RAPE TRIGGER WARNING
I come bearing a gift.
By which I mean bearing a curse. What’s this curse? Over 3,000 words of rapefare from that most favored of punching bags, R. Scott Bakker. Specifically it’s from his non-fantasy thing–I’m not sure what genre it falls into other than “mumbo-jumbo”–Neuropath. Now, by and by I’ve come to view Bakker as rather harmless if socially incompetent; his boon companion Peter Watts is a far more loathsome piece of shit (although anecdotes have it that Watts is, in real life, quite socially incompetent as well and that translates to a certain kind of schoolboy pettiness. Now imagine if he, Watts and Pat have a drink together at a con–but never mind, that’s a vile image: so much smug idiocy concentrated in one place!).
Then someone told me about the rapefare in Neuropath.
Here follows a close reading and dissection of about 3,000 words (more than 10 pages in paper!) of rapefare. I was warned it would be disgusting, but after a while I found it merely hilarious. There’s a weird, off-putting tone to this as of a schoolboy dipping a stick into his own fresh excrement, then running at people to wave said stick in their faces. This isn’t edgy, haunting, horrifying. It’s very simply disgusting in the same childish, mindless way and suggests that Bakker perhaps needs to be house-broken. If Chris Priest believes Charles Stross to be an incontinent puppy, then one can only imagine Bakker as a piglet suffering from explosive diarrhea. It rolls around in–well, you know. Obeying its natural instincts, as it were.
To my Fall 2003 Popular Culture class.
For remaining honest in the face of complexity, and humble in the shadow of mystery.
Jesus, what did his Fall 2003 Pop Culture class do to him? Threaten his goldfish? Argue with him about feminism? Question his feminist cred? Call him a misogynistic fuck? “Self-important roach”?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The following story is based on actual trends in neuro-science, psychology, and cognitive science. Despite all the controversies (and there are many), one fact has managed to rise above the fray: we are not what we think we are.
Oh?
I’m not sure about the set-up and context for this scene, and wasn’t especially interested in finding out. In fact I didn’t read the rest of the book, in no small part because if the writing in Prince of Misogyny… er, sorry, The Rape that Comes Before er… I mean The Darkness that Comes Before–well, if the writing in that is leaden, then the writing in Neuropath can only be described most charitably by abusing the “piglet with explosive diarrhea” imagery to shreds. It’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s so bad that a rape scene becomes, rather than horrific, gut-tearing funny. Bakker can’t write. I’m not sure what it is he’s doing, but it’s nothing literate.
It’s also a thing that makes it obvious that even Bakker’s flimsy I-think-women-are-superior belief is a blatant lie.
‘She’s government owned and operated,’ Neil continued. ‘A radiosurgical psychopath.’
The room seemed to contort and flatten about her smirking face. Neil’s voice fell out of the narrowing corners. ‘I performed the procedure, myself, Goodbook. Compassion. Guilt. Shame. I scrubbed her clean, old buddy.’
‘Sam,’ he heard himself whisper, but he could taste no spit on his tongue.
‘Did you hear that?’ she cooed close to his neck. He could smell the Aveeno moisturizer she used every morning out of the shower. ‘I’ve been tweaked. My amygdalas have been stripped down to their predatory essentials.’ She licked his ear lobe and whispered, ‘Imagine being locked up and helpless with Jeffrey Dahmer.’
As far as I can tell this hinges on something about removing a sense of ethics and social mores and ehhh I don’t give a shit, never mind. But here’s the context for how the female rapist came to be, I guess. We could perhaps pause to consider that Bakker is not very smart, and likely subscribes to the idea that Rapist are Evil Scary People who ambush women in dark alleyways, being evident psychopaths; Bakker most likely isn’t aware of acquaintance or marital rape. Or rape culture period. Well, why speculate; his reactions to every charge of misogyny have so far proven that he isn’t aware much of anything.
‘They call us “Graduates”,’ she explained. ‘People surgically unfettered by your stone-age biases. People capable of driving the hard bargains, who don’t need to bullshit themselves when it comes to choosing the projection of US power over the dissolution of the Knesset, or Orinoco drilling rights over starving Venezuelans. People who protect their own, come what may. And thanks to us, America will survive to pick up the pieces, believe you me.’
Giggles.
‘You’re wondering how it’s possible,’ Sam said, grinning like a tomboy.
How does that work? In what way do tomboys grin differently from anyone else? How do you distinguish a tomboy’s grin from any other kind of grin? Can Bakker simply not write?
Thomas blinked at the blood and tears, stared at her in numb incomprehension, at the trim manikin nose, the commercial-break smile, the cheek curved to no palm in particular. It was a beautiful face, he realized. It was a beautiful face and it could do anything it wanted. Anything.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t necessarily find this juxtaposition of the victim noticing physical attractiveness out of place, but this is the first in a long line of descriptions that emphasize: Sam is pretty, Sam is desirable, Sam is sexy. Rape or not. Not only that, but she’s reduced to her beautiful face–a beautiful face that “could do anything it wanted.” Not “Sam could do anything she wanted,” but her face as though it’s an independent entity. Or, well, an object.
He started struggling against the plastic cuffs and the tape. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck…
The pinnacle, as you can see, of edginess. It’s little wonder that Bakker and Richard K. Morgan are people who will generally defend each other to the death.
Holstering her Glock, Sam slapped her hands together and surveyed her handiwork. ‘All this domination has made me hot,’ she said with a heavy breath.
And now, we start to cringe. If you hadn’t already started from the word go. It’s true that there’s no manual for How Psychopaths Talk 101, but play along with me and attempt to separate this bit of dialogue from the script of a particularly unpretentious, to-the-point BDSM porn–”All this domination has made me hot.” Can you distinguish the pseudo-intellectual, self-aggrandizing PhD-dropout writer from the garden-variety director of a B-rate porn shoot? Exactly.
She shed her blazer and began unbuttoning her blouse. [...] From the scissoring of limbs he could tell she had continued undressing.
She doesn’t strip the man she’s about to rape, by the way.
‘Isn’t this fucking wild?’ she said. ‘I mean all the energies flying around, all the boundaries being broken! How fucking wild is that? I can remember what I was like. I mean, the thought of doing something like this was just… just… I’d have a heart attack!’
Neil gasped in her sudden silence.
‘But now! What a fucking trip! I’m sooo fucking wet!’
This is embarrassing. “I’m sooo fucking wet” indeed. Again, can you distinguish this from the script of an especially terrible porn vid? Neil’s the man she is raping by the way.
