Various saved up writerly rantings

[erastes]

I've never been one to insist on any sort of female solidarity; I don't see why - just because I have hidden plumbing - and am apparently from Venus - that I should back another woman up or join some mythical sorority. Part of that, is, I suppose, because we don't have the whole sorority ethos over here, and I for one would find that deeply disturbing if we did. I never wanted to join "women's club" - I always wanted to storm the bastions of the men's clubs, create one big happy unisex club. That's the ideal.

I don't really get on with women en masse. I have a few close female friends but activities that make them happy, hen nights, Chippendale parties, window shopping, hours on the phone, children - leave me cold and often nauseated.  I don't dislike women, but I just don't have a lot in common with the larger proportion of them. I quite dread going to huge conventions like the RWA, because I'm sure I'll wilt into a corner. Send me to a computer games convention though and I thrive.

Why this wibble? Well, there's a column over on ERWA that my Google Alerts picked up talking about the tired old subject of women writing m/m but in this instance, it's not the same-old tale of a man saying how women shouldn't do it because "gay: u iz doin' it wrong" - this time it's a woman accusing us/m/m writers/me of gender treachery and "hate" because we aren't writing about women, and are shunning our sisters. Hence I am having to express my views here, because there is no option on ERWA to discuss the opinions with the "columnists."

She says that the reasons why I write it (and yes, I'm saying "I" because I'm pretty steamed about it) is not self-evident to her. Well - tough, sister. I don't know why people continue to write clichéd vampire fics, or Mary-Sue bodice rippers. The reasons why people like rape fic is not "self-evident" to me, but yanno? People write them, people read them. That's their prerogative. And no. The fantasy genre has no influence on my writing other than I came to m/m from Harry Potter fanfic. What I write is historical fiction. Emphasis on the historical. So yes, I am trapped in the pillory, as you describe it. And damned proud of the hard work I put in, too.

Most of the article I just don't even understand, perhaps I'm just too dim to do, but phrases like "Squicks expressed as explanations of reality are a different can of worms," just go over my head. What does it mean? I'm clearly not a college professor. But what's the difference between some m/m writers not liking to write or read het sex and some writers of het writers not liking to read gay sex? Why do we all have to like the same things?

And I'm expressing a hatred of women because I decide not to write about them? I'm sorry? What? How does that work? Do I express a hatred of black people by not including them in my fiction? Am I anti-Iraqi because none of my stories are set there? I'm a bigot now? By the same token - surely that means that all het-only writers are haters of The Gay?

I find the entire article incomprehensible, and the final paragraph just compounds my confusion. What is her view?

I'm pleased to see that lee_rowan has also posted about this matter, as it was very personal to her, as Ms Roberta attacked her specifically by being a lesbian and that post is here. 

There will be a (much better written than mine) rebuttal to that column up on Speak Its Name in a few days, T J Pennington is working on it right now.

I just spotted some sales figures over on valarltd's LJ and was slightly shocked by them, it's very brave of Angelia to post them, but they convince me, were I to need convincing, that ebookery (on an exclusive level) is just not for me right now. I had nothing much to compare my publishing experiences with, but Standish which has been print only has been selling in larger figures than those figures quote for Ellora's Cave - whereas Chiaroscuro, which is ebook and nothing else has been deeply disappointing and earns peanuts. I read recently that EC was boasting that some of its authors were regularly making six figure sums per paycheque. I'd like to believe this, but that would mean they are selling hundreds of thousands of copies, surely. Wouldn't this be huge literary news, if so?

And good god, covers don't get any better do they? Who are Torquere using? Their kids?

Comments

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I ran into the whole "women writing m/m = mysogyny" thing back when I was reading tons of X-Files slash. There I was, hoovering up all the Mulder/Krycek fic I could get my mouse on, and suddenly people were saying that I must hate women because I didn't read or write Scully-centric fic. Given the messed up nature of the relationships in the Mulder/Krycek fic I was reading, I expect that replacing either one of them with Scully would have elicited even louder howls of anguish. Now some of the ways writers got Scully out of the way so the guys could get busy were not true to her character, so I could see some accusations of women-hating there. But that was rarely the complaint. Choosing to read or write the men's relationship instead of one of the men with Scully was viewed as hating women, rather than just enjoying the mental picture of two hot, messed up men having sex. It's like saying that I hate apple pie because I plan to nosh on chocolate fudge over the next few days. I adore apple pie. I make a durned good one, too. And I can't make decent fudge to save my life (which probably makes my desire to wallow in it even stronger--oh, hey this works on several levels). My fudge munch-fest doesn't mean I hate pie.

