Onward with the GFY: part 1
6 Mar 2010 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[disclaimer: I'm trying to refrain from value judgments, because that's not really a useful step in deconstruction.]
Okay, the GFY trope.
When last we visited this topic, I was asking: "when, if ever, do we profess attraction to someone but with the caveat that they're the only one we'll ever feel (or do) this with? What if the GFY trope is actually an analogue, if we ignore the copious numbers of badly-written fic using it, and just look at the bare bones of the trope?"
Now, all along when I've seen discussion about the GFY trope, I've been seeing comments like this (and have made a few of my own along similar veins, I do believe).
From Penknife, WNG vs. WS:
Or alixtii's WNG Femslash, which observes:
Somewhere along the way while simmering these thoughts while the post pre-heated, I got thinking about the question of whether there's ever a realistic, valid, point in a person's life wherein one denies sexuality despite activity. That's what's really at the heart of the GFY trope, seems to me: denying that one is sexually active (in whatever form taken), while still wanting to participate in that sexuality.
Slight segue, for those who've never been through it on this side of the fence, or have managed to successfully deep-six any recollections of that awkward time known as adolescence and/or the awkward, usually pretty mediocre, time known as Losing Your Virginity. (For a longer version of my take on that phrase, see this rant.)
Note: I'm giving this attention because, frankly, it's not something most men are acutely aware of on a base level -- and gay men, possibly even less so, and since they form a share of the critiquing audience, I figure it makes sense to make sure everyone's on the same page as to likely audience modes/histories. I mean, it's not like a gay man has to listen to his (female) partner complain about that movie's representation of women, or what the women at church were whispering, or how that guy in the store groped her because she was wearing biking shorts (and thus must've had herself on display for anyone who wanted some).
These are just things that aren't part of a gay man's life, but then, for many straight men, it's not always a part of their life much, either -- I've known more than my share of men who dismiss their wife/lover talking about such things, for one reason or another (all of which are related to male privilege).
About my understandings of the sexes' attitudes towards, well, sex: I came of age when AIDS was taking its greatest toll. People all around me were literally dying because of sex, and there's no terror like the idea that you could not only die from sex, but that in the act of sex, you were effectively having sex with every single person your partner had ever had sex with. Suddenly the questions are compounded from the simple, "do I care enough about this person to go this far," to hearing your mother's voice saying, "don't touch that! you don't know where it's been!"
The upshot is that sex had to have this pre-sex interview. After the first few times, it got a lot easier to ask: "how many people have you screwed? are they all still healthy? how do you know? have you kept in touch with them? have you ever been tested? have you ever had unprotected sex?" By the time I was 20, most of my partners would volunteer the information without even being asked. "I've had sex with X many people, and I tracked them down last year and they're all still alive..." So, yes, I have had a lifetime of asking (and answering) highly-personal questions that (previously) one just never asked. Whether we liked it or not, the simple fact was that our lives just might be on the line, and honesty (and quality condoms) were one of our only means of defense.
The idea that a girl didn't ask a boy those questions -- you got over that bullshit quick. Even if it did mean dealing with the idea that he'd been around the block with someone Who Is Not You (which undermines the adolescent/pre-adult socially-induced female construct of what defines Tru Wuv, one part being that This Is The Big One, and too many little ones seem to add up to equivalent of a Big One). And, most girls knew the danger of answering those questions, because such admission -- of having any sex partners at all, other than in an oblique manner -- puts you at risk of being labeled a slut. (And yes, I did have friends who got dumped then and there upon admitting they'd had more partners than their intended lover, so it's not like the fear was/is unfounded.)
Therein lies the crux of it: from the perspective of a (fully socialized in mainstream gender constructs) young woman, a man's sexual experience is likely in inverse proportion to how much he's been in (true) love. And her own experience is also in inverse proportion to how lovable she might be -- because a Horrid Slut isn't someone anyone wants to keep around, let alone considers a worthwhile person. So a young woman learns fast to be as secretive as possible about her past (which, of course, AIDS pretty much blew the lid off that one), and to be as discreet as possible about her present.
