Women's wicked thoughts

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald and its stablemate The Age about why straight women like male to male (m/m or m2m) films, videos and stories.  Interesting.  As you all know, more than half my readership is female. 

I've written before about The Power of Slash

Women like gay male erotica.  Especially if it's romantic.

[Picture from The Age]

The Power of Slash

More than half my readership is female.  And when I tell this to gay men, they are confounded.  Why, they ask, would straight women be interested in romantic and erotic stories about two men?  

To answer, I must mention 'slash'.  Slash began in the seventies.  Women who thought two men from a TV show sexy would write fanfic about them, making them fall in love with each other.  (But why? you wail impatiently.  Patience!)

Starsky & Hutch, best friends

The term itself comes from the slash between two names to indicate a pairing: Spock/Kirk for example, or Starsky/Hutch.  The essence of slash is that two previously heterosexual blokes (who remain resolutely het in the canonical versions of their stories in TV and film) become so close to each other that they fall in love.  They overcome their upbringing and the taboo against same-sex love, because they love each other so much that they wish to express this love physically and sexually.  They are prepared to ignore the opprobrium of society and to move past their own internal homophobia because of love.  Potent stuff.  And slash is written by women for women.  We men who love this style of writing are the interlopers here.

Starsky & Hutch.  Kinda intimate.

It's no accident that this emotional tension, this journey, is also a standard trope of gay fiction:  the hunky straight (he's never a hideous, pock-marked, halitotic fatso) who somehow falls in love with or has sex with our hero, and so turns gay.  For gay-shaded blokes, I suspect this reflects a kind of internalised homophobia:  we are so insecure in our sexuality that having the handsome alpha jock or sexy cop turn gay validates our own gayness.  Or, alternatively, we are only attracted to straight guys (all those personals ads for "straight-acting" men), though come to think of it, this is also perhaps partly about our own negative self image.  Whatever the reason, the stories about straight men turning gay are a staple of gay fiction.  I've written stories like that myself:  just look at Footy.  I find the emotional dynamic very satisfying to think and write about.  In my own case I would never have known I was gay if I hadn't fallen in love with another bloke, who was (surprise!) a very straight-acting surfer and rugby player.

And make no mistake:  it does happen in "real life".  I know of a couple of relationships where one straight guy has so loved (as friend, but the love deepens) another gay or bisexual man that he has set aside his straightness (if only for his friend) and entered into a profound sexual relationship.  Just thinking about it chokes me up.  But then I'm an old softie.

But why should women like male pairings?  There are a couple of answers.  One is that the women who like men find the emotional journey that straight men make when they start to love another man compelling.  It is conventional that straight men don't show their feelings and of course, like all generalisations, it's flawed.  Yet it is true that our culture, broadly speaking, doesn't encourage men to express their tenderer emotions.  In a heterosexual pairing, this is expected, this is what women have to put up with.  It's the way it is.  Asking a straight man touchy-feely questions is likely to provoke embarrassed shifting and silences.  But in a friendship which deepens to love, the two men involved are forced to come to terms with what's happening to their hearts, and this process means that they open up.  Some women like to read about this -- the kind of women who read and write slash.  It's romantic; it's not what regular guys do; it answers a need within themselves for men who are tough guys on the outside and tender and loving on the inside.  The doyen of gay writers, Victor J Banis, credits female writers and readers with rejuvenating the genre of gay writing:

[Women] came to a genre that was all but dead, and kicked some life into it. Are some of them bad writers? Of course, but they don’t have an exclusive franchise on that either, being a gay male does not automatically make anyone a great writer either. In the end, for me, it’s all about the quality of the writing. And as I’ve said, I am devoted to this genre, and I think the fact that it is now thriving in a way that it hasn’t for 30 or 40 years is largely due to the influx of women writers and readers.

The second reason why women like men who grow to love each other and then get down to the hot and sweaty is simply that women can enjoy two guys together just as some straight men find two women together sexy.  Read this piece about women being turned on by two men having sex.  And think of the relationships in Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series where a straight woman has many lovers, most of whom are bisexual.

Anita Blake with two blokes. Image from Bishonen Works

Slash was created by straight women for other straight women.  The dynamic of love conquering all, of a forbidden love nevertheless flowering between two men, is a powerful and emotive one.  Add hot sex and ...  It certainly pushes my buttons, and I won't hesitate to say that some of the most erotic and moving m2m scenes I have ever read have been written by women.  Wet eyes and wet undies.  A signal achievement.

