Er, why would you think that?
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Whenever some sad sack academic tries to paint Frankenstein as a proto-feminist work, I have to point out:
–The writer identification character is Victor, not Elizabeth
–There are no women front and center in the narrative (Elizabeth is a plot device and poor Safie is barely even that!)
–Her radical social writings featured nothing that Phyllis Schlafly would have minded
I can’t imagine anybody saying that Frankenstein is a proto-feminist work. Not if they’ve read the book, at least. I mean, not even mentioning what you just said, there’s also the fact that Victor is repelled by Elizabeth, Victor doesn’t even like any women except for his sainted mother, and oh yeah, the whole book is about the desire to remove women from the act of pro-creation! Victor is so disgusted by women that he dedicated his life to searching for a way to create a being that wouldn’t involve putting his peepee in Elizabeth’s hooha. Unless Shelley meant all that stuff ironically, but somehow, I doubt it. And yeah, things didn’t turn out well for Victor, but hell, things didn’t turn out well for anybody in that book. Except maybe the Captain. Who spoke of how much he loved and admired Victor, of how he had searched his whole life for a partner like Victor, of how pleasing Victor was to the eye.
Not atl all. For instance, Jenny’s cheating literally castrates the man involved. So that adds “women as castrator” to the mix. Roberta does decide not to be a man, but she is the only sympathetic women, leaving the subtext that the only good women are those that were men.
As for Garp’s father – the idea that Jenny thinks he’s the ideal man is pure hatred for the male sex on her part, implying women believe men are only good for stud service.
Spike Lee seems to have a real madonna/whore thing going on. It’s most obviously on display in He Got Game.
Oh, John Jakes, he of the *Kent Family Chronicles *and the North and South Trilogy. In the KFC, every single major female character is raped. It might be date rape, it might be gang rape, it might be kidnapping and rape, but Every Single One is raped.
And in North and South, Brett is clearly the Good Girl while Ashton is the Slut. No middle ground there.
I think you had the right idea originally and overthunk it.
It’s been years since I read it, but what sympathetic men are there? Robert, presumably, but that leaves the subtext that any good man wants to be a woman.
There’s plenty of hate to go around. Your argument seems to be that when a woman is hated, it’s the author’s voice; but when a man is hated, it’s only because of a vile woman doing the hating.
I just don’t see it as that cut and dried, one way or the other.
You can’t hang that all on Jenny. It’s been awhile, but wasn’t she sitting in the car to break up with the guy? She wasn’t there for sex and only agreed to it grudgingly to get him out of there. And it definitely wouldn’t have upgraded to a castration if Garp hadn’t slammed into the back of the car. She was giving the guy a good-bye blow job. Her husband was the one who turned it into a tragedy.
And the break-up guy’s dis-memberment wasn’t even the tragedy. He becomes largely peripheral to the plot at that point.
About Shelley, I always understood that it wasn’t that Frankenstein was a proto-feminist work, but that Shelley was a proto-feminist. Although she might not ping our modern radar as an advocate for women’s issues, she was pretty open about being able to read and write.
Piers Anthony seems to get called out for being misogynist. I haven’t read much of his work since like the third Xanth book, so I have no opinion on his overall views, but I do recall a story of his in Ellison’s Dangerous Visions collection that could certainly single-handedly put him in a category appropriate for this thread. Anyone particularly sensitive to the issue would find the story easily more obviously objectionable than A Boy and His Dog, but the story in itself is more of an exploration of an adolescent fantasy that proves to be an adolescent nightmare when it is realized. It skewers the immature male perspective, rather than making a comment about women.
Come to think about it, I did think that the Megan Fox character in the first Transformers movie was written in a very sexist way: it’s okay for Shia Lawhatever to like a girl he barely knows because she’s hot, but when she admits to dating guys just because of their bodies, the writer intended us to think her shallow.
Also, when he finds out that megan had had troubles with the law, he’s all paternalistic and dissapointed at her, and she actually acts all ashamed and submissive, and at no point that sort of behaviour is seen as weird by the writers.
You forgot: Killed during rape attempt or suicides to avoid rape.
John Jakes books deserve to be pulped. I cannot imagine how he got popular.
A lot has been made of Alfred Hitchcock’s apparent issues with women. I’m not familiar enough with him to really say, but Psycho (which, granted, owes at least as much to Robert Bloch (possible) and Ed Geins’ (very, very real) issues with women as Hitchcock’s) and Vertigo certainly don’t dissuade me from that POV.
I’ve never read anything else by Larry Niven, but based solely on Ringworld I get the idea that he thinks we’re a bunch of decorative ninnies. Or rabbit’s feet. Or whatever.
No mention of Frank Miller yet? Sort-of surprised, really. Madonna-whore thing in spades.
He does give that impression.
It’s quite possible, and has happened. If the man can’t get an erection on his own, strangulation will force one.
No, that was just Teela Brown, not his women in general. She was supposed to be shallow and immature, due to her psychic luck protecting her for her whole life.
Nobody’s mentioned Sam Peckinpah yet? In his movies the female characters usually end up getting raped by the bad guy or beaten up by the good guy, or both, while somehow deserving and/or enjoying one or both. See Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, etc. The strange thing is I really like all of those movies.
Wasn’t it her mother who was the actual feminist?
I have always hated that song for basically the same reasons. I think of it as the “Parents, don’t fuck up your daughters before I get to fuck them!” song. I’m sure Mayer *thought *he was writing a nice song about respecting women, but the only reasons he can think of for treating daughters well is so that they’ll grow up to be good lovers and mothers. The song’s narrator is only thinking about the proper rearing of female children because he’s decided that his problems with his girlfriend are all her father’s fault and have “nothing to do with me”. There’s nothing at all in the song about treating daughters well for their own sake, it’s just so other guys won’t get stuck with messed up girlfriends.
As the daughter of a single mother myself, it also ticks me off that the song suggests that any girl without a loving father at home is pretty much doomed.
I really hate the part when he says you can treat boys like shit because they can take it but girls, well, you’ll just fuck 'em up before I can get to them-- the tender, fragile things.