‘Fucking wild,’ she mumbled. ‘Oh, God,’ – surprised laugh – ‘I’m gonna come already. Watch me, professor. Watch me, unnngh…’
I would say that my face is locked into a rictus of embarrassment, but it started out that way, so…
The running blood had become acid. His eyes screamed, yet he couldn’t tear them away from the slurry of light and dark jerking before him. Sam cried out, a primal voice for primal ears, then everything became still, save for the fluttering of anguished eyelids.
Mr Bakker, when TVTropes talks about Eye Scream they aren’t being literal.
‘Intense,’ she gasped. ‘Fuck me. Did you see that? Bammo, and he’s still so fucking hard.
BAMMO! Who talks like that.
‘Oh, yeah… I think I got another one. How many times did your wife say she usually came? Three? Four? What do you say, professor? Wanna watch me toss another load?’
‘No.’
Laughter. ‘But of course you do! I can see your boner from here. You guys are made for this stuff. Sex and violence. Juice and penetration. Horror versus fantasy, and fantasy wins! Christ, even Gerard’s got a fucking hard on…’
Something evo-psych something men are made for sex and violence.
‘Just so fucking wild,’ he heard her murmur. ‘So hot! No fucking wonder so many men are rapists…’ Though he couldn’t see her, she became Cynthia Powski sucking on her bottom lip. ‘But it’s not the same, is it? I mean, if I were a guy and you were chicks, it would be more, wouldn’t it? The buzz would be bigger…’
As you can see. It’s very Men’s Rights-y. I also find it intriguing that amidst all the horror the guy finds enough mental space to reimagine her as some vulnerable, seductive woman sucking on her bottom lip.
‘I mean before… I was… well, not a prude… but, you know – like everyone else. Stuff like this… like murder and fucking just freaked me right out. So guilty I couldn’t pass a fucking bum without digging through my purse! I just… just wasn’t built for this job. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. To be a spook. A real world Lara Croft… I wanted to be strong!’
By this point I’m not sure what point Bakker is trying to make–other than to cement the fact that he’s a very creepy, creepy misogynist–but Sam comes across, rather than a psychopath to be feared, as a very vulnerable woman with a horrid case of penis envy.
Pale lines bucked against crowded shadows, and she cried out. ‘What can I say?’ she continued, talking as though to catch her own drool. ‘Anything goes, professor… Anything.’
[...]
‘Are you…’ Sam mumbled. ‘Are you shooooor.’
‘You thought…’ Neil replied drunkenly. ‘You thought screwing me would do it?’
In an astounding gesture of gender essentialism, we have here Neil–a man who I think has also been operated on or conditioned or whatever–who’s absolutely untouchable (more later), pitted against a woman raping him who’s become absolutely incoherent, drooling, and mindless by getting off on rape. Because in Bakker’s fiction women are more prone to losing control, or something.
Thomas stared at the pasty, languorous horror before him. Skin he loved. Limbs he loved. A body he had worshipped, grinding against the pulse of another man.
This is interesting, because let’s compare with another of Bakker’s innumerable rape scenes, the one I’ve quoted before from The Warrior Prophet:
His wife and child were dead. Sacks of penetrated flesh with faces that he loved, and still . . . they did things.
It’s interesting that Sam, the female rapist, and this guy’s wife and child are depicted in very similar ways: things the male narrator loved and lost. Despite her doing the raping, Sam isn’t someone with agency–she very quickly loses control, rationality and even her mind to the high of the rape, in a way not dissimilar to the woman raped in The Warrior Prophet:
Valrissa’s eyes regarded Aengelas, thick with something impossible. She moaned and parted hanging legs to greet the abomination’s hand. A race of lovers . . .
“I don’t know! I don’t! I don’t! Pleaase stop! Pleaasse!” The thing screeched like a thousand falcons as it plunged into her. Glass thunder. Shivering sky.
She bent back her head, her face contracted in pain and bliss. She convulsed and groaned, arched to meet the creature’s thrusts. And when she climaxed, Aengelas crumpled, grasped his head between his hands, beat his face against the turf. The cold felt good against his broken lips.
So, we have got a scene where a woman rapes a man, but the man remains in firm control. Then we have got a scene where a male monster rapes a woman, and the male monster is of course in firm control. In both, the woman absolutely loses her mind to carnal impulses.
Even the narrator in The Warrior Prophet rapefare, Aengelas, retains his mind throughout his own rape and doesn’t lose himself to the stimulus of a demonic cock in his anus.
Back to Neuropath:
The first shot passed clean through her neck, giving her time to turn around and stare at Thomas in round-eyed amazement – at Mia’s revolver shaking in his contorted hands. She raised her Glock in a manikin arm. The second shot took her to the left of her nose, throwing her back off of Neil and onto the floor. She landed like luggage. Her nude body convulsed for several heartbeats, then went very still.
As you know, Scott… Later on–
The guard reached in with thick fingers, withdrew what Thomas mistook for a handkerchief, then recognized as Sam’s white cotton panties.
The guard smiled and scowled at once.
‘You dawwg,’ Mia drawled.
Yep. Her panties. Hurrrrr.
There are a host of things wrong with this shit, but starting from the obvious is the fact that throughout it Sam is eroticized: she’s naked, she’s grinding against Neil, she’s making noises, and the men can’t keep down their erections. Like Valrissa she is susceptible to sex and is unable to keep control of herself. Her lines aren’t that of a psychopath experimenting with sexual violence–she strips herself but keeps Neil fully clothed; she’s some guy’s dominatrix sex fantasy. Sam isn’t in control: the male gaze is.
Later on, Neil experiments with Thomas’ wife and straps her into a machine.
‘But I feel it! It’s the most certain thing I’ve ever…’ Her face was pinned beneath looming circuitry, lines of blood trailing from the bolts that fixed her skull, and yet her expression was one of maudlin yearning, as though she were some teenage diva emoting for the camera. The absurdity of it jarred a wave of nausea from his gut. ‘I mean, why did it take me so long to see? I love. I love!’
[...]
‘I’m confused,’ Nora was sobbing. ‘I don’t… I don’t understand what’s happening. All I know is that I love you, Tommy. That’s all I know!’
[...]
‘I told you!’ she cried. ‘It’s the deepest, the most awesome feeling of…’ She trailed into silence. Her eyes fluttered. She swallowed, then let out a long, groaning sigh. ‘Ungh,’ she gasped. ‘You are doing something to me, aren’t you? Are you touching me? Are you-you-you-yooooooo - ‘
‘You can see it, can’t you?’ Neil said, glancing at Thomas. ‘See her for what she is.’
No, something said. Yes.
