DISCLAIMER: This round-table cannot be considered sexist to men, because as you can see, many of the participants are men. CHECKMATE.

@requireshate Testeria: when testicles unmoor to grip the brainstem, prompting patient to spout evo-psych claptrap and join men’s rights movements.

@requireshate Testerical: what happens when fauxgressive neckbeards or men’s rights advocates speak. (Sometimes the two are one and the same.)

@Eithin adj. overblown displays of performance bile and/or sadness elicited by mild criticism from women.

@ian_sales testeria: n. frenzied bleating by males over perceived attacks to their gender privilege; v. to protest wildly when criticised on issues of male privilege

@ian_sales Rothfustian: n. something you can read only with a mounting sense of horror and moral outrage

@esedia: Peniscule: an exceedingly narrow worldview defined by unrecognized privilege.

@esedia: Phallacy: an argument based on refusal to admit patriarchy exists.

@Paul_C_Smith Book proposal: The White Man’s Fear – Farmboy of destiny has to brave scary [POC] and opinionated women.

@ian_sales Bakkerism: n. repeated and ineffectual defence of an indefensible moral position

@lazcorp I’m looking forward to dismissing sexist idiots by telling them that they’re “just being testerical” ;)

@dedbutdrmng Testocular: A device used to see the world as if you worked for a lads mag.

@ian_sales spermacific: adj. relating to anything particular to a male worldview

@Eithin Semenal adj. important text in the male canon.

@ian_sales cockgitation: n. an attempt at an intellectual repsonse to criticism of male privilege

@ian_sales Bakker’s Cat; if you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison and a radioactive substance, when you open the box, there’ll still be rape in his novels

Iono, lesbian queen of a lesbian utopia, has a problem. Her problem? Why, she likes lots and lots of girls. Delicious black-haired girls. Her present harem, numbering in the thousand, of cute girls doesn’t suffice. The solution is obvious: she must journey to Japan and pick up all the girls!

I love this thing. It’s cute and light-hearted, fluffy, though I do feel sadly let down that the author is a man–the idea that something so positive and sweet and lovely is by a woman (or better yet, a queer woman) has infinitely greater appeal. But, well, I will take what I can get. And what’s to be gotten here is excellent and happy-making.

There are basically no men in this story. Apart from on two pages maybe, and walk-on parts. It’s the story of how Iono meets Eto, a Japanese girl, and convinces her to become Iono’s sobame (lady-in-waiting slash concubine, and considering Iono’s insatiable appetite, it’s mostly concubine). What ensues is hilarity and hijinks, and there isn’t a lot to talk about, but there’s plenty of cute to go “yay!” over. There’s some implied sex, but nothing graphic, and there’s nothing that skeeved me out.

Yep, that’s how man-free a story it is: they reproduce through the power of science (and presumably using some artificial incubator). Iono’s harem grows to become 50,000 strong and counting, but in actuality many of the women just pair off–as seen here–and some go on to have kids.

This bit is the only part where men show up, and it’s to be buttmad that Iono stole all the girls, grrr. One page later a famous assassin in Iono’s employ shows up, they promptly recognize who she is, and run the fuck away. Awwww.

As you can see, it’s fluff, cute, funny and doesn’t have much in ways of substance. No, it doesn’t deal with homophobia because Iono’s country is a lesbian utopia and she is the queen. But I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that works like this exist. It’s okay and wonderful and beautiful that stories can just be gay and affirming and positive. It’s so much okay, it’s necessary and welcome when the majority of the time lesbians are either invisible or being correctively raped as part of a cultural narrative.

My day was made better for having read it and I so much wish I’d overcome my internalized homophobia and read yuri when I was young.

You will have heard of the Bakker brouhaha, if you are here. Let’s have a chronology:

• Requires Only That You Hate – R. Scott Bakker: Prince of Misogyny – dated 16 August 2011
• R. Scott Bakker – Sweet Manna - dated 16 August 2011
• R. Scott Bakker - Misanthropology 101 – dated 1 February 2012
• R. Scott Bakker - Requires Only Haidt – dated 6 February 2012
• R. Scott Bakker - The Halftime Show – dated 10 February 2012
• R. Scott Bakker - That Empty Place – dated 16 February 2012
• Peter Watts – In Vicarious Defense of R. Scott Bakker – dated 16 February 2012
• R. Scott Bakker – Um, does anybody got a mint? – dated 18 February 2012
  

You may be thinking I’ve willfully obscured something. Surely, surely no grown adult man could go on about that one post from August 2011… six months later? Surely not? I must have consistently attacked him! Blogged about him! Many times! Perhaps I may even have personally harassed him! Such is the way of bitchy, angry feminists: we hound offensive men to the end of the earth. So much so that their sales figures suffer and their family goes poor. (For your perusal and pleasure, try this bit of flash fiction by Elodie.)

Alas, no. I made but that one post. Ever after any mention of Bakker on this blog has been peripheral, because I didn’t care about him all that much, and wouldn’t especially want to read his books. But there it is: Bakker stewed over this, apparently, for six entire months. Peter Watts, who is a magical friend of Bakker’s, proceeded to call me “a rabid animal.” Something which even a person who finds me “toxic” recognizes as a loaded term. Not that Peter Watts would admit there’s any problem with him saying that because even if I’d been a fellow nerdy white boy he’d have called me the same, though even after having been told I’m a woman of color it did not stop him from graduating to “foul, rabid animal” which tells you all you need to know. You can go through the rest of that exchange, but I’m more interested in the larger picture of this. Which is: why is it that these people are so deathly afraid of being called sexist, racist, or any such thing… to that froth-at-the-mouth point where they go on to compound the offense by actively being sexist or racist?

R. Scott Bakker would have you believe–

if you actually give a damn about people, then you need to be careful about accusing them of being sexist or racist, because, as a simple matter of fact, you could do real damage and you could be wrong.

“What about me,” Bakker growls. “What about the men, the white men.” Not to be outdone Peter Watts joins in to shriek, “Character assassination!” Jay Lake will be right there crying that he’s been made unwelcome and threatened at WisCon. Let’s set aside for the moment that Bakker, Watts, and Lake have all been genuinely sexist (and for Watts and Lake, racist) to the extent that crying about “false” accusations is a little too late…. it might behoove one to wonder: what real damage could you do? Roman Polanski hasn’t exactly has his life ruined–and that’s for an actual rapist! How about Julian Assange and the rape charges? Has anyone ever seen a white man’s career ruined simply because he’s been accused of sexism or racism… let alone because he has been a sexist, racist fuck? Anyone? Bueller? Orson Scott Card’s and John C. Wright’s books are still selling, aren’t they? Jay Lake is still getting published, isn’t he?

This is a lot of flailing and whining and overreacting to things that can’t, and won’t, affect their careers. It’s classic white men’s tears, and they are all screaming for smelling salts while clutching pearls to their splotchy, wrinkly white bosoms.

Peter Watts started becoming defensive around here after I asked him why he let a comment about “rape card” stand unchallenged. Having evidently read that as an implication that I believe he condones rape (??), he turned testerical (for more on “testeria” and “testerical” please look here):

As for my attitudes (and presumed implicit approval towards) sexual violence (at least, the nonconsensual kind), I’m painfully aware that I can’t speak to what that experience means to anyone who suffers it. [...] I’ve since had a variety of friends and lovers who’ve had various forms of abuse in their past. On a more dispassionate note, I was involved for a while with the manager of the domestic violence lab at UBC, and got a whole whack of horrific data via that avenue. I know that in all likelihood, I’ll never know first-hand what any of that is like, and I don’t pretend to: but before you show the temerity to suggest that I take a light view of sexual abuse, you might want to learn what the fuck you’re talking about first.

By this point our nerdy white boy is no longer half as cool-headed as he’d like to think. Not, again, that anyone ever suggested that he takes a light view of sexual abuse, but isn’t it telling how riled up he becomes at an imaginary suggestion? So much so that he ends up using the fact of having known abuse survivors to bolster his cred. Completely unnecessarily, even, seeing that nobody was suggesting he was taking a light view of anything (except perhaps being an asshole).

