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:
Or a radio show?
@ pecunium
Have you seen Little Britain? I know what you mean about the Pythons, and they all tend to do the same thing on other projects too, but one of the things I like about them is that the poking fun at various groups of people doesn’t feel as mean-spirited as a lot of other shows can get.
(I’m sometimes OK with jokes being mean-spirited, but not so much when it’s a group of public school/Oxbridge grads sending up people who live on council estates.)
re Meller: ithiliania being away for awhile got me to making sure the nasty little spirochette wasn’t allowed to pretend he doesn’t think murdering women is a reasonable thing for an “upset” man to do.
And I’m too lazy (which is a bad thing, as it ends up costing me more time/effort, later on) to have a saved file of that little bit of his vile, and villainous nature. So I get reminded of all the other ways in which he actually supports terrorising women, when I enter “David K Meller Murder” into google (it’s a pretty scary list of hits).
In some ways, for all his freakishly clowny way of presenting, he is one of the more insidious, and wicked, of the repetitive reprobates who come to berate us about our blindess to “the way things ought to be”.
He hates that women are treated as people; with rights and feelings and agency. He thinks having some men who are willing to beat them and rape them and kill them (when they are, “provoked”) is a positive good for society.
He is on a sort list: If I ever find out he has died, I will be pleased. That puts him on a par with Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld. In some ways he is worse than all of them. They did their evil for personal profit, he does it for pleasure.
Cassandra: No, I’ve not seen Little Britain. I like Python, and when they manage it, the joke are perfect (the running gags in many episodes are close to this, though some of them are just a little too much too).
The parrot sketch, and the cheese shop manage it; and it’s not that either of them is short. It’s that they keep the bit going with actual variations on the theme.
But I can’t watch more than about two episodes at a stretch.
How would you find out? A news story with the headline “Local man dies, 600 dolls in Victorian dress removed from home and disinfected before being given to children’s charity”?
Re: class and Python, the sketch about the coal miner son of an artist couple is hilarious.
I like a lot of the Python stuff, although I feel that they’ve gotten this status as legends so many people can’t admit that not EVERYTHING they did were great. Some of the sketches drag on for too long and some just isn’t funny. But lots of it is.
I thought the cheese shop was, like, their least funny sketch ever. Different strokes…
The coal miner son is hilarious. Also the upper class twit games.
Meller’s demise
Cassandra: Since DKM is pretty plainly a nom-de-net, I don’t expect to ever find out (though I’m pretty sure I know what city he lived in, from comments he’s made elseweb).
So, barring an announcement at the Spearhead, or on a Goldbug/Glibertarian/Racist site about him, I am never likely to know.
Which is fine. At some point he will stop showing up, and life (for us) will be better.
@Dvärghundspossen
“You know what he’s like after a few novels!” Brilliant!
Here’s one of my favorites:
http://youtu.be/piWCBOsJr-w
As awful as he is he actually doesn’t upset me at all. Maybe it’s a sign of me being meaner than the rest of you? I find his obvious unhappiness amusing. We don’t even have to wait for him to go to Hell/be reincarnated as a roach, he’s already managed to make his own life pretty hellish.
Re: Moore, Watchmen.
I think some of that was the place and time that Watchmen came around. You have to be kind of into geekish pursuits with a sort of unawareness of the implications. Watchmen is excellent as a vehicle for pointing out ‘hey, Batman and the guys like him are not just doing illegal things but actively making the world a worse place by existing.’ A society-wide deconstruction of why we love super heroes, what it says about us, what it makes us? “Whatever happened to the American Dream?”
But then on the re-read all you notice are the little plotholes.
Re: Pratchett, Gaiman
I adore them both, but for such different reasons. Gaiman’s stuff is existensially dark. He writes about a world where the bogeyman is coming to kill you and there is no way to stop it and there has never been a way to stop it and the bogeyman can no more be reasoned with than time itself because the bogeyman is time, and he doesn’t kill you he makes you into the monster you always feared, the father who bullied you, and you become a shambling creature of habit with no joy who inflicts it on your children.
And it’s wicked depressing, if you think about it too much.
Pratchett, on the other hand, writes about (spoiler warning) the bogeyman who came and gave the kids a little scare each night (a freindly little scare to teach them how to handle their fear and be grownups) and grew to love them so much that he decided to protect them as best he could forever and ever because wouldn’t you do that if you visited kids every night? And what kind of monster could be unaffected by all those kids, visited all those times? BECAUSE THEY’RE JUST KIDS, DAMMIT.
And it’s sometimes pat and treacly, but who can blame him? The kids are adorable, after all.
“We don’t even have to wait for him to go to Hell/be reincarnated as a roach, he’s already managed to make his own life pretty hellish.”
That’s an awesome way to put it. lots of misogynists and MRAs are probably the same way. Reminds me of my miserable brother.
As a person, I think he’s miserable. As a presence, I worry that his persistence (elsewhere) makes him more effective than I’d like to think. He is, for a certain class of people, one of those with a more reasonable tone. He shares views with NWO, for example.
When he doesn’t go too much into the odd dictional tics he can almost sound reasonable.
He has decided to forego all restraint here, but not everywhere.
That roach line reminds me of this:
http://youtu.be/6OGEiOgv86U
He’s so easy to provoke into losing his cool and showing his real self, though. If you really think people might be taking him seriously maybe we need a Meller task force to poke him into ranting about sex slaves and killing cats that scratch everywhere he comments.
Note: I have maintained this rosy view of children by staying far, far away from them. From a distance they are very cute indeed.
Re: Watchmen, and re: my earlier comments about women put in impractical clothing just to look sexy: WHY DO BOTH SILK SPECTRES WEAR HIGH HEELS? Moore wanted to explore the question what the world would be like if there really were super heroes. Well, I’ll tell you one thing – super heroines wouldn’t wear fucking high heels in real life!
But I’m very fond of Watchmen anyway. Reading the news articles about Silk Spectre 1 made me remember some old news articles about an old woman I once knew who was the first female engineer in Sweden and worked on aeroplane engines. They had the same bemused/patronising tone to them…
It’s hard to explain what doesn’t work for me about Gaiman, but it’s definitely not the darkness, it’s something to do with his writing style. The subject matter I like, it’s the execution that bugs. There’s something about him that I just find irritating, especially when he’s writing for young people.
Someone made a joke about Liefeld that he doesn’t know how to draw women’s legs and butts without heels. Maybe Moore has that issue too?
Not that Moore is exceptionally strong wrt women, but the Silk Spectres are indeed a deconstruction of women as super heroes and how they’re reduced to their gender. Silk Spectre I embraces this and makes “pretty and female” her trademark, which is why she wears heels and a pretty ridiculous outfit; Silk Spectre II not so much but she is largely overshadowed and controlled by her mother.
@Atomicgrizzly: That’s a great one too! Although “mangos in syrup” sounds as if they could do quite a lot of damage, if they’re still in the can when you attack someone with them…
@Howardbann1ster: Note: I have maintained this rosy view of children by staying far, far away from them. From a distance they are very cute indeed.
Not sure if you are riffing off Pratchett or not — but in fact, that’s the exact philosophy of HOGFATHER — the sound of children playing is lovely if you are far enough away not to hear the specifics.
Pratchett manages to beautifully show the terrors of childhood AND the ways many adults romanticize childhood!