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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Bindel, Piece by Piece

There has been so much discussion of this piece lately that I almost hesitate to do this, but since several of us seem to disagree on the "meat" of Julie Bindel's argument--the substantive points she's making, or trying to make, rather than the dashes of rhetorical chipotle that spice things up or make us sputter and cough--it seems the way to proceed is simply to look over the article, piece by piece, and see if we can agree on what it says.

Here it is, then, paragraph by paragraph (numbers added for easy reference). Laura, Sarah, and the rest of us contributors can weigh in by editing this post and adding commentary after each paragraph, as well as in the comments boxes.

Let the games...begin!
1. Fifteen years ago, I read 20 Mills & Boon novels as research for a dissertation on "romantic fiction and the rape myth". It was the easiest piece of research I have ever done. In every book, there was a scene where the heroine is "broken in", both emotionally and physically, by the hero. Having fallen for this tall, brooding figure of masculinity, the heroine becomes consumed with capturing him. The hero is behaving in a way that, in real life, causes many women to develop low self-esteem, depression and self-harming behaviour - blowing hot and cold, and treating her like dirt. But all comes right in the end. After the heroine displays extraordinary vulnerability during a crisis, Mr Macho saves the day and shows her he cares.
EMS: Laura has already written about Bindel's research methods here, so I won't cover that. Instead, let me just observe that I don't know what "rape myth" she means, and it matters. Imagine this same paragraph--this one and the next one--as having grown out of a different dissertation, one on "romantic fiction and dominant / submissive sexual fantasy" and see how differently it reads. (One can also imagine it as deriving from research into "romantic fiction and the power of random reinforcement.")

SSGF: Doesn't exploring a "myth" or a narrative give us power over it in real life? Don't various narratives exist precisely so that people can explore the extremes (as Lazaraspaste says in the comments) in order to give us psychic control over the situations if/when they happen to us?

EMS: I agree, Sarah, and I’d like to link this idea to your discussion, below, of the ending of the romance novel. Bindel snidely dismisses the victory of the heroine: “But all comes right in the end.” Why is the ending to be mocked? Because it doesn’t happen that way often enough in “real life”? On those grounds, couldn’t we just as easily dismiss the genres of mystery and detective fiction? Bindel seems never to consider any function of literature other than to inculcate values / ideology or to reflect reality. The notion of literature as dream-work, a way to work through and triumph over threats, does not enter in to her discussion.

2. By this time (you know how uppity women can be), our heroine is so fed up that she does not comply when he grabs her inevitably small frame in his huge arms, and attempts to take her to bed. And so begins the "gender dance" - man chases woman, woman resists, and, finally, woman submits in a blaze of passion.
EMS: I'm puzzled by the euphemism here: "gender dance." Clearly Bindel wants us to see the scenario she describes as a rape, with the final clause an unthinkable, ridiculous finale. On the other hand, again, if this were in a piece about power disparity and sexual fantasy or consensual sex-play, there's nothing particularly unthinkable about the scene she describes; anyone who follows Dan Savage or other sex-advice columns, or reads the LustBites erotic authors blog knows how common such scenes and fantasies are.

EMS: It’s clear from what Laura has posted below that Bindel dislikes this particular “dance,” whether as sexual fantasy or as consensual play. She speaks, for example, of “pornography and sadomasochistic sexual practices” as having “invade[d] the lesbian community.” Her assumption would seem to be that women as such, were they not “invaded” by patriarchal ideology, would not find power differentials erotically exciting. I don’t know what evidence she has for this; certainly as far back as Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” (Frag. 1) we find differences in power between women being eroticized:

[Anne Carson’s translation]

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus,who twist lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart

but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father's
golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you,
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair---

they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.

That penultimate stanza makes it pretty clear that Sappho doesn’t fantasize about equal, reciprocal affection, even between two women. Rather, what she wants the Goddess of Love to promise is a reversal of the existing power dynamic: the chased one will be the pursuer, the beloved the lover, “even unwilling.”

A lot of work was done on this issue in Emily Dickinson's love poetry back in the 1990s. There were two distinct waves of criticism: the first tried to argue that when ED wrote about love between women, it was egalitarian and reciprocal and kind, but when she wrote about heterosexual love, the poems were about hierarchy and domination / submission and so on. A few years later, the problems with this grew unmistakable: the theory simply didn't fit the facts, the actual poems. Bindel strikes me as very much a "first wave" critic in this scheme: on whatever grounds (taste or ideology) she wants to assert that love should be a certain way and that certain behaviors and dynamics should not be attractive. If they are, there's something wrong with you: you've been infected, invaded, etc., by the patriarchy.

EMS: It's also worth pointing out how false to many romance novels this description of the "dance" turns out to be. In novels from The Sheik to The Flame and the Flower the rape scenes are not played out this way: they're scenes of violation with no "blaze of passion" or pleasure on the woman's part. The shocking thing about these novels is the fact that the rapist turns out to be the romantic hero, that the novel forgives or redeems him, which is a different issue, although one that Bindel might well address.
3. My loathing of M&B novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction - Martina Cole novels, which I love, are also formulaic. But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by M&B. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech.
EMS: Has she shown, so far, that the novels perpetuate propaganda? Has she shown that they are misogynistic, evidence of what we might call "female self-hatred" (as one hears of "Jewish self-hatred," for example)? I don't think that she has.

EMS: Let me say that again, more loudly. I don’t think that Bindel has shown, so far, that these novels perpetuate propaganda. She has read selectively, distorted some facts, and implied that a common, even commonplace locus of sexual excitement (hierarchy, differences of power) is at best contemptible, and at worst (as in the later passage, quoted by LV below) radically foreign to women, so that if women like it, even between themselves, they merely testify to their own corruption. I am unconvinced.

EMS: So far, then, the core argument seems to be that these novels feature heroes who "behave in a way that, in real life, causes many women to develop low self-esteem, depression and self-harming behaviour." Am I wrong to see this as meaning, essentially, that Bindel objects to the fact that many women enjoy reading about men who behave in ways that they wouldn't put up with in real life, which is to say that she objects to women fantasizing about things that they wouldn't want to do (or suffer) in real life.

EMS: The logic would seem to be that by enjoying this fantasy, they give aid and comfort to men who act (in real life) like these heroes, and they undermine support for women who have been abused by such men. Let me offer a comparable case from another cultural realm: supposing there was a body of popular work (fiction, songs, movies) in which people have a wonderful time binge drinking, or drinking and driving. Someone who came from the world of public health might well look at all those films and stories and songs--ah! the songs: "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," "Hey, Bartender," "One for My Baby (and One for the Road)," "Seven Drunken Nights"--and write a similar case against them. Yes?

LV - One might also want to make a comparison with smoking in the movies. There's been quite a lot of research done on that. For example, Mekemson and Glantz found that "Both the entertainment and tobacco industries recognised the high value of promotion of tobacco through entertainment media. The 1980s saw undertakings by four tobacco companies, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds (RJR), American Tobacco Company, and Brown and Williamson to place their products in movies." and, Dalton et al observed that "Exposure to smoking in movies has been linked with adolescent smoking initiation in cross-sectional studies. [...] Our results provide strong evidence that viewing smoking in movies promotes smoking initiation among adolescents."

EMS: I'd thought of that analogy also. But smoking is, in all circumstances, a threat to one's health. Drinking leads to alcoholism and alcohol abuse less pervasively or inevitably, except in perhaps in particularly at-risk populations. Are all women to be considered an "at-risk population" here? Heterosexual romance and marriage don't strike me as being quite as dangerous, case for case, as smoking, although I don't know the statistics. Perhaps if I did I'd feel differently?

SSGF: I think the analogy is much closer to the crime fiction Bindel likes so much. Nothing gets resolved in films with drinking and smoking. No one stops the vice, nothing gets fixed. But at the end of crime fiction, the world is a more just place. The killer is apprehended or dead, and the protagonists have saved the day. And it's the END that is valorized in considerations of the genre. The end isn't denigrated as they are in romance fiction, because of course the criminal has to be punished, the crime solved, and order restored. No one questions that ending, and because of the ending, crime fiction has slightly more respectability that romance fiction. And yet, as romance defenders say again and again, no one expects crime fiction readers to go out and commit the crimes they read about. Ah, but you're not identifying with the criminal, right? You're identifying with the solver of the crimes. Then again, what about Dexter, which I've heard is a fabulous show in which one does identify with the serial killer, because he is the protagonist. Still, readers/viewers don't go out and commit their own crimes. It comes down, again, to which part of the story has the most "influence"? The beginning/middle where the hero might be acting like a jerk, or the end where he has reformed, changed his ways, and treats the heroine as she deserves, admitting her power over him. If that's the influential part of the story, then again, as I said in my post, romances are "good for you" rather than "misogynistic hate speech" (I really can't believe she said that).

LV: Sarah commented that "Nothing gets resolved in films with drinking and smoking" which is sort of true, in one way, but in another, if characters drink and smoke and this makes them appear glamorous and more successful sexually, then it's suggesting that drinking and smoking have positive effects, and so that perhaps makes their portrayal in film closer to the ways that some heroes behave. In real life these behaviours might be indicative of an abusive relationship, but in the romances kidnapping a heroine or blackmailing her, or deciding to take her virginity as revenge for something her father did to your father, is part and parcel of the hero's glamorous, sexy alpha-ness. And it could be argued that even the way he changes could be read as encouraging the idea that an abuser could also change, whereas in fact abuse tends to escalate.

LV - and why am I ending up playing the role of Devil's Advocate here?

EMS: Because you're a fair-minded, reasonable person, doing what an academic is supposed to do: take ideas seriously, test them, and see what you think!

LV - anyway, to get back to smoking and alcohol, here's some of the research: “one in every five deaths in the United States is smoking related” and smoking is, as we have seen, encouraged by certain representations of smoking in films.

