May 5th, 2007
by
Liz Henry
When I’m sick I re-read particular comfort books and often they’re things like Trixie Belden or the Bobbsey Twins or pretty much anything YA. A series is best, because I read fast and I want to be immersed in escapism for a good long while. And strangely I find the Pern books comforting like that. Why? At this point, I could recite them, and they have so many issues that annoy me. The comfort lies in Mary-Sueish gratification – not that I want to be any of the characters, but that there’s something oh-noes-so-unfair, and then the protagonists triumph in the most smug obnoxious ways. If someone is rude or annoying to Lessa for even an instant, they turn out to be totally bad and you know they’ll get their comeuppance. They’ll die, or be humiliated in front of all of Pern. This is great when I’m feeling sick and stuck in bed and want to wallow in self-pity. Besides imagining having a sexy dragon and getting to live in a cave with it, the bit of you that identifies with protagonists, male or female, *always get to be right*.
The Pern books are indisputably girl canon. That doesn’t make them paragons of feminism, though.
Since I’m feeling really bitchy let’s pick apart some of the more annoying things about Pern. If I read it with feminist consciousness? Or just any sort of critical awareness?
Let’s start with Dragonflight. It’s easy to pick on. Especially if you’re a totally ridiculous Pernologist.
In general, Pern is one of the nastier more patriarchal fsf societies. Women are slaves and have no rights. Not that there’s any law at all. But women can’t read. They don’t seem to have jobs or property. Rape and sex slavery is completely normal.
=== Read more, oh so much more, below the cut ====
- Harems. Fax has “ladies” and they live in special women’s quarters. They’re bad because they don’t take baths. Visiting dragonrider F’lar gets a “lady” assigned to him with the implication she not only escorts him to dinner but she is there for sexual service. Oh and they get raped (references to Fax “keeping Lady Gemma pregnant” specifically because he hopes she’ll die in labor). The women of Fax’s harem are plump and small and stupid and the spirit has been beaten out of them. Gemma is “the only willful one, and she was too old.”
- The old Benden weyrwoman, Jora, is bad, because she’s fat and lazy. The used to be pretty. She’s also really slutty. She’s also disgusting and stupid. I get the idea she’s a blowsy blonde truck stop waitress with too much eyeshadow, drinking all day on a stone divan with bronze riders at her feet while her dragon doesn’t get pregnant enough. Her weight comes up a lot as metonymy for the world’s problems. Pretty much everything wrong with the world is blamed on her being fat.
- For some reason never explained, queen dragons need female riders.
- The Women of the Lower Caverns. Dragonriders whoosh around all of Pern taking the prettiest young girls back to the weyr to live in the “Lower Caverns” and be their kitchen and sex slaves. The girls supposedly dream of this glorious fate because it’s better than their regular lives. In the Weyr they can have abortions or maybe there’s birth control, it’s unclear; but the difference is they’re “not expected to wear themselves out having children”. (Though even Kylara has five children until she figures out how to abort by going between.) No “woman of the Lower Caverns” ever objects to her life of housework and cooking in service to dragonriders – for the glory of Pern I guess.
- There is one queen dragon in a weyr. (Later, not true anymore.) If your bronze dragon has sex with the queen dragon, you get to be king. I mean, Weyrleader. Also you get to have sex with the queen dragon’s rider, who moves into your cave. As the weyrwoman, you maybe have some kind of power. But not really. Most of it is just a name. The other part of it is that as a queen dragon rider you can manipulate bronze dragon riders (who are actually powerful and have status) through sex or flirting.
- Extended and repeated speculations on why F’lar’s dragon didn’t mate with Jora’s dragon, which would have meant more baby dragons and maybe better ones because of the virility of F’lar’s dragon. Why didn’t Mnementh “fly” Nemorth? Because F’lar thought Jora was stupid, obese, and incompetent. (Not to mention she must have been his stepmother or at least, fucking his dad, F’lon, who used to be Weyrleader.)
- The fastest bronze dragon isn’t always the one who “catches” the queen to mate with her. “Sometimes it is the one everyone in the Weyr wants to have win her.” So a subtle psychic propaganda campaign controls who has sex with your dragon and … with you. So if everyone likes F’lar’s politics, you have to fuck him to bestow political legitimacy on him… Can I just point out how dumb that is!
- Sluts are bad (Kylara, Mardra, etc.)
- Except that weyrs “discarded sexual inhibitions long ago” which means that “the women of the Lower Caverns” will have sex with any dragon rider who feels like it. Which is sort of okay. But sort of reflects badly on them for being slutty, at the same time. It doesn’t reflect badly on the male dragonriders. But it does on the one slutty queen (Mardra.)
- Lessa’s whole family gets killed when she was 11, but we never learn any of their names or anything about them and she has no memories of them other than “my dead family”. Lame! Yet this is a minor quibble.
- Drudges. Okay what’s the deal? “Overworked, underfed, scarred by lash and disease, they were just what they were — drudges, fit only for hard, menial labor.” (In later books, drudges are happy, well-cared for retarded people unfit for other jobs.)
