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On Thursday, I had a bit of a hiccup. I decided that, after a year of using it, I didn’t like the way that Windows 8’s standard email program dealt with emails. So I resolved to sort it out and get Outlook 2013 up and working and make it my default program for email. I thought it would be easy. A ten minute job.
How wrong could I be?
As it turned out, very very wrong. It took me only a few minutes to make it work with my outlook.com email address. Very simple. Done in three clicks. For some reason the icloud.com email address I have but never use was already linked to it. Don’t know how that happened, I’d certainly done nothing to make it do that.
The sticking point was my standard gmail.com address, the one I use for 90% of the time.
Gmail’s instructions make it sound simple. “Put these settings into the email program and watch it work.” So I put the settings into the email program and it did not work. I varied them according to the instructions for over four hours and it still did not work. I had a cup of tea and tried again. No dice. Rebooted. No dice. Cuddled the cat in a marked manner. No dice.
Finally I tried settings I was sure I’d tried at least twice before with no results…and it worked. Eh? What was with that?
My old friend![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
yonmei once said that she’d been working with computers since 1991 and still sometimes the only explanation for why the thing has done what it’s just done is, “It’s possessed.” I concur.
Hugos reviews, continued. Note: rampaging spoilers herein. Please do not click on the links if you can’t cope with spoilers.
I’m currently working my way through the “Best Related Work” list. I should say up front that I haven’t finished two of these, and doubt if I will finish them – if I’m even meant to finish them which I’m not completely sure I am.
Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli (The Merry Blacksmith Press)
This is one I didn’t finish. I’m sorry; I got bored.
The book comprises Antonelli’s personal history, and writing advice interspersed with examples of Antonelli’s writing in the form of short stories. I read about the first 150 pages before giving up, and hadn’t learned anything about submitting SF/F professionally that I couldn’t have got from online sources or from the first 50 pages or so of the Writers and Artists Yearbook. The writing advice was kind of interesting, but I do have several books on writing already so none of it was really new. I’m not sure why it was on the Puppies slate, even.
His stories were mildly diverting, some of them better than the one he has up for a Hugo this year (“On a Spiritual Plane”, previously reviewed) making me wonder why this particular story had been chosen – it could, of course, be the only one he wrote that was published in 2014 that was the right length. Pity.
Hard to mark, given that I didn’t finish. 6/10, maybe. This entry is a Puppy nomination, but I’ve lost my bookmark which set out which of their slates are which, and much googling has not helped.
“The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House)
I like science in general, but I’m no physicist (I gave up studying physics over 30 years ago, though I did get an O level in 1978) so I approached this with some trepidation. What if it was all equations I couldn’t follow? Equations stump me, they always have – when I studied for my Master’s degree, I had to study how poverty is measured. There were some equations in that which made my brains trickle out of my ears. Even when I studied Physics I used to worry about them and at O level they were fairly simple.
However, no worries on that score, the writer explained most of it quite straightforwardly so that I could follow it as long as I paid attention and didn’t let myself get side tracked by watching the cat.
I came away with the impression that (a) things are more complicated than they might appear at first, and most SF books, films and TV have their exciting space machines fuelled by pure handwavium rather than following the rules of real physics as they are currently known. I had always suspected as much. (b) That in the unlikely event that I write a book where there are space ships, I will also fuel them with handwavium. It seems by far the best way – better to have made that shit up in order for it to work the way you want it to than to have someone infinitely better than me at science say that it doesn’t work that way.
I also read some of the other stuff in, “Riding the Red Horse” in preparation for consideration of the “Best Editor – Long Form” and “Best Editor – Short Form” both of which Vox Day has been nominated for – he is the editor of this book.
The stories so far range from the forgettable - in the time since finishing it (Friday) I’d forgotten that Eric S. Raymond’s, “Sucker Punch” even existed. Clearly not a story which stayed with me.
