Philip Pullman thinks it's all a bit silly

But they still think it's fine to patronise women and pretend that threats of rape and torture against women are nothing to worry about.

Well, it probably is true that Pullman won't be subjected to those. He has no skin in the game. I agree with RoyalCorgi on the astonishing ubiquity of misogyny or at least of general contempt towards women. It was a revelation to me how clear it is in social media when it comes to this issue: The basic premise is that women should give in. Not yielding whatever rights are demanded means that one is a monster.

I guess it just feels like offensively complacent male privilege when men, especially ones with influence and who consider themselves ethical or thoughtful people, put themselves ‘above the fray’ like this.

It really demonstrates, more than anything, how engrained misogyny is. A typical left-wing white man wouldn't dare to dismiss black people's concerns about racism as "silly" or pretend that threats of violence by white people against black people didn't matter. Ditto homophobia. But they still think it's fine to patronise women and pretend that threats of rape and torture against women are nothing to worry about.

Let's remember, too, that Pullman knows JK Rowling: I don't know if they're friends, but they're the two most successful children's authors alive and their paths will have crossed many times. It's absolutely unforgivable that he doesn't have the basic decency or courage to stand up for her.

What I found particularly frustrating though was the way he presented the idea of innocence vs experience, which is a major theme and where he says he is trying to give the opposite of the Christian view, where (he claims)experience is seen as evil and a failure. That might be an excusable statement from someone that's spent no time looking into it, but hardy from someone who thinks it's an important enough idea to write a series of novels refuting it.

medium.com/@MForstater/index-on-censorship-please-keep-standing-up-strongly-for-freedom-of-speech-on-sex-and-gender-ec01687cef37

I guess it just feels like offensively complacent male privilege when men, especially ones with influence and who consider themselves ethical or thoughtful people, put themselves ‘above the fray’ like this.

Claiming ‘not to understand’, is a total cop out, because none of this is difficult to grasp if he wanted to. For most people who give it two seconds thought and who don’t hate women.. wel then of course women should be allowed to campaign for our own rights and needs.. and of course women should be allowed to keep single sex spaces... and of course it’s wrong to experiment on kids for political reasons, because we should give everyone evidenced healthcare.. and of course same-sex (or opposite sex) attraction is a thing and nobody should be urged to ‘get past’ their own sexual orientation to include anyone in their dating pool who ‘identifies as’ a biological sex class than their own.
And of course safeguarding remains essential. Who would argue against any of these things?

And especially disappointing that Pullman as a very successful writer, stands back like this. He’s seen a fellow writer, fall prey to multiple rape and death threats, which are never a normal response to anything said by anyone else.. so he should be calling out the only side making these threats and speaking out at much as he can about this. She’s not the only one of course, other writers too have had abuse around this issue.

Maya Forstater wrote a great blog, talking about why Index on Censorship should avoid the ‘both sides’ approach to trying to understanding this area. Maybe Pullman might find it helpful. medium.com/@MForstater/index-on-censorship-please-keep-standing-up-strongly-for-freedom-of-speech-on-sex-and-gender-ec01687cef37

I just think he lacks courage, so prevaricates. You can be a great writer and a weak man.

Some author of olden days ought to explain to The Times that the publishers were never "bastions of freedom of speech". There is a reason for the "colourful language" in Diana Wynne Jones' Wilkin's Tooth, published in 1973: she was not allowed to use even mild bad language like "damn" in a book for children, not even when it was entirely in keeping with the characters who used it. So they say "puce" and the like instead.

Jane in That Hideous Strength exists only to be a Useful Psychic and a Good Christian-Style Wife and to have the Right Baby, though, and quite a bit of the book involves people persuading her to do the latter. Merlin, I seem to remember, says she ought to be killed for having used contraception and not had the Right Baby at the right time. I read it at fifteen and didn't re-read so I may have misinterpreted that, but it was one of my two takeaways from it, along with how easily the NICE (ie malign forces) took everything over and nobody who wasn't One Of The Good Guys In White Hats even tried very hard to stop them.

That last bit has coloured my ways of thinking ever since, so maybe there is some good in Lewis!

Agree completely, Goosefoot, I still can't understand how Pullman gets away with it in Dark Materials - when I first read them, up to about half way through the second vol I was expecting the actual, Christian church to appear and explain that the Magisterium had forgotten about Christ! Straw man indeed.I
The whole thing with Susan is, I feel, very relevant to a lot of The discussion here - she falls into the trap of stereotypical young womanhood, and prefers to 'perform' that rather than being her own self. Sound familiar? She's not punished and cast out, but left to grow into herself again.
This is a theme that Lewis returned to in That Hideous Strength with Mark, whose moment of truth comes when he has finally to choose between his own true self and the constructed self that he has used since school so as to belong to the 'cool' set. Again, sound familiar?
What I love about Lewis is his ability to skewer our tendency to nonsense; he understood human beings, largely because he was honest about his own self.
And I agree with t he 'lucid prose ' DanceLike Lewis can say more, more clearly, in fewer words, than almost any other writer.

I can't remember which P.D James novel it was but I was left with an impression she disliked ordinary people. It might have been Cover her Face or Devices and Desires

To be fair she didn't come across that way in interviews.

