Dear All, Apologies- I didn't read over my Female Man response well
enough, leaving a sentence incomplete. The sentence concerned the
novel's violence, which for many of my students was a key reason for
hostility towards the novel. Women, should (as we all know) be ladylike
and self effacing and NOT slam people's thumbs in doors, break arms, or
kill idiot boss-men.Incidently, one way I tried to "sell" the book to the
class was through the novel's humour. Judging from the blank looks in the
class, I am the only person in the world who found the book funny.
Mike Levy's comments on students, especially women's
studies students, disliking The FM and The Women Men Don't See make
things seem very bleak. And as for LIKING such stupidly romantic
and grimly heterosexual nonsense as Anne McCaffrey's *The Ship Who
Sang*......words fail, they really do. I
found *The Ship* very funny in places, especially the moment where Neill
tries to penetrate Helga's Hull in order to screw her non-existent (but
genetically very attractive) body.I wonder if this notion of Helga as
"essentially" really cute makes her attractive to male and female readers,
where the women in Tiptree's "Women that Men Don't See" are after all
plain
and easily ignorable.Ironies, Ironies. Tiptree's defeatism on women's
rights may be completely
correct. Has the beauty myth won so easily? And to audiences
that really should be critical? I have to wonder what sort of "women's
studies" programme is being run at this university.....is feminism being
firmly excised from it?
Yours despairingly,
Tanya.
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