One question posed in the comments was from Marumae: “The fact that the rapist doesn’t get a POV piqued my curiosity me and I wonder the reasoning for it. ”

Certain genres have certain narrative conventions. Often, Romance and Erotic Romance present the POV of both the heroine and the hero as a device for charting the individuals psychological journey towards love and commitment.

Gaijin is not a romance. I could never write it as a romance. As much as I enjoy fantasy, and even have a taste for non-con, I simply couldn’t – as a woman – envision any circumstances under which Shindo was forgivable or redeemable after his actions. I know there are authors who can do this and readers who want it. I’m just not one of them. I was interested in the main character’s physical and psychological survival, not in romance.

My main character, Jennifer, is in a place many expats have been, hovering on the outside of a society alien to her own. She has learned as much of the language as she needs to in order to be functional, and she is earning her living (I’ll be blunt here) exploiting the fantasies that a lot of Japanese men have about western women. But as that experience turns ugly, I wanted to give the reader an experience of that feeling of the impenetrability of the ‘other’ culture. Had I represented Shindo’s point of view, I felt that her sense of isolation would not have been as tangible to the reader.

Finally, at the time I wrote Gaijin (about 7 years ago, now), I simply did not want to represent the POV of the rapist. It was a personal, ethical decision at the time. I feared that to give him a voice in the narrative in such a powerful way might serve to legitimize or excuse his behaviour. Most men who rape do not think of themselves as rapists. They make elaborate excuses, and come up with some chilling rationales for feeling they have a right or the prerogative to force sex on someone who doesn’t want it. I was not comfortable giving air or credence to those excuses. Again, I know there are authors who feel comfortable writing a character who rapes and then feels contrition for it, and all is forgiven in the end. I’m just not that writer.

Several years later, I felt I had a better handle on the craft of writing and did, in fact, write a story that contains rape from the rapist’s point of view. Click was the product of that evolution. By then, I felt I could represent those rationales, those excuses, without allowing the narrative to somehow legitimize the actions. It’s really up to the reader to decide whether I managed to succeed in what I set out to do. However, if fictional depictions of rape are distressing to you, please don’t read that story.

Ultimately, writers make the decisions they make within the context the story, the level of their skills and their own personal code of ethics.  Had I set the story at a time in history or a geographical place in the world where the prevailing culture didn’t condemn rape in the same way we do today, I might have felt differently about my decision to not give Shindo a POV of his own.

There have been times in our history when a woman’s consent simply didn’t have any significance in the social order of the era. There are many places today where a woman’s consent is immaterial. But I’m a 20th century Western-born writer, and Japan has one of the lowest rates of rape in the world. In neither my reality, nor in Shindo’s culture, is it seen as acceptable to rape a woman. Within that context, I did not feel compelled to present his point of view.

It isn’t a wholly positive review, as no thorough review should be. But it discusses the themes in the book in a way most reviews of erotica or erotic romance books never bother to do. And, for a writer, that’s a real moment of pride: when someone takes the work you’ve written and gives it some deep thought.

Also worth your attention are the comments. There are some very interesting discussions there, on whether the book resembles the equivalent of a blaxploitation movie, and what is the fundamental purpose in books like Gaijin.

I can fully understand why a lot women don’t want to read erotic fiction that contains non-con. I respect their choice, as I would any reader’s choice to read any subject they choose. Hey, there are things I won’t read. Subject matter I find personally offensive. Although, if I have to be honest, there isn’t much I won’t read if the writing is good.

Still, what I did find a little disturbing was the comment question of why the book should exist at all. As if, if a book isn’t to one’s taste, it simply shouldn’t exist. That mindset scares me. I find it intolerant and fascistic.

All that being said, the review is a very thoughtful one. And worth reading for an example of how serious reviews are structured and how, when well written, they expand the discussion beyond any given book, and onto some serious and intriguing issues.

Steven Gregory: Skulduggery Empty Vessels

Some time ago, Laura Miller of Salon.com wrote a compelling critique of the Twilight series. She had a particularly insightful comment to make of Bella:

Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she’s more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in order to render her a vacant, flexible skin into which the reader can insert herself.

