Leigh Butler's re-reads of aSoI&F (which I was introduced to courtesy of a Wert post on another MB) and WoT are very entertaining - except when she gets on her high horse about feminist gender issues, which in this series is going to be all the freaking time. I'm barely into the re-reads of tSR, and already I'm wincing whenever something alluding to the empirical differences between men and women is due to come up, because I know it's just going to drag down the commentary with a shrewish rant.

It's one thing to have different opinions about characters (for example, IDK what she sees in Min, particularly considering this is the one female character who could be described as useless ornamentation up until aMoL, which had not been published at the time this blog was written), but it's another thing to keep dropping the commentary on characters and events to fume with rage over the differences in how men and women approach their respective halves of the power.

The read-through of aSoI&F is almost as bad in a way, because of certain issues that don't come up as much in WoT, namely, organized religion, against which she has a vicious and completely unreasonable prejudice, to the point where she roots for objectively evil characters when they confront widely respected heroes, because the heroes happened to express religious beliefs. We are talking about a man who murdered a child, at the behest of contemptible aristocrats in one of his first distinct appearances in the books, against a group of grass-roots Robin Hood characters, who were admired and respected by everyone the PoV character met along the way. But those latter characters says prayers, so Butler flat out states that she's on the thug's side. Never mind that they give him a fair hearing when that child murder is brought up, his only defense is "I was just following orders" and the good guys let him go when they are unable to prove his guilt. Religion = wrong, and Butler asserts this mentality of hers as if it is something to be proud of.

aSoI&F is not attempting to examine the relationships between the sexes in the way that WoT is, but the author is careful to spread around the unpleasant aspects of how society and its assignment of roles can be unfair in all sorts of ways. Yet, all that Butler can focus on is how upset she gets when a nine year old girl is not given the right to combat training openly (never mind that two male members of her family give her a weapon and hire a teacher, no, Butler's still mad that society doesn't openly toss around opportunities to ALL little girls). Martin, being an intelligent and thoughtful individual, who is well-versed in history and the ins and outs of medieval society, is careful to show such iniquities across the board, such as the flip side of the men-fight/women-babies coin, where there is a significant male character who is marginalized (and undergoes far worse humiliation and disenfranchisement than the spunky girl character) for his lack of that same aptitude that girls are not permitted to explore. Leigh bloviates at length about the awfulness of a female character locked into an arranged marriage like she's chattel being sold or something, and I have seen some of the more respected female posters on this site make similar errors regarding the medieval perception of marriage. But the author has major plot points turn on the male characters' lack of freedom, choice or preference in this regard as well. Plot points where she either ignores this aspect, or even remonstrates against the male characters for bucking the compulsion.

Among the WoT things that she gets incensed over are the conversational generalizations made by various characters in the early books, including Thom's "Men forget but never forgive, while women forgive but never forget," and Marin al'Vere's theory that women desire relationships but are discriminating about their partner, while men need a relationship, but will settle for the first partner to work at making one with them. Setting aside the fact that both are tossed off as casual conversational analogies to explain a course of action, and not presented as hard and fast rules by the series (not to mention ever brought up again), or that they seem to fit fairly well with practical experience and observations in the real world, they are still just generalizations.

Generalizations are a practical shortcut to dealing with large groups as a whole, and the very existence of the concept of a bell curve suggests that generalizations, when applied accurrately, have some merit. It is simply too much trouble for human beings with finite resource of time and energy to ascertain every bit of truth about a person or situation, so practical experience has led to things like generalizations and pattern-recognition in order to help make decisions. A generalization is, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than playing the percentages. Yes, it is foolish to assume that every member of a group fits the generalization, and wrong to impose the force of the law on someone based on the generalizations about their group...but that's not what is going on here. Yet, Butler asserts without any discernible irony "All generalizations are wrong."

I know, right?

It's hard to believe that any human being of her apparent age could be so isolated from day-to-day life to miss that generalizations, like stereotypes, originate with some true or widely-perceived element. At most, the value of generalizations is a debatable issue, not something you can inherently reject without examination. Yet Butler's discussion of her distaste for this sort of thing is not presented as an issue of personal preference, but of absolute wrongness, in ways she seldom approaches when discussing murder.

What this woman is doing is the equivalent of condemning white supremacists, not for the crime of holding one race superior to the others, but for elevating the wretched white race above the obviously better blacks. She is absolutely blinded by her own personal preferences, and so blinded that she is unable to even realize that they are either personal or preferences.

I have little doubt what her reaction would be to a similar blog by a devout Christian who attempted to weigh every action, choice and perception by the characters and author through a lens of Biblical authority. Leigh Butler, however, is doing the exact same thing, except in her eyes, her belief system is valid and the hypothetical blogger's is mere superstition. She repeatedly has the temerity to accuse characters motivated by witnessing genuine miracles or legitimate supernatural dangers of zealotry, yet she cannot bear the idea that another person with vastly different experiences than she might possibly hold an alternative perspective. No one could remotely call Jordan anti-female or anti-woman in his presentation of WoT, but Butler nonetheless cannot let anything that violates the rubrics of acceptable gender discussion, as ordained by the established authorities on womynhood pass without harping on it like, I don't know, a zealot?

This blog should have been presented at best, as some sort of special feminist perspective. You could have got a more generally targeted and objective blog by having Vatican officials comment on lesbian pornography. And yet, somehow, Butler seems to have parlayed this work into a position of some significance at a Jordan-con. When did the world go crazy? Or was this an example of the same decision-making process that gave us Brandon Sanderson?