‘Mmmmm,’ Nora murmured in a tone that stabbed for its familiarity. ‘Ohmigawd…‘
And–
Neil made her come, then transformed the data signature of her voice into an algorithm that made him come. He stood between them and cackled as they cried out again and again, driven to orgasm after orgasm by the sound of the other’s climax.
And Thomas did not want it to stop.
Then Neil did the same with pain, so that her wagging shrieks made him buck and howl, over and over again. A pain beyond weeping. A pain beyond succor or reprieve,
A pain only fallen angels could know.
That last line is awful. Awful.
Aside from that, it’s nearly identical to The Warrior Prophet rapefare. And, at some level, the male point of view retains some semblance of control while the women he loves–Valrissa, Sam, Nora–quickly turn into mindless, gibbering goo.
Mr Bakker, you are disgusting. It’s not even that you are edgy or avant-garde. You’re just disgusting in a sad, banal way; reading this is like catching you masturbating to rape porn surrounded by wads of used tissue. Possibly your masturbating aid is your own steaming feces. And, not quite content with being found out (and feeling no shame, for that matter), you record it and upload it to youtube, and share around the link. Bakker is the piglet with the explosive diarrhea that’s very, very proud of the shit he’s just excreted. And he wants us all to smell it. Possibly follow his lead and taste it too. This novel incidentally arose from an argument between Bakker and his wife:
Since the psychothriller is her favourite genre, I suggested, as a warm, loving, generous gesture on my part, that I try writing one after the trilogy was completed. She laughed – a little too hard, I think – and told me (and this is almost a direct quote): “You couldn’t write a thriller if you tried! You-you, I know you. You’d have to stuff it full of all kinds of literary and philosophical crap, and that’s not what psychothriller’s are about. You’d just screw it up!”
So what began as a gesture of love on my part was instantly transformed into an exercise in spite. I had to prove the smug little… wonderful woman wrong!
Who wants to pretend that Bakker wasn’t about to blurt out “the smug little bitch”? Dot dot dot wonderful woman indeed. I wouldn’t presume to know how she feels about her husband, but my, isn’t that a right patronizing smug asshole? Of the novel, he was quite confident about:
You are not what you think you are. Neuropath pursues that fact through a story of lust, betrayal, and a string of serial murders unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Basically, he thinks the book is Very Deep and Very Thoughtful and will expose you to myriad truths hitherto beyond your little minds. At this point, I don’t think “self-important little roach” suffices anymore. This is a man whose ego has inflated to the size of Jupiter. At one point, one might hope, it’ll collapse into a blackhole and suck him in along with his horde of fanboys eager to fellate him. In the blackhole. Forever. He wasn’t too happy that Larry at OF Blog didn’t want to recommend his book either, and showed up in typical classy (haha) fashion to protest.
The cringe game consists of taking the book, fondling it for a minute or so, then randomly opening it here and there to this or that page, and reading a paragraph or two. Your fingers cramp. The muscles in your back tense. Your shoulders draw up. A burning in your gut bends you kneeward. You grimace, and a voice that sounds a lot like your own says, “Yeesh, I write like crap.”
This has been my experience with every book I’ve written so far: I want to take it back, to burn or to rewrite it, or to a least insert several footnotes apologizing to the reader. Or maybe slip a five dollar bill between the pages, with that note says, “Go to DQ, buy yourself a sundae.” I can honestly say that I suffered none of this with Neuropath.
Oh, dear, and to think even people who are vaguely positive about the Prince of Misogyny stuff think Neuropath is his very worst.
Are the muggles ready for Neuropath? That remains to be seen. The vast majority of readers will reject the vast bulk of the claims made in the book – that goes without saying, I think.
Oh, dear.
The rest is pretty much along the same vein of everything else he’s ever said, in the same tiresome, repetitious, pretentious up-his-own-anus manner. It shows that anyone who takes him seriously is in dire need of reevaluating their own education, intelligence, and gullibility. This is the nadir, this is the deepest depths you will sink to once you take at face value someone like R. Scott Bakker–and submit to the idea that someone so dreadfully vacant has something of real worth to offer because he’s sufficiently long-winded and jargony enough to fool you.
Let alone that this is a feminist man who “battles real misogyny” on his blog every day. If you believe that claim, well… there’s no hope for you, is there? You are just sad. He is sad. Everything about this is a pathetic clusterfuck neck-deep in everything ever wrong with fandom. The shining icon of neckbeardery in its essential definition:
Talkative, self-important nerdy men (usually age 30 and up) who, through an inability to properly decode social cues, mistake others’ strained tolerance of their blather for evidence of their own charm.
Quite. I’m astonished that Bakker’s fanboys remember how to breathe.
Ian Ross (@skybluetrades)
/ April 17, 2012Oh my. Just reading even those few extracts makes me feel like I need to wash my brain out with lye soap. I feel slightly ill.
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012I was tempted to post the whole extract, all 3000 words, without commentary. But that’d have been really, really mean.
shardbaenre
/ April 17, 2012I find it remarkably odd that Sam’s rape of Neil didn’t involve a dildo…or any penetration on her part, especially since the character of Sam then went on a “if I were a dude, this would probably be way more awesome” thing. Leave aside that the comment represents her fundamental break with reality and loss of control, but it also, specifically, equates “womanhood” with “victimhood”. In no part of this, is Neil ever a victim like a woman is a victim and the text pretty well says that. He stays stoic. Oh, speaking of, I have read nor seen any account of a woman being raped remembering that her rapist was the cutest man alive or angelic. So, that he can *still* male gaze her into creepyness is so profoundly disturbing.
That she got naked is so very problematic. It implies exposure, vulnerability, decadence, impurity. Neil gets to be none of those things, though he is, ostensibly, the victim. Also, the amygdala science? Failure.
And then, on top of all that, a joke about her panties. That, for me more than anything else, cements that Sam was never an actual agent or perpetrator. Putting panties in your pocket and bragging about it stinks of frat boys drugging a woman, having sex with her, and then having a “hurk hurk” about it. It’s a damned trophy of a time you want to remember: apparently that time is of a rape and then murder. She was again victimized. But her initial victimization, re: parts of her brain was removed to allow her to magically become a rapist, is all the more galling. I posit that even if she was a willing participant, she was Wolverine’d.
By that I mean, Wolverine signed up for Weapon X. He signed on the dotted line. And then he got pissed when they did what they said they were gonna do. But that guy gets a whole metric shit ton of angst and “nobility” or some shit.
This isn’t a thriller. It isn’t good. It’s pseudo-babble that makes Star Trek look rooted in science…and I love Star Trek, but I very much know what it is and is not.
