i suspect gay men who avoid women then learn how to write about women by copying. and they picked the wrong guys to copy. it gets complicated, it's a big ball of like... misogyny is not ok... but some of these guys have been traumatized by pressure to act straight and thus find attraction-to-women-stuff triggering... so when they try to write for what they presume is a het audience they can't put themselves in the character's shoes... so they copy somebody who acts straight... with the result that they come across as a het kind of misogynistic. what a clusterfuck.
Some of it might just be copying without thinking about it, too. I know I've heard that a lot from artists who just kinda put female characters in (mild) stuck-in-quicksand twisty poses by default without meaning it to be a Sexy thing at all, and it was only when they saw stuff like Escher Girls pointing out the sheer universality of this as a weird fanservice thing in inappropriate situations that they went, "Oh. ...Huh."
I think the same thing was happening in a different way with A Wild Swan. There wasn't the "she breasted boobily down the stairs" shit but there was a very contemptuous Nice Guy-ish tone even though the writer is gay and presumably doesn't actually want women to want him.
My mom tried to get me read that when I was a teenager (I think because it was a Famous Work of Feminist Fantasy and she was trying to balance out the amount of dude authors in my high fantasy fare), but I bounced off it. In retrospect I'm glad of that, because it would have made Certain Later Discoveries a lot harder to deal with.
An alloy is (more or less) the same mass as the original components, so it's not quite 'in the same place', but... yeah. Like, there are even gold/copper alloys! Lots of them!
Yeah, but people in Celtic Britain would probably conceive of the metals as being in the same place now, not being up on atomic structure.
god, same, my mom had it on her bedside table for YEARS, under a deepening fur of dust, and every so often i'd blow the dust off and have a go at reading it, but i couldn't give a flying fuck about anyone or anything in it, and now i don't remember a word. i reckon there's a reason it sat there so long. but it was Important Feminist Writings and therefore we had to read it. SHRUG.
got a quick summary or a link to a short bit? all i noticed really was that it was boring and faintly mean-spirited. not that i'm doubting you. considering the source and all.
Here we go. 70s/80s-style uterus-centric feminism is understandable considering when it was published, but I'm only two chapters into reading the sporking and already the point of view character has been forcibly married off to a violent, abusive man by her own sister and said sister is now telling her she has to fuck a total stranger to bear the majykkal prophesied king. Apparently as long as it's other women forcing women into horrible situations it's feminist.
I still have this thing gathering dust on my bookcase. Occasionally i look at it and I think hmm. But then I go back to reading books that make me happy lol
It would probably still be on my "I should read this someday just for Historical Context about its genre influence" list if it were not for Aforementioned Later Discoveries. As is I dropped it in the "I'll skip this one, thanks" bin instead.
thank you. that's... a lot. i doubt i'll read much of it, but the intro and first bit of actual sporking was pretty explanatory. kind of makes me want to write a 'really historically accurate this time for sure' back-to-the-welsh-myths king arthur story, using the early-and-possibly-original merlin who was a hermit of the woods, driven mad by the horrors of war. in other words, he wasn't dumbledore. he wasn't even sexy dumbledore. he was a hippie vet with hella ptsd who hadn't had a bath in like ten years. he probably took a lot of mushrooms.
One of the other big problems (the biggest problem being forcing young teenagers into sex rituals being portrayed as a good thing) is the elitism. I quote:
Also I followed the link in the above quote, and while I don't agree with the guy that His Dark Materials is terrible, he did point out some amusing plotholes:
