Go Ask Joanne

Last month a San Francisco bookstore announced that it would no longer carry Joanne Rowling's books because of her anti-transgender campaigning.  This caused some concern, some of it disingenuous, as I argued at the time.  I didn't mention this bit, but it's an excellent example of the way people distort things, deliberately or not:

On Monday, Booksmith provided a list on its website of fantasy books similar to the “Harry Potter” series for readers who are interested in alternatives, sparking some backlash and a debate about whether bookstores should make decisions about which books their customers can access.

“So you’re going to curate your selections to only sell books by authors that you agree with politically,” one commenter wrote on social media. “Good to know. I’ll be shopping elsewhere.”

Recommending some books rather than others doesn't deny "access", nor does suggesting alternatives; bookstores and libraries do both, and uninterested customers can ignore them in favor of what they do like.  Ask a clerk or a librarian if you don't know where to look.

Which reminds me of a recent thread from Twitter/X, intended to explain why guys aren't reading books anymore. "Exhibit A", a display of current fantasy fiction:

You see, if there are any books in the store or library that don't interest them, men and boys just have to flee the place before they are swamped in girl cooties.  When called out, the poster replied "I think we need more diversity in traditional publishing today."

There has been a lot of fussing over the alleged shortage of "literary fiction" by straight white males nowadays, and I've been meaning to write something about that.  As numerous writers have pointed out, it's not even certain that there is such a shortage; the alarmists have not cited any actual data in support of their claim, and have been openly impressionistic about it, it's just how it seems / feels to them.  But I'll try to return to that issue some other time.

I'm not very interested in the kind of fantasy fiction on display in the photo above, and I've read a fair sample.  It's not because it's girly, but because I'm put off by the preachiness and New-Agey spirituality common to the subgenre, and the formulaic though professional storytelling.  I'll keep on sampling, though, because some of it made a powerful impression on me: Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor (2014) for example, and Victoria A. Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor (2018).  Both authors have published more work set in their respective universes, which I've enjoyed, but The Goblin Emperor keeps drawing me back; I've already read it three or four times.  The trouble is that there is so much being published, and fantasy isn't the only area important to me.

I've given up any reservations I might have had about the ethics of boycotting Rowling's work, though, now that she has urged a boycott herself, of the British retailer Marks and Spencer for having a transgender employee in the lingerie department.  I'm not going to try to disentangle the facts from Rowling's agenda in the case.  The point is that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ... goose.

And when I began writing this post I remembered something else about Rowling: she adopted the initials J. K. instead of her actual name when the first Harry Potter book was published, at her publisher's urging.  The idea was that a girl's name as author might alienate potential boy readers. Not unreasonably for an unknown debut writer, she went along with the ploy.  (Playboy magazine pressured Ursula K. Le Guin into using her initials when they published a story by her in 1968, thirty years before Harry Potter.)  Her treacherous chromosomes were never really a secret, and the series became a worldwide phenomenon.  It's significant, though, that when it came time to publish her first non-Potter novel, she chose not only another pseudonym but an unambiguously masculine one.  The first Robert Galbraith book didn't sell well until she, uh, came out as its author. Not to make too big a thing of it, but Rowling seems to have a penchant for gender disguise to mislead potential readers. Shouldn't she stop pretending that she can be a man for paraliterary purposes?  One could probably make a case that Harry Potter was the wedge that led to the invasion of commercial fantasy by women, and terrifying, emasculating book displays that cause men to give up on reading altogether.

The More It Changes the More It Stays the Same, Latest Iteration

I've had some interesting discussions with people about the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which has now received several Oscar nominations.  One such discussion was with a straight friend who loved it because, he said, it was so refreshing to see a positive depiction of a computer nerd in a mainstream movie.  I think that's as questionable as the movie's depiction of a gay man, but I suppose he liked it for the same reason many people have liked its depiction of Turing as a socially clueless yet fearful closet case: because they agree that the only way you can win sympathy (or an Oscar) for Turing, as a queer or as a computer geek, is to make him hopelessly miserable and then put him out of his misery.

I would think it even more tragic if Turing had been shown as he apparently was: a gay mathematician who, despite his social awkwardness, could work with others, had friends, was unconflicted about his sexuality, and had a reasonably satisfying sex life -- but was brought down by the bigoted laws of his time and place. To show Turing in this way would take some imagination and creativity; treating him as The Imitation Game does takes the easiest possible way out, by falling back on every toxic stereotype about nerds and queers.

When I explained this, my friend replied that he thought the film "dealt with his sexuality reasonably well," and "didn't make a 'big deal' out of it" and "it was treated as a secondary struggle for him."  He conceded that "If one does a 'queer reading' of the film, I'm sure there are some problems," but he himself "found the character captivating and intriguing and the central tension of his character played well into the film's overall thematic purpose." I agree with that last point, since I think The Imitation Game's "overall thematic purpose" was to win sympathy for Turing by the use of homophobic stereotypes.  (This is not to say that any of the filmmakers were personally homophobic -- no doubt some of their best friends are homosexuals -- but that the way Turing was depicted used homophobic cliches that have long been part of popular culture.)

I think only a homophobic straight person could watch The Imitation Game and perceive it as not making a big deal out of Turing's homosexuality.  Indeed, it makes it into a crucial plot point, when the Soviet spy (whom the real Turing probably never met, let alone worked with closely) blackmails him into keeping silent by threatening to expose his homosexuality.  (Ironically, Turing's superiors certainly knew that he was queer, just as they knew about the presence of a Soviet spy at Bletchley and -- as someone tells the movie Turing -- chose what information he'd pass along to Stalin.  They would have investigated him quite thoroughly before admitting him to the team.)  As for "queer reading," my reading is structurally queer since I'm queer, but it doesn't use any of the concepts or tools of queer theory.  Of course it never occurred to my friend that his "straight reading" brought no agenda to his understanding of the film or of Turing as "struggling" with his homosexuality.

