mythbusting women’s erotica

Literary fictions are useful to living because they’re untrue, which means they’re dynamic and capable of being changed. Frank Kermode writes “fictions are not myths, and they are not hypotheses; you neither rearrange the world to suit them [myths], nor test them by experiment [hypotheses]…” Also, fictions “are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change…. We know that if we want to find out about ourselves, make sense, we must avoid the regress into myth which has deceived poet, historian, and critic.” (from The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction).

Myth is how we structure time through purpose; time as we think of it doesn’t even exist without having meaning to order it, a reason that ties a series of consecutive moments together into a mythical beginning, the present middle, and the mythical end. I’m not talking just myths like you learned in school: the Garden of Eden or Hercules Ten Labors. Myths exist in current places, as in the myth of American democracy (in structure, we’re a republic; in practice, a plutocracy).

Myth can be said to be the version of reality we build our fictions upon, but that makes some fictions good and some bad, depending on the clarity and honesty of our myth/reality. A lot of people define nonfiction as true and fiction false, but it seems to me a good novel usually contains more truth than any news article. Of course, for the really creative nonfiction, I settle for Fox News, and I’ve met the same sort of spin in fiction writing, too, when the truths you expect from an author are based on bad myths, making that truth suspect. I’ve run across a lot of this kind of writing online in the past few years, ever since ebook publishers began publishing women’s erotica.

Once-upon-a-time, I had six novels & stories contracted through online publishers. You can still find a few of the reviews out there, although the books are no longer available. Here’s a summary of my two years of experience with these presses: three presses, one of which died with its publisher (literally) and two that made significant leadership changes in significantly unprofessional ways. In the end, I removed myself from these businesses, and *poof* went two years of writing. Not that I’m unhappy. I felt as if I had been freed.

Anyone can start an online venture. No overhead. No experience. No qualifications except the desire to make money. A new press pops up every few weeks, and about 90% of both readers and the writers of this genre are women. But just because women are writing about sex doesn’t mean they’re writing about women’s pleasure. It doesn’t mean they’re doing much of anything but reinforcing our cultural stereotypes. They’re seldom examining the myths of sex and gender they’ve built their world around.

It’s rather disheartening to me, maybe especially because I believe there’s so much potential in women writing their desires. But it seems feminism has only freed women to be more accessible to men’s pleasure. Few know their own. Women in these stories are often caricatures, their sex seen and experienced in phallic terms. I’m not sure if that’s because the authors are poor writers or because they’re expressing what they see in pornography or from their male-centered bedrooms.

The worst story I recall was a young girl whose father was murdered by a pirate before her eyes. She was kidnapped and later raped violently by the murdering pirate (she experienced “searing” pain, blood), and after he left her in chains, she was so turned on she had an old woman slave perform oral sex on her. Yes, a woman wrote that. An erotic romance publisher sells it.

I admit, that’s the worst I’ve seen, though I’m more careful these days. Other authors have such contrived sex or such dull emotions that I can’t imagine how any woman gets turned on in the story or by reading it. Of course, they do, because an indoctrinated woman learns her power is about giving pleasure, rather than deserving it. Women’s erotica tends to be about how the protagonist creates desire in her male partner; the pleasure she gives is her measure of value to a male, and her value to the male is her only “true” source of pleasure, according to the underlying myth.

Scientific studies have shown repeatedly over the last two decades that many women don’t find pleasure in penetration alone, and very few experience orgasm from penetration alone, but not only is this a feature of male-centered pornography, it’s explicit in most women’s erotica, too. In other words, even women’s fiction is about the power of the penis. Only by using the male myth of sex can these writers possibly be ignorant of the fact that the clitoris is the female sex organ, while the vagina is a reproductive organ. They trust men more than their own bodies to tell them what feels good.

Well, I will end with a few quotes from Helene Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, where she explains how women can and should write their own, true experience of sex:

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experiment-precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.

I wished that the woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.

…

Men have committed the greatest crime against women, Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven’t got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove.

…

It is well known that the number of women writers … has always been ridiculously small. This is a useless and deceptive fact unless from their species of female writer we do not first deduct the immense majority whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women…

(Trans. Keith & Paula Cohen)