Vox Day’s story, “A Reliable Source” was more interesting. It concerned a Colonel of the US Air Force who is blackmailed by Big Bad (what kind seems unclear though people with brown skins are not to be trusted and may be the enemy within) and who just gives up for no reason that I could determine. If you recall I reviewed VD’s book “Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy” and pretty much panned it. For all its faults, “A Reliable Source” is an improvement, and on this evidence VD is better at writing thrillers set in the near future than he is at fantasy.
“Understanding 4th Generation War” by William S. Lind was also worth reading. He gives a potted history of warfare to the present day, and discusses why the US (and the UK but mostly the US) are doing so badly in Iraq. What is it about their forces training and attitudes that have gone so badly awry? I thought he made some interesting points that I’d like to see expanded upon.
The best of these stories, however, at least as far as I’ve read, is the one by Jerry Pournelle, “His Truth Goes Marching On” first published in 1975. It’s a SF reworking of the experiences of the volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. What makes this stand out from the crowd is that it has a simple straightforward style, it doesn’t get tied up in what sort of gun the soldiers are carrying (as too much military SF does) has characters you can feel for, and it carries its message lightly.
For the Thermodynamics essay, 7/10. I’ll hold off giving a mark for the whole work. Again, the essay and the work appear on the Puppies slate.
Finally for this tranche we have:
Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright (Castalia House)
I read three of the essays in this collection, the title essay, “Transhuman and Subhuman”, “The Hobbit, or the Desolation of Tolkien” and “Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters.” I may return and read more, but then again I may cut my toes off with shears first. The jury is out on that point.
“Transhuman and Subhuman”
I cannot list, because there isn’t enough space or time in the world, the number of times I disagreed with something Wright posits in, “Transhuman and Subhuman.” Quite early on in the essay he says, ‘High Fantasy occupies the mental universe where (1) truth is true, (2) goodness is good, and (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice, and when marred life may yet, not without terrible price, be saved.’ He compares it to what he calls, ‘Sword and Magic User fiction’ which has no overarching religious figure, and he specifies Elbereth and Aslan as overarching religious figures.
I don’t agree. I believe High Fantasy (what’s with the capitals?) can include situations where the world described has grey and less grey areas, like our own. One example is one of the other nominated works the novel, “The Goblin Emperor.” Totally High Fantasy, full of grey areas. For those who haven’t read it, the book is about a young goblin, Maia, whose father and three brothers are killed in an airship disaster, leaving him heir to the title.
Raised by an Uncle who has no love for him and who ill-treats him, he has little training for the part because nobody expected him to inherit. He has to work his way through a positively Byzantine court, crammed with people who all have their own agenda, trying to sort friends from enemies and at the same time trying to find out both who killed his family and to prevent it happening to him. The world has a religion which is not particularly fleshed out, and we learn that Maia is more-than-incidentally devout, showing this by meditation.
I also don’t agree that there is a realistic difference between ‘High Fantasy’ and ‘Sword and Magic User’ fiction. I don’t think it’s a useful distinction to make. Nor do I think it’s true that, ‘High fantasy has a Roman Catholic flavor to it, whereas Sword-and-Sorcery is somewhat Protestant.’
I also thought Wright’s inclusion of Elbereth didn’t support his claim. Elbereth was not the ‘god’ of either Arda or Valinor (for there is no god as such in either place.) I think Wright may mean Eru, who was the Creator spirit, also called, ‘Ilúvatar’ by the elves. Elbereth was one of the fourteen supporting spirits, the Ainur who entered the world at the behest of Eru to bring order to his creation. There was a fifteenth spirit, Melkor, and the other fourteen had to combat his evil. (I’m a pedantic Tolkien-ite, and I seem to recall that Tolkien had a long discussion with C. S. Lewis on this point.)
Wright then goes on to deliniate four types of people which he says are, ‘the Worldly Man, the Cultist, the Occultist, the Anarchist’, using some classification of his own to describe the different types. The one which struck me as particularly odd was the Anarchist – his use of the term wasn’t any that I recognise, and he didn’t seem to be using it in its normal (to me) political meaning. But then I’m a Socialist, what do I know?
