Let me tell you about My Mighty Penis. It strikes fear into the hearts of men, it makes me an absolute authority on everything I know even the vaguest bit about, it allows me to get paid about twenty percent more that people who don't have one. It also, of course, grants me a tremendous insight into what it is like to be a woman. After all, who or what has a greater and deeper understanding of the mysteries of femininity than My Mighty Penis.

Obviously this is horseshit (except for the pay thing, that actually works) but deep down there's a part of me that genuinely thinks like this.

It was with this patronising sense of self-assurance that I sat down to read Kristin Cashore's debut novel Graceling. I'd just finished reading Green and was on a bit of a Minority Warrior high. Plus it had come highly recommended by pretty much all of my friends. More specifically it had come highly recommended by pretty much all of my female friends, who found it to be a genuine revelation.

I read it. I liked it. I thought it was really good. But I didn't have the same totally-blown-away reaction that, for example, Kyra had.

I consulted my Mighty Penis, and he promptly informed me that my expectations were simply too high, that my friends had overstated the virtues of the book, that it was after all a first novel by a new author so maybe it wasn't all that. Maybe after all the girls were just being silly and hysterical and over-investing in a piece of mediocre quest fantasy. After all the world-building wasn't that great and the pacing was a bit of, and Katsa wasn't particularly hot and didn't seem to behave in a realistic way a lot of the time, and hey, why were all the supporting characters men, huh, miss feminist? Huh, bet you didn't think of that.

I sat down and thought about it a bit more, and it slowly occurred to me that actually, the reason I didn't react as strongly to Graceling as I have to other books is that it was genuinely not about me. Not only that, but I suddenly realised that it was probably the first time in my life that I had ever had to deal with that in a fantasy novel.

I have of course read a lot of fantasy novels written by women, and plenty with female protagonists, and this has allowed me to feel good about how totally-not-sexist I am. I've also read a fair few fantasy novels which try to engage with Being a Woman (tm). Most of them have been written by men. What I have never read is a book which is so utterly unconcerned with me as a man.

Oh, umm, spoilers.

Katsa

Graceling is the story of Katsa, a child “Graced” with a supernatural talent for – well its complicated, but broadly she's supremely awesome in a fight. She starts the book with a power that terrifies her, being used by her uncle as an instrument of violence, and with her self esteem pretty much on the floor. Over the course of the book she gradually comes to terms with the power she has and the world she's in, with the lies she's been told and the things she can do and achieve. She grows from a confused young girl into a strong, capable, determined woman, in command of her own life and destiny. It is a process which is subtle, complex, and with profound emotional realism. She proves courageous, compassionate, resourceful and forgiving. She is in every way awesome.

I didn't fancy her at all.

Now part of the reason for this is that at the start of the book in particular, she's fairly clearly sixteen, and I'm past the stage in my life where I fancy sixteen-year-olds. On the other hand part of the reason for this is that Cashore spends no time whatsoever trying to make Katsa attractive to straight men. There's little or no description of her naked body glistening in the moonlight, or of her bending over to present her buttocks for chastisement. A lot of characters in the book find Katsa attractive but as a man I have no reason to share their infatuation. Nothing about the way Katsa looks, moves, or acts is remotely sexualised and so it's actually faintly jarring to me to find so many men falling over themselves to propose to her. Okay, by “so many” I actually mean “two”.

My Mighty Penis tells me that this is a flaw in the book, that it is Cashore's job to make me believe that these guys will have a reason to find Katsa attractive. Of course it's actually a flaw with my attitude. We don't need to know what specifically Giddon and Po find attractive about Katsa, we only need to know how Katsa feels about them being attracted to her. This is actually fantastically disorienting to read about, because it's a perspective I have no experience with and seldom if ever see represented in fantasy fiction. To be presented with a situation in which a man is attracted to a woman and to be asked to view it exclusively from her perspective is incredibly unusual and actually faintly discomforting. The notion that Giddon's attraction to Katsa simply does not matter, that not only is Katsa under no obligation to validate it, but neither is the text nor the reader, is genuinely alien to me.