From Strictly Male, my review of Karin Lowachee's trilogy, I say this:

I remember a western, its name and author lost in the dim shadows of childhood, where two heroes – but they were nevertheless outlaws, for reasons I have forgotten – are escaping from a posse of good and upright citizens.  One is wounded, and dying, his blood soaking into his clothes and onto the saddle.  The other, his loyal and true friend, is riding with him, risking his freedom and his life, for he could make much faster progress by himself.  At eleven or twelve years old, this was the very essence of romance to me—two strong, manly, tough men staying together out of loyalty and friendship.  To me, a lonely, bullied outsider, a friendship like that was worth dying for.

The essence of slash:  tough and gritty exteriors covering warm, romantic, loving interiors.  And utterly male, even if they have sex with other men.

Very powerful.  


[The artwork is from P.L. Nunn's Bishonen Works, with classic examples of P.L. Nunn's slash art and writings.  Read more about her and other gay-shaded artists here]

[There are a whole heap of interesting, insightful and revealing comments from female (and one male) readers and writers of m/m  below.  Be sure to read them too]

[Update:  This article discusses the issue.  M/m is becoming mainstream.]

The Uterine Replicator

Stuart & Lucy Gent

The terminology 'uterine replicator'  for a synthetic womb (I love it!)  is  Lois McMaster Bujold's.  She used the uterine replicator in Shards of Honor and expanded on the idea in Ethan of Athos.  But SF has come up with the idea of a synthetic womb many times. It's just that Bujold used it to consider how it would allow an all-male society.

Ethan of Athos is about a planet where a vaguely-Christian religious cult has set up an all-male polity and culture, because women are considered as the source of all evil.  It's a charming book, with a romantic and pleasing love story in it, and I wish to all heck I had written it.  Read my review to see why.  Since there are no women on Athos, they have to create children using uterine replicators, from eggs produced by donated ovaries, fertilised using artificial insemination. Like all technological innovations, the changes such an invention would be likely to bring in its wake will likely all be unexpected. 

I was led to think about the whole concept again by this fascinating story reported in Melbourne's Age newspaper. Stuart Gent, who is gay, wanted to have a child of his own.  So he found an egg donor and a surrogate mother, and had a daughter Lucy. Simple?  No.  Time consuming and very expensive, and not without human costs.  What if you could do it more easily and more cheaply?

Let us suppose for a moment that even the troglodytes eventually accept that the Bible doesn't really say that homosexuality  is immoral or evil.  This kind of volte-face is not without precedent.  The churches supported slavery and opposed women's rights.  Until they changed their minds.  The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa solemnly declared after apartheid* ended that apartheid was "unscriptural" though they had enthusiastically supported it, with appropriate Biblical quotes, while apartheid was the orthodoxy.

Let us suppose that as a result of this, societal attitudes to gayness move to indifference, in the same way that once women who wore trousers instead of skirts were considered immoral hussies but now no one could give a flying rat's clacker.  As I noted in a recent post, this seems already to be happening in certain circles.  I think that process is unstoppable, which is why the Christian-Fascists are so unattractively shrill and devious.

Without homophobia and religious hysteria, young men and women would happily try making love to others of their gender.  They might have a boyfriend followed by a girlfriend.  They might have a sequence from one gender followed by a similar number from the other.  When they went to parties, they wouldn't necessarily be on the lookout for someone of the "opposite" gender. 

It's sounds like a wonderful state of affairs, and, don't get me wrong, it is.   But there's a fly in the ointment.  What about children?  Let's assume for the moment that fairly long-lasting relationships (monogamy) between two people are what our species prefers (it might not be, see my piece, Our Cheatin' hearts, and think about the convenience of having threesomes to look after and bring up children) but let's assume that for now.  

With the uterine replicator, gay couples will be able to marry and have children. Of course, they can do that now, by adoption or using surrogate mothers.  But there are all sorts of difficulties inherent in the fact that biology requires a human womb to gestate a baby.  Interestingly, Bujold doesn't consider the fact that because her "invention" would make gay marriage no different in its essentials to heterosexual marriage, since both would use replicators to carry the foetus to term, it would also do away with hostility to gayness.  What is "natural" about a uterine replicator?  There would be no remaining "need" for heterosexual marriage as a parenting device (and she has some interesting enjoyably feminist comments on that aspect of marriage)  even though marriage for love would continue.

