The complaint about sexism

[NitroS]

I see one of the biggest criticisms about the wheel of time is Sexism but i dont see how its much worse if any then real life.

 

In real life i always see girls my age talking about a guy when he starts talking to them saying things like "oh he just wants to get in your pants" "or he doesnt really care hes a male". I also work with middle aged ladies at work and being one of the few males (im 20) there they constantly criticize there husbands for being lazy because they are males or other related sexist comments such as oh im suprised you noticed i got a hair cut (because males dont normally notice that).

 

Then you hear males talking about women today and they often say the whole get back to the kitchen comment, cleaning etc. Girls just want to talk... Girls are boring etc.

 

Even 60+ years ago women werent even allowed to vote, didnt have equal wages rights and rarely worked.

 

 

 

Yet in the wheel of time you see women and male in equal power (age of legends men were equal with women which changed with the breaking ofcourse) but besides the odd comment of fool man or wool headed i dont find it to be all that bad? Whats your oppinion? are the book reviews just taking it to far, or do you agree with them?

[Rivirland]

There really is a lot of sexism, I think at least 50 times a book you can read 'that's what men always do', 'girls are this or that' etc. But I don't really dislike it, it's usually funny to read.

[Kahsm]

If RJ wants his characters to believe there are strict gender roles or stereotypes, all the power to him. As much as I wish it was, WoT is not a manual for life. I think I've got the flame and void down pat though.

[FarShainMael]

Men and women are different (no! really?? ) and they behave differently. It is not sexist to recognise this, even if some of those differences are less praiseworthy than others. Real sexism consists in mistreating, even punishing, one sex for its differences, making out that one sex is intrinsically inferior to the other.

 

Randland's problem is that 3000 years ago, male channellers went mad and broke the world. Women channellers took the ascendancy. Men had to be watched carefully for signs of channelling ability and its consequent madness. It's not good that this carried over somewhat into everyday relationships, but it's not surprising that it did.

 

 

(Oh, and btw, I'm female.)

[trakand_01]

I think some complainants get far too worked up about things that really aren't very important. And by that, I'm NOT saying that sexism isnt important - I'm saying that in my opinion, what we see in the books isnt what I would define as 'sexism'.

 

Sexism is the discrimination of a person on the basis of their gender, and that's not what we see. We see the women clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes because the men have been all brutish or rash, or we see the men clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes because the women are fretting over something or giving out orders. That's what happens in real life and it's not sexism. Even the wariness that the Aes Sedai have over the Asha'man isnt sexism - it's a genuine and valid concern given what happened only just out of living memory (for the Aes Sedai).

 

And to be honest, Jordan hams it up as well - I'm re-reading the series again and am only on the first book. Rand, Mat and Perrin are stereotypical late-teenagers. They oggle at girls, they pull pranks and they bob and duck to their superiors. Egwene's a stereotypical 16-going-on-30 year old, thinking she's superior to the boys, then giggling as hard as them when the gleeman comes to town.

 

Throughout all the books I think the main 'culprits' are probably Mat and Nynaeve although neither of them mean it harmfully. Mat may make comments about 'women' but he is, in every definition of the term, a lover of women. Nynaeve harshly admonishes men for doing whatever it is that annoys her - patronising her, most often - but almost every major act she has undertaken in the book has been in order to help a man - she left the village to help the boys (she didnt know Egwene had gone, I dont think), she healed Logain, she helped Rand cleanse the source and so on. None of those things were (initially) of benefit to her personally.

 

If I have to read a bit about how the men think the women are snooty and the women think the men are rough then so be it - at the end of the day, they are ;)

[FarShainMael]

This!!! ^^^

[rageofwar1978]

The one thing I noticed the most was that the men seemed to be consistantly good intentioned and a good deal of the time the woman seemed to think that a man could barely cross the tavern common room without getting himself into some kind of trouble that would not have happened if he would have just listened.

 

Many other times though you also see a sincere appreciation of men in general by women and vice versa. The overbearing attitude held by many of the female characters is often almost motherly or at least sisterly. Other then a few of the obvious bad guys (and mat) most men seem to be chivalrous to the extent that some will take wounds some fatal simply to avoid hurting or endangering a woman.

 

A number of years when I was much younger I read some of the latter books at the time and felt that there were a lot more situations when it seemed that the females were almost too much but as ive gotten older and married I see some of the attitudes and understand them very differently.

 

anyways just my two coppers.

[Hybrid]

Other then a few of the obvious bad guys (and mat) most men seem to be chivalrous to the extent that some will take wounds some fatal simply to avoid hurting or endangering a woman.

 

Why exclude Mat?

[trakand_01]

Personally I think Mat's probably the most chivalrous guy we've met, just about. He grunts and grumbles about having to rescue women, but he does it, again and again.

[Kahsm]

Personally I think Mat's probably the most chivalrous guy we've met, just about. He grunts and grumbles about having to rescue women, but he does it, again and again.

 

Yes, but he also assumes he'll have to rescue them because they're women, before he knows that they're actually in trouble. I think that's the "problem" if you believe there is a problem. And again, I do not.

 

Edit: Also, refusing to hurt women is also sexist. FYI. Just like affirmative-action/employment-equity programs are racist. It's just the other side of the same coin. Not saying they're bad or good, but it's still pre-judgement based on race/gender.

[lilltempest]

Edit: Also, refusing to hurt women is also sexist. FYI. Just like affirmative-action/employment-equity programs are racist. It's just the other side of the same coin. Not saying they're bad or good, but it's still pre-judgement based on race/gender.

 

^^ This. Times a billion. Though I feel that giving someone "special" treatment based on gender/race/religion/etc. is wrong and is forcing the idea that whoever is getting the special treatment is somehow incapable of fending for themselves. And that is coming from a woman who works in a male-dominated industry. That said...

 

The "sexism" demonstrated from the WoT men to the WoT women ("I can't hurt a woman!") is something that is taught to them from birth BY WOMEN! Women are to be obeyed. Women are to be protected. You shouldn't slap a woman even if she slaps you back. Blah blah blah blah blah. Teaching a man that he cannot stand up to a woman, whether it's to defend himself or simply because she's being a complete and utter wench, then being surprised when he thinks he should jump in front of a speeding train to keep her from getting harmed when she's standing on the tracks is laughable. We see, consistently, that in Westlands women's lives are shown as being worth more than men's lives, and the women (other than getting huffy when a man pulls their bacon off the coals because it's a blow to their ego that they might have needed help) have no problem with men dying for them. To whine about sexism when you're the one encouraging a certain type of behavior is not just hypocritical, but it makes you a complete jerk.

 

The women of WoT, in general, have huge chips on their shoulders. They want to be treated as though they are superior to men (every last one of them save Birgitte!) and will resort to manipulation or, when that doesn't work, violence (hitting men, threatening men, using the One Power against men, throwing rocks at men) if they feel the men are not being submissive enough to them all the while condemning men for "thinking with the hair on their chests". It was funny the first few times it happened, but like any joke, it wore thin quickly, especially when we don't see any woman who actually has a different view (other than Birgitte, who comes from a different age and Nynaeve, who actually grew into a sensible person). It makes the women look like a bunch of sheep, all with the same attitude and refusing to change.

 

What makes it even more irritating is this attitude from the WoT women that it somehow demeans them to ask for or accept help from a man unless the men helped because the woman ordered that he do so. It makes them seem ridiculously insecure and childish to anyone who has any life experience whatsoever. We all need help now and then, and family and friends are the ones we look to for that help, even if it's just helping us to carry a freaking couch from one room of the house to another. Yet the WoT women act like they are too good to accept help and are insulted when anyone tries to save their ungrateful asses from what aears to be certain doom. I swear, most of the women in the series could be shielded, on fire, have gasoline poured on them, and be a heartbeat from death, but if a man happened to hurry to their side to quench the fire, they'd be yelling at him for sticking his nose in and insulting or punching him for daring to insinuate they needed his help - but if a man wandered up and hesitated risking his own life to save the wench, there'd be ten more beating on him for letting the burning wench die. He can't win. As I said above, the WoT women are a bunch of childish brats.

[David Selig]

The "sexism" demonstrated from the WoT men to the WoT women ("I can't hurt a woman!") is something that is taught to them from birth BY WOMEN!