A similar issue of unfamiliar perspective arises with Katsa's reluctance to sleep with Po, even though she's clearly into him. She talks for a long time about how she most certainly does not want to get married, and when the notion arises that they could be lovers without Katsa having to make any sort of commitment she agonises for what seems an inordinately long time before deciding to go for it. From a male perspective, this makes no sense whatsoever. It makes Katsa look like kind of a fool. After all, Po has told her quite clearly that he won't try to take away her freedom, why doesn't she just take him at his word? I'm going entirely by what other people have told me here, because once again this is utterly outside my personal experience, but the simple answer is that it really is more complicated than that. I don't want to make generalisations about what it is like To Be A Woman (tm) but purely within the context of the text, Katsa has spent her entire life surrounded by people trying to control her. More than that, she has spent her life surrounded by people trying to control her who genuinely thought it was for her own good.

Again I don't want to make generalisations but I know for a fact that I have, personally, treated women the way that Giddon treats Katsa, and the way Katsa fears that Po will treat her. I have never been in an analogous position myself, and I am never likely to be. My personal autonomy, my right to make my own decisions, is protected by every structure of the society I live in. The fear Katsa has of losing her freedom and her identity by being with Po is something to which I genuinely cannot relate. I do, however, know enough to understand that it is neither foolish, nor unfounded.

Katsa is a sublimely realised female character. So sublimely realised that I can't really relate to her. The experiences that shape her are not my experiences. The issues that concern her are not my concerns. The qualities I look for in a female fantasy figure are not qualities the text shows any interest in. My fantasies are not what the book cares about fulfilling. Katsa is not for me and the fact that I even expected that she should be is evidence of how profoundly important this book actually is.

Men

Cashore has been criticised from a number of directions for her portrayal of men. Some reviews have argued that Katsa's relationship with Po boils down to her being “emotionally rescued” by a man, and there was recently an extremely long discussion on Kyra's article about whether Cashore was wrong to include so many male supporting characters, and whether the book would have been better if one or more of them had been a woman instead.

Both of these things confused the hell out of me, because I found Cashore's portrayal of men to be one of the most positive, most important, and most subtle things about the text.

And in case you're wondering, this is the part of the article where I lay into Green some more.

One of the tropes I find increasingly infuriating in books by men about women is what I've come to think of as the “guys who aren't me” mentality. You know what makes life hard for women? Guys who aren't me. You know what's wrong with society? Guys who aren't me. You know why women do more work for less money, why only three percent of rape cases end in conviction, why women are still routinely excluded from everything from government to the games industry? That's right folks, it's because of guys who aren't me.

It is fantastically comforting for men to decide that all of the problems of a patriarchal society stem exclusively from a particular sub-group of their sex who we can severally refer to as “sexists,” “jerks,” “misogynists” or simply “men” - those of us who use the final descriptor tend to self identify as “lesbians trapped in men's bodies”, a self-diagnosis which manages to be offensive to women, homosexuals, and the transgender all at the same time. By subscribing to this model of gender politics, we can avoid having to analyse our own behaviour, or think about our own privilege, and decide instead that all gender equality issues would be solved if more hot women would have sex with us. Seriously, you think I'm joking, I'm not. We really do think like this.

Green is a classic example. It demonises men to a ludicrous extent. The protagonist is so terrified of male sexuality that she mutilates her face and becomes a lesbian. The book keeps her locked away in all-female environments for most of her life, and every time she does meet a man, they try to enslave her, rape her, kill her or all three. It 's an utterly male-centric view of womanhood, and coming from a male writer, utterly self-serving. It absolves men of any responsibility for the way they treat women, it casts Fear of the Almighty Penis as the driving force in a woman's life, and tells women that their only choices are to let men treat them like shit, or become lesbians.