Anyone who has read Fifty Shades of Grey will recognize a doppelganger in the main character of the novel, Anastasia. She is equally blank, equally unaccomplished at anything except biting her own lower lip.

And these are the sort of things that make these heroines apparently absolutely irresistible to the novels’ male protagonists: Bella is clumsy, Anastasia gnaws her own mouth. Because, after all, what else might a real man want?

I have encountered the very same adorable lack of substance in a great deal of erotica and romance recently. Some of the most successful titles sport staggeringly vapid heroines.

I’m finding their overwhelming popularity frightening. These characters are not badly drawn portraits of everything men lust after. They are written by women, for women who, for the most part, are perfectly well educated in terms of feminist theory. How is that that so many women relate deeply to these vessels of emptiness?

It might be argued that the popularity of these ‘empty vessels’ stems from the evolution of other media. Story-telling in game-culture is heavily dependent on creating empty characters in which role-playing gamers can insert themselves in a 2nd person POV narrative experience. Reality TV takes the concept of mediocrity and marketizes it: you don’t have to actually be accomplished at anything to be famous, you just need to get lucky enough to stumble into the glare of the spotlight to get your 5 minutes of fame.

I’ve heard the term ‘cypher’ characters used in this context. But these are not cyphers. Cyphers are mysterious and potentially undecodable. Cyphers are challenging puzzles. Here there is nothing to decode. Here we have a portrait of a female who has no life, no aspirations of her own. She is a vessel waiting for the male character to fill and make significant through the act of filling. Nothing else. These are the Sleeping Beauties of the 21st century.

In the past, literature has been criticized for its poor representation of female characters at the hand of male writers. From Shakespeare to Hemmingway, they’ve been pilloried for their creation of female characters who simply act as plot points for male protagonists. But even Hemmingway never wrote such an insignificant, agency-less woman.

Post-modern theorists would argue that these characters are empty in order to be filled by the minds of the readers. Narrative vessels for the reader’s own creativity. The fictional offered as remix material for the real lived-experience of the consumer. If I believed this were true, I’d feel better.

What I fear is that these empty women are as popular as they are because they reflect how many women feel about themselves. If fashion magazines have succeeded in making most of us feel terrible about our bodies, something else has led us to believe that all our other dreams, goals, ambitions are equally worthless.

And it is easy to see the lazy allure in fantasizing that we might be sought after, adored, lusted after for the simple reason that we have a vagina and a bottom lip to gnaw on. It relieves us of the pressure to strive to be fuller, rounded, complex human beings.

The possible narrative conflicts that can arise in a situation where, for instance, you have a focused, self-directed female character are enormous. Great love affairs, and especially D/s love affairs will, by necessity, engender great frictions with pre-existing career goals, personal aspirations, etc. From a writing perspective, the conflicts arise almost by themselves, believable and compelling.

When you have female characters who have no envisioned life goals, no passions of their own, there is nothing to clash with when they meet with the dominating male character. And so the narrative conflicts have to be manufactured and implausible. Unbelievable misunderstandings of emails, rogue interpretations of reaction, suspect circumstantial hurdles.

And yet, the ridiculously implausible conflicts the authors present us in novels like the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey series don’t seem to bother the readers.  And it is interesting that as these series evolve, the serious conflicts actually belong to the male characters, not the female heroines. The women in these novels seem to be nothing more than the banal and dumbstruck bystanders in the only realistic conflicts that we’re presented with.

Why are we, as women, writing ourselves into insignificance?

Once on solid ground, we obediently lined up to obtain visas. At first they issued me a visa without blinking. The clerk behind the high wood counter wore an expression that tried for wary, but came off looking sleepy. But at the immigration booth, the two uniformed love birds, who I suspect spent most of their time doing each other between the arrivals and departures, decided that my passport offended them, since there was less than six months left to go to expiry.