Getting back to the GFY trope and the various commentaries I've seen, most of the critique has been based on a comparison of GFY (or its fandom cousin, WNGWJLEO) as unrealistic or simplistic fantasies about how gay men come to recognize their innate sexuality. In other words, the deconstructionist attempts have contained a constant assumption, in the critique itself, that this is all about gay men.
And, on the other side of the coin, there's been plenty of the "it's not about men, it's about women!" rhetoric going around, but I've seen very little critique of any M/M tropes from this about-women perspective. Those few I've seen have been cursory at best, so I've not been any more persuaded than it appears the gay men have been. On the face of it, the claim seems counter-intuitive, if not outright nonsensical. I mean, the story is about two men; where on earth do the women come into it, to make the story "about women"?
Me being me, I can't not poke at such things (especially when a trope grates on me as much as some of the GFY examples out there do, and I want to know why) -- and the biggest assumption seems to be that, given the nonsensical-seeming notion of gay romance being "about women", that it's more "accurate" (which in turn begs the question of whose standards are the measuring stick here, but I'll get to that in a bit) to use Real Gay Men as comparison. And since that is an assumption that acts as the foundation of all arguments that flow from it, naturally, I must question that assumption.
(Again, before jumping happens: questioning an assumption does not mean "I dis/agree with it"; it only means "is this really the right or best opening statement to really dissect the trope's meanings? what other foundational positions are there, and might any of those elucidate the trope better?" ... or maybe you could put it down to the idea that I question authority. Everyone's authority. Including my own, plenty of the time.)
Okay, back to the "about women" part. Take the underlying element of the GFY trope -- to be sexually active without having to publicly, or politically, suffer the consequences of that activity -- and the interceding paragraphs I noted about what many of my contemporaries felt/feared when forced to be honest about sexual activity with new potential partners.
Now, the GFY trope isn't just about the fear of admitting one's sexuality. In many instances, a given GFY plotline does contain the previous Straight Guy not just willing to have sex, but enjoying it, even initiating it, and most definitely being an active and creative and attentive and responsive partner in every sense of the words. So it's not just the notion of keeping the sexuality private, for whatever reason. No, the GFY trope is almost always signaled by the profic version of the "we're not gay, we just love each other" step: "I wouldn't be like this for anyone else."
As vcmw replied to my opening sally in this topic,
Yep, that's how it works in the romance (mainstream and not) that I've read, for the most part, although outliers have always existed -- but in reality? The opening position -- "oh my, you're the first/only person that I've ever felt like this about, and it's only with you that I would do this terrifying, exciting, disturbing, eroticized thing" -- not so much.
In essentially interviewing potential lovers for issues of health, such questions do come up, especially when you're young, majorly attracted, and yet struggling with the social pressures that sex must equal luuurve (or else you're a Horrid Slut). Compare that to the attitudes expressed by men of the same age, attitudes echoed when I asked CP for his input last night. What did he recall, about his first time?
For men and women (no matter the partner's sex), prior to the act it is a "terrifying, exciting, disturbing, eroticized thing". The difference is in afterwards, when the young woman struggles to reconcile those social pressures with her own erotic impulses. Compare that to CP's response, which echoed pretty much every guy I've known: "man, that was great, but I bet it'd be even greater if we had a clue what we were doing, so we should probably do it again until we get it right, like a whole lotta do-it-again, like how about right now?"
(I'm not saying women don't have that response. Plenty do. It's just a lot harder for the woman to articulate it, because of that slut-threat hanging over her head. Too many young women get the cautionary tale -- sadly based in actual events, because it's repeated almost daily -- that if you have sex with a guy and then break up, he'll tell everyone you're a slut. There's no option for the woman to retaliate with the same charge, because the guy, as CP noted, is expected to brag of his conquests, and even be lauded for them. The girl can't even strike at the newly-gained cachet with comments like "he's only good for two minutes" or "he's got a small dick," because that's effectively admitting that yes, she did in fact have sex with him, which is self-incriminating and she remains a Horrid Slut, and worse for being one who'd dare to retaliate against a Good Boy.)