Is that really established? After all, the worst case by far in the "Never hurt a woman" department is Rand, and he can barely remember his (step)mother, pretty much his whole upbringing was done by Tam.

[FarShainMael]

It strikes me that - with a single exception which I'll mention in a mo - that if you inverted the situation in the books, swapping men for women throughout, you'd have something not all that far off the 'real-world' attitudes of men to women, at least perhaps as far as WW2. I suspect this may have been exactly RJ's intention.

 

The exception is the 'protection of women' thing, which I still contend is a biological imperative to protect childbearers for the continuation of the human race.

 

PS to lilltempest: I am a retired electronics engineer, which is a male-dominated profession.

[lilltempest]

The "sexism" demonstrated from the WoT men to the WoT women ("I can't hurt a woman!") is something that is taught to them from birth BY WOMEN!

Is that really established? After all, the worst case by far in the "Never hurt a woman" department is Rand, and he can barely remember his (step)mother, pretty much his whole upbringing was done by Tam.

 

I got the feeling that, in Emond's Field, the whole village basically teaches the children how to behave. Besides, look at Perrin and Mat. They're just as bad as Rand. Mat would as soon die as kill a woman who is a Darkfriend!

 

All three come from a village where leadership is divided by gender and the male group can be pushes around by the women's group but the men have no say in the women's group, so it's clear where the true power lies. Throw in the fact that punishment seems to be doled out by the women most times and I'd say that the women have a huge hand in shaping the views of the children of Emond's Field.

 

Also, Andor, in general, is extremely sexist against males as well (the throne has to be held by a woman and the royal "males" are taught to be lapdogs for the queen to be). The people of Andor are almost as bad as the Borderlanders, where women are all but put on pedestals and worshiped. Hell, Malkieri men don't even get a say in who they have sex with. If a woman orders them to bed, they go. Poor Nynaeve. I wonder if they're allowed to say no if they're married?

[Hybrid]

Personally I think Mat's probably the most chivalrous guy we've met, just about. He grunts and grumbles about having to rescue women, but he does it, again and again.

 

Hey, long time, no see.

[Morsker]

It's the WoT story itself that's sexist, not just the more petty behavior of some of the characters. Men need women for guidance, or they'll do idiotic things like run off and get themselves killed, or whatever. Women only rarely need a bit of help from men, never advice, and even there RJ overcompensates against cliches about women needing "rescuing" that he makes the women need help hardly at all. Where are the disasters Cadsuane or Egwene or the Wise Ones will cause, if they don't listen to men? The disasters men will cause if they don't do the reverse are all over the plot!

 

This isn't just world-building the consequences of saidin being tainted, for two reasons. First, RJ claimed that with the exception of Far Madding's matriarchy, he was trying to write a world with gender equality. He clearly failed. Second, it's not just in-world discrimination against men, and in-world stereotypes that they need guidance. The men RJ writes actually need that guidance and help, and the women he writes don't. The sexism is deeper than world-building, and can't be excused by it. The story is extremely sexist.

[rageofwar1978]

my exclusion of mat came solely from his activities in carousing in the later books forgive me if i was unclear. :0)

[rageofwar1978]

my exclusion of mat came solely from his activities in carousing in the later books forgive me if i was unclear. :0)

[Hybrid]

my exclusion of mat came solely from his activities in carousing in the later books forgive me if i was unclear. :0)

 

I was wondering why you would exclude Mat from the category of men who would accept harm to their own body before hurting a woman. Thanks for the clarification.

[Ashlyn]

my exclusion of mat came solely from his activities in carousing in the later books forgive me if i was unclear. :0)

 

I was wondering why you would exclude Mat from the category of men who would accept harm to their own body before hurting a woman. Thanks for the clarification.

 

I don't think you can exclude Mat based on his carousing. After all, he only chases women who want to be chased, so I don't see the issue.

 

As for the general problem of sexism: have to agree with most of what has been said. I understand that RJ's intention was to write a gender equal world, but he ended up leaning too far to the other side again (what's the word for female chauvinists? and no, it itsn't feminist...)

[Guest Emu on the Loose]

I see one of the biggest criticisms about the wheel of time is Sexism but i dont see how its much worse if any then real life.

That’s an interesting remark. You’re starting a topic about sexism in WoT by conceding that it’s present but arguing that it’s not as bad as real-world sexism, and therefore not an issue.

 

This is an example of the “tu quoque” (lit. “you’re another”) logical fallacy, meaning that your reasoning is invalid. Let me give you an illustration:

 

Person A: WoT is sexist.

Person B: Yeah, but that’s not a problem because the real world is more sexist.

 

That kind of reasoning simply doesn’t work. Whether or not real-world sexism is worse than sexism in WoT (and it is), the sexism in WoT is still a problem because it colors the story in a way that makes it difficult to appreciate the story in the way it was intended. More broadly, stories tarnished by the author’s sexism help to preserve society’s sexism problems by reinforcing readers’ own sexism, as we shall see in this very thread.

 

Before I go any farther it needs to be pointed out that WoT has two kinds of sexism. The first is “in-character” sexism. That’s where the RJ was writing sexist traits into his characters. That kind of sexism is not a problem; it’s a part of the story. Sexism is a real phenomenon, and depicting sexist characters or sexist societies is realistic, especially for a world with the technological level and historical traditions of Randland, and, until recently, the Taint.

 

It’s the second kind of sexism, the “out-of-character” sexism, that’s a problem. Out-of-character sexism is where RJ himself presented the story in a sexist way. For instance, he depicted both of the world’s two deities as male, and depicted the strongest, most dextrous male channelers as superior to the strongest, most dextrous female channelers. Those are just two examples of what makes a rather long list. The easiest way to spot out-of-character sexism is this: Whenever you are able to make broad generalizations and/or predictions about people’s behavior or character solely on the basis on their sex, you are looking at the author’s sexism and not the story’s. This test reveals quite a lot of out-of-character sexism in WoT, and people upthread have already affirmed that by the ease with which they have discussed males as a group and females as a group in WoT.

 

This little rule-of-thumb is not exhaustive. There are instances of the author’s sexism which that test will not pick up. But it’s an easy rule, and the burden of proof is low.

 

There’s another thing that needs to be pointed out. Some people upthread have mistaken sexism for misogyny. They’re thinking that when we talk about sexism we only mean the mistreatment of women. That’s incorrect. Sexism refers to discrimination against anyone, by anyone, on the basis of the victim’s sex—regardless of the sexes of the people involved. WoT has a lot of misogyny (sexism against women) but also a lot of misandry (sexism against men).

 

Lastly, before moving on I want to point out that sometimes the in-character sexism and the out-of-character sexism overlap. For example, one could argue that the prevalence of the whole “men are rough” and “women are snooty” stereotypes is an example not only of RJ’s own sexism but of cross-cultural sexism in Randland. That’s a plausible argument, although weakened somewhat by the behavior of cultures off the main continent, such as the Seanchan and the Sea Folk. Even though these cultures share a common ancestor, we would expect the passage of time to bring about different expressions of sexism in each culture, and to the extent that, say, Seanchan sexism resembles that of Randland, what you’re seeing is indisputably RJ’s out-of-character sexism—the bad stuff.

 

All right. Moving on...

 

In real life i always see girls my age talking about a guy when he starts talking to them saying things like "oh he just wants to get in your pants" "or he doesnt really care hes a male". I also work with middle aged ladies at work and being one of the few males (im 20) there they constantly criticize there husbands for being lazy because they are males or other related sexist comments such as oh im suprised you noticed i got a hair cut (because males dont normally notice that).

 

Then you hear males talking about women today and they often say the whole get back to the kitchen comment, cleaning etc. Girls just want to talk... Girls are boring etc.

 

Even 60+ years ago women werent even allowed to vote, didnt have equal wages rights and rarely worked.

All of this is an illustration of the sexism problems in the real world, leading to the fallacy:

 

Yet in the wheel of time you see women and male in equal power (age of legends men were equal with women which changed with the breaking ofcourse) but besides the odd comment of fool man or wool headed i dont find it to be all that bad? Whats your oppinion? are the book reviews just taking it to far, or do you agree with them?

