The Void strikes back

Mark C. Newton had a comment inspiring post today, where he thinks about writers thinking about gender- or racefail issues.

There are those pro-female-emancipation warriors that feel all women must stand up for themselves, walk all over men in doing so (how else show that you're strong and independent), and in doing so also walking all over other women. But hey, you can't win them all, besides they are intelligent and strong, so they know best. Shut up. Also, they preferably look pretty while doing all this. Or not, but then they need another great character trait like be super generous, unbelievable handy, or of course be supernaturally smart. Which is a far more balanced view on women than the stereotypical serving wench and whores.

See, sometimes things are what they are. Me, I like to cook but got nearly expulsed from French discussion class in high school for saying so aloud. This first encounter with Emancipated Caucasian Chicks Inc. certainly left a mark, seeing as how it has spurred my bullshit detector to grow a specialized antenna for female emancipation crap. And I learned that some women can certainly do with some less emancipation, especially when their emancipation infringes on my rights and freedom to be the kind of woman I am or want to be. (Or, as was suggested in the comments of Newton's post: the kind of fiction I want to read).

In the minds of those emancipated chicks, the world would be a better place when women are like them: free, big mouthed, usually short sighted, with little empathy for anything outside the One Thing that matters. In my mind, the world would be a better place if they weren't all so sensitive to one single issue. I'm not for female emancipation, I'm for emancipation, the end. To me the issue is not limited to gender, but goes into the same box as homosexuals, immigrants and other people from other races, sweatshop kiddies, and even battery chickens. That sounds disrespectful, doesn't it? Well, just suck it up, wimp, because in my world those things are the same: issues that need special attention and special action, but with care not to disrupt the world surrounding the subjects. You can't change reality overnight, not because reality will fight back, but because there will be plenty of other issues crawling out of the woodwork as soon as you magically fix the problem. And most of those new issues you'd never thought had any link with the first issue. 

In the end, if you go through life swinging a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. The discussions always dreg up Conan, but nobody mentions Tolkien. But seriously, what do female hobbitses do all day except cook, clean and produce more hobbitses? Damned misogynist of him, if you ask me!

And now I have this terrible urge to reread Cerebus again. All of it, especially the "terribly misogynist" parts. Ah good times.

But first finish cleaning (and especially putting order into the mess) my study, reading Palmer's Debatable Space (my God is that a fun story) and Newton's City of Ruin (which will have arrived by then).

Edited to add: aaah, digital blips *le sigh*