But until the uterine replicator has been invented, if you want children, and don't have oodles of money, you'll have to have some kind of relationship with the "opposite" sex.  In our ideal, troglodyte-free world, assuming (as we have above) that monogamy remains the norm, you would probably end up in a heterosexual marriage.  You might have sex with men and women until you decided you wanted a family and then you'd get married and "settle down".   And that would end your bisexual days.  Fidelity may have been set up as a desirable value by the patriarchy, eager to make sure that their wife's (or wives') babies were theirs, but it may also be hardwired into us (though I suspect it isn't.)  And my experience of the matter is that most wives do not take kindly even to the idea of their husbands having sex with their male friends, no matter how liberated they are.

So, absent a uterine replicator, even in our troglodyte-free society, most marriages would look pretty much as they do now, and most people who got married would marry someone of the "opposite" gender.  Most people would in practice be heterosexual, even as they are now.  And because values are often set just by the way things are now,  bisexuality would be seen as OK and normal between the onset of puberty and, say, your thirties, when you "settled down".  Practising bisexuality among older men and women would be considered risqué and even "off".  I know there are even now marriages where the wife allows the husband to have a male lover outside the marriage and indeed I consider such a marriage in my novel Footy.  But they are far from the norm.

Yet marriage has changed dramatically and may change more.  Everybody thinks that marriage now is the way it's always been, but that isn't so.  Read this fascinating essay by Stephanie Coontz in the Washington Post (my thanks to Hunter for alerting me to it)

Some quotes:

For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than love. Parents arranged their children's unions to expand the family labor force, gain well-connected in-laws and seal business deals. Sometimes, to consolidate inheritances, parents prevented their younger children from marrying at all. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty. For others, it was a privilege, not a right. Often, servants, slaves and paupers were forbidden to wed.

 and;

But a little more than two centuries ago, people began to believe that they had a right to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of parents or the state.

Adopting love as the basis for marriage meant other changes, too, especially greater acceptance of the idea that men and women had a fundamental right to marry, even to people of whom their parents - and society - disapproved. By the 1940s and 1950s, many state courts were repealing laws that prevented particular classes of people from marrying. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriage. In 1978, that court struck down a Wisconsin law prohibiting marriage by parents who had not met prior child-support obligations. In 1987, it upheld the right of prison inmates to marry. 

 and;

huge as the repercussions of the love revolution were, they did not make same-sex marriage inevitable, because marriage continued to be based on differing roles and rights for husbands and wives: Wives were legally dependent on their husbands and performed specific wifely duties. This was part of what marriage cemented in society, and the reason marriage was between men and women. Only when distinct gender roles ceased to be the organizing principle of marriage - in just the past 40 years - did we start down the road to legalizing unions between two men or two women. 

[My emphases]

As usual, my thoughts have wandered in an undisciplined and, well, wander-y way. But it does seem to me that as we as a society become easy with same-sex relationships, either marriage will continue its seismic shift of the last 200 years, or we'll have to invent the uterine replicator, or both. One thing is certain: the rabid religious right will continue to fight rearguard actions to take us back to some imaginary paradise from the past even as ordinary people rethink and reconstruct all the social relationships we all take and have all taken for granted.

A fascinating time to live in, don't you think?



*apartheid is pronounced apart+hate, easy to remember.  And it means separate (apart) + -ness (-heid, cognate with our -hood.)

Scars of My Stumblings

There is a prejudice amongst some gay men which maintains that women cannot write good gay fiction.  This is piffle.  How they can seriously believe this when one considers just Mary Renault's wonderful gay novels, for example,  I don't know.  (I've previously mentioned her here and here)

Some of the most erotic m2m fiction I have read has been written by women.  And so has some of the most romantic and moving.  In fact, it was a woman, Devil Kat, who taught me to write smut.  I miss her very much.

Anyway, one of the many places you find find quality original slash is Slash Archive.  And I'd like today to draw your attention to just one wonderful tale, Scars of my Stumblings, by GioGio.  Beautifully written, moving, clever, insightful, erotic:

I followed the boy's eyes to the door, nodded in an unmistakable gesture of acquiescence. A matter of moments to disentangle myself from the girl, somebody's sister, mumbling excuses about needing air and stepping outside, trying to become the man I am, not like my father, never like my father, but not entirely unlike him either.

[....]

The sun was rising into impossibly blue skies as he pushed me back on the bed and sprinkled long lines on my bare chest. The straw he had taken from god knows which place traced along my skin, making me sigh at the new sensation. Then his tongue followed the straw and kept going, even after the last of the lines had all but disappeared.

