Friskbiskit

Podcast: SF in SF Reading and Panel Discussion

Back in February I took a trip out to San Francisco where the wonderful Rina Elson and Jacob Weisman (of Tachyon Books) put me up and squired me around town. Rina organizes a monthly reading and discussion series called SF in SF and I was privileged to take part in it.

The program consists of two authors who read from their work and then participate in a panel discussion with fantasy author Terry Bisson. In our case the panel discussion turned out to be a wide-ranging analysis of how dominant narratives act as social controls and how as authors Lucy and I both like to posit alternatives to those stories. It's a great conversation and one worth checking out.

Here are the podcasts of the event. More information is also available on Rick Kleffel's The Agony Column. Thanks to Rick for posting the podcasts.

Me reading from The Boy from Ilysies and Amaranth & Ash.

Lucy Bledsoe reading from The Big Bang Symphony

Panel discussion with Terry Bisson, Lucy Bledsoe, and Me

Natural Allies

Here's Brett Hartinger with a more positive spin on the impact of women who love men who love men: AfterElton: Has Slash Made the World Better for Gay Men?

Fuck You, We Like This

It would seem that the Lambda Literary site is down. Interesting. Maybe they're overwhelmed by outraged m/m authors. Update: Back up again, but since none of my comments have appeared on the posts I linked to previously, here are my responses:

Can M/M Romance Challenge the Definition of LGBT Lit?

I had mixed feelings about this article, right up until the last line, where I think the writer nailed it: "Isn’t it about time that we allow writers to have as complicated identities as the defiantly queer heroine, Lisbeth Salander?"

Precisely. So why characterize us (and our audience) as straight to begin with? I'm so glad Lee and Jules came on here to point out how grossly inaccurate that big straight paintbrush the media seems to love painting us with is.

That said, I also cringe when authors disavow their female readers, straight or otherwise. Bottom line for me, everyone is entitled to their own fantasies. And I don't think female sexuality of any stripe is well understood at all. But everyone assumes they know what straight women like, or should like.

I find it ironic that this question of whether women are entitled to write about gay men always arises. Straight men are perfectly entitled to represent women any way they want. Our culture is wallpapered with male depictions of women. And those representations say more about straight male desire than they do about real women. Given our culture of male-mediated depictions of women and women's sexuality, is it any wonder that ignorance about what we really like is so widespread?

OUT's intervew with Erastes and Alex Beecroft

Big kudos and hugs to Alex and Erastes.

This interviewer was pretty brutal at times and some of the questions stemmed from ignorance. Sometimes there was a judgmental tone and some of the descriptions (blushing and stammering, looking a bit like a 17-year-old boy -- really?) were belittling. It couldn't have been an easy experience for the interviewees, but Alex and Erastes stated their truth plainly and with great courage. Hopefully their honesty will educate and inspire others.

You done good, A, E.

The Fetishizing of Queer Sexuality

It's hard to know how to respond to this, except to say that as a woman living in a culture wallpapered with male representations of female sexuality, I too know what it is like to have my sexual identity erased. That is precisely the feeling that I have reading this article, as well. I am a bi woman m/m author married to a man. I write what I do because it is my most genuine creative expression. It is part of who I am. Telling me I'm wrong in following my heart's desire is no different than telling a lesbian it is wrong for her to love women.

Oh and here's Gawker chiming in -- patronize much? -- and a couple of responses to the whole kerfluffle.

I've done a lot of thinking about and explaining of women's interest in m/m around here. I felt it was important to understand it myself and be able to educate others about it. Maybe it is. And maybe if I were a dude no one would question me writing whatever I want. In any case, right now, I like Teddy Pig's response: Fuck you, we like this!

Outqueering the Queer: Updated

Big week for LGBT media to go M/M: WTF?  Here's an article in Lambda Literary from yesterday that starts out doing the usual befuddlement thing but ultimately winds up at a very cool place. The comments are pretty interesting too. And last week, Alex Beecroft and Erastes were on the hotseat with an inteview in OUT that could not have been easy. Folks, go check it out. In my opinion, A & E managed to get their truth out in a pretty antagonistic atmosphere.

UPDATE: And here's the inevitable backlash to the LL article, with plenty of assumptions and innacuracies for everyone: The Fetishizing of Queer Sexuality. A Response. 

