[ SECRET POST #3153 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3153 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 060 secrets from Secret Submission Post #451.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

SA

I would also like to specify that throughout my life I've always subsisted well below the poverty line. So I'm not some privileged upper-middle class lefty person who can love Atlas Shrugged with impunity because I'll never have to worry about a system with makes the rich people richer and blames the poor for their poverty. I know all about that. I just...enjoy the book anyway?

Yeah, I don't really get it myself. I think it comes back to the prose and the way it just grips me and doesn't let go. Also, I will love Dangy Taggart until the day I die. She's the reason that, even though Atlas Shrugged was way squickier than The Fountainhead, I liked it more. I liked Dominique Francon too, but she was not the protagonist, nor was she anywhere near as active or as much of a BAMF as Dagny was.

[(Anonymous)]

huh, interesting comment. I'm... actually considering reading it now.

[(Anonymous)]

Hahaha, well good luck! Twenty to one odds you'll hate it with a fiery passion, but who knows, right?

My advice would be, if you read like fifty or a hundred pages and you're not enjoying it, you may as well quit, because it's only going to be the same except more so as the book goes on. It's not really one of those books that only starts to gel towards the end, I don't think. You basically either hate Rand's writing, think it's immensely self-righteous and that she's writing a manual on How To Be A Shitty Person. Or you...acknowledge it's faults but don't even care because her characters are all bamfs running around doing weird bamfy shit in her crazy, semi-dystopian trains-R-everything universe. Yeah.

[(Anonymous)]

^ This.

I kinda hated Atlas Shrugged but stayed with it till the end because I felt like I had to.

I LOVE The Fountainhead because of the characters. Flawed as fuck, but bold and brash and interesting as all get out.

[(Anonymous)]

I came here to say almost exactly what you said here. I can acknowledge all of Atlas Shrugged's shortcomings, but I liked it anyway, and for many of the reasons that you stated.

I have to disagree with you about which was squicker, though yours is the opinion I've heard from virtually everyone else. As far as I remember, The Fountainhead contained straight up rape, while the sex in Atlas Shrugged was perfectly consensual but described in terms that were all about conquest and surrender. Overall I found it much less bothersome. I've always wondered why I seem to be the only one.

Oh, also Hank/Francisco 4 life.

eeek, long comment, sorry

[(Anonymous)]

I have to disagree with you about which was squicker, though yours is the opinion I've heard from virtually everyone else.

The thing that makes Atlas Shrugged so squicky is that it's basically capitalist propaganda, and that it was intended as such, and that it literally went on to influence some of the biggest business and corporation heads in North America. I don't necessarily believe that Ayn Rand's vision of capitalism was anything like the suffocatingly massive, conscience-less corporate entities that we have today (her biggest failing was arguably her presumption that capitalism was a mechanism with any conscience to speak of). But some of the people who helm those conscience-less corporate entities use Atlas Shrugged and Objectivism to argue that what they do is great and noble and good for the country and all that utterly toxic rubbish. Plus, Ayn Rand had a tendency of vilifying the characters in her books who weren't actively getting shit done, calling them moochers and whatnot. Which, if you carry that forward into modern society, sounds a lot like the nasty conservative asshats of today who run around complaining every time someone below the poverty line gets any sort of financial break whatsoever, since clearly they're poor because they're lazy and weak and therefore should not be treated with decency catered to.

So yeah, basically, Atlas Shrugged is squicky on a truly massive scale, and it's squicky attitudes don't just reflect real world attitudes, they may have actually contributed to those attitudes in a substantial way.


Whereas The Fountainhead is mainly squicky because of that scene between Roark and Dominique. Which, okay, presuming Roark did rape Dominique, yes, the way that scene is handled is massively fucked up. And the way their relationship developes after that is also massively fucked up. But even so, it's fucked up on a very small scale. The Fountainhead wasn't a book on how men ought to treat women, and influential men don't go around to this day citing The Fountainhead as "the book that shaped the way they understood gender relations." It's just a really fucked up, squicky scene in a book.

That said, I do not personally see that scene in The Fountainhead as rape. It's extremely problematic, for sure, and it's very difficult to say conclusively that it wasn't rape, because Dominique herself calls it rape. However, I find it fairly clear that Dominique and Roark have a tacit understanding of what they both expect to happen that evening. Dominique expects Roark to come to her house to ravish her (for lack of a better term). Roark knows Dominique expects it. Roark knows Dominique will fight him. Dominique knows Roark will force her. It's basically rape roleplay except they haven't actually verbally discussed it first and they don't have a safe word.

