intertribal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
intertribal) wrote2010-05-27 01:50 pm
intertribal) wrote2010-05-27 01:50 pm
hope I don't break my arm falling out of the treehouse
Fantasy fans frustrate me sometimes.
Alison Flood (who I often disagree with) writes at The Guardian about her experience reading Conan stories and how turned off she is by the way different races are described, and the way women are described, and the way intersectionality brings the two together into a horrible union: The more lily-white a woman's skin, the more prized she is, says Flood. So she wonders: "Is it ridiculous to criticise Robert E Howard's enjoyably pulpy Conan stories for their 1930s attitudes to women and race?"
The resounding response to this question: of course it is! (And of course Flood responds to all this hysterical defensiveness of Conan with "but I really did enjoy a lot of it, I swear! I promise!" Ugh.)
Man, it is SO AWESOME when "politically correct" is used like this. Geez, thinking that women who are not porcelain white can be attractive is so PC, geez. Gosh, if we were just BEING HONEST... /sarcasm
I get "taking things in context." I really do. I let a lot of classic lit take a pass because of this, and because there are redeeming values in the book. Obviously I am a fan of the Mythos (though one of the lovely things about that is that it is constantly reinvented today without Lovecraft's B.S.), but that doesn't mean I just say "so what" to Lovecraft's racism (and hey, what interesting implications for horror as it pertains to changing social values, eh?). Heart of Darkness is one of my all-time favorite books, although I also think that Achebe's criticisms of the way it depicts Africans are totally valid. I have never read Conan and I don't want to (because epic barbarianism is not my genre), but I suspect if I did I would probably think it was funny in a pathetic way, remember that it is a product of its time, put it back on the shelf, and point and laugh at people who read it. This isn't even about Conan. You can replace Conan with any number of things that now come with the warning, "product of its time."
It's the responses that really get to me, the "who cares if it has that because I had fun reading it when I was an adolescent boy" thing. Does that mean they'd give it to their sons? Probably, yeah. After all, so what? Why not? So Conan lives on, Conan with his lily-white women, Conan who ironically cannot be criticized because he is not to be taken seriously. Whereas classic lit, which is actually, you know, meaningful and interesting and not the equivalent of a Michael Bay movie with half the intelligence, is constantly called out for its outdated bullshit. Which is good, interesting, and ultimately necessary, because we are people living TODAY, analyzing it TODAY. Like my Colonial Encounters class, talking about the way Tin Tin and Babar have been changed over the years, to get rid of the horrific racist cartoons in one and the weird-ass imperialist mindset in the other. Nobody said let's go out and burn all copies of Rin Tin Tin. It's saying, "hey, let's talk about this, look at how norms change over time, look at how embedded colonial narratives were, even in ads for detergent and coffee, did any of you pick up on this as kids?" I wrote a paper on how Peter Pan is an iteration of the Noble Savage myth. I love Peter Pan, but hey, it was an interesting idea. Like this awesome thing I found on Victorian Chromatic Anxiety in Jane Eyre (i.e. "Jane's all white").
And some of the comments on that site did engage with what Flood brought up, suggest other works to try, explain things in a more in-depth way, etc, while still liking Conan stories. There are, of course, Tolkien fights. Which is fine. Engagement and discussion, that's what you want!
But when the response to the idea of a discussion of these issues is a defensive "so what"... damn, it makes me want to break stuff. This is the same thing that people say to defend Enid Blyton, another product of her time - "it doesn't matter, it's just for fun" or "it doesn't matter, it's just for kids".
What the he-ell does that imply, exactly?
I'm not saying no one is allowed to read Conan or what the hell have you. You can even read Enid fucking Blyton for all I care - I don't even want to ban Mein Kampf, so far be it for me to try to disallow literature with psycho ideas and norms. I'm saying this sort of response to criticisms that a book has racist/sexist imagery is really frustrating. Nasty little tidbits tucked in books - especially books for adolescents, especially books for entertainment - do not mean nothing.
ETA: As Lindsey says below, media does not in and of itself cause people to be prejudiced - not in the olden days, not now. If it wasn't a problem in society, it wouldn't be a problem in a book. Obviously it is a problem in society, however.
* Just to note, I don't let romance novels off this hook either.
Alison Flood (who I often disagree with) writes at The Guardian about her experience reading Conan stories and how turned off she is by the way different races are described, and the way women are described, and the way intersectionality brings the two together into a horrible union: The more lily-white a woman's skin, the more prized she is, says Flood. So she wonders: "Is it ridiculous to criticise Robert E Howard's enjoyably pulpy Conan stories for their 1930s attitudes to women and race?"
