The curious case of M/M romance novels.

As a reader of romance novels that also enjoys reading more heady non-fiction, I’ve find myself piqued when thinking about the prolific subgenre of m/m romance novels. For the non-romance reader, m/m indicates am umbrella heading of homosexual romance, of which there are even further subgenres. What I find fascinating about this subgenre is that both its readers and writers are predominantly female. Yes, there are male m/m writers and readers but by and large, like the romance genre in general, the m/m subgenre is dominated by women.

At first glance, it might seem odd. Why would women actively seek out romance novels in which they as a gender play a limited role? There is one lone scholarly article written on the topic which seeks to look at this phenomena. While the author makes a slew of excellent points, I feel they fell slightly short. To expand the conclusions the author of that article drew, I believe the answer lies in trauma.

Women comprise half of our species, but still manage to be a marginalized populations. We are victims of sexual violence, economic inequity, and misogyny. Our bodies are unwillingly sexualized from a young age, and we learn to be on our guard against predators before we even become adults. We find ourselves subject to elusive standards of beauty of which many of us have little hope of living up to. We have been stereotyped, objectified and pitted against each other for centuries.

How relieving then, is it to read a romance novel in which all of those issues have been removed for the reader themselves?

By saying this, I am not trying to excuse the very real objectification of gay men that may happen in this subgenre. Like the heterosexual male consumption of “lesbian” pornography, there is an essential difference between the reality of life as an LGBTQ+ person and a fictional representation marketed for consumption by those not of that community. It is not my purpose here to explore that difference, because the production of such material will continue regardless of the ethical ambiguity. I believe that it is more fruitful to explore what lies behind this phenomena so that we can be more mindful of why the fantasy exists, and thus be more ethical consumers that insist on products that support accurate representation of that community, even if the material is generated by those outside of it.

For a woman reading a m/m romance, they are able to read romantic fiction in which they are not asked to identify with either of the main characters. They don’t have to face their own physicality or sexuality. If they have difficulties with other women, it’s a non-issue. Any trauma that has been perpetrated on our female body doesn’t have to be directly relived, and instead is visited by proxy in a fictional male body that is other from our own. By exploring the taboos that linger regarding homosexuality in European-derived societies, women can indirectly begin to investigate the taboos that exist upon female sexuality.

I think that it would be fascinating to create a study in which female readers of romance, especially m/m romance, were surveyed regarding their experience with sexual trauma. I have nothing beyond speculation to back me up at this point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those who make a habit out of reading the genre had a history of sexual violence in their past. The m/m subgenre, which in contrast with more mainstream romances, often includes a plot that includes trauma. Even if the specifics are not comparable to a woman’s life experience, she may enjoy the resolution of trauma that is encapsulated in the romance genre by virtue of the necessary Happily Ever After, and thus ritually experience a proxy resolution of her own.

This is a quick and dirty examination of this topic, and by no means delves as deep as I believe this strange phenomena goes. Romance as a genre of literature itself deserves a strong presence investigating it within academia, though due to the stereotyping and misogyny that exists surrounding it, it is unlikely to get. Nevertheless, readers of romance should continue to advocate for this genre, and to explore the myriad of intellectual material that it presents. It is the feminine shadow side to literature, and as all shadows, is worthy of exploration and study.

On Disliking Camille Paglia

This morning after waking up and eating some bread, eggs, and vegetarian breakfast sausage, I became randomly possessed by the wish to know exactly why I dislike Camille Paglia.

More than many other pop culture figures that I can comfortably dislike for no reason–the Eagles, Kiera Knightly, Guy Fieri, to name a few–it suddenly felt like I should know exactly why I personally had adopted the opinion of not liking her, other than the fact that most feminists seem to hold her in contempt.

After briefly poking around the internet and reading snippets of Paglia’s views (biological differences between the sexes, the patriarchy isn’t all bad, women hold some responsibility for their own date rape), I came to the conclusion that I don’t like Paglia because she seems to be more after attention than anything else.  I think this is slightly different than why prominent feminists don’t like her.  I can understand that a little better–she seems like she has no real agenda other than courting controversy and does it in a way that seems to call into question feminism as a cohesive movement by calling herself a feminist while still propounding viewpoints that people on the misogynist end of the spectrum would agree with.

