Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility

Nathan Spears · 19 Oct 2006, 18:23 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:23:51 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist? and accessibility
Message-ID: <20061019182353.26473.qmail at web54410.mail.yahoo.com>

> If an author complusively wrote novels about Jews being tortured and 
> killed, I'd at least suspect him of anti-semitism.

You have good reason to suspect Elie Wiesel of anti-Semitism, I suppose.

I agree with the poster who said that Wolfe is a misanthrope.  Many of his characters suffer terribly.  The abuse that men inflict upon other men takes different forms from the abuse that they inflict upon women, and Wolfe is aware of this fact.  Perhaps your reaction to the former is less pronounced because you are yourself a man.  Also, perhaps Wolfe finds himself writing more about the ways in which men abuse women than about strong, realistic female characters, because he is a man, not because he hates women.  Any realistic man knows that he does not understand what it is like to be a woman - portraits he paints of her are from the outside looking in.

Anyway, most of this discussion has been centered around a kind of *cough*misogynist*cough* accusation rather than any sort of organized statement, and it's getting tiresome.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net