Life & Wisdom Quote by Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee is staking out territory in a genre culture that kept trying to draw her a map. In one breath she refuses the trap of being “a woman writer” who must therefore “write women” as a special-interest category, and in the next she insists on women as fully available to the whole range of human (and inhuman) possibility. The neat little oppositions - weak/strong, pathetic/heroic - read like a roll call of archetypes, but the word choice undercuts any tidy moral sorting. “Pathetic” sits beside “heroic” with no apology, as if to say: the cringe-worthy, the compromised, the ridiculous are not footnotes to character; they are the engine of it.

The pivot word is “ditto.” It’s casual, almost dismissive, and that’s the point. Lee treats gender symmetry not as an argument to be won but as a creative baseline: men get complexity by default, so women should, too. Then she blows past the binary entirely - “all the variants” - and lands in her real home: the Gothic, the mythic, the speculative. “Beasts and demons” isn’t edgelord decoration; it’s a declaration that her subject is desire, power, transformation, and the ways we project taboo onto bodies.

Context matters: Lee wrote in the long shadow of fantasy and science fiction’s gatekeeping, where “strong female character” often meant a masculinized exception and “female weakness” was treated as narrative failure. She’s arguing for a messier, more honest imagination - one where agency and abjection, tenderness and monstrosity, can belong to anyone.