- Dragons. Sentient, but sort of not. No rights. Bossed around by riders. No personality in these early books. They hold some of the, what to call it, markers or placeholders for racist thought. Bronzes are a certain way, greens are a certain way, browns are this other way and that’s pretty much it. Their riders somehow take on their qualities so that brown dragon riders are stolid, practical, reliable tanks or fighters. Bronzes are all studly and virile and flashy and warriors, they’re sort of the kshatriyas. Green dragons are always in heat and are flightly and dumb. Blue dragons never get much of any identifying characteristics other than cannon fodder (thread fodder). They’re like the redshirts. And of course the queen gold dragons and their riders are imperious, jealous, haughty, sexy, proud, greedy, and vain.
- Lessa. Spunky. Feisty. Annoying. Every time she does anything tough, she becomes childlike and dependent on F’lar. The whole “Oh, he’ll shake me” scenes? Barf. She has her strong-woman moments, which we all suck down like candy; she’s a rebel, she’s vengeful and fierce and angry; she goes bravely back in time 400 years and almost dies. She throws back her shoulders and puts her chin up. Her eyes are crackling and flashing with defiance. That’s all cool. She is also sly and deceitful and secretive and sneaky, bitter and mistrustful; survival skills developed during her time as a drudge bent on vengeance. That’s also sort of cool. BUT. It is as if because she’s strong, the story has to establish and emphasize her weakness and vulnerabilty, always in relation to men. Whenever F’lar actually likes her it’s because she’s “young and vulnerable and almost pretty”. When F’lar looks at her she is childlike. She’s sweet. She’s innocent. She’s waiflike, candid, trusting, torn, reluctant, little, physically powerless like a little kitten who snarls at you but that you could just laugh at and pick up. Her hero-qualities are undermined on every page.
- Consider Manora. She’s F’nor’s mom. She’s “a stately woman of middle years” exuding “an aura of quiet strength and purpose, having come to a difficult compromise with life which she maintained with serene dignity.” I always kind of wonder what that means. Manora is like everyone’s mom. She runs things and is the housekeeper or steward for the castle. I mean weyr. She’s probably the real power behind the throne… We don’t see much of her though. She mostly stays in the Lower Caverns bossing the squadrons of unnamed housecleaners and cooks. 20 years later in Pern time, Manora is still a stately, cool, calm, collected woman of middle age who runs everything. Despite being one of the infamous Women of the Lower Caverns, she never seems to be having sex with anyone. If she’s done it since F’nor’s dad, we don’t know it.
- It sucks to be F’nor, or any of those people who went back in time and aged 10 years, but no one ever mentions the aging factor and what they feel about it and their possible relationships with other people who didn’t live through that 10 years.
- Skipping ahead a bit, consider how gross it is that Brekke is sexy because she is childlike.
- F’lar and Lessa, rape and sex. I think we’re supposed to admire F’lar because he doesn’t rape Lessa right away when he takes her to live in his cave. She kind of expects him to. (But no – he waits till later.) p. 104: “He caught her arm and felt her body tense. He set his teeth, wishing, as he had a hundred times since Ramoth rose in her first mating flight, that Lessa had not been virgin, too. He had not thought to control his dragon-incited emotions, and Lessa’s first sexual experience had been violent. It had surprised him to be first, considering that her adolescent years had been spent drudging for lascivious warders and soldier-types. Evidently no one had bothered to penetrate the curtain of rags and filth she had carefully maintained as a disguise. He had been a considerate and gentle bedmate ever since, but, unless Ramoth and Mnementh were involved, he might as well call it rape.” Do we even need to take this one apart? Why is he fucking her if he might as well call it rape? If we might as well call it rape, then it’s rape. Instead it’s just sort of evidence of how sensitive F’lar is. He has sex with her and she doesn’t like it, and he’s cool *because he bothers to notice* and wants to “coax her into responding whole-heartedly to his lovemaking” because “he had a certain pride in his skill”. Extra vile!
- The main thing Lessa seems to do in her capacity as Weyrwoman is to serve food. She’s always deftly serving F’lar’s dinner. She pours the klah during important meetings. She clears the table a lot too, and rings for food. Which appears magically from a dumbwaiter from the Lower Caverns where all the slutty kitchen women live. You could go through the book and mark up all her waitress moments.
- women don’t read. p. 75 in my edition. “He withdrew a message from his belt and hesitated, torn between the knowledge that women did not read and his instructions to give it to the Weyrwoman.” Aaaaaaa!
- Women totally listen to you if you physically abuse them. For example… “F’nor’s stern words interrupted her tirade as effectively as if he had grabbed her and shaken her. She had not suspected F’nor of such forecefulness. She looked at him with increased respect.” This happens constantly. Fucked up!
- I do sort of like how Ramoth is all greedy and covered in blood when she does her mating flight. “Ramoth’s wedge-shaped head whipped back and forth; her eyes glowed with incandescent rebellion. This was no amiable, trusting dragon child. This was a violent demon.” Wow, female sexuality is pretty dangerous. During this scene we are told that the whole point of dragonriders is to help dragons mate correctly.