His critique, “The Hobbit, or the Desolation of Tolkien” a commentary on the film, ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ I enjoyed much more. The language is massively overblown, but a lot of people find that funny. I did myself for the first two thirds, until it became a bit much. His points chimed sometimes with the thoughts I’d had about the film. I mean, I loved it – visually it was flawless – but I’m sadly aware of its faults.
He didn’t like Tauriel, which I thought a pity as during the film I warmed to her. She’s not in the book but I forgave her that because she was warm, funny and kick-ass. What’s to dislike?
However, I thought he was completely on-target calling Legolas, “the Moderator’s Pet NPC.” For those who are a bit puzzled, Wright explains, “This is when a moderator [Game-Master in Dungeons and Dragons terms] introduces a character into the adventure who does everything better than any player character, and the entire universe (the moderator’s invented universe, that is) showers him with blessings and love.” I have to admit that in my youth, in the very first AD&D campaign I ran, I committed a ‘Moderator’s Pet NPC’ who could be every bit as irritating to the players as Wright makes it sound. He was a half-elf called Lexin. So now you know.
Wright didn’t like Thranduil as much as I did. I adore Thranduil to little minty balls and have so many pictures of him on my Pinterest that it’s embarrassing. I did agree with him on one point, though, “[W]e get to see Thranduil’s face melt for a second, as if he is hiding by enchantment (an enchantment that slips when he is angry) some old scar from where the dragon burned a huge hole in his cheek…” That little moment made no sense to me, either, and is never explained in the film. It’s just weird.
And so on and so forth. Worth reading, because it is amusing in parts and mostly apposite.
Finally, “Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters.”
Astoundingly annoying and not as described in the title.
Wright opens, “Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.
“As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.”
In the next paragraph he says, “Different reviewers no doubt mean slightly different things when they speak of the strength of a female character: but the general meaning is that the strong female character is masculine.”
No, they don’t mean that. They don’t. At least, I don’t. The rest of that paragraph goes on to describe what Wright thinks are (or should be) the defining characteristics of “men” and of “women”. It should, in my opinion, count as an outstanding description of why (as I believe) the patriarchy (yes, I’m a feminist, so sue me) damages and undervalues men as much as it does women.
This line in particular I want to take and shred, “The female spirit is wise rather than cunning, deep in understanding rather than adroit in deductive logic, gentle and supportive rather than boastful and self-aggrandizing.” A woman like this would get absolutely nowhere in the modern workplace, and women have to work. It’s bizarre nonsense. Some more, “Of classical virtues, temperance and prudence are essential to femininity, especially that temperance of the sexual appetite called chastity…” I mean…ack?! So bizarre that this applies to women and not to men.
He then rails against Political Correctness, without at any stage understanding that what he calls ‘Political Correctness’ those of us with working moral compasses of our own call ‘good manners’.
He also doesn’t seem to understand feminism when he says that feminism means that women are considered ‘weak and helpless’. This is the sort of tripe one hears from the kind of person who calls feminists ‘feminazis’, the sort of person who espouses the ‘mens rights’ movement and seeks training from ‘pick up artists’. That anyone thinks that is…well, I find it creepy as well as misinformed.
He is perhaps at his most bizarre when he discusses vulgarity, and the differences between men and women. He allows men to swear because, “[T]he vulgarity may have the positive effect of stirring up emotions ranging from team spirit to desperate anger which aids the will to win…”
To which I say, “Er…what?” Why would that apply to men and not to women? Aren’t women allowed to win?
He tells us women, however, should not swear because, “[W]hen women in the kitchen or the nursery use the name of the Lord in vain, and the children they are nursing and teaching hear them, the vulgarity has the negative effect of deadening the emotions of the youngsters and making them vulgar and indifferent to vulgarity. Youngsters indifferent to vulgarity with very few exceptions cannot have a reverent or respectful attitude toward man or God. This absence of respect infiltrates to every compartment of their lives; they are mean to the poor, callous to women, negligent of duties, contemptuous of authority, and so on.”
