Reading News in the New Age

I can't be the only one who's had a hard time focusing this week. Here's what I said on Twitter, and I'm not sure how much more intelligently I can add to it right now.

Reading news lately is like getting 100 stress in Darkest Dungeon pic.twitter.com/jbkQYSahRo

— Annabeth Leong (@AnnabethLeong) May 11, 2017

I guess Darkest Dungeon has this possibility, too, but I'm still working on that. pic.twitter.com/xzjufgG7pl

— Annabeth Leong (@AnnabethLeong) May 11, 2017

It's really overwhelming lately to stay alert, and to do anything, and I think this is the second time I've said that this week. Still, I'm trying.

Today there's a protest in downtown Providence, where people will demand an independent investigation in the wake of the Comey firing. I don't know if I have it in me to go, but I want to.

[And can I say a quick thing here? I went to the Women's March in Providence, and people there talked about people "getting off the couch" and coming to protest, and I really didn't like hearing it put that way. "Get off the couch" plays into that thing of calling other people lazy, and it's too popular and rather cruel. There are lots of reasons it can be hard to show up to a protest. For me personally, social anxiety and depression are major factors. So if I'm not there, it's not fair to assume that's because I'm "on the couch." I can think of plenty of other non-lazy reasons for people to not have a history of in-person protest activity.

I'm aware that it can really make a difference to show up in person, so I try to push myself. But it is something I have to really push myself to do. And I have to say that being in a shout-y crowd can be really tough for me. I went with a hesitant partner to a community town hall held by RI Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. There wasn't enough room inside for the crowd, and the crowd got angry. My partner was distressed by the atmosphere and begged me to leave. I felt really torn, because I thought it was important to stay, but I also didn't want to ignore my partner's needs (and need for soothing).

I don't mean to say that people shouldn't be angry, because truly outrageous things are going on. I'm just saying that I wish I heard a bit more understanding about reasons other than laziness that might make people reluctant to go to protests.

All that said, I'm really going to try to go today.]

Anyway, the other thing I did this week, which was much easier for my bookish personality, was read Timothy Snyder's amazing book, On Tyranny. I want to buy copies and just sort of leave them around the city. It took only a few hours to read, but it was profound, scary, and somehow also inspiring. After reading it, I have no doubt that our democracy is in danger, and I also feel a bit more informed about what particularly to watch out for, and ways I can make myself ready to stand up against it. I'm planning to review this soon on Goodreads, and it's also a book I plan to read again.

I highly recommend it, especially if you're feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of terrifying news. The book helped me sharpen my thinking a bit, and I needed that.

Anyway, I'm going to keep trying to be stalwart, vigorous, courageous, and powerful. I hope you can be, too!

Hawaii Is A Real Place

I was born in Hawaii, and lived there for the first decade of my life. My father was native Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese and my mother is English. I grew up wrestling with difficult questions about race and identity, exacerbated by my own mixed blood and the feeling that I didn't belong anywhere, especially not after I left the island. As part of that, I feel a complicated mix of pride in Hawaii's history, anguish over the way it was illegally annexed and taken over by the United States government, and awareness that I was born a citizen of the United States and Hawaii is an important part of this nation now. My father served in the army during the Vietnam War, and that experience marked his entire life. In many ways, I'd say it was for the worse, but I also know I could never have buried him without the veterans benefits he had earned.

So this is complicated and important stuff.

I've had some weird racial experiences by virtue of coming from Hawaii. Once in the late 90s, near the Arizona border, I was pulled off a Greyhound bus by the INS, along with a group of Spanish-speaking people I'd been sitting with and talking to. (I think this may have been a case of racial-profiling-by-association, especially because when I'm tan I've often been mistaken for Latina). In the course of being searched and questioned, I presented my U.S. Passport. "Born in Hawaii?" the officer sneered. "When were you naturalized?"

To which I replied, "1959, when the territory was made a state." (I was born decades later than this.) I wish I'd said that to be clever or sarcastic, but I was speaking mostly out of utter confusion. I couldn't believe this person didn't know Hawaii was a state, and that I'd been a citizen all my life. But that was an important experience that taught me that not even my U.S. Passport could keep me safe from suspicion and ill treatment, from the sense that I somehow "don't belong here"—even though I've never lived in any other country.

I have sometimes been told, perhaps by people who are taking me for a Chinese immigrant, to "go home" or "go back to my own country." Again, I say, I have nowhere else to go. My home is in this country, and it has been for as long as I've been alive. And I find that brand of xenophobia particularly rich when it comes from the perspective of people who didn't respect the sovereignty of the Hawaiian nation. It makes me want to say, "No, you go home. Give the Hawaiian people back our kingdom. Give us self-determination. Give up the land you plundered."

I imagine, though I do not know for sure, that this bullshit happens to Native Americans from the continental United States, too. I bet they get told to "go home," and I bet they feel that particularly bitter burn in response as well. (And, for the record, that "go home" shit is an awful thing to say to anyone, it represents a piss-poor and cruel attitude, and anyone who says it should be ashamed of themselves, whether the target of the comment is an indigenous person or not. In no way do I mean to imply that it is "okay" to say this to actual immigrants. It is not. What I am highlighting here is that it is racist, cruel, and bitterly ironic to tell indigenous people to "go home.")