Real-world sexism is a lot worse than WoT’s. I have described RJ as a transitional writer. He was well aware of the changing social mores on sex and gender, and of the sexism in previous fantasy works—which often excluded females from most adventure roles. I honestly think his heart was in the right place, and I give him credit for trying to do right by WoT when it came to sexism. He largely failed, but I commend him for thinking that it was worth trying.

 

 

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There really is a lot of sexism, I think at least 50 times a book you can read 'that's what men always do', 'girls are this or that' etc. But I don't really dislike it, it's usually funny to read.

I’m not sure what you mean by “funny.” If you mean it’s worthy of eye-rolling, I agree. If you mean it’s cute, I don’t. And if you mean it’s humorous...well, then we have different tastes.

 

For me, the sexism in WoT is one of my biggest complaints about the series. Probably many people don’t mind it, because they’re not sensitive to the evils of sexism. Maybe some people find it humorous, much the same way as little children find farts humorous. But most people who give thought to sexism, or who must deal with the consequences of it, or who work to delegitimize it, don’t appreciate it showing up as an author bias in the stories they read.

 

 

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Men and women are different (no! really?? ) and they behave differently. It is not sexist to recognise this, even if some of those differences are less praiseworthy than others. Real sexism consists in mistreating, even punishing, one sex for its differences, making out that one sex is intrinsically inferior to the other.

 

Randland's problem is that 3000 years ago, male channellers went mad and broke the world. Women channellers took the ascendancy. Men had to be watched carefully for signs of channelling ability and its consequent madness. It's not good that this carried over somewhat into everyday relationships, but it's not surprising that it did.

 

 

(Oh, and btw, I'm female.)

I don’t enjoy having to single you out like this, especially since I tend to like your contributions to the forum, but your post here is probably the worst example of sexism and sexist apologetics in the whole thread so far. I hope you’ll read this rather lengthy post to get a sense of how you might look at things another way.

 

Men and women—or, more properly, males and females—are anatomically and physiologically different. That much is true. Relative to our immediate cousins on the family tree, our sexual dimorphism is moderate but significant. Females can do some things that males cannot, and vice versa. Menstruation is one example.

 

But my reading of your post makes me think that that’s not really the argument you’re making. Instead, I think you’re claiming that people inherently have broad anthropological behavioral differences because of their sex, on the basis of your perception that the sexes behave differently. If I am reading you incorrectly, then my apologies. This still should be an interesting post.

 

If I am reading you tight, however, then your argument is invalidated by a logical fallacy. In fact, it’s actually no less than three logical fallacies and a cognitive bias.

 

The first logical fallacy is called “cum hoc, ergo propter hoc” (lit. “with this, therefore because of this”), or more popularly “correlation does not prove causation.” Males and females do have behavioral differences, demonstrably, but this does not prove that those differences are genetic (i.e., in their nature). I’ll give you an example of the fallacy:

 

Person A: Men tend to prefer the color blue and women tend to prefer the color pink.

Person B: Yes, I wonder why.

Person A: It’s genetic, of course.

 

Except, no, it’s not genetic. This example is nice because it illustrates the ridiculousness of the logic that any differences between the sexes are genetic. Colors? Seriously? Yet, believe it or not, I have actually heard people try and argue that men prefer blue and women prefer pink for genetic reasons. It’s pretty embarrassing, really.

 

Pink and blue are just colors, and our social mores have evolved to say that pink is feminine. That scares off people who want to be masculine, not because they have a gene telling them “Look out, it’s PINK!” but rather because they are savvy to social cues, and societies have historically imposed strong divisions on the sexes on the basis of cues. (Why societies impose these divisions is a story for another day; basically it comes down to control and status.) It could be any two colors, really, or it could other things entirely, like steak and chicken. In any case the point is to have something which says “masculine” and something else which says “feminine,” so that people can orient themselves with the society’s demands. But doing this represses the people whose personal preferences run contrary to the social mores. What if a male wants to wear pink? What if a female wants to eat a huge steak? If they did, both of them would be mocked by large numbers of people in the United States who think that those behaviors should be limited to the other sex. Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer got thrown in a mental institution for wearing a pink shirt to work? (He went on to meet another inmate who claimed to be Michael Jackson.) It’s real enough of a problem that our comedians are satirizing it.

 

More than a century of scientific inquiry into the question has suggested, rather conclusively at this point, that most behavioral differences between the sexes are conditional, the result of social shaping on individuals, and are not a function of sex. This makes your first fallacy particularly significant.

 

(I know, I know. Quotes! Citations! Prove it! Where’re the scientific studies?! But I just went through this in the Lanfear Appreciation Thread and I am thoroughly sick and tired of that kind of red herring. If you’re curious about the support for my arguments, Google is your friend. It’s not hard to find the news articles and scientific papers looking into the roles of nature versus nurture when it comes to the differences between the sexes.)

 

Males and females do have some sex-specific (i.e., genetic) behavioral differences. These occur below the cognitive level. In other words, we don’t consciously think about them. (That point will become important later.) I mentioned menstruation earlier, as one example, and then I concluded that you weren’t talking about such basic stuff as that. Whether or not you were, this “basic stuff” is all you’re going to find when it comes to sex-specific behavioral differences.

 

Non-cognitive behaviors fall into one of two categories. There are physiological behaviors, such as menstruation, and there are instinctual behaviors, such as having sex. For practical purposes, we can combine the two and consider them as one group, standing in contrast to cognitive behaviors. Human beings were originally wild animals, and our non-cognitive behaviors overwhelmingly concern survival—because it’s so urgent and important. Other non-cognitive behaviors concern socialization and reproduction, both of which are also very important.

 

Some examples of non-cognitive behavior include sweating, coughing, scratching, flinching, putting out our hands when we fall, blinking when something comes at our eyes, and getting tense when we perceive danger. All of these occur in both sexes. Why? Because the impetus for these behaviors affects both sexes. All humans need to cool down when they are too hot. All humans need to remove harmful parasites from their skin. All humans need to protect their eyes, or else face enormous survival disadvantages. (In the wild, it would have been a death sentence.) So, none of this stuff is going to be sex-specific.

 

To get to the sex-specific stuff, you have to look at the dimorphism in our species. How are male and female bodies different? Different bodies lead to different behaviors. Well, all sex-specific differences in the human body relate to reproduction.

 

The most significant differences are that only females gestate and give birth to, and then suckle newborn humans. That latter distinction was significant enough to scientists to inspire them to create the word “mammal,” which refers to the class of animals who, among other things, nurse their young with milk from the mammary glands.

 

(Trivia: Our galaxy is also named after lactation: the Milky Way, referring to the milky ribbon of stars comprising the disc of our galaxy as it appears in the night sky. The word galaxy itself literally means “milky way.” You may recognize that through the cognates lactose, the galactose, sugars which come from milk. Clearly, our ancestors thought that lactation was a very important behavior, and of course it was for females only, which amplified its mystique and further “justified” the social divisions between the sexes which have caused so much suffering.)

 

Most of the other bodily differences between the sexes are minimal, both in terms of the human body’s functions and also in terms of the behavior which results from those bodily functions. Both sexes have distinct primary and secondary sexual characteristics which enable sexual identification for the purposes of mating.

 

Now, you were talking about behavioral differences in the sexes, and presumably anthropologically significant ones. Other than female gestation and lactation, to my knowledge there is only one other significant bodily difference that can be said to have had a cardinal influence on the development of our civilization. That difference is male aggressiveness.

 

Humans are aggressive animals. It’s not just a trait of males. All of us are hunters. All of us have the strength and agility to dominate our prey. It is a myth, and patronizing, that only males do this while females go out and pick berries. Female humans are very strong, so far as animals go, and the fact that they are less strong on average than male humans obscures the fact that they’re stronger than most other species. Only the great predators can prey on humans, regardless of humans’ sex.

 

We can also clash with each other, for status and position, and, like most species with predatory characteristics, we often do. This aggression does not only take the form of physical violence, but physical violence supersedes other forms of aggression, such as verbal confrontation, emotional manipulation, and sneaking.

