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- Yes, Stephen King's novels are sexist
From Christine to It, women aren't seen as full people in Stephen King's novels.
The argument
The objectification of women occurs several times within the pages of Stephen King's books. It is often quite subtle — rarely a matter of a single offensive line — but the pattern is consistent enough to offer what critics take as a clear glimpse into the mind of the writer. A rather literal example of this is the book Christine. Christine is a car — a literal object — and the villain of the story. And yet, nothing more. The novel attaches a woman's name and a feminine pronoun to a machine that exists to menace the people around it, and gives her nothing beyond that function. She's an object, and a murderous one at that. A book that can make its female title character an appliance and lose nothing thereby says something about how female characters are conceived in the first place. In It, Beverly Marsh is looked at as nothing more than a sexual being by every single male that exists in her life. The males around her respond to her body before they respond to anything else, and she frequently is only defined by that, and nothing more, despite the knowledge and mind she possesses. The force of the criticism is not simply that such treatment appears in the book — a novel can depict objectification without endorsing it — but that the narrative itself rarely supplies her with an interior life that survives the way she is looked at. The argument generalises from these instances. Though women are involved in almost all Stephen King books, they often do not serve a purpose larger than being objectified by the male characters. When a pattern recurs that consistently across a body of work that large, it becomes harder to explain away as the failing of an individual character or a single story. It's often subtle sexism, but it can be pulled out of many pages. Because King's female characters are frequently framed as objects, on this view his novels are sexist.
Premises
Counter-arguments
These women can be seen as being objectified, but they are also strong and powerful, emerging triumphant over the very men who put them in their negative situations. King writes them as well-rounded individuals who are more than capable of handling themselves.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] While the women may be objectified, they are also strong and independent.