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Bakker and Women 3 (merged topic)


JGP

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[quoteIf I can't even get excited about the empowerment of a lowborn female and the destruction of characters who were symbols of female inferiority (Istriya/Serwe)[/quote]

Why on earth should we be excited about the destruction of the victims? That makes no sense.
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[quote name='Galactus' post='1692128' date='Feb 19 2009, 23.22']Why on earth should we be excited about the destruction of the victims? That makes no sense.[/quote]

Because they were more than just victims. More than just characters in a story - you have to go beyond the text here. They were symbols of everything that was [i]wrong[/i] about Earwa (at least as far as gender is concerned). Destroying them and empowering Esmi was akin to destroying the negative representation of women in Earwa. But, of course, as I alluded to in my post, this is all a very hollow victory.
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The sad fact is that I'm not at all well-read in the genre past the eighties, when university gobbled up both me and my ability to appreciate much commercial literature.

When I say there's 'no dearth of positive female representations,' I'm talking about Anglo culture as a whole.

Regarding (2), I'm saying that, although Three Seas society is thoroughly patriarchal, it is the [i]story[/i] that largely determines the relative paucity of female characters. Just because you don't see many powerful female characters, doesn't mean they aren't there. The assumption frankly perplexes me. My general dislike of quota characterization, or the fact that the world was originally born in the mind of a naive 17 year old, may have led me to go overboard, but I'm not really convinced this is the case. Otherwise I think my choices are pretty much as thematically justified as they could be.

The reason my female characters are defined by male desire is simply because critiquing male desire is one of my primary thematic axes - building up, in the case of Esmenet, to Kellhus's use of contemporary egalitarian rationales to 'liberate' her into his unique brand of slavery, and in the case of Serwe (whose naivete and compliance to desire was meant to parallel that of [i]fantasy worlds in general[/i]), her death in the course of Kellhus's Circumfixion, which is to say, his rise to absolute power in the Holy War. This was one of the things I buried because it struck me as too allegorical, too obvious and one to one: the figure of the scriptural world (where reality is abject before desire), bound as a corpse to the figure of modernity (where desire is held abject before reality - and so goes instrumental).

(But of course, Serwe [i]comes back[/i]...)

Another backfire, I suppose. But still, pretty interesting I think, the suggestion that the reader actually has Serwe's [i]corpse[/i] in their hands because they have Kellhus in their heads!

Otherwise (and you're getting me to do something I despise doing, which is giving spoilers) the idea was to have female characters rise to power in believeable ways - this is what I meant when I said I wanted to tell a rags-to-riches story with Esmenet.

As for the 'numbing' repetition of harlot, womanish, and so on, I meant this as a blur on the numbing repetition of 'bitch,' 'pussy,' and so on in contemporary Anglo culture. Even after all this time, men continue to define themselves and their virtues [i]against[/i] women - to the point where the greatest male sin - homosexuality - seems to come down to playing woman to another man. This is where the themes surrounding Cnaiur directly link up with those underwriting Esmenet. Sadly, this is another instance where I thought I was being too overtly feminist (really!) and actually ended up provoking the opposite response in probably too many readers.

But the fact is I cooked all this stuff up before I really appreciated the way surface details prime subsequent interpretation - before I understood that our brains - yours, mine, everyones - are pigeonholing machines. I really thought that all the clues I laid out would be obvious enough that a substantial proportion of readers would at least understand that I was up to something deeper.

I was wrong. I don't mean this in the self-congratulatory way of saying "I gave too much credit to my readers," but in the critical way of saying, "I failed to understand my readers - female readers in particular."

With reference to (3), I'm talking about the problem of nihilism. Modern liberalism can be understood as the political expression of the fact that there's really no such thing as value. Since we cannot arbitrate between competing version of the 'Good,' the state retreats, adopts a 'live and let live posture,' legislating only those guidelines that most efficiently allow the greatest number of us to maximize our consumption. We dress these guidelines up in sacred clothing, 'equal rights' and what not, but ultimately it's all about keeping the human animal fat and happy in the most collectively efficient manner possible.

In other words, it's about the Logos.

We moderns have become exceptionally good at finding the best [i]means[/i] (via science, calculative reason), but we really have no way of arbitrating the best [i]ends[/i]. Think of the cathedrals of medieval Europe or the pyramids of ancient Egypt in terms of surplus labour, and you come to realize that both of these societies had [i]largely unitary goals[/i], to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, or to assure the passage of Pharoah into the afterlife. In our case, our greatest works tend to be devoted to either the maximization of capital or knowledge, which is to say, to the [i]means[/i]. The bulk of our surplus labour is poured, not into the realization of some Good, but into making us more effective consumers.

This is why Adorno, for instance, claims modern society is the most efficient form of barbarism humans have ever developed. We are primarily organized in such a way as to maximize the only imperatives we still truly share (by virtue of our shared biology), our animal appetites. Thus [i]consumer[/i] culture. We have made the accumulation of means, ways to sate our appetites (knowledge and capital) the very point of our social existence. Our means, in other words, have become our only end, which suggests (on certain interpretations) that modern society is insane.

PoN was my attempt to situate the reader between two monsters, the fascistic chauvinism of our past versus the pointless consumption that is our future - all played out in a Tolkienesque universe.

I hope I haven't crossed too many eyes. I apologize for any lack of clarity in content or organization. I'm whipping through these answers probably more quickly than I should.

scott/
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Wow, has this topic gotten back to being awesome.

[quote]But it's a symantic misunderstanding, I do see your point. What's confusing me though is that I thought the cause of said inferiority in the text comes from the scripture and so Kellhus can unwrite that law if he can change the scripture. I must be wrong about that because that is a different kind of law than the one in Scott's quote or the law of gravity or some other natural law.[/quote]The thing is that we know Kellhus is a liar. Kellhus can cross out the line in the scripture and make the society not believe these things (or at least make them not actually do these things), but he can't control gravity by crossing out a line in the book. Kellhus is doing this so that he wins Esme and because he needs more people to feed his power base, all the people he can get, who will be directly supporting his side. That's the horrible value that Paxter mentions. And it does change society.

But does it change the underlying world?
SPOILER: TJE
the answer so far is emphatically no in TJE. We know that sorcerers are still damned, we know that women are somehow worse than men, and these things haven't actually changed. We have proof that Kellhus is lying and that he is not an agent of God, or if he is God disagrees with him.


To me, Kellhus' crossing out of scripture is similar to the Illinois law that redefined pi to be 3. They can do that all they want, and people can use that in their math if they want to - but it doesn't change what pi is.
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[quote name='Pierce Inverarity' post='1691372' date='Feb 18 2009, 17.49']I know I do an awful lot of sloganeering for a guy who claims to hate slogans, but there is one slogan which drives all my work, if only in a negative sense, and that's Don DeLillo's "I write for the page," which I take to boil down to a nifty version of "I write for myself."

I literally think this is [i]the[/i] expression of a profound cultural tragedy - I won't bore you with details here (I have a paper built around it in the first issue Jay Tomio's online mag, [i]Heliotrope[/i], which should still be kicking around). All writers write for readers - writing is communication, after all, and communication is at minumum a two term concept. To say I write for myself is simply to say something along the lines of "I write for people like me," which is to say, "for people who [i]already[/i] share my tastes and values."

And as far as I'm concerned this amounts to "I write to entertain the like-minded," which I have no problem with so long as you don't pretend to be provocative and challenging (things we normally attribute to 'LITERATURE' (add french accent)). This is why I think most of the stuff that is extolled as challenging and literary is actually little more than a high-end consumer good, and only judged 'challenging' vis a vis [i]virtual[/i] readers who in actuality would never pick these books up.

What you write selects who your readers will be. You can either aim your books outward - and I think genre is the perfect vehicle for this - or you can aim them inward. Since I think we humans are quickly burning through whatever margins that have insulated us from the consequences of our folly in the past, I feel the distinct need to aim my books [i]outward[/i]. To spread the Dubious Word.


scott/[/quote]

I don't have the context for that DeLillo quote, so I can hardly say for certain, but I am loathe to admit that your reading of it is canonical. ;)

While "I write for the page" could be interpreted to mean that he writes primarily for himself, readers be damned, it could just as easily be read as, "The integrity of the story guides my choices." So, not so much only writing what appeals to you (general you) or readers who are complicitly like-minded, but perhaps staying true to the your vision/impetus, even if it takes you in directions unforseen and uncomfortable (for you or readers). As this discussion proves, trying to identity an author’s motives, even when that author periodically pops in for a visit, is notoriously difficult and fraught with peril, and might actually be a fruitless enterprise in the end. I'm not suggesting this “integrity” reading is any more accurate, or that any reading could be. I tend to mistrust all things lauded as canonical. Just suggesting that there are other ways of interpreting something even as simple and sloganesque as DeLillo's line.

