Are women just bored of the rings?

[Buttercup]

An absolutely spot-on explication.

Kimberly, you are a goddess.

 

[Buttercup]

Stormraven, there is another woman with a speaking part in the books. In RotK, there is Ioreth. She was the chatty nurse in the Houses of Healing.

So in the books, we have:

Goldberry
Arwen
Galadriel
Eowyn
Lobelia Sackville-Baggins
Rosie
Ioreth

 

[Storm Raven]

Stormraven, there is another woman with a speaking part in the books. In RotK, there is Ioreth. She was the chatty nurse in the Houses of Healing.

Dang. Forgot about her. That's seven.

Seven female characters! Who said there aren't any female characters in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings?

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Curses! Off by two now! Hmm...so who's going to find the EIGHTH female character? With the way this is going, we may find out that the main characters aren't what we thought...

 

[WayneLigon]

"Lord of the Rings" is for boys ...
A New York Times critic falls for lazy gender-typing.

 

[Buttercup]

I don't understand why anyone feels the need to argue about it.

Don't be a killjoy. We're having fun arguing about it.

 

[WizarDru]

Curses! Off by two now! Hmm...so who's going to find the EIGHTH female character? With the way this is going, we may find out that the main characters aren't what we thought...

Does Shelob count?

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Maybe because very few of us have NYT online subscriptions, and thus can't read the original article?

the title and quoted comments are actually sufficient to realize that its not a review... And though I have never subscribed to the NYT following the link worked for me... *shrug* So you are defending your misjudgement by stating that your are judging the article without reading the whole thing? Thats not usually something you bring up in these discussions...

Kahuna burger

 

[barsoomcore]

So what if LOTR appeals more to men than to women? I don't understand why anyone feels the need to argue about it. It seems like a self-evident truth.

The author is not stating that every single woman on the face of the earth will be uninterested in fantasy war movies but that most women will be less interested than men. It's a sound observation.

My beef with statements like this isn't that they are or aren't accurate -- it's that they aren't useful, critically speaking.

Having made the observation, now what? The only use of such an argument (in a critical sphere) seems to be, as the woman writing for Salon suggested, providing a means of shutting down debate. If you can say, "This is uninteresting to me because I'm a woman," well, there's not much anyone can say about that.

"No, you're not."

Doesn't work so well. And of course you can provide anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but as fusangite's pointed out that doesn't do anything to reverse the general trend.

But while such observations are useful for marketing weasels who need to design posters and predict profit margins (and the fact that Hollywood remains as crappy at that as ever suggests that these generalizations are less accurate than people want to believe they are), they offer no interesting critical insights, and are rightly considered unhelpful when made as critical opinions of a work.

The reason I'm uninterested in Mona Lisa Smile isn't because it's a "chick flick" -- I loved Four Weddings, Erin Brockovich, Sense and Sensibility, all of which could probably be described as "chick flicks" -- but because it sounds bad. I may have read reviews which said, "This sucks because it's a chick flick" -- but those wouldn't discourage me. It's reviews which say, "This sucks and here's half a dozen reasons why," that make me steer clear.

Now it may be perfectly true that most men look at the poster and say, "Chick flick," and don't go. That doesn't make it an interesting critical statement.

 

[KaCee]

So, I guess that was your Vagina Monologue.

Probably.

That's an awesome play that both men and women enjoy. There were plenty of men there when my husband and I went to see it last year!