I’m sorry, this is just wacky. What if the woman has no children? Is she allowed to swear then? It seems not, “[A] woman who is crude inspires contempt, because she has contempt for God and man. The difference is that a woman who loses her native delicacy and modesty does not become an object of fear and respect, but an object of contempt and loathing, because the aura of sanctity women naturally inspire in men is tossed away.”
“Aura of sanctity?” Does that give her +1 on saving throws and +2 against undead or something? It’s flapdoodle. Men and women are human beings alike, and both are entitled to equal respect.
He goes on a bit later in the essay, “My theory is that in the postwar years, the returning servicemen, having survived the hell of war and emerged from the purgatory of the Great Depression, yearned for and created the most pleasant environment imaginable to the human race: the well-tended suburb, complete with elm trees, white picket fences, automobiles with tailfins, televisions with rabbit ears, schoolhouses, (and shoes), for their children, washing machines, and, in yearning for domestic bliss, asked for an exaggerated form of domestic femininity from their women, complete with high heels, aprons and pearl necklaces. They had certainly earned it; and the women graciously granted their wish, and behaved in a more feminine fashion than their mothers.”
He’s looking back to a never-never land that existed, I think, only for a comparatively small number of people both men and women. Poor women have always had to work, they did before, during and after the heyday of the 1950s and 60s that Wright imagines with such affection. What helped the people of the post-war era to have such comparatively lavish lifestyles (compared with the situation before the war in any case) was the rise of organised labour in the form of trade unions which pushed up wages, and an increase in conspicuous consumption. It wasn’t brought about by women being ‘real women’, men being ‘real men’ (and small furry creatures form Alpha Centauri ditto.)
This view of suburbia also applies (as does a lot in all of Wright’s essays) to the situation in the USA. Europe was different, and is still different now. That white picket fence suburbia as outlined by Wright does not exist to the same extent in Europe, and never has.
Wright then goes on to show – at some length – that his understanding of feminism is simplistic and limited. I won’t go into details as I’ve gone on long enough.
Could have been better, the essay on strong female characters particularly lets it down. The critique of the film saves it from total disaster, but I still didn’t think much to it. 3/10. Another Puppies nomination.
How wrong could I be?
As it turned out, very very wrong. It took me only a few minutes to make it work with my outlook.com email address. Very simple. Done in three clicks. For some reason the icloud.com email address I have but never use was already linked to it. Don’t know how that happened, I’d certainly done nothing to make it do that.
The sticking point was my standard gmail.com address, the one I use for 90% of the time.
Gmail’s instructions make it sound simple. “Put these settings into the email program and watch it work.” So I put the settings into the email program and it did not work. I varied them according to the instructions for over four hours and it still did not work. I had a cup of tea and tried again. No dice. Rebooted. No dice. Cuddled the cat in a marked manner. No dice.
Finally I tried settings I was sure I’d tried at least twice before with no results…and it worked. Eh? What was with that?
My old friend
yonmei once said that she’d been working with computers since 1991 and still sometimes the only explanation for why the thing has done what it’s just done is, “It’s possessed.” I concur.Hugos reviews, continued. Note: rampaging spoilers herein. Please do not click on the links if you can’t cope with spoilers.
I’m currently working my way through the “Best Related Work” list. I should say up front that I haven’t finished two of these, and doubt if I will finish them – if I’m even meant to finish them which I’m not completely sure I am.
Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli (The Merry Blacksmith Press)
This is one I didn’t finish. I’m sorry; I got bored.
The book comprises Antonelli’s personal history, and writing advice interspersed with examples of Antonelli’s writing in the form of short stories. I read about the first 150 pages before giving up, and hadn’t learned anything about submitting SF/F professionally that I couldn’t have got from online sources or from the first 50 pages or so of the Writers and Artists Yearbook. The writing advice was kind of interesting, but I do have several books on writing already so none of it was really new. I’m not sure why it was on the Puppies slate, even.
