>>7249829My absolute favourite
"Gene Wolfe is not a misgynist??!!
Before all the sensitive types start in on Gene Wolfe's treatment of women in Shadow and Claw, I thought I would head off such criticisms by exploring women's freedom in Wolfe's Urth.
On Urth, women are:
1. Permitted to learn to read. There are actually a number of women in the narrative that not only can read but also can read and understand something akin to Latin. But, don't you dare call it Latin, because it's not. Gene Wolfe said so.
2. Free to wear clothes or not as they see fit. Much care is taken that women should be offered to wear clothes and even clean clothes when their pathetic nature raises our empathy and pity. Yet, a woman is also apparently free to disrobe and thrown herself naked and pleading to exchange sex for the life of a loved one.
3. Free to sell her body for money legally. Money? Good. Sex? Very good. Sex for money? Men have money; a woman, her sex. How can that be wrong?
4. Free to be beaten. That a woman should be suffered to live for giving offense to a man is a blessing onto her. She may be beaten and pushed down and she is not hurt much.
5. Free to be imprisoned unjustly. In this enlightened age of the far future Urth, women are suffered to live despite they give offense to men and the law of Men. The expense and time to imprison and persecute...err...prosecute a woman in light of her actual value to society is a charity granted to her and her sex.
6. Free to be tortured. That the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence should seek to imprison and torture women clearly indicates that women are thought to be capable of speaking truth or even knowing truth. Similarly, this would also suppose that a woman has a soul capable of penitence or that a woman possesses a soul at all.
7. Free to be publicly maimed and executed. The branding and public execution of a woman suggests the physical vessel of the woman's body contains a space for moral instruction through ritualized excruciation and killing. A woman is no mere animal that can be killed or beaten without conscience. Her body and her life are valued enough to bring forth a physical and moral revulsion to a public branding and execution that is not only a moment of moral teaching but also Thanatonic catharsis.
These are only some of the many freedoms that women enjoy in the world of Urth so lovingly and intellectually crafted by Gene Wolfe. I for one salute his feminist spirit and his magnanimity to grant women a dignified and full existence in the world of his own creation.
And in case my sarcasm isn't clear, F*** you, Gene Wolfe!"
