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[salinea]

"Going Native" sf, anthropology and colonialism by coffeeandink

There's a recent survey done by the Anti Defamation League about antisemitism in Europe http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3669706,00.html
A lesson in modern antisemitism and this other post by chopchica talks about it and about her own experience with antisemitism while travelling in Europe. As a French Jew, it's a little bit odd for me to see a post talking about this from the experience of an American on a trip, but actually it's a bit of an eye opener because there are many things I taught myself not to pay attention to just because I'm used to them. I'm also used to see my concerns dismissed and being treated like a pain in the ass when I insist on complaining about the lack sandwich with chicken rather than three different choices of pork or cheese at local RPG conventions.

Over at the westeros board (yes, I still read it, just lurking, shut up), Scott Bakker insists on showing his ass to the public in a thread (and its sequel) about the treatment of women in his books and people who think it's sexist (and people who think any reading about sexism and misogynism in a book is a grave insult that should never be done because it's so awful!! yeahhhhhhh right). On the same thread, several people, especially Kalbear, Maia and needle are being awesome.

There's a Celia Friedman interview at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist with some interesting discussions about sexism in fantasy as well, especially in the comments.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"They are inferior to men in the eyes of god like slaves are inferior to masters and pigs to snakes,"

WHAT AN AMAZING DEFENSE!!!

I seem to recall that Ridley Scott didn't find it difficult to have a strong female character in movies about the crusades and gladiators without making them decorations or whores.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

His whole defense basically rounds up as "But it is intended to be sexist so as to make a POINT. You're missing my point and my subtext! YOU ARE READING MY TEXT FROM THE WRONG PERSPECTIVE!"
and the hilarious things is that he's supposed to be this extra smart philosophy major!!!

They should give writers a lesson into how to act classy in the internets, it's really sad to see how many of them try to outwank the wankiest fandom dramaqueens.

HAHA, I kinda hated Gladiator, but you're right, there. Actually many people have pointed that PoN's setting is fairly and homogeneously more misogynist than the real historical Middle Age.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I find that most worlds "based on" a world are more sexist than the one they claim to be based on, because they assume they must be and make it 10 times as bad.

[xraytheenforcer.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. They take one antiquated version of the Middle Ages, rather than recent scholarship, and then justify their sexism on the basis of faulty information. Then they get offended when you call them on it.

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Yep. Also because fantasy authors, men especially, LIKE to think that women are always oppressed in a "state of nature" and that it's only a combination of male chivalry and modern feminism that makes today's civilization less oppressive. They apparently haven't read much history. IIRC Terry Pratchett got lots of mail about "Monstrous Regiment," saying that lots of women disguised as men in battle was unrealistic (this from readers of a universe with dwarves, trolls and witches), and he found it hilarious because he found plenty of historical accounts where exactly that happened.

I shouldn't have clicked on those links, Now my blood pressure has risen. There are some real dickweeds on that thread. "But you want a token!!!!1" "But there's a passing mention of washerwomen, therefore there are non-sexualized and non-abused women in the series!!1!" "But you're just wanting your agenda/wish-fulfillment!!"

At least now I know not to read those damn books.

[novin-ha.livejournal.com]

I hated Gladiator too! And being forced to see it all the way to the end because we went to see it with my class from school ;_; painful, I tell you.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Having seen many a painfully long and boring movies at school, I sympathize with your plight ;_;

[werthead.livejournal.com]

I quite liked GLADIATOR when I first saw it, even though bits of it didn't make any sense and MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL was possibly more historically accurate. Every time I've seen it since, I've disliked it more and more, and now refuse to watch it in case I just loathe it outright. Although Oliver Reed was pretty good.

ROME absolutely destroys GLADIATOR in quality.

As for the Bakker situation, I realised that PoN is actually more misognynistic than the real historical DARK Ages, let alone the later medieval period.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, made very little sense and was a pretty eye-rolling narrative :)

Well yeah. And what strikes me as really odd in terms of world building, is that they are so across the wide variety of cultures and societies which Bakker depicts. All of them are exactly as patriarchal (I'm using the anthropological meaning of this word, not the feminist one) and oppressive to women.