Obviously, in lit-crit, there has been no shortage of theorizing about the creation (destruction?) of meaning as author/text/reader engage each other in myriad ways. While I think your intention to "write outward" and keep the reader in mind (even if it is only some phantasmal "ideal reader") is admirable (after all, your readership is likely to be small if your writing is essentially masturbatory wankery), it seems to me that your desensitization to violence/sex might have colored the lenses you used when looking at said reader.

By your own admission, you have created something that you hopes problematizes and defamiliarizes, something challenging and in some ways alienating. All well and good. But not all readers are as equally desensitized as yourself. The “reader” is hardly some monolithic thing easily identified or understood, ideal or otherwise. Given how polarized the posters here appear to be, it seems that your work has succeeded in challenging a good number, but gone far over the top for others (or at least missed opportunities to challenge in a different way).

Is this board representative of your “average” reader who gives PON a whirl? Who knows? Should you lose sleep because a chunk of readers, representative or not, have been alienated thus far in the series, possibly never to return? Who knows? But it might be worth reexamining the rubric, calculus or yardstick you used in measuring and evaluating the readership you aimed for when writing outward, and how your own desires/biases/immunities impacted your perception of those readers.

Or not. Who knows?
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[quote]We moderns have become exceptionally good at finding the best [i]means[/i] (via science, calculative reason), but we really have no way of arbitrating the best [i]ends[/i]. Think of the cathedrals of medieval Europe or the pyramids of ancient Egypt in terms of surplus labour, and you come to realize that both of these societies had [i]largely unitary goals[/i], to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, or to assure the passage of Pharoah into the afterlife. In our case, our greatest works tend to be devoted to either the maximization of capital or knowledge, which is to say, to the [i]means[/i]. The bulk of our surplus labour is poured, not into the realization of some Good, but into making us more effective consumers.[/quote]
Eh, not sure I agree with this. 'Bringing the kingdom of Heaven to Earth' may be an [i]end[/i] in one sense, but it's also basically a [i]means[/i]....a way to achieve spiritual something or other, or a way to avoid going to hell....whatever people actually thought they were gaining. But it's still driven by basic desires and fears in the same way our modern activities are. We build bigger flat screen TV's because we think we'll enjoy watching them more - the enjoyment is an [i]end, [/i]however materialistic the method of attaining it might be. We develop better medical treatments because we want to live as long as possible. I don't personally buy that we're substantially different from our ancestors in this sense, it's all motivated by a desire to exist (in some sense), be secure and happy.

Ok, now I've got Bobby McFerrin stuck in my head.
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Something I'm unwilling to trudge through thousands of posts to check out, but:

Has the presence of a caste system in Earwa and its impact on gender roles been discussed? With all the talk of historical precedent and 'realistic' portrayals of history and that stuff flying around, it's worth noting that Earwa is not Europe and the biggest sociological difference between the two, certainly for the commoners, is the caste system.
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OK, this is how I see the Outside, as a kind of (almost) incontrivertable fact (similar to what Kalbear's been saying). And since we haven't had enough hypotheticals in this thread -

So there's this other realm that works in conjunction with the Inside, same as any element of existence. It sows little soullings and reaps adult souls to feed its endless soulmill. Souls of sorcerors, evil folk and maybe Dunyain (free standing souls are the same as evil souls) aren't any use, they're all shrivelled up and get chucked into some kind of sub-realm reject bin where most of the demons live. Female souls are fine but less replenishing (due to potential childbirth or something) The most powerful demons swim about the place and feed some of their influence (including an impression of the ranking process) down the soul-beams.

It's not a sexist metaphysics, it's just ordered one way and not another. It is unfair of course, and raises the question of why the author might create a world with this kind of thing in play, which has been covered pretty thoroughly in the thread already.

So the only way to get past this is to bring the whole thing down and insert a new regime. We don't really know enough about the Inchoroi to say what's up with them. It seems that this system is somewhat alien to them (maybe they came through from another dimension which would make the Outside the same as the Void, pick your own SF reference). Now it applies and they have to take drastic action. Whether they have any more than a vague idea about how to save their souls, I dunno. But I do think Kellhus et al are going to have to think about altering the Outside (as opposed to just using a loophole).