This, it seemed, became an opportunity to look at me gravely, and shake their heads in unison. I offered them my virgin UK passport instead, but they wouldn’t accept it. Apparently, they have a preference for passports that are neither too full or too empty: and either of these offers them a fortuitous excuse to impose a ‘fine’.  I am guided into a makeshift office that does duty most of the time, when no money is to be made, as a lunchroom. The old wood and glass cases that once might expect to overflow with wilted and flyblown official documents are host to haphazard piles of brightly coloured plastic crockery, and a few mangled aluminum utensils.

“We have a problem, Madame.”

“Really? What is it?”

“We must, I am sorry, impose a fine,” says the official in the ill-fitting olive uniform. He is making a great effort to look like this is causing him regret, but he fails. His gold incisor glints in the fluorescent overheads, the fraying gold braid on his epaulettes do likewise.

“What kind of a fine?”

“A two hundred dollar fine.”

Then he withdraws, and I am left to ponder my fate.The point of this is to allow the nervous traveler’s mind to be fertile. In the isolation of bureaucratic banality, one is expected to dream up numerous unpleasant scenarios that will, in the end, make handing over the ‘fine’ seem like a blessing.

During my life, I’ve been in a lot of rooms just like this one, at the mercy of a lot of petty officials like this one, and so I let my head roll back and close my eyes and catnap for the requisite period of time. At its most basic level, power is wielded in silence.

I already know I will hand over the $200.  Although I’m fairly sure there’s no flight to Hanoi until the morning, and in truth, they’ve nowhere to send me, I don’t fancy spending the night on the ravaged wooden chairs in the immigration hall. I’ve done it before, out of stubbornness and principle, but I’m too old for that now.

On the other hand, if I hand over the money too eagerly, they will start to suspect there really IS something wrong with my passport. So I snooze with a certain smugness, knowing that it will annoy them just enough to process me a little faster, but not enough to really justify anything else.

I wake to hear the official scratching, pen to paper. He presents me with a humidity-warped exercise book on which he has written paragraphs in tight, cramped Lao. This, he explains, is the true account of my travel document transgression.

“Do you disagree?” he asks.

“Would it make a difference if I did?”

“No, Madame.”

I smile coldly and hand over two ravaged $100 dollar bills. I know it’s childish, but it’s my parting gesture of disdain. I will not, under any circumstances, give him the crisp and clean ones I have in my billfold.

He fingers them with disgust. I smile apologetically. “Can I go now?”

“Of course, Madame. Do you need a taxi to the town?”

I lie and tell him the hotel has sent a car for me. My patience doesn’t stretch to furthering the fortunes of his taxi-driving family members.

I had to agree with her and then I went on to wonder why.  It’s not that all the sex in the story was, physically, strictly vanilla. The restraint of her not being allowed to touch him is always there. And some of the scenes do have the physical trappings of BDSM, so why did it read so vanilla?

I came to the conclusion that writing BDSM sex is far less about the external scene than it is about how the person whose POV is represented in the narrative is interpreting it. The M/C in Fifty Shades of Grey has a very vanilla state of mind (and I would extrapolate and venture that E.L. James is probably not much of an avid practicioner of BDSM herself). And so, appropriately, she reads/interprets/experiences all the sex as vanilla, even when, externally, it doesn’t appear to be.

I think it’s something of an interesting  writing exercise to think about this. Take, for instance, the most vanilla position on earth – the missionary position:

From a vanilla perspective, the missionary position allows for the partners to be face to face. It’s a very intimate, loving position with lots of gazing into the eyes of the other going on. It’s easy to kiss. Both partners are within easy reach of the other, to caress and be caressed.

From a power play perspective, it’s definitely a one person-on-top position. The top has all the freedom of movement. They control the thrust. The top’s weight can be interpreted as a form of physical bondage. And all it would take is the top having a firm hold on the bottom’s wrists to make it instantly kinky… if that lack of movement was of some internal significance to the bottom.

( It was just very rightly pointed out to me on twitter, by I.G. Frederick, that it is also perfectly possible to have a very D/s missionary fuck where the Dominant is on the bottom, too)

It’s really all about what kind of language you are using to describe how it feels. And it’s going to feel entirely different to either vanilla lover vs someone in a dominant or submissive role.

