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I am so relieved to learn that I am a member of the least perverted gender/ "Literature" Cannoli Send a noteboard - 19/04/2017 03:55:34 AM

I have chronicled elsewhere on this site, my adventures reading a romance novel, wherein the hero gets the heroine drunk in order to induce her to put her reputation on the line to save his corporate image, and then has sex with her against her will (as far as can be determined from flashbacks, which the victim recalls as a nightmare and a rape), and then wins her love because he occasionally gives her sincere compliments, instead of backhanded putdowns, and when they have consensual sex, he likes her breasts which she and her last fiance thought were too small.

I enjoy some of the urban fantasy genre, especially Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and I cannot reconcile his writing with his account of how he broke into the business by chatting up Laurel K Hamilton over their mutual love of other genre fiction. I don't back away from book series after I've read half a dozen, because of the sunk costs fallacy. But Hamilton just went insane, as her books about a take-no-crap gun-toting heroine with a chip on her shoulder turned into nothing more a series of excuses for the protagonist to have orgies without it being her fault. "If we don't have sex, the vampire will die" (that was the outcome for which I, at least, thought I was paying when I bought her books) "If we don't have sex, the werewolves won't respect you" and so on.

One of the first book series by a female writer ever pushed on me was the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. But they suck. The dragons are lame and pathetic and so inefficient that in book 2 of the series, IIRC, a superior defense agaisnt the very thing dragons exist to fight is discovered. And "fight" is a euphemism, since there is very little draconic combat. The first action scene in the series, is a dragonrider having a knife fight with an objectively evil king, while his giant carnivorous firebreathing telepathic life-partner just WATCHES! Why would you even BOTHER having a dragon if you have to fight evil kings with a knife? If I am going to dedicate my life to bathing & feeding a dragon, he is damn well going to burn and bite whom I tell him! The people of Pern breed giant lizards that eat cows whole, because that was more efficient than maintaining the technology to break out flamethrowers every few centuries to fight the giant amoebas that fall from the skies in an easily discernable pattern. And in keeping with the "writing makes ladies into perverts theme" an aspect of being telepathically-bonded to a dragon is that when your dragons fuck, you fuck. Except 99% of all female dragons have male riders, and 100% of male dragons have male riders. When one of the tiny minority of dragons ridden by women goes into heat, all the men who ride the dragons that are acceptable mates hang around the female rider, and whosever dragon catches and mates with the she-dragon, gets to do her rider. And if she's the rider of the oldest female dragon at the dragon-base, then the guy who did her because his dragon is the best pick-up artist, gets to become the commander of the dragon base and supreme leader of like 20% of the world's air force, on a world that barely understands armies. You could be the world's biggest a-hole, but if you are randomly selected by a newborn dragon, who happens to grow up to be the Zach Effron of dragons, you could be an invincable warlord, except for the fact that your planet is entirely populated by hippie nimrods.

Melanie Rawn wrote a pair of trilogies about a family of obnoxious privileged assholes she thought were cute, and there was a group of magic people who were pretty much a complete rip-off of the Aes Sedai, if they let men in, lived normal lifespans and were perverts. Their equivalent of the Accepted test (or maybe the test for the shawl, I forget what stage of "progress" it represents) involves an adult of the opposite gender coming into your room using Mesaana's disguise to "teach" you how to sex, because the test won't work on virgins, or some bullshit. This is not presented as horrific or exploitative or anything, and when a monarch has a marriage arranged to one of these women and learns about the test thing, he is considered a jerk for looking askance at a bride from an institution that treats sex so casually. Later in the series, the Amyrlin analog decides to assign a particular young woman to do the job on an obnoxious but promising student, because that woman is in love with, and about to marry, a nobleman, and the boss lady wants to reinforce on her subordinate exactly where her loyalties lie, and that her marriage should not mean as much as her duties to her old school. The man to whom this woman is engaged, BTW, is the boss-lady's nephew. Oh, and when the protagonist & his wife both fall into enemy hands and are raped, and then released, they see dragons fucking and the man gets horny, but his wife yells at him and blames him for his being raped (she got raped because she came alone to an enemy's castle and knocked on the door to ask if he was there - HE was abducted and drugged with a super-addictive narcotic, but it's all his fault).

And now, I have read a Jean Auel novel. I remembered the name from reading an interview with her when I was a kid which commented heavily on the realism of her books, and how she learned caveman technology herself in order to write authentically about it. So I saw a copy of "The Valley of Horses" at a used booksale last month and bought it. You'd think I would learn at some point. The FIRST time, you read in minute detail how to make a caveman weapon, it's interesting. The other dozen times in the first couple of chapters, you start wishing you could fast forward. And there is WAY too much about their silly religious practices and superstitions. I'm not talking about an invisible man in the sky setting you on fire if you were bad when you die, I am talking about the belief that being rude to old ladies makes you impotent. The series is called "Earth's Children," and it is well-named, if not for the reasons the author might believe. Auel apparently thinks it's all about how the various cave-persons are all children of their stupid Great Earth Mother, but the reality is that everyone in it talks like a child. Because every caveperson was a literal moron, apparently. Also, for the record, they don't have "saber-tooth" tigers, because how would a caveperson come up with the word "saber"? That would be silly. Instead, they are "dirk-tooth tigers". Because cavepeople who don't know what metal is, have dirks (In no other context in the book is the word "dirk" used, AFAIK).