It reeks of such deep insecurity. They are so scared of being called sexist, racist, or the like. So much so that they plow right ahead and behave in ways that are indisputably sexist, or racist, or both. They aren’t interested in not being sexist or racist–they’re just angry and anxious when someone calls them out on their -ism, because that’s the worst thing in the world, and appearances of being a good person are far more important than actually being a good person, after all. This is why Bakker stewed for six months. This is why Peter Watts is absolutely losing his shit. This is tears, tears, tears, flooding all the blogs, clogging up all the comment threads, derailing so far off the track we’re back where we started.

Moon, you do not know this blog, so I’ll fill you in: on this blog, at least one person went so far as to express eager anticipation over my imminent ass-raping while in jail. I let that comment stand, even though that person had been banned on pretty much every other forum he stuck their head up at; not because I agreed with him, but because I did not want to play the censor even when I was the one getting shat upon (and I got shat upon a lot, in those days). [...]  I err on the side of free speech, however repellent I may find it personally. I called you on “rabid animal” because you’d called me on it, but I didn’t censor your words.

Here’s one of those things neckbeards like to whine about (as Peter Watts himself, of course, has): censorship, denial of free speech. Specifically, said two things as they occur to them. Like how I either delete, edit, or respond with vitriol and ridicule to clueless comments on this blog.

What Watts doesn’t get is that the offensive shit is not actually “personally repellent” to him. It’s easy for straight white men to be gung-ho about freedom of speech and the idea that everyone should have equal chances to air their views: racism, misogyny, homophobia, all the -isms, even sexual threats are not real to them. They are not things that will ever happen to them. This, my friends, is how privilege functions. It shelters you. It protects you in a wonderful little bubble where you need never fear certain things because they don’t affect you, don’t actively and constantly impact your life, your job, your interactions with people, the way you navigate language and culture. Watts’ and Bakker’s posturing–that by allowing all comments on their blogs through they are in some way morally superior–amounts to nothing more than a rich man tearing up banknotes in front of those with less than he. There’s no ethics or moral integrity involved.

Let us sit down and together read this post from s. e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: Curating Safe(r) Spaces In Comments. Sady Doyle’s Professor Feminism and the Deleted Comments of Doom is a fine supplement too, as well as Flavia’s The troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable.

Addendum: Through a combination of dropping certain information, Peter Watts has outed an abuse survivor to total strangers on a non-private, non-confidential channel. There is not enough “lord cocks this is so so so repulsive.” What the fuck was he thinking. Oh, that’s right. Railing against an imaginary accusation that he condones rape and using another person to bolster his “I’m not sexist!” cred. Yes, this was done without obtaining express consent.

Oh, just for spice, we have the usual questioning of identity too. Especially this:

Get down off your high horse, ACM is a privileged woman from a privileged background (a Thai Chinese!) who speaks a very good English and is completely steeped in North American culture in a country where only 10% of the population speaks any English at all, who has access to Internet in a country where only a quarter of the population has any kind of connection and apparently has a lot of free time she can spend reading fantasy books and maintaining a constant Internet presence.

According to an ignorant fuckwad from the west, all Chinese-Thai are super-privileged, by which they really mean “those uppity elitist racist Thais won’t grovel before Mighty Whitey!”, a commonly voiced sentiment among the white expat population in Thailand. This ties into and proves my old, old post on this quite neatly, to wit:

It, as well, couples with the idea that the average citizen of a developing nation must live in conditions so dire that a third-worlder who appears on the Internet, let alone appears to blog, must be:

1. an imposter
2. one of the very elite (because the middle class doesn’t exist and that the Internet is a rare and precious luxury across all developing countries)
3. an outsider looking in and/or honorary westerner (real third-worlders don’t speak English so well!)

[...]

What this boils down to is an Oppression Olympics where the privileged party, in this case the first-world Social Justice Warrior, always wins. Do you not languish in your own excrement? Then you are not worth listening to, because you aren’t one of the real oppressed. Do you languish in your own excrement, haven’t the opportunity to speak about your experiences (except through privilege-filtered documentaries run by westerners), can’t speak English well? Very good! You’re a proper victim. Whom a first-world audience doesn’t have to hear, doesn’t have to listen to because you don’t have a voice–and speak a language–they can understand. Ideally, of course, these Minority Warriors may have done volunteer work in a developing nation, but you and I know perfectly well they are little more than armchair activists whose greatest goal in social justice-related messages is to thump their chests and impress the Internet at large with the blazing light of their progressiveness. They drown out the voices of minorities with obnoxious faux-outrage while revoking the minorities’ right to speak, based on arbitrary, nonsensical standards set by themselves and other Warriors.

A well-known and popular tactic, documented by Derailing for Dummies.

Except in this case the other party doesn’t even pretend to be about social justice in any way (though they certainly do claim to be oppressed as white men!): they are just shitstains, assured and secure in the idea that they and they alone are the greatest judge of authenticity. They know all about how a Thai woman would be like, oh yes, and what she should talk about, how she would behave. The fact that my blog isn’t one-half a “Minority Nanny’s Guide to Southeast Asian Socio-Political Climate” is, evidently, proof that I am inauthentic. It rides on the expectations that, as a person from a developing nation, I have the obligation to teach them about my culture, my country, and what being in this country is like–they want a view in from the outside: in short, they expect me to blog like a white expat living here, or possibly a travelogue written by a western backpacker who spent one week here, focusing on all the exotic details, all the weird customs. They want things that would confirm all the stuff written by John Burdett and Stephen Leather. They want a thrill, not someone castigating them for their white privilege. Which is apparently not important in my part of the world, you know. Why, I should be talking about–I don’t know–hookers, temples, and Buddhism perhaps? “Class, gender, ethnicity and religion” being more important than anything, because if there’s anyone who knows best how a Thai woman ought to prioritize issues, it’s a sheltered, straight white boy from the west. I should also, incidentally, educate them nicely and hold their hands through an exciting adventure in exoticism.

It’s nice and colonialist and, of course, quite racist–the assumption that they, white westerners, know more about me (or indeed my country) than I do. Hence people like Pat insisting I must never have set foot in Thailand, and must be some white nerdy dude and… eh, after a point it’s hard to make out the gibberish, really. They don’t speak Human, you know? It must be all that privilege softening them up to the point where they decided they no longer required the brain, had it removed, and spent all their time gazing lovingly into a jar of curlies.

Venturing across the swift-running river in tiny boats, the dragon scholar Alise and a handful of keepers discover a world far different from anything they have ever known or imagined. Immense, ornate structures of black stone veined with silver and lifelike stone statues line the silent, eerily empty streets. Yet what are the whispers they hear, the shadows of voices and bursts of light that flutter and are gone? And why do they feel as if eyes are watching them?

The dragons must plumb the depths of their ancestral memories to help them take flight and unlock the secrets buried in Kelsingra. But enemies driven by greed and dark desires are approaching. Time is running out, not only for the dragons but for their human keepers as well.

It’s telling that the Amazon product description of this thing is so long–and that’s after I trimmed chunks out of it. This is an epic doorstopper fantasy novel in the most traditional sense and, like the overwhelming majority of epic doorstopper fantasy novels starting from Tolkien, this is a book bloated with padding, a book that goes on for too damn long, and a book of middling to mediocre prose. As you can probably guess, I don’t bother with epic fantasy anymore; in short, if I hadn’t read the previous books in this series, the chances of me picking up this one would have been in the region of “absolute subzero.” But having said that, it’s still a far more interesting book and better read than the majority of epic fantasy out there: far preferable, certainly, than R. Scott Bakker’s “I Express My Feminism With Rape” series or Martin’s “Ye Olde Mighty Whitey” and the like.

It’s not, exactly, that this is a bad book. It’s an easy read, something you can breeze through really fast despite the length (or thickness, if you’ve got a physical copy) especially if you skip huge chunks of needless descriptions and padding, which I can only strongly recommend that everyone does.

It picks up where Dragon Haven left off (which is puzzling because, in a way, Haven‘s ending could have been read as fairly conclusive–but not, then again, conclusive enough for epic fantasy readers), except it piles on more plot threads and more characters. At this point your reading experience will hinge entirely on whether you give a shit about said characters, and whether you can be motivated to continue giving a shit, which can be something of a feat seeing that the best of the lot (and to say that is to say little), Thymara and Alise, have already surmounted all their emotional challenges and are now dealing mostly with external factors. Whereas the previous two books had more-or-less okay pacing, with characters having to deal with both internal and external factors (interpersonal drama and the physical ordeal of the Rain Wilds), City of Dragons shaves off the former and leaves us with the dullest of the latter: the characters complain about rain and chill a lot. I’m not being hyperbolic–that’s pretty much all anyone does for most of the novel. Rain, rain, rain. It could drive one to throwing the book at the nearest wall. It’s especially unfortunate seeing that Hobb’s forte has always been in the interpersonal drama, the domestic tension, the development of characters.