So I wasn't all that surprised when the authors of a new Young Adult science-fiction novel with non-heterosexual, non-white protagonists mentioned (in a "big idea" post at John Scalzi's blog) that "an agent offered to represent it on the condition that we make one of the protagonists straight or else remove his romance and all references to his sexual orientation."  They refused, and eventually found a home for the book at Viking Penguin.  I'm still a bit annoyed by the authors' repeated insistence that writing a story with such characters is "risky" -- there's not enough fiction out there with non-heterosexual characters of color, but there's still quite a lot of it, and "risky" has all kinds of connotations that I think go beyond the chance that an agent won't represent your work because of its content.

The writers also wrote a piece about their experience that was posted on a Publishers Weekly blog, inviting comments from writers with similar experiences, and got a lot of traffic.  (Though the writers didn't name the agency involved, it identified itself and responded, denying the writer's accusation.)  One author wrote that per "editor went through and deleted all gay references between my copyedits and the first pass pages without bothering to tell me.  I pitched a fit and my agent backed me up. The gay character stayed in the novel, as written."  Another commenter declared the need for fiction about Christian gay characters who struggle with their sexuality and ultimately "leave the lifestyle/choose to go on with their lives from a Christian standpoint."  Personally I think it would be interesting to read such a story -- it would be fantasy, of course, but we're talking about fantasy here -- and I wonder why Christian publishers haven't given us some examples already.  I'd even recommend the acquisition of such a book to my public library, and would welcome the change to discuss it here.

Despite the apparent decline in the US and Europe of homophobia and antigay bigotry, to say nothing of structural/systemic heterosexual supremacy, they're still with us.  It's good to be reminded, even if it's frustrating.

Where's the Rest of Him?

So this meme turned up on Facebook the other day, on a queer page called Lizzy the Lezzy which exemplifies the declining standards of queerness nowadays. (No, I don't really mean that: standards of queerness have always been low. Remember, it takes a fairy to make something tacky.) I'm not going to post the image itself, to protect whatever privacy the people in it may have, but here’s the text:

My son Jack (7 yrs. Old), told me he wants to be “Queen of New York”. Maybe that was him “coming out”, maybe not! I did tell him he can be anyone he wants and Id be right by his side! Love knows no limits OR gender! And this is what Ive been teaching him since he was a baby!! #I ADORE AND SUPPORT THIS PAGE!!!!!!

I wasn't the only person who didn't adore. I commented that New York doesn't have a queen, or a king for that matter. This of course led the page owner and numerous others to whine about “haters” picking on a little boy. I don't believe that any of us were addressing Jack. We were addressing the nominal adults who posted this meme on Facebook. If I knew the boy, or someone like him, I wouldn't pour cold water on his fantasy. I wouldn't take it seriously either. It would be difficult to walk the tightrope between non-judgmental support and the patronizing contempt that many adults consider the proper way to deal with children, but I'd do my best. I'm not obliged to be non-judgmental to Jack's adult enablers, though, and I meant my remarks for them.

What is going on here? I don't know Jack or his mother, so I don't know where he's coming from. Does he really want to be Queen of New York, or was he saying something he knew would reduce his mom and some other adults to a slobbering puddle of head-patting? Children often learn to perform for adults (I did), and it doesn't speak badly for them, but it does speak badly for the adults. Even if the boy was serious when he said it, he'll likely forget it in a few months at most, and decide he wants to be Cher, or Margaret Thatcher, or Michelle Obama. And I hope he does, because wanting to be Queen of New York is like wanting to be a Unicorn, or Bartholomew Cubbins: the Queen of New York is an Empty Set.

This has nothing to do with gender, and even less to do with love.  I feel sure that Jack wouldn't have received so much attention and stroking if he'd said he wanted to be King of New York; gender is very much at the crux of the reaction. It seems to be because a little boy said something gender-nonconformist. I don't know anything about his inner life. Maybe he tortures cats when his mom isn't looking.

I don't know what fantasies about being royalty mean to young children. If Jack wasn't just buttering up his mom, then maybe he daydreamed about being the center of attention (which he achieved, online anyway) in a palace, or wearing glamorous outfits, or wearing a crown. (As I've said before, I don't get crowns. Drag queens like them, as do some fundamentalist Christians. I've recounted before the drag queen I heard about from a mutual friend, who stole the crown a rival had won in competition so that he could dress up in his trailer, sit in front of the mirror, set the crown on his head, and admire himself.)

A queen doesn't exist in a vacuum. She sits at the top of a pyramid, at the top of a lot of other people, and she couldn't be queen without them. No wonder Jack's mother told him she'll be right by his side: if he were queen, she'd get a lot of perks. But a queen's life has plenty of routine and drudgery, even more so in the past. I just read Nicola Griffith's new historical novel Hild, which depicts how much work there was in being a British queen in the seventh century of Our Lord: not just cutthroat politics and jockeying for position and producing and protecting an heir but cloth production and embroidery and running the domestic side of court life and managing royal businesses: –production, storage, distribution, trade, and quite a lot more. Not quite what Jack or his mom imagines, I daresay. Not just sitting on a throne while wearing a crown to die for and yelling "Off with their heads!" now and again.