Where vcmw is suggesting the analogue is marriage/commitment, I think it goes back farther, deeper into a person's psyche -- and what I'm thinking here (if it's not already obvious) is that when one says, "it's about women," it's not that the story is about women per se. Nor -- thanks to the presence of Straight Guy -- could one necessarily say it's about gay men quite so much as the story is about men, but perhaps the about-women is because the framework is so strongly reminiscent of a woman's journey into her own sexuality.
That is, women readers who enjoy the GFY trope are, on some level, relating to the characters because it shows men going through what every single woman goes through in the course of claiming her own sexuality.
There are strong corollaries between a gay man acknowledging his sexuality and a woman (of any stripe) acknowledging her sexuality. Homosexuality is as reviled as female sexuality; the two get it with both barrels from the religious/conservative social elements pretty much without cease. And in the GFY trope particularly, you can see even more similarities, the more you deconstruct the basic bones -- yet the coming-out story has a twist on an important facet of those similiarities.
For instance, in nearly every GFY (and many a coming-out) story, mister SG's history revolves around women. He's either had a string of affairs, per the expected young male stud in college routine, or he's been married. Possibly even has kids now, and is divorced; sometimes he's a widower who truly loved his wife and probably always will, to some fond degree. In other words, he has fulfilled every expectation society has of a man: he's done the dating scene, he's fallen in love with a woman, he's made a family. For those characters in college, there's still every indication that without outside influence (yes, really), he'll continue on this trajectory and end up yet another poster child for mainstream society -- and that's when the ghey card hits him.
Going back to the female version of the sexuality story, up to the point a woman has sex for the first time -- be this at fourteen or forty -- her lack of sex puts her squarely in the properly-acculturated, socially-pressured, kind of shoebox. She's been a good girl. Maybe held hands, maybe kissed once or twice, but all the way? Nope, not without love (or in the older version, not without marriage or at least a certainty of marriage). But enter that outside influence -- usually the boyfriend protesting/pushing, combined with her own erotic impulses (even if hardly admitted, honestly) -- and if we're not talking the honeymoon night, she's deviating from the expected role just as thoroughly as a man having gay sex, and she risks being shamed and ostracized just as thoroughly as any young man admitting to same-sex attraction.
Therein lies the twist between the female framework and the male characters within that: the main character has a sexual history -- and the story does not condemn him for it.
The GFY trope may, at times -- in a move reminiscent of how M/F genre romances 'justify' a woman's sexual history -- have the main/het character admit that his sexual history is hollow, or a whole lot of chasing with little emotional satisfaction. That's part and parcel of what vcmw was tapping into, where "being in love", when it's wrapped up alongside "having sex", makes the "having sex" part just that much better, or more powerful, or simply more valid and worthwhile.
Genre romance has a long tradition of equating sex and love. That's not because we, as humans, necessarily always put love and sex in the same box, but because the romance genre is aimed almost exclusively at women -- and a major part of the social construct of "what it means to be female" has soldered together sex+love, and to hell with whether it's a good (or healthy) fit. The romance genre can have its nontraditional moments, but its heart is solidly with that crucial element of the social gender-construct.
That said, in recent decades those outliers (of the non-virgin heroine) are slowly gaining ground but even those non-virgin heroines, more likely than not, will at some point discard or discount or discredit their sexual histories prior to finding Twu Wuv -- a retraction heroes almost never have to make. Unless, of course, it's a hero in a GFY tropic-plotline, in which case, there may be some regret about past promiscuity, but that's still not automatically the same as feeling ashamed of oneself.
There are just as many GFY tropic-stories where the straight guy is divorced/widowed, and in those cases, he's had sex, he's had love, he's had kids, he's done everything, and he's still okay. He's not used goods, or damaged goods, or too old or gone past his sell-by date; loving someone else fully does not make him less, and in fact -- especially in light of the female framework at play in GFY -- that past history of "loving someone else so much" makes him even more attractive.