Link Love: LA Weekly on M/M Romance

Here's an in depth article from LA Weekly on m/m romance featuring Jet Mykles, James Buchanan and many other notable authors.  I like this piece, because, apart from categorizing female m/m fans as universally straight, which is the rookie mistake everyone makes, for the most part, the article gets it right.  And it's supportive, not sneering or judgmental.  Overall, a win for our genre, I think.

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-12-17/art-books/man-on-man-the-new-gay-romance/1

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 6, the Last Lambasting

Well, even though there's probably still a lot more that can be said in defense of m/m, I'm going to wrap up the Unpacking series here with six installments.  It's not really in my nature to be this serious for this long (And I'm running out of alliterations for the titles, can you tell?), so while I'm sure we'll be revisiting this topic many times here on Friskbiskit, for the moment, I'm running out of steam.

One thing I want to stress before wrapping things up is that none of what I've said in the course of this discussion is intended to be universal.  Women write and read m/m for a wide range of reasons and -- and this is the really important part -- all of them are legitimate.

Which brings me to porn and other forms of art designed to engage with reader fantasies. As I mentioned in the last installment, I think women are entitled to their own porn, and their own fantasies. And I think that romance novels, m/m, yaoi and slash all do for emotions something similar to what porn does for bodies. The right m/m story pushes emotional buttons for me, and that is exactly what I want it to do.

I've noticed a tendency for some folks to make a one-to-one correlation between what appears in fantasy-driven narratives and real life. For instance, if a story has two men in it who fall in love and have sex together then that story must reflect the author's views of and intentions toward real gay men in real life. I think that's a pretty broad assumption to make, and one that ignores the fun-house mirror nature of fantasy. For example, it's widely understood that women who engage in rape fantasies do not wish to experience rape in real life.  The fantasy is about being absolved of responsibility for having sex, or about relaxing and letting someone else take control, or about any number of things except actually being raped in real life.

Now I know that a number of women who write about gay men work hard at making their stories as true-to-life as possible. And I'm not slamming that at all.  What I do find distressing is a tendency to position the women authors who strive for realism as the "good" authors of gay male romance, whereas those of us who approach a love story between men from a fantasy-driven angle, are often dismissed as (all together now) voyeurs fetishizing and objectifying gay men for our own sexual gratification. And of course, we write m/m, which term in and of itself is considered a slam in these instances.

Well, you all know how I came to be an m/m fan.  I read it as an escape from real life.  Now, to each their own, of course, but for me personally, the last thing I want in an m/m story are men that act just like men in real life, gay or straight.  I'm into hurt-comfort.  I like my male m/m characters crying and in pain, and then, by the end of the book, I like them to win through to a richly deserved happy ending.  

Just as with a rape fantasy, that does not mean that in real life I want to hurt men.  It's something much more complex than that.  Something that has to do with differing aspects of my personality going through emotional catharsis and finally integrating. To be honest, what an m/m story does for me doesn't really have much to do with men at all.

I've sometimes played around with the question of whether the men in my stories are really men, and in Ameranth & Ash, I'm fooling around with it even more.  But of course, if I'm writing an m/m contemporary, and the characters are male, and they are involved romantically and sexually, then they are, within the context of the story itself, gay men. 

As a human being I feel a responsibility not to perpetuate negative stereotypes.  As an author it is my job to create a self-consistent world in which the reader can suspend disbelief, to write three-dimensional characters the reader can root for, and craft a story that holds reader interest.  And I feel that is the sum total of my obligation to realism.

Now I feel we have come full circle, and are back to the Lambda awards decision again. I see m/m and LGBT literature as two different areas of writing with different creative impulses and audiences.  That those impulses and audiences overlap creates wonderful opportunities for two marginalized communities to work together strategically.  And I do think that we overlap quite a bit, but I think I've made it pretty clear that I come to a story about two men falling in love from a different direction than a gay man would, and for different reasons.

So I don't feel any embarrassment about m/m being identified as a genre dominated by women and women's fantasy versions of men. And authors who want their stories to reflect the lives of real life gay men should keep that up too.  I think there's plenty of room for everyone. But when women m/m authors look to the LGBT community for affirmation of their legitimacy, then I think the Lambda decision is a good illustration of how that can become problematic for everyone.

