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:
Oh, found this:
http://middle-earth.xenite.org/2011/12/16/what-are-the-roles-of-women-in-tolkien/
Oddly, not one of the four commentors told the author to shut up and make him a sandwich
Phukka’s comment is literally perfect. If I were satirizing an MRA’s world-view, I could not write anything better than that.
Oh my freaking god this forum never ceases to amaze me… Still disappointed I can’t talk to any of these people though. I’ve never seen or read lotr but I am into a lot of male oriented entertainment (such as gears of war, fighting games, yeah, I love video games) and I am dissappointed in the lack of female characters but that doesn’t mean I hate men… I wonder how this would have turned out if the roles were reversed, although I doubt MRAs are secure enough in there sexual identity to even attempt to enjoy something female oriented.
Starla, believe me, you don’t want to talk to MRAs and their ilk on their own sites.
What’s the worse that could happen? They could caps lock my ass? I might be naive but I just don’t see them as a threat…I just don’t.
Since I dislike both the (sadly common) trope that becoming an adult means that you lose all sense of wonder and access to wonderful things (think for a moment about how cruel a message that is to give a child who will very soon be an adult) and the idea that manly things are good but womanly things are bad, the whole Susan thing really rubbed me the wrong way.
Oh, Jesus wept! Tolkein’s kiddie book has about the same number of female characters as The Three Little Pigs or Jack and the Beanstalk, and yet I loved them all as a child.
I’m sorry, but this comes across as Davis-Konigsberg’s version of hard chairs.
(Which is not to say that the MRA overreaction to her overreaction hasn’t been any less farcical than expected.)
Starla, if you’re okay with the sort of rape threats and revolting misogynist reactions you’ll likely get from questioning anything they say, then go for it. But I seriously don’t think they’re worth trying to engage with. Have you read posts where people are trying to talk sense to NWOslave, and he resorts to calling women living fuck dolls who deserve to be treated as such? That’s a mild taste of the sort of thing these men go in for.
@ Tam:
“The Three Little Pigs” is not a novel. “Jack and the Beanstalk” are folktales. The Hobbit is. It’s had to hold someone who writes down a folktale responsible for the lack of female characters in a folktale. After all, the folktale existed without female characters before they decided to write it down.
The author of a novel is creating a story from wholecloth. A novelist isn’t bound by the constraints of a pre-existing story. A novelist has a lot more room to create female characters.
Also, no one is saying that you cannot enjoy The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings because they don’t have very many female characters. You are still allowed to like things with problematic elements.
That ought to read:
“The Three Little Pigs” is not a novel. “Jack and the Beanstalk” is not a novel. They are folktales. The Hobbit is a novel.
So many people think pointing out a problematic element means we want to burn it allllllll. No, wait, not so many people, so many alarmist people who cling to the status quo and live in backwardsville where the white male is the most oppressed group in the world. And possibly the universe.
It does appear (in the books) that dwarfs, goblins and wood-elves reproduce asexually, but there certainly were lady hobbits, including Bilbo’s mother, “the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of Old Took’s three remarkable daughters.” Even though she was just in the backstory, not as a character. Too bad, I would have liked to have read more about her, and her sisters.
And of course, the formidable Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, who started out as a thoroughly unlikeable character, then turns out to be cool in the end.
Ketteh
That’s exactly why I find it completely impossible to take him seriously. He sums up exactly how much he know about women, men, humanity, biology and pretty much what it means to have the right to call yourself a man when he says things like that. Nothing. He’s not a bogey man, he’s just a lonely asshole with a keyboard. An asshole that’s also not worth the effort of rationalizing with, as demonstrated by his fellow MRAs in “battle of the banned”
I have no interest in NWOslave in particular, but I do think a serious “why the actual fuck would you think that?” is in order in regards to the reaction MRAs have towards this article. Looking for sexism? Why?!
Tam, Konigsberg isn’t suing Peter Jackson for misogyny, She’s not even accusing him of it. She’s simply noting the bizarre scarcity of female characters in Tolkien’s works, and suggesting that because of that they don’t really speak to her the way they do to other people. The Hobbit is an all male book, and an almost all-male film; that’s certainly worth noting. I think even fans of Tolkien can admit that he had some issues w/ women — he didn’t know how to write fully realized female characters, and had some trouble imagining them even existing in the background in his fictional universe.
If a film came out with 36 women in its cast and one man, we’d certainly be hearing about that.
Oooh, starla, if you want to go play with the MRA’s I’ll come with you! You’re best off sticking with reddit- you can usually get something close to a compromise there. And if things get rough start trying to discuss actual men’s issues with an eye to actually solving them instead of whining about feminists- it bores them and they go away.
When I first read The Last Battle, I interpreted Susan’s banishment from Narnia a little differently: It wasn’t growing up that was bad, and it wasn’t even growing up to become a woman that was bad, it was growing up to be a certain kind of woman, vain, shallow, and social-climbing, in other words, a stereotype.
It may have still come from a place of sexism on Lewis’s part, but the message I took away was that it was okay to be a woman, just not that kind of woman. At that time (I was about nine) I didn’t have any problem reconciling it with feminism. But that’s just me.
@timetravelingfool, that would be an excellent idea if I could actually see where there were issues with men’s rights, then I’d be off to a fine start, all I see is a bunch of children that don’t know how to share the playground.
Starla: they wouldn’t even caps lock you, they’d just ban you. They don’t want honest debate, they’re the world’s shittiest activists. You are 100% correct about them not wanting to share the playground.
Ketteh
Youre right, at least they are good for laughs though.
@ Starla- not with ‘rights’ obviously, but men as a group have issues that need to be addressed. Incarceration in the United States is definitely an issue effecting men, and mainly ethnic minority men. Disproportionately African American men. Parental laws do favor the mother, mainly because the mother is often the primary care-giver. As a men’s issue, the obvious solution to that would to be to make it easier in our society for men to be the primary care giver- stop discouraging parental leave, for instance. Addressing domestic abuse directed towards men without cutting funding to services towards women (which has been the soul effect of MRA lobbying in California, btw). But they are better discussed under the mantel of issues (unless you are discussing the high rate of incarceration for racial minorities, which seems like a deliberate violation of their rights to me).
@timetravelingfool
I see where your coming from but like Ketteh said, they seem more concerned with harassing people they don’t like than actually doing something to make a change. I don’t know if the movement was originally intended for this but they’ve completely lost their focus.
Oooh, someone’s blaming the communists for the article!! What fun!!
So…slightly off-topic, but if you want a good story that focuses on a strong female character, read The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch. It’s my favourite. ” ‘Ronald: Your clothes are all pretty, your hair is really nice. You look like a nice guy, but you are a BUM’. And they didn’t get married after all”.
It’s the new year where I am. Happy New Year! I worked all night…only got hit on by one drunk at work, yay!
@ Starla- Honestly, I imagine the ‘movement’ was just a bunch of whiny woman haters who came across some academic writings of real men’s issues in their efforts to prove how rough men have it.