All posts tagged r scott bakker

alpha males – paranormal biotruths and rape culture

Evo-psych is a favorite pet topic of R Scott Bakker and assorted shitlords. It’s the domain of the uneducated who nevertheless believe they are brilliant; evo-psych is popular pseudo-science at its worst, used to justify roughly every form of bigotry you can imagine (and a few you can’t), with special attention paid to misogyny.

Imagine my surprise to discover that it’s also an obsession in the lofty genre of paranormal romance/urban fantasy.

“Don’t you understand? You, your subconscious or whatever wanted a life mate, and you wanted me bad. Something deep inside you wants to be loved, manu. All you have to do is let me.” –Shirin Dubbin, Dream’s Dark Kiss

Apart from being rapist logic, this line of thinking–”your subconscious wanted a life mate”–lines up neatly with the rhetoric and reasoning of real-world misogynistic creeps. (more…)

137 Comments
by acrackedmoon on December 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on December 13, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/alpha-males-paranormal-biotruths-and-rape-culture/

R. Scott Bakker, Neuropath, and the Spoon of Secrets

You’re all sick of this by now, I bet.

But I failed to cover the funny bits in Neuropath. Why yes, they exist!

Kind of.

She brought her feet to the floor, leaned forward with a skeptical frown. ‘Now that looks about as sexy as stuffing a turkey.’

‘Yeah, but it shows the spoons. Very sexy.’

‘The spoons?’

‘Yeah, where the bum meets the…’ He swallowed, then said, ‘It would be easier to show you.’

Her knees drifted a finger’s-breadth apart. ‘Show me, then,’ she said, her voice thick, her eyes bright with an oh-my-God-I’m-doing-this look.

Thomas pushed the coffee table aside and knelt before her.

A low-volume ‘fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me‘ floated through the living room.

He placed his palms on her knees. She sighed. Parting her legs, he slowly pressed his hands under her skirt, sliding his thumbs past her knees, across bare skin, down into the hollow of her inner thighs.

‘There,’ he whispered, resting his thumbs in the divots to either side of her panties. ‘The sexiest part of the female anatomy,’ he said. ‘The spoons.’

SPOONS.

If someone could just explain to me which part of a woman looks like a spoon… or indeed, a pair of spoons? Would it be safe to say that R. Scott Bakker is possibly the only person in the world who thinks of spoons when he sees a woman? I think it would be. It’s also safe to say that Bakker’s long and away taken Laurell K. Hamilton’s crown of bad sex writing. Or misogyny. Or rapeyness. Or anything, really. The crown? Allll his. And the spoons, too.

Some of what follows is rapey, I think. I’m not sure about the context, but just in case, rape and gendered slurs trigger warning.

(more…)

55 Comments
by acrackedmoon on April 20, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Other
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Posted by acrackedmoon on April 20, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/r-scott-bakker-neuropath-and-the-spoon-of-secrets/

R. Scott Bakker – Neuropath of Misogyny

RAPE TRIGGER WARNING

I come bearing a gift.

By which I mean bearing a curse. What’s this curse? Over 3,000 words of rapefare from that most favored of punching bags, R. Scott Bakker. Specifically it’s from his non-fantasy thing–I’m not sure what genre it falls into other than “mumbo-jumbo”–Neuropath. Now, by and by I’ve come to view Bakker as rather harmless if socially incompetent; his boon companion Peter Watts is a far more loathsome piece of shit (although anecdotes have it that Watts is, in real life, quite socially incompetent as well and that translates to a certain kind of schoolboy pettiness. Now imagine if he, Watts and Pat have a drink together at a con–but never mind, that’s a vile image: so much smug idiocy concentrated in one place!).

Then someone told me about the rapefare in Neuropath.

Here follows a close reading and dissection of about 3,000 words (more than 10 pages in paper!) of rapefare. I was warned it would be disgusting, but after a while I found it merely hilarious. There’s a weird, off-putting tone to this as of a schoolboy dipping a stick into his own fresh excrement, then running at people to wave said stick in their faces. This isn’t edgy, haunting, horrifying. It’s very simply disgusting in the same childish, mindless way and suggests that Bakker perhaps needs to be house-broken. If Chris Priest believes Charles Stross to be an incontinent puppy, then one can only imagine Bakker as a piglet suffering from explosive diarrhea. It rolls around in–well, you know. Obeying its natural instincts, as it were.

(more…)

94 Comments
by acrackedmoon on April 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on April 17, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/r-scott-bakker-neuropath-of-misogyny/

intermission! white men’s tears and the insecurity of the privileged

The subject refers to the idea of white woman’s tears, which sometimes comes into contention due to its gendered nature. But that’s not what I’m here for today, oh no. I’m here to point out that white men too will cry, and cry and cry, and flood the Internet with their tears. Or their jizz, or both, since I’ve come to suspect that many of them jerk each other off as they write the things I will soon link.

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

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?

(more…)

67 Comments
by acrackedmoon on February 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Genderfail, Intermissions, Racefail
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Posted by acrackedmoon on February 19, 2012

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/intermission-white-mens-tears-and-the-insecurity-of-the-privileged/

R. Scott Bakker: Prince of Misogyny

I admit that I’ve never read beyond five pages of Bakker’s debut novel The Darkness that Comes Before. It may have something to do with the fact that the thing opens with a little boy being repeatedly raped, though really the writing is leaden as fuck too.

What you need to know about Bakker’s books, though, is that in his setting women are–objectively–spiritually inferior to men. And that, throughout his books, people are raped a lot: not just women, mind, but even so. It’s a lot of rape to go around, a lot of juvenile grimdark. A lot of people complained about this. Bakker fired back with this:

In a Q&A you did five years ago, you brought up the issue of exploring sexism in the guise of what if religious tracts were correct about the “inferiority” of women. Despite this, you’ve received some flak for the lack of female characters that aren’t variations of the “crone, whore, or saint.” Has this affected your portrayals of some of the female characters?

When it comes to the misogyny charge my answer has been fairly consistent, I think. First, that I am a sexist, insofar as I think men are generally less competent than women across the majority of modern social contexts.

Awwww isn’t he adorable. He thinks this will let him off the hook! Isn’t it just the cutest? Maybe it’d have been if Bakker was ten.
(more…)

179 Comments
by acrackedmoon on August 16, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Fantasy, Genderfail, Other
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Posted by acrackedmoon on August 16, 2011

http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/r-scott-bakker-prince-of-misogyny/