Reader, I Married Him

Little thing that pulls out for your keyboard? What is it, 1996?

I’ve got one of those. I don’t actually use it though.

Where’s the rollover text (I don’t think “tumblr600” counts, though that probably raises my next question: What’s tumblr?)?

[After Googling]: “So that’s what a tumblr is!” I thought it was what one used to drink whiskey straight up.

We’re digressing? Then I guess I can leap from overrated white dudes to fantasy literature and from there to my word of the week, “mansplaining”, as explicated by Sady Doyle.

Which is it – xkcd or xckd? Or does it matter?

I don’t think that there is any plausible good faith reading of GRRM under which he is talking about violence to women for the creepy kicks that Doyle says he is.

This seems overstated to me. Conditions in the GRRM books are much rapier (if that’s a word, which I’m sure it isn’t) for aristocratic women than conditions in corresponding historical periods actually were; sure, knightly chivalry was a crock, but plausibly chaste and unraped noblewomen were a dynastic asset which it was generally understood as wasteful to devalue by raping them (outside of involuntary marriage/marital rape). The amount of sexual violence against the upper-class female characters is at least inflated a great deal for the sake of adding exciting incident to the books.

Now, there’s a fair argument that there’s a wildly inflated amount of ghastly things happening to all the characters, male and female, compared to any likely slice of life from a real-world historically analogous period, and so the extraordinary amount of sexualized violence is just the result of that across the board inflation. But still, when you have a book with an unrealistically exaggerated and vividly portrayed amount of sexualized violence against the female characters, a statement that any reading that concludes that the violence is meant to be titillating on some level can’t be in good faith doesn’t seem to me to be defensible.

But I thought her original review was a hoot, and the response to “Professor Feminism” justified.

I don’t really care about Martin, but I’m curious: Who was “Professor Feminism” and what did he say?

Me, I’m reflexively suspicious of people who use made-up quotes to characterize other peoples’ views, especially when actual quotes are available. By using such quotes, Doyle here is basically saying “I’m going to characterize this in whatever way suits me. I don’t care about the facts.”

I believe it’s E.D. Kain, with more here and even more after that.

And those keyboard thingies? Something always goes wrong. Either the computer doesn’t fit or the keyboard doesn’t fit or I have a laptop (not a good combination) or the fixtures aren’t strong enough for elbows to lean on. Terrible idea.

Fwiw, not read the books after glancing at the first and don’t want to [preferring LeGuin & PKD to epic military stuff]; but the people who thought they were playing cards to defeat Doyle were mostly people who don’t know how the game of cultural analysis works, which leads me to think things aren’t so simple.

Henry, your use of “talking about” is a dead giveaway here. Novels don’t just talk about stuff: there are many ways of representing anything–violence against women, to take one example. The binary “X is in the work because X is in the world” ignores the absolutely crucial fact that there are many, many ways something can be “in” a work.
“Teh realism!” is never in itself an adequate justification for representing particular subjects in particular ways; wishing to make it known that horrible things happen frequently to women in a particular milieu is not an adequate justification for lurid/detailed/etc representations of said things.

(Also, Doyle’s general critique of geek/fan culture needed to be made, imo…)

Nick – I completely agree on the representation issue – but I thought (maybe incorrectly) that was clear in the original comment. This is explicitly an argument about representation. Most genre fantasy has typically represented medieval type societies in ways that do not reflect the actual power relations in those societies, and the implications of those power relations for women. I believe (I obviously can’t be completely sure of this, but there is at least a lot of textual evidence that would seem on first glance to support such an interpretation) that these books’ depiction of women, and of other classes of actors (peasants; footsoldiers who typically die in nameless multitudes in genre multitudes) is intended in large part as a comment on, and a corrective of this tendency. In particular, I think it is intended to argue against notions of ‘romance’ which act specifically to conceal power relations, to flatter the assumptions of the reader, and to titillate male readers with visions of available women with limited choice. Certainly, it is an authorial choice that he is making, and perhaps (I think Lizardbreath’s comment points in this direction) it is tough to strike the right balance in a work which is also intended as an entertainment (but works which are not intended as entertainments have correspondingly more limited readership). I completely agree with your general point about the fantasy genre needing this kind of critique. Nor, do I think that Martin is above criticism. His depictions of non-Western societies left me feeling pretty uncomfortable. But on this specific charge, I think that the most plausible reading of Martin, a la Rosenberg, is that he himself is engaged in an internal critique of just the kind you are looking for.

I haven’t read Martin and probably won’t. I haven’t read much of what I would call fantasy. If Henry Farrell says he’s as good as Mieville I may reconsider. He seems important. I did look at the Doyle and Rosenberg threads. Rosenberg’s commenters made some dubious points: it’s obvious that Martin is “deconstructing” sexist violence which means he’s on the side of the angels and his novels aren’t titillating, Martin devotes at least as much attention to violence against men, Doyle’s concern about the representation of pedophilia is eccentric, the obvious fact that heterosexual rape is not abnormal is an important one to reiterate and there’s something wrong with women who pretend that shouldn’t be a concern of theirs. Rosenberg’s counter, which to my ears sounded much like an easy attack on a simplified straw man version of Doyle’s argument, with added arguments that E.D. Kain is correct, and that Sady Doyle is not going to get very far, unless she changes her tone, wasn’t one that agreed with me.

But I generally don’t get arguments between twenty-something feminists. Could be worse.

No – not comparable to Mieville. Martin is looking to provide intelligent entertainment, not to reinvent the ways in which we tell stories and think about the world. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but they are writing in quite different ways. More generally, and this sort of attempts to respond to Lizardbreath’s general criticism – I think there is a genuinely tough question as to whether something that seeks primarily to _entertain_ can deal realistically with subjects such as rape and the systematic subjection of women as part and parcel of their main argument. I _hope_ that there is, if only because so much of what is out there (in the fantasy genre and elsewhere) carries the implied argument that these are not real problems in societies based on grossly inequitable power relations, and if they did exist, that they were somehow OK, and perhaps even something that guys could fantasize about. Telling the mass audience for these books that no – this stuff is not OK – requires reaching them in the first place. And I _think_ that Martin manages to do this reasonably well, and that the internal evidence surely suggests that this was his intention. I’m much more open to the argument that he tries to do this and fails, than to the argument that he was trying the opposite from the outset. _Contra_ Lizardbreath’s interpretation, while I do agree that the threat of sexual violence against women is ever-present in the books, I don’t think it is at all prurient. The lens through which Martin consistently depicts this violence is the emotional and psychological damage that it does to its victims (and, more subtly, to its perpetrators). This is not (except to what I hope is a pretty small and extremely nasty subset of consumers) likely to be salacious.

@21

Not sure that every argument that has been criticised in stupid ways by sexist idiots is completely truthified by that criticism. Otherwise every internet argument ever made by a feminist, and possibly every internet argument ever made by a woman, would be equally validated.

And I can see it’s a plausible good faith reading for someone who had never read a epic fantasy before. Kind of like you can imagine the response of someone whose first ever crime novel was Stieg Larsson: isn’t it a bit over the top to have someone _killed_ just to start off the plot?

And I can see it’s a plausible good faith reading for someone who had never read a epic fantasy before.

I actually read a fair amount of this kind of stuff, and Sady’s post didn’t seem way off base to me. I wouldn’t argue vehemently that her reading of the books is the most or only persuasive reading (to argue anything vehemently about them, I’d need to reread), but not way off base.

I may be wrong about that, but it’s not from unfamiliarity with the genre.

Is the xdkc-look-alike-comic now a genre of its own, or was this a one-off?

It’s when he’s captured by bandits in one of the flashback scenes. They are described as having raped him, hamstrung him, and thrown him into a deep pool to drown. It’s the scene that starts with him dragging himself feverishly in circles around the pool, making (unbeknownst to the reader until the end) some kind of Q-shaped distress symbol in the guano covering the ground that the Culture spacecraft can see so they know where to pick him up.

And yes, you’re right about the GRRM books. I read the first three, and I don’t remember any men getting sexually assaulted, even by the depraved mercenaries who are vicious torturers and perverts etc.

What Henry said though obviously I’m biased.

tomslee:

But I thought her original review was a hoot, and the response to “Professor Feminism” justified.

I’m fine with you thinking it was a hoot, but what was justified about the professor feminism thing? I was defending a book and a genre that I enjoy. I know many women who also enjoy the series.

Yes, it’s a dishonest reading of the books, not just a poor reading.

And actually, there is very little actual depiction of rape in the GRRM books. Almost all the rape in the books is recalled, described in a memory or a retelling of events. There is almost no graphic sexual violence (not none, but very little). Other modern fantasy novels are far more graphic (R Scott Bakker’s work, for instance).

The lack of sexual assault against men is also likely due to the fact that men were often killed in war, and women raped (and then killed sometimes). But as Henry mentions, this does happen in the fifth book. I would also suggest that Tywin forcing his son to participate against his will in the gang rape of his wife constitutes sexual assault of the father against the son. Forced sex is rape, even if both participants are unwilling.

First – apologies to Belle Waring for diverting this comment thread. It wasn’t intentional, but it’s diverted beyond recall now.

@Henry: while dsquared’s rule seems reasonable, it doesn’t reflect what some feminist bloggers have to put up with. As Sady Doyle writes: “Actually, what happened is that a bunch of other fanboys came over, subsequent to his blog post, and started either parroting his talking points or straight-up calling me a cunt.” Amazingly enough I don’t get a lot of that at my blog, but it wouldn’t take many of those to get me pretty trigger happy with the delete key, and I think that’s fair enough.

Thank you for your correction. I now see the error of my ways.

