Race, Gender, BDSM, and Office Politics

by Annabeth Leong

As usual, what I’m reading is an odd hodgepodge of things that have struck my recent fancy. Like Giselle, I’ve read some books that weren’t good but pulled me in for mysterious reasons. I don’t like to post publicly about stuff I don’t like, though, so I’ll give you a selection of stuff I’d recommend.

Delusions of Gender: the Real Science Behind Sex Differences
By Cordelia Fine

This is the sort of book that makes me want to buy extra copies and carry them around in my purse so that the next time I run into someone who wants to talk to me about how evolutionary psychology explains why women prefer to be “traditionally feminine” and do all the housework, I can just shove the book into their hands and make a quick escape. It is the sort of book that makes you irritate all your family and friends because you’re constantly trying to read things from it out loud to them. It is the sort of book that puts the world into shocking, clear perspective.

This book methodically, meticulously debunks junk science around supposedly inborn gender differences, but it also offers no easy answers for what gender is. Think of this more as a deconstruction, as an expose of how pervasively we are steered toward “proper” gendered behavior.

Lately, I’ve been exploding my brain by thinking a lot about gender, and this book was a valuable addition to that process. My only complaint is that it doesn’t go much into trans and genderqueer experience, which I think could really shed light on questions about what gender is, what it is to be “masculine” or “feminine,” and so on.

Like Twin Stars: Bisexual Erotic Stories
Edited by Cecilia Tan and Kelly Clark

This is really short, but it’s a real treat. It has an early story by N.K. Jemisin, who’s one of the most interesting speculative fiction writers working today. It also has a story by our own Giselle! I didn’t recognize the name of the third writer, Neil Hudson, but his story, which poignantly portrays the agony of a bisexual person who is asked to “choose” is quite moving as well.

I was impressed by how well Circlet’s commitment to speculative erotic fiction served the book’s theme. In Jemisin’s story, for example, the invented fantasy culture provides a positive, supportive space for the main character’s bisexuality that I have never experienced for myself in this world.

I was a bit sad that this book didn’t include any female viewpoint characters. I would have liked reading about some bisexual women. Maybe that’s an excuse for a sequel.

The Room
By Jonas Karlsson

I feel like I am always looking for this sort of book, but rarely find it. It is weird and fascinating, a fast read that stay with you, deceptively simple, strange but still satisfying at the end. The narrator of this book is an unlikeable jerk, and yet I want to know what he has to say.

The plot hinges around a mysterious room that the narrator finds in the office where he works. The room represents beauty, order, and tradition. It’s the only place he can concentrate, and he produces incredible work when he goes in there. The room also seems like it doesn’t exist.

I read this with urgency, though I don’t directly relate to it. I love its spare, clean style. I love the way the reader’s perception of the narrator shifts as the book progresses. I want to know who Jonas Karlsson is (a famous Swedish actor, apparently) and how he came up with this.

The Marketplace
By Laura Antoniou

I’ve met Laura Antoniou at a number of events, and have heard her read (she is hilarious!). The Killer Wore Leather is one of my favorite books ever. So I’ve felt weird for a while that I’d never read The Marketplace, which is definitely the work she’s best known for.

I had reasons for not reading it. Over the years, I’ve started to get weird feelings about power exchange. I like SM, but a lot of dominance and submission makes me uncomfortable. Master/slave relationships particularly bring up a lot of issues. The idea of a series all about BDSM all in the context of consensual slavery did not really appeal to me.

Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve now read The Marketplace, and I thought it was just as incredible as I’d always heard. Reading it was a delightful experience, and it was interesting to think about exactly how Antoniou managed that.

First and foremost, in my mind, is that her story is compelling and fascinating. I’ve been thinking a lot about what erotica would look like if we could get it back from always being coupled with romance. The Marketplace offers one very cool possibility. I would describe it as a classic school story, along the lines of Harry Potter. People have to make it through a training process, and the narrative is compelling because the reader is wondering who will succeed and who will fail, and how.

Because the story was so compelling, I never even cared whether the sex was arousing. (Though it often was.) Every sex scene was integral to the plot, entertaining on many axes, arousal being only one of them.

One of the main things I loved about this book was that it was so consistently funny. At other times, however, it brought me to tears.

Also, the characters! Each person is so distinct and well drawn that I think Antoniou could teach a master class in writing, for example, dialogue specific to individuals.

The book was long and took me a while, and I’m resistant to series. Still, I think I’ll eventually get through this one, even though Antoniou seems to be making each book longer as the series goes on. I’m taking a bit of a break, but I expect to dive into the next book, The Slave, within the next couple of months. If the books continue to be this good, I’ll even feel relief that there’s so much more to come.

Black Man in a White Coat: a Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine
By Damon Tweedy

I picked this up expecting a straight memoir, but got something much more interesting. Dr. Tweedy does talk about his own life, but he is the sort of person who takes his experiences into larger philosophical and societal explorations. So a chapter about his experiences treating patients with HIV becomes a chapter that also investigates how stigma around HIV may be encouraging its spread, and a chapter that explores racial disparities in HIV detection and treatment at the societal level.

The voice of the book is so humane and ethical at all times that it gave me a new respect for the medical profession. I can only hope that lots of doctors are asking questions as deeply as Dr. Tweedy, and coming from a place of such genuine desire for self-examination and altruism. Whenever something happens that disturbs him, his instinct seems to be to ask, “Is it my responsibility to change this for the better?” It is heartening to spend time in the company of such a decent man, especially when there is so much ugliness in the world.

