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. :( :( :(

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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]

Yeah. Pretty much that. :-(

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Good God, they're up to book 39!

[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]

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.

[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.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I KNOW.

[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.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much true, from my experience as a former fanboy. Any Piers Anthony series starts good and declines from there... and that's when you're feelig generous.

[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.