Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
Best review.
Holy crap, Diamanda Hagan! I need to go run around my room making fan girl noises now.
…Okay, I’m back. This is unrelated to any actual discussion here, but this morning I went to the store and the Redbox outside had a new horror film called “Vile.” All I could think of was telling everyone on Manboobz about it.
@Lauralot89: I love Amanda like bunnies. It’s nice to see another fan here. Heil Hagan!
I bought a copy of The Big Issue tonight and on the cover was … a cartoon of Bilbo with a beach towel and zinc cream across his nose! 🙂
The mag gave a rave review to the film, too.
*Diamanda (F*cking autocorrect).
This is just begging for some Tolkien-Pratchett crossover fanfic …
Oin: “Nain’s wearing a skirt! Urrrgh … you can see her legs!
Gloin: “And lipstick! It’s disgusting!”
(run from room)
Bofur: “Um … nice legs, though.”
(runs from room)
Nain (glares at Ori): “Well? What?”
Ori: “Er. Um. Ah … where did you get the lipstick?”
(with apologies to PT for not looking up the actual scene with Cheery) 🙂
Totally OT but on my package of vanilla tea from Trader Joe’s there is a lemur holding a teacup.
…I thought it was funny.
This is what it looks like, for those outside the US.
http://compare.ebay.com/like/330848614148?var=lv<yp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar
I always assumed that he just filled the caverns in The Silver Chair with mysterious shit–which works well in that sequence–and then got to the last book and went “Fuck, I’ve got to do something with those dragon creatures.”
I think he had the idea before then – at least, it’s implied when wossname the leader of the underground people who’s leading Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum says of the animals, and of Father Time, that “it is said they will awake at the end of the world.”
@Kitteh: Best thorin fanfic on the interwebz!
Well, right, but I don’t get the sense that he thought out very carefully what they ought to do at the end of the world.
catbeasty – thank you! 🙂
Katz – I wonder if he thought that the non-talking animals of Narnia just died and disappeared? There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that non-sapient creatures came to Aslan’s country, iirc. It’d be pretty squicky if “Talking Animals” (and the talking fantasy creatures) meant “the only ones with souls”. I really hate that sort of idea.
Reddit should delete all other subreddits and keep reddit.com/r/MensRights/, no one will miss a thing.
4 different editions of The Lord of the Rings in 3 languages? Check!
SEE DVDs of the movies? Check!
Several Elven dresses (including armour) in the wardrobe? Check!
Hadhafang replica on the wall? Check!
Met BFF A in a Lord of the Rings online forum? Check!
Met BFF B playing a LotR cardgame? Check!
I guess I pass the LotR/Tolkien fandom test.
Yeah, lack of female characters. Sucks. Don’t expect much better from a college professor who was born in the penultimate century, but that’s the fucking point, isn’t it?
We notice those things, we understand them, we move on to make them better. We’Re still allowed to enjoy the books and the movies and, well, the fake swords.
The fact remains that in all the books (including the Sil) Eowyn and Galadriel are actually the only women whose role isn’t the defined mainly by whom they love/marry or whom they gave birth to.
And people who are offended by other people, well noticing this need to grow a thicker skin.
” It’d be pretty squicky if “Talking Animals” (and the talking fantasy creatures) meant “the only ones with souls””
Yes, that is exactly what I think meant. In the Silver chair they eat venison, and then are shocked when they learn it was a Talking beast. Similarly, they are not concerned with the Calormens’ use of animals, only when when they learn they are using talking animals.
Yeah, giliell – I was about to post basically the same comment. I don’t do LOTR role play but otherwise we’re the same. I love the books, love the movie adaptations and I’m grateful to Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens and Peter Jackson for beefing up the scanty female roles that Tolkien wrote.
The reality that these stories are not female-driven or even particularly female-friendly is not news. They are still good stories that are worth telling and hearing. But no women. And that’s only a problem worth mentioning because that’s is also the reality about movies that are created contemporaneously for the modern market. When we get new scripts, based on original ideas, including female characters with depth and meaning to the plot, then the male-centric aspects of LOTR (and other literature) would be a footnote.
ah the state of the MRA
how dare someone point out the simple fact that there is only one woman in a 3 hour long movie! MISANDRY!
If a film came out with 36 women in its cast and one man, we’d certainly be hearing about that.
Or not, because that is clearly not a universal story and as such would not be entitled to a large media promotion campaign 🙂 A chick flick with 36 women sounds like a straight-to-DVD release to me.
@Kysokisaien: Well, Bridesmaids was pretty successful (haven’t seen it yet, but I will). And all the reviews were like “OMG it’s a movie with MOSTLY WOMEN IN IT but it’s STILL GOOD and EVEN MEN can enjoy it!”.
