My dictionary sez
I think the statement smacks of sexism but hardly misogyny (and not because the offender is a female, either)
How does it “smack of sexism”?
Add me to the list of agreeing with FlyingRamenMonster.
Authors just don’t seem to know how to handle women. Men can go out and do all kinds of shit and never once feel the need to be sensitive or caring, just as she says. Men get to all the cool stuff.
Women always, always have to bring emotions into it, in books anyway. That’s fine with me, I suppose it may even be true to life sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it!
The statement
is a stereotypical statement regarding women, fictional though they may be. No?
Yes, it’s a statement about stereotypical female characters in fiction. It strikes me as the sort of statement that a feminist literary critic might make (though perhaps in slightly different language).
So that would make the sexism fictional as well. No? I mean from your definition–
*Sexist: prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
*What women are being stereotyped,etc.? Are you suggesting that fictional characters are real?
No. It’s not a statement about women at all, it’s a critique of how women are portrayed. It’s exactly the sort of critique one would expect a feminist literary critic to make, that there is a lack of believable strong female characters. To muddle the two makes for quite a mess… for example, if I were to say that the cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s have clownish, ignorant representations of black people, it would take an extreme and willful misreading to state that I am suggesting black people themselves are (or were) clownish and ignorant, or to say that there’s no difference between the former and the latter. Put another way, if I were to say that the dinosaurs in Jurrassic Park were “unrealistic,” it would be a leap of logic to say that I was some kind of fundamentalist nutjob who didn’t believe in dinosaurs. Put yet another way, if I say I spilled coffee on my map of Central Tennessee, I am hardly suggesting that Nashville has been flooded with hot black liquid. One is map, one is territory. What we say about the representation of a thing is in no way said about the thing it represents.
I hope that clears things up.
That’s a fascinating article, and i certainly agree that Roth’s female characters are never as complex or interesting as his male characters.
I get what you’re saying and I agree. I was muddling that notion and the one that follows…
I think it’s inaccurate to say (as FlyingRaman mentioned) that in the world of literary fiction, women are uniformly portrayed as “sensitive and capable and empowered by single-handedly etc. etc.” It may be her experience based on the novels she gravitates to. But does the stereotype she uses apply itself to the vast majority of fictional female characters?
We can only conclude that she hasn’t been exposed to a wide variety of such books, and perhaps generate a list of such books. I’ll start with To Kill a Mockingbird.
Maybe FlyingRamenMonster just doesn’t care for Chick Lit.
I can’t say that I blame her for that.
I have to agree with FlyingRamenMonster’s assessment of women in popular literature. They are never anything like women I know in real life. They are either hyper-sensitive or they are so hard-boiled you would think they were men. I can never relate to them, and I am pretty much your average female type. The problem isn’t that FlyingRamenMonster doesn’t like women, it’s that she doesn’t like women the way they are portrayed in novels. I don’t think she was saying that SHE BELIEVES
I have to agree with FlyingRamenMonster’s assessment of women in popular literature. They are never anything like women I know in real life. They are either hyper-sensitive or they are so hard-boiled you would think they were men. I can never relate to them, and I am pretty much your average female type. The problem isn’t that FlyingRamenMonster doesn’t like women, it’s that she doesn’t like women the way they are portrayed in novels. I don’t think she was saying that SHE BELIEVES that male SHOULD BE the default gender…she is lamenting the fact that this is so, and that the subsequent way that women are portrayed irritates her. Can’t say I blame her one bit for this.
Have no idea what just happened…can a mod delete my first (partial) post?
Thanks!
Yep. 
Sexist bastard.
:dubious:
This is a “Whooosh” PITing, right? 
'Cause everyone sez I can’t seem to be able to detect a “Whoosh”, and that may be true. But- this is a "Whoosh, right?
:rolleyes:
I thought a “whoosh” is generally unintentional. To be “whooshed” is simply to fail to get the point of a post, right? So the “whoosher” doesn’t need to be actually trying to “whoosh” in order for a “whoosh” to occur. And it just follows from my definition of a “whoosh” that the one “whooshed” can’t detect the whoosh–because to detech the whoosh would require that he understand the point of the post.
But maybe I’ve got the idea of a “whoosh” wrong.
-FrL-
I mentioned this to a friend of mine who’s visiting us, and she and I both agreed with FlyingRamenMonster. Male characters can just be people, and the story doesn’t necessarily need to have something to do with MEN and MANLINESS and MASCULINITY conceptually. Female characters generally aren’t just X, they’re a female X, or a woman managing to do X despite societal expectations/single motherhood/abusive husband/traumatic divorce/whatever.
Oh, and my friend is “a huge dyke”[sup][/sup] by the way, in case that gives her opinions on this any more credibility.
[sup] Actually, she’s quite small.[/sup]
Damn, Selkie. You sure got your panties in a twist over nothing.