 

(This brings us another example of out-of-character sexism in WoT. RJ consistently wrote many of his female characters as bossy, snobby, inconsiderate jerks. That is to say, they are very aggressive and relied very heavily on non-physical confrontation, due to their sex, but would not be able to back that up with physical strength, also due to their sex. This strongly implies female inferiority relative to the males, many of whom “speak softly and carry a big stick,” eschewing non-physical confrontation and resorting to physical confrontation only when forced. This connotes restraint and dignity, which the female characters broadly lack in favor of vanity and pettiness. This is sexist and unrepresentative of human nature. While males do resort to physical violence more readily than females in an attempt to solve problems, both sexes utilize non-physical forms of aggression equally. And males regularly impose themselves on females using physical force—something RJ has declined to explore except in the truly odious example of Shaidar Haran raping most of the female Forsaken—but none of the male ones, which itself is another example of out-of-character sexism in WoT.)

 

Despite the fact that all humans are predisposed to aggression, males have greater musculature and greater physical aggressiveness, having evolved that way to compete with each other for the opportunity to mate with females, and then subjugate and successfully mate with the females whom they desired enough to compete for in the first place. (Males would be much more female-like in terms of strength, height, and body fat were it not for this evolutionary vector.)

 

This is where sexism began. Throughout history, males have had the means to consistently best females in physical strength, and many have had the desire to use that leverage to gain power over females. This reality predates even the dawn of civilization. Male aggressiveness taints some male behavior, especially among young adult males who are under stress and have had a violent or violence-glorifying upbringing. This shows up not only in domestic abuse and sexual assault against females, but also in gang violence and male-on-male sexual assault, both of which are common in prisons, the military, and other male-segregated environments. It also shows up in more subtle ways, like aggressive driving. I’ll return to that point shortly.

 

With civilization, people have built a world which values human rights and respects many forms of power as superior to physical strength, with the result that females have slowly (and bloodily) moved toward sexual equality. Today, technology and education enable the sexes to compete as equals in everything except sports which rely on raw physical strength.

 

This is a good opportunity to point out that the female body is physically capable of every form of work that humanity has yet devised, including those such as military combat which sexists have argued that females cannot perform. RJ got it right with WoT by putting females into every type of job role. On the other hand, Randland is divided, weak, and on the brink of collapse, so it’s possible that RJ thought it was unnatural for females to inhabit these roles. But I doubt it.

 

With some females becoming chess grandmasters, navy admirals, bodybuilders, pastors, corporate executives, film directors, firefighters, computer engineers, fishing boat captains, architects, and airplane pilots—and, likewise, with some males becoming homemakers, interior designers, group therapists, nurses, schoolteachers, daycare aides, flight attendants, and dancers—there’s just no way to honestly make an accurate generalization about the genetic nature of the sexes without being forced to add a truckload of asterisks acknowledging the exceptions to the so-called rule, which is actually another logical fallacy called the “overwhelming exception.” (Remember, I’ve been talking about the logical fallacies and cognitive bias in your argument. This is fallacy number two.) And this is just with regards to career paths. When you try and generalize about people on the basis of sex, the full spectrum of human nature forces you to add more and more asterisks until at some point you can’t help but realize that a person’s sex tells you almost nothing about them. Here is an illustration of the overwhelming exception:

 

Person A: All women are bad drivers. Except for the vast majority of them.

 

We’ve all heard people who make that claim and are serious about it. It’s very common for people to make claims about the entire female sex on the basis of the actions, perhaps situational, of a few specific females. It’s also common for people to make claims about the entire male sex in a similar fashion, though not as common.

 

Most people don’t appreciate that generalizations aren’t valid when they’re full of exceptions, or aren’t accurate, or are based on insufficient evidence. Yet most of the supposed differences between the sexes fall into one or more of these three categories, and people persist in their erroneous beliefs.

 

Any sex-specific generalization which imputes certain characteristics to a person on the basis of sex must apply to all the members of that sex, and none of the members of the other sex, except for people with certain diseases or conditions. Let me put it another way: If a sex-specific difference is genetically based, then (virtually) all the members of one sex will have it, and (virtually) none of the members of the other sex will have it. If that condition isn’t met, it’s not a genetically based sex-specific difference. Only females menstruate. Only males get huge doses of testosterone (from their own bodies, anyway).

 

Thus, when it comes to something like “Women are bad drivers,” either it’s true of the entire female sex and not true of the entire male sex, or it’s an invalid statement. And in this case we have pretty overwhelming evidence to suggest that it’s a completely bogus claim. Indeed, females are actually better drivers than males, at least if the insurance companies are doing their jobs right (which is a lot to ask, I know).

 

Nevertheless, societies have long held the view that females are bad drivers. In the early days of the automobile it was uncouth for females to drive cars at all, if not outright forbidden. Why on Earth would a society think that a female shouldn’t drive a car? I’m not talking about places like the Islamic hellhole of Saudi Arabia, where females are barred from driving for reasons of religious purity, but rather places like our own United States of America. It was because people thought that females couldn’t handle it—didn’t have the concentration, the strength, the nerve, whatever.

 

(WoT time: Driving has always shunned female participation, and that transcends the horseless carriage. If any of you are familiar with the horse world, females were long excluded from riding and driving horses, and even today you will see the hardcore traditionalists ride a hose sidesaddle to avoid the “unseemliness” of spreading their legs to sit on the horse. In WoT, I thankfully do not recall any instances of sidesaddle riding, but we often hear of female characters changing into “divided skirts” or some such article of clothing in order to ride a horse without giving up their “appropriate” feminine attire. In a society where one sex has to have special clothes to ride a horse and the other doesn’t, that’s a dead giveaway of sexism. Whether it’s in-character or out-of-character sexism, or both, is up for debate.)

 

A correct form of the statement is: “Some people are bad drivers.” And that’s true; some people are. But femalekind as a whole is not.

 

Nor is malekind as a whole. The reason that males are worse drivers on average than female drivers is that the behavior of driving a car is affected by one’s level of aggression, and males—especially younger males—are exposed to male hormones which considerably boost their level of aggression. The reason males are not universally worse drivers than females is that driving is a very complex activity, with multiple factors influencing it. One of these factors is a driver’s level of aggression. Males get exposed to male hormones, but this affects individual males differently. Meanwhile, females also have “male” hormones in their bodies, and both sexes can derive aggression from sources other than male hormones. Other factors include a driver’s temperament, individual circumstances, vehicular skills, and experience on the road.

 

Another particularly important factor influencing drivers is that, even though the human body has relatively few differences between the sexes, human societies treat the sexes very differently indeed. In a sexist society, males can be pressured to feel they are supposed to drive aggressively, that it is masculine and therefore desirable to do so, and that to exercise prudence is to be a wuss.

 

To be continued...

[Guest Emu on the Loose]

And now the exciting conclusion!

 

I mentioned earlier that it was important to distinguish between cognitive behaviors and non-cognitive behaviors. That’s because our civilization is much more abstract and complex than the animal lifestyles which preceded it, and requires a cognitive skill set found equally and near-identically in both sexes. This is a difficult point but a crucial one: Most of what we do in our everyday lives draws heavily upon conscious thought. Dimorphism in the brain, especially the parts of the brain which deal with conscious thought, is minimal. Driving a car may be influenced slightly by male aggressiveness, a sex-specific distinction that occurs only in males, but that influence is just one of many that come together to comprise the process of driving a car—a sophisticated and abstract activity which bears little semblance to our animal past, and whose competencies are almost entirely not sex-specific.

 

So, if not a genetically-based sex-specific difference, what do you call it when females on average are better drivers than males?

 

That’s a question with many iterations. People who insist that there are many differences between the sexes are usually talking about stuff like driving a car, where statistics show that one sex is better than or different from the other in a statistically significant way. Given that I have articulated (hopefully) that there are rather few sex-specific differences in the human genome, how do we account for differences like females being better drivers, or males earning more money?

 

Most of these differences can be immediately ascribed to social factors. Thus they are not true differences between the sexes, but artifacts of sexism in the society.

 

Sometimes there are underlying genetic factors, such as in the case of male drivers. In these cases, differences in the sexes tend to decrease the farther away the behavior is from the realm of sexual reproduction. The male prevalence in committing rapes is highly dependent upon sex-specific differences, while the male prevalence in writing the soundtracks for movies is minimally dependent upon sex-specific differences. It is helpful to note when sex-specific differences play a meaningful role in broader anthropological differences between the sexes, but it is considerably more helpful, and will come up much more often in a much bigger and more complex way, to note when sexism plays a meaningful role in those anthropological differences between the sexes.