I want to thank all of you who've taken the time to read these posts.  I hope that some of you come away with some talking points to help you address misconceptions about m/m when you encounter them in your own lives.  And I hope what I've said will encourage those of you who disagree with me to do your own exploration of your relationship with m/m.

Do we need to justify ourselves to our detractors? Of course not. But if we want to counter the myths about m/m so the genre can grow and reach wider distribution in the culture at large, then we do need to make our own voices heard.

Who benefits when m/m is acknowledged as a legitimate genre in its own right?

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 5, The Objectification Obfuscation

In Part 4, I mentioned the sex-negativity inherent in the statement that women authors and readers of m/m are voyeurs, fetishizing and objectifying gay men for our own sexual gratification. 

A lot of women of my association have had one particular response to that statement, and since I've embarked on this series, I've heard it quite a bit: So what?

I think it's a pretty reasonable question. Why is that men can look at women, gay men can look at men, drag queens can present stereotypical portrayals of women, and straight men can watch women pretend to get it on with each other, but a woman reading a work of fiction with men falling in love and having sex together is a moral reprobate of the first order?

Well, we've already been over the whole thing about how women are not entitled to their own sexuality in our society, so that's part of it.  And of course, many people certainly object to lesbian porn for straight men.  In fact, that's another comparison that's often made with m/m as a shaming tactic. 

But here's the thing: if in fact you believe that sexually objectifying anyone is wrong, why would you focus your ire on li'l ole m/m?  For the love of Mike, we don't even use real people!  Why aren't the objectification objectors going after all that fake lesbian porn for straight men?  Or any porn for straight men, for that matter? Personally, and this may be uncharitable, but, I think it's because m/m looks like an easier target.

Some branches of the feminist movement have been trying to put a stop to het porn since the seventies, and they haven't had much luck with it. And our culture is filled with images of women which, while they may not be outright porn, are certainly objectifying. As a woman who, through no fault of my own, cannot hope to meet the ridiculous physical standards of beauty that still count as the gold standard of feminine value, I get pretty sick of it myself.

I sometimes hear people say things like, well, by objectifying men you're just giving men permission to continue objectifying women.  This makes me laugh.  As far as I've ever seen, men are not waiting for my permission or anyone else's.  I don't see het porn for men or the ubiquitous airbrushed supermodel going anywhere any time soon.

Beyond that, I personally don't think objectification is necessarily, in and of itself, sexist.  As noted, I have a few things to say about unrealistic beauty standards that I do in fact think are misogynist, but, just looking at someone and fantasizing about them sexually -- actually, I think that's okay.  What's sexist is the imbalance in who gets to objectify who. 

My pals over at Erotica Cover Watch are all over this, fighting tirelessly to prove to the world that men make great sex objects.  I think m/m can be part of that movement too.

I wonder what a world with gawking parity across genders and sexual orientations would look like?

National Coming Out Day

It's National Coming Out Day and so it seems appropriate, especially given the ongoing Unpacking series, to come out as, well a few things, I guess.  For years I identified as bisexual, but usually got shot down by folks, straight, lesbian, and gay, who'd say, "but you're married to a man."  I got sick of that and started describing myself as "primarily heterosexual," but now, I'm thinking maybe I should stick to my guns and just give it with both bi barrels.  And, very recently, less than a year ago, I stumbled across the term genderqueer, which I love a lot and am still in the process of exploring. It would explain a great deal of the trouble I had with my peers in the social pressure-cooker of adolescence.

And then of course, I'm an m/m author.  You already knew that, but I think that is the aspect of my queerness that most impacts my day-to-day life as a writer, and over which I often feel the most embattled. In some ways it is the most personal and because of that the hardest to stand up for.  That, of course, is exactly what I'm trying to do with the Unpacking series. I put a lot of thought into those posts, but today, I'm going to let this fabulous video of John Barrowman singing in a dress express how I feel, not what I think.

Happy Coming Out Day everyone!

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 4, The Voyeur Rap

Still a bit more unpacking to do...

Skipping the recap this time and just jumping right in. One of the most prevalent accusations leveled at women authors and readers of m/m is that we are voyeurs, fetishizing and objectifying gay men for our own sexual gratification. (Are you getting hot yet?)