So there is some context that might help a person understand how I felt when I read this quote from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

"I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power."

I know I'm not the only one who's talked about how upsetting it is for a quote like this to come out of the U.S. Attorney General's mouth, but I feel it's important for me to say so as well, clearly and explicitly.

This quote brought me back to the incidents I've personally experienced, such as those I've described above. In a historical and political context, the statement is wrong and desperately unfair. (I'm focused here on the disparagement of Hawaii in particular, but I also want to note how wrong Jeff Sessions is about what's "clearly" the president's statutory and Constitutional power.)

For better or worse, Hawaii is an integral part of the union that makes up the United States. Pearl Harbor, anyone? My father, fighting in the Vietnam War wearing this nation's uniform. The heroism of former U.S. Senator Dan Inouye. The birthplace of former president Barack Obama. Patsy T. Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress. Mazie Hirono, the first Asian-American woman in the U.S. Senate, and this nation's first elected Buddhist. I could go on and on.

What I felt when I first learned about the court ruling that prompted this statement was an intense sense of pride in my home. Hawaii is a diverse place, where people from many cultures must interact and work together, and it makes sense to me that a place like that would have an important message to send the nation as a whole about the harm that is done through bigotry and isolationism. Rather than disparaging the island in the Pacific where I was born, Jeff Sessions ought to be damn grateful that the United States gets to benefit from the perspective and wisdom that comes from that place.

And the sarcastic part of me says that if he thinks an island in the Pacific is so unimportant, he ought to ask himself why the United States government was so unwilling to give it back to its people after the illegal actions that overthrew its government in the first place...

Writing Erotica Forces Me to Think About Society

Erotic writers have a reason to be social activists too, especially if they are any shade of queer. Freedom to tell the truth about feelings and lifestyles can’t be completely separated from freedom to live honestly. In some ways, however, writing is exactly opposite from social action. Writing is usually done best alone, in a quiet room. Public displays of protest or solidarity require groups that grow into crowds. Filling the streets in support of an idea is a statement in itself.
-- from "Politically Incorrect" by Jean Roberta

I've been mulling over this quote for several days. More and more, my work has made me realize that I can't separate writing from social action. The deeper I delve into erotic questions that interest me, the more I find myself forced to take positions on issues I've spent a lot of my life afraid to speak up about.

For example, I'm genuinely and truly interested in characters who are seeking sexual autonomy—people who are developing a sense of what they like to do in bed and who they want to do it with. Often, this involves a difficult learning process of speaking up about discomfort or becoming aware of how it is that they came to be adults without learning this. Or it involves some sort of radical action (or at least action that feels radical to the characters) to claim their sexuality as their own. But this often leads me to larger societal considerations.


I'll use an example from a very short story of mine, "Too Much to Give," published in Go Deeper Press's Dirty Little Numbers.

Raul bought me a butt plug because he wants to fuck my ass. In that final frontier of male fantasy, he sees a chance to gain indelible proof that I love him.

As far as he knows, I’ve never even dared to remove the toy from its silk drawstring bag. To him, it’s as untouched and virginal as my asshole.

In fact, Raul's impression of the situation couldn't be more wrong. The narrator of this story loves ass play, but she does it on her own, in secret, with the defiant declaration, "My ass is my own."

I felt bold when I wrote this story because I was claiming ass play as something a woman would do for herself. To people immersed in erotica, that might not sound radical because we're surrounded by sex-positive refrains and stories that focus on female pleasure. I can tell you with authority, however, that in my own life, given the way I was raised, among the people I've known, in the relationships I've experienced, that is a radical, radical idea. My first experiences with anal sex were about coercion, trickery, pressure, and various men demanding love be proven to them. The story isn't autobiographical in a direct way, but it's certainly drawn from autobiography. I am incredibly aroused by anal play, but most of it is masturbation because I'm still feeling the echoes of all that coercion. And it's taken a lot of exploration to be able to claim this sort of play for myself, to make that part of my body feel as if it really belongs to me.


But here's where the story starts to widen into social action. Sure, I could tell this in a personal growth frame, talk about getting over difficult memories, or my own journey into expansive sexuality. But as I've explored this subject in this and many other stories, I come up against something bigger than me or individual players. There are fantastic books out there about anal sex and how it can and should be pleasurable for everyone involved (I particularly love The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino). I've read plenty of articles about how commonly couples enjoy anal sex together. On the other hand, that's not the mainstream narrative I hear. I often hear anal sex brought up as the punchline to disturbing jokes, the threatened fate for a criminal sent to prison, the thing a woman has to do to keep her man, and more stuff I can't really bring myself to repeat. Books like Taormino's (or Rachel Kramer Bussel's collection of anal erotica, Baby Got Back) are an important counterpoint to the mainstream narrative, but when I was growing up, the idea that anal sex was something a woman might herself enjoy and do because she wanted to—well, that didn't even exist on my horizon.

