Don’t ever let it be said that all Men’s Rights Activists hate women so much that they can’t recognize any contributions that women have ever made to civilization.
In the Men’s Rights subreddit, one brave soul named omegaphallic recently stood up to give two cheers to the ladies:
Yeah, saying women hardly ever produce scientific or cultural stuff is bullsh*t, and it makes the MRM look bad.
So let’s hear it. What have the little ladies done?
Some of the best actors, musicians, volleyballs players, writers, pornstars, plus there are some really good female scientists now adays.
Well, that’s an interesting list, omegaphallic. But it seems a little … incomplete.
Hell even in the MRM, the honeybadgers are a major cultural influence, amoung other women.
Ah, I knew there was something missing! The Honey Badgers truly are some of the most accomplished women the world has ever seen, especially when it comes to getting people to send them money for completely ridiculous lawsuits.
Look just because we had a genuine conflict with feminists, and women have sexist advanatges like the pussy pass, doesn’t mean there aren’t awesome a talented women out their.
Yeah, I mean, they have things way easier than us, but you know, some of them aren’t totally incompetent, especially when it comes to the volleyballing, the porning, the Honey Badgering.
I support the MRM to fight discrimination against men and to fight feminist lies and corruption, not to just dump on women for sh*ts and giggles.
I actually tend to like alot of women and enjoy their company for its own sake, so I hate it when some guys act like MRM cliches.
Alot of women, huh?
You’re welcome!
H/T — r/againstmensrights
Maybe Paul means “not Sci-Fi” because a perpetual motion machine is definitely not science – or not as we know it, Jim.
@ bluecat
Not to mention the science fantasy qualities of Galt’s Gulch, given that tobacco wouldn’t grow all that well in the mountains of Colorado, the advanced tractor with the hand-tooled parts that somehow manage to work together absolutely perfectly, and the idea that a fishwife with a few fishing poles could provide enough fish for the community in a day.
No, it’s supposed to start “Well, actually…”
Have you ever read a book that wasn’t assigned in English 101?
OMG he’s actually going “Have I ever heard of you?” He’s literally reciting from the list of annoying cliche questions people ask authors!
That’s because you know fuck-all about literature, duder.
For serious here, notice what Paul’s doing: When it’s his opinion, it’s objective and concrete. “Good writers,” not “writers I like” or “writers I think are good.” But when it’s your opinion, suddenly it’s completely subjective and couched completely in terms of “you think this” or “you don’t like that.”
I’ve got news for you, duder: You’re not the god of literature and other people’s opinions don’t have to get your approval to be valid viewpoints.
For people who actually like books, here are some of the exciting books by women released this month:
The Mirror King by Jodi Meadows
The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater
The Rose and the Dagger by Renee Ahdieh
Future Shock by Elizabeth Briggs
A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry
The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi
Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here by Anna Breslaw
Anyway, BRB, I’ve got to go tell my agent to cancel the thing we have in the works because there aren’t any good women authors nowadays.
I’m trying to imagine how you would ever extract the sci-fi from AS and come up with a story that still adhered to Objectivism. If the so-called Heroes aren’t able to invent super-devices in a weekend, what actually differentiates them from the proles? What are they taking with them when they go to hide out in their absurdly-well-appointed mountain lair? What is society going to miss about them when they’re gone, if they are unable to magick up super-metal?
If super-metal doesn’t exist, in other words, and can’t exist because we aren’t using sci-fi elements, and zero-point energy extractors can’t exist either for the same reason, why do we need to cry when a bunch of rich people decide to take their ball and go home in a snit? What kind of ball do they actually have to take with them, and how is it irreplaceable?
Without the sci-fi, the story becomes an incoherent bodice-ripper.
Real men don’t need garbage collection OR public toilets! They just let their surroundings slowly fill with poop. It’s the American way.
(Yes, I’m still on the Malheur thing.)
Louise Erdritch, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates. To name a few others no one mentioned yet.
If memoirs count, Marya Hornbacher wrote my favorite.
Re contemporary women writers–
Margaret Atwood’s entire ouvre is well worth reading, not just her speculative fiction.
Then there’s Hanya Yanagihara, , Elizabeth Jolley (she died a few years ago but she counts as contemporary,) Rachel Ingalls (brilliant, and should be MUCH better knowm,) Joyce Carol Oayes, A.M. Homes, Zadie Smith, and the previously mentioned Alice Munro. Oh, and Kelly Link.
Those are just the ones I read, and I don’t read alot of contemporary fiction. I’m more into older stuff.
@flora
Oryx and Crake is the first in the trilogy, followed by The Year of the Flood and Maddaddam.
Also, shame on Paul for not putting Flannery O’Connor on the good female writers of the past list.
She’s maybe my favorite all time writer.
@ WwTH
Oh, man. Flannery O’Connor. She could say so much with so few words.
@WWTH
Agreed! Also Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter…
Add to the contemporaries, Annie Dillard and Toni Morrison.
Seriously, though, there’s probably no point in discussing literature with someone who thinks Ayn Rand could write.
@ Lady Mondegreen
Can we add Zora Neale Hurston to the list, too?
Francine Prose, AS Byatt, Diane Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg…stop me anytime, Paul, these are all people who are critically acclaimed.
Do songwriters count? Because if they do, I like Amanda Palmer and PJ Harvey, among others.