@Rich:

I was sort of OK with commenting a bit around the edges of this until E.D. Kain showed up.

How kind of you. Sorry, but I’m mentioned in the thread. So I showed up!

But, sorry, E.D. Kain, I think your reading is annoying and not at all good. “Men were often killed in war?” There are whole scenes around the long-term capture of villagers and low-status castle people by two different mercenary bands, both of whom rape and torture. And yeah, they don’t rape any men. In the Tywin scene, Tywin isn’t forced, he’s fooled into joining in to salve his pride. Henry’s reading—that the sexual violence in the book is a critique of fantasy novels, rather than an attempt to reflect medieval “reality”—is better than yours

Just a few points in response here. Henry’s point is one I made weeks ago (read tomslee’s link above.) It is the exact argument I made, in fact, and that Alyssa Rosenberg echoed and expanded upon and that Sady Doyle called me “Professor Feminism” over.

Second, yes mostly the men in these books are simply killed. Perhaps some other fantasy author should delve into how soldiers and farmers were raped in war. Then again, Martin goes into elaborate detail about the torture and sexual assault of Theon Greyjoy. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the most dehumanizing, graphic violence in the entire series so far. No rape scene compares to it, and anyone who suggests that these books somehow present sexual assault as solely against women is not reading very closely.

I think you mean to say Tyrion is “fooled” into raping his wife, but this is also a very poor reading. He is completely under his father’s thumb and is ordered to do so by someone who has just psychologically traumatized him – as a teenager. Calling this participation in a rape, as opposed to victimization itself, is perplexing. I think there is a notion that men who have an erection when they are raped must not have actually been raped. This is an unfortunate belief.

@Belle:

The question is, does the intrusion of actual, horrible, pervasive sexual into the fantasy world, even if intended as a critique, collapse into titillation at some point? The plates stop spinning around and it’s just regular fantasy but with more sexual violence towards women? You have to admit this is at least a possibility.

And then why only women, when men are regularly the victims of sexual assault and rape in both war and lawless free-for-alls? We see this even in discussions of actual history: is it plausible to anyone that Soviet soldiers only raped women and female children during their pleasant trip through Germany?

For women alone to retain the status of “the class of people who get raped” is both to sexualize the violence against women and to erase the suffering of men who are raped.

It is certainly possible that including too much graphic depiction of sexual violence in fantasy could be seen as a backhanded attempt at erotica or at the very least a juvenile attempt to grapple with a far more complicated issue. GRRM doesn’t actually depict rapes in these books, though. By and large (and I may be forgetting something depicted that was) they are recalled in memory, etc. To your point about the rape of men, I think one issue with the GRRM books is that the characters are almost all nobility and so we don’t see the violence handed out to the rank-and-file or the peasantry in very much detail, or hear much about that at all. However, as I mention and as Henry mentions, probably the most graphic scene of violence, torture, and sexual assault do happen to a male character though it is in the fifth book.

Finally, I had no idea that Sady received hundreds of “you fucking cunt’s” or rape threats. I’m sure feminist bloggers have to deal with all sorts of that horrible shit. Of course, she moderates all comments and deleted mine and several other comments (including those of women) before they were ever read by anyone but her, so who knows?

That is hardly an indictment of the books in any case. There is plenty to dislike about the books, but the reaction of asshole commenters on the internet is hardly one of them.

I suspect that people who troll feminist blogs and threaten rape and call people cunts are not representative of the readership of the GRRM books, but rather of men with such a deep loathing for women that they find any excuse they can to harass and intimidate them.

All I know is that I wrote a post very similar in content and argument as Alyssa Rosenberg’s and yet, when all was said and done, I was called a sexist ‘mansplainer’ and she was called a traitor to women in it for the money. This does not smack of honest debate to me.

bq. ow, I think “castrate” rather than “geld” is the word you’re reaching for there.

‘Geld’ actually works in context – the character in question is specifically and deliberately treated as an animal.

bq. It also seems a little odd for the defenders of Sady Doyle apparently being put into the position of denying that at any given time even in a fantasy history “the very best options available to women involved marriage to someone whom you hadn’t chosen, and could only hope would treat you moderately well (or at least not completely horribly).” I mean, I think we’re all on board there.

The point I’m trying to make – perhaps badly – is that the shitty choices women face when they are tokens in a game played between land-owning dynasties are as much a theme of the books as are the horrible things that happen to women who don’t have the nominal protection of being useful in this sense. That GRRM talks about this is strong circumstantial evidence that he is actually trying to critique what fantasy novels have to say about women rather than drooling over the rape scenes. It’s not dispositive – if someone really wanted to, I suppose they could make a case that this was all protective coloration for GRRM’s hidden agenda. But it would be a pretty dubious case – and Doyle doesn’t even try to make it.

bq. The question is, does the intrusion of actual, horrible, pervasive sexual into the fantasy world, even if intended as a critique, collapse into titillation at some point?

This is a good question. But it is not Sady Doyle’s question. As far as I can see, Sady Doyle doesn’t actually have a question. She has an answer – that the ‘R’ in the middle of George R.R. Martin’s name stands for rape, that he is a promoter of rape-positivity, and that anyone who denies this is a sexist fanboy, a sellout to the sisterhood who is in it for the pagehits and money, or both. This, on the basis of a demonstrably shoddy reading of the books, which is not only dishonest in what it omits, but in its representation of what it includes.

Again – I really think that it’s necessary to read the books yourself to see why her reading is so bad. If someone had written a piece saying that the critique had collapsed into titillation, I’d have read it, probably disagreed with it (he not only concentrates on the aftermath for the victims, but uses a number of narrative strategies that seem to me deliberately aimed at preventing titillation), but been interested. If someone had written about how the books reproduce standard genre tropes about the difference between Western and non-Western countries that are at best problematic, based on a careful reading, I’d have almost certainly agreed. But instead, we have what we have.

And, getting back to Tom Slee’s suggestion that this is just a provocative and entertaining trolling and should be treated as such – I don’t think that this could be any more wrong. These are serious accusations – you shouldn’t accuse someone of being a cheerleader for rape-positivity unless, you know, the person actually _is_ a cheerleader for rape-positivity. If you are actually right in your suggestion that Sady Doyle is doing it for the lulz (I’m not saying that you are), then this is obviously a problem, and I’m surprised that you don’t see it as such.

But why on earth should these particular men be so invested in the claim that Game of Thrones isn’t sexist, given that they are misogynists?

Okay, I’m confused. I thought E. D. Kain’s suggestion was that they aren’t actually invested very much in that claim, and are just using the argument as an excuse to “harass and intimidate” a feminist blogger. They may in fact disagree (perhaps vaguely or casually) with her attack on Game of Thrones, but that isn’t what motivates them to comment. They’re misogynists and assholes first, and fanboys only second, if at all.

I personally have no idea if that is true — I haven’t looked at any of this stuff very closely, and anyway it’s not like we can read the original comments. But certainly it is possible. I’ve known guys who will look for arguments to get involved with solely so they can be inflammatory and offensive. They usually agree with the side of the argument they end up taking, but they don’t actually care about the issue very much; they just want to piss people off.

It seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes one can make with trolls (online or off) is to assume that they take their arguments seriously.

(This isn’t to say that we can’t infer anything about Game of Thrones [and its fans] from the behavior of Game of Thrones defenders here. I’m just making the obvious point that before making any such inference, we have to parcel out how much of the vitriol is due to intense Game of Thrones devotion, and how much of it is due to the desire to inflame. We can’t say “look at how many misogynists like GoT!” if these people are here because they’re misogynists, not because they like GoT.)

I think the scene in which Cersei forcibly takes her attendant felt pretty gratuitous; I am not normally the most sensitive on the subject, but it has continued to rankle at me as being out of place with the books, clearly inserted primarily for shock value and titillation (I also thought that was true of Theoden, although I think that was more skillfully done, less out of the blue).

How do you identify which contributions were Martin’s? After reading one or two old ones in paperback a long while ago, I’ve jumped back in with the latest ones (the trilogy with Busted Flush, Fort Freak) , and it seems to be an uncredited shared world setting. (Did I overlook attributions somewhere?)

“Sorry, but I’m mentioned in the thread. So I showed up!”

Yeah, I’m not saying that you were wrong to show up when named — Google makes that very hard to resist. But from my point of view, there’s’ no good way to go from stuff about Professor Feminism and his supposed army of threatening fanboys on the one hand and Sady Doyle and her dismissive use of two-year-old neologisms and $$$-twitters on the other to any kind of real discussion about the GRRM books.

Not that they are masterpieces awaiting a critic, but honest criticism of them is difficult to entangle from the bog-standard feminist blog dispute that you’re in. My reading would be that Henry’s (and yours, you say; I haven’t really been inspired to read much more of the dispute) is basically correct as far as authorial intention goes, but fails on aesthetic grounds — it’s too reductive to say that depictions of sexual violence in a text are bad only if they seem intended to be titillating in an arousing sense; the book can just as bad if they’re used to maintain reader tension and plot interest though what amounts to horror-movie technique. Henry’s been criticizing the series here as if what matters is whether it has readers who are supposed to be eagerly looking forwards to the next rape scene, but the series fails, in a much more common way, if it has readers who think “Oh no they’re threatening poor naive Sansa again!”, or, indeed, if most acts of agency in the book by female characters revolve around reactions to sexual violence in some way. Compare, say, Margaret Atwood’s writing in _The Handmaid’s Tale_ — um, to make a long story short, rapey book is still rapey.

bq. This issue of who is silenced and who feels safe to post on the internet seems an important one to me. I mention it here because Sady Doyle is often simply brilliant, writing about sexism. Saying, as Henry seemed to say, that if she writes something provocative she shouldn’t complain about angry responses, misses what was to me the most important thing to come out of that post and its comments: that pile-ons can silence people, especially women, especially women who write about feminism.