[sleveen.livejournal.com]

I have a few close female friends but activities that make them happy, hen nights, Chippendale parties, window shopping, hours on the phone, children - leave me cold and often nauseated. I don't dislike women, but I just don't have a lot in common with the larger proportion of them.

Amen, amen, amen and again, amen.
People routinely ask me why I haven't got any children and are always shocked when I reply truthfully that I don't find them interesting in the least. And I don't. The idea of spending large amounts of time with pre-adult humans - my own or anyone else's - makes me want to claw my own ears off. Unlike most of my "sisters" (ugh) the screaming, dot-eyed little malcontent on the morning bus doesn't instill in me the maternal desire to coo, but the desire to take its britches down and warm its little backside until it learns some manners. And although I haven't played video games in awhile (fifteen years) I'm more interested in gangsters (the sharp-dressed, 1930s variety) and guns than various feminist issues. Like you, I have a handful of female friends that I truly love and want to spend time with, and most of them are women like myself - writers or artists, some with military backgrounds or experience (the best time of my young life was crawling through the underbrush on elbows and knees in the mud, holding my rifle) who know how to do things besides the traditionally 'girly' stuff, who are strong and independent, and who have minds of their own.

I've been blessed with a lot of great male friends, too - my best mate at work is a man with the same quirky sense of humour as me - and have no problem bending my elbow in the pub with the guys.

I think you and I would prolly get on great. :)

[rwday.livejournal.com]

For the life of me, I can't understand why people care what other people write. Male/male, female/female, male/female/martian, whatever. Write what you like, read what you like and leave everybody else the hell alone.

[semioticwarrior.livejournal.com]

The last two paragraphs boggle my mind.

>The occasional lurid accident which happens when a sadomasochistic scene goes wrong is overshadowed by the constant, nonconsensual, institutionally-enforced oppression of whole demographics in most cultures on earth.

What?

And the last final assertion that "human beings are sexual and complicated" um...way to make a controversial statement! WTF?

As for there being no history of men writing f/f erotica.... Has the woman never read Penthouse Forum?

Oh, and...

[rwday.livejournal.com]

I don't care if female m/m writers are motivated by self-loathing, misogyny, penis envy, or just plain greed. All I care about is whether or not they can tell a story.

(And now you can tell why I didn't stay an English teacher...)

Re: Oh, and...

[haydenthorne.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

That said, I despise chicklit, which I suppose means I'm a self-loathing estrogener.

Re: Oh, and...

[rwday.livejournal.com]

No, despising chicklit just shows you have taste.

I've got a friend who dropped out of a master's program in English a while back, and we were talking recently about how far too many academics who claim to be 'experts' on writing can't string a coherent plot together or create a character anybody gives a damn about. It's all navel gazing self-absorbed garbage. I can't access the ERWA thing because work is blocking it, but judging by the quotes I'm seeing from it, this woman is one of those 'those who can't, teach' types we were talking of.

[aunty_marion]

Oh, how true... I got inoculated with the philosophy of IDIC at a tender age (oh, OK, I was 15!) and thought it was an excellent one. And I still do. Also, of course, the idea that There Is No One True Way. You don't try and indoctrinate me, I won't try and indoctrinate you...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I somehow thought that when I came out into the big world of real publishing that there would be no wank. That we all would work away and nod appreciatively at our peer's efforts.

How naive was I?

I actually hate apple pie. But I don't expect anyone to make judgments on me because of that...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

There must be a gene for it, I guess. I knew that I was different from my friends even when I was young when they all poured constantly over fashion magazines and spent days deciding on what they were going to wear at the weekend. I did this too, but I also invented plays and would spend every hour I could with my pony. Or up trees.

I'm definitely up for a night in the pub, that's for sure!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Damn right. Live long and don't piss me off, or whatever the saying is...

:)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

If you ever work out what that means, do tell.

I Can Answer That For Her

[ggymeta.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

So why is such a large, prolific, enthusiastic tribe of women writing m/m erotic romance, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else?

Because a large, prolific, enthusiastic tribe of women are READING m/m erotic romance, most times to the exclusions of anything else. ^_^ It's that simple. Perhaps if she took the time to understand the readership beyond pegging them into the slash/fan-fic template, she'd have an answer to her own inquiry.

I course I would never say this to her, because I might be accused of irrational bias and therefore undeserving of giving her a clear answer.

