Onward with the GFY: part 2
8 Mar 2010 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[ preface ]
[ back to part one ]
In part one, I went over a bunch of the social pressures exerted on women in re sexuality, and took a break right after I'd reached the point of seeing how well men coming to a point of (homo)sexuality maps neatly onto the route women take in becoming sexual beings. That's got to play some role, I think, in what makes the m/m genre so attractive for many women readers, albeit sub/unconsciously.
FYI: I have three reasons for using M/M and not "gay" or even "MSM".
While some publishers use "gay/lesbian" or "LGBT" to designate non-het romances, almost all of them will mark individual stories with "M/M", "F/F", "M/F", or whatever multiples that apply. This is far more inclusive, if you ask me, because it sticks with the simplest definition: male, female. Additionally, using "gay" erases bisexual characters from the story's description, and I kinda take that personally.
Secondly [as also mentioned in comments], in the past decade or so, I've learned to associate MSM with 'mainstream media,' thanks to too much political-blog reading, I s'pose. The last time I ran into MSM for any other use was years ago, enough that when seeing the term again & getting its definition, I had to sit there and rack my brains for why I recalled a certain phrase with the term.
It was from Whitman Walker Clinic paperwork/information, and frankly, that use of MSM isn't one I associate with happy things like romance. No, it reminds me of parties where someone'd raise a glass to absent friends, and I'd find myself averting my gaze so my older friends could have a moment of privacy while they got their party-faces back in place. I get that some folks in the slash debate seem to think this is a great term to use and I get the intellectual reasons why, but for me, no. It's not. It's loss and pain and sadness, so you'll just have to deal with the fact that I won't be using it.
Also, a few notes because I'm not sure I made this completely explicit before now.
And now, back to playing around in the hermeneutical sandbox.
Most of the discussion in the last post was applicable to more than just the GFY trope, as the GFY trope itself is really just a subset of the coming-out story. And that, in turn, has its roots not just in coming-out stories within the queer community, but in romancelandia's own fascination with the virginal heroine. The two mesh neatly together, so it's no surprise that the first-time (of love and lust) and the coming-out stories would create a popular mashup.
The resolution-point, the payoff, in the romance genre has traditionally been the "I love you" point. Older stories, it's when the hero confesses he's always been in love (despite acting like a dick for 90% of the story, of course); there seems to have been a transitional period during which sex was okay in romance, so long as it came with the "I love you". More recent bordering-on-erotica stories often have the sex coming well before the payoff, but the happy-ever-after (HEA) is almost always in there, although sometimes it's cast as an happy-for-now (HFN).
Where the GFY trope takes the coming-out story and does this kind of soft-shoe is at this payoff point. That's part of what, it seems to me, makes the trope such a sticking point. For a queer reader, or a queer ally, the "I love you" point — wrapped up as it is in both love and sex, per stock romance expectations — is most honest when it recognizes both the love (to want to be emotionally attached to same-sex) and the sex (to recognize, including public/political, one's sexuality). The GFY trope succeeds on one level and appears to backtrack completely on the other.
The answer, I think, is not in whether the story is about queer men, or some invisible woman pulling the puppet strings. What if it's in the readers' own values? No, I don't mean in the sense of internalized homophobia, as there's little in the texts to support that. Nor do I think we can blame internalized sexism, either. I think it's a little more complex than either.
The trope's message, and its appearance in stories, has a pretty consistent — if somewhat vague — presentation. I went looking for actual examples, but hunh, not so many in my own collection, though I could think of almost a dozen titles or cover images of ones that qualified. Errr, that's because it takes a helluva lot to get me to like this trope, so the least bit of fail and the GFY-using book would end up in my "donotkeep" folder, which I didn't bother to save when the harddrive died. Not like I was expecting to ever open those books again... But I still did find enough, and whittled it down to three statements that seem to be the main variations.
