Has Robert Jordan Ever Actually Met A Woman?*

[Shoegaze99]

Has The_Cosmic_Quest Ever Actually Met An American Woman?

 

[direghost]

My main problem with Jordan is that if everyone would just trust their closest allies and childhood friends and actually TALK this series would have been over in 5 or 6 books.

 

[The_Cosmic_Quest]

Has The_Cosmic_Quest Ever Actually Met An American Woman?

No.

 

[The_Cosmic_Quest]

how is it realistic? i know plenty of american women who are deeply irratated by jordan's potrayal and who think he doesn't know the first thing about women. sometimg i agree with.

The reason they are deeply irritated is because he exposes them.

 

[the_faery_queen]

you just sid you hadn't even met an american woman, so how can you say, with such confidence, that they hate it because it exposes them? sorry, but that's deeply untrue. people often hate something because its an unfair potrayal of them, their gender, their race, not because they see something in it that strikes home and they hate to admit it. sometimes that is the case, but not in this situation. i dislike jordan's women because they are shallow, flat composites, barbie dolls with changable names. there isn't a positive thing about any of them, not one strong, admirable trait. they are all pretty much the same, clothes obsessed, conceited, and arogant. i know many american women, and some are like that, on teh surface, and some aren't. but real people are deeper than jordan's characters, and not all women are the same, the way that jordan's are. to suggest that they are and that they are all the way jordan potrays is offensive, to me at least.

so, please, talk to an american woman, get to know them, meet them, before you decide that all american women are just like jordan's potrayal.

 

[Green]

I imagine he was just having a light-hearted joke. Or he was trying to wind you up.

 

[the_faery_queen]

hard to tell and to be honest, people shouldn't really make jokes, or try and wind up, other people they don't know.

 

[Green]

People shouldn't make jokes?

 

[the_faery_queen]

not jokes that are sexist or could cause offense, no. and i personally see this, if it is a joke, as rather sexist. here we are saying how badly written the women are in jordan's book, how annoying, and he/she is comparing american women to them and saying its accurate. its bound to cause offense to someone or just irratate peple and i dont think people should make jokes that are going to annoy other people.

especially when they're not partciuarly funny.

 

[Thadlerian]

I think the point was that people should be careful about making jokes of controversial themes (like gender and ethnicity) to people they don't know (and whose reactions they cannot foresee), especially when the context in which the joke is made is already strained (like the issue of gender prejudice which this thread is about).

Anyway, it's hard for me to say whether TCQ's statement was meant as a joke or not. But as a claim, it's one I've heard many times before. Robert Jordan is supposedly not being biased against women; he's rather exposing their "real selves", showing off some rare insight of the female mind. Some people claim Jordan is a very courageous writer for doing this.

Personally, I fail to see the courage in following a trend. Jordan's female characters are hardly unique. Upon reading Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, I recognized many tendencies I'd seen in WoT.

I can't take the idea, that one about Jordan exposing women's true selves, seriously. Comparing the WoT characters with real people I know, and characters in books by female novelists like Doris Lessing, Jordan seems rather out of touch with reality. But, in the end, I'm male, so it's ultimately hard to say for certain.

 

[Lacedaemonian]

Humour is the essence of life. However can people go easy with the inflammatory language. You know who you are.

 

[the_faery_queen]

well as a woman i can safely say i don't think the way his women do. and i don't know any women who do. ok sometimes all women go through the, men are idiots, stage, and some may go through the, we want to be dominated stage, but not all of us, and certainly not all the time and certainly not all together en masse, the way his women do. it seems laughable that this man can understand women better than actual women! and even if we do act that way, we are that way secretly inside, why is he putting it into a fantasy book? its not a philosphy/pyschology book, its fantasy. all he has done in revealling this 'hidden truth' is made a bunch of female characters that no one likes or cares about. i think that's a total mistake

personally, i think people cling to this idea because they dont' like to admit he messed up with a bunch of annoying women. i've seen arguments where pepel claim all his women are really different and the things they come up with, different likes and dislikes, are meant to make all the women individuals? im not just my likes and dislikes, im more than that. people are more than their preferences, they are made up of memories as well, of different ways of reacting, and feeling and expressing themselves. and other than nynaeve loosing her temper a lot, we don't really have any variety in teh woman like that. least of all any sign they've been influenced by things in their past to make them who they are now.

so in short, i think people will say wahtever they can, and believe whatever they want, about a writer they like, no matter how silly.

 

[jackokent]

it seems laughable that this man can understand women better than actual women!

Whilst I completely agree with 99% of everything you have said, I have a difficulty with the entire concept of understanding women, or men for that matter. I understand some poeople and not others. I don't think you can understand half the population as a whole. What is it about the womanness or manness that needs more understanding than peopleness. Yes I understand there are issues which pertain to gender but there are issues which pertain to cluture, social status, health etc that mark us apart just as differently. Any writer who catagorises a whole gender in the same way, wether they be men or women, has failed somewhat. And yes I know I have made up some words in this thread

 

[the_faery_queen]

i totally agree with you. people aren't just their gender, that's just part of it. and what annoyed me so much about jordan (well one thing among many) was that all his women were the same. no matter where they came from, their behaviour was pretty much the same. that's really not likely.