His stories were mildly diverting, some of them better than the one he has up for a Hugo this year (“On a Spiritual Plane”, previously reviewed) making me wonder why this particular story had been chosen – it could, of course, be the only one he wrote that was published in 2014 that was the right length. Pity.
Hard to mark, given that I didn’t finish. 6/10, maybe. This entry is a Puppy nomination, but I’ve lost my bookmark which set out which of their slates are which, and much googling has not helped.
“The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House)
I like science in general, but I’m no physicist (I gave up studying physics over 30 years ago, though I did get an O level in 1978) so I approached this with some trepidation. What if it was all equations I couldn’t follow? Equations stump me, they always have – when I studied for my Master’s degree, I had to study how poverty is measured. There were some equations in that which made my brains trickle out of my ears. Even when I studied Physics I used to worry about them and at O level they were fairly simple.
However, no worries on that score, the writer explained most of it quite straightforwardly so that I could follow it as long as I paid attention and didn’t let myself get side tracked by watching the cat.
I came away with the impression that (a) things are more complicated than they might appear at first, and most SF books, films and TV have their exciting space machines fuelled by pure handwavium rather than following the rules of real physics as they are currently known. I had always suspected as much. (b) That in the unlikely event that I write a book where there are space ships, I will also fuel them with handwavium. It seems by far the best way – better to have made that shit up in order for it to work the way you want it to than to have someone infinitely better than me at science say that it doesn’t work that way.
I also read some of the other stuff in, “Riding the Red Horse” in preparation for consideration of the “Best Editor – Long Form” and “Best Editor – Short Form” both of which Vox Day has been nominated for – he is the editor of this book.
The stories so far range from the forgettable - in the time since finishing it (Friday) I’d forgotten that Eric S. Raymond’s, “Sucker Punch” even existed. Clearly not a story which stayed with me.
Vox Day’s story, “A Reliable Source” was more interesting. It concerned a Colonel of the US Air Force who is blackmailed by Big Bad (what kind seems unclear though people with brown skins are not to be trusted and may be the enemy within) and who just gives up for no reason that I could determine. If you recall I reviewed VD’s book “Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy” and pretty much panned it. For all its faults, “A Reliable Source” is an improvement, and on this evidence VD is better at writing thrillers set in the near future than he is at fantasy.
“Understanding 4th Generation War” by William S. Lind was also worth reading. He gives a potted history of warfare to the present day, and discusses why the US (and the UK but mostly the US) are doing so badly in Iraq. What is it about their forces training and attitudes that have gone so badly awry? I thought he made some interesting points that I’d like to see expanded upon.
The best of these stories, however, at least as far as I’ve read, is the one by Jerry Pournelle, “His Truth Goes Marching On” first published in 1975. It’s a SF reworking of the experiences of the volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. What makes this stand out from the crowd is that it has a simple straightforward style, it doesn’t get tied up in what sort of gun the soldiers are carrying (as too much military SF does) has characters you can feel for, and it carries its message lightly.
For the Thermodynamics essay, 7/10. I’ll hold off giving a mark for the whole work. Again, the essay and the work appear on the Puppies slate.
Finally for this tranche we have:
Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright (Castalia House)
I read three of the essays in this collection, the title essay, “Transhuman and Subhuman”, “The Hobbit, or the Desolation of Tolkien” and “Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters.” I may return and read more, but then again I may cut my toes off with shears first. The jury is out on that point.
“Transhuman and Subhuman”
I cannot list, because there isn’t enough space or time in the world, the number of times I disagreed with something Wright posits in, “Transhuman and Subhuman.” Quite early on in the essay he says, ‘High Fantasy occupies the mental universe where (1) truth is true, (2) goodness is good, and (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice, and when marred life may yet, not without terrible price, be saved.’ He compares it to what he calls, ‘Sword and Magic User fiction’ which has no overarching religious figure, and he specifies Elbereth and Aslan as overarching religious figures.
I don’t agree. I believe High Fantasy (what’s with the capitals?) can include situations where the world described has grey and less grey areas, like our own. One example is one of the other nominated works the novel, “The Goblin Emperor.” Totally High Fantasy, full of grey areas. For those who haven’t read it, the book is about a young goblin, Maia, whose father and three brothers are killed in an airship disaster, leaving him heir to the title.
