That Reading Over the Weekend Moved Me to Tears

This weekend, I was in New York City at Bluestockings reading from Me and My Boi: Queer Erotic Stories, as I know I said ahead of time. I have to talk about the event in retrospect, though, because it was really impressive, hit me with more raw sexual energy and emotion than I would ever have expected, and made me feel like Me and My Boi is one of those important books that deserves every effort I can make to highlight it.

I was reading with Aimee Herman, Gigi Frost, Dena Hankins, Anna Watson, and Sacchi Green. I found myself near tears at times, squirming with arousal at others, and sometimes both at once. It feels like I should have known that a book about the erotic power of female masculinity would stir up so much, but still it blindsided me.

Moments I remember:

Aimee Herman, who read like your favorite adventurous, hard-drinking friend taking you out to bend your ear, creating this mess of feverish, omnidirectional queer desire more powerful than the strongest whiskey. Coyly, just like that friend would do, Aimee pretended to skip the good part, namely the details of the rough bathroom fuck with a packing stranger known only as Q that the story had been building up to, then grinned at the audience as we all reeled from the tease. (Those details did not, in the end, get skipped.)

Tearing up as Gigi Frost described the almost unbearable intimacy of a masculine woman revealing her chest to her lover.

Having it dawn on me, as Dena Hankins read from her story set on a boat, that I’ve never really recognized my own clothing (often sporty, these days) described so accurately, made so sexy in the process. The lines a sports bra leaves, the struggle with wrestling it away from an ample chest—it felt so real, and it stunned me that I’d never thought to write it, couldn’t recall having ever read it written that way before.

Anna Watson, whose work always floors me with its sheer emotional power, embodying the voice of her story’s stern femme top, whose orders bring about a transformation—from “funny little woman” to newly minted, sexual, being-herself-at-last boi.

Sacchi Green, relishing as always the role of the crone who can make a room full of youngsters get more turned on than we’d like to admit, reading from a story that plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness until both turn into need.

And for my own story, I hope people got something out of the moments I was up at the front of the room. The biggest moment for me was earlier, when I was practicing, and I heard it all as a letter from pieces of myself I’d been suppressing. My story, “Not Just Hair,” which I wrote some years ago now, set off an eruption in my life. I’m divided by the weekend I wrote it—before, when I could still lie myself about some things, and afterward, when I didn’t know the truth but had no choice but to look for it.

All this to say, this book is really special. So many of us seemed to have changed ourselves in the course of writing for it, or to have exposed something deep and buried.

I have one quarrel with the way the evening was presented. Sacchi seemed to want to apologize for us a bit, feeling that the readers for the night didn’t present as masculine as she might have wished. It would have been cool to read alongside an unabashed butch, certainly, but I object to any implications that the perspectives presented were all femme. I think we know enough now in the world to see that so many things take place on a spectrum, and so much can be going on beneath the surface of how a person dresses at the moment.

While some stories seemed to have been written and read from the perspective of a femme appreciating a butch, mine wasn’t. Mine was written from a place of confusion and change, yearning for the courage to be things I wasn’t raised to be. Reading the story now, I’m humbled by how frightened I still am of the parts of myself that appear in it. I don’t know where I’m going, but there’s something going on for me with gender. It’s clear from what I write, but it’s hard for me to say anything about it out loud, or to say it in relation to me instead of in relation to characters.

So I wish Sacchi hadn’t assumed things about presentation. I don’t want to speak for anyone besides myself, so I won’t say anything about what I think the other writers might have meant. As a listener, though, I heard that ambiguity, that complexity, that confusion about what gender even is and what it means to enact it with each other as queers who get to/have to find our own way.

And I’m so convinced this book is important. And I can promise you it’s sexy. I hope lots of people check it out.

Are women really more disgusted by sex than men are?

I've never liked the stereotype that men like sex and women don't. It seems so patently false to me, both because of my own experience and because of things like the apparent success of publishers like Ellora's Cave, Harlequin, and all the rest.

There does seem to be some kind of scientific backing for the stereotype, however. Here's a bit I came across in Rachel Herz's book That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion:

Closely connected to our repulsion at animality is our disgust at sexuality. ... Sex is among the most brutish behaviors we engage in, and though all cultures have rules for "proper" sex, we cannot escape the fact that sex itself is raw and physical and that we make the beast with two backs quite literally.

Besides being more generally squeamish than men, women tend to be specifically more disgusted by sex than men are. For example, in the first experiment to investigate differences between the sexes in response to sexually explicit films, female college students rated pornographic movies as 20 percent more disgusting and less enjoyable than men did. Many subsequent studies have corroborated the finding that women are more disgusted by sex than men are.