This reads like Bakker’s rape fantasy, which, people can have their kink but don’t try to pretend that it’s some elevated piece of art and it isn’t what it is. In short, this is about as offensive as Piers Anthony’s “Firefly”.
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012Oh yeah, while Aengelas in The Judging Eye gets penetrated, his rapist is a male monster. I don’t think Bakker can conceive of the idea that a woman might do the penetrating. It’d surely contradict the essentialism he’s got going.
I realize I didn’t make it clear, but the point of view dude is actually not the one being raped. Which actually makes it even more bizarre: Neil, the one being raped, has also been trained (I think) but Thomas, the dude sitting by and being made to watch, isn’t. You’d think he would be pretty traumatized due to a lack of training/conditioning, but nah. He grabs a gun and shoots her twice, the big hero.
I’ve thought about the similarities between Bakker and Terry Goodkind, the latter of which also fills his books with copious rape. But even Goodkind has never pretended to be feminist.
shardbaenre
/ April 17, 2012What? So then that makes this scene even worse than before! In many ways! Contrast a male third-party observer of rape scene with his previous ones and at no time is the perpetrator gazed at…it’s only the victim, which means woman. So that the gaze remains firmly placed on the woman and she is *still* eroticized speaks volumes. Even in her role of perpetrator the gaze is still male and *victim*. He doesn’t linger on the male pain or the person who is victimized.
I get no description of his pecs or the sweat on his skin or the look on his face. Nothing. So yes, based on prior scenes that Bakker has written of this nature where there is a third party observer, this is definitely not anything approaching subversive. It’s actually the same tropes applied even more heinously.
the twisted spinster
/ April 17, 2012D: DO. NOT. WANT.
Incidentally, I’ve read BDSM porn that reads like Shakespeare compared to this. Also? It wasn’t rapey. Did a real publisher publish this stuff? (Quick check on Amazon.) “Publisher: Tor Books.” Tor? Shame on you. Shame.
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012Tor also publishes Terry Goodkind. Sooo yeah.
the twisted spinster
/ April 17, 2012Kind of throws a spanner in the whole “traditional publishers are good because they are the gatekeepers protecting readers from bad books” idea.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Note that originally Bakker thought about using racism instead of sexism as his big ‘see how bad the world is’ crap and making racism objectively set in his world, but his publisher indicated that it couldn’t be published that way. But apparently was totally fine with sexism.
Which is pretty horrible on a lot of levels.
green_knight
/ April 17, 2012Tor. And big name publishers are suprised that their sales decline.
Some of my friends are published by Tor, and I *will* buy their books. I can read the catalogue of big name publishers and come away feeling ‘meh’ – I love books, I just don’t love the grimdark.
Liz (@hawkwing_lb)
/ April 17, 2012…
…
…
I got nothing. Except slight nausea.
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012I feel kind of bad now for having exposed people to this.
trevoresque
/ April 18, 2012Your next post better be about puppies play-fighting in a miniature coliseum while fluffy kittens mew cutely in the audience.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012I was just about to add more Neuropath quotes to the main post.
Think of it this way: once you’ve weathered this no book will ever bother you again, short of an equivalent to The Human Centipede.
luagha
/ April 19, 2012That would be those ‘Warriors’ books following the tribes of housecats?
Arthur B (@awakeasaurusrex)
/ April 17, 2012So I knew Neuropath was going to be kind of pathetic because it seems to be the book Bakker most often references when he’s ranting about his Semantic Apocalypse conspiracy theory. (Seriously dude, people have known about these Terrible Philosophical Truths for decades, it’s not a biggie.) But I didn’t realise how pathetic it would get. Wow.
Seth J Dickinson (@sethjdickinson)
/ April 17, 2012I skimmed the quotey bits of the post, for reasons you can probably understand.
Bakker frustrates me because I work in social psych. We study the automatic activation of stereotype attitudes towards minority groups, using fMRI, ERP and other pretty cool stuff. Our tools include Mahzarin Banaji’s IAT, which is one of the best ways to demonstrate a few of your favorite points – namely, that even people who claim to be nonprejudiced hold reflexive associations regarding race and gender. My specialty is simulation of police shootings: we can detect racial bias in reaction time data and maybe even in the brain.
This is the kind of science he’s interested in, ideas about the deep-set nature of prejudice and belief, as well as related cogpsych material about self-justification, rationalization, etc. And he’s right to be interested; these fields could make for some really fantastic genre fiction.
Unfortunately, his work stirs these ideas in with a huge helping of rape and unintended misogyny (along with, you know, the intended stuff he writes in as some kind of ‘challenge’ or would-be critique), and in a beautifully ironic twist he doesn’t seem completely willing to turn the lens of his own appropriated psychological insights on himself. He should know, for example, that the best way to avoid groupthink is to assign a devil’s advocate to attack your own positions constantly, or that self-assessments are always positively biased. This is Psych 101 stuff, not cutting-edge neuro.
Unfortunately he seems to fall into the trap of believing that people who criticize him just don’t get his arguments, or don’t get the science-philosophy he’s interested in. I wish he’d take a step back, acknowledge that he simply does not write women well, and try to isolate his interesting material from his, uh, whatever the fuck this is.
Also I wish he’d ditch some of his weird prose habits, but that’s another issue entirely – and only relevant if I ever read one of his books again after Neuropath.
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012I wasn’t sure whether you wanted your name directly credited on the post for letting me know about the rapefare? Since I also said a few things about Watts.
I don’t trust any of Bakker’s blather exactly because he seems to believe he–and anyone who agrees with him, for that matter–is exempt from the whole “I shall deconstruct the groupthink!” schtick.
Alex D MacFarlane (@foxvertebrae)
/ April 17, 2012I love how Bakker’s idea of subversive is to find new and exciting ways to perpetuate misogyny.
*slow clap*
acrackedmoon
/ April 17, 2012It’s new and exciting too, because I don’t think any grimdark author has pulled female-on-male rape to further a misogynistic agenda yet. The depths Bakker pioneers in plumbing!
Gourmet Neurovore
/ April 18, 2012Actually, I’m pretty sure Goodkind covered that before. Along with all the other rape, the pseudo-rape, the not-quite-rape, and the evil pacifists.
Bakker can’t even be originally transgressive.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012Oh, fuck, you’re right. The Mord-Sith. God, I’d managed to forget all that. Thank you so much for reminding me.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ April 18, 2012Sorry, chief. I’ll see if I can order an extra jar of brainbleach.