Bottom line: there are no Horrid Sluts here -- and the rare instances of GFY with anything remotely like a Horrid Slut, it doesn't make the SG a bad guy, so much as someone who just needs to wise up and accept the love of a Good Hero. That is, there's no slut-shaming. There may be, "well, I just figured eventually you'd come around," but there's never, "you're an utterly worthless person because you had/acted-out your erotic impulses."
The shaming a woman can get, and is taught to brace herself for -- including from her own lover! -- does not happen to SG and his love interest. When it doesn't happen in M/F genre romance, it's because the author's working overtime to create a bubble outside of what the (female) reader expects -- it's a common added-conflict to have the hero withdraw because he -- mistakenly, of course -- believes the virginal heroine to be, in fact, a Horrid Slut, and obviously this requires he avoid her, cue angst here.
When that doesn't happen, it's the hero's lack of condemnation that's part of what makes him the hero. The presence of the shame is notable in its absence, but in M/M -- especially GFY -- there isn't any shame at all. There might be confusion, uncertainty, anxiety and even wangst, but there is never even a hint that the SG's potential partner may possibly condemn the SG for having a sexuality, any sexuality. Why? Because the SG's partner runs the same risks as the main character. Society's heteronormative pressures are exerted in equal amount on the SG and on his potential partner.
In other words: a woman can relate to the character without getting punched in the face, once again, by those ubiquitous social pressures related to female sexuality. That, more than anything else, makes it a damn powerful storyline for a woman, and that, it seems to me, is so valuable -- and so rare -- that the story being about two men is almost secondary. Not immaterial, not irrelevant, but perhaps not quite the focus to the degree assumed by the position that women read M/M as a voyeuristic pr0ntastic escape -- well, it's voyeuristic, perhaps.
It's just that what women might be watching in the stories isn't the same thing as what men think the women are watching.
For the average woman (and this does seem to be pretty strongly world-wide), sex is, the vast majority of the time, something perverted, something Good Girls Don't Do. What makes sex okay is the fact that there's love in there -- like, you can "put up with it" because you just luuuurve the guy so much (and then find out that love = really hawt sex, at least if you're a romance character).
And hello, direct correlation to the coming-out or gay-discovery steps in M/M romances: the SG has never explored that side of himself for a variety of reasons but the underlying common thread seems to be that a) [gay] sex is, well, scary, and b) he's never found the right person to make it worth it.
Really, the more I take apart the quirks in the GFY trope, the more I see that -- above and beyond fictive patterns -- I can see a direct correlation between men discovering their (homo)sexuality and women discovering any sexuality at all. However, it's damn late, this is long enough, and I'll need to wrap this up in the next post -- so I'll leave you to ponder the social pressures, risks, and constructs on/about gay sexuality, as compared to those on/about female sexuality, and we'll meet back here tomorrow and see what fresh trouble I can get into.
Reminder: I'm not discussing whether or not the trope (or anything related) is okay or not-okay, so don't presume that attention equals agreement. I am, however, focused on deconstructing the mechanics of GFY and related coming-out stories, to see if I can tease out why it's such a major trope in female-audience-oriented genre-romance published fiction, and come up with a few theories on its origin(s) and appeal.
onto part two
Okay, the GFY trope.
When last we visited this topic, I was asking: "when, if ever, do we profess attraction to someone but with the caveat that they're the only one we'll ever feel (or do) this with? What if the GFY trope is actually an analogue, if we ignore the copious numbers of badly-written fic using it, and just look at the bare bones of the trope?"
Now, all along when I've seen discussion about the GFY trope, I've been seeing comments like this (and have made a few of my own along similar veins, I do believe).
From Penknife, WNG vs. WS:
The first part, the "I love you, and I find you sexually attractive, but I've never felt that way about another man and never will" ... okay, it could happen; sexuality and attraction are complicated. I think my problem with it is that it always feels so unlikely to me that I tend to read it as "I'm straight, but I'll have sex with you anyway, and it ought to work because we're in love," even when I think that's probably not what the author intended, and then I am thinking horrible trainwreck when I'm supposed to be thinking so romantic. I usually find myself distracted by the desire to sit at least one of the characters down and say "Oh, honey, stay away from the straight boys, it can only end in tears." Not everyone has this reaction, I know.