 

At any rate, as to what you could call it when there is a difference between the sexes but it isn’t really the result of genetic differences, go ahead and call it a “difference between the sexes” if you like, but don’t impute or imply any underlying difference in the actual nature of females and males where there is none to be substantiated. More appropriately, however, you could call these kinds of differences gendered. Whereas the concept of biological sex concerns the actual human physiology deriving from traits dependent upon the human sex chromosomes, the concept of gender concerns human social perceptions regarding differences between the sexes (whether those perceptions are valid or not). To put it more simply, sex is biological and gender is sociological.

 

It’s a progressive use of language, but more accurate and much more helpful in understanding these issues. (You may have noticed my preference of the words “male” and “female” rather than “man” and “woman” in this post. That’s because I have almost exclusively been talking about human biology so far.)

 

Speaking of gender, let’s move away from biology for a bit and talk about popular misconceptions. What generalizations do you know about the behaviors of the sexes that apply to all members of one sex and no members of the other? It’s much easier to answer this for WoT than for the real world, because WoT is filled with sexist caricaturization and simplification which has the effect of presenting strong differences between the sexes. In the real world, in contrast, once you put on your scientist’s hat and evaluate society objectively, it’s very hard to find sex-specific differences which pertain entirely to one sex and not at all to the other.

 

Not that people don’t try. When you go and ask this question to people who are uneducated on the subject, they rarely start talking about stuff like “males have lower voices” and “females have more fat.” Instead, they usually come up with a list of “common knowledge” anthropological behavioral differences between the sexes. What they don’t realize is that the common knowledge is ignorant and those differences are myths which are either wrong outright or technically correct but wrongly applied. Let’s go through some myths.

 

I already mentioned the myth that females are bad drivers, a myth that is flat-out wrong. Another myth is that males have an instinctive drive to protect females. Unlike the myth about driving, this myth is not entirely wrong. It is mostly wrong, though, by virtue of being too narrow. Males have an instinctive drive to protect people who they mate with, people they desire to mate with, and offspring. So there is a drive, but it is not geared toward “females.” Meanwhile, females also have that same drive—they too are driven to protect mates and offspring. Wendi Deng did it the other day when an agitator attacked her husband, Rupert Murdoch, as he spoke to the British parliament. Females are as fiercely protective as males when they have cause to be. There is plenty of individual variation about just how fierce that protective streak is, but the variation does not fall along sexual lines. It’s certainly not unique to males, and the only reason that males claim it for their own is that they are physically stronger and have made the rules in every society until the modern day—because, until modern times, strength was the ultimate arbiter of political power, even more so than money. If the people in power say “That’s how it is,” well, what are you going to do about it?

 

Another myth is that females like consensus-based leadership and males like assertive singular leadership. That’s another one of the myths that is isn’t totally wrong, but is nearly so. When it comes to people’s views on leadership, social structure, hierarchical organization, and the like, you will find much stronger levels of attraction to given models of power on the basis of cultural values than on sex. For instance, as a staunch Emucrat I prefer flightless leadership that gets out of its pen and causes mischief around the town before ultimately being lassoed by the sherrif.

 

However, that male aggressiveness does show up again here, which is why the myth is not totally wrong. Males who are dominated by their aggressive tendencies are likely to prefer competitive, rigidly hierarchical leadership, because that is what human malekind evolved toward in our animal past. I would wager, however, that most males who are seriously thoughtful about the political process in government or in business would have views that do not rely upon their hormones.

 

A final myth is the one that RJ himself illustrated in WoT: Males are coarse, clueless, and stubborn, but underneath it are gentle-natured and well-meaning, while females are snooty, overbearing, and antagonistic but underneath it are lovestruck, loyal, and meltingly sweet. This one is totally false. These kinds of personality traits are only minimally informed by sex if at all; they overwhelmingly derive from other sources, both genetic and environmental.

 

Your third and final logical fallacy is called “cherry picking.” In this fallacy, you are preferentially highlighting differences between people of different sexes while ignoring differences between people of the same sex.

 

Consider (one last time) the male hormones testosterone and androgen. These hormones have male names: Testosterone comes from “testes” and androgen comes from “andro-,” the prefix which means “male.” The reason they have male names is that researchers originally found them in males. These hormones, among their many other functions, promote muscular development and physical aggression.

 

Yet they are not truly male. Female bodies produce these hormones as well, and they can be medically administered into anyone’s body. Additionally, hormone levels vary over the course of an individual’s lifespan, and also vary situationally.

 

Let’s look at testosterone. On average, testosterone levels are about ten times higher in males than in females. There is essentially no overlap on the bell curve: males with the lowest testosterone levels still have about three times as much as females with the highest levels.

 

So, the lesson here is that males and females are more different from each other in testosterone than they are from members of their own sex, right? Wrong! The highest testosterone levels in males are four times that of the lowest testosterone levels in males. The difference between the highest and lowest male levels is 33 percent larger than than the difference between the highest female levels and the lowest male levels, or, in absolute terms, 900 nanograms per deciliter and 205 nanograms per deciliter, respectively.

 

The healthy ranges of testosterone are 300 to 1200 in males, and 30 to 95 in females. Assuming a bell curve that hasn’t got any big-time shenanigans going on, somewhere between one-third and half of males are closer to more females than males in their testosterone levels.

 

What does all this statistical gobbledegook mean? It means that, if you were tempted to believe that testosterone is a significant behavioral influence (and by some measures it is), then males have nearly as many differences between each other as they do between females.

 

That’s a very eye-opening truth. There are indeed many, many differences between the sexes...but there are just as many differences within the sexes. Why is that? It’s because the vast majority of differences between humans has nothing to do with sex, and when two people of different sexes have other differences it is purely coincidental. We have 1 sex chromosome pair in the human genome, and 22 non-sex pairs. Sociologically, we have the instruments of sexism to impress differences upon the sexes, and every other aspect of society to impress differences upon people without regard to sex.

 

Sex as the golden measure of the differences between two people is vastly narrow, inferior, and incomplete. People highlight the differences between the sexes and ascribe great importance to them, yet often give little or no thought to other differences. Oh, sometimes we talk about red states versus blue states, and the poor versus the rich, and religious versus not religious, but most of our differences have no social framework around them, no convenient labels and references. My interests in books, films, and music, my life experiences and childhood upbringing, the cities where I have lived, the way my brain is geared to learn, the people I have met...these things are responsible for far more differences in me than my sex is.

 

To say nothing of the far vaster similarities between us and between all people...we are so much more alike than different.

 

Finally, the cognitive bias in your argument is called “confirmation bias.” Related to the cherry picking fallacy, this bias predisposes people to reinforce their views by framing issues in terms which support those views, and by seeking out sources of information which corroborate those views. I have interacted with a lot of people who talk about sexism and the differences between those sexes, and I can see right away that their intellectual grasp of the issue is very rigid because it is so insulated. Open-minded consideration of the issue leads to one, inescapable conclusion which enthralls those of us who discover it: The differences between the sexes are small, and insignificant for most purposes.

 

Sex should not inform us as to how we should treat a person, nor should we treat a person differently because of their sex (except when it comes to having sex with people, in which case we limit ourselves to the people of the sex(es) to which we are oriented). If a male wants to wear a pink skirt or a female wants to command an aircraft carrier, let them pursue it without regard to their sex, and do not ridicule or exclude them from pursuing their desires because of some silly view on what the sexes should and should not be doing.

 

That’s all.

 

Note: I’ll go ahead and cite the whole testosterone thing since I used specific numbers:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003707.htm

You’re welcome!

 

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I'm NOT saying that sexism isnt important - I'm saying that in my opinion, what we see in the books isnt what I would define as 'sexism'.

 

Sexism is the discrimination of a person on the basis of their gender, and that's not what we see.

You misunderstand the definition of sexism. “Discrimination” does not denote mistreatment or (although it often implies mistreatment), but rather different treatment.

 

Sexism is when people are treated (or otherwise regarded) differently because of their sex. Whether this treatment is good or bad or neutral is immaterial; sexism is bad not simply because some forms of it are directly negative for the victims, but more generally because it shoehorns people and constrains their opportunities.

 

You yourself go on to highlight examples of sexism in WoT

 

We see the women clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes because the men have been all brutish or rash, or we see the men clucking their tongues and rolling their eyes because the women are fretting over something or giving out orders.