LV - Re alcohol, "Estimates for 2002 show that at least 2.3 million people died worldwide of alcohol-related causes accounting for 3.7% of global mortality. Alcohol consumption was responsible for 4.4% of the global burden of disease" (Global Alcohol Policy Alliance). Alcohol consumption is affected by portrayals in film and the media:
The central conclusion reached by Hanewinkel et al. is that exposure to incidental portrayals of alcohol use in US movies has contributed to the early onset of alcohol use by a group of German adolescents.
and a
study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is the first-ever national longitudinal survey of the influence of alcohol advertising on youth. Snyder and her colleagues conclude that greater exposure to alcohol advertising contributes to an increase in drinking among underage youth. Specifically, the analysis shows that for underage drinkers, exposure to one more ad than the average for youth was correlated with a 1 percent increase in drinking, and that an additional dollar spent per capita on alcohol advertising in a local market was correlated with a 3 percent increase in underage alcohol consumption as well. (from here, and more research into the link between advertising and alcohol consumption can be found here)
LV - So those are two activities which can be very harmful and consumption of both substances has been shown to be linked to their portrayal in film/the media. Given the horrific figures relating to violence against women, one might argue that relationships with men, while potentially pleasurable and even beneficial (like alcohol), can often have extremely negative consequences. According to the US Department of Justice’s 2000 Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: "Women experience more intimate partner violence than do men: 22.1 percent of surveyed women, compared with 7.4 percent of surveyed men, reported they were physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, or date in their lifetime."

EMS: Just to jump in for a second, Laura: you say "relationships with men," but the report speaks of assalut by "boyfriend or girlfriend." According to the this website website (which I have not evaluated), "Domestic abuse occurs in approximately 30 to 40% of GLBT relationships, which is the same percentage of violence that occurs in straight relationships. It is a myth that same-sex couples don't batter each other, or if they do; they are just "fighting" or it is "mutual abuse"." Here too, on the AARDVARK site, I read that "The rates of domestic violence in same-gender relationships is roughly the same as domestic violence against heterosexual women" and "The GLBT community itself is often not supportive of victims of battering because many want to maintain the myth that there are no problems (such as child abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc.) in these relationships." One might argue that Bindel's brief against heterosexual romance fiction perpetuates this myth, because it suggests that violence against women is a problem only when women are in relationships with men.

LV: According to the Findings from the Australian Component of the International Violence Against Women Survey (2004) "Over one third of women who had a current or former intimate partner reported experiencing at least one form of partner violence over the lifetime, and four per cent in the past 12 months" (and there are more Australian figures here). In the UK, “One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime” and globally “At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a study based on 50 surveys from around the world” (Amnesty).

LV - Unlike alcohol and smoking, it's much more difficult to establish quite how romance-reading relates to domestic violence. But what evidence there is, is discussed below, in relation to paragraph 4.
4. Why do I care so much about books that few take seriously? Are there not more important battles to fight? Challenging the low conviction rate for rape certainly seems more urgent than trashing novels that perpetuate gender stereotypes, but there is no doubt that such novels feed directly into some women's sense of themselves as lesser beings, as creatures desperate to be dominated.
EMS: "There is no doubt." Does that mean "there is evidence"? If so, where is it?

LV - There is some evidence in Julia Wood's "two-year study, which she described in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, [in which] Wood identified 'women's use of gender and romance narratives to make sense of violent relationships'" and "People commonly use stories to make sense of their lives, placing themselves within those stories, said Wood: 'Some of the images of men and women in these romance novels are entirely consistent with the dynamics of violent relationships'" (from here). As noted previously, Bindel is only saying that romances have a particular effect on "some" women, just as Wood's study was of a small group of women who had been/were in abusive relationships.

EMS: But "make sense of" doesn't necessarily mean "excuse" or "stay with," does it? Is there any evidence that women who repeatedly "make sense of" their situation by reading romance novels tend to change that situation in higher or lower numbers than women who do not?

We'll need to get this study or the full account of it to evaluate it properly--from the description here I'm not sure it qualifies as a "no doubt" proof, or even as very persuasive.

SSGF: I'm with Eric: we need to read this study in full, because it's very unclear (to me) as to whether Wood is looking at women already in an abusive relationship? Again, romance narratives might compound their problems, but I can't believe that they're the sole reason women are in those relationships. But this doesn't cover the blanket statement that Bindel seems to be making that all (or most) readers are adversely affected by the patriarchal ideology of the romance narrative. And if romances contribute to just one women staying in an abusive relationship, that is of course too many, but I think there's too many variables to be certain about anything.

EMS: And, as I've observed before, romance fiction is hardly the only genre or text that can be used to make sense (bad sense, destructive sense) of an abusive relationship. Thus, for example, this:
LV - Pointing out potentially unsavoury aspects of other genres/belief systems doesn't get romance off the hook, though, does it? I mean, if I commit a crime, it's still a crime, regardless of whether other people commit more crimes or worse crimes. And in fact, if other genres and belief systems could be used in the same ways as romance, might that not suggest that romances form part of a wider set of cultural ideas which validate abusive relationships? So if we're defending romance, I don't think we should distract attention onto the beams in other genres's eyes in order to dismiss claims that there's a mote in our own. But is there a mote in our eye? That is the question. And having now misquoted both the Bible and Shakespeare, I think I'd better stop.

EMS: Motes, shmotes! OK, you caught me, Laura. But my point--if I had one besides wanting to give Sarah something nifty to think about at church--was twofold:
  • First, if romance does contain this set of cultural ideas, it may not do so any more than any other genre or branch of culture, in which case it's unfair to single it out for derision or critique; and
  • Second, if romance and the Bible both contain such negative material, they also both contain material that contravenes or complicates or flatly contradicts it. The Bible contains the book of Lamentations, which is one of the more unsettling accounts of an abusive relationship I know, but it also contains the book of Job, which radically ironizes anyone's attempt to justify unfortunate events as divine punishment, and it also contains the Song of Songs, which is one of the loveliest accounts of equal and reciprocal companionate love that I know--in which, I might add, there is occasional play with hierarchy and power and so on.
SSGF: Eric, OMG, where did you GET that? I love Jesus the dom, spanking his little submissive! (I could go into a very long discussion of how Christianity is actually all about submission, but I'll do that another time!)

LV: Wendy Larcombe's Compelling Engagements : Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Annandale, N.S.W.: Federation Press, 2005 is described by her publisher as being
a ground-breaking work which investigates the narratives of rape law and of romance fiction, and explores the outmoded and strikingly similar depictions of their normative female subjects. These are women who are not only vulnerable but also evidently worthy of the protections or rewards promised: punishment of the rapist or the hero’s love. [...] Larcombe shows how the legal construction of gender and subjectivity in rape law is still working to disempower victims. She suggests feminism’s failure to accommodate women’s investment in heroines of romance fiction has limited their effectiveness in transforming rape law.
I haven't been able to get hold of either of these works to read them in full, so I don't know how much evidence, or what sort of evidence, Larcombe provides.

EMS: Does every woman (or man) who wants to be dominated think of him or herself as a "lesser being"? Again, on what evidence does she make that claim? This paragraph seems quite weak to me, but perhaps I'm missing something.

SSGF: Eric, from the BDSM perspective, absolutely not. In fact, most sexual submissives I know are incredibly self-confident, self-assured people who are usually Type A personalities IRL. In fact, in the community, if a submissive is needy and DOES imagine him/herself as a "lesser being," red flags are thrown up around them and clever doms learn to stay away. BDSM is not counseling, it's a sexual orientation. It shouldn't be used to work out self-esteem issues unless all the partners know exactly what they're doing. But that's not what Bindel is talking about. She's talking about a more pervasive unconscious drive that women apparently have to debase themselves because society tells them to. Part of the disconnect here, I think, is that most non-readers still buy into the stereotype of romance readers being undereducated housewives who shore up their "false consciousness" by addictively reading romances, whereas statistics show that, in general, romance readers have a higher education level than the general population, and are probably therefore slightly more conscious about how and why they read, and therefore less likely to "succumb" to the supposed patriarchal influence of romances.

SSGF: And furthermore, while Bindel is looking at how far we HAVEN'T come in feminist aims of an equal society and blaming it on romances, one could turn that on its head and look at how far we have come toward meeting goals of equality in the last forty years, which is precisely when romances have had their resurgence. As in, for hundreds (thousands) of years, equality for women was unavailable, even unimaginable, but since romances became popular, we've been creeping closer and closer to equality. Correlation or cause--you be the judge! (tongue planted firmly in cheek).
5. One argument from M&B apologists is that the heroine has moved with the times. True, she is now more physically active and sexually imaginative. The modern-day character often dares to have sex before marriage, knows what she wants in terms of her career and personal life, and even has a sense of humour.
EMS: So far, she's ceding points to us apologists. I'm getting suspicious. (Did she not have a sense of humour before? I haven't read enough category romances to comment--but then, has Bindel?)
6. As a result of the changing heroine, the hero has been required to catch up. But rather than becoming a "new man", it seems he has become even more masculine and domineering in order to keep the heroine in line. This is how the rape fantasies so integral to the plot have been able to persist.
SSGF: Oh, Lord, where to start. Hey, in the 90s, we tried the "beta" hero in a lot of category romances, and he wasn't so popular. I'm sure Bindel would say that this proves her point, but I'm not so sure. Yes, true, the hero has become more masculine and more domineering, but we've also gained much more access to his thoughts, to his point of view, and this gives us more access to understanding why he does what he does. Again, Bindel would probably say this is patriarchy at its worst, but I still wonder what part of the novels we're valorizing. If it's the end, where the hero is brought to heel--tamed, in fact (sorry, Laura, I know you don't like this word)--then the fact that he's super-domineering means the heroine's victory is that much more powerful (and empowering?).

LV - I also much prefer beta heroes (though because of the very different ways that people use the terms "alpha" and "beta" to describe romance heroes, they often aren't very helpful and you have to provide your own definition of each term before they can really be meaningful).