I appreciate that there are people who provoke us, who raise questions and, through that, seek to advance a movement.   I honestly don’t know enough about feminist history to know if Paglia has hindered or advanced feminism as an agenda.   As a movement, I should hope that feminism is strong enough that it can handle having a few gadflies such as Germaine Greer and Paglia periodically saying hurtful shit that makes them sound like ignorant and out-of-touch ivory tower elite/conservative token feminist darlings in order to gain attention.  If it isn’t, that begs some questioning.

Honestly, after writing all this and thinking of myself as a feminist, I starting questioning more why I don’t like Kiera Knightly than why I don’t like Camille Paglia.  After all, Knightly keeps acting in films that I’d otherwise like to see other than for the fact that they star her.  She’s been honest about her eating disorder, which I appreciate in a celebrity, and she seems to advance a feminist viewpoint in the media.  Hmm…

cultural silencing

It’s odd how much you don’t notice things until they’re pointed out.  I was cleaning my study this past Wednesday, fondly looking over the books that have given me my formal education and I did a mental double take.  Really? Have I studied so few female voices after being in school for such a huge chunk of my life?

I had a lot of pretensions when I was younger, and I believed that a proper college education began with the Greek classics.  I excelled at the humanities in high school, so it was a nice excuse to continue studying what came easiest to me.  The first class I registered for at the Evergreen State College wasn’t anything radical, environmental or social justice related, but a 16 credit course on Stoic and Epicurean philosophy.  From there I signed up for a course on Russian literature, another on romantic, premodern and modern philosophy and art, and returned to the classics my final year.  I studied the pre-hellenic and Hellenic philosophers and their Roman elaborators, I read Chekhov, Bulgakov, Goethe, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Sartre and Camus.  I think the entire time I was at Evergreen, I read around four or five books written by women.  And I didn’t notice.

My books from that era are still with me.  I loved studying the humanities–it doesn’t get much better than reading about philosophy and the arts to me.  These men have said vital, beautiful and profound things that have guided European-derived culture for centuries.  But it’s crazy that one gender has had a monopoly on all that for so fucking long.  I read Mary Beard’s self-proclaimed manifesto recently, “Women and Power“, in which an extremely well-educated classics scholar points out how much the classics themselves have served to embed misogyny into our venerated cultural roots.  It’s brief but spot on–and damning.  Right now, in this burgeoning era of productive feminism, you can’t stare at a bookshelf that contains the “must reads” of the past thousand years without confronting the fact that so obscenely few of them are written by women.

Why didn’t I see this before as the travesty I see it as now?   It’s an astonishingly simple answer–I accepted it as the way it was.   It makes me a bit queasy to acknowledge this as a woman who spent high school rocking out to Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Throwing Muses, and PJ Harvey. “Women’s Studies” never crossed my plate as an undergraduate–it seemed too niche, too reactionary, too…angry.  I wanted to study the intellectual foundations of the culture I was a part of, and it took until, well, now, really, to realize how little of a place I had at that historical table as a Mexican-American woman.

Now that I’m in my mid 30s, have a daughter, and am back in school, I bring this hard earned awareness with me, and it drives me nuts.  I hear the girls in my sciences classes say how much easier they understand things when my male classmates explain it to them, I hear it in the confidence my male classmates speak up in groups, where I and other women have a softer, more questioning tone in their voice.  I hear it, and I push back, but I know I’m pushing against something that doesn’t even realize it’s pushing back, not consciously, not all the time.  It’s not really any of our faults, it’s just been the way things are for the past thousand, two thousand or so years–or more.   It’s hard not to be pessimistic, but necessary that we resist.