Lynne – this is an issue that is real, important and very nasty. On a smaller scale, here at CT it is obvious that commenters (most of whom I suspect would think of themselves as being on the left, not anti-feminist etc) often respond to women posters in ways that they do not respond to male posters, and in ways that seem purpose designed to shut them down and shut them out. But I also think that it is a problem for someone to lump people who disagree with her (controversial) interpretation of a particular text as being _ipso facto_ sexists. And I think it is _particularly_ wrong to claim that another self-identified feminist woman who disagrees with her is betraying feminism (I think that this is the clear implication of her claim that Rosenberg is ‘attacking high trafficked posts by other women’ – perhaps there is a counter-interpretation I am not seeing) and doing so in order to make money. This is another way of shutting down argument. It obviously isn’t even slightly as vicious as rape-threats or calling women cunts. But that doesn’t mean that it’s great either.

How do you identify which contributions were Martin’s?

Characters generally “belong” to their creators, so it’s possible to track who’s writing a given storyline. But checking Wikipedia I see most of the dodgy mind-control stuff was actually Steven Leigh or Lewis Shiner, so I’ll withdraw my remarks entirely and step away from the Internet now.

Oops. Should be “no one could think of *anything* to say about it …” above.

did anyone else find it really weird how specific Larsson was about any material items purchased over the course of the books?

Yes and no. Obsessive specificity about brand names and specs is a thriller tradition going back to Ian Fleming – it’s really his big contribution to the genre, not just in terms of “Bond carries a Walther PPK, and this is why” but even as far as “Bond smokes Senior Service and gets his shoes from Lobb’s and eats Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, and this is why”.

In Fleming’s case it’s a kind of Playboy effect: Bond’s living the glamorous life that Bond’s readers couldn’t in 1950s Britain, and the high-quality brand names are corroborative detail, intended to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. A peek into the world of the rich and beautiful.

And in more modern thrillers, you get the genre of Ordnance Pron – people like Tom Clancy explaining exactly how an AIM-9’s seeker head works in tremendous detail, because the attraction there is to readers who desperately want to be on the inside and who see this sort of fascinating technical arcana as their way of feeling like they’ve got there. In this case it’s a peek into the world of the badged and dangerous.

Larsson isn’t doing it for any of those reasons, though, because his characters aren’t operating in a foreign world that the readers want to be part of – they’re operating in the normal boring world of IKEA furniture and MacBooks. The unmarked world, if you like. And if it was just one character doing it, I could see it as some sort of character marker – “she pays much more attention to things than people”, or “he is obsessive about detail” or something like that – but it’s universal.

I haven’t read the books, and it doesn’t sound like its the only thing the books are about, but I’m having trouble reading the idea that the books point out in the real Middle Ages women got raped constantly is a defense. Like the big message that Mercedes Lackey fans need to hear that while in fantasy women with swords kick ass, in the real world women in that situation get raped, and the only hope for political power is through dynastic marriage. The fact that in the real world women get raped is not a message that women, as a group, have managed to miss. (Other people have argued that the point of the books is to show that actual historical aristocrats engaged in endless brutality in an unsentimental pursuit for power, and that the rape is just part of that, which is a more reasonable defense.)

I like Sady Doyle’s writing, and I liked the original post on GMMR, but she’s clearly acting badly in the aftermath of it. I know, blah, blah, blah, you can run your blog however you want, but writing a post on how the only reason you like a fantasy series is because you want to be titillated by rape, and then deleting links to non-abusive posts that argue the point is an asshole move. Full stop.

Also, the term “mansplaining” is the worst thing to happen to the feminist blogosphere. What’s someone supposed to reply? There is no reply, because that would just be more mansplaining. I understand the impulse behind the term — I’m surprised there aren’t news reports of the form “Feminists blow up Internet after reading one millionth post explaining how women just need to understand that selling beer is a business, and therefore they have to make sexist ads” — but Christ is it annoying when a discussion devolves to the “mansplaining” phase.

I think “mansplaining” has shared the fate of “privilege”, or even “objectify” if you want to go back that far.

A new term is coined with a specific meaning that describes something real. It soon becomes a buzzword that everyone wants to use at every opportunity in order to signal their membership in the Tribe. It’s specificity gets gradually eroded and eventually people get sick of hearing it.

I suspect this is a phenomenon that is pretty much destined to happen over and over again.

ajay:
Great analysis of Ian Fleming’s writing style. I have actually been reading through his original Bond books and you are completely right. He spends a ton of time talking about the special tobacco that Bond smokes and the car that he drives. As for Larsson, perhaps he just finds these sort of object fascinating? I am sure I have bored people talking about the technical specifications of cars and electronic gadgets. I guess what really surprises me is that his editor didn’t weed more of it out..

Because you want to participate in some conversations but not others, so you allow the conversations you want to have to go forward on your website, while allowing the conversations you don’t want to participate in to go forward on the rest of the internet. This doesn’t seem like a hard question at all.

I don’t think it applies terribly well. She wasn’t passive-aggressively pretending to be surprised that anyone was annoyed by the post, she was aggressive-aggressively saying that the people who were annoyed weren’t worth engaging with. Rude, certainly, but not the same thing at all, as far as I can tell. And I’d hate to quote dsquared as if he were opposed to rudeness generally.

tomslee
I found Henry’s arguement more convicing than yours.

but people who think that their blog posts are all special while other people’s responses to them are spam should be given their space, in the sense that if you aren’t a sycophant, why bother to read them.

Same reason you read anything else — if and only if you find it entertaining or informative.

To be fair to Doyle, the Alyssa Rosenberg post made the single worst point ever to appear on ThinkProgress: that there’s an unfair double-standard where TV and movies can show lots of murders but it can’t show lots of rapes without people complaining. Unfair to the artistic-depicter-of-rapes, that is.

We don’t even know what make of car Mrs Merdle was.

I beg your pardon, she was a Daimler.

Is it “they’re really badly written”?

I keep wondering about two things when people say this.

First, in comparison to what? (Other massively popular thrillers? War and Peace? Absalom, Absalom? … ?)

Second, in what way? Did you read the books in the original Swedish, or are you just addressing qualities that you think can’t possibly have been botched in translation? (I’m not being snarky, I’m really curious.)

So look, the entire ‘mansplaining’ post and the fall-out and the Professor Feminism stuff was all directed at me for writing this post. Since she didn’t link to my post a lot of people have made judgments about it based on only what Sady has said, and her conflating my post with sexist spam comments posted to her original.

I may mansplain in my post – I don’t know. I defend a series of books I like based on my interpretation of the texts against what I believe was a very shallow, very biased reading. I felt like Sady was out to pick a fight, gave the books the most biased and cursory reading possible, and then basically told everyone who thought otherwise that they were idiots who couldn’t handle criticism. She then followed this up by saying that anyone who said otherwise was a mansplainer.

Look, I don’t know feminism the way Sady Doyle does. She’s an expert there. But I do know fantasy, and fantasy has traditionally glossed over inequality between sexes, and romanticized the Medieval worlds that form the foundation of much of fantasy literature.

If you read my post (and really I don’t care if you do – yes, Sady accused me of going after traffic but I could really care less about traffic), that’s mostly what I’m saying (aside from pointing out a dozen or so instances of flat-out untruths about the books that Sady includes in her original post).

I don’t think this is the same thing as telling a feminist what feminism ought to be about. It’s just an attempt to argue that Martin is doing the Medieval realism genre and that that genre in particular serves as an internal critique of fantasy and romanticism and the inherent sexism built into fantasy that arises from simply never addressing these issues and making women little more than comic book characters.

“Is it “they’re really badly written”?

I keep wondering about two things when people say this.”

I didn’t find them badly written when compared to other bestsellers such as the truly terrible Dan Brown. The prose is awkward, though that might be the translator, and the books all go on way to long. That said I enjoyed them for what they were, pulpy beach reading.

“The possibility that she has already considered his argument, disagrees, but for her own reasons doesn’t want to engage it”

She did of course have time to write a lengthy piece about what a sexist asshole Kain is.

JanieM:
As a fellow sufferer of Dan Brown you might enjoy the Read it and Weep podcast. Basically it is a group of comedians who review a bad book, movie or television show once a week. It is pretty entertaining. You can find a bit more info here : http://read-weep.com/

/Just wanted to note that I am not affiliated with this podcast at all. Just trying to spread the word about something I enjoy.

This is the kind of comment that probably can’t be done “right” and therefore shouldn’t be offered at all, but since that kind of thing is the subject of a lot of this discussion, what the heck.

Re E. D. Kain at 5:59: Saying “look” to people is … hmmm. Let me just put it this way. When I hear myself saying, or wanting to say, “look” to someone, I do sometimes also hear, in my mind’s ear, that it’s in the imperative, and therefore is perhaps carrying a certain message of insistence on my own righteousness that may not come across to my interlocutor in quite the way I would hope in a calmer moment.

In other words, on the receiving end it feels like being ordered around, and having the truth laid down for me….

;-}

Bond smokes Senior Service

I thought he smoked a custom blend from Morlands and when he couldn’t get that then Gauloises.

Great cartoon Belle, only I was fooled and didn’t catch you calling it xckd, I spent quite some time googling for “tumblr of humanity” and searching the xkcd site in the vain search for that missing mouseover.

