Bakker - A Discussion of Rectal Miracles

[Francis Buck]

Here's the thing with "Bakker and Misogyny". I do not, in any way, shape, or form, believe that Bakker is misogynistic in his daily life. I don't think he treats women like things to be banged, who only really think about sex, or whatever. I think his extreme reaction to people stating as such on the internet was because of this -- it was never intentional. That being said, misogyny is, unfortunately, a very...I don't know, subtle? topic for a lot of men in Western society. I mean, most (or, at least, a lot of) men don't even comprehend that there's an issue at all. Many of those that do comprehend it often make light of it. Misogyny simply isn't as in-your-face as something like, say, racism, until you've come to recognize it.

That being said, I don't really buy that Bakker was secretly some kind of feminist this whole time. He just didn't realize he was writing something that could be offensive to women. Which is no excuse, but still, I think that's the situation. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's necessarily completely aware of every issue, every party involved, etc.

I also think that some people definitely need to be divorced from their writing and their personal opinions. I've been writing since I was in fifth grade (and I fully realize that this kind of argument -- the "I'm a writer too" argument -- mostly seems like bullshit unless you're published/reputable, and so I almost never resort to it, but I'll do so here because I think it's true) and I've certainly been completely ignorant to certain things while never thinking about it for a second. Sometimes, a writer's just trying to tell a particular story, and in the sheer effort of doing so, a lot of issues come up in the process, or otherwise fall to the wayside.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is, I do not think Bakker is some kind of secret misogynist that hates woman. However, I think it's clear that he's absolutely ignorant to the issue (or was) until it threw itself in his face. But at the same time, his arguments about being a feminist, and all of this being planned as part of TSA, are kinda hard to swallow given the fact that the same issues show up in his other works that are totally independant from Earwa. The guy just has an unfortunate blind spot.

[Ser Bryar Ashford]

Writing something that some women find offensive does not necessarily mean one is not a feminist.

[Sci-2]

That being said, I don't really buy that Bakker was secretly some kind of feminist this whole time. He just didn't realize he was writing something that could be offensive to women. Which is no excuse, but still, I think that's the situation. Nobody's perfect. Nobody's necessarily completely aware of every issue, every party involved, etc.

I actually disagree with you there - I'm confident Bakker had a plan to explore gender issues that runs throughout the series. I just don't [think] this has been all that effective, though I do like the whole thing about women shaped by their conqueror's tongue...even if that too is a bit of an [a] slanted view.

In fact I'd argue it's been a hindrance in WLW distorting both Esmi's and Mimara's arcs.

Beyond that, it's hard to think of another author who managed to cock up their internet persona [as badly], though the only place I can maybe see that mattering is him not being inviting [invited] into anthologies like Dangerous Women. And even that I find doubtful.

I didn't [see] Vandermeer's name [in that Dangerous Women anthology], and that guy actually made a feminist anthology with his wife.

[Madness]

Yeah, I have to side with Sci.

Bakker's written before that he intended lay into racism but had to consciously switch to gender issues because of editor opinion.

[Sci-2]

Yeah, I have to side with Sci.

Bakker's written before that he intended lay into racism but had to consciously switch to gender issues because of editor opinion.

God, what a mess that would have been. Definitely don't think Bakker is close to qualified to tackle race, though I can appreciate his attempts to talk about gender while noting they fall short of the mark.

Though maybe if I was a woman I'd feel differently about those attempts that we do have?

I also don't know if his original plan was to look at race and he switched to gender. I mean TDTCB was written long before there was an editor right? And so much of the book is soaked with commentary on gender and sexuality.

[Madness]

Ultimately, I think both were going to be themes but the race thing was going be more poignant with Zuem and Sayothi. Who is to say?

[lokisnow]

See and I thought Bakker was upping the stakes with his portrayals of Serwe and Esmenet. In that he made them deliberately offensive, and then upped the stakes with more and more exaggeration to try and get men to find this sort of portrayal as offensive as women do. To recognize the enemy within, to recognize and be a bit repulsed by, "this is what this is?"in other words to recognize that that pretty mascara is really bat shit.

Bakker is the jerk that rubs his dog's nose in its own shit to 'teach' the dog a lesson that shit is bad.

[Sci-2]

eta: @Trisk ->

I don't know, a lot of stuff seems planned out in the books. Kellhus standing in for modernity, which Bakker sees as a false liberator, is too perfect a symbol to just be coincidence.

