Is a Cigar Ever Just a Cigar? (A Brief, Personal, and Uncompleted History of Sex in Romance Fiction)
The significant birthday I'm going to be celebrating soon has its good and its bad aspects. But when I'm feeling down about it I comfort myself that I can blog at this site about anything that interests me because I, after all, am history. 
For certainly the romance genre changed since I've been writing in it -- as one of the Smart Bitches might say, let me count the ways, yo. At least from the erotic side of things, which is where I, uh... sit... I'd begin counting thusly:
-- Beginning with those readers who were shocked, shocked, when I suggested, in Almost a Gentleman, that a man might ever be attracted to a man (except for when he was part of that acceptable romance device of bad first husband who didn't make the heroine feel sexually desirable).
-- Or when writing about certain sexual positions was enough, as romance reviewer Mrs. Giggles once said of my novella "A House East of Regent Street," to "send genteel readers into seizures."
-- Not to speak of when it was as though I lived and wrote in two entirely separate worlds -- of the hard-core kink of the erotic novels I wrote as Molly Weatherfield and according to the it's-all-about-the-relationship diktat of the erotic romance I wrote as Pam Rosenthal (and when I was urged to keep my dual identity quiet).
None of which distinctions -- to my great fascination -- seem to hold anymore.
The first set of walls that toppled for me was the necessity of keeping my dual identity under wraps. Even in 2003, just after Pam's Almost a Gentleman was first published and Molly's Carrie's Story was reissued, I organized a joint book party for both my authorial identities, at which "we" read from "our" books and talked about the themes "we" shared, and nobody (including my romance editor) seemed to get too exercised about it. Probably because erotic romance was getting so steamy that the borders between it and erotica were simply melting away (more about this later).
While as for the other two changes I've seen, though -- the almost deadpan readerly casualness nowadays about less conventional physical sex and the growing market for romances between two men: You can see examples of both of these in a recent discussion at DearAuthor.com, titled "Do you Skim/Skip Sex Scenes?" And as someone who tends to give a lot of thought to authorial choices in writing about explicit sexuality, I was fairly well blown away by all the "ho-hum, another anal scene" comments, not to speak of a fair number of "oh well, I just read the m/m stuff..." responses.
Though I shouldn't have been surprised by those "ho hum, another..." responses. Actually, I suppose I should have been able to predict them a few years ago when, at a Romance Writers of America National Conference, I found myself talking at a party to an editor from a romance house just about to launch its erotica line.
The editor (who's no longer in the business) was proud as punch and I was curious to find out more.
"So," I asked, "what authorial take will you be looking for, when writing about sex?"
"Oh," she said, "there'll be a lot more sex."
"Yes," I said. "I imagine so. But you know, erotic writing is... well, it takes a certain sense of... of self... and..." I'm not sure what I was going to say, because the business of writing explicit sex, where craft meets self-exposure and pleasure meets I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-doing-this-but-just-try-and-stop-me continues to astonish, delight, and mortally confuse me.
But I didn't get a chance to say it, because the editor in question didn't seem to find anything confusing about it. "A LOT more sex," she repeated. "TWICE as much as in Almost a Gentleman."
More. Right. I got it. As though MORE was all you knew on earth and all you need to know. Which is why, I think, you get all those ho-hum responses now.
While as for the m/m stuff -- well, here I'm curious and fascinated and working overtime to read and understand the historical journey from Jane Austen, who never wrote a scene between men that didn't have a woman present (because she herself could never have physically witnessed such a conversation) to the increasingly common sexually explicit male/male romance written for women by women.
In fact, I was curious (and sometimes entertained) enough by the m/m romance phenomenon enough to put myself on the line recently and propose a presentation for this summer's IASPR conference (International Association for the Study of Popular Romance) conference in Brussels, Belgium, with the title of "The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Imagination." Partly because I figured it was the only way I'd ever get myself to read the brilliant late academic Sedgwick with anything like the attention and discipline her work demands. (Sedgwick was one of the originators of what's called "queer theory" -- and no, it doesn't mean that every story or relationship can be "deconstructed" to find a homosexual one beneath... it means something a great deal more complex and interesting, that I hope to write about after I manage my own reading of it to my satisfaction.)
Which is why you're likely to find me in the library most afternoons these days taking apart Sedgwick's dense, magisterial sentences and feeling as I do that I'm splitting atoms of heavy metal and releasing energy that seems to shimmer and shed new light -- on the questions I've been stuttering about for years, in the strange matter of close-up-and-personal erotic and romantic writing.
And yes, I do have some provisional answers. But not now or here. Except for two hints:
-- yeah, it's at least partly about power. Always has been, which is no surprise to me because for the space of my adult life at least, romance and feminism have been leap-frogging each other to make more sense of these issues in the erotic arena.
-- and in Sedgwick's words from her book Epistemology of the Closet (and with a nod to the guy with the
cigar):
OK. Readers and writers in the romance (and other) genres: What other changes have you noted, and why do you think that is?
And are any of you going to Brussels this August?
