goddess/bitch/whore

David Stockhoff · 28 Apr 2015, 23:17 · from 2015-April.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 19:17:40 -0400
Subject: (urth) goddess/bitch/whore
In-Reply-To: <CAM0v-i6nxBdOTecZJKJQzLzCrsJWmnRkAX73PedOZUu2_h+UnQ at mail.gmail.com>
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	<CAM0v-i6nxBdOTecZJKJQzLzCrsJWmnRkAX73PedOZUu2_h+UnQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <55401514.4020707 at verizon.net>

That's true. Wolfe relies on all sorts of genre tropes, and mixes them 
up in the process. I don't think he can really be accused of treating 
female characters substantially differently from male ones, though he 
seems more comfortable with males.

On the other hand, maybe that's WHY his female characters do sometimes 
feel a bit off---because he doesn't treat them differently.

On 4/28/2015 5:43 PM, Antonin Scriabin wrote:
>
> Neither does Maytera Mint, or Holly. And frankly, quite a few of 
> Wolfe's male protagonists could be easily categorized as whores.
>
> On Apr 28, 2015 5:40 PM, "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at clueland.com 
> <mailto:jwilson at clueland.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, April 28, 2015 16:21, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>     > OK, the word "foil" was wrong. But they all tend to the
>     > goddess/bitch/whore
>     > trichotomy into which female characters are too often written by
>     men.
>     > (Really, from reading some of his fiction you'd get the
>     impression that
>     > he'd heard of women but never actually _met_ one.)
>
>     Casdoe, Dorcas, Jader's sister, Thecla, and Valeria don't particularly
>     strike me as falling neatly into that taxonomy. How would you
>     categorize
>     them?
>
>     --
>     Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com <mailto:jwilson at clueland.com> >
>     A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
>     < http://www.tamut.edu/cil >
>
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