Raised by an Uncle who has no love for him and who ill-treats him, he has little training for the part because nobody expected him to inherit. He has to work his way through a positively Byzantine court, crammed with people who all have their own agenda, trying to sort friends from enemies and at the same time trying to find out both who killed his family and to prevent it happening to him. The world has a religion which is not particularly fleshed out, and we learn that Maia is more-than-incidentally devout, showing this by meditation.
I also don’t agree that there is a realistic difference between ‘High Fantasy’ and ‘Sword and Magic User’ fiction. I don’t think it’s a useful distinction to make. Nor do I think it’s true that, ‘High fantasy has a Roman Catholic flavor to it, whereas Sword-and-Sorcery is somewhat Protestant.’
I also thought Wright’s inclusion of Elbereth didn’t support his claim. Elbereth was not the ‘god’ of either Arda or Valinor (for there is no god as such in either place.) I think Wright may mean Eru, who was the Creator spirit, also called, ‘Ilúvatar’ by the elves. Elbereth was one of the fourteen supporting spirits, the Ainur who entered the world at the behest of Eru to bring order to his creation. There was a fifteenth spirit, Melkor, and the other fourteen had to combat his evil. (I’m a pedantic Tolkien-ite, and I seem to recall that Tolkien had a long discussion with C. S. Lewis on this point.)
Wright then goes on to deliniate four types of people which he says are, ‘the Worldly Man, the Cultist, the Occultist, the Anarchist’, using some classification of his own to describe the different types. The one which struck me as particularly odd was the Anarchist – his use of the term wasn’t any that I recognise, and he didn’t seem to be using it in its normal (to me) political meaning. But then I’m a Socialist, what do I know?
His critique, “The Hobbit, or the Desolation of Tolkien” a commentary on the film, ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ I enjoyed much more. The language is massively overblown, but a lot of people find that funny. I did myself for the first two thirds, until it became a bit much. His points chimed sometimes with the thoughts I’d had about the film. I mean, I loved it – visually it was flawless – but I’m sadly aware of its faults.
He didn’t like Tauriel, which I thought a pity as during the film I warmed to her. She’s not in the book but I forgave her that because she was warm, funny and kick-ass. What’s to dislike?
However, I thought he was completely on-target calling Legolas, “the Moderator’s Pet NPC.” For those who are a bit puzzled, Wright explains, “This is when a moderator [Game-Master in Dungeons and Dragons terms] introduces a character into the adventure who does everything better than any player character, and the entire universe (the moderator’s invented universe, that is) showers him with blessings and love.” I have to admit that in my youth, in the very first AD&D campaign I ran, I committed a ‘Moderator’s Pet NPC’ who could be every bit as irritating to the players as Wright makes it sound. He was a half-elf called Lexin. So now you know.
Wright didn’t like Thranduil as much as I did. I adore Thranduil to little minty balls and have so many pictures of him on my Pinterest that it’s embarrassing. I did agree with him on one point, though, “[W]e get to see Thranduil’s face melt for a second, as if he is hiding by enchantment (an enchantment that slips when he is angry) some old scar from where the dragon burned a huge hole in his cheek…” That little moment made no sense to me, either, and is never explained in the film. It’s just weird.
And so on and so forth. Worth reading, because it is amusing in parts and mostly apposite.
Finally, “Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters.”
Astoundingly annoying and not as described in the title.
Wright opens, “Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.
“As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.”
In the next paragraph he says, “Different reviewers no doubt mean slightly different things when they speak of the strength of a female character: but the general meaning is that the strong female character is masculine.”
No, they don’t mean that. They don’t. At least, I don’t. The rest of that paragraph goes on to describe what Wright thinks are (or should be) the defining characteristics of “men” and of “women”. It should, in my opinion, count as an outstanding description of why (as I believe) the patriarchy (yes, I’m a feminist, so sue me) damages and undervalues men as much as it does women.