Here's something that occurred to me the third or fourth time I watched Frozen, which I think says something about fantasies. When Elsa builds her ice castle in the mountains and closes herself in, what does she do after the great doors slam shut? It's a satisfying fantasy to think of telling off the people who've annoyed you beyond endurance and going to your room, slamming the door, and locking it from the inside. But then what do you do? It's like the difference between having a wedding, and living a married life: the first is glamorous, the second is not, though the second has its pleasures and satisfactions. Even if the cold doesn't bother Elsa, the boredom would surely get to her in five minutes. (No cell phone, no Facebook, no Disney Channel -- how would she survive?)  And even an anorectic ice queen needs food, which Elsa doesn't seem to be able to conjure up from nowhere. She doesn't even seem to have a diary to vent to. It's the theatrical gesture that counts here, the fantasy of power and control and getting even.

Now suppose young Jack wanted to be Scarlett O'Hara, with Tara and gowns and crinolines –and hundreds of slaves to tend to her body and keep the plantation going. I imagine his mom would still drool over him -- she might have the same fantasy, and make them adorable matching mom and son ball gowns and hairdos -- but it might be a little less attractive to other adults. Suppose he wanted to be Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald –-- love the uniform! Or hell, why not Imelda Marcos with her fabulous shoe collection? Suppose he wanted to be Mammy, Scarlett's senior slave. Ooh, way less appealing. But these are fantasies, not realities, right? Who are we to judge a child's dream?

But you can't be anyone you want. You can't be queen or king of New York, because there's no such office. You can't even be queen or king of England: that slot is reserved for a very few select persons. You can't be Barack Obama, or Michelle Obama; you can't be Cary Grant (who himself wished, apparently in vain, to be Cary Grant). Nor can you be Superman. That still leaves you a vast world of possibilities, of course.  And you can always be yourself, but who would want that?

Jack's story got under my skin because it's just the latest in a long series of idiocies. Consider this meme, one of many that have come my way.

I don't think it did this dog any harm to be dressed in that ridiculous costume, but does it say anything about how it sees itself? Of course not. We know nothing about its inner life. I wish I believed that the dog's owner knew that too, but with the floods of similar animal memes and other postings from pets' "mommies" and "daddies," I don't take it for granted. I believe that dogs and cats and other animals have inner lives, but I doubt very much they're about being human superheroes. (Some cat memes base their humor on positing that cats don't like being dressed up in such outfits and plot revenge on their owners for it, which seems more plausible because you can tell when an animal doesn't want to do something. Cats can be quite firm about that.  But loving mommies don't care what kitteh likes or wants; Mommy knows what's good for her sweety-puss.) Even less do their inner lives involve being used as fantasy surrogates for their owners.

Again, I wouldn't tell my* or someone else's young child this, but I wouldn't spread their fantasy all over the Internet either. Why is Jack's fantasy getting so much attention and praise from strangers? If you post a photo of your seven-year-old daughter dressed as Princess (later Queen) Elsa on Facebook, probably only your relatives and a few dutiful family friends will like it, let alone share it. (Don't mention her insistence that she has to diet so she can be skinny like Elsa, because she's "too fat"; that doesn't fit in this happy scenario.) A photo of your son as Elsa, complete with eating disorder, might get more attention for the gender nonconformity. It seems to me that the people celebrating Jack on this page are projecting their own fantasies onto him, using him in an unwholesome way.

By the way, did Jack ask his mom to splash his childish dream on the Facebook to Hell and back? Even if he did, it wasn't informed consent: does a seven-year-old know what it means to go viral on Facebook? What does it have to do with his fantasies, or hers, and those of the adults who slobbered over it? I don't believe these fantasies among adults are more common than they used to be, though I wouldn't be surprised if they were. When the economy is a swamp for most people, when most parents don'’t believe their kids will be better off than they were and most kids agree with them, why wouldn't people retreat into fantasies about being fictional characters? (Corporatists don't mind, of course. Disney sold millions of Anna and Elsa dresses for Halloween this year. There's gold in them there dreams, but not for the dreamers.) We know something about the fantasies of people in the past, the fictional characters they identified with – wanting to be a prince or princess is nothing new. But thanks to Facebook and other electronic media, ordinary people can now publish their fantasies for each other to see.

Nor do I want to forbid other people to fantasize, to make them live in a dreary grim “real” world. (That's a common accusation against those who question fantasies, I know.) I think daydreaming is fine, and indeed necessary. I daydreamed as a child, and I still daydream now. I understand the uses of fantasy. Why shouldn't a child, who's constantly pushed around by adults, dream of being powerful and free? I probably wanted to be Superman; as a five-year-old I drew lots of pictures of him. My mother bought me a Superman shirt, blue with the logo; I think one thing that killed the fantasy for me was realizing that wearing the outfit didn't give me the powers. Later I wanted to be Davy Crockett, and later an astronaut, and later still a musician. I still fantasize about having a book on my shelves by me, published by a major house, with my name on the spine. I'm working on that one.

Why shouldn't adults stuck in dead-end jobs fantasize about becoming rich, even if it's just from the lottery? But humankind does not live by fantasy alone. There also has to be room for action, for figuring out what you really want, what will fill your days in satisfying ways, and how to get it. And somewhere along the way -- when I was in my thirties or a little later? -- I realized that I wanted to be me, and that I'd succeeded.

We don't, in fact, always let people see themselves as they wish.  Bigots don't like to see themselves as bigots; racists don't like to see themselves as racists; homophobes don't like to see themselves as homophobes.  Why should we judge them? Why can't we see them as they see themselves? The standard retort would be that those people are haters, and people like Jack and his mom are about love, and they aren't hurting anybody!  Those people don't see themselves as haters, of course: they're Christians, they are about love and not about hate.  As I've pointed out before, the people who denounce hate are generally big haters themselves.