 

[ButtonPusher]

The reason why people particularly dislike Jordan is because he started his series off pretty well with the first few books; people thought yeah this is interesting and invested time reading his yarn only to find he gradually changes his style and content.
Even in the later books there are quite noticeable differences, particularly between the content of female and male dialogue. You want a conclusion instead you get an ever increasing deluge of crap writing interspacing the thread of the story.

Fantasy works best when the author has researched a bit about history and the mechanics required to live a world, even a fictional world, especially if it is set in an almost medieval/Dark Age replication. If it doesn’t then it falls to the level of a comic literature.

It has to be convincing; we can accept that people and things may have certain properties that do not exist in this world, however the world they inhabit also has to have things that are believable. If someone is just doing human things then it must be just that, human. A young Aiel maiden armed with a spear defeating a heavily armoured knight (Shienaran warriors), well that’s hard to imagine since he doesn’t describe the Aiel as being anything other than just human and that's without referring to the fact that all the Aiel, including the young and old, have the capacity to maintain a pace with a horse, even in long skirts.

There are too many anomalies like that which gradually erode the viability of what should have been a very good story and probably the craziest is: Spanking, Thrashing, stripped and turned upside down naked. I’m sure S&M fans love it but as sensible believable female interaction it’s just plain daft. And it’s not like there just little of this sadomasochism; it’s rampant. Jordan has all his female characters in all his various cultures in his books interact in this fashion, this kind of humiliation and domination are the legal tender of women. The guy was obviously a pervert or at least unconsciously; old men with young girls, young boy with older women, teenage bare breasts, bare bottoms, a lesbo fantasy world, this guy was a serious freak to write so copiously about such a dodgy subject all through the whole series. One of the main characters Egwene al’Vere in ‘The Gathering Storm’ now by Brandon Sanderson who continues with the theme, gets her backside tanned perpetually page after page, chapter after chapter it is so utterly relentless though it that it destroys the integrity and viability of this imaginary world. It’s laughable to read and it makes you wonder about the saddos that revere Jordan with almost blind religious euphoria.

 

[j d worthington]

I normally try to avoid the Jordan discussions, but I couldn't quite resist this one, as this is precisely what put me off Jordan loooong before The Wheel of Time, back when he was doing Howardian pastiche. I felt, with those, that he had a fairly good handle on Howard's Hyborian Age, a relatively good feel for the character of Conan, and created some interesting situations and effects... but his women! Ach! You had two types: the "whore-with-a-heart-of-gold" and the "castrating bitch" (e.g., Karela)... pretty much nothing in between. Karela had some possibilities, had she been more than a cardboard-cut-out before he got through with her, but at that point, I became so disgusted with his inability to create any female characters worthy of that label, that I threw my hands up and stopped reading anything the man wrote. REH certainly had his problems when it came to women in his fiction at times, but compared to Jordan, he was a dyed-in-the-wool radical feminist who could make Joanna Russ look like a misogynist....

 

[digs]

Well, put it this way; if I were Shai'tan I'd have re-sealed my own prison by now and think myself well out if it.

Hahaha!

When 'The Wheel of Time' began I very much enjoyed Mr Jordan's imaginary world. It was filled with all sorts of interesting and original ideas and his efforts to create roles other than 'Princess Waiting to be Rescued' for his female characters were laudable. However, something...strange...happened, the different women all became essentially the same person and now the series feels as though it is being written by someone's maiden aunt.

Yes! The first few books were fantastic. I'll always remember the scenes in book 1 (or was it book 2?) where Rand and Mat have to make their own way to Whitebridge (or...somewhere...I use the term 'always remember' loosely). So gripping, tense and tightly written. But then they fell into this slump of know-it-all women in overly-described clothing being angry at men, men being confused by women, and everyone generally being stupid and annoying. I love the world RJ created, but now I'm happy just to read summaries of the newer books.

***Speaking ofAes Sedai; don't you wish they'd remained ineffable and inscrutable rather than revealing themselves to be just as infantile and silly as every other woman - albeit with better skin?

Hahahahaha!

 

[dlsevern]

Maybe you are all just over-analysing this whole thing, I mean it is fiction and in the world he created, women happen to pretty much rule. In some ways it seems to me that he has actually reversed the roles of men and women in this society. Now, I'm not trying to start an argument here but women in general are whiny , think they are always right, and tend to throw temper tantrums when they don't get their way. I haven't met a woman that hasn't shown that side of her. Now, in Jordan's novels, with the roles reversed these undesirable qualities are escalated because women have more authority, sounds pretty accurate to me.

 

[digs]

Now, I'm not trying to start an argument here but women in general are whiny , think they are always right, and tend to throw temper tantrums when they don't get their way. I haven't met a woman that hasn't shown that side of her.

That's possibly the most volatile way of not starting an argument I've ever seen.

 

[HareBrain]

I don't think it will start an argument, though. Sensible people will just sigh and move on.