The accidental bioessentialism of The Spirit Bares its Teeth:
We’ve been over AJW’s supreme lack of nuance in the topics he likes to cover. I mean c’mon, he wrote the most black and white, unintelligent politics book I have ever read. But we’re not here to talk about Compound Fracture tonight. No, we’re here to talk about TSBIT’s gender politics.
AJW treats this book’s cis male characters more like a hivemind than individual people. They pretty much all agree on the same things, which are misogyny and murder. Headmaster, Luckenbill, Dr. Bernthal, and every background male character we see at Braxton’s are basically carbon copies of the sheriff from Borrasca V (“I’m in it for the power and the women, I’m an alpha, Sam!”), Silas’ father only sees him as breeding stock and a cash cow. The only real exception is George, but in the end he proves to be just another big bad who disregards women to a comical degree. Men as a whole are treated as possessive of women and hating them and wanting them to die horrible deaths. And to be fair, some of this is simply how it was in the time period. But it’s also cranked up to 11 and an extremely nuance-less way of portraying an entire group of people. Just because most men believed it was a woman’s duty to marry and make the home doesn’t mean every father ever wanted their daughters to be raped by old men. There were layers to misogyny then, just like there are now.
Silas is the only male character who really thinks women are worth a damn. He was also born a woman. He goes on and on about how women are beautiful things and men want to own and ruin them, but that he’s not like them. He’s super special and he would never do wrong by a woman, but all the other men are evil. Now is it just me, or does this reek of bioessentislism? Something something “ohhhh Silas is the exception to the rule because of his WOMANLY instincts.” And like yeah, he has life experiences that make him see women differently, but TSBIT also presents us with two extremes of views on women. On one side we get the monolithic men, and on the other we get Silas and Silas alone. I really don’t think this was on purpose, but I am baffled that it never crossed AJW’s mind the subtext of what he was saying. It’s always subtext with him. He tries to weave a narrative about oppressed groups (unless you’re black, then he thinks you can fuck off I guess 🤷), but there’s always this weird subtext. And I guess you could make the case that Daphne doesn’t have strange amab stuff going on, but Daphne also has the depth of a thin crust pizza. I’m convinced he straight up didn’t care about her. I mean, AJW didn’t even TOUCH the fact that she was giving up most of her rights to live as her authentic self; The neglect of AJW’s female characters is another topic that could be talked about at length. Just like the race problem I’ve posted about, he also has a huge gender problem.
EDIT: Fixed a typo + A little more on Daphne. It’s interesting how the story seemingly does the opposite with her. She is a woman, but she mostly exists to dry Silas’ tears and come up with solutions whenever he hits a wall. Outside of this, she has very little character.