The sex-negative attitude of this characterization is deserving of its own post, but for the moment, let's just look at the voyeur aspect, as if, you know, liking to look actually was a bad thing.

I think the notion hinges on a false perception of how women arrive at writing and reading m/m. The term voyeur assumes a relationship of an outsider looking in. Ascribing voyeurism as my motive in reading m/m posits that I came to it through some external cue. I get the impression that the people who say this kind of thing think I saw a gay couple out and about one day and was so captivated that I wanted to follow them home and peek through their bedroom window, but not wanting to get arrested, I wrote an m/m story instead.  Ew. No. 

That's not how it happened at all.  Here's how it happened:

I started out as an author over twenty years ago, writing science fiction. Back then I wrote exclusively female protagonists and I had a lot of lesbian and bisexual relationships in my fiction.  Since I'm married to a man, people asked me why.  I didn't really have an answer at that time, except that I knew I never wanted to write a heterosexual relationship that positioned the woman as a passive partner.  It just didn't feel right to me.

I struggled as a writer, both commercially and with my own creativity and ease of  expression. I was always looking over my shoulder, concerned about how I portrayed my female characters.  I didn't want to perpetuate sexist stereotypes. I was afraid of letting the story get too emotional and of portraying the women as vulnerable. Most of all, I was constantly grappling with fears about opening up and exposing myself on the page. Writing was a slow and painful process.

Then, life really got difficult.  My parents got old and sick, and in a very bad year, with my mother recently passed and my father dying of cancer, there came a day when I realized I had to do something to cheer myself up.  So I gave myself permission to write a story that was to be pure indulgence. My only consideration was to cram as much of what I loved into it as I could humanly manage.

That book was All the Colors of Love, an over-the-top science fiction romance.  Harry's father is a super-villain. Antonin comes from a family that includes an aquatic plant-man with a twenty foot tail and a molecular biologist reincarnated into the body of a sex-android. You know, the usual. It's full of angst, hurt-comfort, childhood trauma, love, sex, and tears.  It was pretty much the opposite of anything I had written before, and it just about wrote itself.

 It was a total revelation to me. I had never dreamed writing could be so much fun. And so easy! For the first time in my life, I wasn't second-guessing myself.  There were no barriers between myself and what I wanted to see on the page. The fear didn't matter any more because what I was doing just felt so damn good. It was my first act of pure, unguarded, unmediated creativity.  And it was m/m hurt-comfort. 

At first I didn't know what to make of that, but my feeling for the work was so  strong, there was no questioning it.  I'd fallen in love.  

And then one night, while searching for information about Kevin Smith's movies, I discovered a stash of Jay and Silent Bob slash. I read my first slash fan fiction, full of angst, hurt-comfort, childhood trauma, love, sex, and tears, and I realized I was not alone.

Since then, it has been a long journey to find a paying market for m/m. I fired an agent over the issue and got burned in the original English language yaoi market. It was years before I discovered epublishing and now that I have, sure, my print science fiction still earns more money and gets more respect that my m/m work. But that doesn't matter. After all those years of slogging away in ignorance, the truth was finally revealed to me: Hot, pervy m/m is the most authentic artistic expression I have to offer the world. 

There's nothing you can do with a revelation like that except run with it.  And, of course, agitate for wider distribution.  :)

Your story is sure to be quite different from mine, but I'm willing to lay odds that your engagement with m/m is every bit as inner-directed, whatever your path has been.

And that's what I find so hurtful about this voyeurism shame tactic. It precisely reverses the direction from which I engage with m/m.  It takes  my inner truth and positions it as belonging to someone else, just because the characters are of a different gender from mine. Well, frankly, fuck that.

So, no 'who benefits?' question this time.  Instead: How did it happen for you?

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 3, A Little Perspective

Hello, and welcome to part three of Unpacking the Case Against M/M.  I started this series in the wake of Lambda Literary Award's shift in eligibility guidelines.  Just so you know, I don't object to Lambda's decision. As blogger Kaigou points out, the technical definition of (fill in the blank) literature is literature by members of the (fill in the blank) community about being a member of the (fill in the blank) community.  When it comes to LGBT lit, that pretty much rules out straight women writing across gender, and really, if we're keeping to the spirit of the notion, should rule out queer women doing the same. To my mind, our real beef here is with the romance publishing establishment's steadfast refusal to acknowledge m/m as a legitimate subgenre of romance. 

