167 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
167 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
Sex and Tolkien
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<p>Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies<br />
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marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a<br />
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delight; Peter Jackson’s <cite>Return Of The King</cite> fully lived up<br />
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to the promise of <cite>The Fellowship of the Ring</cite> and <cite>The<br />
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Two Towers</cite>. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions,<br />
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Tolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful both for Jackson’s vision<br />
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and the fact that Hollywood actually allowed him to make these movies<br />
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as good as they are.</p>
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<p>The marathon was also quite a geekfest. The theater was<br />
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wall-to-wall with SF and fantasy fans, SCAdians, computer hackers,<br />
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and the like. A very intelligent, cerebral, imaginative crowd. My<br />
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kind of people, talking and meeting and mixing with each other<br />
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a great deal more than your typical movie crowd does. The fact<br />
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that many people showed up hours early to get good seats, and the<br />
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two half-hour intermissions, helped a lot.</p>
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<p>In a refutation of stereotypes, many of those attending were<br />
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female. And attractive. And often dressed to display it in Arwen or<br />
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Eowyn outfits. Had I been actually trying, I believe I would have<br />
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taken home at least three phone numbers, which is a significant datum<br />
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even given that I’m a lot more self-confident about the flirting thing<br />
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than most geek guys.</p>
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<p>Part of me was in anthropologist mode, contemplating the mating<br />
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behaviors on display, even as I was chatting with the pretty redheaded<br />
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theater student from State College, the massage therapist in the seat<br />
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next to me, the blonde in the concession-stand line, and the buxom<br />
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big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt who told me all about re-reading<br />
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the Rings every year since she was eleven, and I’ll be <em>damned</em><br />
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if she didn’t mean that as at least a bit of a come-on. I wondered<br />
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what Tolkien, Edwardian prude that he was, would have said of the<br />
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human tendency to turn the appreciation of his works into a sort of<br />
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pickup scene for the high-IQ crowd. That led me to consider ribald<br />
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parodies like the hilarious <a href='http://www.ealasaid.com/misc/vsd/'>Very Secret Diaries</a>,<br />
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which at least two of the women I chatted with obviously knew quite<br />
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well and I’d bet money the other two did too.</p>
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<p>I was also thinking, during the movies, about Liv Tyler. Long-time<br />
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readers will be aware that I have warm and lusty feelings about our<br />
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Liv. OK, so I will cheerfully concede that Miranda Otto is a dish and<br />
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well into wouldn’t-kick-her-out-of-bed territory, but her Eowyn<br />
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doesn’t nail the releaser circuitry in my hindbrain quite the way<br />
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Tyler’s Arwen does. During the first movie I found watching Arwen’s<br />
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lips as she spoke Elvish quite an erotic experience. (And it’s not<br />
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just me. My sister Lisa reported, after I mentioned this, having been<br />
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startled to discover the same reaction in herself. This is amusing<br />
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because I have never had any reason to doubt her report that she’s<br />
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normally as straight as a laser-beam.) Arwen isn’t any less sexy<br />
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in the third movie.</p>
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<p>So I was well-primed to read the essay <a href='http://www.ansereg.com/warm_beds_are_good.htm'>Warm Beds Are<br />
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Good</a> this morning. This is an extended and thorough consideration<br />
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of sex and sexuality in Tolkien’s works. Towards the end, the author<br />
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makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien’s<br />
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mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their<br />
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own fantasy needs. This makes sense; giving a luscious version of<br />
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Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a<br />
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crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it’s a way to make the mythos<br />
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fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather<br />
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dessicated and repressed account of <cite>The romance of Aragorn and<br />
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Arwen</cite> in Appendix A of <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite> would<br />
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have been.</p>
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<p><cite>Warm Beds Are Good</cite> fails to grapple with the most<br />
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interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn<br />
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could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first<br />
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place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of<br />
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Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen’s behavior makes<br />
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any sense at all.</p>
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<p>Aragorn’s end isn’t that much of a mystery. He’s an alpha male of<br />
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a warrior culture, chock full o’ testosterone and other dominance<br />
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hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog. She’s a<br />
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beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility<br />
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signals in all directions. If she doesn’t actively smell bad, tab A<br />
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fits slot B just fine from the point of view of <em>his</em><br />
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mating instincts.</p>
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<p>No, the fundamental problem is Arwen’s lifespan. She is supposedly<br />
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something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets<br />
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Aragorn. That’s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely<br />
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Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a<br />
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normal human female’s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a<br />
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Liberian tramp steamer. On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is<br />
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fundamentally <em>different</em> from a human female’s, what’n’thehell<br />
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is she doing with Aragorn? He shouldn’t look or smell or behave right<br />
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to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to<br />
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most human women.</p>