SIDEBAR: If I believed in an Earth Mother goddess, I would HATE the bitch: she doesn't give us jack-shit, and all our problems come from her OTHER children. If you are going to approach it logically, the only elemental anthropomorphization you should honor is Fire. It follows rules and its damage is limited so long as you respect it. There is no Fire equivalent of an earthquake or tsunami or tornado. And while you need the "gifts" of mother earth and the water to survive, the optimal way to exploit them is the use of fire to purify, cook, smelt, dry or harden said gifts, as well as keep all the rest of our fellow children of earth whom mom gave pointier teeth and nails, from killing us or taking our food. If mother earth is so generous with her bounty, why do we basically have to rape her to get anything really useful? Yes, rape. That's the only way you can look at plowing, planting & harvesting in such a context, let alone quarrying or mining. /SIDEBAR

But cavemen didn't just whack away at rocks to make them into knives and spears. They ALSO 'ahem' whacked away at cavewomen. There are two types of cavepeople. One kind thinks that kids are just the product of a woman and resemblances to the guy she was living with at the time is coincidental, or a cosmetic alteration by the spirits out of respect for the mom's relationship with her partner.

The other kind of cavepeople are neanderthals, also known as "flatheads" or "People" depending on whom you ask, and they think more or less the same thing, but that their personal gods fight when people mate and if the man's god wins the kid looks like him. Or something like that. It wasn't clear, and I don't feel like looking it up.

But considering they have no idea what it does, cavepeople spend a LOT of time and institutional effort on sex. They were apparently a lot like Melanie Rawn, in that when a girl starts menstruating, they pick some guy who is in good with the spirit world to teach her how to sex. They do the same thing with a woman for pubescent boys. The hero of the book is, naturally, the best ever at teaching girls to have Pleasures or whatever similarlly nonsensical euphemisms they use to describe sex. Mating refers to marriage, not reproductive copulation, and it wasn't clear if they understand why animals stick penises into vaginas, despite no intention of honoring the Mother with the Gift of Pleasure.

Jondalar, the hero, is traveling with his brother along what appears to be the Danube River to find out where it goes, and every cavepeople community they encounter requires Jondalar to fuck someone. Even the girl who falls in love with his brother at first sight (while he's wounded and unconscious no less) has an involuntary attraction to Jondalar. Until at the last community, they settle down for a while until his brother's wife dies and they head out (Jondalar's live-in girlfriend and her kid love him, but she totally understands that he isn't destined to be with her or whatever, so she doesn't mind when he just leaves her after several years and being the only father her kid knows, even though he's the best lover she's ever had and the other cavewomen they swing with agree) eventually coming to the eponymous Valley, where, the whole time, this girl named Ayla lives.

Ayla was raised by flathead People who hated her and thought she was ugly and too skinny and too blonde and they kicked her out, and while Jondalar and his brother were porking their way along the Danube, she was figuring out all sorts of elementary tech by the same method TV geniuses solve crimes - a random coincidental occurrence inspires her to try something counterindicated and she intuitively grasps the one correct explanation, rather than the many other ones that might naturally occur from such an observation. She figures out how to ride horses, and make fire from flint and steel, invents a travois and begins to suspect there might be a biological purpose to sperm.

Jondalar's brother conveniently dies so he & Ayla can spend all their time together teaching one another, in minute detail, all the skills we have watched them practice in minute detail over the course of the series, and stare in awestruck admiration at one another's physical attractiveness (they're apparently cave-supermodels, and like all prehistorical megafauna, much bigger than the average modern speciman at 6'6" and about 6' tall), and misunderstand their respective subtle invitations to sexual activity, until Ayla has a nightmare and wakes up speaking Jondalar's language and they are able to clear up their misconceptions and communication issues and eventually get down to having lots and lots and lots of sex.

Said sex is described in the same level of detail as making flint knives, so at least Auel is consistent. But we can make pretty educated guesses about how cavemen made flint knives (probably not least because literate people watched Indians or Aboriginies do it at some point), and it is a sufficiently uncommon skill to assume a modern audience might be interested in the details. We don't know how cavemen fucked, nor is there the slightest reason to assume it was as ritualized and formally institutional as Auel (and Rawn and Hamilton and everyone else who owns a bra and a word processing program) seems to think. AND we, the readers, know how sex works, so we don't NEED the details. Even once should suffice to get the gist of just how Jondalar and Ayla get it on, if that is really important to know (and it ISN'T). That stuff goes on all the way up to the literal end of the book. The last things to happen on the last four pages are: Jondalar gets a blowjob, he and Ayla talk about blowjobs, he says he would love her even if he was impotent and couldn't get any more Pleasure from her, and then they see other people and Ayla is surprised to see someone other than Jondalar smile at her. The book ends before we find out if they are smiling because they saw the blowjob.

