The Cluster&#$@ of Xanth

[swan_tower]

Had you asked me a month ago, I would have described the Xanth series as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that got kind of creepy about sexuality later on.

Now? I would describe it as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that has had really awful attitudes about sexuality and gender baked into it from the start.

The change started with this post. If that isn’t enough, you can follow up with this tag, because she’s continued on into the later books (she’s partway through Castle Roogna now), giving me more than enough evidence to say this isn’t a fleeting problem. It’s pervasive. Xanth is horrible. In addition to the constant male gaze evaluating every female character (including human-animal hybrids) for their hotness or lack thereof, you have pretty women being stupid, ugly women being totally not worth anybody’s time, and the very few women who are both pretty and smart being untrustworthy schemers. You have women, countless women, who only exist to be used for men’s gratification. You have women’s protests against mistreatment being explicitly described as an act women practice to make themselves more attractive to men. You have marriage and raising a family being dreadful fates men are expected to run away from. You have men pretty much wanting to rape every woman they see, and being held up as wonderful paragons of morality when they refrain. You have a farce of a rape trial that is I guess supposed to be funny . . . somehow.

And that’s just Xanth. That isn’t even getting into his horror novel Firefly, which goes so far with the pedophilia that merely reading descriptions of the content (and the author’s justifications for same) has guaranteed I will never read anything written by Anthony ever again.

Sorry to rain on the parades of the people who remember the early Xanth books as being Not That Bad. They are. They really, really are. I mean, the original edition of A Spell for Chameleon contained the following passage (taken from that oh-so-funny mockery of a rape trial):

Bink felt sorry for his opposite. How could she avoid being seductive? She was a creature constructed for no other visible purpose than ra—than love.

Case closed.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Happily, I never did feel the need to read Xanth. But I still mourn the potential that got lost somewhere - back in the '70s, Macroscope seemed such a good book...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The usual thing people say about Anthony is that the first book of any series he writes is pretty good, the second is okay, the third is marginal, and it's downhill after that.

While that may be true on a certain level, I'm now revisiting the question of whether his ideology is ever good.

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. :( :( :(

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Pretty much that. :-(

[asia27.livejournal.com]

Boy, did you just open my eyes to something! I started falling off reading them so far back but never really knew what it was that made the books less enjoyable to read... Seriously fooked up...wonder if he just hates women in general?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

One of the things those blog posts point out is, he doesn't seem to like men much, either. I'm serious when I say the text is awful about gender, not just women; I wouldn't want to be the kind of male character he writes about any more than I'd want to be one of the women.

[dr_whom]

I read this article in the AV Club last fall, which seems to be a lot shorter but is on the same general theme. Thanks for the link; I'd been looking for a longer discussion of the topic for a while.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think the A.V. Club article was one of the things that sparked these posts, either directly or in a more roundabout fashion.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Is anyone still reading Xanth? I mean other than the person you linked. I remember it being much more of a thing in the 80s-90s.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, two new Xanth books came out in 2013 and one in 2014 (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/piers-anthony/), so somebody has to be buying them. Otherwise the publisher wouldn't keep handing him checks to write more.

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

All I can say is, thank God* I was too young when I read A Spell for Chameleon to realize what "ra" meant D:

*Or... maybe the fact that I was so young I didn't catch it makes it more horrible because the fucked up stuff got lodged in my brain before I had any defenses against it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it: I'm appalled to realize what I was letting into my head when I was too naive and uncritical to actually think about it.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

It took me *years* to figure out what was going on in that trial. And I was flat-out obsessed with Xanth for many of them.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

yeah, i saw that first post. holy shit.

it's really unsettling to think that i started reading that series in middle school, and read other Anthony books in the following years; fundamentally, it makes me feel tremendously lacking in critical thinking :( this is worse than Orson Scott Card.

-steve

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

To be fair (if I may stretch that word to the breaking point), I think Card holds the lead over Anthony in "horrifically offensive shit said in daily life." But it's true that I don't recall anything this pervasively and obviously awful in his books.

A plague on both their houses.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I consider Anthony to be the anti-Orson-Scott-Card. OSC's books are often beautiful and interesting and worthwhile, but he himself has become vile.

Anthony's books are vile, but the guy himself is, by all accounts, a lovely person.

But, yes. The vile-ness of the books goes all the way down. The weird thing is how, despite that baked-in nastiness, how many of us feel that we got something worthwhile out of them.

It confuses me deeply.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I (distantly) know somebody who's a personal friend of Anthony's. But there's a point at which I can't help but think about these (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/07/10/a-whiskey-priest-is-not-the-same-as-a-nazi/) posts (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/06/27/a-little-leaven-leaveneth-the-whole-lump-unlearning-the-lies-part-4/) by Fred Clark at Slacktivist, dealing with the inseparability of somebody's opinions on important matters from the person as a whole. Anthony may have the demeanor of a lovely person, but he is still a person who writes horrifically misogynist books saturated with rape culture, and appends an apologia for pedophiles to one of his books. No matter how he comports himself in social interaction, that's part of who he is, and it's ugly.