Alex D MacFarlane (@foxvertebrae)
/ April 17, 2012The “grinning like a tomboy” line is continuing to bother me as well. I can’t quite unpick what he means by it. Given that “tomboy” is used to talk about girls acting in some “boyish” way (ie it’s a very gender essentialist term), I wonder:
- Is she boyish because she’s a highly trained, allegedly highly competent woman? (According to outdated sexist ideas, these are Man Traits.)
- Is she boyish because she’s an aggressive woman? (Also a Man Trait.)
- Is she boyish because she goes on to rape someone? (Due to rape culture, also a Man Trait.)
None of these questions reflect well on Bakker’s construction of gender or his understanding of rape culture, especially as my understanding of his intent is that he is trying to deconstruct gender essentialism rather than to shore it up – he’s trying to point to the fact that rape is about power, and women can want and enjoy power too, women are capable of being dark and unpleasant too, I think?
Needless to say, women can be competent and/or aggressive and/or rapists, and this does not make them tomboys or honorary men.
Obviously the whole depiction of the rape is chock-full of gender essentialism and misogyny, but this specific line is yet another way in which Bakker has no fucking clue about feminism.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012I looked up the book on Amazon’s search inside, just to make sure my epub wasn’t erroneously scanned. Nope. It’s “grinning like a tomboy.” At a guess Bakker meant nothing by it at all, but he whipped that simile out for entirely unconscious reasons. And they are really, really terrible reasons. “Anti-groupthink”, eh?
gonzohistory
/ April 18, 2012I can only assume it’s related somehow to grinning like a tom *cat*? I guess we think of cats as grinning?
Gourmet Neurovore
/ April 18, 2012but… why a tomcat specifically? Why not a molly? Or a queen?
green_knight
/ April 18, 2012It might well have been something that slipped past the copy editor… because after reading all of the book, twice, the poor editor’s eyeballs would have been bleeding.
saajanpatel
/ April 17, 2012I technically finished Neuropath by skipping/skimming many of its pages. It is controversial even among us Bakker fans, being either his best or good or seen as an aberration given its dip in quality.
Beyond that, excising Bakker himself and even his books, I credit him for attempting to push the concept of societal conditioning into the public eye – I recognize he isn’t the first to do this.
In the end, that’s probably the most valuable thing to take away – why do we think the way we do? Why are our personalities the way they are? How can we change how we see ourselves?
the twisted spinster
/ April 18, 2012“I credit him for attempting to push the concept of societal conditioning into the public eye”
That’s not exactly a new concept. People have known about conditioning for decades. It was a major theme of scifi back in the 60s and 70s, even on television, not exactly an area that brings to mind “ground-breaking.” Bakker has grabbed an old trope and made it into really smelly, rancid cheese.
saajanpatel
/ April 18, 2012I was never much of a SciFi reader, don’t really know. I think Bakker has done interesting things in his work while I think in places it is flawed.
But regarding the more important subject of self-transformation, I think others like Pinchbeck take more positive views – seeing this outside process but finding the core self capable of transformation.
But then Dante does something similar at the end of Purgatorio, so as you say this goes back a ways….at least to ancient Asian (Buddhist at least) thought.
shardbaenre
/ April 18, 2012Being horrible at your craft and offensive is not exactly bringing to light the issue…unless it was meant to be said in a negative connotation. I get none of the questions you (Sajaan) raise or an awareness except a profound sense of “This guy doesn’t have a clue and omg is he gross” That is not a very flattering idea of pushing an idea into societal consciousness.
saajanpatel
/ April 18, 2012@shardbaenre: Oh, I was only speaking to what I found in them that was important – How much of ourselves is based on societal conditioning? How often do we reflect on why we are the way we are?
Those are important questions, I think, outside of Bakker’s fiction. I think Larry says as much in his linked review above.
There are probably many people from marginalized groups that have asked questions and done research about societal conditioning -> For example, I know Ms. MacFarlane has noted societal conditioning and challenging it in her review of Le Guin’s The Wild Girls.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Yeah, the notion that societal conditioning wasn’t in the public eye when things like the Manchurian Candidate had been out for what, 60 years? This ain’t exactly news.
Hell, Dollhouse was a geek show by Joss Whedon, and it handled these notions better.
Megan J. Jewett
/ April 17, 2012…..wow. that is some bad writing. so badly written I’m tempted to post some of it to Weeping_Cock over on livejournal. so bad it reads like one of those cheap, horrible romance novels you see in droves at thrift stores.
‘Intense,’ she gasped. ‘Fuck me. Did you see that? Bammo, and he’s still so fucking hard‘
EPIC FAIL. bammo
Emil Söderman
/ April 18, 2012^^^ My first inclination was actually to read it as meaning “grinning like a tomcat” and that it was simply a mistake that wasn’t caught by the editor.
“Bakker can’t write. I’m not sure what it is he’s doing, but it’s nothing literate.”
… Kind of? Bakker’s prose tends to wave between the awful and the “Actually pretty good.” He can do excellent descriptions and battle-scenes for instance, but he sucks at well… describing people or other stuff.
So by the “a half rotten apple is rotten” standard yeah, he can’t write, but at least in his fantasy works he has the occasional sparkle of competency.
s s (@quietsmith)
/ April 18, 2012Do you have a rich benefactor who pays you danger money for analysing books like this?
“Oh yeah, while Aengelas in The Judging Eye gets penetrated, his rapist is a male monster. I don’t think Bakker can conceive of the idea that a woman might do the penetrating.”
The penetration of Aengelas by his male rapist is described in terms of non-male body parts, too (his rapist “made a womb” of him). It seems so old-fashioned to equate being penetrated with the “feminine”? His rape also didn’t feature the hairy-palmed descriptions that went with the rape of his wife earlier in the scene (“soft pink nipples”, “sunlight flickered across the horizon and illuminated her lithe curves”, “sunlit breasts”, she “groans” in “bliss” and “arches to meet the creature’s thrusts” on her way to a “climax”) – there’s none of this – the prose suddenly drops the porn when the male’s being raped. I’d cut Bakker some slack and say the scene is written this way because Aengelas is the POV character at that moment, but since I don’t believe a husband would be dwelling so on his wife’s sunlit breasts mid-rape, especially when he and his son are also in mortal danger, well, it’s hard not to chalk the scene down as terrible, terrible writing. It’s interesting to see how Bakker’s writing differs between a rape scene when the victim is male rather than female.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012I wish!
It adds an extra layer of WTF when you think about the fact that Thomas, the point of view for Sam-on-Neil rape, can barely see because there’s blood in his eyes–and everything is just “smears” or “blurs” to him. But we still get enough “unnngh” and porny dialogue going, and “scissoring limbs” to make sure who it is that’s being eroticized, and it’s certainly not Neil.