But however you feel about the Lambda decision, if you're a woman m/m author, chances are you're not too happy with the way some people have characterized you in the ensuing discussion of the LLA rule change. Words like homophobe, voyeur, exploiter, and fetishist have been flying fast and thick. I think there are a lot of assumptions at play here, so I'm taking a look at a bunch of them, one by one.  Last time around, we looked at the charge that women who write m/m are exerting cultural privilege.

While examining that idea, I pointed out that while our culture is saturated with heterosexual male sexual fantasy, that fantasy positions women not as sexual beings in our own right, but as objects of and accessories to straight male sexual agency.  And that's just the women who please the het male gaze.

Men, and straight men in particular, are privileged to look, but not be looked at, to fantasize, but not be fantasized about. Women, on the other hand, are looked at, written about, touched, hit and manipulated economically. We have little control over how we are represented in mainstream culture, and millions of girls and women harm their health every day, trying to live up to the unreasonable appearance standards that are held up to us as the only valid way for us to be accepted as sexual beings.

In this hostile environment, one of the few safe ways for women to explore their own sexuality is through writing.  The tradition of women writing smut for one another goes back to what many regard as the first novel, Tale of Genji, written by lady in waiting Murasaki Shkibu, for her friends, the other ladies in the 11th century Japanese imperial court. I contend that women writing sex stories for one another is a core element of women's genuine sexuality as we've developed it within the constraints of male dominant culture. 

Likewise, male/male romance in all its many forms also constitutes an adaptive response to patriarchal restrictions that makes room for and expresses a non-male-mediated sexuality. Writing and reading about men gives women an opportunity to pick up the mechanism of our own oppression -- the binary gender system -- and manipulate it to our own ends. Writing hot stories about men together is an opportunity to explore sexual agency in its most accessible form.  It's also a nice break from the daily grind of cultural expectation, heterosexual power dynamics and gender role baggage. In my opinion, this is central to women's enthusiasm for m/m. At the very least, I can tell you that it is the shining light at the heart of my own.

I know from my newsletter group and from my blog hits that the audience for male/male romance is international.  I doubt I need to point out that in Japan, boys love and yaoi constitute a portion of every book store that outstrips the romance section in U.S. bookstores. There, the genre exploded in the seventies, about the same time women Star Trek fans started writing slash fanfiction.  Then, there's Emily Veinglory's medieval nuns who created homoerotic male icons.

My point here is that all these women across nations and generations are not doing this flippantly.  We have our reasons, and again, it speaks to the deeply entrenched distrust of female sexuality that we are treated with such suspicion.

I have a feeling that people who think m/m is a passing fad driven by profit motivated romance authors and that it will go away when the next big thing comes along are going to be pretty disappointed. Women will probably continue to face recrimination for it, but I don't think we'll be giving up m/m any time soon.  The simple truth is that it's one of the best venues we have for sexual expression that is safe, accessible, and offers an alternative to het power dynamics and rigid gender roles.

So this time, let's try flipping the closing question around another way: Who benefits when people who are struggling with sexual oppression recognize and honor their struggle in each other?

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 2, The Privilege Paradox

So last week I wrote about the anti-m/m sentiment that became so evident during the discussion of the Lambda Literary Award's change in elegibility guidelines.  Specifically, the idea that women who write m/m are up to no good. There seem to be so many misconceptions about m/m and the women who write and read it, that having any kind of useful discussion about it is really hard.  So, I am writing this series of posts tackling some of the most prevalent misunderstandings and accusations.

And, before I jump in, I just want to share with you all how fucking terrified I am taking this on. I expose myself through my fiction all the time, but getting up on this soapbox here and saying what I really think, with no filters, scares the living bejeesus out of me.  But I'm doing it anyway, because teasing apart the web of assumptions that keep m/m in the margins of our culture is more important that me being comfortable. (Christ, my heart's in my mouth.  Okay.  Anyway, moving on.)