- F’lar slaps the hell out of Lessa during this mating/rape scene. This helps her come back to reality and also it makes her want to fuck him because she’s angry at him. Kind of trashy-hot, but also pretty messed up. Just pointing it out in case you missed it.
- the aftermath of this night of sex. F’lar’s horrible smugness. Now he has THE POWERRRRR. He takes charge! Because he’s a Man! The Weyr’s morale is improved because F’lar got laid, and he deserves it the most.
- We could really make a drinking game where you drink every time Lessa has hysterics and F’lar helps her by slapping and shaking her. “Her voice had risen to an hysterical pitch of recrimination. He slapped her sharply across the cheeks, grabbing her, robe and all, to shake her.” p. 116. Uh yeah okay that’s just not my kind of heroine… or hero.
- There should be a collection of F’lar’s adverbs. Grimly! Firmly! Sternly! Dryly! Evenly! Sharply! And with deliberate callousness, his voice carefully neutral. Maliciously! That was only two pages.
- A note that of course we also love the bit about the green dragon riders and the gay sex, which comes up for the first time in Dragonquest. I get the feeling that we established in book 1 that all the dragon riders are male, and that green dragons have sex a lot. But we didn’t think about the consequences of that. By book 2 McCaffrey has thought about it and so we figure out during the Weyrleader meeting that B’naj and T’reb just totally had hours of dragon-inspired telepathic gay sex. When I was a kid and read this I was very happy. It doesn’t SAY they did. Maybe they could have been getting it on separately with some of the nameless Women of the Lower Caverns. But it’s strongly implied they get with each other.
- Skipping ahead a bit also to book two, Dragonquest. Take a good look at the part near the beginning, where F’lar goes to the Weyrleaders’ meeting to talk about the knife attack on F’nor in the Smithcrafter hall. He spends a whole page explaining to us why it is better that the Weyrwomen weren’t invited the meeting. Reasons are: sexual jealousy and cattiness between Mardra and Lessa. Also Mardra is a bitch, and promiscuous. Mardra is handsome, older, and stacked, while Lessa is young and dainty – therefore they hate each other. Mardra also hates Lessa for the lamest of political reasons. “So it was as well the Weyrwomen had not been included in this meeting. Put Mardra in the same room wiht Lessa and there’d be problems. Add Kylara … who was apt to make trouble for the pure joy of getting attention by disrupting others, and nothing would be accomplished. Nadira of Igen Weyr liked Lessa but in a passive way. Bedella of Telgar Weyr was stupid and Fanna of Ista, taciturn. Merika… was as much a sour sort as her Weyrleader T’kul. This was a matter for men to settle.” Okay first of all the Weyr-dudes are also jerks, and stupid, and sour, and taciturn, and hidebound, and make trouble for the hell of it, but… they still get invited to the meeting! There is no logic here! Second of all what gives with the extensive analysis of the looks and sluttiness factor of the women — because they have sexuality, they can’t do politics. They just can’t. SO WRONG. Oh also to note that the reason F’lar is thinking about this at all is that Lessa has psychic powers and can do some subtle mind-control on the other Weyrleaders. In short F’lar is an asshole. We already knew that, right?
Equal rights for women on Pern make minor strides during wartime (i.e. when Thread starts falling.) I’m unclear why.
I have pointed out before that Pern is this bourgeois carrot for women and I made fun of it as the suburban upper middle class utopia. If you’re upper class, you get nice food, better treatment, you play hostess a lot, you get your own vehicle, do something that isn’t housework in a dilettanteish way, maybe go to school a bit to learn astronomy or harping, and get to travel a lot. You get a lot of other women to be your servants. That’s the best of all possible worlds on Pern – for women.
Basically, unless you’re one of like 5 women on Pern — unless you’re a weyrwoman, or Menolly, or Mirrim, or maybe Manora – life totally sucks and you might as well not bother. Even if you are the most powerful brave smart talented privileged woman on Pern, you get raped and slapped around a lot.
This is just a small part of why I don’t recommend this series to young girls anymore and instead turn them towards Tamora Pierce’s later books.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege
Filed under Books & Literature | Comments (41)
Wow! Superb!
As comprehensive as it is, though, you left out something I’ve been bitching about for decades, which is Menolly as an example of “the perfect woman.” The perfect woman is the one who can do anything she tries to, learn anything she’s taught, and handle every challenge. The heroine of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the one who invents arithmetic and deduces how pregnancy works is another of my favorites.
And I just this second realized that the perfect woman is the fictional equivalent of the magical negro!
Oh I didn’t even get into Menolly. That would take hours.
Menolly I will still recommend, with some reservations. She is oh-noes-oppressed for being a girl, and her family is abusive, but she doesn’t get raped or threatened with rape. That scores Dragonsinger and Dragonsong some points. She runs away and lives independently (as you point out, just like Ayla; inventing everything from scratch.) She gets magic helpy fire lizard friends because she’s good-hearted and helpy. Then she gets to go to boarding school. Where she is a genius and good at everything.
