[ SECRET POST #2519 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2519 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 049 secrets from Secret Submission Post #360.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, he's really not a jerk. He's just gets moody sometimes without trying to hide it and gets short with people he feels are being patronizing or who cone to him for help and then refuse to give him the information he needs to do anything.

He also doesn't really hate women - he's quite nice to his female clients - he just doesn't want to marry one.

[nyxelestia]

That's always confused me. I'll say right now that while I've read a lot of the original stories, I haven't read all of them, but where did the whole sexist/misogynist!Holmes thing come from? He never seems to be particularly hostile towards women. At most, he may hold a low-level condescension towards women that is honestly just typical of literature and men from that era - at most. I've never seen anything particularly sexist from him (and that's after reading a Scandal in Bohemia, which always seems to be the source of this interpretation of Holmes...?).

[(Anonymous)]

It comes from people who read ACD without taking into context the historical period and attitudes of the time. Holmes isn't nasty with women nor is he a misogynist by the standards of the time. He just doesn't see the point of a romantic relationship for himself. He also teases Watson about his marriage, and a lot of people miss that he's ribbing a colleague, not making a blanket statement about marriage being a waste of time.

[intrigueing]

I don't know about that. Perhaps "by the standards of the time" he wasn't, but Watson explicitly describes him as being more misogynistic than was the norm in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Dying Detective", and in The Sign of Four, his opinion of Holmes's "ribbing" is to tell the reader that he was in too much of a hurry to stop and argue with such an "atrocious sentiment." So Holmes was considered sexist at least by Watson's standards. (Which admittedly might have been somewhat more progressive than the norm -- given Watson's other opinions concerning divorce, race, drugs, colonial warfare, American Politics, etc, it would be pretty IC for him -- but he still wasn't exactly some kind of radical.)

However yes, Holmes was never actually nasty with women. He never dismissed or devalued his female clients either, except that one time at the end of A Case of Identity.

[(Anonymous)]

There are a few other times where he says shit about women, mostly just snide comments about their habits and how they're vapid and fickle and impossible to understand. In The Dying Detective Watson says that although he was polite to them, he disliked and distrusted women in general. And then there's The Sign of Four, where Holmes is not keen on Watson getting married and talks some more shit about women there (which Watson describes as an "abominable sentiment" in his narration). Also, A Scandal in Bohemia implies his sexism decreased noticeably after the encounter with Irene Adler.

But for the most part, yeah -- he talks a big game about how women are silly and irrational and etc etc, but his actions towards them never match his words. He's always very respectful to them and never does the kind of stuff you'd expect a genuinely sexist person to do, like, say, assume they'll lose their heads in a crisis, or push them aside because they'll be useless in following his instructions, or dismiss their stories as hysteria or overexcitement. He rarely, if ever, actually does anything sexist.

[fenm]

Hell, I can think of a few times when he asks women to do dangerous things ("Copper Beeches", "Speckled Band"), relying on them to handle themselves in a crisis. These are not the actions of a man who thinks woman are weak or unstable.

[quantumreality]

This. He can be short with Watson, and on occasion upbraids him, but in the main, he treats Watson as a worthy friend and even goes so far as to threaten the life of a man who shoots Watson in the leg.