Many people want to organize their lives around bumperstickers (and now memes), with everything black and white with no shades of gray, and with simple slogans that tell them what to do.  That's the approach that got us into the trouble we're in now, that Walter Kaufmann called decidophobia, the fear of making fateful choices.  How we see ourselves both matters and doesn't matter; how others see us both matters and doesn't matter.  A wise person must take both into account, listening to others but not giving them final say, but also recognizing that he or she can't see him or herself whole.  We need to find other people whose opinions we can trust to some extent; we must see ourselves as others see us, we need all the input we can get -- but we also must judge for ourselves how far to rely on them.  This isn't a matter of the truth lying somewhere in between, but of both-and.  Children want to be kings or queens, princes or princes; adults must decide for themselves, and take responsibility for their decisions.

* "My [i.e., Duncan's] child" is also an empty set.

Take It to the Limit

I happened on Jonathan Cott's 1978 Rolling Stone interview with Susan Sontag, which was published in its entirety by Yale University Press last year.  I have my differences with Sontag, but I always enjoyed reading her essays, even when I disagreed with her.  I'd recommend this long interview to anyone interested in Sontag, in what it means to be an intellectual, in mortality, or in many other issues.  "Mortality" is a big issue here, because at the time of the interview Sontag was just coming off a regime of therapy for cancer, which was reasonably successful (she lived for another quarter-century), but she'd come close to dying and she knew it.

Still, there's something in the interview that bugged me, and if I remember right it is something that had bugged me before: Sontag's view of the "demonic" side of human sexuality.  I should probably reread her early essay on pornography, and I don't assume that her view of sexuality didn't change over time, but here I just want to comment on what she said to Cott in 1978.  It feels familiar to me from having read her before, and I think it's a view she shared with a good many other people, intellectuals or not.

Sontag begins by saying that she thinks the renegade Freudian Wilhelm Reich "really didn’t understand the demonic in human nature and that he had a picture of sexuality only as something wonderful.  And of course it can be, but it’s also a very dark place and a theater of the demonic" (41).  I don't necessarily disagree with this, though I'm not sure what Sontag meant by "demonic" that isn't merely tautologous, and I find it ironic since elsewhere in the interview she talks about her distrust of metaphors.  I don't suppose she believed literally in demons, so that metaphor needs to be unpacked a little, and she doesn't do that.

More to the point, while I can agree that sexuality "is also a very dark place and a theater of the demonic" (for some value of "demonic"), the same can be said of just about every other human endeavor, from food to art to religion to science to being a parent to being an intellectual.  So why single out sexuality?

Cott then quotes Sontag to herself on S&M from her essay "Fascinating Fascism": "The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death."  Ooooh, child!  That's just a bit simplistic.  One well-known aspect of sadomasochism is its reenactment of scenarios of abasement and control from childhood, but Mom doesn't usually wear black leather when she's warming your bottom.  (At least mine didn't.  I mustn't overgeneralize from my own experience.)  Everything I've read indicates that S&M works best as erotic theater: you kiss your Mistress's boots and then arise refreshed to resume running the corporation from the executive suite. It's not "real," it's playing with fantasies.  Perhaps, as with many fantasies -- including art -- S&M works as a way of managing and controlling painful feelings.  (Is that its essence?  No.  Again, I don't think human sexuality has an essence.)  It seems to me, again, that Sontag was overreliant on metaphor in that passage.  Its ritualistic use of repetition also makes me a bit skeptical of Sontag's disavowal in her answer to Cott:

I don’t deeply understand it because it’s not me, but I guess I understand it more than you in the sense that I know it’s for real, and know that the reason people can continue to have an idea of sexuality simply as pleasure – in the most desirable sense as contact, love, and sensuality – is that they don’t go to the end of what sexuality is … and they probably shouldn’t, of course, because is one is playing with fire.  And if one goes to the end, I think it’s a much bigger and more anarchic thing than one imagines, and that’s why throughout human history it’s been the subject of so much regulation.  I don’t think people understand why there’s been this problem of repression.  I’d sort of turn it around and say that the reason most societies have been, to a considerable extent, repressive about sexuality is that people have understood that it can get out of control and be completely destructive [41-2].

Again, I can agree with this to a point, but it seems to me that Sontag is equivocating.  I think she'd have denied that the true nature or core of human sexuality is demonic, but she still seems to be saying not only that cruelty and domination are part of human sexuality as we have constructed it (which I think is obviously true), but that they are "the end of what sexuality is," and that anyone whose sex life doesn't include some cruelty isn't being honest, isn't "going to the end" of human sexuality (which I think is obviously false).

I don't believe that human sexuality has an essence or an end, which perhaps puts me in the uncomfortable position of conceding that for some people cruelty and destruction may be authentically part of their sexuality, while for others they are not.  I don't see this as a real problem, though, because I'd say that cruelty and destruction are authentically part of human nature too.  Authenticity, however, is not validity.

Cott then quotes William Blake, from his big poem Jerusalem, on "Sexual Organization", and Sontag continues:

Yes, there’s something wrong with human sexuality [laughing].  You see, we’re not animals.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with animal sexuality, but at the same time it is kind of awful because it’s so purely physical and for the most part is so extremely disagreeable to the female.  With the exception of some species like wolves, for instance, who have something more like a family life and tend to be monogamous, it’s generally this crazy kind of disconnected, dissociated act that, as I said, is very unfavorable for the female and really does seem to be the reproductive urge and nothing more.  Human sexuality, however, is something entirely different, but it didn’t quite work out – in fact, I once described the human sexual capacity as being incorrectly designed.  I mean, to move sexuality onto another plane whereby it becomes a psychological and emotional thing doesn’t quite work – it only works when it’s controlled or inhibited in some way.  Did you see that movie by Nagisa Oshima called In the Realm of the Senses? 

I did, and I’m afraid that I’m never going to forget it.  There’s no way you can forget the ending of that film when the woman strangles the man while they’re making love and then cuts off his penis and writes the words “The Two of Us Forever” on her chest in blood.

