON understood as literally, as attempt at realistic depiction, versus the books understood more metaphorically. A metaphorical argument relies on a certain streamlining of existing cultural tropes and symbols into representations, while realism asserts that its representations comprise a true picture of the world. Has the way Bakker tried to combine the two in the case of PON produced a work that, when read primarily as realism, is going to hurt some readers with its apparent endorsement of sexism or its use of rape? That seems inarguable. Could the two modes of storytelling be better reconciled? Well, that's the question for future books, isn't it?

[Kalbear]

[quote]To reiterate: nobody is saying that the issues raised by the books are not uncomfortable, but taking offense at them and refusing to think about them because of this strikes me as narrowminded.[/quote]I think it's similarly narrow-minded to not try and understand exactly why these are uncomfortable to some people to the point where it isn't useful to read anymore because it's just too frustrating and painful.

[quote]And yes, you should be suspicious of this world -- that's the point![/quote]I didn't say I should be suspicious of the world. I said I'd be suspicious of the author's point.
[quote]Depending on what he does do in later books, sure, my opinion of all this may change. But casting final judgment of it all now seems to me a bit like trying to judge the moral complexity of ASoIaF after only reading the first half of AGoT.[/quote]Who's casting final judgment (aside from thebadlady?) I've been asking questions. That's not to say that these won't have answers that are nice, but right now they're pretty unsatisfying answers.

[Ran]

Ro,

I think your personal reading and your personal feelings about the work are valid, as such things go. They are, after all, subjective things. But I think the whole of these threads has shown that not everyone agrees with you, and that one thing just about no one agrees with you on is throwing personal aspersions at Bakker.

You don't know him. You know his book, or your reading of the book, but you don't know him. I don't think you should confuse the two.

Re: Sërwe and Eärwa,

The parallels between them are pretty clear, I thought. Sërwe [i]is[/i] Eärwa writ small. Belief is knowledge to her. Kellhus loves her? It's true. She's carrying Kellhus's child? It's true. No one else in the series was as readily Conditioned.

Sophelia, Kal,

Good posts. The racial analogy is a good one.

In the end, I suppose I come back to this:

Isn't it odd that in wanting to problematize gender, the work has become especially difficult for female readers to read? I have no statistics, yet it seems to me that the sum total of my experience with this book, and the number of women I've seen who are otherwise fans of epic fantasy indicating they read the series only because their male partners encouraged them (I've been doing the same with Linda, but it's not her thing) and that they found it unpleasant enough that they're unsure they'll continue even as there are merits, it seems to me that the series must be particularly forbidding to them in a way that ... Hell, in a way that maybe Goodkind isn't, eh? ;)

Now, Epic fantasy is already a genre more read by men than women, I imagine. But, while holding women to be superior gender, the author seems to have (inadvertently?) gone the extra mile of making what seems to be -- through authorial choice to go with the extremes -- the most toxic possible setting for women that I've ever read this side of a John Norman book (and I've seen no evidence yet that this isn't true), and does nothing to leaven the impression. So far, I have the impression from the trilogy that unlike our 11th century Middle Ages no noble woman could ever inherit her father's lands and rule in her own name, no noble woman would ever be praised for a manful effort in taking up arms to fight against men in defense of her kin, no woman could write tracts on medicine and teach students how to be doctors. For all I know, Esmi is the only woman in the Three Seas who reads, for that matter.

And maybe some or all of that is untrue. But it's the impression that the setting leaves, because there are no hints that there are any exceptions. The 11th century is cited again and again, and yet it feels like a nightmare version of it . . . for women. For men, it "feels" a lot closer to the reality. But for women, it seems over the top, beyond what the stated setting ought to have.

Maybe women can inherit and rule in their own name. Maybe there is an Isabel of Conches or a Matilda of Tuscany out there. But it doesn't feel like there can be, and that's down to authorial choices.