@Victorious Parasol
For sure!
And Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner. 4 of the 10 winners in the past decade have been women.
Okay, how are we deciding contemporary? Because in some circles contemporary is only things produced in the past decade, while in others contemporary is everything in the past 200 years, while in yet others contemporary is anything that happened in the Holocene.
Since the challenge is lady writers, may I throw out some of my faves? No, Ayn Rand did not make the list.
Agatha Christie is awesome. Maybe that’s solely because I encountered her during my appendicitis episode, so I have fond memories of “Cat Among the Pigeons” helping keep my mind off the pain…
Annie Dillard is very much a flavor of the day type for me. Some days I love her. Other days I find her unbearable, because she definitely writes from a very privileged place. Seriously, no one I know can actually pull what she did for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, because we can’t afford to. I love her most of the time, though.
Barbara Kingsolver has some good stuff! I like her essay collection books best, to be honest, over the flat out book books.
Judy Blume and Beverly Clearey taught half the kids in my elementary school how to read, so they can’t be all that bad.
I never really got into Alice Walker’s books, but that’s partially because I read The Color Purple when I was five or six and was super confused about why people were putting things in cats, so now I can’t re-read it as an adult and not have flashbacks of “good grief I was oblivious and what the fudge”.
Tony Morrison I didn’t encounter until a more proper age. Beloved is super creepy, but still really good. I kind of lump Morrison and Walker together thematically, even though I shouldn’t.
Laura Hillenbrand is also great. Okay, fine, I’m biased because Seabiscuit is my favorite racehorse of all time so I’ll forgive those who disagree on Laura.
Tamora Pierce and Dawn Cook are my sleepy-time quiet reads of feel good, particularly the Lioness and Truth series.
Margaret Atwood is great for if you have a hankering for dystopian stuff. She’s kind of like the feminine Orwell or Goulding.
…and those are just the ones off the top of my head.
Stop thinking with your penis. I would add something more scathing but that’s all I can say.
My I suggest Jhumpa Lahiri and Jean Rhys as well? And Gillian Flynn because Gone Girl was a barn-burner of a thriller.
“Still writing and releasing new material” is a good benchmark if you’re talking about writers.
Yay! Writers! Okay, some contemporary women writers I like, and I’m limiting this mostly to fiction:
Ramona Ausubel and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (both American writers with sort of surreal sensibilities)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (mostly for Purple Hibiscus; I haven’t gotten to her newer novels yet)
Alina Bronsky (mostly for The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine – it has one of my favourite Evil First-Person Narrators, if that’s a thing)
Marie-Claire Blais (in French, but most of her books should be translated into English by now)
Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro (to be Canadian and all, and they both have excellent short stories though their styles are really different: SF/surrealism/avant-garde vs. realism)
Oh, and NoViolet Bulawayo for We Need New Names. And Nicola Griffith in sci-fi/fantasy. And Saleema Nawaz and Sofia Banzhaf as newish kind of writers (again in Canada).
This.
At this point, when some antifeminist gives praises for “good writing”, what they really mean is “says things I agree with”.
I think the first time I noticed this was when looking at the huge amounts of bs criticism aimed at ‘Gone Home’. So many people claiming it had a terrible story but none would ever bother to explain it.
It took me a while to figure out that ‘Gone home has a bad story’ actually meant ‘gone home wasn’t a FPS like i expected and changes to the status quo terrify me’.
Like many women, I’m sure, I’m not comfortable enjoying something until some random effing dude “well actually”s at me as to whether it’s good or not; so I’m so glad Paul could take time out of his no doubt busy schedule to tell us all what to think.
Paul, if you’re just doing this for book recs, there are less offensive and awful ways to go about it, I promise.
Okay, since I’m still into YA fiction, I’ll recommend Tamora Pierce, whose Alanna series probably had more influence on JrHigh!Paradox than I will ever know.
Also, huge plus in my book for having a story about a cisgendered teenaged girl that actually deals with periods. Just…so much blessings for that on Miss Pierce. It helped me feel so much better about my own body and helped me through a lot of dark places, and was kind of an influence on me when it came to feminism and the whole “Women can do anything men can do, and they can do it just as well” mentality.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/93b2a617162f18bcbf89d825089d1743/tumblr_inline_nhojr6xtpX1t8roph.jpg
(I might go tracking these suckers down someday. I always borrowed them from the school library, but I need them in my home library now.)
I’ve never commented before, but as long as we’re talking Lady Writers, I hope I can chime in with Aimee Bender and Kelly Link, (arguably sci-fi writers, but the rest of these are essaysts), Kerry Howley, Joan Didion (who might not produce new work but I hope she will), Katherine Boo, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Roach, Yiyun Li, Claudia Rankine, and Diane Ackerman. That’s not even mentioning poets like Terry Tempest Williams, Jorie Graham, Mary Ruefle, Mary Jo Bang, and Eileen Myles. I don’t think they’ve been mentioned yet. Apologies if they have.
And Julia Leigh. And Emily Mitchell.
Anyway, I got excited and forgot the point of all this. Still, co-sign Svetlana Alexivitch. Voices from Chernobyl is one of the most devastating books I’ve ever read.
And woe be upon any house that doesn’t hold Patricia Highsmith a master of 20th century American fiction.