That's interesting about P.D.James, I never thought of her as disliking people in general. Though I did think she seemed interested in the question of evil.

I’ve tried with Pullman’s work, but I just don’t enjoy him as a writer. I feel there’s a coldness and a dislike of ordinary people at the heart of his books. (As a digression, I was thinking that PD James strikes me the same way, and I find her uncomfortable reading. And then I remembered her book The Children of Men - which is set in 2021. Given how 2020 turned out ... en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children_of_Men).

I love CS Lewis. I’m not at all religious, but he is such a wonderful writer of such lucid prose. I remember reading The Allegory of Love and thinking that while I disagreed with it, just reading it was pleasure and I wanted to agree with him because it is such a beautiful book.

And Tolkien’s Tree and Leaf is as good a handbook on how to write fantasy as has ever been written.

Oh, I don't think the point with Susan was that she'd never join the others.

I think it was more about the fact that in adolescence many people lose sight of themselves.

She didn't die with the others so she would have the opportunity to find herself again.

Lucretia I agree. I loved Narnia, but The Last Battle is awful. There is some wonderful fanfic out there that carefully analyses the dialogue (the people harshest on her are Digory Kirke and Polly who would hardly know her) and postulates scenarios that might mean Susan is left behind not as a judgement, but because she is needed to do Aslan's work in this world.

Spoiler alert: Only three of the children go back into Narnia - Susan is no longer one of them because she's become a teenage girl and is no longer interested in magical things, being distracted by (as I recall) boys and make-up and the like. Her siblings talk about her with some contempt, I think (I haven't read it since I was that sort of age myself) At the end of the book it transpires that the other three are now dead in the real world and will never go back to England as they get to stay with Aslan forever (happy happy, joy joy). I don't think Susan is even mentioned at that point but I was haunted for ages by the way she was now left to spend the rest of her life bereft of her family and excluded from paradise for the sin of being a girl on her way to becoming a woman.

and The Commonwealth of Dust was a bit dull or indeed The Secret Commonwealth

It's about par for the course with Pullman though. His Dark Materials is supposedly an answer to Lewis and Christianity generally, but it's always seemed to me that he deliberately misunderstood both. It seemed unbelievable that someone with a brain would bother writing a whole series of novels to refute a straw-manned version of anything.

I suspect now he's like some of the New Atheist crew who imagine that it's religion per se that is related to irrational ideas, orthodoxies, and dangerous ideologies (because that of course describes all of them which is why only clearly stupid people like Lewis or Tolkien were ever religious), and somehow non-religious ideologies are exempt from these things. Any evidence of similar irrationality or bad behaviour in those is just by chance.

George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are extremely weird. I don't remember the plot detail of either but they may well be the first true fantasy novels.

Pullman's criticism of A.A Milne as "sickly nostalgia" is codswallop. The Pooh books are very funny. There's a dry sense of humour there ; particularly in the writing of the characters of Owl and Eeyore. Eeyore is an immensely quotable character. And how anyone who can dismiss the sweetness and melancholy at end of The House at Pooh Corner as "sickly nostalgia" is bizarre.

I'm going off Pullman. He comes across as a bit vain and egotistical (and The Commonwealth of Dust was a bit dull)

I didn't twig that Narnia was about Christianity until he really, really rammed it down my throat at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with that wretched Lamb turning into Aslan. And then I was affronted and thought it must have been an accident, because nobody would be so obvious! (OK, I think I was seven at the time, so I hadn't yet noticed how preachy people often are in their writing for children.)

Dido, I completely agree with you about the chronicles of Narnia. I'm happily atheist, grew up in an oppressively religious culture and no longer like being preached to, but still found those books utterly magical and love them. Love the wacky sci-fi trilogy too (despite the sexism).

Trying to be fair, I read

he didn’t understand the hoo-ha about JK Rowling’s exhortation that women, not people, menstruate.

as meaning that he didn't understand why she was being viciously attacked for it, as indeed anyone who wasn't entirely aware of the whole anti-women campaign wouldn't. Then he was himself attacked, found that equally baffling, and categorised all parties as "being silly".

As well as one or two excellent books with only about 50% Message in them, George MacDonald wrote some fair-to-average pap too: I recommend A Rough Shaking as an example of Goddy tosh. It does have the distinction of telling its trembling readers about a rat trying to eat a baby at one point, but that doesn't really redeem it. I get so bored with Children Too Good To Live (see At the Back of the North Wind. )

One of the themes in His Dark Materials is that going through puberty is an important part of life, and that interfering with that process is evil.

Oh yeah. It was beautifully written too.

But the characters had very gendered souls, didn't they? The shapeshifting (till puberty) animal part ("daemon") was always the opposite gender of the person's physical sex.
I think that's a Jungian concept? (anima/animus)
And Jung is a bit old-fashioned sexist...

From an article about E Nesbit"
Philip Pullman:The books I read as a child shaped my deepest beliefs. When I was at university, my friends and I were thrilled to discover that our childhood favourites seemed even more powerful than we remembered. This was true of classic authors such as George MacDonald, Rudyard Kipling, E Nesbit and Tove Jansson; or 1960s writers like Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Peter Dickinson and Ursula Le Guin." (SlaphappyLarry 2015)
Haha!