And you have Serwe who functions at the level of someone who is mentally enslaved long before Kellhus, Esmi who sees a bit father, and Mimara who can see farther still. None of them, however, are magically pulling themselves up from their bootstraps.

It's an argument that struggles for liberation have to [be] generational, which sort of flies in the face of fantasy's usual one man/woman against the odds approach.

[Kalbear]

He went to a feminist author's website and specifically started yelling at her fans despite being told explicitly not to do precisely that, going so far as to say "I've been fighting REAL misogyny" to their virtual faces.

He tends to take arguments a lot further than they should go.

[Shryke]

Exactly. A short story about a young Swayali wish-fulfilment kick-ass heroine, secretly beautiful. Double wielding. Make her lesbian as well, and maybe half-Zeümi. She could blow stuff up, and reflect on the hardship of feeling contradictory societal pressures on her.

Also, a male vampire falls in love with her.

Amazing HE. So perfectly captures the idea.

Would sell well too I bet, if only Bakker could restrain himself enough to write it.

[Shryke]

Mimara had a ton of promise as a character in TJE, only for that to be dashed in WLW when she became someone who just gets acted upon again for 99% of the plot. It's one of my biggest disappointments with the series so far. You've got this brave female character who leaves a relatively easy life as the Aspect-Emperor's Queen's daughter (albeit after a very rough childhood), follows her not-father into the wilderness despite said wilderness being infested with Sranc and her not-father being in a group of scalp-hunting psychos, and then saves all their asses in the darkness after she sanctifies a chorae.

. . . And then you get to WLW, where she gets pregnant and does nothing except stay high on Nonman ash while occasionally communicating with a skin-spy who is trailing the group. I can almost imagine Bakker thinking some too-clever-by-half idea that this shows how women are ultimately enslaved by their biology, etc, etc. In any case, it was disappointing.

Personally, I've always liked Esmenet as a character.

Man, that's all anyone on the slog does in WLW though. None of the characters on the slog do much. It's not a Mimara specific thing.

Maybe it'll improve on reread, but I was rather disappointed in that aspect of WLW as I found it far less interesting then the Akka/Mimara storyline in TJE. The rest of the storylines I found mostly improved. Esme's I was kinda neutral on.

[Spring Bass]

I remember him talking about the whole "Whore, Waif, Harridan" thing on the old Three Seas forums back in 2005-2006 (I think), so it goes fairly far back - before his dust-up with RoH and other bloggers. Aside from that, I tend to side with Triskele, and think that Bakker just didn't really recognize the potentially misogynistic implications of how he was setting up his story and characters beyond the dismissal of anything resembling "tokenism" (he's mentioned that his editor suggested making Conphas a woman, which he dismissed and she warned him that it would turn off female readers). But once he was criticized for it, he started getting defensive and doing his whole patronizing "dismiss your argument by arguing that you have mental blindspots, etc, etc. I've never seen him really acknowledge that he may have handled it wrongly, in the way that Abercrombie recognized that he handled a particular scene with Teidez in the First Law Trilogy wrong.

EDIT: Actually, I do remember him possibly acknowledging it when someone asked him why the Schools didn't have women over at Three Seas years back. He said he just assumed "because misogyny", but he may have been wrong on that one.

I've always thought that was a mistake. The Few are too rare and valuable - even in a civilization as patriarchal as the Three Seas, you'd think the potential gain to a School by greatly increasing their ranks would outweigh potential social stigma, especially since Sorcerers are already stigmatized and feared.

Man, that's all anyone on the slog does in WLW though. None of the characters on the slog do much. It's not a Mimara specific thing.

Maybe it'll improve on reread, but I was rather disappointed in that aspect of WLW as I found it far less interesting then the Akka/Mimara storyline in TJE. The rest of the storylines I found mostly improved. Esme's I was kinda neutral on.

True. I didn't mind most of the Esme story, although I've just found it incredibly difficult to stay interested in the antics of her youngest son.

[Happy Ent]

I hope men find Bakker’s books offensive as well.

Wherefrom comes the following tacit assumption: If men find a book offensive, it is challenging and ambitious. If women find a book offensive, the book is misogynist.

Are we all tacitly assuming that women are lesser creatures, fragile, easily offended? How can you all hold these essentialist views about readership gender?

[Madness]

Is offense like porn, HE? The Supreme-Court Judge defining porn as something we "just know" as we see it...

What constitutes offense for men, rather than women?

