I was just reading Joseph Heller's Catch 22 for the first time and I had to stop at chapter 13.
Having served in the U.S. Army I could appreciate the text dealing with arbitrary rules, abuse of authority and inability to fix problems due to a heavy military bureaucracy.
This authenticity isn't surprising since Heller served in the military during WWII.
What kept me from going further was the disgusting portrayal of every single female in the book.
Women only exist in Catch-22 to be lusted after and fucked.
While the men in Heller's book have names, personalities and backstories, women are only differentiated by their physical features or the type of sex they have.
One female character is merely referred to as "Nately's whore."
Women are put into Heller's book so his manly soldiers will have something to stick their penises in. Sometime they are allowed to cook meals and clean rooms but only while wearing lime green panties and still being sexually available.
I suppose it's possible that Heller went through life never meeting women who were capable of doing more than cooking meals and serving some sort of sexual gratification purpose, but I doubt it. So I'll put this down to willful misogyny.
There seems to be a certain type of male author who loves to write about manly men in masculine worlds who plow through women and are made godlike in the process.
I wonder if they weren't all latent homosexuals who could never go the distance because being gay wasn't seen as manly enough?
If true, that's really unfortunate but it's still no excuse for making shallow, two dimensional sex bots out of all your female characters.
I'm sure if you had cornered Heller at a party and asked about this he would say he "adored women" and then go on to list the wonderful things about the "fairer sex" that he loved so much. Most of them would be self serving and more about how great they made him look or feel.
Blind worshipers of Heller like the gentlemen who wrote the introduction in my version of the book will easily look past or not mention this little hiccup in their idol's work.
A few of them may even trot out the ol' "product of his time" chestnut-as if there was an era in history when men didn't actually know that women were human beings.
I'm putting this guy in the same rubbish bin as super tit Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer-the latter being an asshole who actually almost killed his wife by stabbing her and then had his family convince her not to press charges.
Having served in the U.S. Army I could appreciate the text dealing with arbitrary rules, abuse of authority and inability to fix problems due to a heavy military bureaucracy.
This authenticity isn't surprising since Heller served in the military during WWII.
What kept me from going further was the disgusting portrayal of every single female in the book.
Women only exist in Catch-22 to be lusted after and fucked.
While the men in Heller's book have names, personalities and backstories, women are only differentiated by their physical features or the type of sex they have.
One female character is merely referred to as "Nately's whore."
Women are put into Heller's book so his manly soldiers will have something to stick their penises in. Sometime they are allowed to cook meals and clean rooms but only while wearing lime green panties and still being sexually available.
I suppose it's possible that Heller went through life never meeting women who were capable of doing more than cooking meals and serving some sort of sexual gratification purpose, but I doubt it. So I'll put this down to willful misogyny.
There seems to be a certain type of male author who loves to write about manly men in masculine worlds who plow through women and are made godlike in the process.
I wonder if they weren't all latent homosexuals who could never go the distance because being gay wasn't seen as manly enough?
If true, that's really unfortunate but it's still no excuse for making shallow, two dimensional sex bots out of all your female characters.
I'm sure if you had cornered Heller at a party and asked about this he would say he "adored women" and then go on to list the wonderful things about the "fairer sex" that he loved so much. Most of them would be self serving and more about how great they made him look or feel.
Blind worshipers of Heller like the gentlemen who wrote the introduction in my version of the book will easily look past or not mention this little hiccup in their idol's work.
A few of them may even trot out the ol' "product of his time" chestnut-as if there was an era in history when men didn't actually know that women were human beings.
I'm putting this guy in the same rubbish bin as super tit Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer-the latter being an asshole who actually almost killed his wife by stabbing her and then had his family convince her not to press charges.
No comments:
Post a Comment