Here's a link to last week's post about the notion that only straight women are into m/m. Well, okay, even though a lot of the women involved in m/m are not straight, some are, so what about them? Is it only okay for queer women to write m/m?  That doesn't make much sense, does it?  And yet, great emphasis is placed on the idea of straight women writing about gay men, with the power relationship characterized as members of an entitled group cavalierly appropriating the life experiences of an unentitled group for our own prurient satisfaction.

For instance, I've often seen m/m compared to a hypothetical genre of fiction written by white women about black women for other white women. But is the power relationship between straight women and gay men really analogous to that of white women and black women?

In the white-black scenario, both parties are women, so all other things being equal (like class, for instance) the fact of their gender falls away, and you're left with white and black and it's pretty clear who the privileged party is.  But between straight women and gay men, you can't just take gender out as if it doesn't exist. Gender directly contributes to each party's entitlement or lack of entitlement in our heteronormative, male dominant society. So does sexual orientation, but not always in as clear-cut ways as people seem to want to believe.

Here's the clear cut part: Heterosexual relationships are without a doubt privileged in our society. As a woman in a sexual relationship with a man, I have privileges people in same-sex relationships are denied. Marriage, visitation rights, custody rights (hypothetical in my case, but still). The list goes on, and probably includes things I'm not even aware of. None of what I'm about to say is meant to discount this in any way.

Now I want to talk a little bit about being a woman who is attracted to men and what that means in a male-dominant, heteronormative society. Earlier this year I blogged about a New York Times article that posited that straight women are primarily turned on by being desired. (Another heart in my mouth moment, but it went okay, which gives me hope.) In a nutshell, I didn't like how much power this version of reality gave the heterosexual male gaze over women's sexual agency. It also didn't reflect my own experience of being (how shall I put this?) not beautiful and still feeling, you know, horny... a lot.

And yet, this is the prevailing model of straight female sexuality. I often think that the intense suspicion over women writing m/m, and the general scorn heaped upon slash, yaoi and even het romance, is reflective of this broader unease with the concept of women as sexual beings in our own right.

Figleaf, a blogger I adore, describes women as the no-sex class.  No-sex as in we're not supposed to be interested in sex in the first place. That's why its okay to expect women to just sit around and wait for a man to choose us.  And why, if we're not chosen, we're supposed to quietly disappear into celibacy, I guess. Over and over again, in the schoolyard, the magazines, the movies and the romance novels, the message is clear: to be passive is desirable, and being desired is the only way a real woman feels desire.

Actually owning your sexuality and pursuing it?  That's really going outside the bounds. Think of that stock character of many a popular film or TV show: the old, fat or ugly woman whose openly sexual interest in the young male hero makes her a villain or a clown. Think too of just getting caught checking out that hot guy in the bar who's with his buddies.  That could mean real trouble, of the assault and rape variety. Does that sound overly dramatic? I wish it were. Sadly, One in four women experience sexual abuse before the age of 18 and one in six women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Women of all sexual orientations live their whole lives under the threat of rape.  Domestic violence makes even the one form of sexual expression sanctioned for women a dicey proposition.

So, as a straight woman, the person you desire might hurt you or kill you.  And if you actually have the gall to express yourself as a sexual being, society shuns you, mocks you or otherwise finds nasty ways of making your life more difficult. You know, I'm having a really hard time figuring out what's privileged about straight female sexuality.  In fact, it's looking to me like we have a hell of a lot in common with gay men, actually.

The problem with characterizing straight women who write male on male romance and/or smut as a privileged group exploiting an non-privileged group is that it treats male and female heterosexuality as they were both the same thing, with the same assigned values and cultural entitlement.  Hopefully, I've shown here that they're not. I'm on kind of a roll, now, though, so if you're still wondering, here's a few more tidbits of info.

While skin magazines for straight and gay men alike are plentiful, the one pictorial magazine catering to the female gaze, Filament, faces roadblocks to print and distribution from sexist companies that feel there is no place in the world for a woman's magazine with pictures of nude men and are determined to enforce that view. Meanwhile, authors of straight women's erotica are working to reverse the trend of putting only sexy pictures of women on the covers of their books. They'd like some hot men to look at, please.  One or two publishers are starting to listen, but most cling to the old policy, citing that men won't buy an erotic book with a man on the cover. "But we're writing erotica for women," the authors point out. Doesn't seem to matter.  Publishers know us girls will take what we can get, because our options are limited. Finally, I also happen to think that attempts at shaming women for writing m/m are themselves part of the overall, systemic sexual repression of women.

