Day: July 20, 2017

howlsmovinglibrary:

chaoslaborantin:

anexcessofsubplot:

acourtofmalesandfemales:

birdiethebibliophile:

I don’t think anyone’s brought this up before, so I’d like to mention the demonization of Amarantha not only as a woman who is fully aware of her sexuality and uses it as a weapon, BUT ALSO as a tool to demonize wlw.

Here goes.

This whole argument centers around a nightmare Feyre has in ACOMAF. I’ll quote the passage in full (from pages 184-185 of the regular Bloomsbury edition of A Court of Mist and Fury:

I tumbled into a sleep so heavy my dreams were an undertow that dragged me down, down, down until I couldn’t escape them.

I lay naked and prone on a familiar red marble floor while Amarantha slid a knife along my bare ribs, the steel scraping softly against my skin. “Lying, traitorous human,” she purred, “with your filthy, lying heart.”

The knife scratched, a cool caress. I struggled to get up, but my body wouldn’t work.

She pressed a kiss to the hollow of my throat. “You’re as much a monster as me.” She curved the knife over my breast, angling it toward my peaked nipple, as if she could see the heart beating beneath. I started sobbing. “Don’t waste your tears.”

Someone far away was roaring my name – begging for me.

“I’m going to make eternity a hell for you,” she promised, the tip of the dagger piercing the sensitive flesh beneath my breast, her lips hovering a breath above mine as she pushed – [end quote]

And then it cuts off as Rhys wakes Feyre up from her nightmare.

The first time – and the subsequent times – I’ve read this scene, it bothers me. A LOT. It’s clearly sexual, from Feyre being naked to the focus on her breasts to Amarantha nearly kissing her in that last paragraph.

This is what bothers me:  there’s lots of sexual content in these books. I know that. Lots and lots. But this is the only time there’s anything remotely like sexual content between two women (everything Mor says in ACOWAR seems rather strangely… desexualized) and not only is it assault, there’s no reason for it.

We already know Amarantha used her sexuality in a way that is wrong. Like Ianthe. I believe the term @valamerys uses is Evil Evil Sluts Who Want to Steal Your Boyfriend. But to me, this is on another level. Amarantha never hurt Feyre sexually – just in physical ways, and emotional/psychological ways. To me, there was no reason to make this dream so dripping with… sex. To me, it becomes an association of “two women in a sexual context” with “horrific torture and assault.” This is very different to the way f/m sexuality is portrayed throughout the series. Only a select few (Ianthe and Amarantha, the twins in ACOWAR though OH WAIT IT’S IMPLIED THAT AT LEAST ONE OF THEM ISN’T STRAIGHT) use their sexuality in ways that are wrong. There’s a lot of sex scenes, all f/m (as Feyre is the narrator and she’s presumably straight), all portrayed in a pretty positive light. Even the scenes that border on sexual assault – the one after Calanmai in ACOTAR, the kiss with Rhys Under the Mountain at the end of ACOTAR – are, in my view, portrayed more positively.

And yet here is the only example of two women in a sexual context, and it’s… this.

Does this mean that Feyre associates women having sex with each other with torture? Does it mean that SJM herself does? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is the ONLY depiction of wlw (sort of) sexuality in the entire series that has a focus on sex, and it’s framed as torture.

And this shouldn’t need to be said, but that’s not okay.

This is basically the demonization of sex between women, something really common in fiction in my opinion. Sometimes in movies Evil Women™ are attracted to other women, or have sex with them for pleasure. No feelings attached, just sex. Women who like women are evil!! Two women can’t be in love and have a healthy relationship, how dare you think that?

SJM, as the ignorant straight woman she is (because she clearly has no idea of what a relationship between two women is), perpetuates those stereotypes in her writing.

Her stans probably think she means well and I’m not saying she is trying to demonize all sapphic women, but it’s very obvious that she doesn’t really care about wlw so this isn’t a big deal for her. 

