Feminists

so I thought I'd link you up.

Here's a nice excerpt:

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What an adequate emotional response to rape might be is lost in translation. Hysterics? Fainting? She does not go to the police, also unlike a normal lady: “Salander was not like any normal person…Visiting the offices of those visor-clad brutes to file a report against Nils Bjurman for sexual assault did not even cross her mind.” (Ironically, one of the supposedly real-life statistics Larsson cites at the beginning of each part of the book asserts that “Ninety-two percent of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police.” That’s an awful lot of abnormal women for one country.)

So, feminist heroine? Maybe not so much. Salander reads more like masturbation fodder for dudes who want to pretend they aren’t sleazy; Tomb Raider for manarchists, if you will. She hates herself, she “look[s] fourteen,” and she has “high cheekbones that [give] her an almost Asian look.” I don’t even want to touch that last one, honestly, but I am not the first person to note that there are some especially inappropriate tropes of Asian ladies currently circulating in our culture, and they are not, shall we say, feminist. Reading Salander as a feminist icon for our times is a pretty challenging endeavor. About the best thing you can say about her is that, unlike Larsson’s other characters, she at least has some depth.

People who write about dead ladies make a shit-ton of money (see: Patterson, James; Cornwell, Patricia; Koontz, Dean; &c ad nauseum). Even more people want to read about dead ladies than want to write about them; which, as a lady, stresses me out. I like murder mysteries and I like thrillers. But I am getting fucking tired of those stories revolving solely around rape and torture. Packaging that nastiness up as feminist is icing on an ugly cake. There are men who hate women: I am aware of this. Anyone who has ever tried living as a woman is aware of this. I don’t need a ten-page explicit rape scene to bring this point home; I need only to leave my house.

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The next, final paragraph is a thing of beauty.

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/07/29/the-girl-with-the-lots-of-creepy-disturbing-torture-that-pissed-me-off-on-stieg-larsson/