So now I'm back again to the question I asked at the end of last week's post, slightly reformulated this time:  Who benefits from preventing an alliance between gay men, and straight women who write sex across gender?

And yes, there is still more to come (gods help me)...

Unpacking the Case Against M/M: Part 1, The Straight Myth

So I've been reading a lot of the fallout over the Lambda Literary Award's shift in eligibility requirements, which now reserve the award for self-identified members of the LGBT community. For the record, I think it's fine for them to do this. Their stated purpose is to raise the status of LGBT people by promoting literary excellence among LGBT writers. As a woman who has benefited from woman-only spaces and organizations, I understand the need to reserve space for marginalized people so that their voices can be heard.

But what really bothers me is the anti m/m sentiment that creeps out of the woodwork every time the subject of LGBT issues and women who write m/m crops up. It becomes clear that a good number of people, lots (maybe most) of them women, think women shouldn't be writing m/m in the first place.  I get the impression they're hoping the LGBT police will come and haul us away, or at the very least, make us stop.

As it turns out, I have a lot to say about this very dense bit of societal assumption, too much for one post, so I'm going to try to overcome my discomfort with presenting my bald opinion, and do my best to unpack this stuff one piece at a time. Here we go with part one:

In these conversations, it is always straight women writing about gay men for other straight women.  Never mind the fact that, as Teddy Pig aptly points out, none of us are really all that straight.  A lot of lesbians write m/m, even more of us are bi, throw in the genderqueer authors and really, there's probably only a handful of m/m women who are full-on straight and even they are engaging in queerness just by writing the stuff in the first place.

Besides erasing the queerness of m/m authors, this depiction creates an antagonistic relationship between female m/m authors and gay men where none actually seems to exist.  I have yet to meet a female m/m author who did not care passionately about LGBT rights. Obviously, I can't speak to how gay men feel about us.  I imagine it depends on the gay man in question.  Certainly a number of gay men are fans of female m/m authors. My point is that if there is in fact ill-feeling, it's not mutual, nor universal in either group.

As a rule of thumb, whenever I see two disenfranchised groups being pitted against one another, I suspect a mainstream agenda at work. And I'm asking myself, who benefits by keeping female m/m authors on the defensive and impeding an alliance between LGBT people and women who write across gender?

More to come...

 

 

Photo Essay: Graphing Genderfuck

So I've been doing all this thinking about crossing boundaries, particularly gender boundaries, and how the act of crossing itself is what seems to be the most important part.  There's a dynamic to it, a truth that only becomes evident through movement from one side to the other.  I wanted to graph it out but I have no patience for tracking down my seldom used graphics program and remembering how to use it.  I've been getting all analogue lately anyway, writing longhand and all, so I drew it out on a pad of paper.  (Sorry for the poor quality of the images.  I don't have a lot of time so I used the camera on my laptop.)

1 up/1 down is my shorthand for male/female, entitled/unentitled, etc.  The two halves of every dichotomous power structure.

The arrow on the right would be the direction in which the kick-ass heroine crosses gender boundaries.

The arrow on the left is the direction in which the male characters I write in m/m cross gender boundaries.

In this direction, female identity is invested with 1 up entitlement and prowess.

In this direction, male identity is divested of entitlement:

 

And this is where it gets complicated:

Men are disempowered by being given the traditional roles and values of women.  Because male entitlement is so indelible, however, it remains even after the male characters are cast as romance heroines, thus giving me the 1 up experience within a framework that makes it accessible or, maybe even more accurately, palatable to me.

Yes, I can taste it.

 

A Gift from WisCon

So as you know, I went to WisCon last week, and found it to be a very m/m friendly place.  Had some wonderful conversations about Why We Like It, and got some new insights, particularly from the Wish Fulfillment in Fiction panel, and from my buddy, Jennifer Stevenson.  Hugs all around to Jen and my fellow panelists.