EMS: There's no logic to this paragraph, folks. Why would we expect the heroes to become more "beta" (mo' betta'?) if the heroines have become stronger? Wouldn't we expect precisely what has happened: stronger heroines need bigger challenges?
7. Take this description of a recent M&B novel, The Desert Sheikh's Captive Wife: "Tilda was regretting her short-lived romance with Rashad, the Crown Prince of Bakhar. Now, with her impoverished family indebted to him, Rashad was blackmailing her by insisting she pay up ... as his concubine! Soon Tilda was the arrogant Sheikh's captive, ready to be ravished in his far-away desert kingdom."
EMS: The "rape fantasy," if there is one, is staged as anticipation here. Does Tilda actually get ravished? Does the Sheikh remain arrogant? Bindel doesn't care enough to find out, but surely it makes a difference. This is one more retelling of E. M. Hull's classic The Sheik, evidently, but I suspect that its actual plot, turn for turn, and its characterization of both hero and heroine are radically different.
8. Or Bought: One Island, One Bride: "Self-made billionaire Alexander Kosta has come to the island of Lefkis for revenge ... He doesn't count on feisty pint-sized beauty Ellie Mendoras to be the thorn in his side! ... There's a dangerous smile on Alexander's lips ... As far as he's concerned Ellie's a little firecracker who needs to be tamed. He'll seduce her into compliance, then buy her body and soul!!"
EMS: "Seduce her into compliance" may mean "rape" in somebody's book, but I don't think it will mean rape in this one. And again, does anyone who reads much romance believe that Ellie will be the only one "tamed"?
9. Or Virgin Slave, Barbarian King: "Julia Livia Rufa is horrified when barbarians invade Rome and steal everything in sight. But she doesn't expect to be among the taken! As Wulfric's woman, she's ordered to keep house for the uncivilised marauders. Soon, though, Julia realises that she's more free as a slave than she ever was as a sheltered Roman virgin."
EMS: We're going to read this one collectively, here at TMT, in January: stay tuned for details. Dibs on the Wulfric costume!

SSGF: This one is fascinating to me, because the titillation factor is high on that last sentence, but the book is actually discussing definitions of civilization vs. barbarism and their treatment of women.
10. The first two were published this year, the third comes out in January.
SSGF: And we all know how accurate the front cover and back blurb are in depicting the atmosphere and actual ideology of the book (see all SBTB Cover Snark!). Great research there.

LV - And yet, people do pick up books at least partly as a result of looking at the covers. So presumably words such as "blackmail," "concubine," "ravished," "revenge," "dangerous," "seduce," and "compliance" are ones which attract some readers. Bindel might wonder what it is about these concepts that's attractive to readers.

EMS: I think Bindel knows what about these concepts is attractive: she just doesn't like it, and doesn't think they should be attractive. On the other hand, readers who know the genre also know that although the books may give them the frisson that these words promise, they will also end with an HEA, so that the book as a whole will take them from the ordinary world into the world of romance and then (as it were) carry them safely home. Even more, they know that they will get to indulge in a fantasy of power that is doubled: male power and female power, even if neither of these play out in a way that Bindel thinks is safe or sage.

LV - In another of the interviews Bindel's done, she spoke to Sheila Jeffreys, for whom
heterosexual sex is sexual desire that eroticises power differences. Lesbian and gay sexual practices do not escape her scrutiny. Two of her books, The Lesbian Heresy (1993) and Unpacking Queer Politics (2003), focus on how "queer" sexual politics have led to oppressed sexual minorities embracing any kind of sex, such as sadomasochism, in the name of liberation. Jeffreys tends to see things coming before they happen. She was the one who warned, in the early 1980s, that pornography and sadomasochistic sexual practices would invade the lesbian community. They did.
LV - Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from Bindel's overall positive response to Jeffreys, and from the word "warn," but I would guess that Bindel isn't exactly embracing sadomasochism. I've only found one other reference to Bindel's position on the issue: "Julie Bindel of Justice for Women even believes a 'bridge between lesbian feminism and S/M politics' is possible (Taylor and Chandler, 1995: 42). This is an unusual acknowledgment that sadomasochism does not necessarily rule out lesbian feminism" (O'Sullivan 118). [O'Sullivan, Sue. "What a Difference a Decade Makes: Coming to Power and The Second Coming." Feminist Review 61 Snakes and Ladders: Reviewing Feminisms at Century's End (1999): 97-126.]

SSGF: ::sigh:: If one sees BDSM purely as a representation of the repressive patriarchal power dynamics in society, then seeing it "infiltrate" the lesbian community must be devastating. But if one realizes that being kinky is, itself, a sexual orientation above and beyond being lesbian, then kinky lesbians do not herald the end of civilization as we know it. Kinky lesbians are just women who happen to enjoy playing with power dynamics in a relationship and I very much doubt the lesbian community has ever been free of them. Let's see, I know an incredibly feminine lesbian dom who calls herself "Master," and a very butch female dom who calls herself Daddy. The feminine dom is partnered with a very butch submissive. The butch femdom is partnered with an incredibly beautiful femme sub. I also know a butch femdom partnered with a butch submissive. How do we unpack the patriarchal power dynamics in these relationships? Or more to the point, should we unpack them? I would argue that we shouldn't.

EMS: "Heterosexual sex is sexual desire that eroticises power differences"? You mean, if I have hot power-exchange sex with another guy, it will still be heterosexual sex? Damn! No one tells me anything. More seriously, see Sappho's poem above, among any number of other texts.
11. In 1970, one of M&B's regular writers, Violet Winspear, claimed that her heroes had to be "capable of rape". Another, Hilary Wilde, said in 1966, "The odd thing is that if I met one of my heroes, I would probably bash him over the head with an empty whisky bottle. It is a type I loathe and detest. I imagine in all women, deep down inside us, is a primitive desire to be arrogantly bullied." These comments may have been made some time ago, but the tradition seems to continue in the many M&B novels that depict female submission to dominant heroes.
SSGF: Or maybe all women, deep down inside, have the primitive desire to control the arrogant bully, because that's certainly what romances give them, if we valorize the ending, not the middle.

LV - I don't think "all women" have either of these "primitive desires". The term "primitive desire" is interesting, because it suggests that these desires are innate/"natural". But if we accept that, does it mean that true vanilla-ness is deviant/kinky/subversive of the norm?

SSGF: I like the way you think! :-)

EMS: Face it, Laura: you're utterly bent! As for Bindel, has she in fact demonstrated that there are "many M&B novels that depict female submission to dominant heroes"? She's shown me the heroes; no evidence yet of the submission. Not in this article, anyway.

SSGF: Ooh, nice point, Eric. Is Bindel arguing by proxy that dominant male necessarily equals submissive female, without thinking that dominant male might just as easily equal dominant female as well?

12. My horror at the genre is not directed towards either the women who write or, indeed, read them. I do not believe in blaming women for our own oppression. Women are the only oppressed group required not only to submit to our oppressors, but to love and sexually desire them at the same time. This is what heterosexual romantic fiction promotes - the sexual submission of women to men. M&B novels are full of patriarchal propaganda.

SSGF: So what dynamic are the kinky gay men in Joey Hills' Rough Canvas replicating? Is Thomas in the feminine position as the submissive/bottom? Isn't that an equally egregious stereotype of homosexual relations as Bindel's view of power relations in romance novels?

EMS: Having gone through this article paragraph by paragraph, I simply do not find that she has demonstrated any one of these central points. She has not shown that heterosexual romantic fiction promotes female sexual submission, nor that the novels are full of patriarchal propaganda. She argues by assertion, with flimsy evidence or none at all. She has convinced me that she has a "horror" at the genre, but that "horror" seems mostly her own disgust with fantasies she neither shares nor enjoys, and with the women who have them. (But it's not their fault! Really--they can be saved!)

SSGF: For what it's worth, going back to the ritualized submission of BDSM sexual orientation and practices, the submissive has all the power in the relationship. It is the submissive's right and duty to say "Stop!" at any point, and the dom's responsibility not only to respect this negative, but also to make sure the submissive is alright, whether or not s/he says stop at all. While this might be viewed at patronizing from outside the community, it absolutely isn't when practiced in real life. Any dom who earns a reputation for not stopping or makes any kind of remarks about respecting safewords should be and usually is completely ostracized. The submissive has all the power, precisely because the submissive gives up the power.
13. I can say it no better than the late, great Andrea Dworkin. This classic depiction of romance is simply "rape embellished with meaningful looks".
SSGF: Nothing is ever black or white. Nothing is absolutely one thing or the other. Does Bindel's argument hold some water for some women? Probably. Her fault is in not realizing that romances can be and are empowering for other women. Her fault is in throwing around words like "misogynistic hate speech" without recognizing that others might feel differently and that for the women who subjugate themselves to patriarchal practices, romance novels are the least of their concerns.

LV - Given Bindel’s admiration for Dworkin, it may be fruitful to examine possible similarities in their thinking. Dworkin, as noted in the obituary Bindel wrote about her, “came to represent the fierce debate on pornography and sexual violence.” Bindel has done research into “sexual violence and the criminal justice system. A founder member of the feminist law reform campaign Justice for Women, Julie believes that doing paid work, however ethically and responsibly, is not enough, and remains a committed political activist.”

LV - Dworkin “achieved fame when, in 1983 along with legal academic Catharine MacKinnon, she drafted and promoted the civil rights law recognising pornography as sex discrimination in Minneapolis” and later “Dworkin and MacKinnon were commissioned by the Minneapolis city council to draft a local ordinance that would embody the legal principle that pornography violates the civil rights of women, and is ‘hate speech.’”

SSGF: Personally, I don't feel repressed by the porn I watch and read.

LV - In paragraph 3 Bindel used the term “hate speech” to describe romances, and I wonder if she also believes that they are pornography. Certainly romances have been described this way by some feminist critics of the genre. 1979 saw the publication of Ann Snitow’s “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” and it was followed the next year by Ann Douglas’s “Soft-Porn Culture: Punishing the Liberated Woman.” Douglas’s comments are particularly relevant, as I think her ideas about romance may be similar to Bindel’s:
The Harlequins are porn softened to fit the needs of female emotionality. They are located inside the female consciousness, but so are most current hard-porn (heterosexual) stories and magazines; so, for that matter, are the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Female, not male, consciousness is the most satisfactory repository and register for the forced acknowledgement of male power. The Harlequin heroines initially resist domination, but so do the hard-core heroines. Breaking down female antagonism is half the fun. (27)
and
How can they [romance readers] tolerate or require so extraordinary a disjuncture between their lives and their fantasies? Probably the Harlequins are not written by men [...] but the women who couldn’t thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality. It is a frightening measure of the still patriarchal quality of our culture that many women of all ages co-sponsor male fantasies about themselves and enjoy peep-shows into masculine myths about their sexuality as the surest means of self-induced excitation. (28)

[LV - I've put all of the Bindel paragraphs into a dark green (green being one of the colours of the suffragette movement).]