[....] 

His tongue flicked across a nipple that had hardened, I don't recall whether from cold or lust, and traveled all the way down my torso again until it came upon cotton. I suppose I must have moaned again as his fingers struggled with buttons. Then hot breath brushed across unblemished skin and I felt soft, hesitant licks to my dick, and I don't think I've ever again felt so alive.

Interleaved with this memory is the present reality of unbearable loss.  Don't ever say women can't write great romantic and erotic m2m.  Course they can.  And I give thanks all the time that they have and they do. 

[The photo comes from this site]

Darl

Darl.  That's Ozzie for 'darling'. I've had a whole series of thoughts arising from this article, about perceptions and stereotypes and how we gay-shaded blokes like to think we're unjudgemental and unprejudiced. About how being constantly put down by others eventually breaks your spirit. But it's going to take me ages to write, so.... tomorrow, or the next day. Meantime, consider why firemen, tradies, policemen, cowboys and leather men are considered sexy by so many gay blokes. Why is the story of a straight man turning gay is so compelling (and such a Nifty trope?) Why is "slash" such a popular genre? Why do so many gays advertise for "straight-acting" men in the gay dating smalls?

I'll give you my answers soon. Meanwhile I'll share with you some pics of hot tradies, from a nationwide competition to choose the sexiest tradie. Frankly, these blokes'd be hot even if they weren't tradies. But something about khaki trousers and sweaty torsos. . . .

Encomium

On-line writers don't get a lot of feedback on how they're doing. If you're selling stuff, you can see: last month we sold x thousand copies, say. But the best on-line writers can do is guess how popular their writings are by seeing how many 'visitors' or 'hits' there are to a site. But you don't know whether they got there by accident or are genuinely interested, or what. So it's awfully nice to get the occasional praise, like this one:

1/2 way thru reading the footy story..... loving it. loving it! teared up on the train reading it......

Oh that's balm to my soul! Inside every artist, every writer, there exists THE CRITIC. And he says: your writing's crap; jeez, call that a plot; no real person would do that, you idiot; just give up now, why doncha? And you don't know any different until someone tells you.

Anyway, thank you buddy. I appreciate your comments.


For all those who liked Footy, I remind you that I'm busy uploading chapters of I Get No Kick From Champagne, which you can read here. And, you'll be glad to hear, I'm writing up a storm.

Here's what I decided to do to solve my writer's block. I type horribly slowly, and when the muse has you in her grip, the words and ideas flow so fast you can't keep up. I make so many mistakes typing, I have to stop and correct. Net result: I lose the muse. So.... I decided to write my stories by hand in a notebook, and then type them up afterwards. So the muse flows as I write, and then when I type it up, the internal editor works (different sides of the brain are at work, I think). It's going well. This is the method Ozzie fantasy author Garth Nix uses, which is what gave me the idea. By the way, his stuff is very, very good. Try Sabriel. A very entertaining read, even if there are no gay or bi characters in it.

Moral of all this? You write encomia to me, I write racy tales--and everybody's happy.

Parhelion

Anther website I regularly visit, in the hope that there is a new story there, is Parhelion's. She writes sumptuous and polished original gay (and lesbian) fiction, but also some wonderful fanfic -- for Nero Wolfe, no less. Read this wonderful alternate version of a Nero Wolfe tale, for example:

Of course I knew right away it was Wolfe. He has a scent of salt and bay rum, and a feel of soft, yielding flesh over barrel-chested hardness that I’d never mistake for anyone else. My body knew it was Wolfe, too, but it seemed to have a different attitude about the fact than it should. When I realized that, I sucked in some air. The sound that came from him in response wasn’t words but a low, sleepy rumble.

And this, from An Angel in Hollywood:

We started out at a gin palace called the Black Cat. Bill had been there. They sent us on to a restaurant called Gino’s. Bill had been there, too. The barman moved us along to a club called The Picador. Hard though it may be to believe, it took me until The Picador to figure out what was going on. The restaurant had seemed normal enough, all red leather booths and bad Tuscan food, and there had been some good-looking dolls at the Cat. It would have taken a blind man to miss what was going on at the Picador, though.

I had insisted that we get a table in a corner, where we could take in the crowd and the floor show without making a big issue out of our presence. Sid’s pictures had been doing well the past couple of years and I knew the studio would not be pleased if he fell into whatever ditch he was trying to pull Bill out of. Sid sprawled out in his chair, smiling at the chanteuse singing “The Sum of You.”