The second part, the "I'm straight, I'm just fucking a guy" ... well, if the author seems to want me to see that as internalized homophobia or denial or flailing or one of those things that just come out of people's mouths sometimes when they haven't thought about what to say, we're cool. But if this is the way the character presents himself in the long term, and the author seems to want me to be fine with that, the problem is that I'm usually not fine. In my ideal world, sexual orientation would be a personal description of romantic tastes that was not socially and politically meaningful, and that would be a perfectly reasonable way to say "I generally strongly prefer women, with occasional exceptions." We do not currently live in that world.
Or alixtii's WNG Femslash, which observes:
It's been much noted, although no one is quite sure what to make of it, that while the WNG trope doesn't seem to as common as it was (depending on how one defines) the characters in same-sex relationships don't exactly seem to be identifying as gay (or even bi, in most cases), either. Is fandom a post-gay space? No one seems to know for sure.
Somewhere along the way while simmering these thoughts while the post pre-heated, I got thinking about the question of whether there's ever a realistic, valid, point in a person's life wherein one denies sexuality despite activity. That's what's really at the heart of the GFY trope, seems to me: denying that one is sexually active (in whatever form taken), while still wanting to participate in that sexuality.
Slight segue, for those who've never been through it on this side of the fence, or have managed to successfully deep-six any recollections of that awkward time known as adolescence and/or the awkward, usually pretty mediocre, time known as Losing Your Virginity. (For a longer version of my take on that phrase, see this rant.)
Note: I'm giving this attention because, frankly, it's not something most men are acutely aware of on a base level -- and gay men, possibly even less so, and since they form a share of the critiquing audience, I figure it makes sense to make sure everyone's on the same page as to likely audience modes/histories. I mean, it's not like a gay man has to listen to his (female) partner complain about that movie's representation of women, or what the women at church were whispering, or how that guy in the store groped her because she was wearing biking shorts (and thus must've had herself on display for anyone who wanted some).
These are just things that aren't part of a gay man's life, but then, for many straight men, it's not always a part of their life much, either -- I've known more than my share of men who dismiss their wife/lover talking about such things, for one reason or another (all of which are related to male privilege).
About my understandings of the sexes' attitudes towards, well, sex: I came of age when AIDS was taking its greatest toll. People all around me were literally dying because of sex, and there's no terror like the idea that you could not only die from sex, but that in the act of sex, you were effectively having sex with every single person your partner had ever had sex with. Suddenly the questions are compounded from the simple, "do I care enough about this person to go this far," to hearing your mother's voice saying, "don't touch that! you don't know where it's been!"
The upshot is that sex had to have this pre-sex interview. After the first few times, it got a lot easier to ask: "how many people have you screwed? are they all still healthy? how do you know? have you kept in touch with them? have you ever been tested? have you ever had unprotected sex?" By the time I was 20, most of my partners would volunteer the information without even being asked. "I've had sex with X many people, and I tracked them down last year and they're all still alive..." So, yes, I have had a lifetime of asking (and answering) highly-personal questions that (previously) one just never asked. Whether we liked it or not, the simple fact was that our lives just might be on the line, and honesty (and quality condoms) were one of our only means of defense.
The idea that a girl didn't ask a boy those questions -- you got over that bullshit quick. Even if it did mean dealing with the idea that he'd been around the block with someone Who Is Not You (which undermines the adolescent/pre-adult socially-induced female construct of what defines Tru Wuv, one part being that This Is The Big One, and too many little ones seem to add up to equivalent of a Big One). And, most girls knew the danger of answering those questions, because such admission -- of having any sex partners at all, other than in an oblique manner -- puts you at risk of being labeled a slut. (And yes, I did have friends who got dumped then and there upon admitting they'd had more partners than their intended lover, so it's not like the fear was/is unfounded.)
