I can easily think of things from my youth that I don’t like now as much as I once did, and that other people would consider silly or unworthy: soapy mystery novels (Julie Smith and Martha Grimes were my favourites), Strangers in Paradise (as I’ve discussed before), Wolff and Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre (that’s a unique case, cause I fell all the way out of it, but then met Batton Lash, who is the nicest guy ever, at a con a couple of years ago and fell all the way back in, so now I love it down to its last bad pun, heavy-handed moral, and character missing the back third of their skull), Elton John (I still listen to his albums semi-regularly, but they have nothing like the presence they had in my life when my brother became obsessed with him*), Moxy Fruvous (listening to them now brings up intense feelings of embarrassment, but I’m really proud actually, to have followed an obscure dorky band around as a highschooler, and it did get me my husband)… but even though I’m no longer a fangirl, I can’t conjure up any shame about them.
It’s not even shame I feel about having been into Piers Anthony, and reading almost all of the Xanth books and most of the Incarnations of Immortality books (it was during this series that my enjoyment turned to disgust). I’m not ashamed because, as I’ve found out, almost everyone who’s into fantasy was into those books at one time. So if I don’t judge them, how can I judge me?
What I am, is regretful of the time I spent on those damn books, and of the awful ideas about sex and gender they were allowed to plant in my head. As I recall (I haven’t picked up an Anthony book in fifteen years or so, and I wouldn’t without a substantial cash advance), it was mostly your run of the mill virgin-whore women-have-no-sexual-desire-except-the-desire-to-be-looked-at-by-men (sometimes in a nice, sex-as-reward way, sometimes in an evil-temptress way, of course) blah blah. It was a lot of what you get from the rest of the culture anyhow, but something made it worse in Anthony. Maybe it was because he was a fantasy writer who, if he wasn’t technically Young Adult, certainly had lots of books with adolescent protagonists. And most people who read YA and a good percentage of people who read fantasy are young girls.
Maybe it’s something I’m still repressing that made Anthony worse. Noah here mentions rapey bits, which I don’t recall, except one notable one, and it’s the event which finally pulled me out of the books and made me question who this Anthony guy was and what he was trying to tell me. Early on in the first Incarnations of Immortality book, our hero saves an undead woman from being gang-raped, and she promptly offers to have sex with him, in order to show her gratitude (he declines, being a nice guy and having heard that undead women were trouble).
I was like, um. I have never been nearly-gang-raped myself, but I am pretty sure that, having just emerged from such a trauma, I would probably not want to immediately have sex, with a random stranger no less. What kind of person thinks your average woman would? (curiously enough, this scene was repeated exactly, except for the undead business, in the contemporary Batman and Robin film. Pretty much the only thing I still remember about those two pieces of… art).
Thinking about it, that scene is the NiceGuy fallacy in a nutshell. Men who act with basic human decency toward women deserve sex as a reward and an incentive, and any woman who accepts any sort of help from a man better pay up in sexual favours, or it’s her own fault when NiceGuys are forced to go bad in order to get any.
This is sample bias, but I get the feeling that nerd/geek culture is especially susceptible to the NiceGuy fallacy (because girls who consume western nerd/geek culture are presented with more opportunities to empathize with fictional and actual nebbishes, at the expense of empathizing with, you know, themselves). Presenting it again (and I doubt my remembered example was the only time, and the “polemics on rape” Noah mentioned are probably even worse), in fun, slightly risqué YA-ish adventures, makes Piers Anthony an evil bad man, and makes me want to smack that book right out of my poor twelve-year-old hands.
Which I can’t really say about Billy Joel, no matter how many trees he crashes into.
*my totally straight, currently ultra-Orthodox brother. His gay-ass taste in music is one of his saving graces.
Anthony's full bore rape efforts are in his older books. There's one series (Galactic Emperor? I can't remember the title) in which one book is just gang rape after gang rape by space pirates. He's got a short story ("The Barn") in which he fantasizes about turning his ex into a human cow and…well, you can probably figure out the rest. That was in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology.
Maybe it’s something I'm still repressing that made Anthony worse.