And so it is, in reverse, with Card: he has written books that are beautiful and interesting and worthwhile, but the man who produced them has become anything but. (Though at least in his case, there seems to have been a downward trajectory; the man who wrote his best books is not the man he is today.)

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

aaaa oh god. i haven't read any of the books, and never had any interest in doing so, but dear lord even the basic description of the plot of this book is vile. it seems over-the-top even for the late 70s, and horrific by the standards of at least the past 10 years. have i been living with my head in the sand about criticism for these books (very possible), or is it truly a recent thing that people are talking about how terrible these books are?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think it's a pretty recent thing. People have been saying for ages that the later ones got kind of bad, but noticing that they were bad from the start? This is the first I've heard of it.

[squishymeister.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you wrote this, because the Xanth series has been on my to-read list for a while now... and after reading this, I don't think I'll waste my time on it.

We gave up on the Wheel of Time series for (though, by reading this, only a fraction of) the same problem.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The Wheel of Time is a paragon of good gender treatment by comparison. I have problems with it, but the complete sexual objectification of women is not among its flaws.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Though it has been decades since I last read them, I seem to remember his Bio of a Space Tyrant series having some disturbing incestuous undertones.

Piers Anthony... one of the many authors I enjoyed in high school who I grew out of along the way.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Never tried reading that one.

Not going to now.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Didn't read the books that came after QUESTION QUEST, where he had run out of ideas and got dull. Previous to that, the misogyny had got more subtly toxic when he tried to reform and start writing admirable females as main PV characters: Electra, Nada, etc, and Irene on her search for her missing child -- all humorless, forced by the plot to depend on some male....

My first time with the series, I got fed up with that and dropped it around CENTAUR AISLE. Next time through the series, I was prepared for that so could skim over it, and found the books otherwise briliant.

Outside Xanth, I found his other books so creepy I never got past the beginning.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm genuinely curious what you found "otherwise brilliant" about the story. The plots of the first three revolve around gender relations; therefore any merit I might see in the story is utterly crippled by the terrible gender ideology woven through it.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I first read them when they came out, and thought they were cute and fun, but I got very tired very quickly of them, they became tired and purile, and a lot of someone elses wishful thinking.

Havent bought anything by him since.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much how a lot of people react, yeah. The part that appalls me is how many of us (and I do mean us; this is me, too) didn't notice the problems that were there from the start.

[leatherdykeuk.livejournal.com]

Yes, I concur, to the point where I was surprised you liked the earlier ones.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Saying I "liked" them might be going a bit far. :-P Pretty sure the only reason I picked the series up was because I was told Isle of View had a crossover with Elfquest, which I adore; while true, this was mostly irrelevant, since all it meant was that there was a four-fingered character with pointy ears wandering around. (This was a gift Anthony put in for a little girl named Jenny who loved both Xanth and Elfquest, and was very sick.) After that I read some of the series, including some of the early ones, but I doubt the total ever reached ten, and I don't think I ever re-read them.

[vcmw]

A Spell for Chameleon is actually much worse than a number of the books that follow it, but yeah, absolutely all of that is there from the beginning. I read a huge amount of Piers Anthony as a kid; there are so many reasons I never once recommended a single book of his to a kid when I was a kids' librarian.

(I have in fact read all 5 volumes of Bio of a Space Tyrant, most of the Mode series, the Phaze books, the Incarnations of Immortality series, the first dozen or so Xanth books, and a couple other series. If you ever want to be horrified by how much of a narrative pattern these issues are across his work, we can do that sometime in detail. It's in no way an issue of one series or one phase of his career. I've skimmed Firefly, and I'm not at all sure it's worse than Bio of a Space Tyrant, and the last book in the Incarnations of Immortality series actually has a guy and his very-underage girlfriend traveling out of time for a while so that when they come back to our timeline she will be legally but not physically over the age of consent. There's also the short story he wrote for, I think, one of the Dangerous Visions anthos about a world where very large breasted women are kept as literal milk cows in barns. I quit reading his books around age 14 when I started being able to understand context for what they were saying. I feel a little weird and icky even admitting in public how many of them I read as a kid, which is one of the big reasons I don't talk about how disturbing they are much.)

[dr_whom]

He has at least two different stories where time travel or dimensional whatever is exploited in order to make a teenage girl legally but not physically over the age of consent. (The other one I'm thinking of is the Mode series.)

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I read the first one, recognized the sexism, and never picked up another one. Puerile and dull were my other reactions.