In other words, sexism.

 

I'm re-reading the series again and am only on the first book. Rand, Mat and Perrin are stereotypical late-teenagers. They oggle at girls, they pull pranks and they bob and duck to their superiors. Egwene's a stereotypical 16-going-on-30 year old, thinking she's superior to the boys, then giggling as hard as them when the gleeman comes to town.

Your view itself is sexist, to the extent you are generalizing these attitudes to all boys and all girls respectively. I also suspect you are male, given how you said “stereotypical late-teenagers” who “oggle at (sic) girls,” implying that stereotypical late-teenagers are male. Last time I checked, females go through late teens too.

 

But that’s almost trivial. Much more important is this: Just because sexism sometimes appears “cute” to some people does not excuse it. It most certainly is not cute to everyone, particularly the people who are victims of it. One of the most pernicious apologies for sexism is that “Hey, sometimes it’s fun!”

 

No, it’s not. It never is.

 

Do you ever wonder why kings and priests of old would so easily order other people’s deaths? Didn’t they know better? Wasn’t it obvious to them the suffering and injustice they were inflicting? No, apparently it wasn’t obvious at all. They simply could not empathize with the people they were killing. I bet sometimes they even thought it was fun!

 

As you get older you’ll hear stories from your friends about being raped, or assaulted, by their partners, bosses, or customers. You’ll hear stories about how they have been denied opportunities or excluded from social circles, just because of their sex, or because their behavior did not fit with what other people thought folks of that sex should be doing. And perhaps someday your kid will come to you and talk about being harassed or belittled by peers or even adults, purely because of sexism.

 

You won’t think it’s so fun if you ever learn to empathize with the people who suffer from it. Part of me hopes you never have to learn, but another part of me hopes you learn very soon so that you can stop being an unwitting enabler of sexism in our society.

 

 

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[Also, refusing to hurt women is also sexist.

Yes, that’s true.

 

 

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All three come from a village where leadership is divided by gender and the male group can be pushes around by the women's group but the men have no say in the women's group, so it's clear where the true power lies. Throw in the fact that punishment seems to be doled out by the women most times and I'd say that the women have a huge hand in shaping the views of the children of Emond's Field.

Indeed. There’s a lot of misandry in the series, and I remember being slightly disturbed at the descriptions of politics in Emond’s Field the first time I read TEotW. Sadly, that was just the tip of a very tall iceberg.

 

Also, Andor, in general, is extremely sexist against males as well (the throne has to be held by a woman and the royal "males" are taught to be lapdogs for the queen to be). The people of Andor are almost as bad as the Borderlanders, where women are all but put on pedestals and worshiped. Hell, Malkieri men don't even get a say in who they have sex with. If a woman orders them to bed, they go. Poor Nynaeve. I wonder if they're allowed to say no if they're married?

Yeah. Ugh.

 

 

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It's the WoT story itself that's sexist, not just the more petty behavior of some of the characters. Men need women for guidance, or they'll do idiotic things like run off and get themselves killed, or whatever. Women only rarely need a bit of help from men, never advice, and even there RJ overcompensates against cliches about women needing "rescuing" that he makes the women need help hardly at all. Where are the disasters Cadsuane or Egwene or the Wise Ones will cause, if they don't listen to men? The disasters men will cause if they don't do the reverse are all over the plot!

 

This isn't just world-building the consequences of saidin being tainted, for two reasons. First, RJ claimed that with the exception of Far Madding's matriarchy, he was trying to write a world with gender equality. He clearly failed. Second, it's not just in-world discrimination against men, and in-world stereotypes that they need guidance. The men RJ writes actually need that guidance and help, and the women he writes don't. The sexism is deeper than world-building, and can't be excused by it. The story is extremely sexist.

This is basically a much shorter version of my own post, and well-said, since I know many folks won’t read anything as long as what I’ve written.

 

I will add to your thoughts that it struck me very clearly that RJ was trying to create “separate but equal” for the sexes in WoT. I think his transitional view was to acknowledge sexism and oppose it, but at the same time to refuse to relinquish the idea that the sexes are different from each other and should behave differently and be treated differently.

 

Ultimately, his inability to let go of his view that males and females cannot be interchangeable doomed his efforts to write a truly progressive story that moved beyond the sexism of ages past.

[NitroS]

I see one of the biggest criticisms about the wheel of time is Sexism but i dont see how its much worse if any then real life.

That’s an interesting remark. You’re starting a topic about sexism in WoT by conceding that it’s present but arguing that it’s not as bad as real-world sexism, and therefore not an issue.

 

This is an example of the “tu quoque” (lit. “you’re another”) logical fallacy, meaning that your reasoning is invalid. Let me give you an illustration:

 

Person A: WoT is sexist.

Person B: Yeah, but that’s not a problem because the real world is more sexist.

 

That kind of reasoning simply doesn’t work. Whether or not real-world sexism is worse than sexism in WoT (and it is), the sexism in WoT is still a problem because it colors the story in a way that makes it difficult to appreciate the story in the way it was intended. More broadly, stories tarnished by the author’s sexism help to preserve society’s sexism problems by reinforcing readers’ own sexism, as we shall see in this very thread.

 

Before I go any farther it needs to be pointed out that WoT has two kinds of sexism. The first is “in-character” sexism. That’s where the RJ was writing sexist traits into his characters. That kind of sexism is not a problem; it’s a part of the story. Sexism is a real phenomenon, and depicting sexist characters or sexist societies is realistic, especially for a world with the technological level and historical traditions of Randland, and, until recently, the Taint.

 

It’s the second kind of sexism, the “out-of-character” sexism, that’s a problem. Out-of-character sexism is where RJ himself presented the story in a sexist way. For instance, he depicted both of the world’s two deities as male, and depicted the strongest, most dextrous male channelers as superior to the strongest, most dextrous female channelers. Those are just two examples of what makes a rather long list. The easiest way to spot out-of-character sexism is this: Whenever you are able to make broad generalizations and/or predictions about people’s behavior or character solely on the basis on their sex, you are looking at the author’s sexism and not the story’s. This test reveals quite a lot of out-of-character sexism in WoT, and people upthread have already affirmed that by the ease with which they have discussed males as a group and females as a group in WoT.

 

This little rule-of-thumb is not exhaustive. There are instances of the author’s sexism which that test will not pick up. But it’s an easy rule, and the burden of proof is low.

 

There’s another thing that needs to be pointed out. Some people upthread have mistaken sexism for misogyny. They’re thinking that when we talk about sexism we only mean the mistreatment of women. That’s incorrect. Sexism refers to discrimination against anyone, by anyone, on the basis of the victim’s sex—regardless of the sexes of the people involved. WoT has a lot of misogyny (sexism against women) but also a lot of misandry (sexism against men).

 

Lastly, before moving on I want to point out that sometimes the in-character sexism and the out-of-character sexism overlap. For example, one could argue that the prevalence of the whole “men are rough” and “women are snooty” stereotypes is an example not only of RJ’s own sexism but of cross-cultural sexism in Randland. That’s a plausible argument, although weakened somewhat by the behavior of cultures off the main continent, such as the Seanchan and the Sea Folk. Even though these cultures share a common ancestor, we would expect the passage of time to bring about different expressions of sexism in each culture, and to the extent that, say, Seanchan sexism resembles that of Randland, what you’re seeing is indisputably RJ’s out-of-character sexism—the bad stuff.

 

All right. Moving on...

 

In real life i always see girls my age talking about a guy when he starts talking to them saying things like "oh he just wants to get in your pants" "or he doesnt really care hes a male". I also work with middle aged ladies at work and being one of the few males (im 20) there they constantly criticize there husbands for being lazy because they are males or other related sexist comments such as oh im suprised you noticed i got a hair cut (because males dont normally notice that).

 

Then you hear males talking about women today and they often say the whole get back to the kitchen comment, cleaning etc. Girls just want to talk... Girls are boring etc.

 

Even 60+ years ago women werent even allowed to vote, didnt have equal wages rights and rarely worked.

All of this is an illustration of the sexism problems in the real world, leading to the fallacy:

 

Yet in the wheel of time you see women and male in equal power (age of legends men were equal with women which changed with the breaking ofcourse) but besides the odd comment of fool man or wool headed i dont find it to be all that bad? Whats your oppinion? are the book reviews just taking it to far, or do you agree with them?