I’ve lived a far from flawless life, and am not really in a place to be any leader, but I do see it as my duty to be as articulate, well-read and aware as possible.  At my husband’s urging, I wrote Michael Pollan after reading his book about psychedelics and noticed that the history of those substances here in the US are dominated by privileged white men. It seemed odd to me because the experience of psychedelics Pollan documented was cast as being subversive, liberating and empowering–experiences that seems like they would wonderfully benefit women and people of color.   His assistant wrote me a very kind email back, saying she thought it was an important note and that she’d pass it on.  I know he wasn’t being consciously sexist–again, it’s just the way things are and have been until…well, it’s still the way things are, but we’re actively working on it.  That’s why its so important to point these things out, even if they seem obvious, even if they seem shrill and tiresome. Especially if they seem shrill and tiresome.

We’re not post-racial, and we’re not post-gender.  Sometimes you need to state what’s right in front of you and redundant, just so that we start to realize how much we’ve lost out on up to now.  The voices of women and the powerless have been muted for most of our written history.  There is a fall out from this, and we’re just now coming to it.  It’s an exciting and horrifying time to live in, and it will be interesting to see how it’s incorporated into our tragically flawed cultural tapestry.

Eat and enjoy it

Last night my husband and I watched Netflix’s “Ugly Delicious”. We’d never given it a chance before, but the first episode about pizza was inspiring. Pizza is empirically one of the best tasting foods in the universe, and I can prove it with stoichiometry:

Pizza x (bread/pizza) x (sauce/bread) x (cheese/sauce) x (satisfaction/cheese) = satisfaction.

“Too bad this show is kind of aimed at bros” my husband commented. I realized at that point that here had only been one woman on the show, and she was mostly shown yelling at the camera. My husband has always been a bit of a feminist, but since we had a daughter, he’s catching onto things he hadn’t before seen. Like how there are plenty of women hosting cooking shows, but almost no women hosting shows about how good food is. Anthony Bourdain, R.I.P., used to roam around the world experiencing deliciousness, but is there a female counterpart? I don’t think so. And if there was, she wouldn’t be overweight, I can tell you that much.

I’ve always loved food, and I’ve never been skinny. I manage my weight to remain healthy and because I feel good exercising, but it doesn’t go much more beyond that. It’s one thing for me to overindulge food in comfort eating, but if my eating isn’t disordered, and I’m enjoying food because I care about it, have a passion for it, well, then, fuck it. I’m not going to feel bad about it. If watching my weight and being fashionably slender means that I have to meticulously count calories, consciously depriving myself–because that’s what so many women do–then it’s not for me. Why it’s taken me 36 years to stop feeling bad about my failure to fit into the expectations society has for me as a woman in this regard shows how well we indoctrinate our girls into the cult of skinny.

Food should be good, and taste should be cultivated. I love choosing ingredients, going to the store and browsing the produce aisle, the seafood, the cheese. I love fresh bread as much as anything else you can name, and that’s ok. Another mom made cookies for our board meeting at preschool, and handed me one, saying, “You’re a good cook. I used an unusual ingredient for these cookies, what do you think it is?”. I took the cookie and sniffed it. It had a low note, something of dairy that wasn’t butter. Cottage cheese? I guessed. She looked surprised. It wasn’t cottage cheese, it was ricotta, but she was still impressed. I love that I can do that at this point in my life. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours in the kitchen cooking, and it’s wonderful to reap the reward of noticing these subtle things.

The things is that if you’re a woman you’re allowed to enjoy food so long as you do it publicly but not privately, or else remain thin. It’s the classic Tina Fey/Liz Lemon paradox. Liz Lemon was a female character who ate with gusto, but Tina Fey the actress has been upfront about the unreality of it all. She has to diet as much as any other actress, despite enjoying food as much as the character.

Feminist thought has embraced the multitude of figures women inhabit, and our society at large can pay it lip service, but we still have a long, long, long way to go. For my daughter, I think the best thing I can do is embrace my medium-large size 12-ish body and give it the respect it deserves. She will have to make her way through this hypocritical culture no matter what I do to try to protect her while she’s young, so the least I can do is try to work through my own body issues before she begins noticing them. And if, as a plus, I can have a less complicated and more thoroughly enjoyable relationship with the food I use to fuel myself, well, then, it’s a win on all fronts.