So, here’s my challenge: Have a go at writing the exact same sex act, using nothing but the tone of language and the POV of the narrator to present it as either kinky or vanilla.

If you take up my challenge but post to your own blog, please leave a comment to link to your efforts. I’d really love to see how different writers experiment with this.

For those few of you who haven’t read it, the book charts the course of a 22 year-old ingenue’s relationship with an older, kinky billionaire. I’m not good at writing summaries, but this was easy because … well, that’s all there is. It has all the hallmarks of a mild BDSM romance without the mandatory HEA ending.

I really hate writing a totally negative review, so I’m going to first tell you what is good about the book: it’s not very long; it has a secondary school reading level, and nothing blows up. And, to be fair, I think this is a reasonably fair portrayal of the problems faced when a kinky person sincerely attempts and fails to date someone vanilla. Finally, I have to say that the sex, while not brilliantly written, is not too bad. For a mainstream novel, that’s refreshing.

Okay – check positive aspects.

I wasn’t surprised at all to read that 50 Shades started out as Twilight Fan Fic ¹. What disturbs me most about the phenomenal popularity of this novel is that, like Twilight, it revels in the sheer mediocrity of Anastasia, the main female character, and presents us with a male romantic interest, Christian Grey, who is obsessively drawn to that mediocrity. Implicit in its popularity is the disturbing truth that so many women must feel equally mediocre in order to identify with her so strongly.

Anastasia is a 22-year old virgin who has never orgasmed, never masturbated – never gotten to 2nd base, in fact. She’s graduating with a degree in English literature but doesn’t own a computer. One would think that, alone, would make for an interesting, under-socialized, sexually inhibited and disturbing sort of girl. But she isn’t represented that way. She’s represented as entirely normal.

22 year-old virgins are pretty damn rare in the industrialized world. 22 year-old virgins who have never masturbated are downright odd and require some explaining. 22 year-old non-masturbating virgins who instantly turn into uninhibited fans of rough-fucking and grade-A cock suckers are simply a pornographic mythology. We need an explanation for Anastasia’s very strange sexual development and we don’t get one. (And hands up how many of you took to deep-throating like a duck to water).

In that sense, the critics’ description of Fifty Shades of Grey as ‘mommy porn’ are fair; it is ‘pornography’ in as much as it offers us a heroine who is an unreal and fetishized symbol of sexual innocence.

Admittedly, Anastasia has two inner personas who annoyingly jockey for attention in italics. There’s her ‘goddess’ who is an insatiable and feisty libertine and the Cynic, who keeps calling her a whore. Sadly, either of her italicized sub-personas would have made a more interesting and loveable character.

In the other corner of the ring, we have Mr. Christian Grey: the 27 year-old BDSM-loving, control freak billionaire. Despite the fact that he extolls his own virtues as a canny reader of people, the plot revolves almost completely around how pathetic he is at reading her. He is terminally impressed with her beauty, mental acuity, her snarky mouth and her wide-eyed innocence (charming qualities which are not in evidence in the actual text – maybe he’s in love with a character in another book and doesn’t know it yet).  He lavishes inappropriate gifts upon her that she supposedly doesn’t want but can’t stop mentioning. We’re told he’s a rule-bound control freak who, inexplicably, breaks all his own rules with a frequency that quickly gets boring. We’re given to understand that he has a long history of practicing BDSM but shows a jaw-dropping propensity for misjudgement. All in all, very much like Twilight’s Edward, it’s simply a mystery as to why he is so besotted with the heroine.

I’m not one of those erotica writers who insists that BDSM always be represented as a happy and healthy lifestyle choice. I’ve met too many people who were drawn to BDSM to fulfill needs that have their origins in a traumatic childhood.  So, it did not bother me that Christian puts his kinky propensities down to early childhood abuse. However, it does bother me tremendously that a character, who has supposedly been practicing BDSM for as long as Mr. Grey, can’t tell the difference between a Dominant and a Sadist.