The idea of sex as something enjoyed by both parties, the idea of enthusiastic consent, the idea of being able to withdraw consent in the midst of a sexual act—those are all things I've learned by reading "radical" books as an adult. And I don't think this is ultimately just about sex. I think it's about the seemingly radical idea that every person should have dignity and choice. I think it's about the need to get out of tired narratives about how "men only want one thing" and what "nice girls" do and don't do. I think this world desperately needs a broader understanding of gender and sexuality (because if you start reading stuff about gender theory and start to really understand where phrases like "all genders" are coming from, that's going to blow huge holes in gender essentialist ideas absorbed from society like the ones I just listed).

For me, on the tail of those realizations, I started to want to speak up and make change. I listen to the radio or watch television or read a book or play a video game, and I cringe at all the poison being transmitted. I'm sure I'm still believing some of it, or transferring some of it myself, but I want to do better.

So, what's happened to me over time as I write is that I'm feeling Roberta's point more and more. I started out as an erotica writer by playing with my fantasies, claiming personal power, working out my own questions, and thinking about what I might enjoy. Then I came up against all the places I don't let myself look, and I started to notice how fenced in I'd gotten over the course of my life, and I started to think about why that is. As I tried to free myself, I found that it's not just about me. I want a different world. I started to understand and have more compassion for struggles other people are having. I started to realize that I can't stand by.

I've noticed that it's more comfortable to talk about these stories individually, as personal narratives only, as things I need therapy for. But that's part of what I've started objecting to. I don't think it's an accident that most people will recognize the phrase, "Men just only want one thing," and I think we all need to be thinking about why that is and the damage that belief is doing to people of all genders.

This is only one example of the path my writing has taken me down, and perhaps it's a clumsy one. But I've got a bunch of these. Writing erotica and really thinking about it (and also reading erotica and really thinking about it) has forced me to consider race, class, gender expression, sexuality, ideology—a huge list of social issues, basically. I never wanted to be a social activist—I don't like confrontation and I'm often afraid to speak up. I went to a protest in college once and left because I got scared.


The ideas are showing up, though, more and more—my zombie erotic romance, Run for Your Love, turned out to be about pacifism, domestic violence, and class warfare. Untouched, the book I just wrapped, could be described as a story about how one woman claims her sexual desires and needs as important and valid in their own right, even when they go against the desires of her super-hot, approved-by-society boyfriend (and if you'd like to have a very long conversation with me, sit me down and ask me why that was hard to pull off).

Whenever I talk this way, I'm afraid that readers will think I'm abandoning hotness for politics and that my work is going to become a series of treatises. That's not what's happening, though. As I explained in my post about revising for emotional honesty, this stuff is making my work hotter, more honest, more urgent. What's sexier than rebellion, after all? What's sexier than doing the forbidden, transgressing the rules, breaking out of what's always been and forging a path into something new, scary, and exhilarating?

I'm sure I'll be talking about this more, but for now I want to end with the question I've got about Roberta's quote. She contrasts writing and social action, saying writing is done alone and social action is often accomplished by filling the streets. But I find myself seeking community lately, discussing politics with other writers. I find myself wanting to fill the shelves with the sort of resistance I'm describing. I want to see a bunch of us writers making books that demand new and different cover art—people with different body types, people of varying races, people doing all sorts of things with all sorts of different people. Yes, I have to spend time alone to get the words down, but I've been wondering lately if writers ought to be gathering in groups more somehow. Should we be taking a page from social action?

Sexual Fantasies and Being a Slut

There's been a link going around on Twitter for a couple days, highlighting an article on women's sexual fantasies. It's worth a read, and the fantasies listed are roughly what I'd expect--certainly nothing shocking to an erotica writer. (It misses the popularity of m/m scenarios among women, but I suppose I can forgive that).

But here's the part of the piece that really grabbed me:

I began to explain that I asked hundreds of women about their fantasies and received wonderful responses. That's when I was interrupted.

"Are (these women) slutty?" Hoda asked.

Kathie Lee answered, "Total sluts."

My brain froze. Wait -- what? The whole point of this conversation was to get women to feel empowered so that they could share their fantasies with their partners. Now they're being called sluts? (And besides, if you've read any of my work, you know that I have a visceral reaction to the word.)

Like the article's author, I felt outraged by the response. Now, I love erotica for the fun of it. I love one-handed reading, and I love squirming while I write. But moments like this are when I feel that writing and openly reading erotica is a sacred calling and a feminist act. People need to stand up and claim sexuality as normal, healthy, and beautiful, even when--especially when--we're not just talking about m/f missionary.

Speaking up is scary. This name I write under is a pseudonym for a reason, and I was afraid even to use a pseudonym for a very long time. But I spent way too long feeling terrorized by judgments like the ones expressed on this episode of the Today Show.

Erotica writers and others unafraid of talking honestly about sex saved my soul, my self-respect, my sensuality, and more. Thanks so much to all of you.

We have a long way still to go.