The science classroom and women

I like chemistry, and I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of really good chemistry teachers.  This past year, if I ever struggle with the reading, I don’t worry about it because I know that the teacher will explain it in a way that I understand.  I would take this for granted, but it has not been the same case this year in physics.  This is why I found it somewhat funny and frustrating today when I overheard a female classmate of mine talking to a male classmate, saying she just didn’t get it, then after he explained it, suddenly it all became illuminated to her.

Now. I’m not oblivious to any possible aims of the lady, nor do I fault her if she is indeed interested in this guy romantically.  He’s a class friend of mine, and she could do worse.  What made me want to roll my eyes and give her a talking to was that this is a woman who rides her bike to class, has this feminist patch:

sewn on her bike messenger bag, tattoos, and plugs in her ears.  Earlier this quarter when I was completely frustrated with the class dynamics and the men of the class totally dominated the discussion, I approached her to ask what she thought, hoping to share my indignation about the absence of women’s voices in the daily class conversation.  She saw nothing wrong with the class dynamics, she said, she liked them, and when I tried to explain myself, things only got increasingly awkward.  I don’t really hold this against here–I was too angry to be articulate, and I totally understand if I just seemed like a weirdo to her.  But since then, hearing her talk loudly about how she hopes that there isn’t math on the exam, how she doesn’t get it, and other such incidences…well…

It’s never been a belief of mine that we should pretend that we’re good at something we’re not, and I totally understand being lost in a science class and have empathy for her.   She has the total right to be her, and that should include all of the above without exception.  I still succumb to complete and utter anxiety when I get lost in a mathematics lecture in my physics class and avoid pure math classes like I hope to avoid getting another root canal.  But thing is, we live in a society that it so completely gender biased that women don’t even noticed that their voices are almost silent in certain classes.  I don’t know what we have to do to begin fixing these unconscious biases and stereotypes,  but loudly proclaiming our ignorance in a highly competitive classroom doesn’t help.

The other thing that bothered me witnessing this scene is realizing that these boys who dominate the classroom get these little boosts from their peers, looking to them as authorities, and regarding them with obvious respect.  I do very well in that class, am quick to understand, and speak up often, getting things right as often as those boys, but I very rarely treated as such.  I’m not looking for it, and even thought I’m writing about it in relation to myself, I can honestly say that I don’t really want it (I’ve seen myself when I get cocky, and I don’t like it), but it’s striking that it’s something that happens so easily to these guys and not to the women who are on their same level.

Last quarter in a group quiz, I got all the answers.  I had busted my ass studying enthalpy reactions the day before, and really knew my stuff for that chapter.  When one of the other guys in the group wasn’t getting them correct, I tried to explain.  He dismissed me, and looked to the the Asian guy sitting next to me to get the right answer.  The guy had a similar answer to mine, but he had his signs wrong, so I pointed it out.  I was right and knew I was right, but he then had to check with a friend of his in a separate group before believing that I was indeed right.   At the end of the quiz, the first guy who didn’t believe me, said sorry to me with his eyes on the ground.  I didn’t ask him to, and I don’t think I came across as mad, but I think the whole thing was too obvious for him not to.

That incident stuck with me, as did the one where I realized that the most outspoken and smartest sounding guy in the room also got things wrong and had no problem lifting my explanations from me when they sounded intelligent enough and passing them off as his own.   I don’t mean to sound too righteous or like I’m just complaining, because the thing is that this is big–it’s what happens to so many women in STEM classrooms.  It happens to women when they’re young and don’t have the confidence that I do as an older, married and secure woman, and it gets internalized.  They see their right answers dismissed and stolen, they’re not treated as authorities, and they see the attention granted to the best students of the class go to their male peers, even if they’re understanding is just as good.  Unless you’re rock solid in yourself and your knowledge, knowing that you too have your place in this classroom, it’s easy to see why so many women start to feel like maybe they’re not as good at math or science as their male counterparts.

And so, I carry on busting my ass studying, raising my hand, speaking up, and challenging the guy who is perceived as the smartest in the class when he’s wrong, part for myself and my grade, and to keep a consistent female voice at the table in that classroom as a competitive figure.  Even if I get it wrong sometimes, even when I’m tired and don’t feel like it, even if it makes people not like me, and even if I don’t get recognized for being as good a student in class as I am.  Because what else can I do about it but that?