YES, that is incredibly messed up and it could NEVER happen in the real world, and if it did it would almost certainly be rape. Because in the real world people don't somehow just magically know what another person is thinking and what they want. But in The Fountainhead, the premise is that they understand each other with almost telepathic clarity. Is it problematic as all hell? Resoundingly, yes. Is it rape? YMMV, but for my money, no.

Notably, Ayn Rand herself has said that "If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation." Also notably, the book was published in 1943, a time when people didn't have words like "rape roleplay," and didn't understand that "rape by engraved invitation" was an irreconcilable contradiction in terms.

Re: eeek, long comment, sorry

[(Anonymous)]

If one were to pay close attention to what she says in her books, her view of capitalism is nothing like it is practiced today.

Everything she disliked in what businessmen and corporations were doing are the same things that gives capitalism a bad name today. She was against outsourcing, speculating the stock market (which drives inflation), cronyism, the concept of corporation itself, political favors (no government involved), corporate "personhood" (she would be horrified), big business exploiting ways to prevent healthy competition from small business.

It's interesting that many of her villains are businessmen.

All these corporate assholes who cherry pick her works and claim to be her fans, she would have absolutely loathed them. Especially Paul Ryan. She came to hate conservatives.

Yeah, she was far from perfect, and so were her ideas, but she isn't as horrible as some people make her out to be.

Re: eeek, long comment, sorry

[(Anonymous)]

If one were to pay close attention to what she says in her books, her view of capitalism is nothing like it is practiced today.

I agree, and it's one of the things I find incredibly frustrating about all the people who knee-jerk hate Rand and her books. I don't think many of those people even try to understand what Rand is actually trying to say.

However, the flaws in Rand's philosophy are, IMO, so tightly and thoroughly interwoven with what's actually good about her philosophy that it can be very hard to separate them, or even tell the difference between the two. Not to mention, she wants the reader to understand capitalism as something it simply isn't, and as something I don't believe it could ever actually be (in theory, yes; in practice, no). So I suppose I blame her for having the narcissism to believe so unquestioningly in her own philosophy that she failed to recognize it was poisoned by her own personal biases (growing up in communist Russia) and presumptions (Capitalism is noble!).

And while I don't believe she meant for people to use her books to justify the sociopathy of modern day corporate capitalism, there's still so much about her books that does encourage people to despise the weak and the inactive, and to despise socialism. And that's pretty toxic.

And hey, within the context of her books, I'm totally fine with despising Peter Keeting and James Taggart and Lillian Rearden and the like. Because the way they're depicted makes them thoroughly deserve to be despised. The trouble is, in the real world the people who are often laziest and weakest of character are the leaders, the ones with the power and the money. But your average reader is not going to recognize that Rand gravely miscast her "weaklings" and her "moochers," because that would mean rejecting the ideas that are right there on the page making them feel good, in favor of more challenging and less gratifying ideas.

Yeah, she was far from perfect, and so were her ideas, but she isn't as horrible as some people make her out to be.

I agree. In fact, I almost...kind of...like her? In a way. I like that she was this bold, OTT powerhouse of a woman; taking no shit and giving no fucks; smart, passionate, ugly as dirt, kind of an asshole. I think she probably did more harm than good in the world, and I doubt I would have liked her had I met her, but as a person who existed and was this complete character and commanded respect from a country of men whose capacity to respect women had all but atrophied...I kind of have to respect her.

[(Anonymous)]

SA

P.S. - Hello fellow Ayn-Rand-liking-liberal-sane-person! There are not nearly enough of us and I'm always so happy to run into another person who feels (mostly) the same way about Rand's books as I do!

P.P.S. - Ayn Rand's worlds all feel so intensely hetero that I'm not sure I can make Hank/Frisco work in my head. But if I ever read Atlas Shrugged again (which I probably will, someday) I promise to give it a try. Really, the more I think about it the more it totally should happen. I always did feel rather bad for Hank (though less so for Frisco, since we see him so much less and he was always off dicking around). It makes sense that they might find, in each other, the same core of passion and indomitability that made Dagny so appealing to them both.