Therein lies the crux of it: from the perspective of a (fully socialized in mainstream gender constructs) young woman, a man's sexual experience is likely in inverse proportion to how much he's been in (true) love. And her own experience is also in inverse proportion to how lovable she might be -- because a Horrid Slut isn't someone anyone wants to keep around, let alone considers a worthwhile person. So a young woman learns fast to be as secretive as possible about her past (which, of course, AIDS pretty much blew the lid off that one), and to be as discreet as possible about her present.
Getting back to the GFY trope and the various commentaries I've seen, most of the critique has been based on a comparison of GFY (or its fandom cousin, WNGWJLEO) as unrealistic or simplistic fantasies about how gay men come to recognize their innate sexuality. In other words, the deconstructionist attempts have contained a constant assumption, in the critique itself, that this is all about gay men.
And, on the other side of the coin, there's been plenty of the "it's not about men, it's about women!" rhetoric going around, but I've seen very little critique of any M/M tropes from this about-women perspective. Those few I've seen have been cursory at best, so I've not been any more persuaded than it appears the gay men have been. On the face of it, the claim seems counter-intuitive, if not outright nonsensical. I mean, the story is about two men; where on earth do the women come into it, to make the story "about women"?
Me being me, I can't not poke at such things (especially when a trope grates on me as much as some of the GFY examples out there do, and I want to know why) -- and the biggest assumption seems to be that, given the nonsensical-seeming notion of gay romance being "about women", that it's more "accurate" (which in turn begs the question of whose standards are the measuring stick here, but I'll get to that in a bit) to use Real Gay Men as comparison. And since that is an assumption that acts as the foundation of all arguments that flow from it, naturally, I must question that assumption.
(Again, before jumping happens: questioning an assumption does not mean "I dis/agree with it"; it only means "is this really the right or best opening statement to really dissect the trope's meanings? what other foundational positions are there, and might any of those elucidate the trope better?" ... or maybe you could put it down to the idea that I question authority. Everyone's authority. Including my own, plenty of the time.)
Okay, back to the "about women" part. Take the underlying element of the GFY trope -- to be sexually active without having to publicly, or politically, suffer the consequences of that activity -- and the interceding paragraphs I noted about what many of my contemporaries felt/feared when forced to be honest about sexual activity with new potential partners.
Now, the GFY trope isn't just about the fear of admitting one's sexuality. In many instances, a given GFY plotline does contain the previous Straight Guy not just willing to have sex, but enjoying it, even initiating it, and most definitely being an active and creative and attentive and responsive partner in every sense of the words. So it's not just the notion of keeping the sexuality private, for whatever reason. No, the GFY trope is almost always signaled by the profic version of the "we're not gay, we just love each other" step: "I wouldn't be like this for anyone else."
As vcmw replied to my opening sally in this topic,
When we agree to marry someone, presuming that it is the first time, the cultural hetero myth is "oh my, you're the first/only person that I've ever felt like this about, and it's only with you that I would do this terrifying, exciting, disturbing, eroticized thing." ... And then by the end they've both been brought to a realization that they're going to marry and commit to each other, and often the resistant-to-marriage person (analogous here to Straight Guy) pointedly and repeatedly articulates that it is only for this very special person that they would contemplate marriage...
Yep, that's how it works in the romance (mainstream and not) that I've read, for the most part, although outliers have always existed -- but in reality? The opening position -- "oh my, you're the first/only person that I've ever felt like this about, and it's only with you that I would do this terrifying, exciting, disturbing, eroticized thing" -- not so much.
In essentially interviewing potential lovers for issues of health, such questions do come up, especially when you're young, majorly attracted, and yet struggling with the social pressures that sex must equal luuurve (or else you're a Horrid Slut). Compare that to the attitudes expressed by men of the same age, attitudes echoed when I asked CP for his input last night. What did he recall, about his first time?
For men and women (no matter the partner's sex), prior to the act it is a "terrifying, exciting, disturbing, eroticized thing". The difference is in afterwards, when the young woman struggles to reconcile those social pressures with her own erotic impulses. Compare that to CP's response, which echoed pretty much every guy I've known: "man, that was great, but I bet it'd be even greater if we had a clue what we were doing, so we should probably do it again until we get it right, like a whole lotta do-it-again, like how about right now?"