None of that is supposed to prove anything, btw. But it's where my position stems from, as far as the text goes.
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[quote name='Pierce Inverarity' post='1692208' date='Feb 19 2009, 10.26']The sad fact is that I'm not at all well-read in the genre past the eighties, when university gobbled up both me and my ability to appreciate much commercial literature.

<snip>

I hope I haven't crossed too many eyes. I apologize for any lack of clarity in content or organization. I'm whipping through these answers probably more quickly than I should.

scott/[/quote]

Great post, Scott. Our gross consumeristic nature is one of the many gripes I have with humankind in general.
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[quote name='Werthead' post='1692245' date='Feb 19 2009, 16.04']Has the presence of a caste system in Earwa and its impact on gender roles been discussed? With all the talk of historical precedent and 'realistic' portrayals of history and that stuff flying around, it's worth noting that Earwa is not Europe and the biggest sociological difference between the two, certainly for the commoners, is the caste system.[/quote]

That's a good point. Certainly caste should trump gender but there's no scenes I can recall that show this. I'd imagine from Bakker's comments that would be the case.
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[quote name='Kalbear' post='1692218' date='Feb 19 2009, 08.40']Wow, has this topic gotten back to being awesome.

But does it change the underlying world?
SPOILER: TJE
the answer so far is emphatically no in TJE. We know that sorcerers are still damned, we know that women are somehow worse than men, and these things haven't actually changed. We have proof that Kellhus is lying and that he is not an agent of God, or if he is God disagrees with him.
[/quote]


But are women worse than men in Bakkerverse? I just finished TJE after a marathon read last night, and (not going into spoilers) -- there is a section where The Judging Eye is used and the principle female character of the book openly thinks that men are more animalistic than women - an implication that women are more "pure".

Again, I'm a bit knackered (stayed up until 2 last night to finish the book), but the women objectively inferior to men - wasn't the impression I recieved. Sure, the consensus of Bakkerverse mortal-perception seems to [i]suggest [/i] this- but that passage, in particular, struck me as challenging the notion.
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[quote]When I say there's 'no dearth of positive female representations,' I'm talking about Anglo culture as a whole.[/quote]

To be honest, I'm not even certain of that.

[quote]The reason my female characters are defined by male desire is simply because critiquing male desire is one of my primary thematic axes - building up, in the case of Esmenet, to Kellhus's use of contemporary egalitarian rationales to 'liberate' her into his unique brand of slavery, and in the case of Serwe (whose naivete and compliance to desire was meant to parallel that of [i]fantasy worlds in general[/i]), her death in the course of Kellhus's Circumfixion, which is to say, his rise to absolute power in the Holy War. This was one of the things I buried because it struck me as too allegorical, too obvious and one to one: the figure of the scriptural world (where reality is abject before desire), bound as a corpse to the figure of modernity (where desire is held abject before reality - and so goes instrumental).[/quote]

I'm honestly not certain I'd agree with those terms for the scriptural world as opposed to modernity...

[quote]With reference to (3), I'm talking about the problem of nihilism. Modern liberalism can be understood as the political expression of the fact that there's really no such thing as value. Since we cannot arbitrate between competing version of the 'Good,' the state retreats, adopts a 'live and let live posture,' legislating only those guidelines that most efficiently allow the greatest number of us to maximize our consumption. We dress these guidelines up in sacred clothing, 'equal rights' and what not, but ultimately it's all about keeping the human animal fat and happy in the most collectively efficient manner possible.[/quote]

I think, to be honest, that you are kind of misunderstanding the nature of liberalism. Any study of actual liberal ideology will reveal that it is actually far more complex and far more [i]moralistic[/i] than it likes to pretend: Check out what early 20th century liberals were actually doing, for instance.

There is also a strong [i]bildungsideal[/i] inherent in liberalism (and socialism) that goes back to the Enlightenment, which isn't really conductive with mere hedonism.