You know, I think Oshima’s right.  I think that’s an authentic experience.  Luckily it’s given to very few people.  But this is a perfect illustration of what happens when you don’t have any breaks anymore.  They went to the end, and the end is death [42-3].

Here Sontag says it explicitly: the end of human sexuality is death.  Well, in the long run we are all dead, but conceiving death as the telos -- the completion in the sense of fulfillment, the goal -- of life is a mistake.

The complexity of human sexuality, even as Sontag theorized it here, isn't a matter of "incorrect design," since organisms aren't designed (another unfortunate metaphor that Sontag should have known better than to use).  I view it as a consequence of the human capacity for symbolism -- for language, for abstract thought, for constructing stories about our experience -- overlaid on our biological functioning, because in Darwinian evolution there is no reason why human sexuality (or anything else) should be correctly "designed."  Darwinian evolution is often a mess, because it isn't directed by a designer or toward any goal.  What matters is whether a trait more or less works overall, and doesn't screw the species up to the point that it can't sustain reproduction at all.

In the Realm of the Senses is not very helpful for Sontag's discussion.  As Cott says, it's the story of a man and woman who have an obsessive sexual affair, which culminates in the woman strangling the man while they copulated, and (after he was dead) cutting off his penis and testicles.  As Hollywood marketers would say, it's Based on Real Events, though the film was made by a maverick, bad-boy Japanese director outside even the workings of the Japanese film industry: in 1936 a woman named Sada Abe did just that to her lover Kichizo Ishida.  She carried the severed parts with her until she turned herself in to the police a few days later; she was tried, convicted, imprisoned, and released in 1941, five years after the murder; she lived until sometime in the 1970s.

Oshima Kagisa's 1976 film was neither the first nor last to be made about her, but it was the most notorious because of its onscreen depiction of genitals and penetration.  Whether Oshima was "right" about Sada Abe is open to question, since he was of course creating a story of his own, imposing his understanding of the events for his own purpose, but it seems clear enough that Sontag wants him to be right, and to agree with her interpretation of the case, that Abe and Ishida "went to the end, and the end is death."  But what's the big deal?  One could say the same thing, just as accurately, of a monogamous married couple who vow to stay together "till death do us part" and do so, even if neither one kills or mutilates the other along the way.  But that's not transgressive, not "edgy."  If Sontag exalts Abe and Ishida's "end" over the more prosaic kind, it must be for other reasons than logical necessity.

Cott protests, talking about Reich's account of repression and "healthy" ways of being sexual.  Sontag replies:

But I believe that’s true, too. I know people who have very pleasurable, sensuous, nondestructive, non-S&M sexual lives.  Not for a minute am I saying that that’s not possible.  In fact, not only is it possible, it’s desirable.  I just think the people who can do that don’t take it to the limit, and, as I said before, they shouldn’t.  But I don’t agree with Reich that fascism primarily comes out of sexual repression, though I do think it has a very powerful sexual rhetoric that was appealing to people [44].

Here again, Sontag says that people who don't kill and mutilate each other "don't take it to the limit," covering her ass with "as I said before, they shouldn't."  But she doesn't sound very convinced.  I agree with her that fascism doesn't primarily come out of sexual repression (largely because I doubt that fascism is "primarily" anything), but I disagree that violence is "the limit" of human sexuality (or of sexuality in other animal species, for that matter), and I don't think Sontag gave any reason for supposing that it is.  It sounds as if she wanted it to be, and considered that reason enough to suppose.

Which isn't to suggest that Sontag was a secret sex killer. I suppose she was excited by the fantasy, and tried to rationalize the fantasy by basing her interpretation in human nature, which indicates to me that she confused metaphor and reality here.  Compare the way that some writers have tried to identify the S&M classic The Story of O with the true nature of human sexuality or love, and the fantasies it depicts with the true desires and practices of the woman who wrote it.  As the author of that book said, "There is no reality here. Nobody could stand to be treated like that. It's entirely fantastic."  Analogously, millions of people have been thrilled by the indestructibility of John McClane, walking barefoot for hundreds of yards on broken glass, scorched by flame, beaten up repeatedly.  But "Nobody could stand to be treated like that" in real life, and it's not even an ideal to be worked for.  It's a fantasy that stands for something else.

So let me try some analogies.  Is there a similar limit to food consumption?  Are the lucky few who eat until they explode going to gastronomical limits that the rest of us unimaginative souls just lack the guts to explore?  What would be the limit of masturbation?  Or spanking your child?  Isn't that kind of ... vanilla?  Or accumulating lots and lots and lots of money?  Or writing a novel?

I think Sontag overlooked that our bodies have limits, and they're mostly fairly modest.  Most love affairs simply burn themselves out, and those that last for any length of time coexist with other human activities.  Abe and Ishida apparently found it difficult to stop copulating: they often spent days in bed at a time.  Abe wanted to kill Ishida because she was afraid she'd lose him to another woman, and she wanted to have him entirely to himself.  (Another example of the kind of "limit" Sontag evidently had in mind is obsessive jealousy, wanting to own another person.  That presumably originates in the jealousy of infants who don't want to share Mommy with anybody else.  It may be "authentic," but should it be indulged to the limit?)  But most sexual partners lose that initial craving to spend all their time glued together: the obsession wears off, turns into satiation, indifference, even repulsion.  Satiation is a limit just as authentic as stuffing yourself until you burst.  Once the body is satiated, it usually shuts down: the man can't produce an erection let alone an ejaculation, the woman gets sore or exhausted.  Sometimes it doesn't happen, but that's a sign that something has gone wrong.