28 comments:

  1. I have been following this conversation with interest and I have a lot to say so I might rant here a bit. Forgive me.

    The problem with Bindel's assessment (P. 1) isn't that she's wrong, for that is the plot to many a romance novel. No, the problem is that when you break down a narrative structure into its basic elements, well most plots sound absurd or offensive or both.

    What Bindel fails to acknowledge is that what one likes to read is just that, what one likes to read. It is a matter of taste. If we must analyze literature and art from a (sigh) sociological and anthropological perspective, endlessly debating whether these books may or may not harm women's psyche, progress, personal quest for self-actualization, etc. then we must acknowledge that different women need different things at different times in their ives. That not only do some women enjoy reading about being "broken in" but there are probably a few who actually might desire this in their real lives.

    What I found particularly obnoxious about Bindel's statements wasn't that she thought romance was trash but the implication that she knows what is best for women. That if women want to be free from patriarchal oppression not only must they not want men to behave this way (P.1) in real life but they must not read about it in a book.

    And it isn't Bindel alone. Most opponents of the romance genre take a similar tact. Most of these critics write their arugments from this moral high ground, shaking their collective heads at those poor, benighted souls who have failed to see the light(whether it be ideologically left or right) and realize that the only literature worth reading is literature that ennobles us. And if people are resistant to being ennobled then we enlightened few must continue to educate them through a process of shame and condescension.

    So I'm not saying she's wrong. I'm not suggesting that the plot summaries (P.7-9) aren't absurd at best or offensive at worst, because they very well may be both. What I object to is being talked down to regarding what is essentially a matter of taste. I like books where (P.1) Tall, handsome, brooding men take charge and break in the heroine. I just do. Bindel just doesn't. But I'm sick and tired of being morally upbraided for having a different aesthetic ethos or being accused of being a bad feminist because I have failed to divest myself of the desire for heterosexual intercourse in all its varied forms. Even if I am only desiring it through reading.

    People make bad choices. They have atrocious taste in art and they have atrocious taste in life partners. But it is not the job of adults to tell other adults what to read, nor indeed how to live their lives. Sometimes the result of letting people have choice is that they end up in abusive relationships or bad careers or on the cover of US Weekly with no panties on. That's just how it is. And yes, art influences people and sometimes it influences people in ways which the artist/author didn't intend. Bad ways, even but influence is not causation and neither is correlation. Often art and literature are attacked rather than those legal, economic and religious conditions that are the cause.

    I do not think the romance genre will ever become a respectable area of study if we constantly allow ourselves to be drawn into arguments in which we have to defend the genre based on whether or not it is "good" for women. Nor on whether it may or may not be a "bad influence". The inherent worth of a piece of literature should not determine whether or not people have the right to read it, enjoy it or engage in the critical examination of it.

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  2. What Bindel fails to acknowledge is that what one likes to read is just that, what one likes to read. It is a matter of taste.

    In paragraphs 12 and 13 I've added in a few links to other articles by Bindel. I get the impression that for her it's very much not just a "matter of taste", just as pornography wasn't something Dworkin considered a matter of taste, and Sheila Jeffreys thinks "that beauty practices - from make-up to breast implants - should be redefined as harmful cultural practices."

    Writing about a book which changed her life, Bindel says that

    I saw a book with my name on it - literally. The book, Brothers, by the late Bernice Rubens, was a fictional trawl through Jewish history, beginning with the build up to the pogroms in the late 1800s. It followed the fate of two brothers named Bindel, and their descendants, in order to question how certain groups of people become oppressed. The book's analysis of how colonisation of any one people builds and is maintained spoke volumes to me. As a naive young feminist, it was an important lesson to learn - those who oppress you first have to dehumanise you, which is how men maintain power over women.

    So for her I don't think the argument is one about ennoblement or aesthetics, but about the sexual politics inherent in ideas about marriage and romance, which she believes help "men maintain power over women." At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading a selection of her essays.

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  3. Thanks for adding the links, Laura! They add a lot to one's sense of Bindel as a thinker and critic.

    I've started writing some commentary on the piece itself, paragraph by paragraph. I'm trying to give it a fair shake--please catch me, everyone, if you think I'm distorting her ideas or being unfair or simply snarky!

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  4. The book's analysis of how colonisation of any one people builds and is maintained spoke volumes to me. As a naive young feminist, it was an important lesson to learn - those who oppress you first have to dehumanise you, which is how men maintain power over women.

    I think that the keyword in that sentence is colonisation. I do not deny, by any means, that women have been oppressed through dehumanization nor that they continue to be dehumanized in varied and diverse ways.
    But the relationship between men and women is not analogous to the relationship between one ethnic group and another, one tribe and another. It is not a matter of colonization, of a nation coming in to conquer, despite how Dworkin views sex (I actually like Dworkin, her prose is really rather fabulous. I just don't agree with her.) I do not consider women to be a conquered people nor a nation in exile, like the Jews. The relationship between men and women is far more complex because while we talk about the battle of the sexes and gender identity as if they belong to each sex or sexes collectively, they do not. These identities are far more mutable than the identity of a community. Individual identity is a confusing mass of contradictions, paradoxes, amalgamations, thwarted desires, requited desires, etc. etc. etc. How people see themselves and their place in the world as gender, race, religion or nation, is very complex.

    And it is this mutability in individual human identity that brings this issue back to a question of taste for me. Or rather I think it comes back to a question of subjectivity. The sexual politics of any culture come down to the individual man and the individual woman, what's between them, how they construct a relationship in that context. It comes down to the how the societal norms and mores are played out between the man and the woman in their specific relationship. This is what romance as a narrative structure is exploring. Sometimes it does it badly, sometimes it does it well. But the cliches, the tropes are there in the narrative as means of exploring the possibilities of normative behavior and anormative (if that's a word) behavior in sexual relationships.

    Part of that exploration is going to include fringe desires. As Violet Winspear said in P. 11, she'd bludgeon one of her heroes in real life. But narrative is not real life. It is not describing the external world but the internal world. It is not an allegory but it is a metaphor for those aspects of our psyches, even our cultures that are dark and dangerous and yet, somehow desirable.

    I do not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape, as some claim Dworkin was saying. Nor do I think romance is "rape with meaningful looks." But all heterosexual intercourse involves penetration and from this one fact arises a great deal of confusion, fear, anger, and misconception. From those summaries (P.7-9) it isn't just a sexual fantasy being explored or even a romantic fantasy but about desire itself, the romantic relationship itself. It is a story told in extremes rather than a muddled middle ground. There is a satisfaction in extremes because it lets us see and experience things in a clearly delineated way that just doesn't exist in reality.

    If Bindel believes romance, as you suggest Laura, is a means through which men maintain power over women then what she is suggesting is that Mills and Boon romances are merely propaganda for a patriarchal agenda. And that, I do not believe. Like fairy tales or allegory, the simplicity of the romance narrative can (and, in some instances it is) be seen as flat story meant to indoctrinate us with some moral. However, I view it as being not so much allegorical and pedantic as it is archetypal and symbolic.

    These plots are absurd. They make no sense if viewed through the lens of realism. Sheikhs, kidnappings, mistresses? Mistresses? Who has mistresses anymore? But it isn't meant to be realistic, it's meant to be romantic, not just in the sense of it being a love story but in the sense of it being an adventure. I think, Bindel et al., forget that because all they see are the offenses and not the catharsis.

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  5. But all heterosexual intercourse involves penetration and from this one fact arises a great deal of confusion, fear, anger, and misconception.

    Three things. First, I think it's arguable that
    the idea that penetrative intercourse is heterosexual sex is socially constructed. There are other ways for two people of opposite sexes to achieve orgasm--and many, many ways for them enjoy eroticism together-- but penetration is the only one that's considered "real" sex. I think that cultural ideas and fictional portrayals have a lot to do with this. In straight Romance, all we get for our main course is Tab A meeting Slot B. This is the pinnacle of the h/h sexual relationship. The idea of a historical hero with impotence who loves his heroine ever so much, but has no blue pill is... unimaginable. As is the idea of an intersexed hero or heroine who would cause a sex scene to take a different turn, if straight up in and out penis/vagina sex isn't possible. As is the idea of a heroine who's been sexually abused to the extent (FGM?) that one bout of mindblowing sex with the hero isn't possible as a convenient way to restore the status quo, enforce the positivity of het penetration, etc.

    What I'm saying is that this you're putting forward is dominant in Romance, but it doesn't spring purely from nature. It's a construct that has ableist bias, at the very least.

    This ties into my second point, which is that the idea of penetration as a thing that is done to the heroine, as an invasion, is also socially constructed.

    Heterosexual sex in Romance, like heterosexual marriage, is problematic way down at its foundations because of the ways it's seen, because of how the stories that have been told about it are told, not because of the way it naturally has to be.

    And this brings me back to where you said that "The sexual politics of any culture come down to the individual man and the individual woman, what's between them, how they construct a relationship in that context."

    I think that, as long as the very basic things that drive us are hardwired into us by a patriarchal culture, it's impossible for a couple in reality or Romance to be freed of sexism. Much the same way it's very difficult to escape invented concepts like race once one has been rasied with them, it's very difficult to see het relationships through a different lens than the one patriarchy has given us.

    So, for instance, instead of questioning the construction of penetrative sex as a violent invasion and a requisite of a het relationship, a heroine must either learn to love being invaded, or pack up her things and leave the stage post hast.

    I don't want her to have to leave the stage. I don't think that dynamics established by patriarchy are the only ones that should get seen. I want to see more varied dynamics and bodies and people have their Romance.

    In the same way, it's assumed that the heroine must behave according to certain norms, must be smaller than the hero, must be the primary caregiver of any children, etc.

    What I'm trying to say is that, when the default is a certain ideology, the act of not questioning that dominant ideology is the same as deliberately supporting it. Individuals can't even escape it if they don't go out of their way to try, because the things that they will want, that will feel natural to them, are the things that the dominant ideology has ingrained in them.

    Thus we don't see intersexed heroes (imagine a character who might be able to experience both vaginal and penal orgasm! the medical precedent is there) or heroines, or historical heroes with impotence and no easy solution for it, or love stories with heroines who are survivors of FGM, or heroines with short vaginas, or straight crossdressing guys and the women who love them is because of widespread negativity toward people who don't fit neatly into the patriarchy's performance of gender and sex.