I see your point about how that is annoying but it’s very gratifying in a perfect way…
I disagree it is like the magical negro. The magical negro exists to give the white character(s) a learning experience or epiphany. Menolly and Ayla actually exist for themselves. There is a point where Ayla is Jondalar’s Perfect Woman and he has some sort of epiphany about love. But she continues having an independent existence and her own motivations. Menolly has moments of being the Masterharper’s Perfect Woman that he treats her as his heir and the embodiment of his politics and artistic philosophy. (And of course later it is made all grotesque by it being sort of sexed up.) But again I argue that she has her own strong personality and her own motivations — a life independent of “being the thing that makes a guy’s life meaningful”.
We could actually define out the Perfect Woman thing — I just don’t think it functions the same way.
McCaffrey has written romance novels under a pseudonym, and it shows. I think in general, most of her female characters are as feminist as they can be within their own paradigms, and I remember it getting better as the books went along (certainly the gender parity of the AIVAS groupies was better).
While we’re on the subject of the presumably gay (or bi, I suppose) green riders, where do all the lesbians on Pern go? I can’t help but think it would suck to be a gay female queen rider– studly bronze riders constantly angling for you to pick them as your Official Mate and therefore Weyrleader, and all you really want is the cute healer woman in the Lower Caverns.
I agree it’s not the same as the magical negro, in part because magical negros are written by whites and perfect women are generally written by women. At the same time, there’s a strong similarity, which has to do with how you can write a person from a marginalized group who gets not only accepted but admired by the mainstream group. They have to have something that the mainstream group wants (magic for negroes, sweet perfection for women). And the perfection has to be sweet and helpy, or it’s no good at all.
Indigo – Even worse to be a lesbian queen dragon since apparently female dragons in heat fight to the death over the bronzes. I suppose once they figured it out (and how not? They’re telepathic!) they could sneak off somewhere. Damn! Someone needs to write that!
The *real* reason Lessa and Mardra have drama… All the Weyrwomen are each others’ ex and current girlfriends…
Debbie – Hmm wow you have something there with the sweet helpy perfection. *pondering* To make it the strength palatable to the dominant class (in the book and as readers) the strong female character has to be pleasing someone else, helping them. We should try to come up with great counterexamples.
Wow… when I read the Pern series for the first time, I remember being upset by the sexist nature of the world, but I had no idea it was that bad. Now it makes me wonder if being such a fan of the novels had any bearing on the screwed up relationship I had with men throughout high school….
It’s OK to be powerful.
And long as they get all the benefit from your power.
Great post!
I’ve been in Pern fandom, off and on, for ten years… since I was 12. And realizing how sexist and heterosexist Pern is was a big part of my feminist awakening. A big one for me was realizing that the heroes F’lar and F’nor raped Lessa and Brekke, and that was supposed to be romantic and true love.
Some more fun Pern facts:
- Anne McCaffery used to make folks in fandom follow a set of rules to play in her world, one of which (at least as the fans interpreted it) restricted the gender and sexual orientation of Impression: no straight men on green dragons, and no queer bronze and goldriders! Since gold and bronze dragons telepathically choose good leaders, queer folks can’t be leaders.
- Bisexual and transgender folk don’t exist on Pern.
- On Pern, you become gay by being on the “receiving end” of anal sex, which is the only type of gay sex, and apparently something heterosexual couples don’t do. McCaffrey said as much in an interview a few years back:
Her kids went around and made people take the interview down from websites, but this little quote survived.
Very nice and thorough. I couldn’t stand F’lar, and while Lessa had potential, smart and devious and rebellious, she spent most of her time being bullied by F’lar. The dragons were actually sort of sweet, but of course we didn’t get to see much of them.
But even Ramoth, big and dangerous as she was during the mating flight, was technically raped – she had selected Orth out of all the remaining bronzes and was going for him when Mnementh ambushed her. That sure put a warm feeling in my heart. I know the whole point was for whoever caught her to be victor whether she liked it or not, but I wonder that if Hath had caught her, as much as she hated him, she would have killed that bronze and drove Lessa to stick a dagger in R’gul’s neck.
Now, *that* would have been fun. But I’m a mean person.
And…I didn’t even notice the gay thing. I knew the greens were always having sex but it just didn’t click. Now I’m thoroughly entertained.
I had not known about the tent peg! SPEECHLESS…. laughing…. disbelief… horror…
That’s a really good point about Ramoth also being raped.
Ide Cyan you sum it up beautifully! Right to the point!
I need a whole new post to take apart Dragonquest, and how T’bor beats Kylara and how McCaffrey presents that abuse, and to list more Waitress Lessa moments, and more bits where having a dragon is directly equated with male power and male power equated directly with sex or more often, rape.
[...] of views dissenting from the canon, I thoroughly enjoyed the channelled ire of Liz Henry taking the freshly-fueled chainsaw of feminism to the old wood of Anne McCaffery’s P…: “The main thing Lessa seems to do in her capacity as Weyrwoman is to serve food. She’s [...]
This post made me laugh out loud, Liz — thanks! I still have the Pern books I bought in my teens, but I haven’t reread them in 20 years, largely because the sexism turned toxic for me. Also, when I was a kid I was fascinated with the alternate social structure she depicted — it seemed so OTHER — but once I studied some history I got that she was just recreating manorialism and the guild system of medieval Europe. Once the whole “they came from space” thing was revealed in The White Dragon, it really started to bother me that we were supposed to believe that humanity had “devolved” in such a way as to completely duplicate this historical social structure from c. 13th century Europe. It all started to seem poorly thought out and lame.