Dominants enjoy controlling the sexual experience of their subs and will give them pleasure or pain – mental or physical – with a view to having an enhanced intimate experience. They don’t get off on inflicting pain when they are absolutely aware that it is a wholly unpleasant experience for the submissive. Yes, some dominants do mete out punishment that is not physically pleasurable, but they do it knowing that the sub is getting mental pleasure from the power-relationship.

Sadists are a very different matter.  They do get off sexually and mentally on inflicting physical and mental pain and their ability to be aroused by witnessing or inflicting it it is not associated with the masochist’s consent or fulfillment. Now, if you’re a sadist reading this and are about to accuse me of defamation, please read that first sentence carefully again. I’m not saying that principled and disciplined sadists don’t set limits of consent for themselves and their partners. Many do. But they do so because it allows them to practice their sadism in a safe and ethical manner.  They may be sadistic within consensual bounds and enjoy it. But, if they allowed themselves to inflict non-consensual pain or humiliation, it would still arouse them – even if they felt guilty about it.

This is a major problem I have with the success of E.L. James’ novel.  It really does spread misinformation about the subtle but important differences between dominants and sadists. There is no question in the readers’ mind that Anastasia is not going to get off, either mentally or physically, on the final belt whipping. And it would take a massively incompetent dominant to think she would. Mr. Grey is a sadist and, for all his pretense at consent, a very inexperienced and unprincipled one. Now, don’t get me wrong. A novel about an inexperienced and unprincipled sadist might be very intriguing. But this is not that novel.

It would be fair to say that, in most aspects, this reads like a very mediocre erotic romance. The characters are either uncannily perceptive or staggeringly stupid depending on what the plot requires.  It uses the same tired and annoying plot devices of improbable misunderstandings to artificially heighten the tension. It is a litany of contrived conflicts that beggar the suspension of disbelief of any intelligent reader.

So, I’m going to say something that is probably going to piss a lot of you off: if you thought this novel was entirely brilliant and smokingly erotic, I do have to question your ability to be a discerning reader. The writing is flaccid, the characterization is appalling, and the plotting is downright pathetic.

I can’t begin to explain why, with so many brilliantly written erotic novels about BDSM out there, Random House chose to pick up this one.  You have a right expect much more of your kinky erotic novel that this.

You really do.

We’re better than this, I promise.

Nikos Kessanlis, The Crowd, 1965

I’m sorry the blog has been quiet for a while. I have some projects on the boil I can’t tell you about yet, but will announce soon.

In the meantime, my monthly post at the ERWA blog is up. This one is on The Voices of Others: Genders, Sexualities and Beyond

During the whole censorship / PayPal debate, over and over again, I read people equate and confuse real examples of illegal sexual behavior with fiction.

Hyperbolic comments like “Well, I’m glad that stuff is banned. Do you really want someone fucking your 12 year old sister?”

Huh? *BLINK*

I have no idea what is going on here, but it’s rampant. Blinding lapses in simple logic. Obvious inabilities to mentally separate fiction from reality.  It was really quite chilling.

Were we always this stupid and I just didn’t notice it, or have people been slowly getting dumber? And what’s caused it?

About women supporting Santorum: I too find this baffling, and can only attribute it to some form of Stockholm Syndrome. As someone who grew up among born-again and evangelical Christians in Appalachia, I would hypothesize that women who have accommodated themselves to living an evangelical lifestyle have nothing to gain from questioning the premises of Christian patriarchy. Their lives are more comfortable, less fraught with domestic conflict, if they simply decide to be happy and make the most of their assigned roles. Although to a feminist the trajectory of their lives seems constrained, on a day-to-day basis evangelical women feel productive and empowered by playing a dynamic role in their churches and schools, from which they derive a potent sense of community. Nor are they necessarily barred from having a job. They have avenues for self-expression such as crafts, baking, or book clubs. (If your first reaction is to disdain these, then unless you’re a professional artist you probably have too high an opinion of your own creative outlets.) In fact, when I recall the women I grew up under, they didn’t think men were superior at all; they took the patronizing attitude that men were to be indulged in their masculine delusions. It would be elitist/snobby/condescending/wrong to view such women as passive or merely subservient. How many of us want to challenge the social constructs within which we have created active lives that are reckoned as meaningful? At any rate, this is my best effort to make sense of the women’s vote, which is otherwise unfathomable and preposterous to me.