    And that's the same reason, imo, why even able, straight, vanilla couples who aren't physical representations of Western ideals of masculinity and femininity (why is it so important that a heroine be ravishingly beautiful? Or her hero taller and stronger than her), or who try to be egalitarian, or who aren't in the perfect childbearing age range, have different power dynamics than male-dominant and female-submissive are in the extreme minority of Romance.

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  6. I think I'm making a hash of my point here. Let me have one more go?

    Bindel's article made me think that a Romance doesn't have to be like those horrid twenty M&B books she read to be patriarchal. All it has to do, imo, is be written by someone who's not actively trying not to be patriarchal. The unexamined assumptions are just going to come through, whether in a "funny" conversation where the hero razzes his male friend for being "like a girl" to show male bonding, which is enforcing the idea that female = weak and less than, or where the hero's allowed an active sex life, and the heroine must be a virgin to be worthy, or where the hero "tames" the heroine by forcing sex on her... whatever, it's going to be there to a greater or lesser extent. Much like the way that racism is, again imo, going to be in any work created in a racist culture, if only in the complete unrealistic absence of people of color, or the fact that the behavior of the token of a particular ethnicity follows racist assumptions.

    I'm not sure when a story is supposed to cross over from merely being a product of negative cultural assumptions that the author isn't actively questioning to becoming a promotional material for that negative cultural stuff, as Bindel seems to be saying that Romance is.

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  7. *in any unquestioning work created in a racist culture

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  8. First up, to take a point of agreement with angel, I had similar ideas when reading lazaraspaste's comments about penetration. My immediate thought is that the act of slot A in tab B doesn't have to be seen as penetration. It could just as well be seen as a woman-driven act of engulfing and overwhelming. There is a slight barrier to a woman being the total instigator of the act in that if the man isn't physically ready, then it's virtually impossible for the act to occur, while a woman does not need be physically primed for it to occur. Regardless, the point remains, I believe, that penetration is only one way of seeing that particular sexual act, nor is that act the only one which consitutes sex, as angel says. On the other hand, intercourse is probably inherently more vulnerable as it's the only one that carries the risk of pregnancy, a life-changing event.

    Anyway, getting back to Angel's main comments here and in an earlier post about Austen's era, while I follow the reasoning, I keep being afraid that it means we have to declare pretty much every relationship before The Second Wave of feminism as inherently flawed. Surely this is overkill.

    Men and women in patriarchal cultures and matriarchical cultures surely fell in love and often became better people because of that love. We could declare that it's because all women in particarchal societies and all men in matriarchal ones had internalized their messed up cultures such that they felt "love" despite the fact that they were furthering their own oppression. But, honestly, I have a hard time believing that. Here's an example of why.

    Let's say that a man and a woman today are both genuine believers in a society of total gender equality. They strive their entire lives to accomplish this and along the way they fall completely in love and spend an amazing life together. I'm trying to paint a picture of the ideal love affair based on every social or political moral we have.

    And yet in 50 years, 100 years, people are going to realize that some of our perfect ideas were wrong. We just aren't that smart, no matter how hard we try, and we make moral judgment mistakes. This means however that our ideal love of today informed by the best of feminist thought is also perpetuating a flawed and mistaken society. The only way out of this is if you think that suddenly now for the first time in history, we've got everything right. And of course the belief that one's own culture has the universal moral truths for all time is the great and recurring sin of ethnocentrism.

    But I still want to say that this ideal love affair of today, as we are dreaming of it, was still a great and inspiring love affair, with a story worth telling and one worth reading by our future descendants, despite the fact that many of them realize the heroine and hero were believing absurd things and probably hurting others due to these absurdities.

    Does this make any sense? The argument I am trying to build is that flawed societies are not the end of love and romance, because all societies are flawed.

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  9. Angel, I really like what you're saying, but who decides if the narrative is consciously fighting the hegemonic ideology? The hegemony? Those fighting against the hegemony? The author? The reader? The literary critic 200 years later, like Pacatrue describes?

    For example: Was Jane Austen conservative or liberal, radical or reactionary? Does it matter what SHE thinks she was or does it matter what uses the reader and/or history have put her narratives to? People have built their careers on arguing this point. Can an author be outwardly "conservative," for whatever value of conservative you want to define, and yet under-the-surface subversive, whether consciously or unconsciously? And it the answer to that question is "yes" then which interpretation (outward or inward) holds the most sway over the reader? Or, again, does the importance lie in what use the reader puts the book to?

    My prepositions are running away from me, so I'll stop there, but I really enjoyed your comments. They gave me a lot to think about.

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  10. SSGF: Re: the pattern of the detective story. There's a very good essay on this by Dorothy L. Sayers, "Aristotle and the Detective Story," in which she argues that the detective story is the only form of modern literature which fulfills the criteria of Aristotle's Poetics.

    The most memorable portrayal of smoking in a movie as far as I'm concerned is the scene in Dead Again in which detective Kenneth Branagh goes to see the reporter who covered the original murder, a wisecracking, chain-smoking newsman played by Andy Garcia, and finds him an old man in a nursing home, talking through a hole in his throat as a result of cancer from the smoking. He won't talk until KB gives him a cigarette, then tells his tale while EXHALING SMOKE THROUGH THE HOLE. As he leaves, KB tosses his pack of cigarettes into the wastebasket in the hall. To me, that cancels out a dozen shots of Marlene Dietrich whispering sweet nothings through a cloud of smoke.

    As for the influence of literature on violence in relationships, surely we should look to sadistic pornography written for MEN before we blame romance novels? There is an excellent depiction in Nora Roberts's Public Secrets about how a normal, healthy woman gets sucked into an abusive relationship. The man the heroine marries is at first very loving and protective; the "protection" gradually segues into isolating her from the other people in her life; and then the cycle of abuse, apology, forgiveness, and abuse again begins. Eventually she is able to seize a chance to escape (a funeral he has to let her attend); and finds her old friends and family willing and able to help her. Eventually he comes after her and nearly kills her. She DOES kill him. I think reading this book might well help women recognize the early signs of a dangerous relationship before it turns abusive, when she still has time to get out. And thank goodness, we now have anti-stalker laws.

    Eric: Re: your cartoon: Funnymentalist Christians like to quote the bibical verse that states that "The man is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the Church." But C.S. Lewis pointed out that that is most true in a marriage that is most like a crucifixion for the husband....

    That's actually rather mild compared to the Christian Reconstructionists, who actually advocate stoning to death not only for adulterers but also for rebellious children. ("Eat your broccoli, Dolores, or else!")

    I really don't know what a "beta" hero is. Among wolves, the beta wolf is the assistant pack leader. Hero's best friend? I happen to like a hero with a brain, like Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and other armchair-type or intellectual detectives. And what about heroes like Baynard Kendrick's Captain Duncan Maclain, who was blind? (The TV series Longstreet, if anyone else here is old enough to remember it, was about an updated version of Maclain.) The kind of hero I like best is the kind who is protective of the heroine, using all that alpha power for her, not against her. Magnus in Edith Layton's A True Lady is a good example. (Of course the heroine, being raised the daughter of a pirate king, is pretty well able to take care of herself most of the time.)

    In the romances I like there tends to be a turnabout factor in the dominance. This is especially true between Eve and Roarke in the J.D. Robb books. Not only do they take turns jumping each other's bones, there is also a recurring power struggle over choices. IIRC, there are only two incidents in--what is it, 20 now?--books in which Roarke forces Eve. One is when he finds another man trying to embrace her and a simmering anger over their current quarrel boils over; he wallops him and then grabs Eve. She finds herself eventually turned on by this. But this is the ONLY time this happens, and he regrets it more than she does afterwards. The other time is when someone has been messing with his brain waves with an electronic gadget, and he is shocked and horrified as well. When he finds out the truth, and Eve grants him five minutes alone with the perp before she hauls him off to lockup--well, it isn't pretty.

    Maybe we should go back to Dr. Tatiana and her point that seeking to mate with the most alpha male around is a universal biological imperative. If, as has been said, "a hen is an egg's way of making another egg," then all these quasi-rapists and fluttering virgins are merely pawns of the Almighty Zygote.

    And what is all this "breaking in" stuff? I am familiar with the word in just one context: forcing an unwilling inmate of a brothel to accept her situation by repeated and brutal rapes. I rather suspect this is what Bindel means to imply, but it certainly doesn't apply to any romances I've read. Is she off base, or am I missing a lot? "Sexual initiation" would make a lot more sense. From the discussion so far, I've come to believe that romance novels serve a function similar to that ascribed to fairy tales in Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment: depicting in symbolic form the transition from one stage of life to another. In fact, he says sexual initiation is the point of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Beauty and the Beast" and its analogues. (Nasty old Freudian!) As Lazaraspaste said: It is not describing the external world but the internal world. It is not an allegory but it is a metaphor for those aspects of our psyches, even our cultures that are dark and dangerous and yet, somehow desirable.

    Sheikhs, kidnappings, mistresses? Mistresses? Who has mistresses anymore?

    Does the name "Camilla Parker-Bowles" mean anything to you?

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  11. pacatrue, it was a pleasure reading your comment!

    Regardless, the point remains, I believe, that penetration is only one way of seeing that particular sexual act, nor is that act the only one which consitutes sex, as angel says. On the other hand, intercourse is probably inherently more vulnerable as it's the only one that carries the risk of pregnancy, a life-changing event.

    I like this, and your earlier suggestion of another way to look at hetero intercourse. The possibility of thinking of it as a "woman-driven act of engulfing and overwhelming" is very interesting to me because it seems as fitting a metaphor for it as the dominant image of invasion and because of the way that it shifts the agency of the act.

    Your mentioning the physical risks associated with het intercourse for women got me thinking about how, in a culture without birth control and with a high maternal mortality rate, any sane straight woman would probably chose to reserve penis-in-vagina intercourse solely for reproduction, and enjoy other forms of sex for pleasure when making children wasn't her aim.

    Perhaps a matriarchy would be obessively focused on the act of cunnilingus? With objectification of the male mouth and its use for female pleasure? I'm imagining all the "women's place" comments I've ever heard recast in such a society. People would commonly and unselfconsciously say things like "A good boy knows how to keep his head down." The late night comics would say things like "Boys should be felt and not heard, am I right?" Cue knowing laughter from audience. "Have you ever heard them talk? Blah, blah, blah. Why doesn't she love me? Does my ass look better in this thong? They don't have anything to say that's more important than what they should be doing."