I am looking at my Kindle now, where most of my books are located. The female authors (excluding anthologies I almost certainly bought for male writers) are as follows (with an accompanying pervert rating):
Jacqueline Carey ( )
Ann Coulter
Gillian Flynn (some but mostly )
Sharon Greene ( )
Robin Hobb
Katherine Kerr
Molly Knight
Julie Cochrane ( )
Phyllis Schlafly
Christina Hoff Sommers
Suzanne Venker

Coulter, Knight, Schlafly & Venker and Sommers are non-fiction. The ONLY fiction author whose works do not lead one to assume she is a pervert is Robin Hobb, whose protagonist's experiences of "family" & "friendship" appear to be largely psychologically abusive and emotionally manipulative.

Jacqueline Carey, who was recommended to me by Robert Jordan (actually, he also recommended George RR Martin and his Conan was the most promiscuous of almost any writer... ) and whose first work is basically a LotR homage, but from the PoV of the villains who have a not-unreasonable postion. That inspired me to pick up the "Kushiel" novels by her, which is set in a version of medieval France where magic works and a pack of gods wandered around France boinking everything with a hole in it, so the French people are all preternaturally beautiful and worship sex and the protagonist is neurologically inclined to be a submissive masochistic prostitute. She's also a highly successful spy, because every brilliant political intriguer and manipulator is also a dominatrix or sexual sadist who can't stop themselves from talking about their schemes while beating up hookers. I give Carey props for phasing out a lot of sexual nonsense as the series progressed. Unlike many authors discussed herein.

Flynn's novel, "Gone Girl", famous for its film adaptation a couple of years ago, features a woman using a wine bottle to simulate the physical signs of sexual assault, to justify murdering her "attacker".

Sharon Greene's book, which apparently are a whole series of old timey pulp fantasy novels whose covers resemble the Conan pastiches, is like, nothing but pages and pages of women raping a man they captured, who is mad, because they interrupted his plans to go rape other women. I gave up after a few chapters. There was just NOTHING else going on.

Julie Cochrane's books are all co-authored by John Ringo, who has his own issues, but these are a spin-off/sequel to Ringo's Posleen War tetrology, following a young woman from that series who has grown up to be a secret agent assassin. Who gets close to her targets by methods I am SURE you can guess at by now. She falls in love with a guy she meets on a mission in the first book, marries him in secret because of their covert lifestyles, and can only visit him from time to time to maritally relate to one another and show him pictures of their kids. In like the third book or so, he makes an off-hand comment that indicates to her that he believes she is still using said methods in her operations, when in fact, she gave that up when she got (secretly) married, and flipped her shit when her sudden refusal to be a honey trap messed up her unit's entire operational philosophy, because they had come to rely on that tactic like a crutch. Anyway, her marital fidelity forced a complete overhaul of her organization's strategy (her GRANDFATHER is the team leader, with command responsibility for every one of the missions in which she was so used, BTW), and a decade into her marriage, her husband remains completely unaware that his wife has been faithful to him, but is totally understanding of the sacrifices he is assuming she is making for the cause. So, like her credited co-author, Cochrane is at least a self-aware pervert.

And now that I think about it, Robin Hobb's books included a scene where the hero tries to induce his girlfriend to have sex with him on a patch of gravel, and when she doesn't want to, she just makes him be on the bottom, instead of, oh, IDK, going ANYWHERE ELSE? They each have a bedroom, there are inns and a beach nearby, but they HAVE to do it on gravel, and argue about who has to be on the bottom? I don't even... what...

Kerr's books have sex, but not explicit, aside from an incest subplot in the first book, and evil gay sorcerors who were excised from later editions, and pretty tame compared to some people whose business relationship with HBO was a meeting of soulmates.

I haven't even read those books on which "True Blood" is based.

You know what? People gave Robert Jordan a lot of crap for writing a series where he has three (or 4 or 5, depending on how you count) gorgeous women, most of whom are powerful and accomplished as well, fall for the main character, and induce him to have a polygamous relationship over his token protests, and one where the most powerful woman in the world is elected to office after ritually flashing the legislature, and the most powerful organization in world is made up of women, whose ceremonial promotions to rank take place in the nude, despite the lack of a male audience or male decision-making role in said organization. The feminists get all huffy saying "Why would women do this?" To which I have the answer: for the same reasons they write these damn books!

Cannoli
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
This message last edited by Cannoli on 19/04/2017 at 04:08:11 AM
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I am so relieved to learn that I am a member of the least perverted gender/ "Literature" - 19/04/2017 03:55:34 AM 790 Views
try C. J. Cherryh *NM* - 19/04/2017 03:53:36 PM 294 Views
I thought that men were more visual - 19/04/2017 04:15:09 PM 405 Views

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