[quote]We moderns have become exceptionally good at finding the best [i]means[/i] (via science, calculative reason), but we really have no way of arbitrating the best [i]ends[/i]. Think of the cathedrals of medieval Europe or the pyramids of ancient Egypt in terms of surplus labour, and you come to realize that both of these societies had [i]largely unitary goals[/i], to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, or to assure the passage of Pharoah into the afterlife. In our case, our greatest works tend to be devoted to either the maximization of capital or knowledge, which is to say, to the [i]means[/i]. The bulk of our surplus labour is poured, not into the realization of some Good, but into making us more effective consumers.[/quote]

No, no, no.
The medievals never sought to bring heaven to earth. [i]That is a modern development[/i]. Utopianism is, by and large, something that comes with the renaissance and seemingly only grows stronger. Building the New Jerusalem is a *modern* project. Especially when it is done here, in the now.

What the medieval ideologues considered was the idea that the goal of society should be, essentially, to let some people pursue spiritual excellence. Which is a far different thing.
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[quote]But are women worse than men in Bakkerverse? I just finished TJE after a marathon read last night, and (not going into spoilers) -- there is a section where The Judging Eye is used and the principle female character of the book openly thinks that men are more animalistic than women - an implication that women are more "pure".[/quote]Sure, and there's plenty of times in PoN where this is mentioned as well. Akka mentions it in his description to Esmi of women and men, for instance. Kellhus and Esmi talk about it in one of the more striking scenes in the book ,where he describes why women are in their place.

None of this make that real in the world. And I think that's one of Bakker's attempted points. Despite that women are in general more suited to a modern world, despite their being more capable, more intelligent, less prone to animal urges (this is what Akka remarks on too), they're still worse than men because..well, there's no because. That's just the way it is.

Again, it's nothing to do with the actual women in the world. It doesn't have to do with their traits, their actions, or anything like that. It simply has to do with their sex. That's it. Like John said, for whatever reason they're not as tasty to the demons of the Outside, or something. They have less value to the metaphysical.

This is an interesting sidenote, John - the image of the Outside consuming souls women being considered less than men has an interesting corrolary to Kellhus 'men seek to control women because they desire them' speech. What if the gods view women as spiritually inferior to men because they desire them more for whatever reason? What if their souls are tastier? Just an odd thought.
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I'm not disagreeing with you, Galactus. The theoretical interpretations I provided in the exegesis above, which are in differing degrees adapted from Adorno, simply have to be considered cartoon caricatures simply because the phenomena they purport to describe is supercomplex. Concepts are hopelessly clunky, the subject matter is deviously ambiguous, and we humans are just too plain prone to fool ourselves. All you can do is hold your nose and hope your interpretations catch something of the dynamic at issue.

There's endless debate regarding What Liberalism Is, same as with What Science Is, and so on. The dogmatists bitch back and forth, and this or that theoretical fashion has its day before being discredited, then something new comes along. The bottom-line is that there's literally no way to [i]definitively[/i] arbitrate between them.

That said, I should have made clear the conditional nature of my commitment. This is just one powerful and disturbing way to look at contemporary society. There are certainly others.

The thing that really creeps me out is the way modern neuroscience seems to be slowly strengthening the hand of the nihilist camp. It troubles me because I am not a nihilist. I literally [i]want[/i] to believe in some version of the liberalism you describe.

But the older I get, the more I read, the more I fear it's just one more chapter in the long history of human wishful thinking. And that the 'moralism,' as you put it, that characterizes the intellectual history of liberalism is simply the result of theorists mistaking the true nature of their practice.

This is the assertion of a fear, not a fact.

scott/
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[quote name='Pierce Inverarity' post='1692208' date='Feb 19 2009, 10.26']With reference to (3), I'm talking about the problem of nihilism. Modern liberalism can be understood as the political expression of the fact that there's really no such thing as value. Since we cannot arbitrate between competing version of the 'Good,' the state retreats, adopts a 'live and let live posture,' legislating only those guidelines that most efficiently allow the greatest number of us to maximize our consumption. We dress these guidelines up in sacred clothing, 'equal rights' and what not, but ultimately it's all about keeping the human animal fat and happy in the most collectively efficient manner possible.

In other words, it's about the Logos.[b]

We moderns have become exceptionally good at finding the best [i]means[/i] (via science, calculative reason), but we really have no way of arbitrating the best [i]ends[/i].[/b] Think of the cathedrals of medieval Europe or the pyramids of ancient Egypt in terms of surplus labour, and you come to realize that both of these societies had [i]largely unitary goals[/i], to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, or to assure the passage of Pharoah into the afterlife. In our case, our greatest works tend to be devoted to either the maximization of capital or knowledge, which is to say, to the [i]means[/i]. The bulk of our surplus labour is poured, not into the realization of some Good, but into making us more effective consumers.

