Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (69927)	1/19/2009 1:47:23 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

That's a good way to describe Ayn. I never could stand her. She's the epitome of woman as man. I can understand why some guys like her- she's just like them. Nothing maternal, nothing feminine. And quite frankly, the sex scenes she writes are just kind of creepy. They'd read much better if you turned the woman in to a guy, and just read them as homoerotica. Weird woman, Ayn. Among famous writers I can't recall any characters more wooden than hers. There must be a few, but I can't recall them. A little humor would have served her well, but also, maybe, she needed a big dose of estrogen. If you read about her life it sounds like she wasn't very happy- again, maybe it was all just a hormone imbalance.

To: koan who wrote (69927)	1/19/2009 5:45:15 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 71178

But her one tell sign is that she has no sense of humor. Absolutely spot on. NONE at all! And the other thing that struck me in Atlas, which I hated, was her treatment of parenting as a kind of secondary, not terribly important, activity, and certainly not really relevant to her grand philosophy. I think the only mention it got was toward the end in her utopian mountain retreat where the kids were in a sort of nursery taken care of by women whom Rand obviously disdained as inferior minds. Her main characters couldn't be bothered with having children and remain happily infertile despite their active sex lives. Goes with Mme's point on how completely non-maternal Rand was- in real life as well as in her writing. She couched her own behavior in pseudo-heroic terms to justify actions I think were hurtful and selfish. I hated her characters, and found Dagny Taggart horrid. And it WAS kinky-- and she seemed to put up with physical violence against herself on the part of the men. I remember being horrified when Hank Reardon smacked her... not that I didn't want to smack her a lot myself in the course of that endless book.. While discipline may be necessary at times, using humor is far better as a distraction. We always found it provided some kind of space to step back from bad situations. ANd everyone here knows I survived CW's teen years only by making fun of myself and our conflicts.