@JanieM – maybe so, maybe so. In any case, I’m not saying my behavior or argument or any of the rest of it was perfect. Far from it. I stooped into definitely petty territory, and I may have bungled my initial argument at least in some points where I may not have had enough knowledge about where Sady is coming from, etc. I accept that all of my actions/posts/ may have been flawed. And yet, I don’t think that either her reading of the books or her characterization of my argument were honest attempts at underscoring either the flaws in the Martin books or in my own argument. That’s all.

Doyle said (1) she personally found the series distressing to read, and didn’t wish to do whatever “work” she’d need to do, if she was going to get over it, and (2) it seemed like, for female characters in the books, there was only one possible narrative, involving rape. The back-and-forth has been about the accuracy of (2), and its importance. But a significant number of readers who’ve somehow felt called to defend the honor of the author against Doyle’s blatant refusal to bend her knee have (literally, apparently) claimed the ability to know what is in the novelist’s mind–and they agree that rape is omnipresent for women in the books, and that anything else is fantasy.

But there’s this distinction between “engaging in debate” and “putting up with yet-more abusive sexist pile-on crap” that seems to resonate with some and not with others here, to put it mildly.

But it’s you that’s missing this distinction. What in Kain’s comments did you find “abusive sexist pile-on crap?”

Re E. D. Kain at 5:59: Saying “look” to people is … hmmm. Let me just put it this way. When I hear myself saying, or wanting to say, “look” to someone, I do sometimes also hear, in my mind’s ear, that it’s in the imperative, and therefore is perhaps carrying a certain message of insistence on my own righteousness that may not come across to my interlocutor in quite the way I would hope in a calmer moment.

Just curious: In Doyle’s linked post, did you detect a wee bit of a righteous tone? Were there any words there that were a bit “imperative” in their tone?

The concept of “political correctness” has been coopted, but in its origin – as a critique of the left by the left – it was important and useful.

“First, I don’t think there’s a thing wrong…”

Would love to the the second part of this comment.

I agree with RP @101 about spam. A blogger can do moderation however she or he wants, but to call a comment saying “I disagree. See my post xxx” spam is ridiculous.

E.D. Kain – Oh, I didn’t think you were trying to be polite, and I’m serious that there’s nothing wrong, in context, with being rude; Sady wrote rudely about the books and people who enjoy them, and you wrote rudely about her and her arguments in response. (I think your criticisms of her post were offbase, for the reasons I gave here above, but I don’t think there was anything out of line about the fact that you were rude.

I was mostly disagreeing with pf that the conversation she was being invited to engage in with you was polite and low key, and noting that given the tone, her failure to engage with you substantively didn’t seem all that peculiar to me.

But Kain’s response to Sady’s post was not, in fact, polite and low-key.

I guess years of Internet invective have dulled my sensitivity, but in the context of the post to which he was responding, Kain’s post seemed polite to me.

I do think Kain’s conclusion is substantively wrong, and he (apparently he’s a “he”) got a bit too cute by invoking Doyle’s use of the word “creepy,” but if we’re going to bring out the sensitivity police, we ought to have them collect all the available evidence.

I’m not saying “Doyle started it” as some kind of defense of Kain. I’m agreeing with you that there’s nothing wrong with writing in that style, and I admire Doyle’s knack for it.

I’m saying that Doyle subsequently crossed a different set of lines. Which (of course) she has every right to do. She even has the right to complain about being criticized for it. And to delete comments that are critical from her blog.

I’m only saying that I agree with the critics of her response.

@politicalfootball at #105

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/08/26/enter-ye-myne-mystic-world-of-gayng-raype-what-the-r-stands-for-in-george-r-r-martin/

She did engage in conversation with readers of Martin’s book, after the book review. I link to the comments and post above. Around # 54 of the comments she lists reasons she deletes posts, too.

The mansplaining post was more about process, and not about the books. It was a different subject, which some people didn’t like. They wanted to insist she talk about what they wanted to talk about. A lot of pushing of boundaries, and nastiness, hence the post about process, and yet some people STILL wanted to get her to talk more about the books, and impute low motives to her when she says No.

Looks to me like Rich sums it up best:

“to make a long story short, rapey book is still rapey.”

Eh, I was bored, so I read the Sady Doyle original post on the GRRM books that Lynne links to above. (Spam!) As a description of the books, it seems to me to be perfectly accurate. Even the “heroic old Ironman” comment that Henry picks out makes sense, in context; to his culture, Victarion is heroic and old and an Ironman, whether we think that he’s a hero or not. You can disagree with whether this means that GRRM is creepy or not, or furnish some other reason why the books are written that way, but they seem to me to really be written that way.

Sorry, Lynne, don’t know how I misplaced the “n”.

As someone who has read all five books I am in full agreement with 121. I also thought Sady’s post was somewhere on the largely to completely correct continuum. It always read to me like a main-stream fantasy series that makes some half-hearted attempts to send up genre tropes, with a lot of rape, and some weird sexualisation of children in the first few books. I’ve never gotten that the Game of Thrones is meant to be a critique of medievil society, because it’s not about medievil society. I suppose, I would agree that it could be read as a critique of our representations of feudal society and warfare in genre fiction. I just don’t think that not enough rape, or attention paid to the possible erotic lives of 12 year old girls, is anywhere on my list of problems with fantasy fiction’s depictions of feudalism, or that a series of seven thousand page novels is the proper format of such a critique.

Oops, Lizardbreath is right, I thought Martin was English, and assumed he’d got past a US based editor only because he’d already been published.

Comparable to Lolita (which wasn’t published either at first, and which does painstakingly depict it as abuse)? Is the marriage (which I read about in Doyle’s post) treated as abuse? If a critic couldn’t distinguish between a novel about abuse and a novel about something supposed to be a love relationship, and attacked an obvious critique as a sympathetic depiction of the feelings of an average thirteen year old, I would disagree. But I’ve noticed that none of the claims that Martin is “deconstructing” something have claimed anything along the lines of his adding things to the story that plainly show, even to the reluctant reader, that the relationship constitutes abuse.

(Never mind.)

@124- hit enter too soon.
I took this more as a critique of fantasy fans romanticizing periods where that was a common social problem, but do you think forced marriages of children aren’t a problem in the English-speaking world today? Even leaving aside the isolated FLDS communities in the US where this sort of thing goes on routinely, I was just talking to a Dutch diplomat who had helped several Dutch teens escape forced marriages to much-older relatives (for the purpose of getting the relatives Dutch citizenship). He got help dealing with these cases from the UK diplomats, because this is apparently a more common problem in the UK and they have better protocols for dealing with it. So yeah, forced marriages of teenagers are a current problem in the Anglophone world. Not to mention the countries where the marriages were taking place were also English-speaking, among other languages.

I wonder, Rich, what did you think of Starship Troopers? I found the book to be an appalling authoritarian fantasy, and regarded the movie as an entertaining authoritarian fantasy. Never read The Iron Dream.

Rich, it’s not like novels that critique genres by comparing them to Hitler are a dime a dozen.

If you’d shown me The Da Vinci Code and I didn’t know what else Dan Brown had written, I could have been convinced it was a critique of a certain kind of modern grail romance novel. I have a tendency to assume serious novels are critiquing things in them I don’t like, if there’s no very, very solid internal or external evidence to the contrary–and occasionally I’ve had to change my mind.

The Song of Ice and Fire may well be a critique, and Sady Doyle may well hate characters I like, but she can’t be wrong only because she didn’t like the books and other people think they’re good.

Belle@139: There’s at least a fair amount of disagreement that these novels are aimed at males, incidentally. I’ve certainly heard the claims that fantasy is traditionally more popular with females than males (it gets complicated with all the genre distinctions, but eh).

I don’t think that the young marriages in the novel are intended to be completely traumatic. That there are issues in the one marriage of Daenarys at age 13 isn’t any particularly meaningful critique of child marriages; he has lords at 16 leading armies in the field, and every relationship faces serious trouble. (One of the apparently older men in the book, Ned Stark, is actually only in his 30s). Martin’s world is compressed, brutish, short.

While I’ve defended these books here, does anyone else have a problem with the prose style? I usually find myself skimming because the writing is so bland.

“I don’t think the books were written to make us all think about how bad Medieval Europe was, or what a rotten system twelfth century feudalism was. ”

And Spinrad wasn’t saying “SF: as bad as Hitler!” The point of what I’ve been calling a critique isn’t to say “Actual Medieval Europe was bad”. It’s to say that fans have been carrying around a fantasy landscape in their heads that carries a lot of objectionable tropes with it that they really should think about.

From the left, this takes the familiar form of screeds against Tolkien. From someone like GRRM, it’s a sort of reaction against a medieval fantasy landscape in which knights are noble and princesses are princessy in the way that young girls in our culture are sold images of princesses. Every knight in GRRM has to be a power-hungry bastard; every woman has to be under sexual threat no matter how powerful she is. Asteele, who I basically agree with, writes “I just don’t think that not enough rape, or attention paid to the possible erotic lives of 12 year old girls, is anywhere on my list of problems with fantasy fiction’s depictions of feudalism.” But the book isn’t trying to be a more accurate description of feudalism. (See: dragons, magic, etc.) It’s (I think) trying to be something that dislodges part of fans’ stereotypical pseudo-medieval mental landscape. And failing.

I think that Doyle’s description of the books is fine, as a description. But reducing the reason for what’s going on to “GRRM is creepy” just doesn’t do it.

Oh great, Piers Anthony. I’m still trying to forget those books, and now you’ve set me back.

A quick search of my “dudes who wrote fantasy that had some literary quality” mental category brings up: John Crowley, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, Michael Moorcock (later work), Tolkien, William Morris, C.S. Lewis, China Mieville if you count the New Weird as fantasy. Lovecraft, depending on what “literary” means to you. Samuel Delany. Um… Zelazny? Fritz Leiber? Steven Brust? I’m trailing off here. But yes, looking at that list, I don’t think that “women as serious characters” is a big area of strength.

