Literary Talk
- At July 23, 2006
- By Bob Howe
- In Blog Posts
9
A dirty secret; the shock of recognition; shallot etymology; why guys dig girl-on-girl action; and whether fiction matters.
Confessional
I don’t like being read aloud to. I don’t like books on tape, and when I go to fiction or poetry readings, it’s sometimes a struggle to stay engaged. I don’t know why that is, but the feeling is so pronounced that I’m sometimes tempted to yank the offending material from the reader’s handsnot that the content or its relative merit have anything to do with my impatience.
Still, I try to get to readings as often as my work schedule allows, most notably the KGB Fantastic Fiction and New York Review of Science Fiction series. I go not least because people have been very supportive at the few readings I’ve done, and because I invariably meet interesting people and am exposed to material I might not otherwise come across. And because fiction matters. (More on that in a moment.)
So it was with my usual mixed feelings that I hooked up with
With both authors I had that shock of psychological recognition that one gets when a character does something that one couldn’t have anticipated, but seems so completely right when one reads it. More than once during the readings I said to myself, with rueful admiration, “How does he/she know that?” Fantastic fiction as a whole has (justly) been criticized for insufficient attention to characterization and psychological realism, but these two writers are joyous exceptions to the stereotype. Beyond living, breathing, real characters, I was riveted by both writers’ exquisite (and disturbing) wealth of detail. (I don’t mean to lump the authors’ work together, by the way: they are mining different veins of ore in different waysthe connection is the superb execution by both of them.)
* Full Disclosure: Witcover kindly gave me a copy of Asylum at the recent Readercon (I hadn’t cracked the cover prior to the KGB reading); despite that, I would say we have a nodding acquaintancefriendly, but not really friends. Before Langan’s reading I had never heard of her, and couldn’t have picked her out of a police lineup of garden gnomes. I’m not above plugging friends’ books when I think they deserve it, but this isn’t one of those instances.
Intermission
Dinner afterward at Uncle Mao’s Old Home, Fill ‘er Up an’ Keep on a-Truckin’ Cafe was excellent, though the Napalm Conch seemed not to agree with
Exegesis
Upstream I said, almost in passing, that fiction matters; I have had a lot of dark nights of the soul when I wasn’t at all sure. Lately I think it does, a belief I come to via girl-on-girl sex.
I have had several female friends ask me, “What is it with guys that they’re so turned on by lesbians?” The tone of the query has ranged from curiosity to mild exasperation to barely-suppressed fury. The subject is a staple among stand-up comics, in sitcoms and films, and even in television commercials. Equally common is the observation that guys are infatuated with a fantasy of lesbianism at odds with reality. But the reality isn’t what matters here: why do so many guys fantasize about lesbians?
Probably there are several reasons why guys think lesbians are hotsexuality is so plastic, and so highly idiosyncratic, that you could make the case that there are as many explanations for the fantasies as there are guys having them. But I think one explanationone that’s probably more often true than notis that fantasies about lesbians are a safe method for guys to role play in a way that their gender training doesn’t normally allow.
Lesbian fantasies allow guys to step outside their gender armor of toughness and dominance, and let themselves experience tenderness and softness. (And yes, there are certainly guys who can get in touch with their gentler sides without lesbian fantasies, but I don’t think they’re in the majority in our culture.) That’s what fantasies are good for: putting ourselves in someone else’s head; in someone else’s skin. The high degree to which we can empathize with what other people are feeling is one of our most human attributes.
And what is storytelling, if not that same kind of fantasy role playing? For the duration of the story or novel, we can project ourselves into the hearts of its characters. We can try out the roles of hero and villain, lover and beloved, carpenter and king. Fiction is a chance to put on the mask of The Other, and to walk (or dance or sail or fly) in his shoes. Or her shoes.
Does it matter? You bet your ass it does. There’s a reason why bigots don’t want to see the objects of their hatred portrayed in fiction or on screen: it’s much harder to hate someone once you understand them from the inside. The right-wing homophobes who protested against Brokeback Mountain (the filmE. Annie Proulx’s transcendent short story sailed below their radar), were right to fear its effect on society, since seeing gay men as real people is bound to make people more accepting of them. For a long time Blacks struggled with the same near-invisibility in film and televisiona struggle that’s not over yet, I suppose, but the increasingly common presence of Blacks in leading roles in film and on television has done at least as much to further racial equality as any civil rights legislation.
If that sounds like a sermon, I don’t mean it to be. No one, least of all me, wants to read fiction because it’s Good For You. Of the many pleasurable things about reading fiction, the one that may matter most is that it makes you feel connected to other people. It can be a cold, lonely world out there, and fiction can bring us back inside the circle of the campfire’s light.
barb_krasnoff
It’s an interesting theory (i.e. the girl-on-girl sex thing). My theory has always been that many of the guys who get into lesbian fantasies secretly suspect that women don’t totally let go when they’re sleeping with men — something akin to how they observe women tell other women things they won’t even tell their husbands. This way, they can watch two women go totally nuts (as it were), and they find that exciting. Possible?
keikaimalu
And here I thought guys liked girl-on-girl action because there are lots of tits and other bits flyin’ around everywhere, without men around to compete with the fantasizer for their attention. Isn’t part of the fantasy supposed to be the women’s delight when the (male) fantasizer comes along to play with them, in his he-man, take-charge, macho way?
admin
Well, that explanation never occurred to me; I suppose it’s possible. As I said, there are probably a lot of reasons why men are attracted to girl-on-girl sex, and there’s no saying that any particular man’s fantasies isn’t driven by more than one of them.
admin
Yup, that’s certainly possible: girl-on-girl means no competition. But the point I’m making is that, for at least some men some of the time, lesbian fantasies are not driven by “he-man, take-charge, macho” impulses, but their opposite: the desire to experience tenderness vicariously.
steelbrassnwood
Fiction and empathy
I think you’re right that fiction (like songwriting) matters because it encourages or allows empathy. Bad fiction (like bad songwriting) does the opposite — think of the Schwarsegalibson blockbusters where people are blown away with gleeful abandon. Or worse yet, encourages stereotypes, hatred and makes it easier not to empathize.
admin
Re: Fiction and empathy
I agree about the parallels between fiction and music, but I don’t know that I’d rush into dividing art up into “good” and “bad” piles. That’s what I was struggling with when I wrote “No one, least of all me, wants to read fiction because it’s Good For You.“
First of all, aesthetic judgments about are subjective; moral judgments even moreso. The question always looms: who gets to decide? But that’s not even the critical issue for me the problem with looking for “good” and “bad” art is that obscures what we come to art for in the first place.
Encouraging empathy, I think, is only a byproduct of good writing, not its goal. Art at its best is not utilitarian; art at its best is for itself. That’s not to say that there aren’t moving works of art created with an implicit message (good: WPA murals; bad: Leni Riefenstahl films; undecided: cathedrals), but “message” art is by definition a narrow view of the human experience.
All great art is probably amoral, in the sense that it speaks to the whole human psyche, good and bad. I’m no fan of the action-adventure blockbuster, as you know, but it does have the primal draw of spectacle and cathartic violence.
silk_noir
Mmm, I never think of it as good for you–I think of it as tickets to different exotic locales–if I, the reader, am lucky.
As far as girl on girl action?
It’s hot.
admin
And that, Wonder Woman, we’ll consider the Last Word on Girl-on-Girl action, the powers of storytelling and the Human Condition.
Anonymous
Great story. But how annoying is that “Story Highlights” at the top?