The worst thing about the Guys Who Aren't Me school of gender studies is that it has an unfortunate veneer of maturity. Compared to Green's cynical portrayal of a world ruled by irredeemably corrupt men who will all rape a woman to death given half a chance, Cashore's cast of kindly grandfathers, gay princes, and Graceling lovers seems positively naive.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Because Cashore never demonises men, because she shows not only men whose power makes them venal and corrupt but also men who are good and kind and virtuous, she shows that men have the power to make real choices about the way they treat people. By allowing Katsa to interact with men who actually enrich her life, Cashore places the responsibility for the way men treat women exactly where it should be, with individual men making individual choices.

Cashore's portrayal of men, and of the relationships between men and women, is profoundly subtle and nuanced. Where many writers opt either for “women good, men bad” or worse, “good men good, bad men bad, women kind of irrelevant” Cashore recognises and explores the notion that even perfectly decent men can still behave towards women in a manner which is destructive (something a great many male writers seem to think literally impossible). Randa is a bad man, and seeks to control Katsa because he's a tyrant. Giddon is a good man and seeks to control Katsa because he loves her. The fact that Giddon is otherwise a nice guy (with or without capitalisation) doesn't change the fact that his relationship with Katsa contains destructive elements. Raffin is also a good man, and his relationship with Katsa is genuinely supportive, but even so there are some things which he simply can't do for Katsa, because there are some things about her life he simply doesn't understand.

Katsa's relationship with Raffin in particular highlights the fact that no matter how nice a man is, a relationship with him can never be literally equivalent to a relationship with another woman. This seems obvious but again I know from experience that there are a lot of men who genuinely don't realise this. A lot of men do really believe that they can expect women to treat them as if they were a woman. They'll keep saying things like “well I've always found that I identify more strongly with women than men” or the aforesaid “well really I think of myself as a lesbian trapped in a man's body” and they'll get genuinely pissy if women choose to spend time with other women instead of with them.

Raffin is in the book for all of thirty seconds (briefly at the beginning, briefly at the end). His relationship with Katsa is significant in its insignificance. It is entirely healthy, and entirely constructive, but nowhere near as important to Katsa's early emotional development as her relationship with Helda, the servant who takes it upon herself to make sure that Katsa grows up with an actual woman in her life. The idea that women do actually need to be around women, and that men – even nice men – are no substitute for that is one which recurs constantly in the text. At the end of the book, when Katsa finally leaves Bitterblue as Queen of Monsea, it is Helda she sends for and trusts with the care of the young Queen. This is a simple concept, but again what struck me about it was how rarely it is expressed. As a man, I am used to the idea that me and my Mighty Penis can achieve anything and the notion that women can get something from other women that they cannot get from me is far more alien and disturbing to me than I care to admit to myself.

Of course the other side of this coin is Po. Katsa starts the book quite broken, convinced that she is nothing but a killer, unable to really trust anybody, terrified of losing what little freedom she has. Her relationship with Po is a big part of her becoming a more complete person. This is totally okay. It is more than okay, it is incredibly important. The notion that it is somehow unfeminist to suggest that women can have relationships with men which are loving, supportive and help them to grow and mature as individuals is frankly mind-boggling. The point is not that her relationship with Po was something that Katsa needed the point was her relationship with Po was something that Katsa wanted and that the way Po treated her, supported her, trusted her and helped her was the way she had the right to be treated.

In short, Cashore's portrayal of the relationships between men and women the most aware, most nuanced, and most flat out sorted that I have ever read. Graceling says that women need the company of other women, but can also enjoy the company of men, that they have the right to interact with men as equals, and without fear. It says that sex is okay, and it's something women are allowed to want. Criticising it because Katsa has several healthy relationships with men, or because her relationship with Po is unambiguously good for her, seems at best to be nitpicking, and at worst to be patronising. Neither I nor any other male reader gets to give Kristin Cashore a “B+ Could Try Harder” for her portrayal of gender issues.

Kristin Cashore, you wrote a book that wasn't about me and wasn't for me, and it's probably one of the most important things I've ever read in the genre. Thank you.

Oh, and thanks for the Week Three NaNoWriMo email. That was awesome too.