The mind, on the other hand, has no limits.  (Money, as opposed to real material wealth, is similar: money is an abstraction, without inherent limits.)  We can imagine impossible things: copulating with the same person for decades without doing anything else, owning everything in the world, being the supreme King or Queen, eating your own weight in ice cream, living forever, etc.  They aren't therefore "authentic": the opposite, if anything.  It should be remembered that this notion is a point of agreement between Sontag and many religious conservatives: they believe that one (the?) function of marriage is to control sexuality, and without such control it will spill over into rape and other kinds of excess.  This is open to doubt for various reasons, for example that rape occurs in marriage too.  That Sontag and religious nuts agree on something doesn't prove it's wrong, but I'd say it ought to give one pause before one accepts it.

You Know, I Learned Something Today

One of the disadvantages of reading a lot, over a period of years, is that I become a bit harder to impress. Not impossible to impress: I still find a good many books that delight me, and I never forget how ordinary the vast majority of published writing is.

There's a famous principle, Sturgeon's Law, named after the science-fiction writer who, when told that ninety percent of science fiction is crap, retorted, "Ninety percent of everything is crap!" It's a snappy comeback, but in fact, ninety percent of everything is just ordinary, run-of-the-mill, average, mediocre. There's no reason why it shouldn't be; the really important thing is that you never know in advance where the extraordinary, head and shoulders above the rest, above-average, brilliant work will come from. And one of the wonderful things, to my mind, about writing is that you don't need special training to do it well, nor do you need to come from a long line of writers. All you need is access to books that other people have written, followed by the conviction that you want to do it too; and after that, five hundred pounds a year and a room of your own.

It seems to me, however, that the level of mediocrity in science fiction and fantasy has risen in the past fifty years. By that I mean that even today's ordinary writers write better than ordinary writers did in the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. It's partially a result of rising standards among editors and writers alike, plus writing workshops and classes, and perhaps just that a lot more people are writing. What can't be taught, though, is originality -- let alone brilliance.

But readers change too. I didn't know, when I began reading science fiction about fifty years ago, that many of the stories I encountered were reworkings of themes that were already old: the first time I encountered them, I thought they were new. Partly because of the relatively limited amount of sf available to me, I read older work, including Golden Age SF from before I was born, and some of the first critical and historical work on the genre was also being done in the 1960s. So I began to get a sense of where SF had been before I started to read it.

Nor is it a bad thing to take another crack at an idea or theme that's been done before. SF has a number of basic ideas, and I think it was the Noble Engineer Heinlein who argued in the 50s that there are only three or four basic plots. In SF, writers often tried to write the definitive Time Travel Paradox story, for example. When Isaac Asimov began writing robot stories, he was aware of what other writers had done, and tried to put his own spin on the subject. The idea of extraterrestrials coming to earth to bring us the benefits of their millions of years of civilization was also old hat when I first read Edgar Pangborn's 1953 story "Angel's Egg," though I didn't know how old hat it was at the time.

As I got older, though, I began to notice recurring themes and cliches. I liked William Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, but I soon recognized it as refurbished noir, like a lot of SF: just put your hardboiled private investigator on another planet or in another galaxy, give him a blaster and a space suit instead of a .38 and a fedora, let the femme fatale be a Catwoman, and voila. (SF readers had been complaining about that syndrome for decades before Gibson updated it a bit.) I also recognized that, contrary to what a lot of people were saying, Gibson wasn't writing "hard" SF, the kind that's based in some scientific knowledge and extrapolation: Gibson knew nothing about computers when he began writing his cyberpunk stories. That didn't make them less fun to read: they were very well written and imagined. But they were no more 'about' computers or technology than a Philip Marlowe story: they were about male anxiety.

All this is just prologue to some comment on a new anthology I just finished reading, Human for a Day, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jennifer Brozek, published a couple of months ago by DAW Books. It's an "original" anthology, in that none of the stories has been published before. I presume they were solicited to deal with the overall theme, that of non-humans who become human for a day. (Unlike many such anthologies, there's no introductory material at all, just writer bios at the very end.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room.

I'm not sure what I was expecting or hoping for, but I was let down. Of the writers I'd only heard of Tanith Lee before, but according to the bios they're all well-established and some have won Hugo and other genre awards. The trouble as I see it is that almost none of them have anything to say about the unifying theme. The stories are mostly ideas rather than stories, which set out their situations and characters, describe how the protagonist became "human for a day", and then turn him or her back; finis. One or two even feel like the opening chapters of novels, rather than stand-alone stories, which isn't good.

Almost all the stories are fantasy, rather than SF, which isn't bad in itself -- I like and have read a lot of fantasy. Still. If I'd been editor, the third story ("Cinderella City" by Seanan McGuire) would have opened the book. Here the being that becomes human for a day is the city of San Francisco, personified and humanized by an evil sorcerer, and even in human form followed everywhere by rats and pigeons. It's well done, and it entertained me better than the actual openers did. Ian Tregillis's "The Mainspring of His Heart, the Shackles of His Soul" (gratuitous Harlan Ellison allusion there) is set in an alternate universe where Dutch alchemists learned to build metal clockwork slaves with magical souls, and so came to dominate Europe and the Americas; the theme is the slave's desire to be free. The second story, "The Blade of His Plow," by Jay Lake, is about an effectively immortal soldier who'd been present at the crucifixion of Jesus and so must wander the world for thousands of years until he's set free. It's just military fantasy, full of details about soldiers' gear over the centuries. Several stories are built around war or swordplay, with severed limbs and blood geysers for the younger set. Anton Strout's "Tumulus" flaunts its writer's research on Celtic religion and magic. Tanith Lee's contribution, "The Dog-catcher's Song," is a cut above the rest in execution; Lee has been writing for a long time, so it should be. But the story itself didn't do much for me.