Is this so extraordinarily difficult to understand?

Her specific gripe was about the use of the word “look” in comment 91. I thought that was a trivial complaint – which, yes, she acknowledged that possibility when making the point itself, so it was probably uncharitable of me to emphasize it. But still.

And I disagree with this characterization:

Sexist passive-aggressive bullshit.

In what sense was I engaged in sexism? In what sense was I passive? Janie argued that I was asking a trick question, but I think it was plainly a rhetorical question. A different thing.

And in context:

109: and what does she get right back, even after she’ssaid she’s new to commenting and is obviously anxious about it? Sexist passive-aggressive bullshit. Shouting at people about feminism on the Internet is different from shouting down said shouters, such that the identical tone employed in the former case might be wrong in the latter. Is this so extraordinarily difficult to understand?

Absent some example of my having “shouted down the shouters”, or having endorsed doing so, yes, it’s difficult to understand why you’d direct this at me.

I get that there are things that I’m not competent to have an opinion on. And contra AcademicLurker in 73, I think “privilege” and “mansplaining” and even Janie’s “entitled” are perfectly good words that describe real things – and real things that I have been guilty of, and might be guilty of here.

But I’m not getting it. I don’t understand what I’ve done here that merits this description of my comments. And – to be clear – I don’t think I’m “entitled” to any such explanation from you. If you deleted my comments, then mocked them at length without linking them or accurately quoting them, you’d be entirely within your rights. All I can say is that I wouldn’t be able to understand the appropriateness of that.

I haven’t managed, in my busy life doing important things, to read GRRM, or Sady Doyle, or Alyssa Rosenberg, or E. D. Kain, or much of the above discussion. But I can make inferences, based on my extensive experience, of what’s probably in those books, and what those people probably wrote. So by golly, I have a very strong opinion on these matters, which I will share with you at length.

Oddly enough, both Belle @140 and pf @148 seem to be conflating Lynne and me.

Which I take as a compliment, but still, we are not one and the same. It was Lynne @54, not I, who “cautiously dipp[ed] a toe in the water” as a new commenter, and who @74 brought up the notion of commenters at Sady Doyle’s feeling “entitled.”

Just to give credit where it’s due.

“Rich Puchalsky 09.26.11 at 9:21 pm: It’s possible for a book to be, simultaneously, both an attempted authorial comment on feminism and representation of fantasy societies, and one of the worst constant-threat-of-rape books ever. I refer you to Iain Banks’ Inversions.”

Since I read the whole book thinking that either Vossill or Perrund was Diziet Sma–and wondering who the other one really was–I did not get that vibe at all. Every page I turned, I expected to read about Skaffen-Amtiskaw dismembering somebody who had annoyed one of them…

Re: “Brian 09.27.11 at 1:03 pm: I think the scene in which Cersei forcibly takes her attendant felt pretty gratuitous; I am not normally the most sensitive on the subject, but it has continued to rankle at me as being out of place with the books, clearly inserted primarily for shock value and titillation (I also thought that was true of Theoden, although I think that was more skillfully done, less out of the blue).”

Theoden?! I don’t remember that scene from either the book or the movie of The Two Towers…

128: Raise your hand if you think a novel depicting sex between an adult male and a thirteen year old female could be published in the US,

Wait, I don’t understand. The GRRM books are published in the US, along with plenty of other books that meet that description.

More than that – a story meeting that description is constantly in print, regularly filmed, taught in schools, and held up as the epitome of romantic love.

— She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?

–A fortnight and odd days.

— Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.

We don’t even know what make of car Mrs Merdle was.
I beg your pardon, she was a Daimler.

My mistake. Actually I think Sayers highlights the brand-name issue twice via Harriet: she’s described as wearing, at one point, “a frock made of what male writers describe as ‘some soft, clinging material'”, and later on apologising to Lord Peter for her inability to grasp all the subtleties about what men should and shouldn’t wear, which is why she makes her own hero, Robert Templeton, a careless dresser.

Brad@157: Check the secret diaries. (Also, oops. Theon Greyjoy, of course)
Belle@159: JanieM and ED Kain worked it out between themselves, but it did seem a little odd to have ‘Look,’ called out as self-righteous and counter to discussion, when there’s ‘mansplaining’ over there in the corner. Primarily and thankfully off-thread, of course.

shah8:

…Strossian, Halting State dialect…

This week I just finished reading Halting State for the third time! Beginning to love it more than any other Stross. But I digress.

I was charmed by Belle’s phrase “somewhat lascivious pose”. Made me think of my wife…when we were young just being in the same room with her, sans pose, was lascivious enough…but I digress.

When I was very young I knew what lascivious meant but never having heard the word I pronounced it as LASSIE VICIOUS.

But I digress.

“Since I read the whole book thinking that either Vossill or Perrund was Diziet Sma—and wondering who the other one really was—I did not get that vibe at all. Every page I turned, I expected to read about Skaffen-Amtiskaw dismembering somebody who had annoyed one of them…”

I have to admit that I’ve forgotten which characters Vossill and Perrund were, specifically. But I do remember that Culture knife missiles end up killing quite a few rapists in _Inversions_. It’s still a constant-threat-of-rape book even if the rapists or attempted rapists get violently killed. Actually, the two usually go together. Think of the horrible _Death Wish_ style movies, say, which are generally set up with some kind of rape at the beginning.

“More than that – a story meeting that description is constantly in print, regularly filmed, taught in schools, and held up as the epitome of romantic love.”

Yeah, I was sort of wondering when someone was going to bring up Romeo and Juliet. She’s stated to be 13, but I don’t know whether he qualifies as an “adult male” by contemporary definition; the usual guess at his age seems to be 16.

bq. a feminist critique, which some people don’t like, of a novel.

Without getting into the rest of it, the original post was not a “feminist critique.” It was a claim (on the basis of pretty shoddy evidence) that George R.R. Martin was a rape-positive creep. That’s actually sort of important to the way people reacted (not the rape-enthusiast trolls from westeros.org, but that’s a different issue ). Dunno if harping on that puts me on your “do not read further” list or not, but there you go.

“I think you can make strong cases for Crowley, Delany, Moorcock, Mieville , Peake (a little less certain there – I haven’t read the books since my early 20s, and can’t remember enough to make a good argument about whether Fuchsia should count) in that list.”

Jack Vance, Paul Park. The problem with starting searches of mental categories is that the searches never terminate…

Anyways, I didn’t mean that all of these writers were uniformly bad at writing women as serious characters. I might disagree with some of the “strong cases” that you mention … did Moorcock ever write a woman as a serious character? Una Persson I can’t take seriously because of her name and because she’s exactly the kind of super-competent yet vague character that’s put into a long-running series when the author realizes that there are no women in it who aren’t adjuncts to the protagonist. Amelia Underwood? But she is put into what is basically an extended Madonna/whore setup, where the books can only go on for as long as she refuses to have sex. Peake’s character Fuchsia is as real as any of his characters is, but all of his characters are rather Dickensian. And, you know, if we’re going to talk a la China Mieville about female characters being gratuitously disposed of, Fuchsia is a textbook case.

So it’s not that you can’t find one male author of fantasy who has written a serious woman character somewhere. But I think that I’ve listed the best (in literary terms) male authors in the genre, and as a set, they’re not doing very well in this regard.

This sucked. I wish you had made fun of my failure to include a clever mouseover text …

*Raises hand sheepishly* Um, I did, kinda…

Damn, a lot of commenters for whom I used to have respect have just gotten thrown in my trash pile of “do not bother to read” today. This sucked.

It’s been a weird week for CT, eh? (Maybe someone should do an astrological chart).

@Janie at #153,

Thanks, I take it as a compliment, too.

@ Belle at various places esp. #172

It feels weird to me that you could write that post (#172) and get people talking about the books afterwards as though you had not spoken. Maybe people don’t see posts as soon as they happen, though, and wrote theirs as you wrote yours.

I have been wondering something so I’ll throw it out and see if anyone else has the same impression. There have been two threads to the Sady Doyle discussion, one about the books, one about the post tomslee linked to which was about the reaction to SD’s piece about the books. Some commenters here have participated in both threads but I’ve wondered whether there’s a gender divide with women in the second thread (that’s certainly been my interest) and men wanting to keep the discussion about the books.

I don’t know, though—maybe I’m imagining it?

It seems not so easy to have a feminist discussion here. Partly the lack of a thread tree (because, I know, it’s a comment thread to a blog post) but partly the response to any woman saying something is sexist being “what’s sexist about it?”

I mean, I can imagine two reactions to being told something was sexist that I hadn’t thought was (esp. if it was something I said myself): 1) step right up and challenge with what’s sexist about it? as has been done here. 2) step back and think and read/listen. Of course, any of 2) that’s being done is being done off-screen—maybe there’s lots of that going on. But the challenging part tends to shut people up, which is what Sady Doyle’s post was about, as Belle said.

Some commenters here have participated in both threads but I’ve wondered whether there’s a gender divide with women in the second thread (that’s certainly been my interest) and men wanting to keep the discussion about the books.

Not me. I’m male, and I find the same part of it interesting that you do.

@Tom #174

Love it.

“It feels weird to me that you could write that post (#172) and get people talking about the books afterwards as though you had not spoken. Maybe people don’t see posts as soon as they happen, though, and wrote theirs as you wrote yours.”