Just want to clarify.

I think, from your initial argument here, that we'd be assuming that marginalized perspectives qualify as privileged with knowledge.

Which is reflected in a number of philosophies. Are the books a sacrifice? An easy example for feminists to flay for the public while the men who read it are ultimately disillusioned of their misogynistic perspectives?

Are there not a great number of marginalized perspectives in the readership than 'women'?

[Castel]

See and I thought Bakker was upping the stakes with his portrayals of Serwe and Esmenet. In that he made them deliberately offensive, and then upped the stakes with more and more exaggeration to try and get men to find this sort of portrayal as offensive as women do. To recognize the enemy within, to recognize and be a bit repulsed by, "this is what this is?"in other words to recognize that that pretty mascara is really bat shit.

Bakker is the jerk that rubs his dog's nose in its own shit to 'teach' the dog a lesson that shit is bad.

Yeah, the problem with this is that your work has to be good (or perhaps absurd) enough for the point to come across and be separate from the general background noise. Otherwise you just seem as if you're escalating on the trends that have come before.

[Sci-2]

Are we all tacitly assuming that women are lesser creatures, fragile, easily offended? How can you all hold these essentialist views about readership gender?

Not all women are offended by the book, but it seems a lot of them were a bit disturbed by the choices made.

What seemed to convince people that it was either a failure or just dark fantasy that brutalizes women were discussions with the author. Well, that and reading his interviews.

I'll be interested to see what happens after TUC. Bakker has promised some resolution to character arcs, and he may be more open about what he was thinking once that happens.

I think a big problem is allegory and symbolism in the midst of fantasy epic that demands so much of its plot is [are] hard to accomplish. There just isn't enough time to cover everything, and Esmi's arc clearly suffers for it.

[Spring Bass]

Wherefrom comes the following tacit assumption: If men find a book offensive, it is challenging and ambitious. If women find a book offensive, the book is misogynist.

No, because the offensive elements are specifically related to women-related issues such as sexualization of female characters, hence the potential "misogynistic" label. It's entirely possible for books to be offensive to women without it being a matter of misogynistic story elements. The child rape in the Prologue can be seen as offensive regardless of gender, although it didn't stop me from reading.

[Faint]

I think the wrong argument is being made. I find it far more likely that women do not read his books because of the dearth of interesting female characters, not because they are easily offended or because the books happen to be sexist. There have been plenty of enterprises, some far more sexists than Bakker's books, that have legions of female fans. What distinguishes this particular case is that the first trilogy had absolutely horrendous female leads, who actually grew worse with every book (i.e., Esmenet). By the time Bakker got around to writing one decent female character in the new trilogy, all his woman readers had long since fled.

At this point, the Ents have a far better chance of finding the Entwives than does Bakker at regaining female readers, at least as far as this series is concerned.

[Happy Ent]

The child rape in the Prologue can be seen as offensive regardless of gender, although it didn't stop me from reading.

There are a lot more men raped in these books than women. Nobody thinks this is a problem. Why do we assume that women, uniquely in the readership, form an amorphous mass primitives? I simply don’t get it. I find the rhetoric routinely used on this and other threads about how women receive art to be a lot more offensive.

I am clearly wrong. But I don’t get it. Unless we presuppose that women are intellectually or cognitively different, in an essentialist sense. This is an assumption that I refuse.

[Happy Ent]

I find it far more likely that women do not read his books because of the dearth of interesting female characters,

Thank you, I also find that a plausbile explanation.

But that’s a really bad point against women as readers, then. That they are supposed to read for identification, and that they can only identify with women.

I identify foremost with Catelyn, and partly with Esmi (and somewhat with Akka). To identify with characters along gender lines is alien to me.

To put this differently: if a man said “I don’t like Orange is the New Black because of the dearth of interesting male characters” we’d laugh him off the board. It would clearly be a moral, artistic, and intellectual failure. (Interestingly, I haven’t even seen somebody make that point.)

So why do we accept this extreme parochialism in women? (It’s clearly correct, evidenced by the Romance genre, which is obviously written and marketed as self-identification and wish-fulfilment literature.)

Note that there is plenty of male wish-fulfilment entertainment. We laugh at it. Why is the same trend not only acceptable for women, but a gold standard that decent producers of art need to adhere to?

I really don’t get this. I’m not playing dumb. To me, it holds women to infinitely lower intellectual standards than men. The whole argument goes against every moral fibre in my body.