[cleo]

You should really post the link and your commentary to metafandom. Of course, then it just might cause a hullaballoo. And I'm here via the "friends of friends list" thing (because it was too shiny to resist this morning). So, I have no idea who we have in common in friending, but I'm glad I found this.

But it really seems like this woman hasn't read anything actually published academically on slash (Henry Jenkins and co) or really bothered to read any fan generated meta. I had trouble figuring out the point of the article too. It was pretty rambly and ridiculous.

...but phrases like "Squicks expressed as explanations of reality are a different can of worms," just go over my head. What does it mean?

I am a college professor, and I can tell you that it means she doesn't know what she's talking about, and this is her way of hedging herself out of it.

Why do we all have to like the same things?

Because liking different things might make us *gasp* different. And we wouldn't want that.

Seriously, if she is going to accuse slashers of hating women, can't we say the same of typical romance authors who continually put women in powerless, demeaning situations? No? We can't? Oh, darn.

Re: Oh, and...

[haydenthorne.livejournal.com]

Literary fiction's extremely tricky. My all-time favorite books are literary fiction, but I had to slog through piles and piles of WTF! titles that say nothing more than "life's a back-biting bitch" in the most pompous way possible in order to find those gems.

Alan Hollinghurst, I'm looking at you (and I loved The Swimming-Pool Library, too, until you became the critics' darling).

I am, I must say, a Kazuo Ishiguro hor. :D

Re: I Can Answer That For Her

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, I liked the way she deftly covered that base...

[aunty_marion]

Hand in Vulcan V with palm out: Live Long and Prosper.

Hand in Vulcan V with back of hand out: Lust Long and Perspire.

*g*

I have a pair of Vulcan chopsticks. Picked up in (of all places!) Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in Scotland. They had four Chinese characters on them, so when I got home I dug out the Japanese dictionary (since Japanese uses the same characters, mostly with the same meanings, too), and nearly laughed myself off the chair when I discovered they were the characters for "Long Life and Prosperity"!!

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

My Barbie dolls were all spies and explorers. The obsessive changing of clothing seemed like an awful waste of time.

My partner's theory is that some of us (and that's a gender-neutral 'us') see ourselves as human beings who have a gender, not the other way around. While our genital configuration is not insignificant, it isn't our defining feature. Most of my long-time friends seem to have this same attitude. It probably isn't a majority view, but it seems more balanced to me.

Re: Oh, and...

[rwday.livejournal.com]

Literary fiction is like every other genre in that regard. The ratio of crap to quality is probably at least 10:1 whether it's literary, romance, SF.

When writers start writing for the critics or believing their own PR (yes, JKR, I'm talking to you here), that's when things start to go wrong, IMO.

[rwday.livejournal.com]

Yes, sometimes I think we'd be better off as Vulcans. Though perhaps not with the 7 year mating thing...

Re: Oh, and...

[haydenthorne.livejournal.com]

When writers start writing for the critics or believing their own PR (yes, JKR, I'm talking to you here), that's when things start to go wrong, IMO.

Bingo!

Must... resist... an Anne Rice reference...

[kalitakasar.livejournal.com]

The article made my head hurt.

[aphephobia.livejournal.com]

I don't get what she's saying, either.

And yes, I'm a feminist. I write a fair degree of m/m stuff. And honestly, as a reader, I'd rather see women not included (and then question that from the genre rather than specific writers) than see badly written or stereotypical-- or gawd forbid-- token-- female characters in what I read, watch, or play.

As for the "sisterhood" thing-- I'm not down with it, either. I'll support women being fucked over by the patriarchy, but the patriarchy also screws over some men and minority groups, and I'm not going to ignore them. (Class also plays a part-- is someone seriously going to try and argue that a white, educated het woman is in as crappy a position as a lot of other people?) Nor am I blindly going to follow someone because they're a woman. There are plenty of women who've managed to use the whole system to their advantage and who continue to screw over other women, and people from minority groups, too. Fuck that.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

*giggling* Well that seems obvious to me - what did you think they were going to say? "A Present from Scotland"?

[aphephobia.livejournal.com]

if she is going to accuse slashers of hating women, can't we say the same of typical romance authors who continually put women in powerless, demeaning situations?

See, that's something I hadn't thought about before-- maybe I like slash and m/m stuff because there's no gender politics and expected gender norms and behaviours from either participant, whereas in het "romance," it often comes back to that.

Not only do I not identify without, but I don't have any interest in seeing it. I feel similarly about porn, actually, too...

Wow. I'd never thought about it like that. Thankyou for that comment. :)