Re: Menolly as “perfect woman” — I don’t think she qualifies because she isn’t beautiful. Ayla, however…
In case anyone’s interested, I wrote a few posts to the Feminist SF listserv years ago about sexism in the Pern books. Here are the links:
http://therem.net/femsf2.htm#femsf2-10
http://therem.net/femsf2.htm#femsf2-13
http://therem.net/femsf2.htm#femsf2-19
In one of them, I quoted the very same passage you did from Dragonflight, Liz. It really stands out in its awfulness!
Brilliant! I found this via the Velcro-City link (nice bit of circularity there).
I only read one Pern book as a teenager which I found dissatisfying for reasons I couldn’t articulate at the time, despite loving the idea of dragons and sex and everything. I now hope I was subliminally feeling “this is not a world I am comfortable with”.
OMG! i haven’t thought about the dragonriders of pern in so long! but i remember that i went through a total phase in junior high school, and i remember my totally mixed feelings about the early books especially. i was really into the whole dragon fantasy part, but i had a lot of misgivings about how all the women were portrayed. it bothered me that i couldn’t identify at all with the heroine. and i remember quite clearly to this day (15 years later) that there was a part that filled me with pure rage and confusion. it must have been a bedroom scene with lessa and f’lar, where she was trying to discuss something and was upset or something, and the scene ends with “he answered her in the only way a man can answer a woman,” or something to that effect. my 13-year-old self was like, “BOOOOO!!”
I have similar feelings about Anne McCaffrey’s books. I loved them when I was younger, but I reread them when I was 18 and the sexism and homophobia slapped me in the face. My single biggest problem with the original Pern trilogy is all of the rape disguised as love (F’lar and Lessa, F’nor and Brekke, Jaxom and Corana). After realizing how sexist the Pern books are, I took a good look at every other McCaffrey book I’ve read and they are all the same, but there’s less “forced seduction” (to borrow a term from romance) in her more recent books. And I actually like The Skies of Pern because she addresses a lot of the sexism and rape in the earlier books and sort of rights some of the wrongs.
WOW! And to think I probably first read the Dragonrider books when I was 10 or so. Glad my parents never paid attention!
I haven’t re-read these in years and years. I always have thought of them fondly–they were such a big part of my childhood imagination. But I doubt that I was aware enough to realize how women were portrayed. I probably felt a bit dismayed that the chicks couldn’t read but I imagine it didn’t go beyond that.
Great breakdown though. I’ll not think of these books in the same way again!
>McCaffrey has written romance novels under a pseudonym, and it shows.
The Lady, her horse-y romance, is actually my favorite of McCaffrey’s books and the only one that I can still read. (I, too, went through a McCaffrey fandom phase and I got a lot out of it while simultaneously becoming completely disgusted with large chunks of the source material.) But even in that one, the rape and sex and overall handling of the characters is…very uncomfortable. And becomes more so when you put it next to her other work.
(I wrote a bit about it here: http://buymeaclue.livejournal.com/372006.html)
I do owe a lot to McCaffrey and I can even kind of respect how much id seems to show through. But still, it pleases me to see the work given a good hard look.
I throughly enjoyed this essay Liz! I don’t have a lot to add because I’ve never actually read the first three books in the series. When I started in Pern I began with the Menolly/Fire Lizard books and never went back. All I can say now is thank goodness, I don’t think I could make it through.
Oh and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragons_%28Pern%29#Fandom_Considerations
Someone in the comments brought up McCaffrey’s ideas on sexuality and much of the stupidity is on display at the link above. The “effeminate” vs. “masculine” homosexual, the idea that she’ll never allow women to fly blues or browns in canon but she ruled that it was allowed in role-playing games. Just *sigh*
[...] There was not a lot of love for print on the internets this week. At Feminist SF – The Blog!, Liz Henry is “Perturbed on Pern”: [...]
I never read any of the Pern books (and now, I never will!), but man, the other books of hers I’ve read weren’t nearly this sexist or irritating. I read the Talents series, the Powers series, and the Crystal Singer series, all of which have strong women and no rape and everyone acts like pretty normal people. What the heck happened there, I wonder?
(Though I will say that having whatshername the teenage linguist marrying the adult guy at 16 in one of the early Talent books was a bit squick.)
Oh, and I forgot: the Powers series has two lesbian partners in it, and they’re treated with nothing but respect in there. Hopefully McCaffrey has improved (or at least her writing partner restrained her in the Powers series).
I also forgot the Ship books, but I only read two of those because I thought the whole concept of “I love him and he loves me, but we can never have sex” was pretty torturous/creepy. I only read the second book after Ship Who Sang because my ex told me that a way had been found to get around that problem. I forget the title, the lead character is Hypatia.
Wow! I remember the Pern series was one of my favorite SF books when I was younger (obviously to young to cath all of the misogyny). After reading your detailed analysis, I will have to revist the series with a critical eye (once I complete the daunting taste of a master’s thesis).
