I have several vloggers I follow on youtube – Acapella Science (the science singer), Action Movie Kid (family fun and special effects), Jill Bearup (on writing and fandom with her lovely accent), and, most recently, the Pop Culture Detective. His posting for today was especially insidious. (Fair Warning – Watching today’s episode, linked below, may wreck some of your favorite movies. It did not for me, since I had long ago realized these issues. I never saw the Bladerunner scene for anything other than what is described in the video; I saw it as an college-age female after … well, we don’t discuss such things in mixed companies, it might hurt our male friends to know. They’re fragile.)
You know, never mind. I watched Bladerunner after I had two experiences of being thrown against a wall by a male – once in college from a guy I had been friends with for over a year and once by a random guy in high school. The high school guy put his hands either side of me against the wall to hem me in and waited for a reaction. My friend, FRIEND, tried to strangle me because he was angry – I had been ragging him about school as teenagers are wont to do for a while and he exploded. Guys are stronger. The friend was actually shorter and younger than me, and I couldn’t break his grip. To this day, I still can’t have a massage on both sides of my neck at the same time. In any situation where a woman is alone with a man she is offering a trust beyond anything a person used to being in a position of strength can ever understand.
And, here is the truly crazy part, I blame myself for the friend one. I had been the one teasing him and I “should have known better”. Why?
Because our culture says it is the female’s job to avoid getting herself hurt. I won’t walk out a door unless my keys are in my hands so I can get either in the house quickly or in the car, and they, as I have been taught, double as a weapon. A piss-poor weapon because we are to throw them at the bad guy’s face, and then how are we to get away? I won’t go on about the rape culture; if you are on social media, you are aware of the issues. Thanks to social media, it’s an open secret.
Anyway, like I said, the vlog didn’t show me anything new. What it did make me do is look at my writings. I love romance and I love sci-fi. Both of these formats heavily lean on the predator-prey dynamic of the “woman doth protest too much”. Have I done this unconsciously, just like I absorbed it was me who is to blame about the friend getting angry? I had to look.
It’s so easy to fall into the classic “woman saying no but meaning yes”. I have consciously tried to avoid such scenarios. Just like avoiding my pet peeve of the couple not saying they love each other, or making assumptions without talking to each other, just so the author can keep them apart as a tension device. I endeavor to make my characters be mature adults. Even Dewayne in Honestly didn’t strike out physically, but left when asked to (and if I ever write the next story of that family unit, we will even see him mature a little, not a lot, but some). One of my readers mentioned expecting to see a physical altercation between Dewayne and Troy, and even during my initial writing I was thinking I needed to do that to prove Troy was the Alpha Male so often seen in romances. But as I wrote the story, the characters revealed themselves to be beyond the caveman-must-pound-chests … not by much admittedly with the screaming matches Kassandra and Dewayne regularly participate in, but they were real people.
So I reviewed my novella. In each scene Troy and Kassandra asked permission before closing, before touching. They respected boundaries and did nothing to weaken each other, such as playing games with the prosthesis. Each exchange was as honest and complete as they emotionally could handle at the time. (wipe sweat from brow) I had done what I had set out to do, write an erotica where both people were sexual, healthy beings.
Now the rest of my writings. Looking over the blog, the closest one is The Bleue Toscano Eggs of Power. In this one I was trying for the predator-prey vibe, since the couple about to become sexual were both super-power villains. But I also wanted it to show each was giving the other permission to move forward. They circled, touched, backed off, and bartered. Even with two forces of evil(ish), I managed to avoid coercion through mundane or magical literary devices. Meaning it can be done. American culture has it so women cannot wholeheartedly act sexually and this is unhealthy. It’s one of the reasons why I find erotica so freeing when done right.
We need to do it “right” more often, allowing the free and open “Yes” of women and men. Allowing tender touches and secret smiles, the sizzles and spanks. The only way to do that is “normalize” healthy behavior and phase out the unhealthy.
I promise to continue to write about Alpha Males who stand equal to their Alpha Females, if you promise to continue to tell me and other writers this is what you want to see.
