Today, we’ll continue our examination of Scott Bakker’s linked fantasy series: The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor. We’ll criticize his badly misguided notions of female nature and, more importantly, demonstrate how this misconception drags down his prose.
Bakker wrote his fantasy world in the traditional “medieval” sense—swords, crumbling empires, sails, horses and knights. The women in his book are not emancipated. In fact, they find themselves treated rather horribly. Bakker wants to drive into your thick skull just how nastily men act towards women. His visceral and repeated depictions of simpering male cruelty suggest a deep-seated concern with this issue. Unfortunately for Bakker, these visceral and repeated depictions led a lot of people to believe that he depicted such acts because he enjoyed them. Their interpretation of the text is: “I hate women and will therefore flog these fictional examples with a hundred miseries,” instead of the correct: “Look what men do! We’re such jerks!”
Bakker does not hide his views:
When it comes to the misogyny charge my answer has been fairly consistent, I think. First, that I am a sexist, insofar as I think men are generally less competent than women across the majority of modern social contexts. I generally find women more reliable and trustworthy. If anything, misandry is my problem, not misogyny.
Women more reliable and trustworthy than men! Poor guy has no broederbond.
To explore the peculiarity of Bakker’s position, we’ll need to dive into the second series, where he introduces a character with the ability to make absolute judgments. That is to say, she sometimes sees the truth, full stop. This character saying “I saw this” is the same as the author saying “I meant this.”
And what does she see?
Between women and men, women possess the lesser soul. Whenever the Eye opens, she glimpses the fact of this, the demand that women yield to the requirements of men, so long as those demands be righteous. To bear sons. To lower her gaze. To provide succor. The place of the woman is to give.
As we’ve already established, Bakker doesn’t believe this. He finds it repulsive. He writes such a theme to show how wicked, how unfair, the world would be if it operated this way. The guy is a philosopher, (he teaches at some Canadian college,) and he’s preoccupied with the idea of objectivity—of the world possessing meaning regardless of how we feel about it. He doesn’t feel the real world possesses this objective worth but the concept haunts him enough to write novels about it.
Regrettably, he has a rather questionable grasp of what objectivity means. In his fantasy world, women are not allowed to learn magic because of course they’re not. The ruthless superman who has taken over the civilized world, driven only by practicality and entirely unaffected by emotion, reverses this ancient ban so that he may double the legion of sorcerers at his disposal. All good so far. This is what one would expect.
There exist some seven or so schools of magic, all of whom the superman bends to his service. One of these schools jealously hoards the most powerful branch of sorcerous power. The superman forces this school to gift his newly created order of woman-wizards with this most powerful sorcery but he does not have them share it with the other schools. For context, it is inconceivable that any of the schools would rebel. The superman has complete control. Women receive the great magic because they are reliable and trustworthy. The men are not.
A male sorcerer notes:
It was almost as if women possessed a kind of sanity that men could only find on the far side of tribulation. Witches… were not only a good thing, they could very well be a necessity.
Remember, this character lives in what moderns would call a misogynistic society. His upbringing would incline him to look down on women but his experiences teach the opposite. Especially when compared with the author’s statements, the text straight-up argues for the emotional and mental superiority of women which is where the theme of women’s objective inferiority breaks down.
The text presents women as objectively superior by measurable metrics. Yet there exists some power that “objectively” deems women inferior. The correct word would be “arbitrarily.” This is the new atheism of Christopher Hitchens—but with God! Bakker doesn’t present a careless and unforgiving universe. He presents a universe which very much cares about your actions but is at the same time petty and capricious. “What if God were real but His rules were still dumb?”
Bakker assumes that a woman bearing sons, lowering her gaze and yielding to the requirements of men are all torments. His scene of the sole woman in the presence of a band of low and thuggish men offers insight into his view of female psychology:
She carried herself… with a kind of coy arrogance, as though she were the sole human in the presence of resentful apes. Let them grunt. Let them abuse themselves. She cared nothing for all the versions of her that danced or moaned or choked behind their primitive eyes—save that they made her, and all the possibilities that her breath and body offered, invaluable.
As a friend remarked, this is something no woman in such a situation has ever felt. But it gets worse. We have a scene wherein these thugs attempt to rape the woman. They end up all killing each other, somehow, but not before they get her clothes off. Likewise, we get a scene of the sorceress-princess fighting a dragon, naked, while it bellows a stream of inane innuendos. Naked women happen but this feels contrived.
If this portrayal of women weren’t enough, we could buttress our argument with the fact that the great darkness of the setting deploys millions of rape-orcs as its foot-soldiers. The inhuman creature that commands this horde, a sort of rape-pterodactyl with a hominid head stapled into its beak for communication, flaps around with its immense phallus uncovered. The simulacrum-human-spies the great darkness produces in laboratories constantly go about with throbbing erections—even the women. None of this is subtle.
Consider the elves.1 Thousands of years ago, they conquered the forces of the great darkness and forced the rape-pterodactyls to bestow their wondrous technological medicines, making the elves biologically immortal. Their enemies could still stab them to death but they had become free of senescence. Then, all the elf-women sickened and died. A lot of readers interpreted this as a pterodactyl plot but that would have been pretty careless of the reptiles. Why wouldn’t they make their fake cure kill all of their enemies?
The author insists the pterodactyls did not intend to kill the elf-women:
The simplest way to look at the Womb Plague is as a kluge. The Inchoroi are stuck with the remnants of a technology they can no longer understand… They attempted to give immortality to their Nonmen allies to begin with... realized afterward that their gift was fatal to their women.
Evidently, the nature and tools of evil are simply inimical to female nature. Women are pure that way.
Worse than mere delusion, Bakker’s outlook poisons his text. No one in these books is ever happy. It’s not wretched in the sense that bad things happen to good people. It’s that bad things happen to miserable people and how could it be otherwise when he rejects the fundamental nature of man’s dealings with woman? A fellow who suspects males possess a biological tendency towards “rape” and also believes that any sexual experience for women without “consent” to be sheer agony, will necessarily loathe ordinary human relations, and that bleeds into the narration. He presents evil not in human nature but in male nature, while giving men all the social and military power.
It’s as if you were to write Lord of the Rings as Saruman versus Sauron. The hobbits, the people we care about, lose no matter who wins. Not surprising that Bakker’s books ended up rather unpopular.
They’re not called elves in the text but close enough.
A book that so fundamentally misunderstands male and female nature that it could only ever have been written by someone calling himself a modern "philosopher".