The sexism in the books runs rampant, yes. However, time period plays a huge role in story telling. Anne was born in 1926, where morals were very different than today’s. The original two Dragonriders books were published in 1968 and 1970. She’s clearly old-school morality, but her writing and world shifts as time and morality changes. Her later Pern stories, as well as her later books, don’t show the sexism anywhere near as much. Not that it isn’t present, but…
Just a little context to put things in.
I’d be really curious to see whether the domestic violence/rape theme still runs strong in those later books. It seemed clearly tied to the “love and romance” bits (though the waitress parts weren’t so much.) It can be interesting to see an author change her tune over her lifetime — as Le Guin did! I don’t have the later books in her series, but if anyone wants to post examples from the texts of less-sexist bits, I’d love to see them.
However, I think your basic point has some flaws. I grew up reading girls’ books written in the late 19th and early 20th century, ones that I would consider feminist though in many ways a different feminism than the one I practice now. Now, even Elsie Dinsmore would not put up for a single second with Mr. Travilla raping and beating her. None of the cheery basketball-playing boarding school girls of the early 1900s “girls’ annuals” would have thought it normal. Contrary to your point I think that in 1920s there was a strong thread of public awareness, as there is now, that it is not okay for men to hit and rape women in the name of love, and I could back up a lot of evidence for this. (What would Flora de Tristan say!!) But since we are talking about stories, I’ll try to stick to stories. How about Nancy Drew or Cherry Ames? They have strong groups of friends who are women, and while Dr. Lex might act a little gruff we also do not expect him to grab Cherry and shake her and slap her! It would not have been sexy of him to do, and she wouldn’t have stood for it. There are counterthreads at any time and place I think — so you could also find many examples of
Just a point! Again, I could expand… infinitely… on the idea!
I found similar sexist violence in the Crystal Singer series, Killashandra starts off great as a very strong woman character, until she falls in love, becomes hysterical and gets beaten a lot. Its like “Taming of the Shrew”.
Its not as bad in the telepathic series, because Primes are so rare, they are heavily protected and the first one, who become guardian of the Rowan child, is portrayed as a super “spoiled brat” who needs a strong man to manage her ‘temperament’, (or a bunch of staffers etc) but Rowan grows up almost normal anyway, knowing also she must breed. Lucky she adores having babies and finds her true fulfillment in finding her “perfect match” and in motherhood. Like so many strong women characters, she willingly takes second place once the love hormones kick in.
This topic thread has also been referenced to the Forums Book Discussion Group at: http://forums.feministsf.net/viewtopic.php?t=342
concerning re-visiting older books, such as M A Foster’s ‘Warriors of Dawn’ (Book of the Ler) and finding the sexism that we often miss on first reading.
It is quite sexist, but it was written by a woman raised in a sexist society. I read in one of the books-Moreta, I think-about the Holds and Crafthalls abhorring the Weyr sexualities. I don’t know if that meant the homosexuality or the fact that the boys who Impress Bronzes are usually 11/12, and could possibly be having sex with 20 year old queen riders when they’re 15.
The homophobia wasn’t lost on me, and I did wonder for a while why lady-loving women weren’t dragonriders. Then I read an interview which said that the women’s pregnancies would interfere with flying Thread, and as the women are ”raped” the lady-lovers would be impregnated by men even though they like ladies…….
The anal-sex effeminicity thing…Huh? Hello, sense?
And what exactly is a masculine homosexual man? Effeminate? There seems to be no man-loving men that are just people. But the aforesaid interview said if a woman was to Impress a blue, she’d not have to like women, just to be the more assertive type of woman. So I just take the effeminicity/masculinity to be based on whether the riders would pick up lamb chops covered in gravy with their hands or not. The idea of a homosexual male rider with a good taste for clothers and interior decoration doesn’t fit the risking their lives every few days.
I do quite like K’lon and A’murry in Moreta, because at the time it was published(1983) the Aids virus was killing hundreds of homosexual men, and no-one seemed to care for the men who were dropping like flies from it, the men and women who were watching their brothers, sons and lovers dying knowing that there was nothing they could do about it. The book shows that these people lived, died, fought and bled the same as everyone else.
The blues and greens do seem to die a lot, taking their homosexual riders with them. This does seem homophobic, and even though it isn’t it still irritates me. There are a lot of greens and blues, and when they were stil fire-lizards, the smaller creatures would have been like worker bees, so there would be a lot of them.
The ”rape” isn’t rape, because neither partner has a choice in it….Still quite creepy though.
The homophobic no-homos-on Bronzes-or-Golds I do find quite irritating, and I would like for the last book to have a Weyrleader and Weyrman couple/or Weyrleaderess/Weyrwoman couple.
The Jaxom and Corana think just pissed me off so much. Am I the only one who wanted Jaxom and Felessan to have wild, tantric sex? Or Jaxom and me? (If you imagine Jaxom like I do, you’d want it too!) If you’re reading this and haven’t read past Dragonquest, Jaxom and Felessan are older than 6 and 8 in later books.