When I read things like this, I always wonder if the disgust the female students are reporting is truly biological or neurological or the result of a lifetime of being told that women don't like sex. I'm also curious about how the specific pornography shown influenced the female college students' response. Are the women more disgusted by sex, per se, or are they more disgusted by something about the way the sex is presented? This seems a significant distinction, though it's all too easy to conflate the two.

For those interested, a nitpicky analysis of the footnotes to the paragraph quoted above:
I want to get hold of the study cited in this paragraph -- D.L. Mosher, "Sex differences, sex experience, sex guilt and explicit sexual films," Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973), 95-112 -- I imagine it may answer some of my questions. But right off the bat, I have to note this study came out in 1973. If female disgust at sexuality is socially based rather than biologically based, then I'd be really interested in an update.

Herz cites another study (in a footnote after the sentence about how many studies have corroborated Mosher's finding), but when I checked out that citation, I wasn't sure how relevant it was. (D.M.T. Fessler and C.D. Navarette, "Third-party attitudes toward sibling incest evidence for Westermarck's hypothesis," Evolution and Human Behavior 25 (2004), 277-94.) It was a paper about how third parties respond to sibling incest, which found women reacted with stronger disgust. Saying women are more disgusted by incest than men are seems pretty different from saying women are more disgusted by sex than men are.

Given my dissatisfaction with these footnotes I wonder if the problem here is that Herz is buying into the cultural stereotype that women don't like sex. If those two citations are the best she's got, I wonder if there really is scientific evidence to back up her statements about women's disgust at sexuality.

The Difficulties of Writing About Penises

Erotica For All put up a guest post from me today, in which I talked about the challenges of writing sex scenes from a male point of view as a female author:

Take the case of a male point of view. I like penises. I’ve played with my fair share. And I’m a human who doesn’t believe that men are from Mars and women are from Venus — we’re both from Earth, and we have a lot in common. I probably wouldn’t hesitate to write a non-erotic story from a man’s point of view. Erotica, on the other hand, intimidated me, since such an undertaking would necessitate describing how it feels to have a cock.

This came up a lot when I was working on my e-book The Six Swans, which was entirely from a male point of view. But since I conquered the fear with that piece, I've found myself writing from the "other side" more frequently. Less Than a Day, for example, came very naturally that way. And I recently contracted for my first m/m story.

If you'd like to see my mini writing lab on how I leveraged my own sexual experience to pry my way into the head of the opposite gender, you can read the full post at Erotica For All.

The Demotion

I've noticed a negative shift in how others react to my writing, one that I think has to do with subtle sexism.

I used to spend most of my writing time on technology journalism. Most of my professional interactions were with men. They were the vast majority of my interview subjects, readers, and editors. My career also played well with men. At dinner parties, I invariably found myself in long discussions with the men about the merits or flaws of the iPhone, or similar subjects.

My career commanded respect. People took me seriously and never asked things like, "Is there enough work?" or "Do you make a living writing that?"

Things are different now, and I'm writing a much larger proportion of erotica. Most of my professional interactions are with women. Women are the vast majority of my writer friends, readers, and editors. I have a "coming out" issue when asked about what I write. Do I talk about it at all? Is whoever I'm talking to going to react strangely? I avoid the subject at dinner parties.

When I do tell people about my writing, I often get asked, "Is there enough work?" or "Do you actually get paid to write that?" or "When will you go back to writing 'real' stuff?"

Some of this may have to do with the taboo subject of sex versus the socially acceptable subject of technology (ironically, frequently written about using terms borrowed from the language of sex). However, I think some of the sense of demotion has to do with writing in a "woman's world" versus in a "man's world." I get added support for this theory because I sometimes play softball by saying I write "romance," which seems to inspire even more questioning about whether I am actually doing anything -- despite the fact that romance sells beautifully.

I sense loss of respect from conversation partners, but also within myself. Over and over again, I have to remind myself that I'm writing erotica more because this is what I enjoy writing the most. I am doing this for pleasure, and because I seem to be pretty good at it. And yet I feel strong pressure to write more about technology to regain respect.

When I ask myself why, I keep coming up with ideas like this writing is frivolous, less valuable, or self-indulgent. I should note that this runs directly opposite to my deeply held beliefs, and my personal experience of the power of writing and reading erotica. I frequently uncover beliefs about how this writing isn't as serious or well-crafted, despite knowing how hard I work on it -- in many cases, much harder and with more concern for art than was the case when I wrote about technology.

The sense of frivolity or lack of value keep bringing me back to subtle sexism I've found in my thinking. I grew up with the sense that I should try as hard as possible to act as little like a woman as possible. I didn't want to talk like a woman, have emotions like a woman, or behave like a woman. In writing erotica, I really embrace my femininity -- much more powerfully than I did in my technology writing. The sense of demotion that comes with that feels sinister to me, related to that deeper underlying sense that I should avoid being female wherever I could manage to do so.