(I'm not saying women don't have that response. Plenty do. It's just a lot harder for the woman to articulate it, because of that slut-threat hanging over her head. Too many young women get the cautionary tale -- sadly based in actual events, because it's repeated almost daily -- that if you have sex with a guy and then break up, he'll tell everyone you're a slut. There's no option for the woman to retaliate with the same charge, because the guy, as CP noted, is expected to brag of his conquests, and even be lauded for them. The girl can't even strike at the newly-gained cachet with comments like "he's only good for two minutes" or "he's got a small dick," because that's effectively admitting that yes, she did in fact have sex with him, which is self-incriminating and she remains a Horrid Slut, and worse for being one who'd dare to retaliate against a Good Boy.)
Where vcmw is suggesting the analogue is marriage/commitment, I think it goes back farther, deeper into a person's psyche -- and what I'm thinking here (if it's not already obvious) is that when one says, "it's about women," it's not that the story is about women per se. Nor -- thanks to the presence of Straight Guy -- could one necessarily say it's about gay men quite so much as the story is about men, but perhaps the about-women is because the framework is so strongly reminiscent of a woman's journey into her own sexuality.
That is, women readers who enjoy the GFY trope are, on some level, relating to the characters because it shows men going through what every single woman goes through in the course of claiming her own sexuality.
There are strong corollaries between a gay man acknowledging his sexuality and a woman (of any stripe) acknowledging her sexuality. Homosexuality is as reviled as female sexuality; the two get it with both barrels from the religious/conservative social elements pretty much without cease. And in the GFY trope particularly, you can see even more similarities, the more you deconstruct the basic bones -- yet the coming-out story has a twist on an important facet of those similiarities.
For instance, in nearly every GFY (and many a coming-out) story, mister SG's history revolves around women. He's either had a string of affairs, per the expected young male stud in college routine, or he's been married. Possibly even has kids now, and is divorced; sometimes he's a widower who truly loved his wife and probably always will, to some fond degree. In other words, he has fulfilled every expectation society has of a man: he's done the dating scene, he's fallen in love with a woman, he's made a family. For those characters in college, there's still every indication that without outside influence (yes, really), he'll continue on this trajectory and end up yet another poster child for mainstream society -- and that's when the ghey card hits him.
Going back to the female version of the sexuality story, up to the point a woman has sex for the first time -- be this at fourteen or forty -- her lack of sex puts her squarely in the properly-acculturated, socially-pressured, kind of shoebox. She's been a good girl. Maybe held hands, maybe kissed once or twice, but all the way? Nope, not without love (or in the older version, not without marriage or at least a certainty of marriage). But enter that outside influence -- usually the boyfriend protesting/pushing, combined with her own erotic impulses (even if hardly admitted, honestly) -- and if we're not talking the honeymoon night, she's deviating from the expected role just as thoroughly as a man having gay sex, and she risks being shamed and ostracized just as thoroughly as any young man admitting to same-sex attraction.
Therein lies the twist between the female framework and the male characters within that: the main character has a sexual history -- and the story does not condemn him for it.
The GFY trope may, at times -- in a move reminiscent of how M/F genre romances 'justify' a woman's sexual history -- have the main/het character admit that his sexual history is hollow, or a whole lot of chasing with little emotional satisfaction. That's part and parcel of what vcmw was tapping into, where "being in love", when it's wrapped up alongside "having sex", makes the "having sex" part just that much better, or more powerful, or simply more valid and worthwhile.
Genre romance has a long tradition of equating sex and love. That's not because we, as humans, necessarily always put love and sex in the same box, but because the romance genre is aimed almost exclusively at women -- and a major part of the social construct of "what it means to be female" has soldered together sex+love, and to hell with whether it's a good (or healthy) fit. The romance genre can have its nontraditional moments, but its heart is solidly with that crucial element of the social gender-construct.
