And the rapes in the first book were so unnecessarily graphic that I had an uncomfortable feeling that Larson was getting off on writing them. And then, of course, gets praised as a feminist for doing so. Just because you’re ashamed of your torture fetish doesn’t make it okay, Stieg.

As @Miya Rogers says above, there are huge problems with these books. I understand the sentiment behind “[p]ackaging that nastiness up as feminist is icing on an ugly cake.” But “packaging” suggests far more insidious author intent than I think we can reasonably assume from the text. And part of this piece *is* titled “On Stieg Larsson,” so his motivation is being called into question. Which is fine! Except I have trouble reaching the same implicit conclusion TR did: that this is torture porn attempting to masquerade as feminism. My take is that it is a bumbling, thoroughly imperfect attempt to write about violence against women that is too enamored with how that violence plays out.

I didn’t intend to write a “mini essay.” People write long comments here. I assumed that was okay.

I agree with literally every other point you made.

so effing disgusting and hypocritical I just want to scream.

Which I thought was pretty heartening, like, you don’t even *have* to have your consciousness raised about feminist issues to get a yucky feeling from these books, or realize at some level there is something disingenuous going on with them.

What makes Salander’s rape even more disturbing is that a broken social system is ultimately responsible for putting her into the circumstance that leads to it. The rape is not just sexual violence; it is also violence of a different, societal nature. Because of her past, Salander is classified by society as incompetent and mentally unfit, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that society is wrong about her, so what else might it be wrong about?

Salander survives and fights back, partly by helping Blomkvist solve the Vanger mystery, and another character in the book (Major spoiler alert here) who also endures rape, Harriet Vanger, also survives. In fact, she does more than just survive. She gets herself out of a terrible situation and creates a new life for herself. I agree with you that “The violence women negotiate every day of our lives doesn’t look like having our hands burned off over a slow fire. It looks like being assaulted by people we know; being denied access to legal medical procedures; being paid less for equal work; all the hundreds of little garden-variety inequalities that add up to a great big pile of shit.” And here’s the thing: both Salander and Harriet were assaulted by people that they knew and should have been able to trust. That was the heart of the story, not the serial-killer subplot which was, I agree, far-fetched.

Like some of the other commentators, I think Larsson’s message is ultimately made clear in books two and three, which delve into Salander’s background and the ways she has been systematically victimized by the very society that should be trying to protect its members. There is a subplot involving Berger in book three that also addresses misogyny in the workplace, which also involves “assault by people we know.” Part of the book addresses domestic violence against women. There is a female cop who is unfairly treated differently by some of her male colleagues because she is a woman, but Larsson makes it clear that she’s a better cop than those colleagues. And there is also commentary on how some men feel threatened by female sexuality and how the mass media is complicit in perpetuating and sensationalizing unfair stereotypes about women.

Ultimately, Larsson’s argument seems to me to be that the violence against women that counts is all of it, and not just the kind that “ends up with us dead.” The violence that counts is the misogyny that lingers in the social system and is all too often ignored. There is more that I could add, but this is already an essay in and of itself. If you’ve read this far, thanks for taking the time to consider my perspective.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20012770-10391698.html

Ugh.

I would just like to point out as well that everything in quotation marks in the piece is, you know, a quotation from the book. You can certainly argue that Stieg Larsson accomplishes his feminist project with this book; I will wholeheartedly disagree with you, but that’s an opinion, and we can debate it.

You cannot, however, argue that Lisbeth isn’t normatively attractive or that Blomkvist isn’t normatively attractive; those things are in the text, repeatedly, as observations made by both the third-person omniscient narrator and other characters. As is Stieg Larsson’s comment that normal women go to the police when raped: again, in the text, repeatedly, and an observation made by the third-person omniscient narrator.

Finally, I find it completely horrifying that people are arguing here that men need to read graphic, extensive, and extremely sexualized depictions of the torture of women in order to realize that misogyny happens. I like to hold the bar a little higher for the cisdudes in my life, and they all seem to manage it just fine.

I’m not going to read the next two books to see if I “get it”; I’m a busy lady. I’d rather just read books that are good.