I've a love, hate relation with these books. I can keep on reading these books, especially parts with Daenerys or Arya for instance, but everytime you run into another rape scene, child defloration or other insult toward females.
(The notification from Tywin that his daughter Cersei has to be married off again, drove me up against the wall! Who the f*ck he thinks he is? She's the King-mother regent and he's just The Hand. Let Ice bites his neck for god sake!)
Those moment I have to put the book aside and don't read it for days sometimes. The overall storyline kept me hanging on though, I'm in the 2nd volume of the third book now.
Thesis :
The meaning of Barbie for the emancipation of women is underestimated.
Barbie is now more than 50 years old. This is about as old as the women movement itself. She has done a good many prework for it though.
She had been there since 1959 in America, from 1964 in Europe. For the first time a doll not looking like a baby or toddler, but looking like a grown up woman. Imagine what a gigantic shift this must have triggered inside a little girls soul, not having a doll you had to mother, care and bring up, but one in whom you have the ability to project a wide range of possible adult rolls, just by the way how you dress her up and act with her. Her wardrobe offered a wide and emancipated choice to do so.
Plausible or nonsense?
Nonsense, everything in her wardrobe was pink, just like all her accesoirces. She had completely out of proportion shapes, which many little girls wanted, and even some woman have thanks to plastical surgery which is the only way to look like that. To little girls she's still the same as doll shaped as a baby because little children walk with barbie dolls in a baby carriage as well. In my eyes, it hasn't changed anything.
Another thesis from an article written in the dutch NRC newspaper some time ago
It’s striking how a serious, adult aspiration Mattel gave to their blonde figurine. Creator Ruth Handler was clear about it though: "Barbie always represented the choices a woman has. She was more than Ken's girlfriend or an inveterate shopper. I think this was what made the doll succesful, not only to daughters - who later became the first major wave of working women - but also to their mothers."
The doll, seen by right-thinking women worldwide as stupid and superficial, appear to have been designed as a vehicle for emancipation. Barbie's clothes, her hair, her houses and means of transport: she paid it all herself. Even her expression was blank, intended by Handler as a blank canvas on which every budding woman could project on her dream personality.
And now? Those girls indeed go to work, just like Barbie - although unfortunately not with a guarantee for self-development or a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes. A number of them remained unmarried and free to continue dating, just like Barbie - until they looked back and found that Ken was long gone and now walking behind a baby-wagon peacefully.
Dieter votes nonsense.
Lol, she all paid it herself, I've never seen that. And the choices a Barbie doll represents are what clothes to wear, not really more than that. Her face is indeed blanc, just as with any other kind of doll since if they would give them a certain expression they would just look weird in many situations.
And that's why I vote nonsense.
A dance with dragons is not supposed to be the final book in the series, only the last one, unless Martin dies soon, which I'm afraid is very likely to hapen to a fat sedentary guy who's about 60. I never ever hated Faith - in fact she was one of my favorite Buffy characters - I kind of had a little identification with the mayor of Sunnydale - that guy was of my own heart. My fovorite witchy women are 1- Endora, Samantha's mother on Bewitched, a series of the 60's 2- Elaine Bennes, of the series Seinfeld 3- Neil Gaiman's Sandman's Death character.