I was entertained by Laura Resnick's "Mortal Mix-up," in which a sophisticated New York vampire finds herself the victim of a body switch with a spoiled teenager. The spell is reversed, of course. I was not entertained by "Band of Bronze" by Jean Rabe, in which several statues from Central Park become animate for a day. Narrated by the Mad Hatter, who's accompanied by William Shakespeare and a soldier from a World War I memorial, it tells how the three take on muggers and purse snatchers, culminating in an exchange of automatic weapons fire and grenades with Crips and Bloods. Rabe has Shakespeare ("Bill") quoting his own plays, probably because she can't imitate Elizabethan English herself: she gets it wrong every damn time she tries, though I'll blame a subliterate copyeditor or a spellchecker for the time "Thou" is spelled "Though." ("Though abominable doghearted hedgepig!") The Hatter, for some reason, speaks slangy turn-of-the-21st century American English instead of the 19th-century British English I'd expect. There's a zombie story too.

I should stop to praise David D. Levine's "Into the Nth Dimension," which I hesitate to summarize here because I really don't want to spoil it. It verges delicately on camp without quite crossing over the line, and sweetly confirms what you always suspected about certain comic-book characters. There are a couple of stories in this collection with passing gay content: it's not their central point, just something that happens to be there, and I appreciated that. On the other hand, it's another of the stories which can't conform to the overall subject, but maybe that's the fault of the subject.

Praise be once again to public libraries, the training grounds of socialism. Someone (I can't remember who, but it was online) recommended Human for a Day, and I'm glad I could check it out to read, instead of spending money on it. Maybe I'm just jaded. Maybe to some thirteen-year-old just discovering SF and fantasy, these stories will be small revelations. Don't take my word for it; read it yourself if you want. Some negative reviews absolve me of any obligation to read a book; others make me want to read the book myself, because I can tell that I'll like what the reviewer didn't. I'd like this post to do both, or either, as the reader finds useful.

You'll Never Get to Heaven If You Break My Heart

While procrastinating (a skill I've honed to perfection over the past several decades) I stumbled on this review of a graphic-novel adaptation of Pauline Reage's 1954 pornographic classic The Story of O. Well, L'histoire d'O if you want to be purist about it, and of course "Pauline Reage" is a pseudonym of the literary critic Dominique Aury, which was also a pseudonym for the novelist and journalist Anne Desclos.

As the reviewer, Sasha Watson, sums it up, "The main character, O, is a Parisian fashion photographer who submits to no end of sexual torture for the pleasure of her directing lover. In his approving presence, she is whipped, raped, and abused in countless ways." And as Watson says, the book is still powerfully disturbing after almost sixty years. I finally read O myself a couple of years ago, after reading Ashley Tauchert's Against Transgression (Blackwell-Wiley, 2008), a book whose arguments I still really want to grapple with here sometime.

I appreciated Aury's own comment, quoted in the review: "There is no reality here. Nobody could stand to be treated like that. It's entirely fantastic." Which reminds me of something Gore Vidal's said about his 1948 queer novel The City and the Pillar: even though people fantasize about sex a great deal, when they read about it they assume that the author could not possibly be making things up, so many readers of The City and the Pillar assumed that Gore Vidal had, like the book's protagonist Jim Willard, worked as a tennis pro and male escort.

Watson writes:

one can't help but feel, when reading Story of O, that there's something more than pornography going on here, that what Aury is really portraying is the beating heart of passion at its wildest and most raw.

It's the great paradox of women's lives that we are expected to begin life with a passionate union and then immediately put it away and get on with the business of working and raising children. Adult women who get stuck on the passion are deemed unstable or tragic. Given that, it takes an extreme act—an act of self sacrifice—to break out of the bind. ...

In describing the place where violence and tenderness, pleasure and pain, love and brutality all meet, she's not describing an eccentric fetish culture, but a universal desire. We can all recognize in this description the thrilling vulnerability of falling in love. To forge a deep connection with another human being is to transcend the bounds of our selves, Aury is saying, and only then can we truly be free.

Well, erm, I don't think so. First, once again, I think Watson is mistaking fantasy for reality. In The Story of O, the heroine gives up both her lovers as an act of self-annihilating sacrifice, but Aury wrote the book to seduce and stimulate her lover Jean Paulhan, and it worked -- their affair continued until his death, at 84, in 1968. Her protagonist was willing to immolate herself, but Reage / Aury / Desclos wasn't.

Or, depending on whom you believe, she wrote it to challenge Paulhan's assertion that women couldn't write erotica. Or maybe it was some of both, but either way -- Desclos was no O.

Watson also confuses Declos' fantasies with more recent women writers who have written about their practice of masochism, swinging, anal sex (gasp!): "Dominique Aury lit the way with Story of O, a novel that begins and ends with messy degradation, and in which every physical act leads to spiritual transcendence", choosing to forget that memoir and erotic fantasy are different things, genres, whatever. (Indeed, the degradation in O is rarely "messy": everything is tidy, regimented, controlled. O has to ask permission even to die.) Geraldine Bedell, the writer for the Guardian piece, makes the same mistake:

But beyond its merits as a literary work, its merits or limits as pornography, there lies the paradox that this incendiary book was written by a woman who wore little make-up and no jewellery, who dressed with quiet elegance, who lived out a polite, bluestocking existence in a small flat with her parents and son. Beneath this unlikely exterior raged terrible passions. In the end, the most instructive aspect of the book is that it demonstrates the demoniac nature of sexuality in any or all of us. This quiet, learned woman understood the power of sex. She knew that desire can ignite compulsions to commit sudden, arbitrary violence and induce a yearning for voluptuous, annihilating death.