Whereas the previous books stood decently on their own, City of Dragons has the kind of pacing that can be most charitably described as desperately incompetent. There are a lot of plot threads: the dragons struggling to fly and feed themselves (a point of contention that’s informed both previous books, and must yet be dragged out for this one and the next), the mysteries of the Elderling city Kelsingra (explored through Alise’s documenting attempts and Thymara’s exploration with one of her sorta-romantic interests Rapskal), the threat of the Duke of Chalced seeking dragon parts to prolong his life and cure his ills, Rain Wilds/Bingtown/etc politics, and finally an upcoming feminist revolution in Chalced. Puzzlingly there is also a subplot about Selden who’s been kidnapped and… I’m not sure why it’s even there, seeing that it serves nothing and every scene we see associated with it consists of precisely the same matter repeated over and over: Selden is miserable, held captive, and tries to make himself understood. It’s in fact the same scene copy-pasted about… three to five times?

Anyway.

When I finished the book, I was startled: as I said, the pacing is incompetent such that there is no pace as such. City of Dragons halts abruptly, having developed no momentum, having resolved nothing, and having in a word run out of pages. Which it should not have, seeing that Hobb spent so much time and attention to needless details and bloat: had she cut those out, removed the silly Selden scenes, and generally done away with the padding we might well have had City as the concluding volume of a trilogy, instead of a dreadful waffling middle-book that goes nowhere and does nothing. I’d have loved to read about the feminist revolution by the way–a princess who’s murdered all her husbands and inciting women throughout her country to rise up and take vengeance on the men through poetry!–but by the time we get a secondhand account of its beginning, we’re at the end and there aren’t any more pages. Terrible.

I will have to add, moreover, that not only is the padding unnecessary, it’s written with such power of description that after everything I still have no real idea what Kelsingra looks like. Its mysteries and magic are not discovered; rather they are explained by Rapskal who’s explored them, become an expository machine, and spends most of the text trying to tell everyone what he knows (and what he knows isn’t passed on sooner only because people aren’t willing to listen). Because there is no longer any interpersonal tension at least 80% of the dialogue is useless exchanges between people in love doing nothing for character development/plot advancement, tending toward cutesy saccharineness that begs your tooth to fall out and your gullet to retch up a gob of projectile vomit. The bizarre obsession with pairing up everyone off continues: Hobb can’t even let her minor characters alone, even the birdkeepers responsible for the missives preceding each chapter (which I skip by the way) end up married, almost as though Hobb doesn’t believe anyone can be happy without a lover or better yet a spouse (relationships in this series don’t seem validated until marriage happens). Slut-shaming, naturally, goes on as usual–

Jerd was lovely, with her fair hair and piercing eyes and lithe body. She had chosen which keepers she wished to bed, and then picked them off one at a time like a cat at a mouse nest and with as little compunction about the outcome of her appetite. Even when some of the youths came to blows over her, she seemed to accept it as her due. Thymara had been torn between envy for the freedom Jerd had claimed and fury at the swath of emotional discord she cut through the company.

It was strange to think that Thymara had taken a lesson from [Jerd's miscarriage], but Jerd had seemed unaffected by it. Thymara had refrained from sharing her body with any of the keepers, while Jerd continued to take her pleasure wherever she pleased.

God forbid a woman doesn’t give a shit that her fetus didn’t live, I guess. Fortunately, the novel’s dominated by women’s stories and there are attempts all around to understand each other: Malta empathizing with Tillamon’s mutation (Malta’s makes her pretty, Tillamon’s makes her an object of disgust), the issue of Thymara coming to terms with having sex (and how that doesn’t entitle anyone to her more than she is willing to give), Thymara trying to grasp that her mother’s apparent hatred for her–

“I think . . . well, I’m not sure she hated you. I think maybe the neighbors made her ashamed of wanting to love you. But even if she did hate you, she never left you. Or threw you out.” He sounded almost stubborn in his insistence.
“Except that first time when she gave me to the midwife to expose,” Thymara pointed out bitterly. “My father was the one who brought me back and said he was going to give me a chance. He forced me on her.”
Tats was unconvinced. “And I think that’s what really shamed her. Not what you were but that she hadn’t stood up to the midwife and said she was keeping you, claws and all.”

–which is nice, though I’m not sure why it takes a boy to explain that to her. Still, I liked this:

When you decided to be with Jerd, did you stop to wonder what Thymara would think of it? Or Rapskal or Warken? Or anyone?”
A bemused smile twisted Tats’s mouth. “When I ‘decided’ to be with Jerd. Hah.” Despite his misery, the memory lit his face with a smile. “I don’t remember deciding anything that night. Or thinking at all.”
“Well, perhaps for Thymara . . .”
The smile faded abruptly from his face. “But she’s a girl. Girls do think about those things. Don’t they?”

And this:

“Yes.” Tats was animated now and perhaps angry. “And I can’t stand thinking about them together, and I can’t stop thinking about it. How can she do that to me? I mean, couldn’t she have told me about it, warned me, or given me a chance to do better before she chose him, or, or something?”

Carson glanced over at Sedric and then back at the boy. “Sometimes things aren’t all that planned. They just happen. And, well, you’re talking as if her being with him, if she is with him, is something that she’s doing to you. Now I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but chances are that you didn’t figure at all in her decision. 

Quite. Tats is very bitter that “She had given herself to Rapskal. All the years they had known each other, the accumulated closeness of friendship, and his desperate courtship of her in the last few months, it had all meant nothing to her. She had chosen Rapskal over him.” But it’s balanced out by Carson’s lecture which points out that what Thymara does has nothing to do with him; a boy isn’t entitled to sex just because he’s flattered her with “desperate courtship” or even “all the years they had known each other.” The iffiness of constant slut-shaming directed at Jerd aside, this is a great point that needs to be made.

So, yes, I will be reading the next one when it comes out, though I very much hope that Chalced doesn’t turn out to be an analogue for “brown Middle-Easterners” (right now they oppress women and use scimitars, so uh…).  Onward and upward with a feminist uprising and, hopefully, a lot of dead men. And less bloat.

I’m rarely this disappointed with a manga.

So, Shitsurakuen is essentially Utena with some elements of shounen action thrown in. There’s an Utena, an Anthy, an Akio; there’s a student council; there’s the duels and the pulling of weapons from girls’ chests; there’s even a fairytale motif. It’s not very subtle in what it does, and yet there are moments of striking understanding that are nuanced and mature in its delivery of internalized oppression, the way girls can be strong in different but equally valid ways, the way girls can help other girls in a setting so viciously misogynistic.

And then it all falls apart.

The premise goes: at Utopia Academy, school dynamics and politics are controlled by a virtual reality game called Exaclan. This game is set up by the ultra-rich corporation/family that runs the school as a ground for raging misogyny, patriarchy writ large–all the players of the games are male, all the weapons are girls, and male students combat each other using weapons they draw out of the girls’ chests. While a Rose Bride girl is “owned” by a male student he is free to do anything he wants to her, including rape and severe physical assault, though no other male student may touch an “owned” girl without being penalized. Enter Sora, a transfer student who aspires to be a “knight of justice” who protects all the princesses.

You may have heard this before.

Sora soon finds herself with a rose signet dueling glove that allows her to participate in Exaclan. Thus begins her quest to save the female population of Utopia Academy and destroy the patriarchy. Her first battle has her pulling a lightsaber out of a girl.

It isn’t, of course, especially subtle. The male students barring a select handful are all ragingly abusive assholes who are always calling girls “bitch” and if not beating them up then trying to rape them–even Sora, or perhaps especially Sora, is subjected to this: as the sole female participant of Exaclan she is targeted more harshly than anyone. Sora herself isn’t the brightest crayon in the box and fills the role usually taken by a shounen hero–she’s endlessly perky, brave, and gets by through sheer pluck and inspiring others to believe in her. Needless to say, as she wins duels and obtains girl weapons, she develops around herself quite the harem of adoring girls. By which I mean lesbians. Yes.