Piemur and Jayge. I SOOO wanted it. There isn’t many prominent same-sex couples in it, like there isn’t in any books I’ve read by any author. Why? Why not Hermione Granger and Ginny? Frodo and Sam?
In dragonquest which I’m re-reading, it’s said that Felessan was as likely to Impress a bronze as any boy F’nor had ever seen or something like that. Heterosexism!
[...] me for this one I know Anne McCaffrey has said some really bat-crazy-ish in the last few years and that most if not all of the books in the Pern series are super problematic (enough so that I’ve never actually gotten through the first duology). Now that being said I [...]
Thank you, Liz, for writing this article. I love your style and witty humour! Brilliant stuff.
I wonder if Anne ever read your article…? If not she should, but, bloody hell, at her age it might give her a heart attack, bless her.
I was an obsessed fan of the Pern series as a teenager, being a strong minded girly I was instantly taken in by Lessa’s fesity character. Recently I decided to re read the books and, well, the books just don’t sit right with me like they did when I was a kid! Nearly all my mates are either lesbian, gay or bi (including myself) and to be honest when I read her tent peg theory, I was immenesly disappointed, not to mention outraged and it’s basically soured the whole series for me.
I feel like gate crashing the Meeting of Minds forum, leaving a verbal turd in their little fandom midst and then tra-la-la-ling offskies! I can hear the cries now…”Traitorrr! Shuuuun the unbelieverrrr!!” “Hush Anne ’tis not true, we don’t mind what you say about homos, we love Pern and want a dragon of our own!” says T’wat, bronzerider of Cunth.
P.S. Jaxom is such an annoying twat, and to think he’s based on her son Todd…yeeeach!
P.P.S what is your take on Mirrim? I always found her fascinating as a character, do you think she could be a manifestation of Anne’s own irritating personality??
Oh my goodness you made my day with “T’wat, rider of Cunth”. I’m laughing so hard there are tears!
Hey Liz, glad I gave you a giggle! ;-)
…has anyone read Anne McCafrey’s short story collection, Get of the Unicorn? Its been a while since I read it, but it does have her 70s cashing-in-on-the-soft-porn-in-SF-market story (which if memory serves is slightly squicky) and it does have this one story involving homosexuality and polyamory. I’ll have to dig it out of the closet (ha!) and re-read it with this discussion in mind.
Oh gods, I remember reading that allegedly soft-porn story in the high school library. Definitely squicky. ‘Soft porn’ in this context apparently means ‘rape fantasy featuring a… sorry Princess Bride fans… HOUS (Humanoid Of Unusual Size)’.
What I found even more disturbing was that it’s clearly the short story that eventually evolved into the Freedom series (if that’s what they’re called… Freedom’s Landing et cetera), which I’d read previously and quite liked. Well, at least the first one.
Can’t say I remember the polyamory/homosexuality story though. Might have to track it down now that you mention it…
…but more on topic, thanks Liz–found this a bit of an eye-opener! I did always think the books had a certain bodice-ripper idea of romance but never really stopped to think it through. Maybe I should have a word with my aunt re encouraging her teenage daughter to read the Pern books… (or at least about taking them with a grain of salt…)
Though I have to say, I never noticed the blue dragonrider thing when I read the books. (Plus I started with Dragonsinger, which confused the hell out of me–I remember thinking Thread was the name of some notorious bandit athlete Menolly had outrun–plus also making her my favourite character and being afterwards forever annoyed that she and Piemur didn’t hook up.)
While we’re talking other McCaffrey books, what about the Doona series? I seem to recall the gender politics in that starting out in pure 1950s mode, and without the excuse Pern has of using quasi-medieval tropes. (Especially among the Hrrubans, for whom ‘going back to nature’ apparently means ‘wives and mothers in the hut at all times’.) Like her other series, though, I think things improved a little with later books (e.g. the Gringg captain in the third book). I wish I could remember details of the female Hrruban antagonist in the second book–I’m sure there must be something worth pondering in there…
I found my copy of the collection last night; it is actually titled Get Off the Unicorn, where Get Of the Unicorn was the working title.
The polyamory story is called “Changeling,” and concerns a beautiful young woman who starts co-habiting a beautiful, prideful arrogant intellectual homosexual man. He later takes a lover, whom she shares, and thier triad is later joined by a straight man to help stabilise her.
The arrogant intellectual and the woman conceive a child through artificial insemination, and on the day the baby is due, he kidnaps her and forces her to give birth under his sole care, while she thinks to herself how she is powerless to resist his demands and concludes that he probably knows best anyway, being a man.
…like I said, rather off topic, but an interesting story to read in light of her views on homosexuals and gender.
I was directed here by a friend and I share these sentiments. Last year, feeling miserable, I re-read quite a few of the early Pern books. I even role played in one of the fandoms for a while before I realised what the rules meant (yes, I do mean THAT gay issue)
It’s interesting that you would bring up the sentient dragons being nothing more than slaves for their riders (being raped and abused all about the place). I recently started reading Naomi Novik’s ‘Temeraire’ series which started off being Pern on Napoleonic earth. Highly entertaining and well written but still with some issues – then in the second book the issues are addressed, and in the the third one they are brought to the attention of the world – by the most recent fifth book all of history is being changed and the thing is blown wide open on everything.