    The people in power decide what is important.

    It's only really useful to a culture run by men that needed the use of women's bodies for reproduction to focus on and enforce het intercourse as the ultimate (and sometimes only?) act of socially recognized and supported sex, as well as an act of natural and just dominance and invasion that a woman passive receives, though it puts her life at risk.

    It effectively takes away a woman's right to make sensible choices about her own reproduction by telling her it's not her choice, and telling her that, if she wants to be a sexual creature at all, there is no other real choice.

    So we have Romance heroes musing about how they want to make the heroine's belly "swell with his seed," and how she's liable to make a good (read: docile) wife once she's been settled down by pregnancy. Maybe he throws her a little lip action, 'cause he's such a nice guy, but his consideration for her pleasure is a nice thing he decides to do because he's a hero, while the presumption in all the Historicals I've read is that the heroine naturally must have intercourse with her hero. It's not a nice thing she does out of choice (even though she's risking her health and her life), it's what has to be done for it to be a Romance at all.

    Anyway, getting back to Angel's main comments here and in an earlier post about Austen's era, while I follow the reasoning, I keep being afraid that it means we have to declare pretty much every relationship before The Second Wave of feminism as inherently flawed. Surely this is overkill.

    I think pretty much all human relationships are flawed inherently in one way or another. We're such cruel, mad, mistaken creatures on the whole. But I don't think that "inherently flawed" is the same as worthless. We shouldn't stop having children because every child born will inevitably suffer in a multitude of small and great ways throughout his or her life and die one day; we shouldn't stop trying to love each other though we more often than not hurt one another. We have to believe that the afternoons spent playing make believe, the cool slices of honeydew mellon, the wonder of curiosity, the night sky, etc. all make life a worthwhile thing to give another sentient creature, and we have to believe that the companionship, the orgasms, and the wonder of really trying to know another person are all worth the bruises and broken bones, the rapes, the mental torment of an an emotionally abusive spouse, or the loss of a lover, etc. that relationships also mean.

    Men and women in patriarchal cultures and matriarchical cultures surely fell in love and often became better people because of that love. We could declare that it's because all women in particarchal societies and all men in matriarchal ones had internalized their messed up cultures such that they felt "love" despite the fact that they were furthering their own oppression.

    I don't think that patriarchy creates love. I think that the affection for others and sexual longing we think of as Romantic love is a human capacity. I think that a culture with oppressive and abusive ideas can shape how people express and perceive the things they feel in negative ways.

    A traditional parent who really, truly loves his/her child can give them a painful, humiliating experience (spanking) because they believe that that is how the love they feel is rightly expressed when their authority is challenged. And a man who truly loves his wife can, depending on his culture, assume control of her life in negative ways because that's what he thinks righteousness is. Berkas cause serious vitamin D dificiency and illness, but I'm sure there are many loving husbands and brothers in the world who think that, if their wives and sisters should ever try not to wear one, she should be broken down emotionally and even physically until she gives into doing things the right way -- for her own good.

    In the same way, a boyfriend might love his girlfriend and like her best when she's "pretty" (i.e. wearing makeup products with ridiculous levels of carcinogens in them) and express this to her in non-violent ways that she doesn't feel able to disagree with, because of the "natural" power differential coded into their relationship by their cultural assumptions. He might also "help" her go on diets that don't give her the fundamental nutrician she needs without realizing that what he's doing is wrong, because he just wants what's best for her. He wants her to acheive what society has told him is her full potential because he loves her.

    Let's say that a man and a woman today are both genuine believers in a society of total gender equality. They strive their entire lives to accomplish this and along the way they fall completely in love and spend an amazing life together. I'm trying to paint a picture of the ideal love affair based on every social or political moral we have.

    And yet in 50 years, 100 years, people are going to realize that some of our perfect ideas were wrong. We just aren't that smart, no matter how hard we try, and we make moral judgment mistakes. This means however that our ideal love of today informed by the best of feminist thought is also perpetuating a flawed and mistaken society.


    What I personally hope for in life and in the Romance I read is for people to become aware of the ways they abuse each other in their love (and their lives in general), and try to work against them. I don't believe that perfection is attainable on any level for human beings. Organic things always have flaws, like the gorgeous, healthy plant with a couple brown leaves. It's part of the deal. It's the attempt to do better by each other (and the ways we sometimes fail in that attempt and have to get up, dust ourselves off, and ask for forgiveness) that interests me.

    (BTW. If you want a rec of a couple books that have an example of m/f that follows the pattern I'm trying to describe here, Barbara Hambly's Windrose Chronicles-- particularly the first two, The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage-- are it. They're fantasy novels, but stuff like the presence of a traditional hypermasculine, nonemotional warrior "hero" who the story and heroine recognize would be the romantic interest in a traditional Romance, and comments where the heroine says that her fantasy world duds make her feel like she just stepped off a Romance novel cover tend to support my reading of the story as being, in part, an argument with Romance tropes)

    The only way out of this is if you think that suddenly now for the first time in history, we've got everything right. And of course the belief that one's own culture has the universal moral truths for all time is the great and recurring sin of ethnocentrism.

    We're, imo, so far from rightness in the West that it's a dim and distant hope. Classism, sexism, racism, ableism... There are feminists who think that we should put off racial equality until we've achieved equality of the sexes, and eco-loving liberal men who think we should do away with classism and the rape of the environment, and then bother with the women and their silly issues.

    Even if we irradicated tomorrow all the prejudice that's aimed at a person's body (sex, race, genetic problems, disability, sexual orientation), I'm sure that things like religious intolerance and classism would become even more violent and powerful forces in our culture.

    As a supporter of human rights, I do believe in a sort of fundamental universal morality that should be considered true despite individual cultures, while respecting culture as much as possible...

    But I'm still digging around, trying to figure out how that's meant to work!

    What bothers me is when a Romance acts like the traditional het model of sex and power dynamics in relationships we're fed our whole lives is unquestionably right. What goes beyond bothering me to making me spitting angry is when a Romance is set up as the hero's forcible instruction of the heroine in that type of relationship. One particular dynamic of submission and dominance shouldn't be assumed like that, imo. Which is why I don't have a problem with BDSM, where everyone is concious that they're making a choice, and I did with a recent Romance ("A Man to Slay Dragons" I mentioned earlier) where the hero basically tells the heroine that all sex is naturally violent and she needs to learn to accept and enjoy that, and puts himself forward as the one who'll teach her how to love it.

    Um, dude (and dude's writer!). No. Your kink is not everyone's kink. Your kink is not more righteous than anyone else's kink. If your heroine doesn't enjoy violent sex, you shouldn't offer to break her to the bridle like a horsie, you should go find somebody who already loves your kink as much as you do and have lots and lots of fun.

    That, to my mind, makes the difference between the choice of BDSM and the male dominance encoded in culture as right and just.

    Does this make any sense? The argument I am trying to build is that flawed societies are not the end of love and romance, because all societies are flawed.

    It makes since to me, and I agree with you.

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  12. Sarah,

    I really like what you're saying, but who decides if the narrative is consciously fighting the hegemonic ideology? The hegemony? Those fighting against the hegemony? The author? The reader? The literary critic 200 years later, like Pacatrue describes?

    I guess that, in the same way there isn't a fixed rubric for a "good book" that readers, writers, and literary critics can agree on, there isn't one for whether a book is consciously fighting hegemonic ideology or not. I wish there was! I know that, in the case of Jennifer Crusie, her being an openly thoughtful feminist in her blog and her online essays increases my enjoyment of her books enormously.

    Even when I don't agree with some of the perspectives she takes, or things that happen in her books, the fact that her blog posts, her essays, her academic work show that she's obviously thought about these things before coming up with her own opinions is something I value highly.

    I feel the same way about another of my favorite feminist writers, Joss Whedon. The progressive politics are there in his body of work along with a lot of debatable points, but the fact that he's made blog posts and one fantastic speech talking about these issues makes the debatable points work for me. I'm quoting the serious bit here, but it's seriously funny, too...


    So, why do you write these strong women characters?

    Because equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and women who’s confronted with it.



    This is a male geek who's written in male dominanted genres like comic books and Science Fiction. I'd *love* if it there were more Romance writers--who are largely female, and who write to a largely female audience--who cared that much, and had put that much thought into women's rights, and were willing to speak out about it as well as work it into their stories. They don't all have to go about it the same way, of course, or write the same books. We don't all have to be feminist clone cyborg things, the unholy alliance of advanced hardware and liberalist groupthink software, no! ;) I love Joss, even when he's doing some, er, interesting things with sex workers in space, and I love Jennifer Crusie, even when the rhetoric of her He Wrote/She Wrote blog felt a little gender essentialist, because they're trying. Really hard.

    And also because their brillaint, clever, funny, romantic stories crawl into my heart and stake their claim in amazingly enjoyable ways, of course!


    For example: Was Jane Austen conservative or liberal, radical or reactionary? Does it matter what SHE thinks she was or does it matter what uses the reader and/or history have put her narratives to? People have built their careers on arguing this point. Can an author be outwardly "conservative," for whatever value of conservative you want to define, and yet under-the-surface subversive, whether consciously or unconsciously? And it the answer to that question is "yes" then which interpretation (outward or inward) holds the most sway over the reader? Or, again, does the importance lie in what use the reader puts the book to?


    My, that's a lot of good questions that I don't have any good answers for! :)

    Let me say one small, anacdotal thing re: Austen. One of the important things to me in the changes that occur in both Elizabeth and Darcy over the course of Pride and Prejudice is that neither of them is coerced into changing by physical force, emotional manipulation, financial threats, or anything like that. They change because of their feelings, but those feelings aren't deliberately played upon by the other person in abusive ways. Their essential fairmindedness and their growing love for eachother makes them overcome their prejudice. They're both domesticated largely by their own better natures. This makes P&P feel so refreshing and far more progressive, though written so long ago, than modernly penned Historicals where the hero bullies the heroine physically, or holds sway over her financially, or the heroine "tames" the hero in emotionally manipulative ways.

