![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 20th, 2015 07:40 pmI'm bouncing off a book I tried starting reading today. So far instead of book I have had lunch, had a nap, played on the computer twice, and done my nails again. Also stared into space. A lot.
I've read a few chapters in between those things but it's not going great. I may take this one back unfinished. I have until Wednesday, I kind of expected to finish it in one afternoon like usual, but no.
There's two point of view characters, one bloke, one bird. The bloke is fed up of women because they're all so vain and fluttery. The woman is Not Like Other Women, who she finds vain and fluttery.
That's the big. That's what I'm utterly done with. That assumption, that women were actually sitting around being pretty all day every day with not a thought in their head, except for Our Heroine, Not Like Other Girls, who has secretly acquired an education and earned money!
I'm not saying there's no bits of history where you'd find fluttery vain women. I'm pretty sure said women were often shrewd political actors using the power available to them, but that gets called vanity.
The thing is there are so many other bits of history. Why are our fantasy novels not set there?
Like I was reading about English History from the library last week and it said stuff like Anglo Saxon women could be Lords, because the word hlaford usually translated as Lord was actually gender neutral. Women were landowners. They built forts, they ran abbeys, they owned many things and kept them jointly if they got married. They were in charge. And inheritance, at least for kings, was drawn from a pool, the aethelings I think it said, and those were everyone descended from like the great grandfather king. I should look it up, I'll do a more precise post before I send the book back. So whoever turned out to be best at the kinging job got it. And then the Normans turned up and they had that primogeniture rule where the firstborn son got everything and the rest of history was quite a different shape.
But if you're writing a fantasy book then why not draw on a system where ranks are gender neutral and the best person for the rank is drawn from a pool? Drama and competition! Everyone needing to be good at all the jobs! Equal opportunity fluttery vanity among people who know they're not going to get the job on their own merits, if that sort of thing appeals. But mostly, women, women everywhere, doing all the things and being just as good at them.
The telling of history has perhaps been uniformly sexist in mainstream sources for a long time now. The living of it was not. It wasn't a straight line of progress from women as property to women now, we had property and ruled stuff long times ago, it just got took away somtimes.
Also there was a bit about Boadicea and I've always heard she, like, inherited being the boss because the blokes around her died, but the way this particular book tells it it was more that the locals found it unremarkable for a woman to be in charge so she was boss of course. What it says was just "like other Celtic peoples they accepted the authority of female leaders." And then the Romans turned up and were like 'no, where's the bloke in charge', only in Latin and with more swords. They did what they did to her partly because Rome wasn't having any of that women-in-charge stuff.
So there's one version of history as if the Roman way was the normal way, but there were Celtic peoples here long before and after the Romans turned up, doing things their way, with female leaders being normal.
Why aren't they in the fantasy books?
Even the ones by women often rework particular sexist eras, with sexist assumptions, shaped around the idea that the version of history that's all battles and who had the biggest army is the important one.
It's never about diplomacy or arranging a good marriage as a business and political transaction that holds kingdoms together. It's always looking down on women as fluttering vanity trying to snare a man for personal ambition. The nuts and bolts day to day work that should have gone with that ambition, that's nowhere.
Or it's there, but because she's Not Like Other Girls.
Blergh.
Our brains got poisoned by wrong teaching. Need to think more better.
I've read a few chapters in between those things but it's not going great. I may take this one back unfinished. I have until Wednesday, I kind of expected to finish it in one afternoon like usual, but no.
There's two point of view characters, one bloke, one bird. The bloke is fed up of women because they're all so vain and fluttery. The woman is Not Like Other Women, who she finds vain and fluttery.
That's the big. That's what I'm utterly done with. That assumption, that women were actually sitting around being pretty all day every day with not a thought in their head, except for Our Heroine, Not Like Other Girls, who has secretly acquired an education and earned money!
I'm not saying there's no bits of history where you'd find fluttery vain women. I'm pretty sure said women were often shrewd political actors using the power available to them, but that gets called vanity.
The thing is there are so many other bits of history. Why are our fantasy novels not set there?
Like I was reading about English History from the library last week and it said stuff like Anglo Saxon women could be Lords, because the word hlaford usually translated as Lord was actually gender neutral. Women were landowners. They built forts, they ran abbeys, they owned many things and kept them jointly if they got married. They were in charge. And inheritance, at least for kings, was drawn from a pool, the aethelings I think it said, and those were everyone descended from like the great grandfather king. I should look it up, I'll do a more precise post before I send the book back. So whoever turned out to be best at the kinging job got it. And then the Normans turned up and they had that primogeniture rule where the firstborn son got everything and the rest of history was quite a different shape.
But if you're writing a fantasy book then why not draw on a system where ranks are gender neutral and the best person for the rank is drawn from a pool? Drama and competition! Everyone needing to be good at all the jobs! Equal opportunity fluttery vanity among people who know they're not going to get the job on their own merits, if that sort of thing appeals. But mostly, women, women everywhere, doing all the things and being just as good at them.
The telling of history has perhaps been uniformly sexist in mainstream sources for a long time now. The living of it was not. It wasn't a straight line of progress from women as property to women now, we had property and ruled stuff long times ago, it just got took away somtimes.
Also there was a bit about Boadicea and I've always heard she, like, inherited being the boss because the blokes around her died, but the way this particular book tells it it was more that the locals found it unremarkable for a woman to be in charge so she was boss of course. What it says was just "like other Celtic peoples they accepted the authority of female leaders." And then the Romans turned up and were like 'no, where's the bloke in charge', only in Latin and with more swords. They did what they did to her partly because Rome wasn't having any of that women-in-charge stuff.
So there's one version of history as if the Roman way was the normal way, but there were Celtic peoples here long before and after the Romans turned up, doing things their way, with female leaders being normal.
Why aren't they in the fantasy books?
Even the ones by women often rework particular sexist eras, with sexist assumptions, shaped around the idea that the version of history that's all battles and who had the biggest army is the important one.
It's never about diplomacy or arranging a good marriage as a business and political transaction that holds kingdoms together. It's always looking down on women as fluttering vanity trying to snare a man for personal ambition. The nuts and bolts day to day work that should have gone with that ambition, that's nowhere.
Or it's there, but because she's Not Like Other Girls.
Blergh.
Our brains got poisoned by wrong teaching. Need to think more better.