Late to the party as usual – hope everyone’s holidays were merry and bright, btw. I think what sticks in my craw about all the MRAs shitting their pants over a woman pointing out the lack of women in a story is the “make your own media!” bit. Another part of the problem I think is that there ARE a lot of writers out there who have written and/or are writing some truly fantastic SF and Fantasy with loads of awesome lady-type characters but aren’t always getting as much recognition as the writers who write about dude characters and/or are dudes themselves. They even mention JKR but don’t seem to remember that the main character is a dude, and most of the main characters are dudes (all girls and women aside from Hermione are given, admittedly fantastic, but quite firmly secondary roles) and that her books bear only her initials, not her full name, which was a conscious choice made by her and her publishers (which, I’ll point out, was a mere 15 years ago, not almost 200, as was the case for “George Eliot”/Mary Anne Evans). The thought was that if a woman’s name appeared on the spine, it might dissuade young boys from reading it. Which, spot on as it may have been (and I do believe it was, given most young men’s inclination, IME in libraries to gravitate way far away from books about girls and/or women and/or written by women – hell, for a long time I didn’t want to read books about women either because I thought all of them were Twilight-esque or not as “adventure-story” like), is still pretty indicative of a media culture very much steeped in catering to men – why, it’s even considered an affront on them to suggest that the creator of their dude media might be a lady!
Sabriel is probably one of my favorite books (and one of my favorite examples of an awesome book about an awesome lady hero) but there aren’t many other women in the story except tacked on at the end and beginning (at Sabriel’s school). In the next book in the series, Lirael, we meet a lot more women, in fact a whole society of women who are pretty awesome and self-sustaining (a society that would probably make the MRAs again shit their already soiled pants) and as a whole, I think the Abhorsen series, is pretty great and sufficiently successful as a book with cool lady-characters, however, it’s also worth noting that these books aren’t nearly as popular as Harry Potter or LoTR (not that The Old Kingdom is in any way shape or form as deeply and meticulously thought out as Middle Earth) and neither are the tons of other books published during that late nineties, early 2000’s fantasy surge or published since then that are still brilliant fantasy books (again, arguably not quite as brilliant as LoTR, but IMHO, if you want another work that takes a lifetime to complete, you have to wait another lifetime, and it’s worth noting that a lot of lit critics can be a bit disapproving of Tolkein considering that what he makes up for in leaps and bounds by detail and imagination, he very much lacks stylistically speaking) that were probably just as good, if not better than Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia (which IMHO is really saying a lot, since Harry Potter, quite literally was a life-changing book series for me) and yet did not receive nearly as much recognition. Harry Potter has his very own themepark and Sabriel has an author who has all but abandoned her story for stories of young boys instead (Ok, I admit, I AM a smidge bitter that Garth Nix seems to continue to promise a prequel and sequel and seems to keep pushing it off). Harry Potter got eight movies and official movie merchandise. Meggie Folchart of the IMHO, stylistically absolutely breathtaking Inkheart Series by lady-author Cornelia Funke, got one movie that morphed and changed her story to effectively chop off the other two books in her series and put her growth as a human being and coming of age story to an end. It seems the coming of age of young boys and men is much more interesting than that of young girls and women. Other lady authors who specifically mention things like their lady heroines menstruating and/or possibly having sexual urges, aren’t given any sort of consideration for movies at all and also don’t have near the amount of following as books like Harry Potter. Tamora Pierce and Kristen Cashore are two I can think of now, but I’m sure there are plenty of others.
Yes, I know there’s The Hunger Games beating all the odds and being mostly rather splendidly feminist, having a lady-lead and plenty of secondary lady-characters with whom Katniss converses (and sometimes co-conspires) about things other than men, and being written by a woman, but that is very much the outlier. I honestly cannot name another book that gets converted to the big screen that meets all that criteria. I know plenty of MRAs would probably point to the Twilight films, but jeezus, if you want to talk problematic works…. gadzooks, I could go on for days, possibly weeks about the heterocentrism, the sexism, the racism and the pedophilia (among other things, like being extremely poorly written) in those books. I’ve no idea what the film adaptations are like, since I draw the line at seeing them, but what I remember from the books is Bella being a rather annoyingly empty shell of a Mary-Sue who continually seems to need rescuing from and/or by her stalker boyfriend (who shows all warning signs for majorly abusive behavior and is manipulative as fuck) or from and/or by her stalker non-boyfriend Bad Boy/Nice GuyTM who is also manipulative as fuck and somewhat rapey. She is then married off at the ripe old age of 18, promptly impregnated, nearly dies giving birth, and only after that has some sort of semblance of a personality, implying that young girls and women don’t really become people until they’re properly married off to a controlling fuckwad of a husband and bear his children for him. To top it all off, her stalker Bad Boy/Nice GuyTM falls in love with her newly hatched demon-spawn BABY and after Bella gets over the initial shock, is presumed to be mostly OK with this development and her husband thinks it’s FUNNY of all things. It’s practically an MRA fanfiction. I suspect it would be held up as such if it weren’t written by a woman, and if the movies didn’t seem to rely heavily on dudes taking off their shirts a LOT.
