Friskbiskit

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?

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...