Real-world sexism is a lot worse than WoT’s. I have described RJ as a transitional writer. He was well aware of the changing social mores on sex and gender, and of the sexism in previous fantasy works—which often excluded females from most adventure roles. I honestly think his heart was in the right place, and I give him credit for trying to do right by WoT when it came to sexism. He largely failed, but I commend him for thinking that it was worth trying.

 

 

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There really is a lot of sexism, I think at least 50 times a book you can read 'that's what men always do', 'girls are this or that' etc. But I don't really dislike it, it's usually funny to read.

I’m not sure what you mean by “funny.” If you mean it’s worthy of eye-rolling, I agree. If you mean it’s cute, I don’t. And if you mean it’s humorous...well, then we have different tastes.

 

For me, the sexism in WoT is one of my biggest complaints about the series. Probably many people don’t mind it, because they’re not sensitive to the evils of sexism. Maybe some people find it humorous, much the same way as little children find farts humorous. But most people who give thought to sexism, or who must deal with the consequences of it, or who work to delegitimize it, don’t appreciate it showing up as an author bias in the stories they read.

 

 

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Men and women are different (no! really?? ) and they behave differently. It is not sexist to recognise this, even if some of those differences are less praiseworthy than others. Real sexism consists in mistreating, even punishing, one sex for its differences, making out that one sex is intrinsically inferior to the other.

 

Randland's problem is that 3000 years ago, male channellers went mad and broke the world. Women channellers took the ascendancy. Men had to be watched carefully for signs of channelling ability and its consequent madness. It's not good that this carried over somewhat into everyday relationships, but it's not surprising that it did.

 

 

(Oh, and btw, I'm female.)

I don’t enjoy having to single you out like this, especially since I tend to like your contributions to the forum, but your post here is probably the worst example of sexism and sexist apologetics in the whole thread so far. I hope you’ll read this rather lengthy post to get a sense of how you might look at things another way.

 

Men and women—or, more properly, males and females—are anatomically and physiologically different. That much is true. Relative to our immediate cousins on the family tree, our sexual dimorphism is moderate but significant. Females can do some things that males cannot, and vice versa. Menstruation is one example.

 

But my reading of your post makes me think that that’s not really the argument you’re making. Instead, I think you’re claiming that people inherently have broad anthropological behavioral differences because of their sex, on the basis of your perception that the sexes behave differently. If I am reading you incorrectly, then my apologies. This still should be an interesting post.

 

If I am reading you tight, however, then your argument is invalidated by a logical fallacy. In fact, it’s actually no less than three logical fallacies and a cognitive bias.

 

The first logical fallacy is called “cum hoc, ergo propter hoc” (lit. “with this, therefore because of this”), or more popularly “correlation does not prove causation.” Males and females do have behavioral differences, demonstrably, but this does not prove that those differences are genetic (i.e., in their nature). I’ll give you an example of the fallacy:

 

Person A: Men tend to prefer the color blue and women tend to prefer the color pink.

Person B: Yes, I wonder why.

Person A: It’s genetic, of course.

 

Except, no, it’s not genetic. This example is nice because it illustrates the ridiculousness of the logic that any differences between the sexes are genetic. Colors? Seriously? Yet, believe it or not, I have actually heard people try and argue that men prefer blue and women prefer pink for genetic reasons. It’s pretty embarrassing, really.

 

Pink and blue are just colors, and our social mores have evolved to say that pink is feminine. That scares off people who want to be masculine, not because they have a gene telling them “Look out, it’s PINK!” but rather because they are savvy to social cues, and societies have historically imposed strong divisions on the sexes on the basis of cues. (Why societies impose these divisions is a story for another day; basically it comes down to control and status.) It could be any two colors, really, or it could other things entirely, like steak and chicken. In any case the point is to have something which says “masculine” and something else which says “feminine,” so that people can orient themselves with the society’s demands. But doing this represses the people whose personal preferences run contrary to the social mores. What if a male wants to wear pink? What if a female wants to eat a huge steak? If they did, both of them would be mocked by large numbers of people in the United States who think that those behaviors should be limited to the other sex. Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer got thrown in a mental institution for wearing a pink shirt to work? (He went on to meet another inmate who claimed to be Michael Jackson.) It’s real enough of a problem that our comedians are satirizing it.

 

More than a century of scientific inquiry into the question has suggested, rather conclusively at this point, that most behavioral differences between the sexes are conditional, the result of social shaping on individuals, and are not a function of sex. This makes your first fallacy particularly significant.

 

(I know, I know. Quotes! Citations! Prove it! Where’re the scientific studies?! But I just went through this in the Lanfear Appreciation Thread and I am thoroughly sick and tired of that kind of red herring. If you’re curious about the support for my arguments, Google is your friend. It’s not hard to find the news articles and scientific papers looking into the roles of nature versus nurture when it comes to the differences between the sexes.)

 

Males and females do have some sex-specific (i.e., genetic) behavioral differences. These occur below the cognitive level. In other words, we don’t consciously think about them. (That point will become important later.) I mentioned menstruation earlier, as one example, and then I concluded that you weren’t talking about such basic stuff as that. Whether or not you were, this “basic stuff” is all you’re going to find when it comes to sex-specific behavioral differences.

 

Non-cognitive behaviors fall into one of two categories. There are physiological behaviors, such as menstruation, and there are instinctual behaviors, such as having sex. For practical purposes, we can combine the two and consider them as one group, standing in contrast to cognitive behaviors. Human beings were originally wild animals, and our non-cognitive behaviors overwhelmingly concern survival—because it’s so urgent and important. Other non-cognitive behaviors concern socialization and reproduction, both of which are also very important.

 

Some examples of non-cognitive behavior include sweating, coughing, scratching, flinching, putting out our hands when we fall, blinking when something comes at our eyes, and getting tense when we perceive danger. All of these occur in both sexes. Why? Because the impetus for these behaviors affects both sexes. All humans need to cool down when they are too hot. All humans need to remove harmful parasites from their skin. All humans need to protect their eyes, or else face enormous survival disadvantages. (In the wild, it would have been a death sentence.) So, none of this stuff is going to be sex-specific.

 

To get to the sex-specific stuff, you have to look at the dimorphism in our species. How are male and female bodies different? Different bodies lead to different behaviors. Well, all sex-specific differences in the human body relate to reproduction.

 

The most significant differences are that only females gestate and give birth to, and then suckle newborn humans. That latter distinction was significant enough to scientists to inspire them to create the word “mammal,” which refers to the class of animals who, among other things, nurse their young with milk from the mammary glands.

 

(Trivia: Our galaxy is also named after lactation: the Milky Way, referring to the milky ribbon of stars comprising the disc of our galaxy as it appears in the night sky. The word galaxy itself literally means “milky way.” You may recognize that through the cognates lactose, the galactose, sugars which come from milk. Clearly, our ancestors thought that lactation was a very important behavior, and of course it was for females only, which amplified its mystique and further “justified” the social divisions between the sexes which have caused so much suffering.)

 

Most of the other bodily differences between the sexes are minimal, both in terms of the human body’s functions and also in terms of the behavior which results from those bodily functions. Both sexes have distinct primary and secondary sexual characteristics which enable sexual identification for the purposes of mating.

 

Now, you were talking about behavioral differences in the sexes, and presumably anthropologically significant ones. Other than female gestation and lactation, to my knowledge there is only one other significant bodily difference that can be said to have had a cardinal influence on the development of our civilization. That difference is male aggressiveness.

 

Humans are aggressive animals. It’s not just a trait of males. All of us are hunters. All of us have the strength and agility to dominate our prey. It is a myth, and patronizing, that only males do this while females go out and pick berries. Female humans are very strong, so far as animals go, and the fact that they are less strong on average than male humans obscures the fact that they’re stronger than most other species. Only the great predators can prey on humans, regardless of humans’ sex.

 

We can also clash with each other, for status and position, and, like most species with predatory characteristics, we often do. This aggression does not only take the form of physical violence, but physical violence supersedes other forms of aggression, such as verbal confrontation, emotional manipulation, and sneaking.