So, yeah, there are plenty of authors (plenty of women authors) writing plenty of very good fantasy, but they very rarely are recognized nearly to the extent that male-authored, male-centric stories are.
Has anyone else read Sheri S. Tepper? I love her writing, and the book “The Fresco” is, I’m sure, the MRA go to for examples of misandry. Her take on faerie (and all the mythical people within) in “Beauty” is the most disturbingly realistic one I’ve ever seen. Her genre is eco-feminist sci-fi.
Silmarillion features a Nice Guy TM! The elf Maeglin is completely enchanted by the beauty of princess Idrin the first time he sees her. Idrin realises in time how he feels for her, but is a) squicked out because they’re first cousins, and b) doesn’t like him that much anyway, since he basically just sulks around and stares broodingly at her. “But as the years passed, still Maeglin watched Idril, and waited, and his love turned to darkness in his heart.” There you go!
When it comes to Tolkien’s view on women, yeah, I’ve heard it before that he felt uncomfortable writing female characters since he didn’t feel he understood women. Now, as I said before, the few women he do write are generally strong characters who even occasionally save the day where male heroes faltered. So I don’t think he was an anti-feminist or misogynist in any way – if he were, he wouldn’t have let women be heroes. But a person with a completely sound view on women wouldn’t feel bothered portraying them, but just write them as PERSONS the way Pratchett does.
BTW, another male writer whom I really like in part because he writes women as simply persons and have tons of female characters is sci-fi writer Alistair Reynolds. He even wrote a short story once called “Spiro and the queen” which took place in an all-female world. What’s so cool about it is that them being all women is just a fairly unimportant premise of the story. For some reason which I can’t remember right now the human species has moved on to wholly artificial reproduction, and for some technological reason it’s a bit easier to make women than men, so everyone’s female. Still, their society is neither better nor worse than any other future society he’s imagined. The plot of the story centers around a war and artificial intelligences that has gone sentient – the fact that all humans are women is accidental.
Eek, fast-moving comment threads! Here be rambling.
Some of Pratchett’s younger female characters are terribly self-conscious in a way that irks me, although maybe it’s because I’m recognising bits of myself I don’t like. Susan I only like in Hogfather and an deeply irked by in Thief of Time. Polly struck me as smug. Tiffany had a Mary-Sue effect on Granny Weatherwax (ie Granny was nicer to her than I found plausible even in a children’s book) and generally is a bit too Special for my taste.
My best friend maintains that I am basically a thirtysomething Granny Weatherwax, which is quite flattering even if Nanny Ogg has a hell of a lot more fun and red boots. I think of myself as thinking like Agnes and looking like Magrat, which is the adult version of being Mildred Hubble wishing she was Wednesday Addams.
All comments on the heteronormativity of Sam and Sybil are valid but I still love her rather a lot. I do suspect slight hints of tongue-in-cheek autobiography, which makes me find it less irksome somehow.
I think that maybe Pratchett is a little cautious about writing women who are as shambolic as his young male characters, so he sometimes errs on the side of slightly too good to be true. I can’t really resent it because it’s almost a deference about writing women while understanding that there’s the potential to get it wrong. And generally I think he gets it right.
I find that Discworld books are excellent for reading when my brain has convinced me that I am too stupid for Proper Books (my brain is magic) or I’m just too germy or tired to concentrate on anything else, because they’re incredibly easy to read and very comforting to reread, but still intelligent and ethically satisfying and not likely to give me the book equivalent of eating eight bags of Doritos and then feeling ill and still hungry.
You know what Pratchett book that I hope they do a spectacular job in making the mini-series on is Small Gods. I read it and went “THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE ABOUT RELIGION AND GOD.”
Hogfather was one of those books that no matter what you can get the layers and layers and layers of meaning from:
Commercialization of holidays
The wonder of being a child
The nature of death
The nature of belief
Origins of stories
Sacrifices
How to control people
Family
Who really is a monster-a seven foot tall skeleton or men with weird behaviors
Fear
Finding out what you really want
What kids really are like
Waiting to be what you cannot be
etc
I mean it is one of the most meaningful novels of all time.