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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1282282" data-attributes="member: 812">Well, I won't argue that the books have appealed more to men than women. However, how much of that is social -- to what degree have they appealed to men because women have been discouraged from investigating this kind of material?Obviously the answer is we don't know because we're not able to conduct experiments on stuff like this -- we only have one example, and of course no counter-examples, so who knows?All that aside, I question how much value there is in generalizations like "Women tend not to like this book." I mean, once you've made that observation, then what? It doesn't provide any predictive power -- you have no way of knowing whether or not any given woman is going to like the book or not, so what good did the generalization do?Besides make us feel smart, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Now here I must take exception. The idea that friendship, sacrifice, courage and honour are themes that women don't connect with is pretty insulting when you think about it. I certainly don't for a second think you meant to be insulting, and when I read your post I didn't even recognize the problem with the statement -- it wasn't until I read Buttercup's response that I started thinking about this statement and saying to myself, "Of course friendship, sacrifice, courage and honour matter just as much to women as to men."I think more relevant to the "more men than women" appeal of LotR are elements like swords, castles, monsters and constant descriptions of women as beautiful. Not that those things don't appeal to women, but that at least in our society, women are more likely to be considered a little oddball for demonstrating a prediliction for such things. Which could be seen as a form of discouragement.Again, Spatula, I don't believe you were trying to make an insulting statement, and I understand the idea you were trying to get across -- which is NOT that women don't care about friendship, sacrifice, courage and honour. But I do think it's interesting to note the manner in which you put your ideas -- and again, I think it's interesting because at first I accepted it without question.Gender roles run pretty deep.</blockquote>

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