The gender dynamics are not precisely nuanced. Men are abusers; women are victims. Yet it’s alleviated when you come to the point where Reiko shows up and you learn that she’s going along with the system in an effort to climb the ranks, gain power, and undo it from within. You learn from a younger student that there was another girl who tried to do what Sora is doing before, only she failed and was sent away. It’s not exactly that Sora is the special chosen one (though she… kind of is, but in a different way than you’d expect) and no other girl has ever thought of fighting back before, but the success rate of the ones who have tried has been so abysmal (i.e. zero)–and the consequences dealt to them so bitterly harsh–that the rest of the female student body doesn’t try anymore. They know they’re in a shit place, but to step out of line will make their lot even more terrible: a point Tomoko, the third girl Sora liberates from a male student, drives home when she pleads to be released from Sora’s “ownership”–she knows that to be tied to Sora will make her a target, and she’d rather keep to what she knows: the kind of abuse she’s gotten used to from one single male instead of a whole crowd. As Tsuki explains it–

So bleak, and yet in many ways, believable. Of course some suspension of disbelief is required in that you might wonder why the girls don’t phone home and get their parents to take them the fuck out of there. There’s some handwaving to do with that, like “the corporation is too powerful” and blah blah, but it’s not terribly well thought-out.

For the first eighteen chapters or so, it’s mostly really good. I cheered every time Sora kicks, punches, or shoots a male student in the face. (Yes, she often goes for the face.) There are moments where it falls down and the Akio figure shows up to rescue Sora while scheming, seemingly, against her. But mostly, it’s about the girls doing the best they can in an environment so hostile, trying to survive, and for the girls who have joined Sora, trying to give others courage to break free.

Then it all goes to fucking hell and I wanted to kill something.

I’m not sure how much I want to spoil but… seeing that ultimately I can’t recommend Shitsurakuen anyway, I suppose I might as well. So, the Exaclan game turns out to be some kind of experiment to… uhm… I’m not sure actually. It pulls an R. Scott Bakker, I guess. Anyway basically it’s all the fault of a psychotic little girl, and there’s shit about how the system VICTIMIZES THE MEN TOO WAHHH, and god don’t Sora and her harem understand HOW THE BOYS FEEL being forced to abuse all these girls! It’s the most amazingly ginormous helping of “what about the mens” derailment I’ve ever seen.

And then we are told that hey, the guys who have been treating the girls like shit? The ones who have been viciously assaulting, raping, trying to rape, and otherwise beat them up so bad they have to be hospitalized? WELL THEY ARE REALLY DECENT PEOPLE DEEP DOWN. All are forgiven and one of the girls apologizes to her abuser toward the end. Not only that, but all the girls are the ones who initiate the reconciliation. Like they have something to be sorry for–oh, that’s right. The awfulness of thinking these abusive assholes were the villains! My goodness how very dare they. They should have tried to empathize with the guys who raped/tried to rape them, okay?

Fuck.

By that point of the manga I was starting to think that the author must be a man, even though previous handling on internalized oppression made me believe otherwise–but then again, said handling was never particularly subtle. Insult to injury? Many of the girls pair off with boys romantically. Oh my god fuck no, projectile vomit. Admittedly one of the pairs is between the girl who tried to change the system from the inside and a guy who throughout the manga was never abusive toward anyone, but still. You could argue that most of the girls in Sora’s harem were never in love with her but had a case of hero worship, but what you end up with is a very problematic conclusion where the yuri harem breaks up and most of the girls pair off with boys: even Sora winds up, albeit possibly platonically, with a boy in the last panel. Female homosexuality is once again invalidated, passed off as a phase, and the gay girls are returned to the comforting grounds of heteronormativity.

There’s a special final chapter that got tacked on where Sora and her childhood friend Tsuki get together, and it’s all very sweet and awesome, and cute–matching rings! the best girl-kiss! UTOPIA IS HERE–but keeping in mind that Tsuki was the psychotic little girl who was responsible for Exaclan, for establishing the misogynistic system (“so Sora will only look at girls and rescue only princesses”), I’m not sure it can even be thought of as a happy ending. Of course this is also a manga where girls apologizing to and getting together with their abusers is portrayed as happy endings too; at least Tsuki and Sora never abused each other, so… yay? Uh, apart from Tsuki scratching that scar onto Sora’s forehead. But at least she didn’t try to rape Sora!

Jesus.

Click to enlarge. Pages are left to right, panels right to left.

I’m honestly willing to love these pages (and the preceding ones), which should tell you a lot considering that these two never really resolved their problems–of Tsuki’s unhealthy need to emotionally monopolize Sora (to the point that she made Exaclan the way it was, and stabbed a guy in the eye as a little girl), of the emotional manipulation Tsuki committed to Sora, of Tsuki keeping so many fucking crucial secrets from Sora. But we’re meant to think Tsuki got better, I guess. So yeah. Final pages are amazingly adorable, hooray, people who want to see lesbian visibility must take what we can get, huzzah.

Fuck.

From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

I first read this book a long time ago, but couldn’t fully appreciate it then; rereading it now older and with a more grown-up perspective, the book has only gained in resonance. And more than ever before I now understand just how thoroughly wonderful and excellent Angela Carter’s language is.

Let me complain first that I’m growing bored with retellings with origins in Greek, Grimm’s, Arthuriana, Andersen’s, Celtic, and similar folklore. In short, if it’s Western Euro- or Anglo- I’m less and less likely to have time for it. If it’s a retelling of something very well-known–no more “Snow White” or “Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella”, please!–it’s doubly likely that I will give it a pass. If it’s a retelling based on nothing more than the simple idea of “girl rescues boy!!” or “princess puts on armor and sword” it’s… nice, but it’s really not that interesting to be honest, nor especially nuanced. Not least because “girl rescues boy” (i.e. a woman’s entire life revolves around her man) has been done before anyway by extremely regressive chauvinists: what else is Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” if not that, what else is the story of Luthien and Beren? Like, yes, feminist retellings good, but better nuances? Also good.

Which is to say, Angela Carter is pretty good.

The titular story “The Bloody Chamber” is a retelling of “Bluebeard” and a fine introduction to Carter’s prose.

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

It’s not an especially complicated story: an innocent young woman marries a creepy, older man of hideous wealth who brings her to live with him in an islet chateau, where he hides a dark secret, a door which he forbids his teenage wife to unlock after having given over every single key. While that’s not an overly scintillating narrative, it must be said that the sensibility, the unapologetic feminism, and the language far elevate it from a simple retelling to a thing of delight and beauty. Of note is that the unnamed young woman is rescued not by a man, but by her own mother, who literally rides to her salvation.

On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head.

There’s some racefail in there, with the emphasis on yellow menace and the casual reference to her mother being a “tea planter’s daughter” (we also see, unfortunately, “Chinamen” in one of the other stories), but otherwise the story holds up very well indeed, thick with imageries that’s wonderfully evocative even if they aren’t especially subtle.

“The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride” are both retellings of Beauty and the Beast but through decidedly different lenses. The former is perfectly conventional, the tale of a shy and gentle Beast who requires love to survive, and who transforms into a handsome man to suit his human bride: it’s almost word-for-word Disney. The latter, however, presents a more intriguing and nuanced picture from the perspective of a daughter gambled away by her father in a card game:

I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more draughts of the firewater they call ‘grappa’, rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance. When we left Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, cornfields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast.

Rather than a gentle creature awaiting true love to transform him, the Beast of “The Tiger’s Bride” is and remains very much a wild thing: hunter, intimidating, and more than a little alien. In whom the protagonist of this tale finds unexpected kinship–

I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us–mounts and riders, both–could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out.

Indeed, as a woman she’s considered in Judeo-Christian terms debased, without reason, lesser to men in much the same way as the beasts of the field are, and it is in this that she recognizes a commonality. Rather than him transmuting to a man for her, then, she instead transforms into a tigress: a point that I found more powerful than the tale of a man who begs–clings–to a woman for attention and adoration, without which he will die. The tiger’s bride recognizes that men will never see her an equal, and rather than aspiring to that she casts her lot in with the beasts.

“Puss-in-Boots” is the tale of how a cat helps a man woo a lady. Out of the whole collection this is the lightest, funniest, and the prose style turns from heavy to glibly irreverent–

I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone

–and rollickingly ridiculous:

As soon as they are left alone, no trifling, this time; they’re at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet since the bed is occupé. Up and down, up and down his arse; in and out, in and out her legs. Then she heaves him up and throws him on his back, her turn at the grind, now, and you’d think she’ll never stop.

