How sexist are the Hunters, really?*
*For the purposes of this analysis, I'm mainly considering their portrayal in the five main books. If you consider BoO, the hunters are drastically worse, with some seemingly being fine with men being enslaved (looking at you, Celyn), and generally looking down on men.
I was writing a meta about Artemis, and was starting to realize that ironically, probably the thing she says that's most biased against men is "You did well, for a man." Of course, that could very well be humor, as Artemis does generally seem to use dry humor.
Either way though, it made me interested in examining the sexism of the Hunters, and what I found was actually kind of surprisingโ I think the common perception of sexism from the Hunters is incorrect, and it manifests differently than how most people think it does.
That is, the Hunters nowadays are portrayed as typical Riordan girlbosses, thinking that men are all incompetent and that women do it better, with a side of looking down on wanting any kind of relationship with them. But in actuality, the original way the Hunters were portrayed is far from that. Rather, they mostly seem to distrust boys/men and want separation from them, and if anything the ones they seem to have more of a grudge against are women who believe in men.
Now, to explore this, we can go through them scene by scene.
The first indication we get of the Hunters being sexist is Zoรซ's reaction to Percy:
But the interesting thing is, although this is definitely a negative impression we get of the Hunters, it isn't actually an example of how the Hunters act in general to some random boy.
We don't learn this till later in the book, at which point our impressions are kind of set, but this isn't Zoรซ meeting some random boyโ this is Zoรซ meeting the boy who has been the talk of Olympus twice in the last couple of years, and who wields the blade that is tied directly to the personal betrayal she experienced from Hercules. She isn't just looking at a random boy, she's looking at the next Hercules, so to speak.
Also notably, the stuff Artemis seems to take issue with isn't men or boys per se, it's the idea of girls being distracted by romance:
Boys are mentioned first, yes, but 'preoccupied' and 'insecure' are also mentioned, and are presented as intertwined with growing up in general, alongside being smitten with boys.
The next thing we learn is that the Hunters at one point did burn down some cabins:
However, call me a Hunter apologist on this one, but I do think there are cases where it might be deserved, especially if we consider that Camp is broadly beholden to the social mores of the time. That is, we don't have any reason to think that Camp Half-Blood was particularly progressive on matters of gender, so campers could have been pretty sexist, depending on when the visit was. That would track with Zoรซ talking about foolish campers.
As for when the visit was, it was after Dionysus came to Camp Half-Blood, and since he says he finished 50 years of his sentence at the end of TLO, that probably means he was sent there around the 1960s.
On the other hand, we don't have a strong upper bound on how recently it could have been, but we do have this:
This is a tradition, but also apparently Percy has to inform everyone, which at least somewhat implies that it isn't actually a known tradition for campers. Now, obviously, this would be clearer if this was a summer visit, it's possible none of the campers there had dealt with a camper visit before but it had happened, but this at least somewhat indicates it's been a while.
(Also, if there had been an incident where a cabin burned down in recent memory, in-universe I'd kind of expect Percy to know about it from someone talking about it, and thus would know about the Hunters.)
Now, this isn't to claim that the Hunters are just fine with boys, either. Broadly, though, they seem far more interested in being separated from boys than anything else:
We do know of at least two arguments that they got into with Campers:
However, only one of these seems to have resulted in bad blood:
This is the dislike that is paid the most attention to by the text. The thing with the Ares camper, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be about anything in particular, it's just there to foreshadow Phoebe being combative, since she hits the Stolls during capture the flag and that's why they give her the shirt.
So far, then, we're very much seeing that the dislike of love and romance is being presented as the more major thing about the Hunters, while they generally stay away from boys. This is further reinforced by Zoรซ's phrasing in the scene where they're discussing who should come:
Zoรซ's first reaction is to say that the Hunters don't need help from campers. (Arguably, from Thalia specifically, since 'thy' is the second person singular pronoun in Early Modern English, but since 'your' is the second person plural pronoun and Zoรซ has trouble with that, she may just incorrectly be using 'thy' for both the singular and plural, in which case we can't differentiate. After all, she also uses 'thy' before a vowel, where it should be 'thine', so she may just overuse 'thy'. However, she does correctly use 'thine' and not 'thy' at the end of the sentence.)
Then, she's hesitant to take Grover, but is convinced by the fact that he can play a tracking song. But when it comes to Percy, her reasoning isn't that boys are incompetent, like the Hunters in later books might claim. Rather, she's very clear that she doesn't want Hunters traveling with a boy, and that she doesn't want to be in the company of a boy while facing danger:
It becomes all the more clear with this line:
It's specifically a male hero that she doesn't want to travel with. It's not actually about boys per se (though I'm sure they do have some biases), it's about trusting a male hero to be an actual companion, which makes sense, because that's one of the big themes of this book. Percy is being a hero unlike those of the past, unlike Theseus and Hercules.
Of course, in this case, it probably doesn't help that he's still the wielder of Riptide, which probably makes it even harder for her to trust him to watch her back. Together, these make it clear that it's not simple denigration of a male's abilities, but something more complex and psychological.
But Percy actually demonstrates his character relatively early on in the quest:
After this, once Percy tries to offer Zoรซ credit, Zoรซ is actually... broadly non-hostile? She doesn't make jabs about boys or anything, as far as I saw on my reread. She does, however, continue to be openly suspicious of love, in the form of Aphrodite:
Overall, a hostility to both romance and male heroes marks the Hunters far more clearly than disdain for boysโ they merely avoid them.
Now, that's not to say the Hunters are unbiased:
Zoรซ's first assumption is still to look at Percy, which shows pretty clearly that they are sexist to a degree.
But beyond that, it's clear that most of Zoรซ's resentment is bound up with male heroes and the ideal of heroism. There's a reason why she refers to him as 'hero', not 'boy' or 'Percy' in this line:
Overall, I think it's very clear that whatever sexism against boys existed in TTC, it was derived from a disdain of romance (which far more frequently is mentioned) and male heroism in particular.
Now, things already start decaying a bit by Sword of Hades, admittedly. There, we have this:
Frankly, it's a line that I can't make total sense of. Maybe grumbling about boys is so endemic that she picked it up, but Zoรซ doesn't seem to have that really, so it's odd that Thalia does.
In TLO, things are more chill:
The bit about not shooting them is clearly some humor from Percy, and I think this is probably the best encapsulation of what's up with the Hunters. They don't like being around outsiders in general, and also don't like being around boys. There's some bias and sexism, but not a massive amount, it's just mostly uncomfiness.