That said, in recent decades those outliers (of the non-virgin heroine) are slowly gaining ground but even those non-virgin heroines, more likely than not, will at some point discard or discount or discredit their sexual histories prior to finding Twu Wuv -- a retraction heroes almost never have to make. Unless, of course, it's a hero in a GFY tropic-plotline, in which case, there may be some regret about past promiscuity, but that's still not automatically the same as feeling ashamed of oneself.
There are just as many GFY tropic-stories where the straight guy is divorced/widowed, and in those cases, he's had sex, he's had love, he's had kids, he's done everything, and he's still okay. He's not used goods, or damaged goods, or too old or gone past his sell-by date; loving someone else fully does not make him less, and in fact -- especially in light of the female framework at play in GFY -- that past history of "loving someone else so much" makes him even more attractive.
Bottom line: there are no Horrid Sluts here -- and the rare instances of GFY with anything remotely like a Horrid Slut, it doesn't make the SG a bad guy, so much as someone who just needs to wise up and accept the love of a Good Hero. That is, there's no slut-shaming. There may be, "well, I just figured eventually you'd come around," but there's never, "you're an utterly worthless person because you had/acted-out your erotic impulses."
The shaming a woman can get, and is taught to brace herself for -- including from her own lover! -- does not happen to SG and his love interest. When it doesn't happen in M/F genre romance, it's because the author's working overtime to create a bubble outside of what the (female) reader expects -- it's a common added-conflict to have the hero withdraw because he -- mistakenly, of course -- believes the virginal heroine to be, in fact, a Horrid Slut, and obviously this requires he avoid her, cue angst here.
When that doesn't happen, it's the hero's lack of condemnation that's part of what makes him the hero. The presence of the shame is notable in its absence, but in M/M -- especially GFY -- there isn't any shame at all. There might be confusion, uncertainty, anxiety and even wangst, but there is never even a hint that the SG's potential partner may possibly condemn the SG for having a sexuality, any sexuality. Why? Because the SG's partner runs the same risks as the main character. Society's heteronormative pressures are exerted in equal amount on the SG and on his potential partner.
In other words: a woman can relate to the character without getting punched in the face, once again, by those ubiquitous social pressures related to female sexuality. That, more than anything else, makes it a damn powerful storyline for a woman, and that, it seems to me, is so valuable -- and so rare -- that the story being about two men is almost secondary. Not immaterial, not irrelevant, but perhaps not quite the focus to the degree assumed by the position that women read M/M as a voyeuristic pr0ntastic escape -- well, it's voyeuristic, perhaps.
It's just that what women might be watching in the stories isn't the same thing as what men think the women are watching.
For the average woman (and this does seem to be pretty strongly world-wide), sex is, the vast majority of the time, something perverted, something Good Girls Don't Do. What makes sex okay is the fact that there's love in there -- like, you can "put up with it" because you just luuuurve the guy so much (and then find out that love = really hawt sex, at least if you're a romance character).
And hello, direct correlation to the coming-out or gay-discovery steps in M/M romances: the SG has never explored that side of himself for a variety of reasons but the underlying common thread seems to be that a) [gay] sex is, well, scary, and b) he's never found the right person to make it worth it.
Really, the more I take apart the quirks in the GFY trope, the more I see that -- above and beyond fictive patterns -- I can see a direct correlation between men discovering their (homo)sexuality and women discovering any sexuality at all. However, it's damn late, this is long enough, and I'll need to wrap this up in the next post -- so I'll leave you to ponder the social pressures, risks, and constructs on/about gay sexuality, as compared to those on/about female sexuality, and we'll meet back here tomorrow and see what fresh trouble I can get into.
Reminder: I'm not discussing whether or not the trope (or anything related) is okay or not-okay, so don't presume that attention equals agreement. I am, however, focused on deconstructing the mechanics of GFY and related coming-out stories, to see if I can tease out why it's such a major trope in female-audience-oriented genre-romance published fiction, and come up with a few theories on its origin(s) and appeal.
onto part two
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Date: 7 Mar 2010 05:30 pm (UTC)Barring any natural disasters, I hope to have the second part up by tonight. *fingers crossed*