Mind you, there’s a corpse in the room at the time. Uh, yeah. I’m not a great fan of how the woman’s old chaperon is described as a “man-hater” (what) and one of Puss’ pieces of sage advice to his master is ”all good women have a missionary streak, sir; convince her her orifice will be your salvation and she’s yours.” What do you know, it even works. It’s not that the coveted girl has no agency, it’s that she exists very much as a prize, though certainly she is very much into the sex (see above). But she doesn’t seem to do/want much else: a guy shows up to serenade her, she goes “huzzah, freed from my old impotent husband at last!” and decides she’s completely in love.

“The Erl-King” stands out as the only story in the collection that’s not based on a Western European/Anglo fairytale that the popular collective conscious will readily recognize, even though it is Western European. The figure of a forest spirit is however not exactly alien; that he’d be seductive and malevolent at the same time no surprise, especially given the themes in the other stories. It’s an interesting piece, though it lacks the staying power of “The Bloody Chamber” or “The Tiger’s Bride.”

I’m not entirely sure about “The Lady of the House of Love” not least because Carter admitted it was inspired by Anne Rice and… uhm… yeah. There are some interesting passages about rationality and the “gothic,” but I suspect this story relies entirely too heavily on problematic tropes about Romania (yes it is, in fact, a vampire story… a descendant of, yes, Vlad Dracul who is served by an old crone and lives in a huge decaying castle; it’s basically a checkbox story). Being a Carter story it, of course, delves into sexuality and women, with her natural flair if–again–not very much subtlety: an interesting point is raised using the motif of virginity as protection (see also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) versus the “voluptuous” sexuality of the vampire as popularized by Bram Stoker; the titular lady has “a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even–but he put the thought away from him immediately–a whore’s mouth.” She’s destroyed, it is implied, by his purity and his wish to impose a construct of rationality that’s very patriarchal on her. I am overly fond of this story.

The last few stories are all about werewolves. Again, the language continues to be very lovely, but these weren’t stories that did much for me. “The Snow Child,” a very brief Snow White retelling, isn’t that stunning if you are already acquainted with the medieval romantic imagery it evokes.

All in all, I’d say it is a pretty excellent collection if you keep in mind the very unfortunate racefail–very heavy on the yellow menace, as aforementioned–and the fact that it’s entirely, absolutely, unrelentingly heteronormative. I really wish it was otherwise, but unfortunately Carter wasn’t interested in the queer woman’s experience (or entertained the idea of queer fairytale retellings).

meet Charlaine Harris: misogynist, racist, talentless - 6 comments, no wank

ann bishop misogynistic homophobic turd - 5 comments and 31 comments respectively, no wank (except some whiny shits on RPG.net crying about anti-white racism, but that’s not related to Anne Bishop specifically)

To what happens when I do the same to men:

R. Scott Bakker: Prince of Misogyny – 82 comments, tons of wank, author has personally linked it twice (the second time months after the fact!) and plops down the raging butthurt every time without fail; slavering neckbeard fanboys attended to circlejerk author and show up here to mansplain and tone argument the shit out of everything. Author believes “accusations of misogyny” (which he even acknowledges happen regularly, and in a more self-aware person that might have given one pause…) has damaged his sales. Score!

Joe Abercrombie’s THE LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS and the rape of lesbians – 38 comments, no wank directly on this blog, but plenty to be found on Westeros.org. Synopsis. In this case, the author actually admitted he didn’t think it through/that writing a shrill man-hating lesbian who only exists to be raped is really pretty fucking offensive. No fear, the fanboys told him he was wrong!

Jim Butcher: chauvinist AND talentless–stunning combo! – 65 comments, tons of wank;  slavering neckbeard fanboys attended to circlejerk author and show up here to mansplain and tone argument the shit out of everything

What should I take away from this? That neckbeards have shitty impulse control, and are generally more immature than say people who read Anne Bishop and Charlaine Harris? That they are more defensive, easier to rile up, and more likely to personally identify with the works they read (such that charges of -isms become assaults on their sterling characters)? I mean, just look at all this, isn’t it really embarrassing to watch? The Butcher troglodytes, the Westeros hissy fits, and of course the whole Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist thing. They all react in exactly the same way too, with gendered insults and cliches like “feminazi” or “man-hating” or “crazy bitch.” I’ve also come under some fire in the past for eviscerating Harry Potter–if there’s butthurt that compares to that of neckbeards it’s Harry Potter fandom, who will hear nothing but that JK Rowling is the goddess of all social justice ever and her writing is undiluted literary gold and eat death if you dare say otherwise–but it’s not like Harris has a small fanbase either. I don’t know the figures, but it’s likely that Harris earns more than Joe Abercrombie and R. Scott Bakker put together, seeing that she’s got a TV series based on her dreck and everything.

Also:

• A useful comparison is the Strange Horizons incident around Liz B. Woman reviews shitty fiction that fanboys like; fanboys lose their shit, etc etc. And that’s for some godawful tat that began its life self-published, not Abercrombie/Rothfuss/Bakker/Martin. Neckbeards truly are illiterate subcreatures.
• Now compare: some random fanboy getting angry at John Walker, a man, of Rock Paper Shotgun for some reason. Note the lack of “you’re crazy”, speculations as to Walker’s mental condition/whether he requires medication/whether he has been sexually assaulted.

Links of interest!

Yuri no Boke is my new favorite thing. It is a blog about lesbian things. Films and anime. Especially appreciated because such media can often be male-gazey, icky and shitty as fuck; highlights of the ones that are not those things are much appreciated. Also, yuri subtext from anime. It’s kind of hard to find anime that’s actually out-and-out yuri, come to think of it. I like her views on shounen, too.

Nic of Eve’s Alexandria explains tone argument to a neckbeard. Salutations, Nic; you have more patience than I.

Politeness is a red herring. You see, your *tone* was polite, but the *content* of what you had to say was not: it was rude and aggressive in the extreme. From the very first comment you left on the post, you belittled her argument and dismissed her experiences, and demanded that she focus on you instead. What you were saying to her was: “Why are you wasting your time talking about something as trivial and boring as whether one of the core works of genre fantasy, beloved by millions and imitated by genre writers for decades, contains insidious racist assumptions that don’t affect me? Why are you bothered about a silly thing like whether fans of these books dismiss and attack anyone attempting to point this out, and thus dismiss and attack your right to participate in discussion about the genre? Why don’t you talk about something much more important instead, like how you’re being really mean to me?” The fact that you didn’t swear and use allcaps is irrelevant.

Bolding mine. Hallelujah! Beautifully summarized.

Analogue: a Hate Story by Christine Love is out! $15 and DRM-free, just as promised. I hope to have a first impression post up soonish. For what it’s worth? So far, quite excellent. It has an interesting, unusual take on the generation ship idea, and features Korean characters. Lovely art, lovely soundtrack, lovely writing.

ShitRedditSays, a subreddit dedicated to catharsis. Mocks straight white cis males who say shitty things. Due to the things they quote/link, trigger warnings of ALL sorts apply.

Larry of OFBlog’s opinion on the Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist brouhaha.

Recently, there was a post that took another blogger to task for his depiction of her native Thailand (and his views on Islam and near-slavering over this “Girls of Geek” calendar).  [...] Pat in his response to the Requires Hate posts does anything but acknowledge his obliviousness to how his words showed a callous disregard for a complex situation.  No, the narrative there is that he was just pointing out an uncomfortable “truth” about the sex tourism industry over there (while neglecting to point out or being very unaware that sex trafficking is a very serious problem in both the United States and his native Canada).  Of course, the way he put it was taken as very condescending at the very least, not just by acrackedmoon, but by several others who read it.  But what happened is that there was no communication to hint that hey, ya know, maybe a native’s perspective might just be more valuable in this case than someone who, like the people in the Holiday Inn commercials, think that they “know” a culture or society just because they visited a few places over a period of days, weeks, or months.

[...]

Yet what’s even more disconcerting than the spewings of those who use the sexist terms of “shrill,” “harpy,” and of course the ubiquitous “bitch,” are those who feel that they should lecture her on her “tone” when it is precisely because of the trangression  against “polite talk” (read “the deference of ‘inferior’ races/women to their white male superiors) that women like them are heard at all.

