i'm just going to leave this here

From a Ferretbrain review of Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear (review by Dan Hemmens):

What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan [A/N: From the much-maligned Twilight series], about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya [A/N: Heroines written by fantasy writer Trudi Canavan] because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

This, by the way, is why I love Ferretbrain.  And have a very low tolerance for reflexive bashing of Twilight.  Some of it, I'm convinced, is straight up fear/disdain of catching girl cooties.  Some of it is under the guise of a "concerned citizen," in this case people who say it's "bad for girls" - it's bad for young girls to idolize unhealthy relationships, but apparently it's totally fine for young boys to idolize unhealthy relationships.  Female wish fulfillment must be guarded very tightly so that it doesn't go down bad paths and stays on a realistic straight-and-narrow, but male wish fulfillment?  Boys will be boys.  Or even better, that's just entertainment!  Or I guess in this case, that's the standard-bearer. 

Boy, when I become famous some day and someone asks me in some well-meaning interview which genre (out of science fiction/fantasy/horror) is the least hospitable to female writers and readers, it's going to be so hard to decide!