Yep! All right, I’ll stop. With regard to the comic, though, I hope that what I wrote about it wasn’t taken as “speculat[ion] about the precarious state of [your] marriage.” Just that what’s seen an obvious joke by two people who know each other well can be harder to tonally decode by someone looking at stick figures, and maybe that was why there wasn’t more comment on it.

Brian: but it did seem a little odd to have ‘Look,’ called out as self-righteous and counter to discussion, when there’s ‘mansplaining’ over there in the corner.

Belle: Yes, Sady is unequivocally performing a female version of “mansplaining.” She knows that.

Thanks, Belle. Again.

I was cautious because I’m always cautious (until I lose my temper), but especially when pointing out a fault (I know that makes me odd on the internet), because mostly it backfires and people just double down, so what’s the point. I give E. D. Kain a lot of credit for not doing that.

But more: part of the point of highlighting something so “trivial” (pf) (and see Brian, above) is precisely that the very mildness so often provides cover and deniability for condescension and other polite versions of shouting down.

Another part of the point is that I agree with Belle that Sady knew exactly what she was doing. I wasn’t sure that E. D. Kain knew what he was doing.

OK – talking about other semi-relevant stuff instead. The reason I was ambiguous about Fuchsia was exactly the Ophelia-esque manner of her death. Having Cure songs devoted to your memory is a strong signal that something has gone badly wrong in a cliched Gothy faux-romantic way. On the other hand, my vague memories are that in Titus Groan, she’s the only character who emerges as a spiky and interesting individual.

The Vance/Park pairing is interesting. Vance emphatically counts towards the negative. I’m writing a series of posts on the sociology of Jack Vance on a more-or-less private blog – I’ve been planning for a while to entitle the last one “The Feminist Jack Vance,” and to have nothing in the body except a small 8 point message at the bottom saying “This page intentionally left blank.” Park – the opposite. _Three Marys_ is particularly strong on gender (and you could make a qualified case for Katherine in _Celestis_, although whether a mostly-artificial drug-constructed personality counts is a real question).

On the more difficult topic – Daniel Abraham (whose Long Price Quartet is excellent on its own terms, and for strong and interesting female characters) has an essay here which is worth looking at.

Hell, I make judgments about Piers Anthony personally being a pervert creep. I may be mistaken or unfair.

google his name and ‘firefly’ if you have some brain bleach lying around that needs a good use. If I was a sheriff, and Piers Anthony was moving to my town, I’d seriously look into what were legal and appropriate surveillance measures.

But that question, or ‘which fantasy authors would you try to discourage your daughter from dating?’, is not going to be relevant to all that many people.

‘Which books are going to be enjoyable and interesting to read’ is more widely applicable. There’s a certain pattern where a book gets a reputation as feminist, with an unspoken _within it’s genre_. As a result, it then gets read by an actual feminist, who, to say the least, doesn’t like it.

It would be a measurable loss to the net welfare of humanity if that pattern resulted in a sub-optimal allocation of readers to books. So an accurate description of a book is an inherently good thing, even if that happens to giving it a lower sexism score card.

Half a million people spending four hours each reading a book they don’t like is several bad marriages, ten foreclosed mortgages, or one small business failure’s worth of dysfunction.

Which is about the same as a few hundred million people failing to get a web-comic joke.

On the other hand, my vague memories are that in Titus Groan, she’s the only character who emerges as a spiky and interesting individual.

If we’re talking about Peake’s female characters, surely it’s the Countess who stands out?

Makes me wonder what you think about the same author’s (Robert A. Heinlein) later “Lazarus Long” series of novels. These seem to be more relevant in this context.

Yeah, true. I read quite a lot of his stuff in high school, including the Lazarus Long stuff, and while I understood the warmongering, authoritarian bits to be despicable, I was oblivious to Heinlein’s overt and genuinely awful sexism, in part because it took a different form than I was accustomed to. I’m afraid I internalized his own view of his ephebophilia and incest themes, finding them provocative and liberating rather than creepy and exploitative. I plead youth.

Fuck this.

…a short way in I had hope for a 200-comment thread about ideas for tumblrs (given the way a tumblr page layout cascades downward, a tumblr of ‘things going up’ would be a nice meta-joke, wouldn’t it?) or maybe anecdotes about those keyboard rollouts that aren’t compatible with laptops (why don’t laptops have detachable wireless keyboards?).

Go through the thread and see what the women are posting about. Few or none of the men in this thread have any interest in that discussion, apparently. I’m seriously giving up now because this sucks and I’m bored with it, and people I generally like fine are making me unhappy.

So you’re saying that you feel entitled to demand that people here discuss things that you want them to? Interesting.

Seriously, I’m not reading anything else and I will close comments when I get around to it. Fuck this.

See, now this really is a feminist blog. Well done.

Rich, that’s the only sense I can make out of some of the attacks Doyle got from bloggers and commenters. It seemed as if some people may have thought, “Okay, she is taking the strongest possible position against, I will come back at her just strong on the ‘for’ side.”

Maybe there is an issue about what a “critique” is.

Henry, for me saying something is “creepy” doesn’t mean there is a “creep” anywhere in it. Sady Doyle seems to make a certain kind of demands on characters in novels. Not everyone thinks those demands should be made, but they’re not illegitimate. She has a certain set of breaking points. Not everybody has the same ones, but most people have some. I don’t see “rape-positive” anywhere in Doyle’s post, and I don’t see where you’re getting that from. Yes, Doyle wants to see male characters who rape depicted in a different way, and if she does she should stay away from fantasy novels (which she is doing), but the demand isn’t illegitimate.

E.D.Kain: Honestly, it doesn’t make me more comfortable to be told that Martin has taken a genre beloved by women readers and subjected their favorite characters to rape because he thinks that’s what would really happen. You think the fact that he has the brains to write a novel means he couldn’t possibly not be writing a (certain kind of) critique. (At least, I think you’re making an argument about the novelist along these lines.) You may be right, or as you said above, you may be wrong. But it’s difficult to separate a novel from its readers, and if the readers who are showing up are (for lack of a better word) “rape-positive,” it seems like the only alternative is to argue with the novelist’s best fans about what you say is the real reading.

Everyone was talking about the HBO miniseries and it’s silly to say someone who hated the novels shouldn’t be able to post about her opinion.

(Caveat: I’m not caught up on all the comments.)

“Martin is looking to provide intelligent entertainment, not to reinvent the ways in which we tell stories and think about the world.”

Err, but he is making a thousands-of-pages-long critique of the fantasy genre and it’s cliches and nervous tics. Same as Glen Cook & Michael Swanwick & Stephen Brust have. Watch the prophised noble-born heir in exile….f**k up continually.

It is great to read a fantasy epic not about the Keeping the Ultimate Bad Guy Away from the WMD’s, though, ‘cos if there’s a literary genre in the shadow of the Manhattan Project, it’s High Fantasy.

On the prevalence of rape in Martin’s books, it’s worth remembering that the novels started in the 1990s when the Balkan wars where in the news and rape as part of warfare was, maybe for the first time, in the public discourse.

Similarly, it’s hard not to read Dany’s tribulations in slaver bay with the Sons of the Harpy and not think about Iraq or Afghanistan.

The comment thread on D-squared’s infamous post, after apparently stopping a couple of days ago @373, is showing signs of life this morning. This one took longer to get to 200 (about 24 hours vs. about 48), but it seems possible it may still surpass that one, thanks to tomslee’s thread-jacking. Let’s give it the old college try.

I was going to stay out of all this, but Jesus:

But it’s difficult to separate a novel from its readers, and if the readers who are showing up are (for lack of a better word) “rape-positive,” it seems like the only alternative is to argue with the novelist’s best fans about what you say is the real reading.

Look (he says imperatively), I’m not a GRRM fan or reader, so I mercifully don’t have a dog in this particular fight. I’m not (I like to think) prone to critiquing people’s “tone” or getting stuffy when someone says something acerbic or to concern-trolling about “broad-brushing” when someone doesn’t include enough qualifiers in a sentence. I’m even sympathetic to Sady Doyle’s assessment of geekdom in her initial post, at least as it’s applicable to the large and noxious swamps of Interior Geekdom, so heavily populated by obnoxious, spoiled, reactionary adolescents and social retardates aged 13-55. And from what I can tell I think it’s entirely possible the books are too rapey by half (a common failing of attempts to correct for unrealism by substituting “grittiness,” as Rich has already noted), and that E.D. Kain’s argument, though reasonable enough, is wrong.

But… come on. Look at that. That really is just a slightly reworded version of saying “the only true fans of these books are rape apologists.” And that’s by a charitable rendering of what “rape-positive” could signify. Even by the very, very relaxed standards of Internet Jerkdom, there are provocations that qualify as gratuitous and stupid. An important lesson of threads like this one, as Henry correctly noted early on, is: don’t do stuff like that and then complain when other people jump down your throat. It’s going to happen, and (barring actual threats) they’ll be within their rights to do so. (A corollary: don’t defend that kind of bullshit and get frustrated when nobody else is impressed.)

Of course, the real lesson is y’all should have listened to those of us who actually tried to talk about Belle’s comic. But failing that, it’s a dream I have that hopefully we can all move on from this thread and grow as human beings into better citizens of the

Okay, I guess I couldn’t finish that sentence without laughing.

That really is just a slightly reworded version of saying “the only true fans of these books are rape apologists.”

Just to keep things clear, the ‘that’ in this sentence applies only to Bianca’s comment at 4:26?

That’s what I thought — I just had trouble getting it straight on my initial reading, and didn’t want the thread to get all hostile again based on people misreading what you were talking about.

I just had trouble getting it straight on my initial reading, and didn’t want the thread to get all hostile again based on people misreading what you were talking about.