Or not. Remember that, though Desclos was devastated by Paulhan's death (they'd been lovers for decades, and had lived together for the last 11 years of his life, so that's hardly an extreme reaction), she outlived him by 30 years. I wouldn't care to assume, or even speculate, what role her undeniably powerful fantasies played in her actual sexual life. But it seems equally clear that she didn't live them, nor did she want to. I'm not saying that being spanked, or being penetrated anally, or having multiple sexual partners, are particularly extreme -- certainly not compared to O's experience at the Chateau; what matters is how a person experiences them, and not everyone experiences them the same way. A good many people think of sex of any kind as a slippery slope -- once you put your toe in, you just have to keep going in deeper, until you drown. That may also be a fantasy, but most people do not do it.

I really dislike the idea that the ideal, the telos, of love and sex is self-sacrifice, self-annihilation. Or the sacrifice and annihilation of others ("If I can't have you, no one will"). Death may be a popular metaphor for orgasm, and vice versa, but they are not the same thing. Watson also mentions Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love, which I promise I'm going to read soon! But I still say that terrible, raging "passion" (which means suffering) is something to be avoided, not courted or cultivated.

I don't mean that I'm immune to the visceral power of Desclos' fantasies; they touch deep and scary parts of me too. Brian Eno used to say that art is a safety net (both for the artist and the audience, I think): you can vicariously experience things that you couldn't and wouldn't want to experience in reality. I think he was right, and I think it's an important function of art.

But I also find useful T. S. Eliot's concept of the "objective correlative", that explicit symbols and signs in art can refer to inexplicit emotional states. (Possibly it's another way of phrasing Eno's dictum.) I know that I often find myself weeping at certain scenes in movies, usually about the loss of a beloved person, or reunion with a beloved person, or (as in Awakenings) the loss of important human capacities, like literacy or even consciousness. My point is that it's the emotional reaction, not the situation that evokes it, that is the important thing -- the payoff, if you like. It doesn't mean that I want to be reunited with my late parents, or with former boyfriends, or that I should have fathered children; or that, like Robert DeNiro's character in Awakenings, I have been (or wish I had been) in a cataleptic state for several decades. It's just that these situations in art touch me deeply in a specific way. (By analogy, the fact that I may laugh uproariously at slapstick humor in a movie doesn't mean that I'd laugh if someone slipped and fell in the street, or that I think I ought to.) Whatever the meaning of O, I don't think that anyone should treat it as a handbook for sexual or emotional relationships. When someone tries to act out "the demoniac nature of sexuality" by giving in to "compulsions to commit sudden, arbitrary violence and induce a yearning for voluptuous, annihilating death," something has gone wrong. Such things will happen sometimes no matter what we do, but I think it would help if writers, preachers, and teachers did not mistake them for the "nature of sexuality."

One other thing. Though both Sasha Watson and Geraldine Bedell pay lip service to the "universality" of The Story of O, I get the impression that the "we" they have in mind is "women." That may be comforting to many men, but it's worth remembering that The Story of O was celebrated by the French male literary establishment, not just by Paulhan but by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who contributed an introduction to the first English translation. From what I've always heard, masochists are often (usually?) male, looking for a woman (usually) to dominate them as O was dominated; a perennial complaint in s&m circles is the shortage of tops/dominants. Contrary to the book's feminist critics, I suspect that most male readers of the book identified with O, not with her masters. How many straight men have written fantasies of straightforward male abjection? There must be some, but at the moment I'm drawing a blank; what comes to mind is Allen Ginsberg's queer poem "Please Master," his ode to Neal Cassady. Gay men, who are culturally assumed to be 'feminized,' don't count, and Anne Rice's tales of male submissives in her Sleeping Beauty trilogy and Exit to Eden, being the work of a woman, probably don't count either. (As I remember -- it has been over 40 years since I read it -- Henry Miller's Sexus had some such elements, without overt sadomasochism. And then there's war fiction, which may well serve some of the same emotional function for men.)

It seems that a lot of "post-feminist" women writers have embraced the old Freudian notion of essential female masochism, ignoring the abundantly visible (but ignored, therefore invisible and therefore officially nonexistent) "deadly masochism of the male," as Adrienne Rich called it. And men in general, while many secretly hope for the strong but loving dominatrix who will take away the painful necessity of being responsible for themselves, prefer to talk out and act out fantasies of aggression, dominance, supremacy. But like passivity, submission, abjection, they are fantasies, not realities. This is a knot we all need to work at disentangling.

Reality Is For Those Who Can't Face Oz

"Fantasy is not for everybody," [Martin] Gardner contentiously puts it. "I know of no studies by professional psychologists on this matter, but I hazard the guess that an eight-year-old's liking for fantasy reflects the strength of his imagination. ... I suspect that it is from the ranks of such children, when grown, that come our most creative individuals." (Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America [Johns Hopkins, 2003], page135)

Such a tendency [to accomodate the real] was reinforced by John Dewey's turn-of-the-century preference for stories that do not encourage children to escape from reality... (Clark, 136)

When asked whether Oz is especially popular with young girls, Martin Gardner responded, "I'm afraid it is." (Clark, 140)

I think it's quite funny, this notion that "fantasy" fiction encourages children (or adults) to escape from reality while "realistic" fiction encourages children to face it. It's as funny as the Freudian belief that the Pleasure Principle is somehow opposed to the Reality Principle, though I suppose that one makes sense if you believe that Reality is no fun at all, but c'mon -- pleasure is still part of reality. I read all kinds of books as a child, from fairy tales to "realistic" fiction, biographies, popularized science, and so on, and I used all of them to escape "reality," the reality of growing up a book-crazed sissy in the semi-rural Midwest during the 1950s. Alexander the Great, George Washington Carver, Frank Lloyd Wright, Clara Barton, and Madame Curie were as real, and as fantastical, to me as Stuart Little, Jo March and her boys, Horton the elephant, the Boxcar Children, or the Three Billygoats Gruff.