Well, there's the rampant pedophilia. There are several times where Anthony has a child "seduce" an older adult and cause his/her downfall. This belief (that children can seduce powerless adults) is born out in some of his non-fiction writing. I think it was the five year old (or similar aged) child sex that sent me running. I don't remember which book that was in.
Ah yes, here we go:
http://www.roeszler.org/piersthread/piersinterview.htm
"and I'm sure many are outraged by the flashback sequence where a five year old girl has consensual sex with a grown man. She was taught that sex is love, and she wanted love."
Check this Amazon review for more:
http://www.amazon.com/review/REF1DCC2LB6Q6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Bio of a Space Tyrant
Yep, that's the one. That was a bad, bad series.
A college friend of mine was a hardcore Fruvous fan. Years later I stumbled across a radio talk show a former member hosts and sent her a link to its online presence. She responded that she now had a personal loathing for the guy in question, for reasons she didn't explain. Fan betrayal? I dunno.
Man, I read a decent number of those as a young'n – Never cared for Zanth much, but I liked the Immortality Ones – and I don't remember ANY of that.
just gang rape after gang rape by space pirates
fantasizes about turning his ex into a human cow and
several times where Anthony has a child "seduce" an older adult and cause his/her downfall
…whoa. so it *is* worse than i could have imagined. ew ew ew. how are these mainstream teenage reading, rather than fringe laughingstocks like the "gor" books, again?
aaron,
yep, the drummer became a cbc entertainment host five or so years ago, & has been shuffled through different shows, because being on cbc means you never get fired.
he was the handsomest one & the one with the most obvious stage charisma, & he wore really tight clothes all the time, so he was the focus of most of the teen-girl crushes (there were creepy rumours going around that he took some teen girls up on it, but never anything i heard firsthand).
but he was also the most mouthy, about his political opinions especially, & the least smart of the four. fruvous were most famous for having great chemistry & great banter onstage, & so whenever he said anything dumb the others would shoot him down or just riff on it in an entertaining, comedic manner.
i've found him increasingly smarmy & embarrassing solo, because he doesn't have three smarter, funnier guys around to put him down all the time. i've heard other fruheads emeritus say the same (but of course, all canada rallied around him when billy bob thornton threw a tantrum on his show recently).
ironically, though i fnd his current persona embarrassing, he's clearly embarrassed by having been in an extremely minor dork-folk sensation in the nineties, which is all the more incentive for me to brag about having been a diehard fan. if you see what i mean.
When you say Batman and Robin film, I assume you're talking about the Joel Shumaker effort.
Where was the gang-rape, offer sex sequence? It was a kid's movie. I don't want to actually have to sit through the film to see if I can find the scene, so I'm asking you to do the heavy lifting. Don't let anyone tell you that blogging can't be Hell.
anonymous,
well, the assault probably didn't go far enough to cross the ratings line, but the intent was pretty explicit. & then the offer of sex may not have been explicit, but she definitely wanted to, like, make out with her "saviour" right away.
i don't remember much, but i know robin was the niceguy in question, the girl may or may not have been alicia silverstone/batgirl.
more work than that, you'll have to do on your own.
You know, the more I read about other people's reactions to Anthony, the more I think that if I actually revisited his stuff, all of my lingering fondness for him would be shot to hell. Weird misogyny creeps me out more now than it used to.
You entirely over simplify the scene from “On a Pale Horse”. First of all, the “Undead girl” was a ghost, a spirit, a memory of her past life. Second, she was a poor Irish girl who was, if I remember correctly, involved with prostitution work in her living life in order to get by, not to mention the fact that she entered this work at a young age, blurring the line between prostitution and “goods/services”. It was clear enough that she didn’t want to be raped, but also blurred enough to see it as a viable reward for a genuinely kind act from a man; combined with the understanding that “all men want sex” that many girls young an old understand and the realization that she’s a GHOST with no property or money to give away, I think it’s clear that this situation offers little choice otherwise.
Some might ask, “then why not change the situation? He’s a creative writer after all,” but you can’t just do that. The Incarnations of Immortality universe is precariously constructed in a way that does not allow for this girl’s identity to change, since she is involved in other books and character’s lives in specific ways, ways that require a background such as her’s.
You have a point about sexism, I will grant you that, but there is FAR more than a little bias in your rendition and explanation.