 

(This brings us another example of out-of-character sexism in WoT. RJ consistently wrote many of his female characters as bossy, snobby, inconsiderate jerks. That is to say, they are very aggressive and relied very heavily on non-physical confrontation, due to their sex, but would not be able to back that up with physical strength, also due to their sex. This strongly implies female inferiority relative to the males, many of whom “speak softly and carry a big stick,” eschewing non-physical confrontation and resorting to physical confrontation only when forced. This connotes restraint and dignity, which the female characters broadly lack in favor of vanity and pettiness. This is sexist and unrepresentative of human nature. While males do resort to physical violence more readily than females in an attempt to solve problems, both sexes utilize non-physical forms of aggression equally. And males regularly impose themselves on females using physical force—something RJ has declined to explore except in the truly odious example of Shaidar Haran raping most of the female Forsaken—but none of the male ones, which itself is another example of out-of-character sexism in WoT.)

 

Despite the fact that all humans are predisposed to aggression, males have greater musculature and greater physical aggressiveness, having evolved that way to compete with each other for the opportunity to mate with females, and then subjugate and successfully mate with the females whom they desired enough to compete for in the first place. (Males would be much more female-like in terms of strength, height, and body fat were it not for this evolutionary vector.)

 

This is where sexism began. Throughout history, males have had the means to consistently best females in physical strength, and many have had the desire to use that leverage to gain power over females. This reality predates even the dawn of civilization. Male aggressiveness taints some male behavior, especially among young adult males who are under stress and have had a violent or violence-glorifying upbringing. This shows up not only in domestic abuse and sexual assault against females, but also in gang violence and male-on-male sexual assault, both of which are common in prisons, the military, and other male-segregated environments. It also shows up in more subtle ways, like aggressive driving. I’ll return to that point shortly.

 

With civilization, people have built a world which values human rights and respects many forms of power as superior to physical strength, with the result that females have slowly (and bloodily) moved toward sexual equality. Today, technology and education enable the sexes to compete as equals in everything except sports which rely on raw physical strength.

 

This is a good opportunity to point out that the female body is physically capable of every form of work that humanity has yet devised, including those such as military combat which sexists have argued that females cannot perform. RJ got it right with WoT by putting females into every type of job role. On the other hand, Randland is divided, weak, and on the brink of collapse, so it’s possible that RJ thought it was unnatural for females to inhabit these roles. But I doubt it.

 

With some females becoming chess grandmasters, navy admirals, bodybuilders, pastors, corporate executives, film directors, firefighters, computer engineers, fishing boat captains, architects, and airplane pilots—and, likewise, with some males becoming homemakers, interior designers, group therapists, nurses, schoolteachers, daycare aides, flight attendants, and dancers—there’s just no way to honestly make an accurate generalization about the genetic nature of the sexes without being forced to add a truckload of asterisks acknowledging the exceptions to the so-called rule, which is actually another logical fallacy called the “overwhelming exception.” (Remember, I’ve been talking about the logical fallacies and cognitive bias in your argument. This is fallacy number two.) And this is just with regards to career paths. When you try and generalize about people on the basis of sex, the full spectrum of human nature forces you to add more and more asterisks until at some point you can’t help but realize that a person’s sex tells you almost nothing about them. Here is an illustration of the overwhelming exception:

 

Person A: All women are bad drivers. Except for the vast majority of them.

 

We’ve all heard people who make that claim and are serious about it. It’s very common for people to make claims about the entire female sex on the basis of the actions, perhaps situational, of a few specific females. It’s also common for people to make claims about the entire male sex in a similar fashion, though not as common.

 

Most people don’t appreciate that generalizations aren’t valid when they’re full of exceptions, or aren’t accurate, or are based on insufficient evidence. Yet most of the supposed differences between the sexes fall into one or more of these three categories, and people persist in their erroneous beliefs.

 

Any sex-specific generalization which imputes certain characteristics to a person on the basis of sex must apply to all the members of that sex, and none of the members of the other sex, except for people with certain diseases or conditions. Let me put it another way: If a sex-specific difference is genetically based, then (virtually) all the members of one sex will have it, and (virtually) none of the members of the other sex will have it. If that condition isn’t met, it’s not a genetically based sex-specific difference. Only females menstruate. Only males get huge doses of testosterone (from their own bodies, anyway).

 

Thus, when it comes to something like “Women are bad drivers,” either it’s true of the entire female sex and not true of the entire male sex, or it’s an invalid statement. And in this case we have pretty overwhelming evidence to suggest that it’s a completely bogus claim. Indeed, females are actually better drivers than males, at least if the insurance companies are doing their jobs right (which is a lot to ask, I know).

 

Nevertheless, societies have long held the view that females are bad drivers. In the early days of the automobile it was uncouth for females to drive cars at all, if not outright forbidden. Why on Earth would a society think that a female shouldn’t drive a car? I’m not talking about places like the Islamic hellhole of Saudi Arabia, where females are barred from driving for reasons of religious purity, but rather places like our own United States of America. It was because people thought that females couldn’t handle it—didn’t have the concentration, the strength, the nerve, whatever.

 

(WoT time: Driving has always shunned female participation, and that transcends the horseless carriage. If any of you are familiar with the horse world, females were long excluded from riding and driving horses, and even today you will see the hardcore traditionalists ride a hose sidesaddle to avoid the “unseemliness” of spreading their legs to sit on the horse. In WoT, I thankfully do not recall any instances of sidesaddle riding, but we often hear of female characters changing into “divided skirts” or some such article of clothing in order to ride a horse without giving up their “appropriate” feminine attire. In a society where one sex has to have special clothes to ride a horse and the other doesn’t, that’s a dead giveaway of sexism. Whether it’s in-character or out-of-character sexism, or both, is up for debate.)

 

A correct form of the statement is: “Some people are bad drivers.” And that’s true; some people are. But femalekind as a whole is not.

 

Nor is malekind as a whole. The reason that males are worse drivers on average than female drivers is that the behavior of driving a car is affected by one’s level of aggression, and males—especially younger males—are exposed to male hormones which considerably boost their level of aggression. The reason males are not universally worse drivers than females is that driving is a very complex activity, with multiple factors influencing it. One of these factors is a driver’s level of aggression. Males get exposed to male hormones, but this affects individual males differently. Meanwhile, females also have “male” hormones in their bodies, and both sexes can derive aggression from sources other than male hormones. Other factors include a driver’s temperament, individual circumstances, vehicular skills, and experience on the road.

 

Another particularly important factor influencing drivers is that, even though the human body has relatively few differences between the sexes, human societies treat the sexes very differently indeed. In a sexist society, males can be pressured to feel they are supposed to drive aggressively, that it is masculine and therefore desirable to do so, and that to exercise prudence is to be a wuss.

 

To be continued...

Woah thats alot of writing i dont have time to read it now but will read it when i have time and reply. In my opening sentence i thought it was obvious but i was trying to say that one of the biggest complaints of the WOT is HOW MUCH sexism is involved in the books and then i compared it to that in real life and found from my personal experiences that sexism is more substantial in real life then the WOT books so i cant see what the complaint is. Its like complaining about people dieing in a movie when people die in the world all the time.

[rand4747]

Personally I think Mat's probably the most chivalrous guy we've met, just about. He grunts and grumbles about having to rescue women, but he does it, again and again.

 

Yes, but he also assumes he'll have to rescue them because they're women, before he knows that they're actually in trouble. I think that's the "problem" if you believe there is a problem. And again, I do not.

 

In the case of the super girls they almost always need rescuing so hes not wrong in assuming they need it :p

Only time he was wrong there was when he went to salidar and tried to "rescue" Egwene

[Kahsm]

Personally I think Mat's probably the most chivalrous guy we've met, just about. He grunts and grumbles about having to rescue women, but he does it, again and again.

 

Yes, but he also assumes he'll have to rescue them because they're women, before he knows that they're actually in trouble. I think that's the "problem" if you believe there is a problem. And again, I do not.

 

In the case of the super girls they almost always need rescuing so hes not wrong in assuming they need it :p

Only time he was wrong there was when he went to salidar and tried to "rescue" Egwene

 

Being right doesn't make it not-sexist =). Unless he assumes they always need saving not simply because they're women but because of who they are as people and his knowledge of them as individuals. But I got the impression it was simply because they were Bloody Women.