Even an acknowledgment that it’s a rape (“raper’s thrust”) whereas Valrissa is too busy being orgasmic to care. My skin, she crawls.
Darius Wilkins
/ April 18, 2012I got to wondering what you had against Peter Watts, since from what I remember, he isn’t horrible on gender (aside from some of the books in the Starfish world setting). Far better than this dross reviewed here. Forget about race, though, even if not actively malignant–just lily white.
Anways, after reading this review, I went around looking for a Watts book review. Nope. Okay, ummmm, Gallery Buttmad–ah! Click link, and… Well, I see why you’d never read anything by him.
Ehh, stuff happens. I’ve largely been there, done that (at a different SFF author’s site), stole the t-shirt before the ban, though. There is nothing quite so infuriated as a self-righteous artiste when said artiste is called on the bullshit, legitimately. This one was one of those people who think they are enlightened about race and gender, but only if you don’t challenge their patronly privilege. Infuriating.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Before the hordes of angry fans get too irate, note that the sexy monster funtimes referenced don’t come from The Judging Eye; they come from the Warrior Prophet. Which doesn’t matter at all as far as the actual POINT goes, but many people will use this as a Deep And Signifying point that shows how bad you are. Or something.
Also, Sajaan and Seth, I blame you – things were vaguely quieting down on the whole Bakker crap or at least had been stopped via mod fiat, but no – you had to bring up Neuropath. Now we go from Bakker posting over at Scalzi’s, to Bakker posting at Mamatas’, to Bakker posting at Valente’s to him fighting and losing with Vox – and now this. Guh.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012What? Is he fighting Vox again?
I’ll correct that point, thank you. Also, “sexy monster funtimes” heh heh. What is the demon thing anyway? Why does it go around raping everything as its primary means of interrogation?
…and how high is the rape quotient in those books, out of curiosity?
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Apparently. Vox has posted a couple of articles about wangsty, and has also engaged Bakker at Bakker’s site.
This would be what the Mayan apocalypse looks like.
Also, on Neuropath – I know you haven’t read it, so OMG SPOILER ALERT – but one of the things that bugged me was that the woman character above is supposed to be this amazing genius sociopath operative who can manipulate everyone as she sees fit, but the only thing she can think to do in order to get the protagonist to actually get something done is to fuck him. It’s so very banal and dull. It’s like Hannibal Lecter can only teach people about Buffalo Bill by blowing them or something. And naturally, this actually works, because Bakker’s view is that men are automatons that are driven by sexual urges primarily and thus the best way to control them is to fuck them.
I’m starting to come to the conclusion that Bakker isn’t a misogynist – he’s a misanthrope, and it just turns out that his version of misanthropy towards women looks entirely like classic misogyny. So he’s telling the truth when he says that he treats men that way too – it just so happens that it’s not as big a deal given the lack of institutionalism and patriarchal culture harming them directly.
It really is a shit book from head to toe. His wife, as it turns out, was totally, 100% right.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012What is the demon thing anyway? Why does it go around raping everything as its primary means of interrogation?
…and how high is the rape quotient in those books, out of curiosity?
Trigger warning here.
Sorry, missed that in the original reply. The demon thing is one of two remaining alien beings that come from a race where everything they do is tied into pleasure. They can create biological robots which are controlled by pleasure, they can force others to feel pleasure for any sensation (as they do above), they are pleasure seekers first and foremost. It does this schtick earlier in the books, albeit in the form of a human, as a means to extract information. (presumably this would have the poor efficacy of any torture system under duress, but as it turns out the aliens are also incredibly stupid, so that’s fine).
The rape quotient turns out to be shockingly small depending on what you’re counting. The number of rapes is not great and is smaller than ASOIAF, and there are fewer references to them. Where it differs is that they tend to happen to (or are performed by) the PoV characters, so it becomes a lot more of an issue and significantly more prominent.
And then, of course, we have the last book where one PoV character not only forgives her rapist in the act of raping her, she loves him. It’s a bit less horrible than that sounds (she ends up loving everyone because she can see everyone’s flaws and their reasoning) but the overt text is a rape victim forgiving and loving her rapist.
FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012wait what
as in
She forgives him in the middle of the rape and this isn’t portrayed as a coping mechanism or something?
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012She forgives him in the middle of the rape and this isn’t portrayed as a coping mechanism or something?
Actually she forgives him right as he’s about to commit the rape and it’s either because her forgiveness removes his sin (aka Jesus) or she loves him so much now that she can’t help but forgive him, because she understands what drove him to this point. It’s very confusing to be honest, as is that entire character.
And oddly it kinda sorta works, as apparently he’s banging his flaccid member against her for a while in the next scene. Which is a GREAT MESSAGE.
I had missed the falling in love with her rapist part the first time I had read it, but my wife picked up on it and pointed out that it was even worse than I thought it was.
saajanpatel
/ April 18, 2012“Also, Sajaan and Seth, I blame you”
Heh, I’m pretty sure I mentioned Neuropath on Westeros after either Larry or maybe Datepalm.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012I’m still blaming you. This time this whole kerfluffle isn’t on me.
saajanpatel
/ April 18, 2012Kal, do you feel like you’ve – for whatever reason – reconsidered the quality of the series?
Or do you feel less and less that things posited as mysteries – like the retrieval and use of the Heron Spear against the No God – will be explained?
I’d curious what Larry thinks of the series now as well.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012I’m starting to feel like I got suckered in like I did with Lost – where there were all these Great Mysteries, and everything seemed like it had a plan, and we’ll end up with more questions than answers and the answers we get are going to be fairly shitty.
Despite me snarking on it I do think that there are a lot of good things in the books. Worldbuilding is well done, the magic stuff is good, and the original hook – that the savior of the world is actually a sociopath vs. creatures that are damned because they exist – is a good one. I know I have a weakness for worlds, and a good fantasy world can make up for a lot of shortcomings elsewhere. This is why I think Bakker’s other works have failed for me – because without that awesome setting, there’s not a lot of compelling stuff he’s putting out.
I’m getting more and more bothered by the actual execution of those ideas he has in that world, though. I think someone on another board said that there are often two types of writers – those who have great ideas and those who have great execution – and I’m thinking that Bakker is the former. As an example, I think about how vaguely unsatisfying the ending was to the first trilogy; that should give me some warnings about it.
I’ll still read The Unholy Consult, though I’ll not be buying it. But I’ll probably stop there unless the reward of entertainment significantly outweighs the negatives of slogging through more philosophizing bullshit.