As Caroline Stevermer and P.C. Hodgell talked about how their wishes to be strong and safe as women  have informed their fiction, it got me thinking.  That used to be my wish-fulfillment scenario too.  Magnolia, the main character in my first novel, is the embodiment of my desire to be able to face down all obstacles and kick ill-intentioned men in the nuts (or stab them in the back.)  She was an unusual heroine back when I wrote her in the early-nineties, but now, the kick-ass bitch  is a stock character in every action film going.  For a number of years now, I've found myself frustrated with the need for this wish.  I'm annoyed with the fact that women still have to fight so hard just to get along.  My fantasy has changed.  Now, I want to imagine a world in which I don't have to fight.  In which my safety and my freedom are a given, in which my competence is a given, and does not need to be proven with black leather and a submachine gun.

This brings me to baseline assumptions about male characters and female characters in fiction, and about writing in opposition to those baseline assumptions.  For me, as a forty-five year old woman raised in a not particularly enlightened environment, the baseline assumption about a female character has always and on some level continues to be that she is not capable.  Unless otherwise marked (with black leather and submachine guns, for example) she is in the story in order to be rescued by the male character.  Conversely, the baseline assumption about a male character in a story is that he is capable.

When I write female characters, I feel obligated to write against this assumption and make them strong, capable and confident, with or without black leather.  Who wants to read about a woman who doubts herself, who is weak and afraid?  I don't.  That's a message about myself that I grew up with and that I abhor, and one of the reasons I detest the kind of romance novel in which the heroine must be dominated by the hero before their relationship can really get off the ground.

And yet, and yet, to be weak is to be human, and to be forever strong is to be something less than that.  It is a kind of amputation, this insistence on super-competence in female characters which has become the current fashion in fiction.  I find I'm bored with it, while at the same time, the patriarchy is still out there, churning out plenty of sincere messages about women's appropriate role being submissive.  To be blunt, I don't feel safe doing it.

Now, I happen to be fascinated by characters who are afraid they can't cut it.  My favorite kind of hero is someone who is certain of failing, but who tries anyway.  This, as was pointed out by one of the audience members at the panel (thank you, whoever you are) is the drama of imposter syndrome.  What is wonderful to me about writing men is that everyone expects them to be capable, which means I can go right ahead and make them incapable, weak, fallible, flailing.  I can have all of the angst, with none of the nasty patriarchal aftertaste. 

I'm not suggesting any of this is ideal, or universal to everyone, or even a prominent draw of m/m to anyone but myself, but it is a brand new lens through which to look at m/m romance.  And it provides at long last an answer to a question that has long troubled me.  Why do my male characters always feel more heroic than my female characters?  Because with the men, I am free to play out my own worst fears, and conquer them.  It's not because I don't think women are heroic, its that male characters are better positioned in the overal social context to enact my particular wish-fulfillment fantasy.

On Women Writing M/M

Another one from the way back machine.  In 2007, Erastes wrote this post about criticism of women writing m/m.  I like to collect these things, because I'm always looking for talking points on various aspects of the genre and issues people raise with it.

From time to time I've come across the notion that women writing love stories with male protagonists is exploitative of gay men.  I don't believe that in and of itself it is.  I think it is if the story itself is exploitative, but that depends on the author, and not the author's gender or sexual orientation.

In general, I get offended when I hear whole genres, subgenres or tropes of fiction dismissed as wrong.  That seems to me to be an attempt to control other people's imaginations.  In particular, I find myself feeling great frustration with the implication that as a woman, I am not permitted to "move freely about the cabin" of my own sexuality, because it belongs to someone else.  I feel that if I did not have m/m, I would be missing a big piece of who and how I am.  Am I co-opting gay male sexuality for myself?  Maybe, in the same way that drag queens co-opt femininity for themselves.  But me writing m/m and my old friend Dee Dee doing the town in her heels and her wig are no less honest, for all of that.  The truth is, that male, female, trans, gay, bi, or straight we all occupy overlapping territories when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.  It might surprise us who we find ourselves rubbing elbows with, but that's not a reason to assume that other person is not exactly where they belong.

Beyond that, I think that the rules of good writing, like the rules of etiquette, protect us all.  Be nice to people.  Don't interrupt.  If you make a mistake, apologize.  Write characters that are well-rounded, with virtues and flaws.  Make sure that every action a character takes has sufficient motivation.  Treat people like you'd want them to treat you and write people like you love them, even when they happen to be the villain.  Be honest.