Languages of Pao Q1 The Draft of Women

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The 'draft' of young women was likened by by some to rape. Is it rape? Is it something else? Does Vance as author seem to condone it? Should situations like this not be discussed in fiction? Or should they be approached differently? What do you think?

Comments

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    Yes, it is rape, whether in the sense of sexual violation or in the sense of carrying someone away forcefully. Both are happening.

    Vance seems to be ambivalent. The protagonist avails himself of the draft and seems to do away with it for reasons other than that it is wrong.

    Situations like this should be discussed in fiction. How they are discussed is important. That the practice does not seem to be repudiated in any way in this piece of fiction is problematic.

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    This is where I dropped out. The draft of women is definitely rape, on a mass scale. How many of those women had a choice over what happened to them? They didn't have a choice about whether to be drafted, or who fucked them, or whether their bodies were used to carry babies. And then they, and their unwanted children, were jettisoned like so much human garbage.

    I got as far as the incident with Gitan Netsko. She was raped by the evil space wizard, given like an object to the viewpoint character, and expected to be grateful. When she realised she was pregnant, she regained the only agency she could by killing herself. And the repercussions of that act? The evil space wizard may have been a little embarrassed, so she was just erased.

    This and Lyonesse show me that Vance thought of women as being less than human, little more than walking fucktoys. He's abhorrent.

    Should this sort of sexualised and gendered violence be mentioned in fiction? Yes, but it needs to be done carefully. There are (at least) two dangers. One is that the violence is portrayed as something that is harmful and destructive. The other is that it's lazy, that rape and sexual violence is taken as a "default character-building background event" rather than the author actually coming up with something more interesting.

    And @clash_bowley , thanks for addressing this issue head-on.

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    You are welcome Neil! This is an important aspect of the book, and it needs discussion.

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    The treatment of the subject in this book is certainly lazy. I don't know Vance well enough to judge him based on these two books, but agree that women do not come off well, which is enough for me not to recommend him as an author to anyone I know. I did think there was a sort of repudiation in the latter half of the book when the main character acknowledged the wrongness of the draft (though yes, he's too casual about it.) I also think the story of Gitan was intended to make the wizard and the situation seem awful to us, and I can't think why Vance would want to do that if he was into rape culture. So my take away is that the plot line is meant to be salacious, but is gratuitous and handled totally without nuance or tact. It really takes away from the rest.

    The Broken Earth was every bit as awful, and also not very nuanced, but I think it was pretty clear where the author stood. That's obviously not so clear with Vance. In that book, the main character was driven to do awful things buy virtue of their circumstance, and people were mistreated 'for their own good'. In Pao, the women are mistreated without trying to pass it off as something else, which makes it all the more brazen and willful. Pao at least was honest in making it clear the women wanted no part of it. Those waters are much more muddy in Broken Earth, where both men and women were forced into the breeding program and nobody really took a stand against it, until Sy killed her own child to prevent it from happening again.

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    @Apocryphal said:

    The Broken Earth was every bit as awful, and also not very nuanced, but I think it was pretty clear where the author stood. That's obviously not so clear with Vance. In that book, the main character was driven to do awful things buy virtue of their circumstance, and people were mistreated 'for their own good'. In Pao, the women are mistreated without trying to pass it off as something else, which makes it all the more brazen and willful. Pao at least was honest in making it clear the women wanted no part of it. Those waters are much more muddy in Broken Earth, where both men and women were forced into the breeding program and nobody really took a stand against it, until Sy killed her own child to prevent it from happening again.

    Broken Earth is a story about oppression; Pao is a story where oppression happens. Broken Earth centres and gives voice to the oppressed; Pao uses them as set-dressing.

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    The situation (not just the treatment of women, but other areas of abuse very widely) occurs a lot in historical fiction, and is the subject of a lot of conversation amongst authors there. Take for example slavery, forced marriage, institutional cruelty or violence, attitudes of racial superiority - or whatever. Should an author tackle these subjects at all, and if so how? There are a few positions that end up being commonly chosen:

    1) The author has his/her protagonist adopt a "modern" viewpoint and express revulsion at the practice, or as a variation, has antagonists relish in it
    2) The author has his/her protagonist be involved in the practice but in such a way that makes it clear that "it isn't really their fault, it's just how society is"
    3) The author avoids the topic as far as possible and focuses on other aspects of the culture
    4) The author feels that he/she should tackle the problem and describes the situation in great detail, to the exclusion of other aspects of the culture
    4) The author apparently approves of the practice and focuses on it

    Obviously, each of these has problems - (1) is often seen as anachronistic, (2) removes moral agency, and so on. The debate continues without broad agreement as to what should happen. My feeling (and the main reason why I now read a lot less HF than I used to) is that more contemporary authors are going for (4).

    SF/F is in a different position in that the cultures described are not in fact real, albeit modelled in some way on real past or present ones. So if an author chooses to foreground the topic (like The Handmaid's Tale, maybe) then they are doing so to make a point. I get the sense with Vance and Languages of Pao that our collective feeling is that Vance did not really see the plight of women as a big problem, and so wrote something that is ambiguous about the situation. I don't know enough about him to say either way.

    However, as a counter-argument, I do feel that Vance's focus was primarily on social and collective structures, not really individual ones. The personal stories here are kind of lightweight compared with the global ones. So the transportation of women away from Pao is seen as a cultural imposition rather than a whole lot of acts of personal abuse. I think that the group rather than the individual is a legitimate focus for a novel - Book of the New Sun did something similar - but it necessarily means that individual focus and calamity is diluted or ignored.

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    Yeah, the whole thing is treated far too ambivalently by Vance for me to be comfortable with it - as previously said, our protagonist avails himself of it, can't quite stop himself being complicit in it (boys will be boys, apparently), and only seems to suffer any regrets about in so much as he can't benefit from it any more. It's all a bit throwaway, as if the concubining just makes people take a sharp intake of breath and tut, as if the author can't bring any of his cultures to quite condemn it properly.

    There's also the throwaway continents of "women violated" by Eban Buzbek with their invasion, and, yeah, it's all quite hard to give Vance the benefit of the doubt. I get the point about it not being the whole focus of the book, but I'd have been more comfortable with a little more reassurance that cultural rape wasn't just a plot device to explore some linguistic theory.

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