Indeed.

Where do you run when a world is out to get you? AIs, Forged beings, superheroes, angels, and worlds that change in the blink of an eyehere is a richly imagined tale of ordinary redemption in an extraordinary world from one of the most provocative writers working today…. Francine is a young runaway looking to find a definition of love she can trust. In Sankhara, she finds a palace where rooms are made of bone, flowers, and the hearts of heroes. She finds a scientist mapping the territory of the human mind. She finds a boyfriend. And she finds Eros itself incarnated in the androgynously irresistible form of Jalaeka. But not everyone is in love with the god of love. Unity, for one, wants to assimilate Jalaeka along with every other soul in the universe. And contrary to what everyone always believes, love alone can’t save the day. It will take something both more and less powerful than the human heart to save the worlds upon worlds at risk when gods collide. 

This book was bad for me.

On one hand, the premise–as outlined above–absolutely sucked me in. Rooms made of bone, flowers, and the hearts of heroes! Androgynes! Multiverses! Wait, what the fuck is Unity?

And what the fuck is this really lengthy rape scene doing here?

Wait a minute. Why are there two lengthy rape scenes?

This isn’t to say this book is all rapeyness all the time. In fact, unlike the grimdark gritty feces the neckbeards love to defend against all comers, some of this is written from the victim’s point of view, and doesn’t silence her, or make it look as though this is okay or should go unremarked upon. But there are… problems with it. You will see.

There are going to be a lot of quotes. It’s about 4860 words of rape. In a standard paperback? That’s roughly 17-18 pages. Living Next Door isn’t standard paperback size, so it’s somewhat fewer pages than that (I’d say totaling at 12-14 pages). I’m not going to quote either scene in its entirety, but… yeah.

Before we get to that, let’s start off on a leg less unpleasant. Which is actually not that positive or that pleasant. Robson’s world makes little sense if you aren’t acquainted with the previous book in the same multiverse, Natural History, and I am not: you are plunged headfirst into a veritable setting-salad with a bunch of terms, names and concepts primarily built on pop culture. Cities of comic-book superheroes. A realm of elves, and not just any elves but elves that speak Sindarin, for that extra bit of tweeness. References like:

Their dark, almost black bricks were marked with the illegible graffiti of dead and artificial languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Coptic, Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin, English and Cobol.

…might have been cute to some, but to me (Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin) it’s merely eyeroll-inducing. Geek-pandering doesn’t work for me, or at least not this kind.

The book concerns itself with Unity, a huge… cosmic… thing that does… shit. It lost bits of itself, so it’s hunting down those, and it wants more people to “translate” into its collective astral plane or whatever. Fuck, I don’t really care–it’s probably best to get out of the way the fact that, even outside of the issues I will soon discuss, this isn’t a very good book. It’s incoherent, it’s dire, and many of the characters that populate it either bored me to tears or never cohered in a way that intrigued me. Take Francine:

“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “I’m probably just acting out some desperate need for love. Not to mention issues at home; dingbat ex-model mother losing her looks and getting old, devious stepfather bent on social climbing into the stratospheric heights of county politics. Nobody who understands me. You could do me as a project in Psych in ten minutes.” My self-pity made me nauseous.

And then she runs away. Because she’s done the teenage rebellion thing, and her mom still doesn’t pay attention to her, or something like that. Francine has been genetically engineered to be smart, beautiful, and well-adjusted by the way. I’m not entirely certain what her problem is, apart from the “cold home life” thing and being fourteen. Francine then meets Jalaeka, one of the pieces that made up (but broke out of) Unity, and they fall in love.

Other sections of the story concern Greg, an academic studying Unity, and Theo, the human avatar of Unity. There is also a good bit of disparate, irrelevant subplots and tertiary characters that distract and detract from the plot unnecessarily. Some of them have to do with elves and superheroes, like the worst catch-all mish-mash of geek-pandering you’ll ever see. “Disparate” just about describes the book really, when “dull” (see also: Greg and great big chunks of Jalaeka, as well as Francine) doesn’t do the job. Theo and Jalaeka, by the way, are roughly equals: they can both call on the powers of Unity, though in different ways (and Jalaeka isn’t so much into “summon the translated dead back into being” thing)–but whereas Theo hunts Jalaeka relentlessly, what you see Jalaeka mostly doing is mope, faff about, angst prettily and being about as useful as shit-all. This is an individual who is terminally unwilling to do anything to get himself out of the shittiest situation, even when it is entirely within his power to do so… and even when there are no good reasons for him not to employ his near-godlike abilities. All he does is flee from one dimension to the next, making people cry (and crying/bleeding on people) all the way.

This, in very many ways, is a problem. And also where I’m going to talk about the two extensive rape scenes. To establish some context first, in Jalaeka’s backplot is a time when he lived in some kind of empire, and at this time another splinter of Unity like himself lived. This is she:

This other half flung itself towards her all the time. It was quite mad, uncomprehending of anything save its own suffering, fears, pleasures and loss. It took all Kya’s energy to keep it at bay since she had caused herself to be split in two. She had done so as the result of a failure in love. Her lover had scorned her, thinking himself the superior who would rule the magical world and that she was to be simply his woman, an instrument of various uses, for he had been made by crude minds.

Kya had eaten him and then, with his power, she had cut off the weak parts of herself with the razor of cold logic. So it was not that she was unfeeling. She simply had no desire to be hurt. She felt no hurt and no love. And with the same exact method she set out to rule the Empire from beneath and to erase every trace of superstition, magic and chicanery from its precincts. She became the force of Empire, and her will shaped its ideals and policies.

…which, by itself, is rather bothersome. She’s the only woman in the whole work who is unambiguously evil, which normally wouldn’t strike me as iffy because the novel has quite a few women running around (except… more on that in a little while), but what Kya is is a woman made evil because, uhm, a man rejected her. Which hurt her so much she split herself into the logic half and the feelings half. Having found Jalaeka, she is surprised when she can’t absorb him. Partly afraid that he’d grow in power and become her rival, she proceeds to use a woman, Intana, to make him weak and vulnerable with love (“That was how it had happened to Kya long ago-that she was made an idiot by feelings-and so it would happen to him”).

Then she has Intana gang-raped.

On the stool a girl was tied up-he recognized her, she was Intana’s friend and his friend, Tash. Her neck was in a rope noose depending from the ceiling and it was taut, tied fast to an iron ring. Behind her stood a man in a black hood, ready to kick away the stool. Tash was shaking with exhaustion from the strain of having to stand so very tall in order to breathe. Sweat made her clothes cling to her and ran down her face, along with tears. She breathed in gasps and when he got there she stared fixedly at him with desperate hope and her gasping increased.

On the other side of the room a naked woman hung in the swing and a man, standing in front of her, his hands on the ropes, rutted fiercely and quickly inside her. There was a queue of men behind him, disorderly in places, their faces turning to him now and all of them sneering in some way, small or large.

[...]

Jalaeka saw all of this in a moment. And he finally recognized who was in the swing.

“So now you have a choice,” Kya said to him. “Which is what you wanted, isn’t it? You can choose to hang her, and send the rest of these men back out onto the streets where I found them. Or you can join the queue. What’ll it be?”

So, a woman made evil because a man rejected her decides to control another man by using another woman, and finally to torment him, she has that woman gang-raped and tells him to join in too.

It seemed a long time, and no time. He watched the soldier in front of him hurt her. He took a long time and her misery pleased him. Intana saw Jalaeka watching and turned her face as far as she could in the restraint, away. The man came and pulled out of her, wiped himself on the tail of his shirt. A foam of blood and semen ran from between her legs. “I’ve known better goats,” he said.

[...]

the way he longed to make love to her after that, to repair it, and the way she pushed him away effortlessly into other people’s arms to save herself from having to admit any of those men inside. I got stuck in that disgusting, horrible moment at the bottom of the arc of that swing, which was also a tender and adoring moment

This is seen through the perspective of Greg. So, in case we haven’t belabored this enough yet: a woman, made ruthless and evil by a man’s rejection, has another woman gang-raped in order to hurt a man and the rape itself is narrated through the vehicle of yet another man–a vision relayed to him, Greg, in order to hurt Greg.