“Sid?” I said. To me, my tone was pensive.

“Yes?”

“That singer is not a Jane, is he?”

“While performing, it is considered courteous to refer to her as ‘her’.”

I spent a minute juggling pronouns in my head before I gave it up. “Okay, that is what I thought.” I checked the crowd. There were lots of regular fellas, but there were lots of Ethels present, too. It was a pansy club, all right. “So, I am slow this evening. Explain to me again why Bill is over on this side of town?”

“As I said, he and Betty have had a battle over her nice, new rattle. This is his way of demonstrating his annoyance with what he assumes her after hours activities to be without his involving another woman. That would be viewed by both of them as a serious and irrevocable step.”

Knowing both the people involved, it almost made sense to me, which I found to be annoying. “Hooey. Stepping out is stepping out, no matter what the plumbing is.”

Sid let out a deep sigh and looked a little sad. “I would agree with you, but many would not. What is illegitimate and illegal is widely believed not to be subject to the same standards as the normal and expected.”

I gave Sid the face. “Do not ever tell Frankie that. He expects our family accountants to be four-square and on the level always. Unless they are showing the books to the government, that is.” I thought some more. “You can not tell me that you treat your candy any different than you would treat dolls.”

He laughed. It started real deep and moved up to his face, before it shook his whole huge body. It was a noise that made you want to look, like the sound of a good jazz band opening up. People at the neighboring tables turned to see. “It pleases me, as ever, not to be mistaken about you, my Angelo.”

Oh man! I wish with all my heart I wrote that well. She is utterly convincing in her portrayal of the 1930s. She's also pretty good with the 1880s or so too. Read her superb love story Dry Bones in Cowboy Up.

Here's to you, Parhelion. May your writing muse never fail!

Book and Film Lists

One of Amazon's very clever innovations is to use the (free) input of its customers to create added value for customers and itself. Stuff like customer reviews and customer lists. I've created two lists, though I will be setting up more; one for romantic gay or bi stories; and one for good gay films.

Looking through the list of books I'm struck by how many are 'slash': Swordspoint, The Fire's Stone, The Protector, Luck in The Shadows, Wraeththu, Fire From Heaven, just to name a few. Now traditionally (and some would say, strictly speaking it still is so) slash is about taking heterosexual characters from say Star Trek or Starsky and Hutch and have the two blokes get so close they discard societal taboos and become lovers. At first, slash was written by women for women. But gay-shaded blokes like me find the emotional sensibility of women when they write about men very appealing. I never liked the cum-and-go culture of gay life prevalent when I was a young man. My attraction to men was always much deeper than sex, sometimes, indeed, instead of sex. I'm not saying men don't turn me on. I like cuties of both genders. What I am saying is that my relationships with men were always, from my side, about love and friendship and companionship, and I could (and often did) do without the sex.

So I was drawn to m2m stories written by women, starting with Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault, and then of course (which gay-shaded man hasn't read it?) The Charioteer. To my way of thinking, slash has broadened from Spock/Kirk (which is where the term 'slash' comes from, where it was and still is used to indicate the pairing) to any m2m story whether written by a man or a woman where the 'feel' is like the first slash stories, or like the stories written by Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar (her Memoirs of Hadrian, about the Emperor Hadrian and his Greek slave Antinous, is a masterpiece) and their ilk, which are not 'slash' but are written by women. And I consider that I write 'original slash', reflecting my propensity towards romance rather than sex.

There are sex scenes in my writing. I've put them in partly because I object strongly to the fact that heterosexual sex scenes are treated as acceptable, but homosexual sex scenes are preceded by a warning ("may offend"). In ElvenSword there is a het sex encounter between Fluin and Ilya, and it seemed only reasonable to put in m2m sex between Fluin and Steppan or Fluin and Lthon. But the drivers of the relationships between my characters are love and affection and respect, and only secondarily sex. As it happens, writing good sex scenes is hard. They take me much longer than even dialogue which is hard to get to appear natural without being natural. Real dialogue is elliptical, confusing and boring when written down -- think of the transcriptions of Nixon's phone calls.

As it happens, right now I'm working on Will and Emma's sexual reconciliation in Footy. The hard thing isn't the sex. The hard thing is making her forgiveness and his love convince within the context of the bedroom scene while Sean, Will's lover and Emma's friend, is alone in the bed in the spare room. So I suppose I'd better go and finish it!