I thank you. Although IMO the comment I was responding to has essentially already crossed the threshold of hostility.

I just wanted to add in, I appreciate this little cup of unhappiness is nothing compared to the sheer undulating misery that this thread has caused, but was it really necessary to reveal the end of Perdido Street Station without the by-now Internet-standard “***SPOILERS***” or something similar? I’m a slow reader who is about halfway through that massive draught-excluder, and now I feel like I’ve wasted hours of my life. Again, no biggie, but kind of bummer nevertheless.

On the rapiness or not of the early Middle Ages, Duby’s “The Chivalrous Society” gives some clues. 1100 and onwards the aristocracy was in flux, but the general tendency was for noble fathers to produce a lot of extra sons who could not inherit. They’d be kicked out of the castle to roam the countryside killing one another, besieging castles, etc. They could try to steal someone else’s land and castle (difficult) or their could look for an heiress, a widow or daughter. Fortunately, they killed each other a lot, so in a certain proportion of cases women would inherit. Marrying an heiress was essentially the only possibility of maintaining one’s station.

Some say that this led to the love poetry of the troubadors. Knights wanted to get themselves on the list of eligible husbands for widows . On the other hand, one tactic was to take an eligible heiress into custody when she was very young and marry her when she was of age (16 or so).

It seems to be assumed that widows with castles needed to have a husband to defend the castle, but at least the castle gave her enough leverage that she could participate in the selection. (In Yvain, fiction, a widow marries the man who killed her husband within a week,).

So I’m not sure if this is important, but I left my initial comment on Sady’s post very soon after she posted, before she had ever posted that she was getting threats or spam or anything. I then tried to post a second comment after mine was spammed explaining that I was only trying to let her know that I’d written a response and there was no need to call it spam and make mocking comments about my looking for traffic. This was also spammed. After that my pride was wounded and I “moped about” on my blog (not across the internet…?) and acted silly about the whole thing. I was surprised at being accused of going after traffic. Then came the Professor Feminism post, etc. etc. I certainly didn’t try commenting at her blog after seeing that people were threatening to rape her or anything else of the sort, nor would I have at that point.

@bianca steele’s 5:41, while I don’t quite understand how it’s “what LizardBreath said,” is certainly a vast improvement over the previous post I replied to. So thank you, and I won’t say anything more about that.

As an aside (it’s going to be kind of a long aside, I guess): I don’t grasp what “rape-positive” is meant to mean either, and I strongly suspect this is because at its root, it really doesn’t mean much beyond its function as a way of accusing someone of being deviant or unwholesome on the subject while retaining a bit of deniability about having done so. There are after all a number of different ways someone could be “pro-rape”:

1. Believing rape is bad and rapists are bad, but also tacitly treating it as on some level appropriate as a punishment for evildoers and/or “uppity” or “loose” women. (A common manifestation of the chauvinistic attitudes exhibited in prison rape humour or popular myths about how “women who dress like X are asking for it.”)

2. Believing rape is bad, but also at some level tacitly getting off on titillating fantasies about dominance and control. (A bigger market among both men and women than many people are comfortable admitting.)

3. Essentially believing there’s no such thing as rape because women or underage boys or whoever your chosen target is secretly want it, or believing that rape isn’t bad because the target’s opinion of what they want or don’t want is of no consequence to the rightness of the act. (Mentalities commonly exhibited by real rapists.)

4. Believing that rape is usually bad, but that one’s specific circumstances necessitate or justify the use of rape as a tool of control, terror and authority. (A related mentality commonly exhibited by, say, prison gangs or armies in the field.)

5. Believing that rape is bad, but simply being mistaken or insensitive about or unaware of its true consequences, causes and remedies, to such a degree that you’re the sort of person who winds up as part of the problem despite your best intentions, the unconscious constituent of a variously-defined “rape culture.”

All of those are factors which could exist — often in overlapping forms — in some proportion of any random group of a hundred people. But most of them are also factors that most people in that same random group would punch you out over if accused of manifesting them face-to-face. The potential exception is 5., the most antiseptic and in a way the least judgmental possibility, which is where the deniability part comes in. But the term “rape-positive” essentially blurs the distinction between that and previous factors, and between all of them and a further factor that usually elicits its use:

6. Believes that rape can be permissibly portrayed, alluded to or even joked about in a way I do not feel is appropriate or comfortable.

And who knows? An instance of 6. may well overlap with some of those other factors, or it may not, or it may from some points of view and not others. There are sure to be examples of both. OTOH it may be just as likely — it’s certainly just as well-attested a phenomenon — that censoriousness on the subject masks some of those same objectionable or unsavoury or at the very least embarrassing “rape-positive” beliefs and proclivities. It’s all very vague and allusive and yet despite that, or because of it, maximally insulting and provocative at the very same time.

Given that, it would seem awfully hard to find a way to make the term into more signal than noise.

This familiarity in fact seems to be, from their accounts, what appeals to many readers about GRRM’s use of the trope when they talk about his having created characters they feel like they’ve met in real life.

Yes! Spot on! What I find deeply suspect is only partly the authors’ obsession with sexual assault. It’s also the fact that their defenders/fans are not just satisfied with putting a period costume on a contemporary pot boiler, they hail it as an achievement. Excuse me, I made the wrong career choice – how hard is that?

I’m not saying there isn’t a legitimate place for contemporary romances. I’m not saying either that they shouldn’t be gritty (Catherine Cookson) or cloaked in period/pseudo-period costume (Georgette Heyer, whom I adore because she’s so fucking funny). My objection is that these people are writing about 21st century concerns with a bit of gadzookery in the dialogue (OK) and being hailed as geniuses for doing it by people who evidently haven’t the critical wherewithal to understand that this is all they’re doing (OK), who are then taken seriously (not OK).

Now, if somebody said to me that GRRM was the Heyer of para-medieval fantasy, I’d probably buy one to read on the train. But we’re being bombarded with the idea that this is something on a higher plane, and that this ambition/recondition excuses the unpleasantness of the narrative. No.

Dear Belle,
Although you’ve signed off now, I appreciated your crooked tumblr of humanity cartoon. It was great, really – what didn’t it have? Contemporary politics (ycch), weirdness (xkcd), marriage (!), whimsy … with a touch of the underbelly of post-modernity (concern about Mitt Romney’s interior life), not to mention a cool reference to your blog itself (title).

As near as I can tell, there was a threadjacking (new vocab word) at 7, aided and abetted by comment 8, and then things got permanently derailed. However, you succeeded in generating generated tons of mansplaining (new vocab word), sthg CT excels at. I note you also attracted a couple of Very Important Male Academic Bloggers, too – so kudos, I think.

As a reader of almost every post and comment thread on this site, I’m grateful to the blog hosts because I learn so much from them, but it is a bit of a boysite (new vocab word just invented by me). The language is that of high-level male academic discourse, with comments in a similar discourse and of a comparable level. It is what it is; I accept it because I admire it, but I really hesitate before commenting.

Nonetheless, I’m going to (dare to) address a comment by Henry @60 (iirc) re: the Stieg Larsson trilogy. I don’t read fantasy or sf at all, but I read a fair amount of crime fiction. To me, the extreme violence of the Millennium series was not titillating, and it certainly didn’t feel gratuitous; it was an integral element of the series, which is in one sense an attempt to reveal a very dark and largely hidden side of northern European society. It shocked, it appalled, it enraged – all of these, certainly, but it didn’t titillate. Its heroine is highly uncharismatic, but she fascinates: alienated yet engaged in a relentless search for truth/justice; abused and willing to retaliate in kind (not a common trope for female heroines); a (female) geek among an amorphous network of (male) geeks. Yes, it does shock that a woman (a tiny, weird, marginalized woman at that) should seek revenge in kind (that she should meet sadism with sadism). Some women when pushed to the limit will retaliate with words (er, sort of like Belle did when she signed off @196); others will retaliate with actions. Wiki notes that the original Swedish title for the first volume in the series was “Men Who Hate Women”, which I hadn’t known when I read the series, but it seems to me a much more telling (if unattractive) title than “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.

Oh, comity, for heaven’s sake!

Yes, yes! Comity all around, chris! My words of mild disagreement were nevertheless offered in the overall spirit of sweet Concord, which I guess didn’t come across.

@198: oddly, I am going through this thread and mostly reading the women commenters, ignoring pretty much everyone else except to the extent they are engaging with you.

I think you pretty much nailed what’s going on in 172.

1. I like Crooked Timber a lot and read it a lot. I have noticed the dearth of comments by women, in general.
2. I’m living in London and went with my daughter to the British Library last week, and walking past the J. Lennon sketches etc. suddenly saw the open page, “Reader, I married him.” Faintness, swooning, and Bronte-bonding.
3. I asked my techie brother what tumblr was the other day–and, even though I’m old, I like xkcd. I also like your very gentle mocking of your husband’s latest Crooked Timber obsession.
4. As a teen and young woman I read a lot of fantasy. At some point I realized that as a female I was there on sufferance–when I reacted just like one of the boys things were cool, but if my gendered reality was different from the male norm, it was my reality that had to give.
5. This is not different from my experience in any other area, particularly academia.
6. There’s nothing like an academic/geek shoutdown of a woman’s perspective to send one quietly toward the exit.
7. This may have something to do with #1. Nevertheless,
8. Thanks to those who stick it out.

Back before I quite noticed Scott Adams was a misogynist arsehole, I had a pretty successful political tactic at work based on selecting the Dilbert cartoon that best described whatever I didn’t want to happen.

The key was to, with a grin, give it to the guy making the decision before he got it wrong. Printing it out and sticking it to the coffee machine after the stupid decision had been made would just have been passive-aggressive.

