Who remembers that commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
where there’s this guy walking down the street eating peanut butter, and then
another guy is walking the other way eating chocolate, and they run into each
other and fall down. And the one guy says, “You got peanut butter in my
chocolate! And the other guys says, “Well you got chocolate in my peanut
butter!” And then they both start eating it, and they’re like, “Hey, not bad!”
I think about that sometimes with the whole girl cooties
thing we're discussing this week. And because I’m an urban fantasy writer, I think about it with urban
fantasy. Like SFF readers thinking, “You got sex in my
sci-fi/fantasy!” And many feeling like that's a bad thing.
Delving into relationships and sexuality has long been
associated with a feminine point of view, and very hearth and
home and second class and all that. And not high art.
I was at a used bookstore the other day, Booksmart in Uptown
Minneapolis, and I asked the guy where the romance section was. He gave me this
look and led me to this area and said, dripping with disdain, “It’s the pink
ones.”
I stood there thinking, that’s not romance, fucker,
that’s chicklit. You work in a bookstore and you don’t even know the
difference? Like it’s all women crap. And
then I saw Kelley Armstrong shelved under erotica and I wanted to trash the
place. I will never go back.
I think there is a sense that a focus on relationships and sex scenes in particular don’t have
story value. I remember Nick Hornby, a writer I greatly admire, once saying
that he closes the door on sex scenes because, why do we need to know who put
what bits where? Like it all has no more story value than pizza delivery boy porn.
Sure, there are sex scenes that have zero story value, only
titillation value. But a lot of sex scenes do have great story value. Because,
in real life, people do reveal deep things about their character in sex, or
have turning points and various types of breakthroughs. Sex is a kind of anvil
of character development. So to me, the peanut butter and the chocolate should be
mixed together, or the story has a gap.
With battle scenes, I would never say, I don’t need to know
who put their knife where, just tell me who won. Sure, some battle scenes have no story value - they're just a lot of clashing knives and foot sweeps, but many do. Choreography-only battle scenes don't make me think battle scenes don't belong in good books. It’s sort
of like the question, how long is a piece of string? Aren’t you glad there’s an
illustration for that?
I actually read a lot of the comments on that notorious
Scalzi post about the “booth bunny/geek” issue, and a lot of the objections to
women’s involvement in SFF cons revolve around their degrading the genre and the cons
with a preoccupation with sex and/or titillation or relationship stuff without reverence,
or really even knowledge, of what SFF is all about, the idea being that that’s a bad way of interacting with
the genre and takes space from others. I thought the dialogue was cool, as was
Scalzi’s post. One of the points made was that women interact with the SFF
genre in many ways, and even if they interact as “booth bunnies,” is it so very
wrong? Why can’t that be their way, or even their gateway?
A lot of the objections to feminine interaction is a kind of
“scarcity thinking,” like there is somehow not enough to go around, or a thing
will be taken away or changed for the worse.
I see this objection with cons, and also the bookstore shelving issue
– I’m talking about B&N now--new bookstores. Like girls are taking away
dwindling SFF shelf space and con space. And I think that is scarcity thinking, which is
a way of being small and not expansive.
Which is ironic, considering SFF is so
much about imagining something beyond current reality. In my mind, the failure to imagine
something more, and the urge to cling to the past, is always an enemy of art and of progress.
To me, UF and SFF, like all great literature, is way of
encountering humanity and the humanity in ourselves, and if you take it by that
definition, the marginalization of women, or of any mode of human interaction,
is just a kind of impoverishment.
