Have any other advanced blamers out there read Paolo Bacigalupi’s much-praised Nebula-award-winning bla bla etc. novel from last year, The Windup Girl?

I have not actually finished it, and as of this point have no intention of doing so, though I’m curious as to whether that’s giving it a fair shake. I gave up after the second rape scene.

The book was Powells.com’s featured book today, and the reviews very nicely helped crystallize why I am pretty sure it counts as literature using a thin veneer of a possible feminist slant to justify pandering to the lowest common denominator of the heterosexual male gaze. My favorite line from one review is: “Emiko, the titular despised but impossibly seductive product of Japanese genetic engineering, works in a brothel until she accidentally triggers a civil war.” Yep, ain’t nothing as sexy as a woman you can treat like garbage, amirite?

The first rape scene is one of the most horrific things I have ever read, and to give him credit, I don’t think the author is trying to present it as titillating. However, it does read as though sex with a woman incapable of consenting is not OK if you also torture her, but is totally OK if you refrain from beating the crap out of her.

Has anyone else read it? Does it ever redeem itself?

I noted some people on here wondering at the lack of female Alphas in BNW, and thinking that the lack of them indicated sexism on the part of the author.

I always rather thought the point of Brave New World was that in order to control the populace without obvious force, the government instead controlled them through subversion.

And the easiest way to appease any dude is to provide him with plenty of pornulated, always, always, eager women-folk.

In order to guarantee pornulated, always eager women-folk, the government could not allow women to believe that they were in any way equal to men.

Hence no Alpha women.

Hence “sex is wonderful and the best thing ever” brainwashing beginning when they were children.

Hence under-developed, desperately unhappy women.

Hence the government provides them with easy access to happy-pills, lest they ever begin to question anything.

But the women were still under layers and layers of denial unhappy in their roles, and the dudes were for the most part just having a time of it.

So, I didn’t think that the BNW was so much mired in patriarchy as it was showing the logical ends of completely dominant patriarchy.

It’s possible that I need to re-read it, since it’s been a few years.

Also: RE: So very many Sci-Fi Utopian fantasies written by men that involve pretty much a constant orgy-fest? Well what do you think the ideal Dudes Utopia involves? Clue:

Many, many dudes seem to believe that the only thing stopping them from getting all of the pronging that they so rightly deserve is our guilt.

Because if you ascribe to a Christian viewpoint in the slightest you must need a logical male to point out for you that you are clearly just making up an imaginary friend to replace the worthless father you had growing up and that your abstinence from sex is clearly you trying desperately to cling to your childhood, and all of your complex psychological issues could be sorted out with a good pronging.

Ditto for women who have any sort of a relationship with their father (good or bad!)

Ditto for feminists (clearly that particular illness is caused by Bad Experiences with Bad Men and can be solved by submitting to be pronged by Good Men)

Because it certainly cannot be any sort of problem that we have with them.

So when we all evolve as a human race, women will grow past all of that silly guilt and become every bit as sex-obsessed as they are.

Sorry if I seem a bit bitter on that one. Oh wait, I’m not sorry at all.

http://io9.com/5060135/could-you-live-in-a-world-without-women

(Discussion of Sci-Fi that depicts societies or worlds without women)

I think any minimal amount of research would have made this clear for Murphy. She wants to romanticize Natives as “accepting” LGBTQ people (and, I think, give herself an excuse to write steamy scenes) without delving into what the roles meant to the people who experienced them. I think it’s just plain racist for non-Indian writers to continually write about our cultures by taking one concept, not researching further, and just making up what they imagine the concept meant. To do so perpetuates stereotypes and misunderstandings. I blame the colonizers’ narrow, two-gender-having, others’-cultures-appropriating, patriarchy…

* Two spirit is, roughly, the most popular term for people today who fill these other gender categories and see their gender (not just sexuality, but a whole host of things) as having certain spiritual implications/obligations peculiar to two-spirit people. Not all two-spirit people are glbt, and vice versa. Some might disagree with this definition.