I love Kalbear's fanwank that in Bakker's world there's only a ratio of 1/4 women to men. It makes so much sense XD

[zoeiona.livejournal.com]

His whole defense basically rounds up as "But it is intended to be sexist so as to make a POINT. You're missing my point and my subtext! YOU ARE READING MY TEXT FROM THE WRONG PERSPECTIVE!"

I think he missed the class on philosophy of art. :) Also... what point is he making? Has he thought that we've missed that the world is, you know, sexist? And the fact that he had to ask whether there really was an ongoing problem with female representation in SFF really makes me wonder if he's living in a bubble.

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, granted I haven't read the books, but I have to ask: what point could you possibly make by creating an uber-sexist world? It's not like the real world doesn't have plenty of real-life examples of sexism, so if you want to say something about sexism, why create a world that's even worse than ours has been?

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I think you can make that kind of story, creating an uber-sexist world, and be writing an actively feminist text. Writing to show the mechanisms of gender-based oppression, how it screws everyone over, how people deal with it. Distopia is a genre of SFF for a reason. However, if you do it, and if you do it in a genre already oversaturated with sexist settings like fantasy, you need to be real careful about how you go at it. You need a lot of female PoV and female narrative, for one. The problem is that Bakker, having taken the decision to deal with themes about how sociological, psychological and biological factors influence people without them actually realising it to the point that the self is the slave of all those influences, and trying to deal with specifically how oppressive institutions tied to class, gender, sexuality etc. are widespread due to those influences, chose to have only two female characters who are PoV; plus female character who doesn't, to fill the archetypes of the Harlot, the Prize, and the Crone; and that of those three, the Harlot is the only character who 1/ doesn't die 2/ is somewhat sympathetic. Moreover all three characters are very sexualised (including the Crone, and very creepily so), and secondary or even tertiary female characters are almost completly absent apart from a few odd mentions. The result is very... odd, indeed, and doesn't accomplish at all what Bakker was trying to say, or what he thought he was trying to say.

Now he whines about it *rolls eyes*

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Yes, I spoke too hastily in dismissing the whole possibility of writing that kind of story. Maybe I should have said, there's no point to writing an uber-sexist world if (1) you're going to make women's roles a "natural" fact, something inevitable, like a law of physics, and (2) you're not going to do something really intelligent with the sexism of it...and it would have to be something very unusual, to the point of uniqueness, because otherwise I don't see why you couldn't use a society with RL levels of sexism, rather than creating a society with greater levels of sexism than many of the most misogynistic societies in human history. That's the part I really don't get.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me either :(

[hamsterwoman]

I've just read both of the links to chopchica's posts and... god, how fucking depressing. My husband has been quoting the results of that survey, which are bad enough in themselves, but it's reading the first-hand experiences and the experiences of the commenters all piled together that's really making me feel sort of ill...

We are still planning to go to Europe this summer -- visit B's mother in Antwerpen and then drive around France -- but I'd be lying if I said B and I aren't nervous about it because of everything that's been happening. (We've been jokingly working out plans to pretend to be Italians or Albanians or something if we get caught up in something uncomfortable...)

My mother-in-law lives on a street that's pretty much on the boundary of the heavily Orthodox Jewish area of town. With the latest conflict in Gaza, there were violent anti-Israel demonstrations one street over that resulted in shop windows getting smashed, and someone tried setting a Jewish family's house on fire by stuffing burning rags through their mailbox -- it didn't take, so there was only minor damage to the house and everyone sleeping inside was OK, but that's still fucking scary. More and more of her Orthodox neighbors are emigrating -- to Israel, to Canada, because they just don't feel safe anymore. It's increasingly common for the Orthodox boys riding their bikes to school to be accosted and beaten up, and the women to get anti-Semitic slurs thrown at them in the shops. My MIL's neighbor is part of some social group, I forget what exactly they do, something innocuous and domestic like gardening. A few weeks ago, the organizer of the group (non-Jewish) called up the neighbor lady out of the blue and proceeded to berate her about the actions Israel had been taking, complete with the Israel = Nazi comparisons. It's almost surreal -- the neighbor could almost not believe it was happening...

