Of all of the people to pick as an example, Le Guin seems an odd choice. The author of The Left Hand Of Darkness was not leaving gender up to stereotypes. In bu

Of all of the people to pick as an example, Le Guin seems an odd choice. The author of The Left Hand Of Darkness was not leaving gender up to stereotypes. In building a sexist world of Earthsea, she was making a deliberate decision. The article doesn't understand why "women extend this thinking to the fantastical", but surely it's obvious: speculative fiction is always about us, today. It can be about elves or aliens, but it's always really about humans. TFA is absolutely correct that sexism is built deep into our cultural consciousness, and even writers seeking to exclude it will end up including it in ways that they don't realize. But the author seems to deal mostly with novice writers, and Le Guin was anything but a novice. When she included sexism, it was a deliberate choice. It does justify the title: feminists can build sexist worlds. But at least some of them do that because the current world is sexist and they want to say something about that. If the author wants an example, try JK Rowling, who thinks of herself as a feminist, and in some ways she is. But Harry Potter's world is deeply patriarchal, in ways both obvious and much more subtle.