July 3rd, 2006
by
Liz Henry
News flash of the dumb kind: women bored by long fight scenes according to Anthony Snodgrass, some annoying professor emeritus of archeology who apparently is an expert on what interests women:
But he added: “The idea of a woman writing The Iliad and not being bored out of her mind by the endless fighting and killings is a bit more far-fetched.”
So, does Snodgrass think that women don’t read and enjoy the Iliad? Or if they do, they’re not really normal women? Or does he think their “minds” are capable of reading about war, but not paying attention long enough to write about it?
I don’t think I’m being an apologist for war itself by seeing that stories about war are interesting and significant. Especially when a story lays bare the lives and motivations of individuals that drive them towards mass violence. Individual fights can be metaphorically complex, very rich scenes that are important to a story.
What Snodgrass said is just one dumb statement by some dude who got quoted in the paper. Who cares, right? But… it’s important to contradict him, in public, because his one dumb statement reflects a huge segment of people who think that women are essentially disinterested and disengaged from what the patriarchy deems important, i.e. most of art and culture… when actually it’s the other way round, and women tend to *have* to have some knowledge or pay some attention to what men consider important, while men don’t have to pay attention to what women do, think, or say. Women read what men write and men don’t read what women write, not because men are tapped into what is “universal” but because men have more power under patriarchy and so for the sake of survival women have had to learn their rules. So, attitudes like Snodgrass’s expose how fuzzy essentialist thinking excludes women from being producers of “universal” great works.
This seems relevant to me especially in SF and in discussions of making SF canons and deciding what is interesting, good, etc. as well as in talking about hard sf or military sf. For example, if you take as your premise that women aren’t interested in military or hard sf and then jump to “Well then, that’s’ because women don’t know how to see what’s good, and they don’t really like SF” rather than “well then, most of hard sf is not successfully ‘universal’ ” … then you’re reinforcing patriarchal definitions of quality and genre. Instead try writing some fight scenes that are part of a real epic with characters that have a little depth of relationships to each other … as Bujold does, for example.
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Liz Henry at
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Filed under Books & Literature | Comments (7)
I guess I just wanted to speak up as a woman who is really, substantially bored by fight scenes in literature and movies… I feel like this is really important: “well then, most of hard sf is not successfully ‘universal’ ” because it takes the blame off the person whose standards aren’t those of the patriarchy, and places it on the standards developed by the patriarchy. I mean, obviously it’s not true that women are bored by fight scenes. But even if it were, it seems important to respond to that by saying, “well, then, fight scenes aren’t universal” rather than capitulating to the idea that fight scenes are a necessary part of good literature.
I\’m sorry, my vision is too clouded by rage to continue reading… I need to hit something.
I shake my head. For me anyway, the resolution of conflict through physical violence inflicted upon other human beings can be a theme but it’s not a universal one, never mind I personally find the obligatory “fight” and “chase” scenes in much (but not all) fiction to be either boring, superfluous, clumsily handled or plain gross.
I shake my head. The resolution of conflict among human beings through violence is not a “universal” theme. Truth be told, I wontedly find “fight” and “chase” scenes in fiction to be needless, clumsily handled and boring.
Now, I’d say death itself is a “universal” theme but most people don’t arrive there through traumatic gunshot wounds after a series of frantic chase episodes.
this is such an interesting and important issue. folks — particularly but no only men — in this country still seem very invested in totalizing notions of what makes narraitve good or bad, and these investments are, as you are suggesting, connected intimately to race, gender, and class. The question of violence is particularly interesting to me personally, as i’ve written about it as a lit critic and i am in the process of writing it dramatically as i make my way through the final draft of a futurist novel. as a writer, i am very attracted to fictional violence, and yet i’m politically a pacifist. violence can become — as you are suggestiong — a way to simply reinscribe,reify, and just reassert all the worse patriotic, patriarchal, formulae that we know. And yet, violence also can become an imaginary means to explore sexuality, identity, agency, and all kinds of other issues. I think for example of Sarah Connor breaking out of the mental hospital in T2 — that remains for me personally, as a “good girl” of the 50’s — one of the most searing and empowering feminist moments in mainstream cinema. But i think this may be generational as well, and i am undoutedly responding in a way that a younger woman might not. thanks for this — very thought provoking!
I, too, wanted to rant and rage… but, Snodgrass.
::chuckle::
A bit of a digression from Liz’s point that women can, and do, write fight scenes, and to suggest that they can’t is silly ghettoizing:
Check out the discussion in the FSF Carnival posting at http://kalinara.blogspot.com/2006/07/second-carnival-of-feminist-science.html. I thought it was interesting that a commenter made the claim that they agreed with the notion that a woman could not have written The Iliad — because of extreme sexism & unrealistic depictions of women. Note, not because there is violence and women can’t write violence; but because women are treated as commodities, shown reacting unrealistically to rape & violence, etc.
My problem is that (A) potentially misinterprets the form (I’m not sure that there’s a lot of room for realistic depictions of characters in The Iliad anyway);
(B) applies modern standards of behavior and expectations to characterization (Marie Jakober in Even the Stones had a different take on whether a woman could fall in love with her rapist: That a woman who was raised with the expectation of being treated as chattel would judge the worth of a man differently than would a woman who had been raised with standards more contemporaneous to our own. I’m not saying she got it right, but I think it’s an interesting point and relevant here.); and
(C) Even assuming that the Iliad is sexist (I really have no quarrel with that argument, after all) the content of the work is not enough to say that a woman couldn’t write it. Women can, and do, hold sexist beliefs and can therefore write incredibly sexist material of whatever sort. The commenter conflates being written by a woman with an authorial feminist viewpoint.