I noticed that I had left this saved as a draft from last week, so here is my reply to Natalie’s post on misogyny in Elizabethan England.

I certainly felt a little uncomfortable about the disregard of consent in “Hero and Leander,” but I also wondered how much of that is depicting a lack of consent or continuing the theme of women as the seductresses ruining a man’s virtue. Like we’ve seen with the Sirens in The Odyssey or Duessa in The Faerie Queene, women seem to be nothing more than tempting objects meant to thwart the stories’ heroes, making their own feelings and identities, unfortunately, nonexistent.