    I think it's the philosophical difference of a world where "might makes right" vs. Austen's world, where sensible, fairminded people go along, making mistakes and regretting them bitterly, not because they've been punished by another, but because they value right action and thought in themselves, who are ultimately drawn to each other because they value that in others, too. And the drawing together of these likeminded individuals ultimately betters both their lives.

    My prepositions are running away from me, so I'll stop there, but I really enjoyed your comments. They gave me a lot to think about.

    I'm glad I could contribute something to the conversation. I can't express how much I appreciate what you guys are doing here. The sheer humor, intelligence and healthy appreciation of good, sexy, romantic stories expressed on this site is always such a joy to see. :)

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  13. I keep coming back to one question. Much though we try to rationalize it,or give counter examples, Bindel is essentially correct about the power dynamics found in a large majority of romance novels. So - what? What am I supposed to do about that? Give up books I enjoy - why the hell would I do that, when I know they're not hurting *me*? Tell other women *they* shouldn't enjoy what they enjoy - who has that right? And what about the men who read romance novels, is THAT okay in this scenario?

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  14. Okay, this is getting so long and complicated with all the comments that I think I'm going to use my Monday Readers Gab column to make my response. I'll post the link on Sunday for anyone who might be interested in reading it and/or commenting.

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  15. I have recently been hammered by others in another forum because of my deep distaste for the various fantasy genres and in particular, that genre ungrammatically known as 'alternate history'. I cringe when I read invented redactions of real historical events, and real historical persons, which bear little or no resemblance to reality.

    As one, my opponents rose up, their eyes blazing, and cried, 'IT'S FICTION! As long as it is fiction, it does not have to relate to real life!' I retired, hurt. So why does this not apply to fantasy about human relationships? Why is a common sexual fantasy (e.g., sex with a stranger, sex in a public place) suddenly all about reality, if it is a romance novel?

    Just asking.

    AgTigress

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  16. The thing that bothers me most about Bindel's assumptions is that she is guilty of the same attitude of the mysterious "they" patriarchy behind the nefarious plot to subjugate women through Sheikhs and Secret Babies. The most offensive thing she says is that she doesn't blame the writers or the readers of romance--thanks for that absolution by stupidity. I--as both a writer and reader of romance--am too stupid to understand that what I'm reading is taking me away from the important fight against the phallocracy. That I should not be blamed, but rather excused by reason of ignorance. Because me being intelligent enough to acknowledge these dynamics--right, wrong, or otherwise--implies that my very womanhood is not inherently superior, angelic, or residing in the moral heights of the noble savage--I mean the martyred and oppressed.

    And further, her attitude seems to suggest that I as a reader should stop reading what Daddy (the patriarchy) tells me to read and start obeying Mommy (Biedel) instead. Neither option actually taking into account the possibility that I know my own mind.

    Not only is this insulting, but it actually sets back my own ideas and ideals of feminism--to declare what I like and how I like it regardless of societal mores, and to make no apologies.

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  17. OK, everyone, here's a question.

    Is it relevant, or even fair, to point out at some point in this discussion that Julie Bindel has written at length about how she is a lesbian, not because of innate sexual preference (which she does not believe in), but rather because she "shuns heterosexuality"?

    [The full article, again from the Guardian, is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1372971,00.html]

    I'd like to think that ideas are ideas, and certainly Bindels' sexual preference (or Radway's, for that matter) does not affect the substance of her criticism. On the other hand, given the subject matter, is it entirely irrelevant? If I wrote a disgusted, poorly-researched essay about how horrible and propagandistic Christian romance was, the fact that I'm not a Christian might not account for the substance of my argument, but perhaps its tone? It's extremity, or lack of sympathy?

    (I don't actually feel that way, by the way--just trying to make an analogy.)

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  18. is it entirely irrelevant? If I wrote a disgusted, poorly-researched essay about how horrible and propagandistic Christian romance was, the fact that I'm not a Christian might not account for the substance of my argument, but perhaps its tone? It's extremity, or lack of sympathy?

    I'd say it depended on your reasons for not being a Christian. Are you a non-Christian because some other faith calls to you more, or are you a non-Christian because you deliberately eschew Christianity. If the latter, then any time you write a critical essay on Christianity it will be assumed that your motivations on the criticism will reflect your choice--that your conclusions will contain the same active antipathy that your religious decision did.

    If she actively shuns heterosexuality, how can she be expected to pronounce an objective judgment on a body of literature whose main focus is the celebration of the very thing she abhors?

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  19. Oh dear. This Bindel female seems to me pathetically old-fashioned in her views (and I expect I am old enough to be her mother, if not her grandmother). Normal gay people, at least all the ones that I know, are not bothered in the least by heterosexual relationships (and fantasies), any more than normal straight people are bothered by gay ones. Good grief, we ought to have got over that sort of thing at least 40 years ago.
    I get so tired of the fact that people seem to want to fight the same battles again and again and again, and learn nothing from history.

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  20. Web,

    I keep coming back to one question. Much though we try to rationalize it,or give counter examples, Bindel is essentially correct about the power dynamics found in a large majority of romance novels. So - what? What am I supposed to do about that? Give up books I enjoy - why the hell would I do that, when I know they're not hurting *me*? Tell other women *they* shouldn't enjoy what they enjoy - who has that right?

    I think Bindel would probably recommend giving everything with the faintest whiff of misogyny about it up. I disagree with that. But she's like a person working on the front lines of environmental protection who would, of course, recommend that everyone stop using fossil fuels in their lives.

    On that topic, I think that it's enough to support new fuel technologies, carpool when possible, and make sure the cars I use get the best milage possible. I take a similiar perspective on Romance. The answer I've come to in my own life is that being aware of this stuff--engaging with it actively--and trying to minimize the noxious effects (by support feminism within the genre, articulating my dislike of certain conventions) is enough to make my pleasure in Romance justifiable to me.

    It's difficult to find any genre of fiction that isn't tained with patriarchy. It's in all genres of TV, films, books, comics. Everywhere. The reason why Romance gets hit so hard is that it's a genre aimed at women and the oppressive narrative of het relationships is the entire focus of the stories, so things that might not seem as blatant in other genres really stand out. But it's not the only offender, or the worst.

    For instance, I've more misogyny in a single episode of the UK cop show Murphy's Law than I have in most Romance novels, for instance. But since women weren't on stage as much, even though they were being represented in really negative ways when they were on stage, the spotlight wasn't on how hateful the narrative was being toward them.

    Anyway. I don't think you should let anybody make you feel bad about something that gives you joy and doesn't directly hurt anybody else.

    And what about the men who read romance novels, is THAT okay in this scenario?

    That's a really good question. Should only women be allowed to write and read about the rape and abuse of other women because (a) it's *our* right to deal with it in our stories because it's something we have to deal with in much higher numbers than men in real life, and (b) the chance that reading about it is going to inspire us to go out and do it approaches nil?

    Should gay men be allowed to read it, too, since they're just as unlikely to act on it? Should lesbian women be excluded as well as straight men because of the statistics of partner abuse in GLBT relationships Eric cited?

    If it's argued that a woman reading a Romance with a rapist hero in it is (possibly, sometimes) a person being trained to take a victim role, is a man (or lesbian woman) reading the same book being trained to take on the role of victimizer?

    I don't know. I certainly think I'd rather be alone in an ally with a guy who's been reading too many old Mills & Boon Romances than a guy who's been watching violent, misogynist porn. The thing is, men have access to the use of far more directly vicious materials than Romance, and tacit social acceptance of their objectification of female subjugation.

    Xandra,

    The thing that bothers me most about Bindel's assumptions is that she is guilty of the same attitude of the mysterious "they" patriarchy behind the nefarious plot to subjugate women through Sheikhs and Secret Babies.

    I don't think Bindel is referencing a mysterious "they." I think it's understood within feminism that patriarchy isn't a cabal of nasty people conciously trying to be oppressive, it's a type of social organization that comes with really hurtful pressures, assumptions, and power dynamics coded into it. I picture it as a really powerful meme (or series of memes) that we're trained to accept throughout our lives.

    Eric,

    If I wrote a disgusted, poorly-researched essay about how horrible and propagandistic Christian romance was, the fact that I'm not a Christian might not account for the substance of my argument, but perhaps its tone? It's extremity, or lack of sympathy?

    Ah. Point. I think it would be possible for a person to have reasonable, well though out problems with Christianity that make them chose not to be a Christian in their personal life, and that they can also express in a valid critique of Christian romance.

    For instance, if a reviewer isn't a Christian mainly because s/he believes that Christianity has been too majority anti-gay for far too long that, even though there are progressive Christians, the whole religion is too spoiled by the surplus of rotten apples to be worthwhile, and then s/he objects to the oppressive heteronormativity in Inspirational Romances in a constructive way, the justifiable argument can carry over without it seeming like s/he's just taking an instinctive bias from his/her personal life and labeling it a literary critique.

    Imagining this scenario makes me wish I could see a better written, more considered article making similiar arguments to Bindel's, and what the Romance community's response to it would be.

    I wonder if she was deliberately trying to polarize her readers, or if she was just speaking from her heart about how offended she is by what she's seen of Romance?

    Sarah,

    And yet, as romance defenders say again and again, no one expects crime fiction readers to go out and commit the crimes they read about. Ah, but you're not identifying with the criminal, right? You're identifying with the solver of the crimes. Then again, what about Dexter, which I've heard is a fabulous show in which one does identify with the serial killer, because he is the protagonist. Still, readers/viewers don't go out and commit their own crimes.

    Actually, since Dexter only kills people who have committed murder themselves and escaped the justice system, he could be read as a "solver of crimes" in a radical, vigilante sense. What makes the show so thorny and compelling is that he doesn't kill these people primarily as an act of vengeance, like Charles Bronson-type characters, or to prevent them killing anyone else, but because he enjoys torturing and killing other people more than anything else. He limits himself to victims that society doesn't care as much about to keep himself safe and because, in a twisted sort of way, he can imagine that this makes him better than the "trash" he takes care of, because he's a "useful monster." What's interesting there is that, since he's a sociopath and has no moral campus, the morality he lives by is a warped reflection of how effed up "normal" culture is. The vigilante impulse, the idea of there being expendable dregs of society who's suffering can be ignored, etc.

    It's a seriously well written, well acted show that never, ever lets me feel comfortable when I'm watching it. I'd recommend seeing it if you're thinking about renting the first season DVDs or something, Sarah.