For certainly the romance genre changed since I've been writing in it -- as one of the Smart Bitches might say, let me count the ways, yo. At least from the erotic side of things, which is where I, uh... sit... I'd begin counting thusly:
-- Beginning with those readers who were shocked, shocked, when I suggested, in Almost a Gentleman, that a man might ever be attracted to a man (except for when he was part of that acceptable romance device of bad first husband who didn't make the heroine feel sexually desirable).
-- Or when writing about certain sexual positions was enough, as romance reviewer Mrs. Giggles once said of my novella "A House East of Regent Street," to "send genteel readers into seizures."
-- Not to speak of when it was as though I lived and wrote in two entirely separate worlds -- of the hard-core kink of the erotic novels I wrote as Molly Weatherfield and according to the it's-all-about-the-relationship diktat of the erotic romance I wrote as Pam Rosenthal (and when I was urged to keep my dual identity quiet).
None of which distinctions -- to my great fascination -- seem to hold anymore.
The first set of walls that toppled for me was the necessity of keeping my dual identity under wraps. Even in 2003, just after Pam's Almost a Gentleman was first published and Molly's Carrie's Story was reissued, I organized a joint book party for both my authorial identities, at which "we" read from "our" books and talked about the themes "we" shared, and nobody (including my romance editor) seemed to get too exercised about it. Probably because erotic romance was getting so steamy that the borders between it and erotica were simply melting away (more about this later).
While as for the other two changes I've seen, though -- the almost deadpan readerly casualness nowadays about less conventional physical sex and the growing market for romances between two men: You can see examples of both of these in a recent discussion at DearAuthor.com, titled "Do you Skim/Skip Sex Scenes?" And as someone who tends to give a lot of thought to authorial choices in writing about explicit sexuality, I was fairly well blown away by all the "ho-hum, another anal scene" comments, not to speak of a fair number of "oh well, I just read the m/m stuff..." responses.
Though I shouldn't have been surprised by those "ho hum, another..." responses. Actually, I suppose I should have been able to predict them a few years ago when, at a Romance Writers of America National Conference, I found myself talking at a party to an editor from a romance house just about to launch its erotica line.
The editor (who's no longer in the business) was proud as punch and I was curious to find out more.
"So," I asked, "what authorial take will you be looking for, when writing about sex?"
"Oh," she said, "there'll be a lot more sex."
"Yes," I said. "I imagine so. But you know, erotic writing is... well, it takes a certain sense of... of self... and..." I'm not sure what I was going to say, because the business of writing explicit sex, where craft meets self-exposure and pleasure meets I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-doing-this-but-just-try-and-stop-me continues to astonish, delight, and mortally confuse me.
But I didn't get a chance to say it, because the editor in question didn't seem to find anything confusing about it. "A LOT more sex," she repeated. "TWICE as much as in Almost a Gentleman."
More. Right. I got it. As though MORE was all you knew on earth and all you need to know. Which is why, I think, you get all those ho-hum responses now.
While as for the m/m stuff -- well, here I'm curious and fascinated and working overtime to read and understand the historical journey from Jane Austen, who never wrote a scene between men that didn't have a woman present (because she herself could never have physically witnessed such a conversation) to the increasingly common sexually explicit male/male romance written for women by women.
In fact, I was curious (and sometimes entertained) enough by the m/m romance phenomenon enough to put myself on the line recently and propose a presentation for this summer's IASPR conference (International Association for the Study of Popular Romance) conference in Brussels, Belgium, with the title of "The Queer Theory of Eve Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Imagination." Partly because I figured it was the only way I'd ever get myself to read the brilliant late academic Sedgwick with anything like the attention and discipline her work demands. (Sedgwick was one of the originators of what's called "queer theory" -- and no, it doesn't mean that every story or relationship can be "deconstructed" to find a homosexual one beneath... it means something a great deal more complex and interesting, that I hope to write about after I manage my own reading of it to my satisfaction.)
Which is why you're likely to find me in the library most afternoons these days taking apart Sedgwick's dense, magisterial sentences and feeling as I do that I'm splitting atoms of heavy metal and releasing energy that seems to shimmer and shed new light -- on the questions I've been stuttering about for years, in the strange matter of close-up-and-personal erotic and romantic writing.
And yes, I do have some provisional answers. But not now or here. Except for two hints:
-- yeah, it's at least partly about power. Always has been, which is no surprise to me because for the space of my adult life at least, romance and feminism have been leap-frogging each other to make more sense of these issues in the erotic arena.
-- and in Sedgwick's words from her book Epistemology of the Closet (and with a nod to the guy with the
cigar):"...where would the whole, astonishing and metamorphic Western romance tradition (I include psychoanalysis) be if people's sexual desire, of all things, were even momentarily assumed to be transparent to themselves?"Not to speak (this is me, Pam, now) of how many romance (and romance-inflected) novels we'd have lost along the way. (And I absolutely love that she uses the same word I so often do, "astonishing.")
OK. Readers and writers in the romance (and other) genres: What other changes have you noted, and why do you think that is?
And are any of you going to Brussels this August?
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