The resounding response to this question: of course it is! (And of course Flood responds to all this hysterical defensiveness of Conan with "but I really did enjoy a lot of it, I swear! I promise!" Ugh.)
- so what...take it in context. Do you critique sub-Saharan African or Oriental literature for its focus on particular races?
personally, as soon as you say Oriental you are docked like 1,000 points in my book.
- attempting to over-analyse them is the wrong way to approach them.
- its like dissing Harlequin romance novels for heaving breasts, wimpy heroines saved by manly men, and schmaltz writing.* Conan was always the romance novels for teenage boys.
- Oh, on the matter of political correctness or whatever you want to call it, I don't think it's all that bad. It's reconstructed, perhaps, and there's some stuff sitting between noble savage paternalism and popular xenophobia, but they are by no means Nazi screeds or something. I'm a pretty wishy-washy PC sort of a guy, but I don't see that as a big failing in the Conan stories, particularly if you consider the times and - more so - the men's adventure writing genre.
- No, you couldn't get away with writing like that today but so what? They're still good tales. The racism jarred? Just as well you didn't read the Del Ray editions which are the definitive texts, unlike your edition which was based on texts edited in the 1970's to make them more politically correct.
personally, as soon as you say Oriental you are docked like 1,000 points in my book.
- attempting to over-analyse them is the wrong way to approach them.
- its like dissing Harlequin romance novels for heaving breasts, wimpy heroines saved by manly men, and schmaltz writing.* Conan was always the romance novels for teenage boys.
- Oh, on the matter of political correctness or whatever you want to call it, I don't think it's all that bad. It's reconstructed, perhaps, and there's some stuff sitting between noble savage paternalism and popular xenophobia, but they are by no means Nazi screeds or something. I'm a pretty wishy-washy PC sort of a guy, but I don't see that as a big failing in the Conan stories, particularly if you consider the times and - more so - the men's adventure writing genre.
- No, you couldn't get away with writing like that today but so what? They're still good tales. The racism jarred? Just as well you didn't read the Del Ray editions which are the definitive texts, unlike your edition which was based on texts edited in the 1970's to make them more politically correct.
Man, it is SO AWESOME when "politically correct" is used like this. Geez, thinking that women who are not porcelain white can be attractive is so PC, geez. Gosh, if we were just BEING HONEST... /sarcasm
I get "taking things in context." I really do. I let a lot of classic lit take a pass because of this, and because there are redeeming values in the book. Obviously I am a fan of the Mythos (though one of the lovely things about that is that it is constantly reinvented today without Lovecraft's B.S.), but that doesn't mean I just say "so what" to Lovecraft's racism (and hey, what interesting implications for horror as it pertains to changing social values, eh?). Heart of Darkness is one of my all-time favorite books, although I also think that Achebe's criticisms of the way it depicts Africans are totally valid. I have never read Conan and I don't want to (because epic barbarianism is not my genre), but I suspect if I did I would probably think it was funny in a pathetic way, remember that it is a product of its time, put it back on the shelf, and point and laugh at people who read it. This isn't even about Conan. You can replace Conan with any number of things that now come with the warning, "product of its time."
It's the responses that really get to me, the "who cares if it has that because I had fun reading it when I was an adolescent boy" thing. Does that mean they'd give it to their sons? Probably, yeah. After all, so what? Why not? So Conan lives on, Conan with his lily-white women, Conan who ironically cannot be criticized because he is not to be taken seriously. Whereas classic lit, which is actually, you know, meaningful and interesting and not the equivalent of a Michael Bay movie with half the intelligence, is constantly called out for its outdated bullshit. Which is good, interesting, and ultimately necessary, because we are people living TODAY, analyzing it TODAY. Like my Colonial Encounters class, talking about the way Tin Tin and Babar have been changed over the years, to get rid of the horrific racist cartoons in one and the weird-ass imperialist mindset in the other. Nobody said let's go out and burn all copies of Rin Tin Tin. It's saying, "hey, let's talk about this, look at how norms change over time, look at how embedded colonial narratives were, even in ads for detergent and coffee, did any of you pick up on this as kids?" I wrote a paper on how Peter Pan is an iteration of the Noble Savage myth. I love Peter Pan, but hey, it was an interesting idea. Like this awesome thing I found on Victorian Chromatic Anxiety in Jane Eyre (i.e. "Jane's all white").
