Bam. Two negative, almost hateful diatribes against female-focused erotic fiction books in as many days.
Instead of being condemned as a cheapjack book slut pandering to male fantasies, you will be profiled in the serious press, with a photograph of you dressed demurely, and women will not be ashamed to be seen reading your book on the Tube. Feminist websites will praise you for “provoking debate in intellectual circles” and claim your book “does not intend to function as porn” (even though it sort of is porn).
– Feminist slant for female erotica writers – The Times Online
and
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Roche and others from the new wave of women shock-jocks tell us that baring their fantasies, or recounting their love lives in lurid and exhaustive detail, is uniquely emancipating.
While I would fight tooth and claw for women’s right to sexual freedom, I’m not sure the sisterhood has gained much if it sees that freedom as a chance to brag about sex and conquests in the same kind of tedious and lewd manner that made the new lad so obnoxious back in the Nineties.
Un-erotica? As another female writer publishes an explicit novel is this new feminism or a tawdry betrayal of women? – The Daily Mail
The first piece derides all those nasty women writers for daring to dabble in erotica, because it’s really just porn, you know. And porn’s for men, after all.
The second piece happily indulges in all the usual false consciousness assumptions about how women who explore their sexuality mustn’t really know what they’re doing. That they’ve been duped, somehow, and isn’t it a shame they’ve lost their femininity like that?
The shoes-in-handcuffs idea pays lip service to the concept that exploring your sexuality equals being enslaved or degraded by it.
There’s this ongoing idea that writing about sex is inevitably tawdry, that writing something to induce arousal is a less noble and certainly less literary pursuit, one that should only be done by dirty old men in raincoats.
Facts. It IS feminist to have sex whenever and however you want. That’s a choice that women should be free to make. It’s a feminist act to express your thoughts and feelings about sex. And when a woman challenges the whole Madonna/Whore myth by publicly revealing that she is a voracious sexual being, she does all women a favour.
Now, go and read Girl With A One Track Mind. I’m sure she has a heap more to say on this topic.
You know, this echoes the debate over The Pill in a very strong way. I’m a tiny bit too young to remember well the rhetoric that went flying around that, but it was a part of my later childhood, as well, even after the actual issue of legal availability was laid to rest. The two camps (“It puts freedom from having sex solely for procreation in women’s hands.” vs. “It gives women carte blanche to be dirty, evil, nasty whores!”) don’t sound so very different from the ones debating here.
What I really want to know is if this makes us all internet radio shock-jocks. 🙂