Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

LuthienByNight t1_j2axy8w wrote

Reply to comment by NeoSeth in Does Don Winslow introduce endless female characters just to write explicitly about their bodies and sex lives? by hammnbubbly

Not to mention that the genre in which this is so often a problem is fantasy. As in "you created this entire culture and people out of your own fertile imagination and you get to decide what their culture is like". Since when did fantasy have to remain faithful to specific aspects of certain historical cultures? You can draw inspiration from medieval Europe, but your fantasy place is still entirely your own to invent.

I think that part of this boils down to the idea that the weight we place on consent is a more modern concept and that if a society is earlier in development, then there's bound to be a lot of rape. Well, the Code of Ur-Nammu from over four thousand years ago punished rape against a woman with execution. It all varies from place to place. There are a million reasons that an otherwise gritty fantasy culture wouldn't have a lot of rape, and the exercise of figuring out what those are could provide for better depth and world building around the society itself.

46

Not-your-lawyer- t1_j2cuhxz wrote

It's also (often) not internally consistent. If you've got a sword & sorcery story where everyone has some sort of power, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for your female characters to be vulnerable damsels.

I know ASOIAF isn't really the best example as a whole, but the bits with the free folk beyond the wall hit the contradiction pretty well, since the women are warriors as well. There's a bit from Tormund, I think, saying that someone "can own a knife or a woman but not both." And fantasy forgets that all the time. Your characters have fucking superpowers, dude. An armed society might not always be a polite society, but the "impolite" people are gonna be short lived.

8