This is why Adorno, for instance, claims modern society is the most efficient form of barbarism humans have ever developed. We are primarily organized in such a way as to maximize the only imperatives we still truly share (by virtue of our shared biology), our animal appetites. Thus [i]consumer[/i] culture. We have made the accumulation of means, ways to sate our appetites (knowledge and capital) the very point of our social existence. Our means, in other words, have become our only end, which suggests (on certain interpretations) that modern society is insane.

PoN was my attempt to situate the reader between two monsters, the fascistic chauvinism of our past versus the pointless consumption that is our future - all played out in a Tolkienesque universe.[/quote]

I've been thinking of something along this lines since the first book. I mean, really, what would a perfect Dunyain, a "Self-Moving Soul" WANT? What would it's goals be? Without the darkness that comes before, how does it define for itself objectives to be acheived?

Kellhus, for all his incredible means to acheive ends, has no goal of his own until he breaks his Dunyain conditioning.

Would that suggest that the perfect Dunyain is, as you put it, insane?
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[quote name='Shryke' post='1692418' date='Feb 19 2009, 18.57']I've been thinking of something along this lines since the first book. I mean, really, what would a perfect Dunyain, a "Self-Moving Soul" WANT? What would it's goals be? Without the darkness that comes before, how does it define for itself objectives to be acheived?

Kellhus, for all his incredible means to acheive ends, has no goal of his own until he breaks his Dunyain conditioning.

Would that suggest that the perfect Dunyain is, as you put it, insane?[/quote]


This is an interesting question. Do Dunyain even think of "Self-Moving Soul" as achievable, or is it an ever-moving goal? I am afraid it is also a RAFO question, though.
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I am really taken aback that this is an aspect of the series that people find controversial. I've not gotten the impression from the novels that women in Earwa are categorically inferior - spiritually, intellectually, characteristically, or in any other way. I see no evidence of misogyny. The use of the terms "whorish" and "harlotry" seem, to me, to be appropriate considering one of the main characters [i]is a prostitute[/i]. And that there are few women of power in the novel seems perfectly apropos considering the status of women in general in the early medieval period in western europe, a period which the actions in these novels seem to echo. The novels present one story in an entire fictional world that stretches back nearly to infinity (and beyond!). That the one sliver of the history of this vast, ancient world that this story represents doesn't contain a wealth of powerful female characters is hardly misogynistic considering the history of medieval Europe - there are countless pivotal episodes from the history of that period that do not feature powerful women actors in prominent roles. And since when must gender roles in all fantasy novels be themselves fantastical? Is it really misogynistic to have gender roles in a quasi-medieval fantasy reflect gender roles as they were, by and large, in the medieval world to which it hearkens - a world in which powerful women were an exception to the rule, in which the world of power was almost entirely a male-dominated one? Perhaps Mr Bakker has created Earwa as a world which was far more oppressive to women than medieval Europe was; perhaps on Earwa there were no women anywhere who ever held power. I don’t believe that the text itself indicates that. I read it as being reflective of a world in which - like medieval Europe - powerful women were an exception to the rule, and simply did not feature in this particular story. The women in the series are certainly no less admirable than the men imo – the one complaint I have about these novels is a lack of sympathetic characters, period – there aren’t any of either sex, really.

There are ten billion pages on this subject already, and I apologize if everything i've said has already been addressed and refuted. Regardless, it seems to me that, having been weaned on politically-correct, self-esteem-boosting narratives where the only gender differences were anatomical, many readers find stories that do not conform to that dynamic offensive in and of themselves merely for violating laws of political correctness to which we all must now subscribe, regardless of whether [i]reality itself[/i] violates those laws - as the reality of gender roles did in medieval Europe, and do in Earwa.
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[quote]Complete ignoring of the rest of the threads by archie[/quote]Eef, would you like to sing along?
[i]
"Boy the way Glen Miller played
songs that made the hit parade
guys like us we had it made
those were the days
and you know where you were then
girls were girls and men were men
mister we could use a man
like Herbert Hoover again
didn't need no welfare states
everybody pulled his weight
gee our old Lasalle ran great
those were the days!
[/i]
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