Wendy replying to Mistral
Avon may be mocked, but Meegat is objectified.
Your use of the term is meaningless. None of the characters treat her as an object;
No, they treat her as a means to an end. A woman deluded into thinking Avon is God, a delusion which they can easily exploit to get what they want.
Exploiting people's delusions to get what you want from them might not be very nice behaviour, but it can also be extremely sensible. Given the predicament Avon et al were in (stranded on a dangerous planet), they'd have been daft not to at least consider stringing her along.
However, any real objectification of Meegat is not by the characters in the story but by the story itself, so we're back to Terry bloody Nation again (which was, I think, Wendy's point right from the very start). Yes, she's a plot device, but so what? Character-as-plot-device is a standard literary tool. All characters are plot devices to one degree or another.
Yes--come on, boys, why *haven't* you been saying that? It is just as bad a stereotype to show males as rough, tough and brainless thugs who'd as soon kidnap a woman as look at her.
Do you mind? We're far too busy discussing the nature of misogyny.
Or, wait, could it be that these actions are maybe seen in this culture as macho? Kind of positive even? How many action-movie heroes does that above sentence describe?
Savage hairy primitives in a B7 script just make my eyes glaze over. Ho hum here we go again ect.
In fact, your entire argument rests on _your interpretation_ of the material - which is okay! - except that you seem to want to present it as fact, while denying others the right to interpret the available material in another way.
No. I presented my opinion, which I backed up using facts from the story.
This seems to be true, actually.
Other people presented their opinions, which they similarly backed up with facts from the story.
Also true, though the dividing line between facts and opinions seems to have been blurred to some degree by all contributors to the debate.
All except me, that is.
I then responded in kind by pointing out what I saw as the holes in their arguments, just as they had done for mine. This is NOT denying people's right to interpret the material in their own way; it's just saying that I see certian problems in their reasoning on SOME of the points.
This is what's called a debate.
And despite the less than enthusiastic response from some quarters, I think it's a jolly good one and just the kind of thing I subscribed to the Lyst for. I really am enjoying this one.
For example, Freudian interpretation is not inherent fact;
Never said it was :-).
or that
matter, IIUC, Freud has fallen well out of favour in the professional psych community.
But the last time I looked, not out of favour in literary criticism.
So by your own admission you stand by the principles of a discipline that eschews inherent fact and makes recourse to hypotheses considered outdated by the professional community that stands to have the most practical use for them? Don't you think that literary criticism might be at fault here?
A rocket does not _equal_ a
phallus.
It doesn't. It *symbolises* it. I never said the rocket *was* a phallus, just that I found the *symbols* in the story a bit dubious.
Symbols can
sometimes illustrate reality; they do not ever define it.
But this isn't *reality*. It's a *story.* For instance, in the novel Jane Eyre, IIRC there is a storm at one point when the main character is having an emotional crisis. The parallels between crisis and storm are obvious, and because it's a novel, the author can get away with having a storm raging outside while the character is having a crisis.
Ah, so the storm is a plot device. It ends up being objectified in an insid ious piece of misotempestic trash masquerading as literature. Stand up for oppressed meteorological phenomena - DON'T READ JANE EYRE!!
Okay, I'm being silly. So what else is new?
I simply don't feel offended or threatened by occasional non-heroic portrayals of women. If you do, that's your prerogative, but please don't insist that the rest of us must.
I don't. But it goes beyond "occasional non-heroic portrayals." Let's face it, in most TV sci-fi, the default position for women is as helpless rescuee. B7 is better than most for showing women in other roles-- but it's substantially more than 25% of the time that a woman needs rescuing by a man, even in B7.
The Sevencyclopaedia actually lists the number of times each regular character was captured and how often they rescued others. Unfortunately there are problems in defining exactly what constitutes a capture/rescue, so figures are necessarily approximate. And quite often you have characters captured in batches, or rescuing others in batches. So it's very hard to extract any hard figures of male/female roles in being captured or rescued. In other words, I can't be arsed.
But Servalan is not portrayed as being evil and power-seeking *because she's a woman,*
She bloody well is!
she is portrayed as being evil and power-seeking because she's a megalomaniac. Nowhere in series 4 does anybody, IIRC, suggest that women in power are overly sexualised, emasculating bitches-- just that Servalan is, cause she's mad.
And nowhere in Deliverance does anyone take one look at Meegat's rocket and say, "Cor, what a whopper!"
See my above comment re Freud. A cigar is almost always just a cigar.
See my above comment re Bronte. A storm in that case isn't just a storm.
But if you're so hot on litcrit then you should be aware that the meaning of a text does not reside within the text itself, but is constructed by the author and reconstructed by the reader. The transmission of meaning into the text is distorted by noise impact on the author, with similar noise impact distorting the perception of meaning by the reader. Any meaning attributed to a text can only exist through a consensus of interpretation by a body of readers with or without corroboration from the author (assuming s/he is available to corroborate). A text taken in isolation is devoid of meaning.
In which case a storm can be nothing more than a storm, and a rocket can be nothing more than a big iron thing.
Neil