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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercutio01" data-source="post: 4878474" data-attributes="member: 37277">1.  He is NOT the only white man on the planet.2. He comes from Earth which has a different gravity ratio, hence the "superhuman."3. He is not smarter or more civilized than anyone else.  Indeed, he's nowhere near the smartest guy on the planet, and his makes numerous remarks about the civilization of Mars being no different from that on earth, which is also continuously mired in warfare.4. He doesn't change how the society of the red Martians works at all.  He changes so little, in fact, that he becomes the Warlord and princess cohort, not the leader, not even the associate leader.  Just a general.A great deal of EVERYTHING ever written is extremely bigotted, misogynistic, and about as culturally sensitive as all heck.  I will say it again, if you attempted to ban, burn, or otherwise limit anything that was written that had an objectionable element that you named above, you would read, watch, or otherwise consume nothing at all.  You would sit in your cave and stare at the wall.This is not to say that some things are not objectionable, but taking them in context is the key to reading them.  Reading Joel Chandler Harris' "Tales from the South" can be taken either as a racist stereotype unworthy of reading and be burned in a pile with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huck Finn" or else seen for the expert capturing of dialogue, the struggle for black slaves to keep a sense of African identity amidst the horrors of slavery, and the exceptional story-telling of said African influenced tales.  You seem to be firmly in the former camp, and to my great dismay, most of academia follows the same thought process.Once again, Shakespeare is as racist, sexist, misogynistic, and/or otherwise objectionable as anyone else writing during his time period.  We teach him because of his "great skill" which is up for debate amongst highest level academics (did he really write all those plays?).  But we still teach him even so.  Why?  Because it captures a historical time point, tells a good set of stories, and is still generally considered literature.  Meanwhile, he was considered a hack at the time, no one ever read his poems (which were considered abject failures) and he was most definitely on the same level of "pulp" as the pulp writers of the 1920 and the studio writers in the TV industry today.It is context that drives meaning and story that drives entertainment.  As a story-writer, Burroughs was near the top at the time (and has lasted an extraordinarily long time).  As a "learning" environment he does a lot of things well, and a lot of things not-so-well, as does even Shakespeare.  In context, Burroughs is as worthy of study as anyone else in the time period.  And he so much less misogynistic than Hemingway that to compare them is to note that Burroughs has more in common with Gertrude Stein than the crotchety old woman hater of the Florida Keys.</blockquote>

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