Links, man, links. The first is from Keep Your Bridges Burning, a critique of The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, that punching bag which everyone should join in punching until it’s bloody. Neil Gaiman is basically like Joss Whedon: a rich white straight man everyone praises as the champion of minorities, but who’s actually racist and pretty sexist, and also:
Like, in this one, I remember the character Judy- who appears in the deeply problematic 24 Hours section- to be pretty sympathetic, and actually kind of a fashion root. But on re-reading this comic today and yesterday, she actually is kind of a paper-thin dyke stereotype dressed up as something more complicated, who is immediately killed off. She hits her girlfriend and then dies.
YES THANK YOU
Fatihah Iman wrote a really rad post about the Bechdel Paradise of a Muslim woman’s life.
When I am older, my network of female friends will become my Auntie Network. Grown Muslim men live in awe of the power of the Auntie Network, and I have never met an Arab or Muslim woman who didn’t have one – a vast, highly organised web of female friends to whom she turns whenever she has a need, great or small.
This is the strength of Muslim women. It’s a strength deeply rooted in collectivism, based not on the power of the individual but the combined power of a group working as one. It’s a strength built on the ability to call for backup at a moment’s notice, and THAT is rooted in a female-only social environment that nurtures and strengthens intimate friendships between women. Missing that out of a novel about Muslim women is hugely dis-empowering, because it erases a major source of our power.
More people have weighed in on the Bakker thing: Foz Meadows and Larry. Yes, Bakker himself showed up for both firing squads and brought his fanboys. Naturally. Bakker also makes a bid for pity by using his daughter as a velcro vest. It isn’t very effective.
4) Do you think I have deserved the demeaning, in some cases, dehumanizing, things that have been said of me? What should I tell my daughter when she reads strangers telling me I should die, that I’m more worthless than excrement, and so on and so forth?
One might wonder just why he might let his daughter know about all this. Is it some kind of dinner conversation piece? “Family, Internet strangers have said mean things about yours truly! WHAT IS TO BE DONE?”
Dear Author reviews are generally pretty staid, but they’ve got this one up for some astounding thing, a novel with moments like:
“The pleasure’s all mine, beautiful.” It was easy to see that the sweet talk and silver tongue was a family trait.
Jacob bristled, even though he knew his brother didn’t mean anything by the endearment. “Do I need to say ‘Tag’?” Jacob growled, irritably. “Tag” had always been the code word that the McCoy brothers used to alert the others that a particular female had been honed in on and weeded out of the herd for his own personal delectation.
She also reviewed the first book of the same series.
Lots of people have been reviewing Sheri Tepper’s Waters Rising, the Talking Horse novel. With the tentacle hentai or something and this moment:
“Oh, mares,” said Blue**, shaking his head. “They always have to be whinnied into it. Or . . . subdued.”
“Why, Blue,” cried Abasio in an outraged voice. “That’s rape.”
Blue snorted. “I have long observed that human people do not care what they do in front of livestock, and believe me, what some humans do during mating makes horses look absolutely . . . gentle by comparison.” He stalked away and stood, front legs crossed, nose up, facing the sea.
“Isn’t Abasio your friend?” the Sea King asked him.
“Friends do not call their friends rapists,” said the horse without turning around.
What the fuck.
Sam Kelly
/ May 5, 2012Why did I never realise before that Dream of the Endless’s art direction was basically “look, you’ve met me, OK? Imagine I was really pale & interesting. Now draw that.” I still like Sandman, in a Problematic Things kind of way, but then that goes for a lot of things you hate. P&N is very definitely the most bad, and “24 Hours” is the story I always skip on re-reading.
jwilliamcarroll
/ May 6, 2012If I were R Scott Bakker I’d be more worried about what my daughter would think of me after she read one of my books…
acrackedmoon
/ May 6, 2012I can’t stop cringing at the idea of him subjecting his daughter to his books.
kazei5
/ May 6, 2012I’m not sure what’s worse… Scott Bakker or his fans who came out to defend him. I think all one has to do these days is just mention his name and he’ll appear like Candyman.
Ginmar Rienne
/ May 8, 2012I just had some patronizing little fanboy tell me—pat pat on your little head, girlie—-that it wasn’t sexist to call a woman irrational if she was being unreasonable, any more than it was unreasonable to call Iraqis terrorists.
I made a lot of friends in Iraq and gained a perspective on Islam and the Middle East that has probably put me on several watch lists. And this asshole happens to hit me with that bullshit. Unbe-fucking-lievable. Bakker’s ideology is bullshit to begin with—-”Oh, well, rape is hard wired, and feminism gives women stupid expectations, so let me just perform good deeds for men only while I show them in great and pornographic detail that rape is bad and learn women to adjust their standards downward”—–but his fanboys take the beshitted fuckery to septic tank explosion levels.
Yeah, some ally. Anybody who can’t grasp that rape is wrong at this point is not reachable. The fact that that dipshit can’t see it’s wrong to tell women how to think and how he’s doing it for our own good is just….ARGH.
kazei5
/ May 8, 2012It’s hrorible to even think that, that rape and victimization is somehow normal and jsut a part of life is what gets me the most. It’s WRONG. W-R-O-N-G, wrong! And you can shout it out from the rooftops all the live long day but pricks like him and his ilk won’t believe it and will shout back psychological evolutionary BS back at you. There’s simply no debating with them, and it’s that kind of attitude that keeps the rape culture we live in alive and well. Hell, look at the protesters who gather in front of abortion clinics to shame, bully, and mislead women.
Good lord, it sickens me to even contemplate the idea that I am hard-wired to rape women. It’s compeltely on a different level from saying that we all have the capacity for good and evil, because it’s saying it’s inevitable.
Well, I am not a rapists, women are not victims, and Scott Bakker is NOT an ally or feminist or anything resembling a decent human being. I hope that his daughter somehow manages not to grow up with the emotional packaging her father seems to want us all to have.
Athena Andreadis
/ May 7, 2012To kazei5: they’re so alike in content and style that I wonder if one or more is a Bakker sock puppet (a tactic he has employed elsewhere) or whether it’s a universal outcome that if you gaze at your navel long and lovingly enough, the lint eventually clogs your brain.
braak
/ May 7, 2012Oh, well you know, he’s a philosophy teacher at a university, isn’t he? I wonder if maybe he’s just got a bunch of kids who’re primed with his assorted theories, and so when they show up they’re using the language that he’s already provided them with.
Athena Andreadis
/ May 8, 2012He didn’t finish his PhD, so it’s unlikely he teaches at a university unless he’s an adjunct.
braak
/ May 8, 2012This is possible, though; didn’t he dedicate Neuropath to “his students”?
Unless maybe he has his own secret academy/cult somewhere.
jwilliamcarroll
/ May 8, 2012As a published novelist they probably let him teach English classes in lieu of the academic credentials.
Ginmar Rienne
/ May 8, 2012God, warping young minds….I’m sure he’s a treat for his female students.