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  21. So many wonderful comments! I hardly know where to begin.

    Angel, you've made any number of great observations in your comments. The ones that particularly stick in my mind right now have to do with the way that romance fiction endlessly inculcates, not patriarchy per se, but a particular version of normative sexuality, centered on PIV intercourse. If I have any concerns about my daughter reading my romance novel collection, it isn't at all that she'll learn to excuse abusive men or to think of herself as a "lesser being." Rather, it's that she's going to imbibe a narrow, misleading, and statistically incorrect set of assumptions about what makes for satisfying sex. If there's anywhere a critic might turn to spot ideology at work, the triumph of idea over experience, this would be it.

    (On a side note, I found the matriarchal jokes curiously compelling. Hmmm... Maybe the Barbarian Virgin King gets captured by pirates and sold into slavery in a matriarchy... Hmmm...)

    That "Dexter" show would make me blow a Bindel, guaranteed. It sounds like it does with violent, vigilante impulses what some romance fiction does with politically dicey erotic impulses. I simply can't see how the former is entertaining; it squicks me out, as my students would say.

    I'll post more later, at length, about this notion of romance (and fiction more generally) as bodying forth all the dicey impulses, but right now I've got a hot Visigoth in my living room, & must run!

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  22. I'll apologise in advance for what's going to be a rather disjointed set of quotations, loosely linked together by a bit of commentary.

    In the article you mentioned, Eric, Bindel says that "sexuality and sexual desire are social constructs, not biological or genetically determined."

    To some extent (depending on how much one thinks is socially constructed, and Bindel seems to go very, very far in the direction of denying any biological aspect to sexual orientation at all), this ties in with what Pacatrue and Angel were discussing:

    the act of slot A in tab B doesn't have to be seen as penetration. It could just as well be seen as a woman-driven act of engulfing and overwhelming. (Pacatrue)

    and

    The possibility of thinking of it as a "woman-driven act of engulfing and overwhelming" is very interesting to me because it seems as fitting a metaphor for it as the dominant image of invasion and because of the way that it shifts the agency of the act. (Angel)

    It seems to me that in many cultures there has actually been a fear of female sexuality because women were seen as engulfing and overwhelming men. For example:

    "Whereas the ideal for Athenian males is that they should be able to moderate their sexual impulses, women are seen as sexually voracious and incapable of such control." (from here)

    and

    There are no references to same-sex acts endangering Greek males, yet a long line of thinkers portrayed sex with women as dangerous. According to the Hippocratic corpus women were dried out by too little sex; men were dried out by too much. Women relied on intercourse with men for their health. Men could thus be exhausted, but women were inexhaustible, having no self-control. (McLaren 14)

    and

    In Rome who penetrated whom was crucial. Anal rape was feared. There were no discussions of the boy’s pleasure, indeed the assumption was made that the passive male could not be pleasured. Those who brandished accusations of effeminacy tended to liken passive men to slaves and women. Yet the worst thing a man could be accused of – even worse than servicing another man by fallatio – was, as noted in Martial (Epigram 2.28), that of servicing a woman by cunnilingus.
    The ancients’ concerns for potency can only be fully understood when viewed in the context of a culture that lauded male dominance and feared the mythical, sexually voracious female.
    (McLaren 6)

    These ideas about the voraciousness of female sexuality, and its danger to men, persisted throughout the Middle Ages.

    many believed that through intercourse, a woman gained the vital heat that she lacked (Salisbury, 90):

    The more women have sexual intercourse, the stronger they become, because they are made hot by the motion that the man makes during coitus. Further, male sperm is hot because it is of the same nature as air and when it is received by the woman it warms her entire body, so women are strengthened by this heat.
    (from here, and I think that's a quote from Secrets of Women, which, referred to by its Latin name below, also yields further information on the dangers posed by female sexuality:

    De Secretis Mulierum [...] contains some inescapably misogynistic ideas, such as the belief that menstruating women give off harmful fumes that will "poison the eyes of children lying in their cradles by a glance" [...] and another which declares that some women place pieces of iron in their vaginas in order to wound men with whom they have intercourse (from here)

    Anyway, I think this does suggest that (a) ideas about desire and gender have affected sexual practices, and (b) it seems that alongside the use of vocabulary which depicts penetration as a way for men to exert power, there's perhaps also the fear that the invaded party may launch a counter-attack (the vagina dentata may bite back).

    And in romance, meeting the heroine does sometimes make the hero unable to perform sexually with other women. There are also rather a lot of heroes who are convinced that all women are dangerous/out to milk him of money (or semen if they're planning to get pregnant and then force him to pay financially and/or be trapped into marriage) on what seems to be the rather illogical grounds that one woman was nasty to him, once.

    I'm not really sure where all these ideas fit into the discussion, but I think they're relevant because they suggest that a power dynamic which may initially be read as about male power, may, on closer examination, be about male sexual power used in response to fears about female sexual power.

    Actually, the erect penis is at some risk, particularly if the woman is given greater agency:

    Although it is perceived as a relatively rare condition, the incidence of penile fracture might be increasing. [...] In Western countries, where vaginal intercourse is the most common etiology, the highest reported incidence is seen in North America. [...] in the overwhelming majority of cases the etiology is sexual, with intercourse and masturbation being the most common precipitating events. Some authors have described certain sexual practices and sexual positions, such as the female superior position, as providing an increased risk of sustaining a penile fracture, possibly due to abnormal angulation of the erect penis when pushed against the female perineum or symphysis pubis. (McEleny et al.)

    However, that doesn't explain the extent of the irrational fears about the dangerous vagina. I really just included it because I thought it was interesting.

    McLaren, Angus. Impotence: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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  23. Hi, Laura! Fascinating stuff. Certainly the power dynamic you describe--assertions of male power in response to fears of female power--is all over the sonnet tradition, at least from Petrarch on. What this says about women writing scenes of such assertion, I'm too tired to figure out.

    I was curious enough about that Martial epigram to hunt it up on line. Here it is in Latin and English:

    rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum
    dixerit et digitum porrigito medium.
    sed nec pedico es nec tu, Sextille, fututor,
    calda Vetustinae nec tibi bucca placet.
    ex istis nihil es fateor, Sextille: quid ergo es?
    nescio, sed tu scis res superesse duas.


    Guffaw loudly at anyone who calls you a bumboy, Sextillus, and stick out your middle finger at him. Yet you are neither an arse-fucker nor a cunt-fucker, Sextillus, nor does Vetustina's warm mouth give you pleasure. You are none of these, I admit, Sextillus. So what are you? I don't know, but you know that there are two things left over.

    My source is here: http://martialis.blogspot.com/search?q=28. Fascinating website, but a depressing side of Roman culture. I wonder how the Visigoths felt about such matters?

    Is the "dangerous vagina" like the Dark Willow of the Magic Hoo-Hah 'verse?

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  24. That "Dexter" show would make me blow a Bindel, guaranteed. It sounds like it does with violent, vigilante impulses what some romance fiction does with politically dicey erotic impulses. I simply can't see how the former is entertaining; it squicks me out, as my students would say.

    Thing is, what Dexter does (torture and kill criminals) used to be a job description. If he'd been born in Europe in the right time period, he could have gone to work as an executioner and done terrible things to people while a cheering audience watched. It's a lot like the way that rape within marriage and spousal abuse were legal and even promoted in European and American societies.

    Violence, sexual abuse -- these things are impulses humans deal with, and sometimes justify on a large scale.

    The reason why the show works for me is that the horror, the monstrousness of primal human pleasure in vengeance violence is repeatedly thrown in the audience's face. Why are you cheering? the show asks Why have you suddenly stopped? What made this one scene different from another? Why was it satisfying to think of a child molester being stopped by a useful monster like Dexter, but the death of the not-so-bad drug dealer who escaped a murder conviction seems so wrong? By what standard are you judging? What do you really think about the punishment of criminals in society?

    I'd like to read a Romance novel that made the default sexism of the genre and its "dicey" eroticism as downright agonizing for the audience to experience as Dexter does with the vigilante impulse. IMO, most Romance that presents "dicey" eroticism, does it like a Charles Bronson movie does vigilante justice, where the audience is invited to feel good about what's happening--enjoy the satisfaction of it-- instead of questioning it.

    In the first season, Dexter admits he's a monster. In the rapist Romances that have been discussed on this blog, the heroes don't recognize or admit what horrible creatures they are. In Romance, rape has often been a thing a man might feel bad about later, but not something that makes him really hate himself.

    How about a rapist hero who only rapes other rapists?

    ;)

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  25. Laura,

    I'm really glad you pointed out those sources; I had no idea there was such a history of male "hysteria" about female sexuality. I wasn't familiar with that at all.

    Something to think about.

    I wonder if the fears build up around a power imbalance, or if they're the cause of it?

    Would the "bitches are just out for your money/trying to trap you in marriage" idea that you mentioned which appears in Romance be considered a modern Western myth about the danger of female sexuality? 'Cause, you're right, the one instance of Bad Woman the hero uses to form his opinion is an awfully shaky foundation. And I wonder why so many writer have reached for it as a characterization point.

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  26. Laura: The stuff you quoted about the dangers of female sexuality links ups, in a curious way, with the charges against witches in the Malleus Maleficarum: they mostly involve spells interfering with fertility/virility: witches can blight crops, cause milch cows to dry up, cause men to become impotent, and prevent a baby from emerging from the womb (this by concealing a spelled knotted string under the bed). And of course there are all those tales of witches having intercourse with the Devil and/or incubi. This argues an atavistic fear of women's sexuality--or perhaps women's fertility--that may go back to prehistory. After all, it was the Goddess who gave life...and the male who was, when necessary, sacrificed. We really screwed up the power relationship between the sexes when we went and invented agriculture, as these themes do not seem to appear in the hunter/gatherer culture. Maybe we could go back; then we'd have ideal relationships and no lima beans or Brussels sprouts. An earthly paradise, to be sure.

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  27. Okay, starting tomorrow morning (Monday, 12/17), if anyone's still interested, my response to the Bindel will be on www.accessromance.com/gab

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  28. Thanks Robin, it's just gone up, so I've linked to it at the bottom of my first response to Bindel, and I've put another direct link in here in this comment.

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