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<p>“B-b-but…” I hear you splutter “This is<br />
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<em>fantasy!</em>”, to which I say foo! Tolkien was very<br />
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careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by<br />
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temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology,<br />
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thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps. He<br />
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lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent<br />
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secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely<br />
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repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of<br />
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the lost past of <em>our</em> Earth, and that therefore matter, energy<br />
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and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know<br />
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them.</p>
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<p>Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as<br />
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though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men<br />
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both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin’ biology makes any sense at<br />
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all under this assumption.</p>
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<p>And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves<br />
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are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring. That means<br />
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they have to be genetically very, <em>very</em> similar. If there<br />
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are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior,<br />
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the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small<br />
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set of genes that somehow don’t interfere with that interfertility.<br />
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In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the<br />
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same stock.</p>
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<p>When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first<br />
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movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare<br />
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periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each<br />
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other for life when they mate, like swans. This pattern is actually<br />
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within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon — which<br />
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makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid<br />
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subspecies.</p>
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<p>This ‘swan theory’ would be consistent with Appendix A,<br />
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which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven<br />
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prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien’s rather clotted<br />
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chansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there,<br />
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and (b) has Arwen’s family apparently operating under the assumption<br />
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that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn’t be<br />
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mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.</p>
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<p>One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a<br />
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canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor;<br />
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first wife Miriel, second Indis). In subsequent discussion, we<br />
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concluded that it wasn’t possible to frame a consistent theory that<br />
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fit Tolkien’s facts. The sticking-point turned out to be the<br />
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half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to <em>choose</em> whether<br />
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they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they<br />
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do so at puberty.</p>
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<p>Since that’s true, the difference between Men and Elves can’t<br />
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properly be genetic at all. It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit,<br />
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magic, and divine interventions. This is not an area in which Tolkien<br />
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(a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all. Elvish<br />
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sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any<br />
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reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so,<br />
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and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens’ hormones<br />
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from getting them jiggy Until It’s Time.</p>
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<p>Helluva way to run a universe, say I. Inelegant. A really<br />
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craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn’t require<br />
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constant divine intervention to function. It’s a serious weakness in<br />
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Tolkien’s ficton, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like<br />
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domestic cats (which didn’t reach northern Europe until late Roman<br />
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times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.</p>
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<p>Meanwhile, back in this universe, I’m kind of wishing I’d asked the<br />
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buxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt for her phone number. Too<br />
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many alpha-male horn-dog hormones, that’s me. Tolkien wouldn’t have<br />
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understood a sexual culture in which that was even conceivable<br />
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behavior for a happily married man. much less one in which the wench<br />
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and wife would have then been more likely to become friends than not;<br />
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his only category for it would have been debauchery. But I think his<br />
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fantasy continues to work partly <em>because</em> it’s so repressed.</p>
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<p>Sexual love (and all the mutability of human custom that goes with<br />
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it) is essentially a side issue in Tolkien’s work, primarily a symbol<br />
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of reward for valor (Faramir and Eowyn; Sam and Rosie; Aragorn and<br />
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Arwen, for that matter). His Edwardian restraint produces a nearly<br />
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blank ground on which Peter Jackson can project Liv Tyler and readers<br />
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can project all their own sexual dramas and hopes, from the romance of<br />
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Aragorn and Arwen to the rather weird ones like Gimli/Legolas slash<br />
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fiction. Certainly that’s what the women in Arwen and Eowyn costumes<br />
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were doing.</p>
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<p>And for a good laugh, there’s always the <cite>Very Secret<br />
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Diaries</cite>. Rather than launch into a postmodernist-sounding rant<br />
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about irony and appropriation, I’ll just finish by observing that all<br />
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of these things modulate each other; that not only do we project our<br />
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sex onto Tolkien’s sex, we read Tolkien’s sex differently after<br />
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the <cite>Very Secret Diaries</cite>, or after seeing Liv Tyler<br />
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speak Elvish, than we did before. That much, Tolkien would<br />
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have had no trouble understanding.</p>
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