I found Dr. Tweedy’s meditations on race particularly valuable because they don’t come to neat conclusions. He embraces uncertainties, exposes complexities, and eschews easy answers. He often made me uncomfortable—for example, a story about his ability to find common ground with a family of white supremacists made me feel queasy on his behalf rather than inspired by the resolution, as I believe the narrative intended. I think, however, that if a discussion of race doesn’t feel uncomfortable, it probably hasn’t gone deep enough.

There was a lot of talk about weight loss, which concerned me because I’ve read a lot about the dubious health benefits of trying to force people to lose weight (interventions often do more harm than whatever good comes from weight loss, and there’s little evidence that any weight loss program is lasting for anything more than a tiny minority of people—for more on this, see, for example, Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon). The weight loss stuff seems endemic to the medical profession, though, so I don’t fault this book too much for focusing on it.

***

That’s it for now! I’m about to go out of town for a long trip, so I might be scarce in the comment section. See you all soon! :)

For Laura Antoniou, May She Forgive Me

By
Kathleen Bradean

If you haven't already, read Charlotte's post because she puts so much of my feelings into words. I adore the idea of fanfic. (I would be extremely flattered if my stories inspired people to create.)  I love re-imaginings such as when Steven Moffat's Coupling on BBC told the same tale from several viewpoints much like Akira Kurosawa's brilliant movie Rashomon. Moffat's version fit together with such a delicate sense of timing and story structure (for each POV as well as the complete story arc) that I'm still in awe. And while I hate to turn my disapproving auntie face on other writers, I can't get over this feeling of wrongness when the project is to use the original text of classic literary work (not rewrite the story) and insert stuff. *squeamish shiver*


A writer's style has a rhythm. It weaves a spell. Once you've been drawn into their story, the worst thing that can happen to a reader is getting yanked out of the story against your will. Inserting sex scenes into text that was never intended to titillate or explore desire is a Sleeping Beauty kiss of death that breaks the spell and dumps you unceremoniously back into reality to find some randy prince with no sense of personal boundaries humping your leg. And you are supposed to be grateful for that? *diva head wag* Uh uh. I don't think so, honey.

However, since I can "entertain a thought without accepting it," I decided to explore how well it works to try to duplicate the style of another writer and insert stuff seamlessly so as not to break the original author's spell. So of course I immediately thought of Atlas Shrugged, because I'm that nth degree of cruelty, an "evil things lurking under your bed" black swan event horizon. Alas, while I have it somewhere around here, I'm not about to dig through my stacks of books to find it just so I can torture you. (In the movies, this is the cat jumping at you out of the dark while the music reaches a fever pitch scene. Next time, it might be the crazed killer, no doubt wielding his well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged. So what I'm saying is, don't get too comfortable yet. Literary gore awaits you later in this blog entry. But first, I must lull you into a false sense of security.)

Since I'm too lazy to leave this room to find a book for this exercise, I turn to the book shelves within easy reach of my computer. Damn. I read a lot of history. History is written in blood and sex, no need to embellish that.

I have a lot of smut. I review it for Erotica Revealed and publishers send me other books for some reason I have yet to figure out plus I buy a fair amount so my collection is huge. However, adding sex scenes to classic works in erotica isn't the point of sexin' up the oldies (my name for this project), so that's out.

Sometime in the Grip's past, we were challenged to write in the style of our favorite author, so if you're a constant reader you've seen my Raymond Chandler pastiche. I'll imitate his style, but I love his work too much to change or add a single word. Gorky Park has sex scenes. So do a lot of mysteries. Not explicit. "We did plenty," is about as graphic as it gets in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Adding more sex to books that already have sex scenes is, again, beyond pointless. While I have the Complete Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes at hand, and I'm aware of the intense longing of fans to put Watson and Holmes into a carnal embrace, I prefer the relationship stay out of the bedroom because it's much more challenging for the audience. How simple things would be if we could just check off that box that defines their sexuality. But while our pencils remain wavering over the choices, our minds are open to all the possibilities, including the unnerving one where two men living together can deeply care for each other without it being sexual. We've been raised in such a homophobic society that ironically we have no concept of platonic love anymore. I refuse to help anyone check off that box by adding sex scenes. 

Above my mystery shelf are the classics. The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (pulling that one out for a re-read), and Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, to name a few. Oh look-- The Illiad! So that's where that went. Again, not work I feel like slicing open like Catherine Eddows. (Bad analogy. Jack the Ripper took things out of her, not inserted them, and I'm not saying that slicing open a human is ... Well, I've written myself into an uncomfortable corner, haven't I? Let's move on, shall we?)

At this point, a bit desperate, I turn to my vast science fiction collection. And there it is, the Holy Grail of this evening: Dune. Since Laura Antoniou (The Marketplace Series) threw out the idea of a Dune-themed erotica anthology-- He Who Controls the Sex Controls the Universe!-- I've had gom-jabbar sex toys on the brain.

Not really.

As far as you know. 


So, without further guild-worthy space and time warping, I lunge at you from the darkness under the basement stairs (you forgot this was coming, didn't you?)  with Dune Sex! (To make it easier for you to discern the inserted stuff from the original text, I have italicized my contribution.*

~~
"You're so quiet," Chani said.

He held himself poised in the awareness, seeing time stretch out in its weird dimension, delicately balanced yet whirling, narrow yet spread like a net gathering countless worlds and forces, a tightwire that he must walk, yet a teeter-totter on which he balanced.      

And then he fucked her.

~~

I stand corrected. That seamlessly flows, like the spice.



*My sincere apologies to Laura, because I do not wish to imply that this desecration was what she proposed.