It's not nearly as bad in the US yet (*knocks on wood*), but we've encountered some reeeally hinky stuff here, too. A fairly highly placed administrator at a university who'd just been hired in, kept saying things like "we are not Jewish slaves" at his first staff meeting. The other folks in the room, after boggling at that, approached him after the meeting and suggested he might want not to do that in future, and he did cut it out, but that was still very, very WTF. (I have this third-hand but from reliable sources, and the guy's a bit of a weirdo in other respects, but still... o.O)

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Oh my! What your mother in law lives through and what they tell you about, I have no word. This is really awful.

I don't think it's really dangerousdangerous to travel in France right now. You know, any more than it is dangerous for people most of the time. I mean, to be on the safe side, it's probably better not to wear jewellery and clothing making Jewish identity obvious. But, yeah, there can be uncomfortable encounters. As I said in chopchica's post, I never really encountered any blatant antisemitism since I was a kid, only things that are annoying and uncomfortable making. Obviously some pretty serious antisemitic things do happen, but not so frequently that every Jew would encounter them in a dangerous manner.

[hamsterwoman]

Yeah, I think it might be uncomfortable but not downright dangerous, barring some random circumstances that could happen anywhere after all. And I suspect I wouldn't be as shocked by low-level endemic anti-Semitism as an average American Jew -- I did spend the first part of my life in Russia, after all, where anti-Semitism was not only endemic but fully institutionalized. So, not really worried about myself... but I hope we don't have to, like, tell the kids not to speak Hebrew in public (they normally do, with B) and such.

Our friends, who are Israeli, did a drive around France about 3 years back, and they did report feeling uncomfortable, but they didn't encounter anything actually dangerous. I'm hoping things haven't changed for the worse too much since then.

[novin-ha.livejournal.com]

:(

You know, Polish antisemitism is one of the things that just really get me down, especially as I have family members very much guilty of that :/ and many a time have I argued with them about that.

*hugs*

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I know how it is to argue about family about their prejudices, I do that with my parents too, and I've done so with my uncle when he was alive :(

*hugs back*

[la-vie-noire.livejournal.com]

Oh my God that man. My head hurts.

[la-vie-noire.livejournal.com]

And unhm wow the survey. Because racism and discrimination in Europe doesn't exist. Those numbers are more than telling. Wow.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Europe = not the LahlahlahLand of freedom and tolerance and equality, indeed.

[la-vie-noire.livejournal.com]

Not only "NOT THE UTOPIA." It looks pretty ugly from here. (Or, I just want to shove this into some white-Europeans-in-denial's faces.)

[solesakuma]

Let's do it!!! Because we can
I mean, I live in Backwards Land, supposedly and swastikas are not exactly a common sight.
[Not that there isn't Anti-Semitism. It's just subtler. Most of the time.]

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Or, I just want to shove this into some white-Europeans-in-denial's faces
Please, go ahead. You know what I think of that.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yes, it does.

[solesakuma]

You know, the Middle Ages get used as an excuse so many times in fantasy.
You have witches and dragon, you can add some exceptions to the rule
I mean, yeah, brutal times. (I know of a lot people who live in the same conditions. I don't have to travel that much, actually.)
And I think their bad reputation also extends to anti-Semitism, because, hey, there was Anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. El Quijote, el Mio Cid are... not exactly nice.
But at the same time, Jewish at least exist there. :S
But it's like people want to say: 'Middle Ages = Free buffet of Oppresion. This days = We're like so nice.'
/rambles

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

lol

You know how many realistic fantasy stories set in pseudo Middle Ages have Jews? Cuz, I can only think of one (okay, two, if I count the one where the Jews that are all Christians and in which there are no other Jews).

/end sarcasm.

[solesakuma]

I was going to ask that, actually. XDDD
Because if they go on about how accurate their stories are, there should be Jews and Muslims. I mean, the first Romance-language poems were a mix Hebrew/Classic Arab and proto-Spanish, so they were there. Writing even.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I mean, the first Romance-language poems were a mix Hebrew/Classic Arab and proto-Spanish, so they were there.
Oh! I didn't even know that! Pretty cool!