That’s a lot of “having a woman raped in order to hurt men.” One woman’s rape, multiple men hurt. And I’d also like to know in what way Jalaeka joining the gang-rape to perform cunnilingus on Intana counts as a moment that despite being disgusting and horrible is also “tender and adoring.”

The other extended rape sequence references the one above.

This is just a fraction of the entire scene. I’ll spare you the full text. I want to make clear that I think it’s written well, it’s brutal, it’s effective. Justina Robson very much can write.

But it also made me mildly ill, physically. Despite Francine’s rape being from her point of view, the matter stands that she’s being hurt so Jalaeka may be in precisely the same way Intana was: and that the event is used to narratively motivate him. Prior to this he has been doing nothing much, not to protect himself, not to protect those he loves, not to do anything except sit around and angst a lot over Unity coming for him.

I’m sorry but that is fucking awful. I can’t imagine any reasoning that’d justify this much rape written for the single, explicit purpose of emphasizing a man’s pain, suffering, and to give him a motivation.

There’s some story left afterward, which deals mainly with how Jalaeka finally gets up and starts doing shit, and blah blah blah I don’t give a shit. It’s a book written well enough, technically, with prose that isn’t bad at all–with prose that can be, even, effective–and intriguing ideas. As a whole however, it’s ruined by dull characters, unclever geek-pandering, and way, way too much goddamn rape for the sake of manpain.

No. No thank you.

Keeping in mind that he wants a “friendly, more casual approach”? Keeping in mind that he said he’d “monitor” the comments? This is what he let through:

(Trigger warning: rape.)

Interesting that he’s a Ryan, by the way. Remember Ryan? The guy who was really obsessed with me and started flinging shit at anyone he thought agreed or cared to read me in any way? Mm-hmm.

In any case, this is the company Pat keeps and the kind of people who read Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. My dear honky, this is not a compliment. This, you see, is what happens when you think you are a progressive liberal but are in truth nothing more than a racist, sexist asshole. The true colors show, Pat darling. That goes for most of his readership too.

I’d like to take this occasion to note how impotent they generally are–they are so scared shitless by the idea of feminism or anti-racism, expressed in a way they don’t like (i.e. a way they find difficult to ignore: hence all the tone arguments being flung around. For more, see here and here) that any time someone talks about such in a “tone” that riles them up, they close ranks and throw hissy fits. They hound anyone they think might possibly agree with, or not react like rabid dogs, to rhetoric like mine or that of say Tiger Beatdown, and whine at them until (it is hoped) the person who doesn’t scream “GOD SHE IS SO HATEFUL AND RACIST AND SEXIST” joins them in the chorus. Sadly, neckbeards are generally not possessed of half the persuasive power they think they do, so… all it comes off is TONE TONE TONE, which anyone who’s read Derailing for Dummies quickly recognizes. Then we have folks like Ryan, who fly absolutely off the handle and splat right into shit, like the above, no longer pretending that they are possessed of an intellect–but note that despite having said that shit he did, Ryan still thinks he’s not racist or sexist.

But taken all together, the neckbeards can’t really do very much apart from join hands and circle-jerk each other into a coma. They’re not very good at silencing anyone, and certainly not particularly good at recruiting. The more they talk, the more rampant douchiness and -isms they reveal, which generally tends to turn off decent human beings.

Charisma: the dump stat, as it were.

Back in June last year I wrote Deconstructing Pointy-Eared White Supremacists. It was one of the most linked things I’ve ever written, even though I didn’t think it addressed anything new or broke new ground. I thought I was, frankly, belaboring the obvious.

I was wrong, of course. There was a number of interesting discussions off the site (some of which I joined). But mostly what happened was a flurry of assorted man-child types who came in, absolutely hysterical, to defend Tolkien from charges of… well, anything actually. It’s that thing again with rabid fanboys thinking that their favorite thing being called -ist or -phobic means it’s a personal assault on their sterling characters–which compels them to not only get particularly shrieky, but also to defend their neckbeard icon in such a way as to make it obvious that they are racist, sexist, and homophobic.

In any case, I’m not interested in further debating why/how Tolkien was a racist, sexist bore: they are evident things, and if you have to ask chances are good you are of the “BUT HE COULD NOT POSSIBLY BEEEEEE” camp. I’m more interested in the wonky mental gymnastics people perform in order to make him out to be the most progressive man of his time (lolno), and the cliches people bust out to further said wonky mental gymnastics. Some of them are conveniently listed here. Please imagine the following parts in bold are spoken by a manchild in a high-pitched, obnoxious voice to best capture the experience of engaging with one of them.

He wasn’t racist! LOOK AT THIS ONE SCENE WHERE SAM FEELS SORRY FOR AN EASTERLING MAN, god!

This is the passage in question:

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

Now please consider that this is the one single solitary passage in the entire trilogy. They comprise of seventy-seven (77) words. What is the total word count for Lord of the Rings as a whole? In the region of 473,000 words, if the google search I did is any indication.

That’s 0.01628% of the text.

Put that against the rest of the work where these faceless hordes under Sauron, who are of course not Caucasian, are portrayed as either, well, faceless hordes or misguided primitives who need the guidance of the white men to renounce their worship of Sauron, because Whitey is the Mighty, and Whitey knows best. Compare, as well, Tolkien’s thoughts on Jews:

The dwarves of course are quite obviously – wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.

Now consider the dwarves in The Hobbit:

The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor fellow doing it if he would; but they would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him.  There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much.

“The dwarves of course are quite obviously Jews,” eh?

For further reading, check out Abigail Nussbaum’s review of The Hobbit. 

Collolary: BUT TOLKIEN ONLY MEANT THEIR LANGUAGE!1!! This requires the aforementioned mental gymnastics. One does not say “wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of Jews?” when you mean to say “I constructed their language to sound Semitic.” I promise, o neckbeard of little literacy.

He meant to Europeans! God! EYE OF THE BEHOLDER OKAY? Get some perspective, you PC police! 

This originates from people pointing out this wonderful, charming quote from one of Tolkien’s letters where he describes orcs like so:

they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

According to fanboys, this is not racist in any way whatsoever, and if you think it is, you are applying modern sensibilities to a man of… uhm… the twentieth century. Which is, like, totally hundreds of years ago, man.

Here’s a newsflash, assholes: even in that time saying something like that in public wouldn’t have gotten you kudos. Tolkien’s time? Not exactly the era of the British Empire. Considering that Tolkien himself was a European, what does his acknowledgment of “to Europeans” mean exactly? A tacit admission that he found “Mongol-types” repulsive? Was he under the impression that everyone in Europe was white? Hmm. A bit sheltered of him, isn’t it? One might even say ignorant. One might even say… racist.

He didn’t like fascists! He said so! He said he hated apartheid! That makes him NOT racist! HAH TAKE THAT.

Relevant quotes are:

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

And:

Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge–which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light

There’s also an “I have many Jewish friends” clause in there too.

Yelling as shrilly as possible that you are not a sexist, or a racist or a homophobe, does not necessarily mean you aren’t one. For one thing, such declarations predicate on an assumption that you are self-aware. Unfortunately, straight white males are not usually very self-aware. You may think the more repulsive thoughts about Asians possible, and you’d still say “But I can’t be racist! My best friend is a chink!” or “I can’t be racist, I married a Thai woman!” You may defend to the death your right to use “cunt” as an insult, and you’ll still believe you are a Great Defender of Equal Rights. (Yes, I told him I was going to get an iron-toed boot and kick him in the cock after he said that he believed misandry, heterophobia and anti-white racism were real things and just as bad as misogyny, homophobia and actual racism. I regret nothing.)

Tolkien was, in a lot of ways, a proto-neckbeard. He thought he was a pretty progressive guy who would never ever think a single racist thought, but there is a reason neo-Nazis adored (and likely continue to adore) his books; there’s a reason the British National Party did (and for all I know, still do) make Lord of the Rings required reading. It’s not an isolated incident–multiple white supremacist groups honestly thought his works endorsed their principles. While I doubt Tolkien consciously believed all Jews should be eradicated, his treatment of his Semitic analogue in his own fiction is telling. Likely he never thought “women’s only place is on the pedestal,” yet that’s where his female characters generally end up. In short, authorial intent doesn’t matter. The neckbeards of today likewise think of themselves as progressive, liberal, and open to gay marriage–but spend your time in the company of any neckbeard and you quickly realize they are some of the most regressive people you’ll find outside of an Aryan Nation meeting. After a while bleating that you can’t possibly be racist or sexist or prejudiced in any way becomes protesting way too bloody much.

LOTR promotes racial harmony! I mean, elves and dwarves MAKE FRIENDS OKAY LOOK LEGOLAS AND GIMLI. 

Consider this guy:

Well, we know someone got all A’s in her womyn’s studies curriculum. [...] Lewis, like most racial panderers, reads race into everything under the sun but there is no place race is more inappropriate to discuss than in reference to this epic work of creative genius.

[...]

Perhaps it is really multicultural envy that causes Lewis to praise The Matrix for its African and Asian characters as any honest examination would cause her to admit that the figures she mentions in the film are all members of the same species; whereas those in Middle Earth she describes as being “whiter than white” are often members of differing species. [...] Why does Lewis hold white males in such contempt?

This is an article from 2004 from what I assume is a Men’s Right Movement website. But I’ll bet you anything that these views are both current and held by neckbeards who think they are anti-racist, anti-sexist, and perfectly enlightened saints. A few I have engaged pulled this very same card:

Again: you are counting nonhumans as “white” simply because they have superficial resemblances to human Caucasians. Your obvious underlying assumption is that “whiteness” and “blackness” transcend SPECIES, which is far more racist than anything in Tolkien’s world.

Within Tolkien’s world, which is the context in which the characters live and which governs the assumptions on which they operate, Humans and Elves have separate origins (far more separate, in fact, than those of Caucasians and Negroes in the real world) and very rarely interbreed (there are ballad-cycles sung for millennia about the rare exceptions to this rule).
[...]
Compared to these differences of origin, fate and appearance, the minor fact that the Elf might be light-skinned (and we have no evidence, btw, that all Elves are light-skinned) and you were light-skinned would be a trivial resemblance. To put it in real-world terms, some chimpanzees are pink-skinned and some are black-skinned on their faces and palms, owing to melanin variations. Do you imagine that the pink-skinned chimps are closer kin to Caucasians and the black-skinned ones closer to Negroes, on the basis of this single trait? No? Then why do you imagine the same thing about Elves and Dwarves, on the basis of the SAME trait?

I don’t think this requires any commentary.

Tolkien was writing an Anglo-Saxon mythology, of course everyone is white! 

This is valid only if you believe there have never been any POCs whatsoever in Europe or specifically England. It requires a staggering amount of ignorance, but then people who defend Tolkien rabidly tend to be burdened with staggering amounts of ignorance. This, incidentally, is what Tolkien actually said:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish, but nothing English, save impoverished chapbook stuff.

So “English” to Tolkien was… what? All white, all the time?

Tolkien wasn’t sexist, Eowyn and Luthien are STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS!1! 

Ah, yes. You know, Eowyn and Luthien, women who are entirely defined by men? Luthien, the one who gave up her immortality for a man? When in the entire history of Middle-earth no male elf ever gave up his immortality for a woman.

There’s no end to the creepiness of how women are treated by Tolkien’s narrative. Let’s run down some of the major ones (if I miss any, feel free to contribute):

Luthien - performs heroics for a man (Beren), dies for a man; overcomes Morgoth by dancing and singing, which is peculiarly gendered and sexual (hurr hurr! The only way a woman may defeat a man…). When she passes away, the world mourns her not because she is powerful and heroic: it mourns her because she was the most beautiful woman. She’s so much on a pedestal that it becomes extra special creeptastic when you realize that she’s meant to be Tolkien’s tribute to his wife.

Eowyn – performs heroics because she crushed on a man (Aragorn), almost dies defending a man (Theoden), speaks to other women about once (in the House of Healing), gives up the sword for a man (Faramir) who treats her like a child.

[...]

Then quietly, more as if speaking to herself than to him: ‘But the healers would have me lie abed seven days yet,’ she said. ‘And my window does not look eastward.’ Her voice was now that of a maiden young and sad.

[...]

Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else she understood it… ‘I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’ And again she looked at Faramir. ‘No longer do I desire to be a queen,’ she said.

Eowyn’s problem–and it’s treated very much like one–is that she underwent a “phase” of wanting to compete with the men, which is just not on and entirely childish (whereas riding to war is, for men, a perfectly proper, mature and correct thing to do: the narrative chastises no other character for wanting to go to war, or seeking martial glory–see Gimli and Legolas competing on orc kills). Naturally it takes a man to fix her and love her back into proper femininity; just as naturally she accepts that love as restorative and proper. A woman’s place is to love growing things and healing; ambition, like “desiring to be a queen,” should not exist in a woman–she’s meant to be a man’s adjunct, and if she becomes queen it is only because her husband is king: see also Arwen.

Arwen – she has how many speaking lines in the books? Prizes that exist to be won by a man don’t need to talk, okay? Oh hey, she wove Aragorn a banner! Awesome.

Nienor – where do I even fucking start. She has her memory erased by a dragon, runs through the forest naked, is rescued and falls in love with her brother, and commits suicide after discovering her pregnancy is first-class incest. The narrative then focuses on her brother’s manpain. Finduilas, from the same story, fulfills a similar role–falling in love with Turin, and then dying, all to contribute to said manpain and make Turin super extra sad because abloo bloo bloo emo wangst bullshit.

Celebrian – implied to have been raped by orcs and sailed to the west.

Rose Cotton – does she even talk? She just seems to exist to give Sam a litter.

There are a lot more rapes in Middle-earth. Like, lots and lots. And women who commit suicide. The men are, of course, never subjected to any sexual threat because NO HOMO, NO HOMO. About the only women in Tolkien’s narrative not treated creepily are Galadriel and possibly Haleth, but the former also ends up on a pedestal while the latter is very minor. The next time someone attempts to cite any of the women on this list as evidence that Tolkien was an exemplary feminist, feel free to brain them with a sack of bricks. Twice.

Tolkien wasn’t classist! Samwise Gamgee was a gardener. 

Ah, the one commoner in a cast full of landed gentry, princes, kings, aristocrats and descendants thereof. Sam ends up a landed gentry by the way, having inherited Frodo’s stuff. Sam, who always deferred to his Mister Frodo, sir? Tolkien wasn’t exactly Dickens, if you catch my drift.

Ultimately the core of the trouble is that fanboys don’t want to believe that Tolkien’s body of work is anything other than an “epic work of creative genius,” that anyone saying otherwise must either have an agenda, have no taste, or in some way defective. They refuse to consider the thought that Middle-earth fiction has contributed nothing of worth to culture at large, outside of enforcing the straight-white-male hegemony of the genre… which, naturally, they are all too happy to keep up and praise as excellent and worthy. Much of the politics in it will resonate strongly with those believing in the nobility of the bromance, the boys’ own adventure, the exclusion of women outside the sphere of a reward at the end of a quest, someone who keeps the house tidy (or weaves them banners, as it were).

When confronted with the faintest suggestion that anything might be defective in Tolkien himself, or the works he produced, their reactions tend toward the knee-jerky sort:

My friends accused The Lord of the Rings of being racist, opinions?

I got quite offended by this as I have personally never considered Tolkien’s writing racist in the slightest – to me my friend seemed to be putting on all these racist connotations on a piece of work that didn’t have them to begin with. :/

[...]

“Your friend might be racist for noticing all of this. =P”

The Return of the King: Three Unforgivables

Brought face to face with the cruel ringwraith, he announces that no man can kill him, and she, removing her helmet and revealing her long blond locks, utters, defiantly, “I am no man.” She might as well have thumped her chest and grunted, “I am woman, hear me roar.”

[...]

To make it a feminist battle cry is to celebrate where Tolkien would have us weep. It is, in short, one of the most appalling alterations in the film.

…which incidentally cements the truth that the grimdark purveyors/fans, and the Tolkien purveyors/fans are the same people. Try to tell these quotes apart from the ones linked and discussed here. Fanatical Tolkien fans and fanatical grimdark fans are of the same overlapping demographics, the same attitude, the same neckbeardism: feminists are scary, anti-racist critiques are not to be borne, interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, silly ad hominem, the whole lot.

Contrary to the barking of people like Richard Morgan, the fantasy being touted for their gritty maturity today isn’t much different from the regressiveness of Tolkien. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

HOLD ONTO THOSE PADDLES, FRIENDS; WE MAY SOON BE BEATING LIVE WHITE MALES