In related news, here’s a link to xkcd.

“1. I like Crooked Timber a lot and read it a lot. I have noticed the dearth of comments by women, in general.”

Since a large number (a majority?) of posters here post under pseudonyms how do you know this is the case?
/Not saying you are wrong.

Well, I thought the cartoon was a lovely homage, even as someone who liked the latest xkcd about neutrinos. And I enjoyed the way it hinged on Professor Holbo and his provocative literary subgenre of “Yes, but would we ever come out from under our beds if we really thought Michele Bachmann means what she says?”

On the other hand, ajay @ 162 wrote:

if he’s the Greatest Investigative Reporter in All Sweden, he should jolly well act like the GIRAS from time to time, and he doesn’t

and now I keep thinking about “Buck” Blomkvist, GIRAT (Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time) and one of the main protagonists of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Who Was Left Behind. Thanks a bunch, ajay.

“So I’m not sure if this is important, but I left my initial comment on Sady’s post very soon after she posted, before she had ever posted that she was getting threats or spam or anything. ”

Ah well, she deleted my post pointing out that one of the minor male characters gets raped (and later sacrificed to the Drowned God), and that the Unsullied, being eunuchs, have been gelded.
One of the main male characters [it is thought] also has been gelded and possibly raped, in addition to his mutilation and torture.

So it’s not like the males get off scot-free from sexual violence in GRRM’s novels. Much of it is off-screen, but it’s still there.

I’m genuinely curious on this.

… There, that’s what the cartoon means to me, in a wordy and awkward style. Wherever you are, I expect hilarity has just ensued.

I am uncomfortable about how they rape up genres generally considered to be juvenile in order to make them more “adult”. People point fingers at that dr. light comic but “watchman” is really the start of that shit in comics.

There was a while in the 1960s-1970s where there was actually a lot of pro-rape stuff in popular culture. Check out “high plains drifter” some time.

Like most women, I currently live in a society where violence, harassment and scary shit can break out at any moment, just because I told some random asshole “no” without bothering to be nice about it.

Sigh. Sounds to me like someone needs to grow up. If I respond in an uncivil fashion to any random request or question, the chances are I’m going to get an uncivil reply back.

This is news?

There’s nothing there that really privileges one gender over another in that regard.

I disagree. I would even have said that disagreeing is sort of constitutive of being a feminist. But you took a class, so…

Er, no, I’ve never taken a class in Feminist studies. I’m merely pointing out there’s a difference between being a human being first and a man or woman second . . . and considering oneself to be a man or a woman first and a human being second.

And it looks to me that the majority ganging up on the minority, however you slice them – race, religion, money, gender – is very much just what humans do. Women as well as men, men as well as women. I also happen to believe that, even if you disagree with it, it’s not remotely controversial as an opinion.

But that’s just me.

Dudes… I’m surprised that comments haven’t been closed, but since they haven’t, and since men are still going on about the mansplaining part of this, we really shouldn’t. A guy going on about mansplaining, pro or con, is a kind of subset of mansplaining. Writing about a strange definition of spam, or about the books, or about the comic of course was fine in this thread, I thought, but when someone says that they’re writing out of a certain lived experience that you don’t have, there’s nothing you can really say about it.

And it’s not exactly a new, neologism thing either. I was in a Men Against Rape group more than 20 years ago which was all-male for pretty much exactly the same reason — there are times when someone says “I don’t want you in my space” and really, the best thing to do is just get out of their space. That wasn’t the only reason for the group — there were male victims of rape (by other men, of course) in it, and it was easier for them to get support without having to explain certain things every time — anyways, the Internet is very big, and 99% of it is fine with guys going on however they want, so maybe this really predictable argument should be had somewhere else.

“men are still going on about the mansplaining part of this, we really shouldn’t. A guy going on about mansplaining, pro or con, is a kind of subset of mansplaining.”

Since when did this place turn into Shakesville? Are we going to have to start using trigger warnings and agreeing to ridiculous manifestos in order to avoid the dreaded label of “Fauxgressive”.

http://meme-of-thrones.blogspot.com/2011/07/hipster-snow-old-gods.html

Fansplaining is a much-needed term. We’ve all seen it: fans who over-identify with a work, who take every critical reading of that work as a personal attack, and who think that sufficiently forceful arguments might persuade the rest of the world that their own reading is the only valid one.

It’s fans who explain that Tolkien’s essentialist treatment of races is not at all racist, that Heinlein never flirts with the boundaries between libertarianism and fascism, that medieval fantasy isn’t massively politically conservative, …

(I can’t even say I don’t do this kind of thing myself.)

I’m going to have to unsubscribe from this blog if it degenerates into nothing but splainsplaining.

There’s nothing worse than someone wearing the wrong tartan who defends her error by clansplaining.

What about the chief whose pots are too large and this error is defended by pansplaining?

I think the point could have been made better by noting that the shag carpeting was a real addition to the interior of the Mystery Machine.

252: “…going on about the mansplaining part of this, we really shouldn’t”.

sanssplaining?

“Curioser and curiouser.”

Stop interacting with Lewis Carroll, please.

A mansplaining. A plansplaining. A canalsplaining. Panamasplaining!

. . . but when someone says that they’re writing out of a certain lived experience that you don’t have, there’s nothing you can really say about it.

I remember a few Thanksgivings back when the men were telling war stories and one of them went something like “I blacked out after taking the phosphorous in the shoulder and the lead in the belly. When I came too, Charlie was out in force, bayoneting the bodies to see who was faking. I kept still, because I needed to stay alive and report back. Afterwords, the VC encamped 20 yards off, so I couldn’t crawl away, not even when the rats were out gnawing on my privates. Then the fire ants came. A day and a half later, they left and it took me another day and a half to make the rendezvous point and debrief. I lost the arm, but at least we knew which way they were moving.”

Then one of our wider-hipped women spoke up and said something to the effect of “Yeah . . . yeah. That’s pretty good. But until you’ve given birth to a child after 20 hours of labor, you just don’t know what pain is.”

The older I get the more resorting to “you don’t know what it’s like” rings hollow as a catch-all for any sort of bad behaviour.

What? We’re interacting with George R.R. Martin here?

If George R.R. Martin didn’t want me to interact with him, he shouldn’t leave the house dressed like that.

Also, was I mistaken about which of those fellow posters has a literature/humanities degree?

No, which is exactly what made it So Much Worse. But never mind.

It appears to be Namsplaining.

(die meme die)

The older I get the more resorting to “you don’t know what it’s like” rings hollow as a catch-all for any sort of bad behaviour.”

Is this like one of Thomas Friedman’s cab driver stories?

No. Yet another edition of simple answers to stupid questions.

rf: “But from what Iv picked up in my short life it seems its actually not that painful.”

See, now that’s some mansplaining right there. Well illustrated.

“No. Yet another edition of simple answers to stupid questions.”

Charming as ever SoV. Good to have you back.

Since this is in response to your:

Is this like one of Thomas Friedman’s cab driver stories?

which, I might add, you also conveniently snipped, it strikes me that you don’t have a leg to stand on. Or is this an example of gratuitous nastiness that’s not really gratuitous, ’cause it’s all about making a point, see? And I just don’t know what it’s like because I haven’t been there?

If I were you, I’d put down the shovel. Next time, make more of an effort to be polite. Also, don’t complain when unwarranted snarkiness receives a reply in the same tone – like I originally said. Nobody likes a whiner.

I thought the original mansplainer in this subthread was the relative in my story who said that until men have given birth to a child they don’t know what real pain is like.

No, that would be momsplaining. If moms were accepted targets for that form of snark.

#263 – I take it that’s vansplaining?
Seriously, it’s way too late for anyone to be saying anything seriously. SoV, don’t forget to turn out the lights when you’ve finished washing up.

Indeed it was Doctor Slack, well observed.

“This is a common rhetorical device and I was curious if that was the case with your tail of fire ants and limb loss.”

I’ll answer for SoV here. No — every detail of that story was literally true. I can prove it using real ‘rithmetic.

Mathsplainin’?

“Later, you mansplaining thing you ;-) Really. As Bloix said, be the last one to turn out the lights if that’s what you want.”

Oh you.
:-)

(die meme die)

happy to help!

Network system administrators spend a lot of time LANsplaining.

Anathem characters are prone to man-planing.

It is impossible to adapt this meme to the circumstance of having a former lover condescendingly droll on to you. (Hyphenating explaining as ex-plaining doesn’t cut it.)

No no salient it works just fine. Exsplaining (with an ‘s’) is what happens when a former lover condescendingly drolls – or trolls, as the case may be.

Also, in the context of George RR Martin, bransplaining is what Bran Stark does whenever he starts going on about the three-eyed crow:

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Three-eyed_crow

Slansplaining is when you start acting like the the protagonist of a certain novel by Van Vogt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan

But really this is just fansplaining on stilts.

Rich P. on Spinrad: Spinrad didn’t try to make his Hitler-as-SF-hero story entertaining. On the contrary, it was grimly boring as well as being horrific.

I certainly agree that The Iron Dream succeeds brilliantly. I wonder what your take is on his horrific novel of a few years earlier, The Men in the Jungle? I think it is a brilliant book, but am a bit more conflicted on my reasons. I assume Spinrad was in part “critiquing” himself in the latter book.

And speaking of Spinrad and books that could not be published in the US, his Osama the Gun appears to be worth a look.

“We’re just trying to preserve our Southern culture’n’heritage, you Yankees wouldn’t understand,” Slidell klansplained.

“Skin cancer be damned, I look marvelous,” George Hamilton tansplained.

303, 304: Well ajay cheated by reading a 1000-page book just to get in the right mindset.