This line in particular I want to take and shred, “The female spirit is wise rather than cunning, deep in understanding rather than adroit in deductive logic, gentle and supportive rather than boastful and self-aggrandizing.” A woman like this would get absolutely nowhere in the modern workplace, and women have to work. It’s bizarre nonsense. Some more, “Of classical virtues, temperance and prudence are essential to femininity, especially that temperance of the sexual appetite called chastity…” I mean…ack?! So bizarre that this applies to women and not to men.
He then rails against Political Correctness, without at any stage understanding that what he calls ‘Political Correctness’ those of us with working moral compasses of our own call ‘good manners’.
He also doesn’t seem to understand feminism when he says that feminism means that women are considered ‘weak and helpless’. This is the sort of tripe one hears from the kind of person who calls feminists ‘feminazis’, the sort of person who espouses the ‘mens rights’ movement and seeks training from ‘pick up artists’. That anyone thinks that is…well, I find it creepy as well as misinformed.
He is perhaps at his most bizarre when he discusses vulgarity, and the differences between men and women. He allows men to swear because, “[T]he vulgarity may have the positive effect of stirring up emotions ranging from team spirit to desperate anger which aids the will to win…”
To which I say, “Er…what?” Why would that apply to men and not to women? Aren’t women allowed to win?
He tells us women, however, should not swear because, “[W]hen women in the kitchen or the nursery use the name of the Lord in vain, and the children they are nursing and teaching hear them, the vulgarity has the negative effect of deadening the emotions of the youngsters and making them vulgar and indifferent to vulgarity. Youngsters indifferent to vulgarity with very few exceptions cannot have a reverent or respectful attitude toward man or God. This absence of respect infiltrates to every compartment of their lives; they are mean to the poor, callous to women, negligent of duties, contemptuous of authority, and so on.”
I’m sorry, this is just wacky. What if the woman has no children? Is she allowed to swear then? It seems not, “[A] woman who is crude inspires contempt, because she has contempt for God and man. The difference is that a woman who loses her native delicacy and modesty does not become an object of fear and respect, but an object of contempt and loathing, because the aura of sanctity women naturally inspire in men is tossed away.”
“Aura of sanctity?” Does that give her +1 on saving throws and +2 against undead or something? It’s flapdoodle. Men and women are human beings alike, and both are entitled to equal respect.
He goes on a bit later in the essay, “My theory is that in the postwar years, the returning servicemen, having survived the hell of war and emerged from the purgatory of the Great Depression, yearned for and created the most pleasant environment imaginable to the human race: the well-tended suburb, complete with elm trees, white picket fences, automobiles with tailfins, televisions with rabbit ears, schoolhouses, (and shoes), for their children, washing machines, and, in yearning for domestic bliss, asked for an exaggerated form of domestic femininity from their women, complete with high heels, aprons and pearl necklaces. They had certainly earned it; and the women graciously granted their wish, and behaved in a more feminine fashion than their mothers.”
He’s looking back to a never-never land that existed, I think, only for a comparatively small number of people both men and women. Poor women have always had to work, they did before, during and after the heyday of the 1950s and 60s that Wright imagines with such affection. What helped the people of the post-war era to have such comparatively lavish lifestyles (compared with the situation before the war in any case) was the rise of organised labour in the form of trade unions which pushed up wages, and an increase in conspicuous consumption. It wasn’t brought about by women being ‘real women’, men being ‘real men’ (and small furry creatures form Alpha Centauri ditto.)
This view of suburbia also applies (as does a lot in all of Wright’s essays) to the situation in the USA. Europe was different, and is still different now. That white picket fence suburbia as outlined by Wright does not exist to the same extent in Europe, and never has.
Wright then goes on to show – at some length – that his understanding of feminism is simplistic and limited. I won’t go into details as I’ve gone on long enough.
Could have been better, the essay on strong female characters particularly lets it down. The critique of the film saves it from total disaster, but I still didn’t think much to it. 3/10. Another Puppies nomination.