Emil Söderman
/ April 18, 2012“Also, “sexy monster funtimes” heh heh. What is the demon thing anyway? Why does it go around raping everything as its primary means of interrogation?”
I’ll take it as a genuine question?
It’s what they call an Inchoroi, who are well… rape aliens. They like raping stuff. They’re on this planet and trying to kill everyone becuase they are damned (presumably for being rape-aliens, although it’s kind of ambigious whether or not they’re damned for that, or if they’re rape-aliens because they’re damned, the damnation system is kind of arbitrary) and they don’t want to be. They think (for reasoning that’s too convoluted to explain) that killing most people means they won’t be damned, and can then live forever raping stuff.
Or something.
If I never have to write “rape” that many times in a blog post I’ll be thankful.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012I uh… this sounds absolutely fucking stupid.
shardbaenre
/ April 18, 2012This sounds just like hentai. Terrible, horrible, hentai, which makes this absolutely not anything remotely connected to quality. There are no high thoughts here. Rape aliens is old hat. Like the oldest of hats and it sounds like he doesn’t attempt to add anything…which…I’m thankful for. But at least now I understand the appeal: anime porn. The subset of people who love the worst anime porn has to offer. I guess they just want to feel special and less icky and somehow validated since it isn’t anime porn…it’s *books!*.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Hentai tentacle demons is something that’s been often used to describe these guys, so yeah – it’s entirely fitting. There are other parts to it that make it more interesting of a concept, primarily focusing on what damnation actually means, but it’s not that profound.
As an example, in order to defeat their enemies the hentai monsters become their physicians and then give all the men immortality while killing all the women via a plague. Shockingly, the men don’t just die right on the spot and go out and kick their ass, being completely enraged that everything just went to hell. It sounds like a horrible thing, but the plans they use are right out of Pinky and the Brain.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012Okay I’ll be overusing this a lot but: that’s incredibly fucking stupid.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Similarly, the hentai monsters create the EVIL NO-GOD who has the effect of making all humans barren and stopping all conception from occurring while it exists, all the while making everyone feel totally bummed, dude. And the hentai monster’s goal is to reduce or eliminate all souled life (like humans) on the planet so they won’t be damned. (I’m not going to go into that, but that’s their goal)
The obvious thing here would be to just hang out for about 40 years and let humanity die a slow, depressing death, right? Don’t need to do anything, just chill out, hang out with your new friend who is a god and be merry. And obviously the way that humans won was to go find this thing and destroy it at the cost of all they hold dear, right?
Nope, the aliens send their giant no god into human territory to try and finish off the humans once and for all, and naturally it gets killed.
The Emperor from Star Wars had better plans than this.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012You are kidding. Are the rape aliens supposed to be scary?
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Well, I guess they almost wiped out the world twice or something. And they do a lot of raping. They’re big on that. Their new weapon are these biological robots who can imitate any human, which is a kind of neat idea for a bad guy in a fantasy novel but ends up being fairly meh. They’ve also got hordes of raping orc analogues, so that’s…more rapey. And they do a lot of mind control where they rape some more. People don’t like that, so it’s probably scary.
They…uh…get together with their human allies and have freaky sex? I’m sure that’s pretty bad, right?
Truth be told, as shitty as all the main characters are and as shitty as the world is and as shitty as the gods are in that series, I’ve been rooting for the tentacle porn monsters to win for a while. Sure, they’re incompetent and stupid and led by their pendulous phalluses (an actual term in the books, IIRC), but the rest of the place sucks so much that I’d be okay with it all going away.
acrackedmoon
/ April 18, 2012ಠ_ಠ
I won’t make fun of pink masts and Myrish swamps anymore.
the twisted spinster
/ April 18, 2012And “souled”? “Damned”? Is this science fiction, fantasy, or a Jack Chick comic created by someone on a meth high?
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012You have to make fun of pink masts and myrish swamps. Those are horrible terms. Just awful.
But yeah, Bakker is the master of phalluses in his books. Someone should take a note of the various ways they’re described; it’d be pretty funny.
Emil Söderman
/ April 18, 2012^ Yup. He tends to use big words though, so people are often confused into thinking it’s brilliant.
ronanwills
/ April 18, 2012If Rob Liefeld wrote a porn novel, this is what the dialogue would be like.
“You couldn’t write a psychothriller honey, you’re too *smart* for that! I know you just can’t help but put all that high-brow philosophy and awesome literary writing into everything you do!”
I would bet a considerable amount of money this conversation never happened, or at least not the way Bakker describes it here.
That whole passage reveals some serious resentment towards his wife. The fact that this argument apparently inspired him to write a book about a psychopathic woman raping men…… ew.
phnxprmnt021
/ April 18, 2012“You couldn’t write a psychothriller honey, you’re too *smart* for that! I know you just can’t help but put all that high-brow philosophy and awesome literary writing into everything you do!”
I would bet a considerable amount of money this conversation never happened, or at least not the way Bakker describes it here.
That whole passage reveals some serious resentment towards his wife. The fact that this argument apparently inspired him to write a book about a psychopathic woman raping men…… ew.
This. This x1000. What a fucking creeper.
the twisted spinster
/ April 18, 2012Yeah, I found that conversation suspect too. I’ll bet that all his wife said was something like “I don’t really think writing psycho thrillers is you”; or more likely, he made fun of her reading tastes and then made the ensuing spat into something more complimentary to himself (“She challenged me and I met her challenge and totally pwned her! Rawr!”) Let’s just say I’ve had people, er, “tweak” conversations I’ve had with them when telling other people about them, and suddenly I had supposedly been in the middle of this apocalyptic battle of wits instead of a once-off conversation consisting of a few remarks I forgot about the next day.
shardbaenre
/ April 18, 2012I feel like I just want to post this in response to everything Bakker says. Everything.
Phoe (@trojanphoenix)
/ April 18, 2012I don’t understand how stripping someone’s amygdala turns them into a rapist… it would destroy you ability to feel fear and possibly destroy other emotional responses,. Damage to it can trigger depression, PST, anxiety and autistic spectrum disorders, how some one jump from that to “gleeful rapist”?
Gourmet Neurovore
/ April 18, 2012Well, there’s a reason Bakker is a PhD dropout…
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012A book by Greg Bear called Mariposa actually answers that a bit better than this (or at least conceives of a better notion) – where people suffering from PTSD were given a cure that had the primary side effect of removing guilt and shame and fear. This caused them to entirely disregard any social learned behaviors as optional at best, which meant they were free to do whatever they really wanted to without feeling any societal pressure to conform. One character beats his wife to death and then goes and reads a bedtime story to his kids; another spends all his time locked in his room. And another decides that he wants to save people, but only because he personally finds it interesting.