Depictions of wlw in media are rare and usually not positive. So yeah, she probably didn’t want to hurt wlw, but this is still a bad stereotype that should die.

Oh, and I would like it if she stopped writing unnecessary scenes that involve sexual assault.

Im also not happy her two women in power–amarantha and iantha–conflate taking power from men (they have their own authority outside of men) and the rape of men. It creates this parallel of taking power from men and taking sexual power from them. Like, iantha and amarantha are so gross and perverse in the books’ world because they somehow have taken authority away from men AND rape men. They’ve totally turned the world order on its head and they’re monsters for it. Theyre othered (iantha and amarantha) and i hate it.

Especially when we have an abusive high lord beating his wife and everyone rolls their eyes like it’s just a bad habit.

Amarantha is intented to be a monster, but Ianthe had such potential to be used for showing how an oppressed woman searches for ways to receive any power she can get. Even if she has to seduce men for that. What shall she do, if all power derives from men in her world? Notice that unlike Mor, Amren and Feyre, our women in power, Ianthe doesn’t have magical powers to set her apart from the roles laid out for Prythian women. She chooses religion and having children as her means, rather tradition ones, but the books turn her try to gain power against her, demonizing seduction by making Ianthe a rapist.

And at some point, this becomes hypocritical as Feyre only becomes so important because two powerful men are interested in her to begin with. Feyre suceeds at winning a man’s favor where Ianthe doesn’t, and that’s why I should hate her? Please. Let a woman be a villain without making it about sex.

There are so many layers of internalised misogyny surrounding Ianthe and Amarantha that I genuinely don’t know how to unpick it. The thing that I’ve noticed, other than the obvious conflation of women who dominant also being perverse, is the way that women are utterly punished for sexual transgression and abuse, in comparison to the men that perpetrate the same crimes getting off with little or no reprecussions. It’s seen in the fact that, although both men and women have engaged in non-consensual behaviour in this series, only the women are branded as rapists by the plot.

Like, ACOWAR squicked me out so much, because in the same book that we have the rehabilitation of and depiction of positive, heroic traits in (at least) two male abusers, Tamlin and Eris, (I say at least because I also think that Mor’s father is forgiven to some extent ‘out of necessity’), we also have a scene where Feyre gleefully smashes Ianthe’s hand to smithereens and feeds her to the Weaver without a second thought.

Men are forgiven for sexual assault, or their past indiscretions are discretely swept under the rug, often because the plot demands it (’we have no other choice’, ‘we need allies’, Tamlin did a selfless thing so everything is fine). Meanwhile Amarantha is skewered against a wall, and Ianthe is depicted in two brutally violent revenge scenes. They are being punished for their sexual abuse in a way no other male character has been in these series. This is despite, arguably, Ianthe potentially being a ‘valuable asset’ in the war against Hyburn in book three for all the reasons listed above, thus having the potential for a squicky ‘needs must’ narrative if that’s the way SJM decides to treat every other male abuser. Even if you perhaps think that Tamlin was demonised for plot purposes, Mor’s dad and Eris are the ones responsible for her literally having her womb skewered, and they forcibly become her allies with little or no ramifications placed on their past actions. And Eris is depicted sympathetically. I’m obviously not excusing the sexual assault perpetrated by Ianthe or Amarantha, but the double standards retroactively applied to sexual assault by male vs female characters are just weird. It really really creeps me out.

I genuinely don’t know what’s behind it – does SJM think it’s more acceptable or ‘normal’ for men to perpetrate sexual assault, and therefore it’s more forgivable? I don’t know – it does fit with the conception of fae men as subject to their ‘instincts’, whereas the women who forcibly become sexually dominant seem to subvert the natural order and become monstrous. All I know is that the moment a woman in these books has sexual power that takes dominance and power away from men, they automatically become liable for the harshest, most graphic punishments in the books, and have to be utterly demonised and violently excised from the plot, because somehow their sexual assault is more perverse, wrong and ‘unforgivable’ than that performed by men.