I’ve talked about this before, but not in so much detail.
By now we’ve all seen the ‘girl cooties’ issue from the POV of the old guard of male Science Fiction and Fantasy authors. The old guard was about ‘business as usual’. Their opponents argued that female characters were marginalized for decades. That female authors were often considered less than professional. Less capable of writing ‘real’ SFF, whatever that happened to be at the time of the debate. A respected professional group in the US is finally retooling its guest writer practices, because of a recent blow-up. An extremely respected SFF editor for a major publisher apparently stands accused of sexual harassment. The publisher has also apparently been accused by many people of having ignored similar complaints for over a decade.
Truth will out. We seem to be advancing beyond that issue, slowly and with much hand-wringing on all sides. I’m glad it’s happening. I don’t like bullies. I really don’t like it when obvious bullies try to defend themselves by claiming they were bullied too, or first, or that their minor ‘bullying’ issues somehow equate with thousands of years of entrenched chauvinism and persecution.
Note: this does not mean I’m the traditional anti-male feminist. Because I like men. I think men have been getting a bad rap in marketing, popular culture, and education for decades, and it makes me furious to see it happening. Makes me glad I was born female, because I’m in a time and place where the old rules don’t restrict me so much.
But there’s another ‘girl cooties’ controversy flaring up in the erotic romance world. Since this one hits me where I write, I have to talk about it.
Exhibit A: A post on the very respected M/M erotic romance review site Jessiewaves. Jess makes the point that M/M readers (many of whom are female-gendered) react Very Badly to even a hint of M/F interaction. Her post appears to essentially say that any mention of heterosexual male/female sex in an otherwise M/M novel must be labeled with the same urgency and clarity as rape and dubious-consent triggers.
Yes. Vaginas are as bad as Rape. Consensual male/female sex is somehow as triggering and traumatic as one of the worst acts human beings can inflict on each other. This also says nothing about the other parameters of sex, including bi, lesbian, etc.
An AbsoluteWrite.com author called L.A. Witt has a great answer to this, as well as links to others. They’re probably more worth reading than my snark, if you want to cut away now.
The common excuses for female character exclusion are often retaliatory. Traditional romance shut out M/M aspects, so the M/M writers are staunchly claiming their ghetto as sovereign territory. (I recently saw this online, with the category separations of several erotic romance conventions and literary awards.)
I’ve also heard that many female readers might view a female character as competition, impeding the reader’s mental insertion into the gay male relationship.
Whatever the reasons behind it, I hate this stupid, damaging, and dividing debate. I’ve already seen it in fan fiction and romance and sci-fi, from all angles. I never got the distaste for gay scenes in traditional romances, because I came into the erotic romance genre from science fiction and fantasy. Likewise, I never found any transgression in reading a M/F scene mixed in with the M/M. SFF Authors like Tanith Lee, Storm Constantine, Diane Duane, Misty Lackey, Lynn Flewelling, and Tanya Huff were my role models, and they handled the variations beautifully. Love is simply love, in any form.
I understand that many well-adjusted women (and men) might not want any F mixed into their M/M. I did that myself, for the ten years after I abandoned M/F romance as too formulaic. I read (and wrote) almost nothing but M/M romance, and sought it out in SFF. I also examined why I liked it, very carefully. I’ll spare you that bit of self-analysis, but it led to another realization.
I love characters. I love their emotional journeys. I don’t really care, as a demisexual reader, what gender those characters are when I follow their stories. I’m likely to find a woman in a sex scene just as compelling as a man, if the author did their job and made me care.
I’ll play nice, in this genre. As messed-up and neurotic as it can be, the erotic romance genre is still more open to explicit M/M sex scenes than SFF or traditional romance. (Look on any medium to large SFF or Romance convention program list, and see when, if any, of the LGBTQ writing panels are scheduled. Five’ll get ya ten, they will be late night panels.) So for my erotic romance readers, I promise to start labeling my mixed-gender works M/M/F from now on. When I label something M/M, it will be just that.
Jessie has her own site. She has the perfect right to enforce a M/M only restriction on the books her reviewers accept. I’ve had lots of fun browsing through the reviews for great M/M books. But when strict categories become codified and fossilized ritual, then they’ve lost their usefulness to me. When M/M reviewers start calling any hint of het (or any sex beyond M/M) ‘disrespectful’, an infringement on their rights, and even a form of discrimination then I call
Fucking.
Shenanigans.
And worse. I can understand that viewpoint from my gay male friends. They want to read what they like. I get it, and I won’t infringe. When I see it from women readers and reviewers, I start wondering about the self-images of some of the most tireless female M/M advocates. It seems a really short mental hop from the female exclusion argument to female self-hate and socially-sanctioned genital mutilation. It’s almost Classical Greek in its disavowal of female sexuality and value. The Hellenes gave us many good things. Their attitude toward women was not one of them.
An oppressed population is only beyond salvage as long as it fully participates in and furthers its own oppression. Choices in publishing are far from the worst issues facing readers and authors in this messed-up world. But media is a vanguard of social change (as the various neoconservative groups have been trumpeting for years). So-called ‘alternative sexualities’ are almost a non-issue for many people under the age of thirty.
Let’s build on that foundation, rather than tearing it apart in messy little civil wars.
Edited To Add: as of the afternoon of July 4, 2013, the owner of the Jessiewave blog took down the the post that spurred this discussion. I have no doubt cached copies exist, but see little reason to find them at this time.
“this does not mean I’m the traditional anti-male feminist”.
You are perpetuating a bad and wrong stereotype here. Most feminists are NOT anti-male. They are anti-patriarchy. Please don’t repeat and spread the wrong-headed idea that feminists don’t like men.
Mea culpa, Reg. I certainly did not mean to further that particular argument without explanation. Of course, most modern feminists are against the blight of patriarchy, not men in general.
However, the stereotype lingers for real reasons. I have read and witnessed many examples of a certain older school of feminist philosophy, which appears to denigrate males. I’ve seen it firsthand at a recent SF con, where a tolerant and respectful male friend was verbally assaulted by a female con-goer for no reason I could see (AFAIK, he wandered into a situation already primed by some boorish male attendees.)
I have watched modern marketing aimed toward women, in numerous scenarios where guys are all too often cast as bumbling, less-intelligent, emotionally stunted, and easily led by sex.
I’ve seen male participation in public school science and humanities lag after a certain age, and male students who are far more likely to be medicated into socialization than female counterparts.
Does this put me in the same camp as right-wing pundits who declaim that men are better citizens? Hell, no. I am an equalist. I want a world where respect for all people is the standard.