And shockingly, somehow none of them turn into rapists! It’s crazy, I know.
Emil Söderman
/ April 18, 2012“And “souled”? “Damned”? Is this science fiction, fantasy, or a Jack Chick comic created by someone on a meth high?”
That’s actually the point where I think he’s vaguely interesting (moreso than his conditioning/choice stuff which is pretty bland) he’s positing a world in which souls, damnation, etc. are real, tangible things. Some people (Sorcerers, mainly, but apparently rape-aliens too) are damned just because who they are, and the various ways of coping with this. (some, like the rape-aliens and their human allies, basically try to avoid damnation at any cost, others just ignore it or seek to make the most out of life here and now, some try to find ways of escaping the gods, one group essentially claims that it is a sacrifice they have to make in order to preserve the world from said rape-aliens (in a trite inversal of the biblical quote their motto is: “Though you lose your soul you gain the world.”)
That’s I think something that could be vaguely interesting in a cosmic horror kind of way. (and in some ways it’s anti-Lovecraft: the universe isn’t uncaring, it cares very, very much, it just has completely arbitrary preferences) the dystheism is kind of vaguely interesting.
If you know, it wasn’t because of his fascination with rape and bad evo-psych.
kalbear
/ April 18, 2012Agreed; that’s one of the more interesting concepts in the books. In almost every fantasy book they have the concept of gods – who are real – but no real concept of or interacting with the afterlife. Characters have religion but aren’t religious. In Bakker’s books the afterlife and gods are real, and they aren’t fair. Damnation exists and can be seen and it really, really sucks. And people are very religious because hey, they can actually interact with the gods in a very real way. This sets up an interesting set of questions and ideas – things like “if you knew the gods were real and damnation was real, what lengths would you go to avoid it? (which is basically what motivates the rape aliens and some sorcerers) or “does it matter if you’re worth less in the afterlife as far as what you do now?”
These can be really interesting questions, and seeing more fantasy novels where religion is a really big deal is a nice change of pace. I just think the execution is fairly flawed and muddled by doing too much other stupid stuff along with it.
s s (@quietsmith)
/ April 19, 2012Interviewer: “Every good fantasy book has a well worked out background story. What do you think is the key to writing convincing characters and plot?”
Bakker at 44 seconds: “Too much porno.”
acrackedmoon
/ April 19, 2012Oh my god. What an awkward, awkward man. That is painful. Also why’s he so pink?
the twisted spinster
/ April 19, 2012Good lord, he is a neckbeard.
Callan
/ April 19, 2012I know – and check out this guy (called vox day) who left a comment on Scott’s blog. You’ve gotta read that Vox post “Logic dictates that women must be encouraged to bear and raise subsequent generations.”!!! Frikkin’ hell! I think he has even more on his blog archive.
acrackedmoon
/ April 19, 2012You’re really transparent. Also, the Vox-Bakker feud is excellent free entertainment.
trevoresque
/ April 20, 2012Vox Day is pretty vile. I didn’t know who he was until today, and I stumbled across an article by him that blamed the queer rights movement for causing queer youth to kill themselves. Lovely. Oh, and he’s written some fantasy books. Are you brave enough to dive into one of those?
acrackedmoon
/ April 20, 2012Oh, I know he’s a vile piece of shit, but Callan is a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy (of, I believe, both Bakker and Watts). I understand he’s here to bait me into showing up at Bakker’s blog. Silly cretin.
trevoresque
/ April 20, 2012Sometimes I think some of these people love you the way rivals in shounen fighting anime love each other.
shardbaenre
/ April 19, 2012Maybe this is why he is alienating specific demographics. Writing is a craft. You research it. You hone it. You make it something worthwhile after the initial “Eureka!” moment. Guy, this is why people are saying it’s pseudo-philosophical bullshit that isn’t well thought.
Also, I really dislike bagging on a person’s looks, but jeez does he come off as a creeper. I mean, his mannerisms, everything. Creeper.
saajanpatel
/ April 19, 2012I think the greaser hair doesn’t work for him. I will say he is one of the few men I’ve ever seen capable of rocking a mullet.
I can’t argue with Scott for more than ten minutes before I want to punch a hole in the wall but he really isn’t a bad guy.
trevoresque
/ April 20, 2012Blasphemy! The one true mullet is Bono’s 1985 masterpiece. Like a lion’s mane, flowing free in the Celtic wind. Untamed. Eternal.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ April 20, 2012So, how are we defining ‘bad guy’ here?
saajanpatel
/ April 20, 2012Not sure. How do we define “good” – probably a spectrum where we judge people on different factors?
Clearly Vox is bad, that’s a start.
layclaim
/ April 22, 2012Okay. I got here from a link on Bakker’s blog. I have to admit, the fact that this discussion exists in such numbers is suprising.
The essay about Bakker’s love of rape alwasy throws me off. When what is happening is worse, and believe me it is ALWAYS WORSE, I can’t understand complaining about it. It’s an interpretive duck-hunts, and once it begins I find myself disagreeing more and more.
You picked up this book, and probably all the other books you’ve read, looking for a handful of things you could interpret to give youself something to write about.
Bakker is not a mysogynist. I know what those look like and he’s definitely not one of them.
Ask his wife.
acrackedmoon
/ April 22, 2012Not the brightest bulb, eh.
the twisted spinster
/ April 23, 2012Misogynists have a special “look”? Really? Like, they have an extra nose, or they wear uniforms or something? Please educate me, sir, on how misogynists “look” so that you “know what those look like.”
You know what gets to me? The fact that being married to a woman is supposed to absolve a man of misogyny. “Ask his wife. He’s so nice to her! He hasn’t killed her or even hit her and he hardly ever sneers at her opinions and he makes sure she’s out shopping or something — women and their shopping, heh! — before looking at internet porn.” I would really like people who think like this to go play in traffic.
Nate Manella
/ April 22, 2012I’m not entirely sure which is more turgid and unreadable, the Bakker segments or the commentary of the writer of this blog.
Peter Davies
/ July 30, 2012I have spent a long time wondering whether there was anyone else who disliked Neuropath as much as I did. Prayers: answered. Thanks muchly.
californiasunshine111
/ March 21, 2013It also really bothers me that this book pretends people need radical emotional alteration to be capable of choosing oil rights over starving venezualans- as if the problem with the world is a surefeit of ethical people who can’t prioritize there personal/national interests over others.
vaiyt
/ March 22, 2013Maybe RSB is just writing what he knows – as a fuckwad with no concept of ethics or empathy, he’s projecting his moral bankruptcy on all characters he writes.