—CWolfe

Personally, I lay this at the door of the more radical aspects of 2nd Wave feminists, whose zeal to hermetically seal women away from their everyday realities, their faiths, their families, the men they loved and their histories was so hyperbolic that they succeeded in demonizing the whole movement for a great many people.

We left these women behind out of an intolerance for their realities and a disdain for their capacity to endure and succeed within a very narrow world-view. Now, we’re inheriting the wages of that elitism and snobbery. They were too absolutist, in too much of a hurry, and to unwilling to even contemplate the positive sides of these women’s lives.

When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, little did she know how close to many women’s lived-reality her fiction was straying. But her ending was unbelievable and exemplary of many urbane, educated and sophisticated women’s answers to these issues.

Personally, I’m a staunch atheist, but I’ve lived long enough in deeply religious cultures to know you can’t demand a woman purge herself of all the structures of her life before she is welcomed into the arms of feminism.

We left these women behind with a sneer. And this is what we’ve inherited.

For those of you who have stood shoulder to shoulder with me in the trenches in the battle against erotica censorship, I want to thank you for your brave and shining hearts.  We have won, it seems, a small victory of sorts. PayPal has backed down and reformulated its TOS with regards to taboo erotic fiction. It is, sadly, only a small victory. Graphic novelists, game developers and comic book producers are still not being afforded the respect or freedoms they’re entitled to.

I’ve read a lot of post-game criticism of Mark Coker for his light-handed, politic way of doing battle. It might have not been my style of combat either, but I’d like to remind all of you that only he (Smashwords) and Selena Kitt (Excessica) put up any kind of a fight at all. That, regardless of his perennially mild tone to PayPal, he went a long way to getting you what you wanted – the freedom to write what you wanted and somewhere to sell it.

I want to thank the fabulous Rainey Reitmann at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. The EFF emerged as a passionately vocal advocate and a ferocious activist in her fight to defend legal fiction from commercial censorship. If you do anything on the web, they deserve your donation.

I also want to thank No Boundaries Press for stepping up to the plate and offering a haven to a lot of writers who suddenly felt abandoned and kicked to the wall when the PayPal fiasco went down, and to the Comic Book Defense Fund who decided that our fight was theirs as well. And we should reciprocate the support, because content with drawn images is particularly under threat.

It is our experiences that define us. This month has taught me more about what it means to be a writer than the previous ten years. I’ve learned to articulate and defend what I do academically, legally, economically and morally.

I’ve learned who my friends are.

I’ve learned who my enemies are, too.

To the writers who blithely stepped aside while their fellow erotica and romance writers went to the wall, who said nothing, who looked the other way, who felt it didn’t concern them and carried on with business as usual: SHAME ON YOU.

To the smug assholes and bitches with their lips pursed around self-righteous, moralistic, parsimonious, off the cuff reprimands: FUCK YOU. I sincerely hope you end up in loveless, lustless unions with partners who cheat on you out of mindnumbing boredom and in response to your staggering mediocrity,  your lack of human decency, your sagging tits, your shriveling pudenda and your unruly, ungrateful children.

To the fatuous, pasty-faced eBook retailers who knuckled under, and did nothing but send blunt and dispassionate emails of rejection to the writers whose books have made you money: MAY YOU FIND YOURSELF RELEGATED to the selling of undesirable tupperware and unfashionable shades of low-quality lipstick. You don’t deserve to sell the written word. You’re nothing more than ‘product floggers’.

To the brave writers who continue to push at the boundaries of the comfortable, the acceptable, the saleable and the polite: you will have your place in history. The canon of literature is a long list of authors who took chances, caused controversy and pissed off the placid.

To the intrepid readers who brave the discomfort of challenging writing, who support and encourage writers to reach further and write bravely, who joined us on the battle lines and demanded the freedom to buy and read what they wanted: everything I write is for you. You complete the cycle. Without readers, I would be no writer.

Keep writing what you write and reading what you read. Write the truest thing you know.  And celebrate the little victories.