THE WHEEL OF TIME TIDBITS

Stereotypes. While Jordan is generally good at treating his various factions as being full of individual people who aren't necessarily in ideological lockstep with each other, he still very aggressively assigns each group 1-2 dominant traits that every! single! member! must portray in constant overwhelming spades. And when I say "faction" I mean groups of any size and particularity from individual Ajahs all the way up to "all women ever." The most egregious is the "slut" trait. There is absolutely zero reason, none whatsoever, for the Green Ajah to be the "man-crazy" Ajah, other than a sort of oppositional parallelism to the Red, but that stereotype is chokingly pervasive. Similarly, every single Domani woman is almost obsessively seductive. Is there not a single woman from Arad Doman who isn't lounging around in skin-tight clothes and fluttering her eyelashes at men? C'mon.

Feminism. I'm ambivalent on this one, because it's really clear that Jordan is doing his absolute damnedest to write a traditionally-styled high fantasy epic that empowers women and treats them as equal players, and in the context of the time that WoT was being written, he does a really good job! Contrast with contemporaries like ASOIAF, Shannara, etc, and by comparison Jordan's practically knocking it out of the park. But man, he still falls flat on his face in so many places. This is related to the stereotypes point above: his women are not nearly as varied in personality and particularly interpersonal skills as they ought to be, and in particular they are almost always controlling, backstabby, and mildly-to-majorly condescending toward the men they interact with. While the women in WoT are empowered and capable, the gender segregation (everywhere except among the Seanchan and Darkfriends, interestingly) is deeply pervasive and nigh-impregnable.