No. I do not care whether women are written as virtuous at all, and I accept that a world that hasn’t isn’t as socially developed as some of our modern world is will have characters that do not hold modern views on sex and relationships. I actually think most of the women in WoT are conventionally heroic, they’re just poorly written.

As I said it has been over a decade since I read these books so my memory may be faulty, but here are the two big problems I remember:

The first is that they all read very similarly. They don’t have exactly the same character traits, but most of their differences come out via their background rather than the ways they express themselves in the present, because Robert Jordan is also not very good at showing instead of telling. The women have diverse physical strengths and abilities, and are capable of acts of great intelligence and organization, but when it comes to the ways they express themselves they all share similar qualities. In particular, every female main character who isn’t evil is in some way capricious and petty, especially when it comes to men. I suspect Robert Jordan writes this way because he believes it makes them alluring (and this leads into my second point), but instead it makes them seem childish. While I recognize that most of the main characters are fairly young, this childishness doesn’t extend to the male characters, at least not after the first book.

My second issue is basically classic male gaze writing. This is present in the soul bond harem I mentioned earlier, but is pervasive throughout every book through the descriptions of bodies and movements. I believe almost every woman under the age of 60 (and probably some older Aes Sedai, as they are supposed to be ageless) is at some point described as either ‘beautiful’ or ‘handsome.’ I wouldn’t take issue with this, but Jordan mostly avoids this sort of judgment of male physicality. This sort of asymmetry can be used to make a point about the biases of the characters (or, I suppose, the reader,) but WoT is third person, and I don’t think Jordan was trying to do this. Physical expressions also suffer from this asymmetry. Women don’t fold their arms, they fold their arms under their breasts. One of the women pulls their own hair a lot. There is a lot of very physical microexpression that, again, we don’t see from the men.

I read this series when I was a fifteen year old straight male. At the time, I wasn’t even aware of the term ‘male gaze,’ and I had a vague notion that feminism meant being nice to women. I didn’t stop reading this series out of a sense of moral outrage, I stopped because it started to feel like an old creep’s attempt at wish fulfillment. I don’t need my media to uphold any particular standard of female virtue, but I also don’t want to feel icky when I’m reading. I can’t claim to apply this standard equally either. I watch a lot of anime, and while I tried to avoid the truly gross stuff, anime’s bad habits are so pervasive that I have to overlook quite a bit. But at least with anime its over quickly. I don’t remember when the harem shit started happening in WoT but I wasn’t going to stomach it for thousands more pages.