[solesakuma]

*puts on her monocle*
Let me educate you about the jarchas:
French scholars believed the first recorded literature in a Romance vernacular was, of course, from Provence. Because, you know, France.

Spanish scholars hated that. Because, you know, France.

So, in the '40s, a Hebrew scholar and an Arabist discovered these old texts in Hebrew in an Egyptian synagogue. There were moaxacas, a common poetic composition, but the refrains made no sense in Hebrew or Classic Arab. But when they tried to read it in Ibero-Romance, lo and behold, it made sense.
And then everyone rejoiced.

Except French medievalists, but who cares?

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! This is awesome. Thanks for telling me. Also I love it's a text with a mix of Hebrew, Classic Arab and Romance language :D

[hamsterwoman]

Lions of Al-Rassan and the Kushiel books, yeah?

I've actually come across another one which I'm not sure qualifies, but which pinged me that way. Not in a good way, though. I'm talking about Sarah Zettel's Isavalta novels, which I was talking about a couple of years ago. They are set in a magical parallel universe pseudo-Russia, and... well, you could read the whited-out spoilery section in that post I linked to if you want to know, but it definitely pinged me oddly, kind of the same way Carey's stuff did, although the parallel to Jews is much less clear-cut.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

That would be the ones, yes :)

Glad to learn there's another one even if it's no good. *sighs*

There are a lot of books with discriminated usually travelling folks that feel like a mix of Rom, Native Americans and perhaps Jews. But it's usually a very mixed vibes.

[rebbe]

Th-the results of that survey. They're terrifying.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are.

[dizilla.livejournal.com]

Wait, I'm lost about the cheese thing... You can't have cheese? (Like part of your religion or are you lactose intolerant?)

I only eat pork when i'm in japan (as it's the only guaranteed way i'll get my white meat haha) so yeah, it sucks when there's no chicken option sometimes... And turkey's not the same thing. XD

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I can have cheese. I just would like an alternative to cheese and nothing. Especially when it's camemberg cheese which I don't like, and when there have 3 different kinds of pork.

I think pork's somewhat more widely eaten in France than in the US (apart from bacon). LOL yeah visits to true Japanese restaurants (not your average sushi place owned by Chinese) have menus where picking those two or three dishes without pork can be difficult sometimes.

[dizilla.livejournal.com]

Ahh I see, and now it all makes sense. =D

Pork's pretty popular here, usually BBQ style or as some type of sausage/dog. I don't care for it really, too fatty tasting. XD

Pretty much all my japanese selections will usually have chicken. =D But it's more often to get white meat chicken here in the US than in Japan, heh.

[twistedsheets10.livejournal.com]

O_O

...I feel shivers down my back, reading that survey.

And I am just...facepalming at the whole Bakker thing. Really. My brain hurts reading the discussions (while the middle ages sucked for women, I don't think Bakker needed to make it worse than it was), and I have the urge to rip my hair out. And Min is right, while not comparing Bakker to Tairy or his minions, his arguments do have the same....uh...flavor. IDK.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah he does come across as very Tairy-like in his mode of defense. Poor guy, it's kinda embarrassing to watch him ridicule himself.

Shryke and the others are really.... eeeeek x_x You keep using that tokenism word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

[twistedsheets10.livejournal.com]

D:

I think that word needs to be banned in the discussion, like you know, maverick or something, its so overused.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yes. I would subscribe to this idea.

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Also, Bakker is a whiny twit. Where does he get off complaining about the "presumption that there's not more to the books than meets the eye"? News flash, honey, you have to EARN the presumption that your book has layers and that it's worth my time to go looking for them. You have to earn my interest. You have to earn my trust, as an author, just like any author does. You have to earn my belief that the story is going somewhere interesting and that it's not just a sad little jerk-off fantasy for you.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Hihi, yes, he's quite the whiny twit. And, yes, basically everything you say. A writer has absolutely no right to go an complain about how people read his books because this wasn't the way he intended us to read it.