I adore Temeraire these days, it even surpasses the old nostalgic joy I get from Pern. I only wish Ramoth could be brought into his world and he could show her what real dragon love is like ;)
Just read the latest entry in the Pern saga–I should know better, but just can’t help myself. This gem is Dragonheart, and it’s by Todd. Wow, how to count the ways it’s dreadful?
SPOILERS
In order to avoid having sex that is “dragon-inflamed”, the heroine (who is all of 14 or so), goes to the older bronze rider voluntarily just before her dragon is about to mate. Said bronze dragon rider has signaled his affection for Fiona by teasing her that she is becoming fat. She has to give up her unrequited crush on her dead older sister’s ex-boyfriend to do it. And getting drunk with an older married couple also helps her sort things out.
In addition to carrying on Mom’s sexism, the book is dreadful in all the ways we’ve come to expect from Todd-thin characterization, jarring contemporary word choices (Ursula LeGuin has a great essay on this, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie), and bewildering plot twists. Oh, and in a strange bid for contemporary relevance, the Pernese discover stir fry and curry.
Oh well, at least I checked it out from the library, and didn’t reward this dreck financially.
Jillybean: I would go for some Temeraire/Mnementh NC-17, myself…
Jane: That’s horrifying and hilarious. I can just imagine how they encounter curry. WTF. I thought they only had klah, bubbly pies, redfruit, and roast wherry! So, the curry. Do they discover it, or do they invent it on the Southern Continent, or find a lost city in a volcano, or a cookbook on one of the satellites? I’m all agog.
Well, see, the dragonriders have to go back in time to deal with an epidemic. And they go from Fort Weyr to Igen Weyr. And it’s all–how do we adapt to this hot, hot climate? But they meet some friendly traders, who teach them the ways of the hot, hot desert, which include eating hot foods. So they eat “thinly sliced meats and thinly sliced vegetables, cooked quickly.” There’s one great scene where the mystery ingredient in a new recipe is revealed to be coconut. There’s no explanation for where this came from–were palm trees brought by the colonists? why did it die out later? if the traders have access to it, why is it unknown in the north, etc. Alas, no spaceship cookbook, though I like the idea.
Also, the intrepid 10-year-old headwoman invents taste treats such as iced klah and iced cream!
Thank you so much for this. After hearing everyone enthuse about this series in my teens I picked up a copy of the first instalment in the series today and the treatment of women in the series, as well as Lessa’s unabashed tokenism and dismissal of the suffering of other drudges around her made me put it down pretty quickly. I am rather glad I never made it to the rape scene.
It’s a pity, I would have liked to enjoy a series that has dragons in it. I rather like dragons.
I happen to like all the pern books, although I haven’t gotten the chance to read Todd’s latest additions beyond Dragon Kin.
I read this when I was 13 and over ten years later, F’lar and Lessa are still my favourite characters. I like how McCaffrey puts the little sways in boldness and doubts and misjudgements (nobody is free from these) and even the ‘rape scene’ is well done. Rape is not something I condone or belittle, but I think it is forgotten that beforehand Lessa was fond of F’lar to begin with. I think of it more as unexpected sex than rape, I barely noticed any sort of human intimacy when I first read that part. Mostly, I was like them: with the dragons.
Which brings me to another point, despite their abilities dragons are still animals, like the firelizards they were bred from. I’ve owned some pretty smart creatures in my life as well as some dense ones, but they’re domesticated beasts, relying on us to be there. For sure, some would be dead or worse without us.
And, while I’m on the subject, has anyone seen a group of male whatevers (horses, chickens, cats, take your pick) after a potential mate? The fastest and strongest gets her, the best genes get bred which helps the species as a whole (not that animals care). It’s natural, and no different than the weakest prey being pulled down by the predator.
(On another note: I will love to see how I’m greeted when I get one of my books published. Especially when the first chapter has god-possessed rape and murder in it.)
Oh, thank goodness it’s not just me! XD This was quite refreshing to read, Liz. :)
I was a huge Pern fan as a kid and always wondered what it would be like to be a blue rider (and why there weren’t any girls riding blue, because that would be cool). Then “Skies of Pern” came out and, even though I was still at the age where most of Anne’s crap flew over my head, the scene where rape trauma is solved with rape made me quit cold turkey. (Sorry, Anne, but one choice isn’t a choice at all and it’s still rape.)
When I got older, I thought I’d re-read the books and, yeeg, talk about an eye-opener. Then I made the mistake of reading some of Anne’s interviews (the infamous “tent peg” one and another one where she pretty much flipped all disabled people the bird, metaphorically speaking). I made the even greater mistake of reading Todd’s books after that and now I sort of want to punch them both on behalf of all gay disabled people, especially blind lesbians. >D I still kind of feel stabbed in the back by the McCaffreys; I reeeeally loved those books when I was a kid.
As for Todd… The unnecessary statutory rape scene in Dragonheart actually made me sick. And the less about Nuella, the better. I can’t recommend his books to anything but a furnace in good conscience.