And some of the comments on that site did engage with what Flood brought up, suggest other works to try, explain things in a more in-depth way, etc, while still liking Conan stories. There are, of course, Tolkien fights. Which is fine. Engagement and discussion, that's what you want!
But when the response to the idea of a discussion of these issues is a defensive "so what"... damn, it makes me want to break stuff. This is the same thing that people say to defend Enid Blyton, another product of her time - "it doesn't matter, it's just for fun" or "it doesn't matter, it's just for kids".
What the he-ell does that imply, exactly?
I'm not saying no one is allowed to read Conan or what the hell have you. You can even read Enid fucking Blyton for all I care - I don't even want to ban Mein Kampf, so far be it for me to try to disallow literature with psycho ideas and norms. I'm saying this sort of response to criticisms that a book has racist/sexist imagery is really frustrating. Nasty little tidbits tucked in books - especially books for adolescents, especially books for entertainment - do not mean nothing.
ETA: As Lindsey says below, media does not in and of itself cause people to be prejudiced - not in the olden days, not now. If it wasn't a problem in society, it wouldn't be a problem in a book. Obviously it is a problem in society, however.
* Just to note, I don't let romance novels off this hook either.
no subject
no subject
All I can say is that "expecting everybody to be equally human beings" is not how you always come across (I mean in other conversations). I often feel, rightly or wrongly, that you expect everybody to be "a man," and that you are much more likely to dislike a woman (any woman) than a man (any man), because women are socialized to be weak and men are socialized to be strong. I remember particularly a conversation about Nietzsche that made me think this. And maybe that's because you can't relate to a lot of women, or because femininity is a position of inferiority, or both.
And in recent years I have started to understand your criticisms of femininity - I know there are things you may have said in college that I disagreed with then that I agree with now. So it's not that I "see and dislike" your opinion. It's just that I think I remain slightly more sensitive to words like "cunt" than you, and maybe even that we look at gendered insults differently (which I think this conversation has shown). And I feel like I know you're looking at it differently, so I try to compensate for what I feel is my perspective, so that you get where I'm coming from, because I know we're not coming from the same place, exactly.
no subject
If I expect everybody to be "a man," it is only in the sense that I expect people to be what men (rich white men, even) have always been taken to be: individual human beings, who are the "eye that looks" (in de Beauvoir's words), instead of being confined to the status of objects. Anything else about men I think can be taken or left on an individual basis, and is probably pretty culturally bound as well. But so much of the male/female distinction simply comes down to subject/object, unmarked/marked, and to be a true, independent, self-respecting, self-reliant human being, you have to be the former. You have to be the former even though no one is objective and everyone is coming from their own particular experience and so on.
A few radical feminists have made the point that, for instance, women shouldn't be expected to be logical because logic is a "man's" thing and telling women (and everybody else) that this is the standard they have to be judged by is just being sexist. I think these arguments are a piece of shit. They are only a 'man's' thing because it was men who were given the privilege to look out on the world and make decisions about it and settle disputes with some appeal to reality and rationality. Just because women weren't doesn't mean it's some inherently masculine thing, and buying into that sort of logic is just buying into patriarchy and their own subordination as women--because it's subordination that told women their thoughts didn't matter; it's subordination that told women their only virtues and duties were to husband and family, and thus that their only logic was a personal and practical logic; and most of all it's subordination that made them objects in a man's world, not thinking subjects of their own.
This is basically my standard of judging, and my expectations are high. More men tend to meet them than women, but that isn't saying a whole lot. Same goes for Nietzsche.
I'm not sure what you mean by compensating for what you feel is your perspective.
no subject
Well, yeah, obviously that argument is shit. I think the difference between us may be that given an example of a woman being reliant, dependent, et al., you would blame her and I would blame society. Which is not to say that I don't think women should take responsibility for themselves, because I do.
It just means I feel like I have to explain my perspective more because we don't have it in common.
no subject
I think it's strange how many of the things you say about my point of view I find much more offensive than calling me a cunt/bitch/pussy/whatever ever would be. Of course it's partly society's fault and partly her own doing. How could it be anything else? How could it be otherwise that women tend to do things like become mathematicians, or philosophers, or not do things like become homemakers or stay-at-home parents, or marry at an early age with no established career much less often than men do simply because women are not socialized to and/or do not have the opportunity to do these things? (sorry awkward sentence wording)
I am not sure what you think we don't have in common or what is dividing our perspectives or what.
no subject
Yeah, I don't know either, at this point. Probably that I think gendered insults matter more (because they are gendered).
no subject