Note: no direct quotes. That just seems kinda rude, since I don't know what lurkers reading this might take out-of-context quotes as critical of the authors, and that's not my intention here.
Taken completely out of context and looking at the first sentence again, my immediate thought it that it does seem like it harbors secret homophobia. While brushing up on the texts containing this example, I noted among my titles almost twice as many M/F romance novels with the same conclusion (by either the hero or heroine). Hmm. It's actually surprisingly common, if my collection of about 400 titles could be considered roughly representative.
In M/F versions, the premise (as stated by the woman) is more of, "I've always enjoyed sex." So again, the parallel between the two sexuality paths. And, again in a character-history closely matched by the M/M romances, the heroine's belief seems to be predicated on the fact that liking sex is the reason she didn't expect to find love. (And that, I say, is a really damn sad commentary about our society, that this would be so popular, obviously striking a strong chord with readers.)
In one particular example, the heroine was pretty wild during her early teenage years, drinking, drugs, sex; she cleaned up and came back as someone else, someone respectable. In doing so, she wrote off her chances at love: because to really be loved, you can't be loved halfway, but who would love the wild teenager that still hid inside her?
Given the M/M romances have analogous characters verbalizing nearly the same fears (that their sexual exploration is inverse proportion to their chances of love), I'd have to say this isn't the author's own pressure twisting the story. It's the author recognizing that social pressures can twist a person into being convinced that sex (and any pleasure thereof) comes at the cost of ever having love.
And, being a romance, naturally this fear is proven wrong. True love does eventually arrive, and always in the form of someone who loves the person for their sexual empowerment and their heart.
This one, after some thought, doesn't strike me as an authorial fear limiting the character, either. In context (and even out), it's really a very virginal kind of statement. Again recalling the mapping, "to like girls" for a boy is to be "good" in society's eyes, while "to stay chaste" for a girl is to be "good" in society's eyes.
On the M/F side of the genre, this trope plays out as a former good girl who does retain some longing to fulfill society's expectations — to be good, to not sleep with someone without marriage, to not do wild and crazy things in bed. At the same time, she's acknowledging that the hero's just got her so beside herself that, oh, hell, for him, she's willing to toss off those social expectations.
Yes, we could go into a complete side-discussion on whether or not this is actually an improvement. After all, hiding in there is the dubious undercurrent of whether the virgin (het woman, though it could apply to a non-het man) has just traded out of one shoebox into another, and both the "stay chaste" and the "sleep with me" are corralled and controlled by a man. It's not a completely simple and always-positive shift, and potentially disastrous in the hands of an author intending to show the darker side (or just clod-handed enough to unintentionally imply the darker side). Fortunately we're not talking about romances written in the '70s and '80s, so we have a slightly better chance that now it's more positive.
Either way, in this statement, the virgin (of either sex) is effectively not entirely in control of his/her sexual agency; s/he is responding to and/or seduced by external pressures. From a psychological point of view, perhaps it's not the best, but that doesn't change its universality, in that you can find it in people of all shapes, sizes, sexes, genders, cultures, and so on.
To explain: no matter who we are or where we come from, our culture is going to shoebox our sexuality, whether this be a big shoebox or small, it's still a shoebox in the end, and very few people are able (or willing) to escape. Just about any culture does have some pretty serious punishments for transgressions. Not that it always needs to carry those out, because our own internalized hang-ups about our sexuality will do the punishment on the society's behalf. We berate ourselves, denigrate ourselves, judge ourselves as perverted or unworthy or secretly unlovable, and all we're doing is thwacking ourself with the stick society's handed us. That's internalized self-hatred (of any stripe).
This particular version of the GFY trope is getting around that, by taking the 'crime' out of the person's hands. She wanted to be a good girl, but the hero's magical-smexxing just carried her away. He wanted to keep liking girls, but the hero's magical-smexxing just swept him off his feet. The admission that "you're the one exception" takes this terrifying reality of breaking social rules and puts a safe fence around it.
Remember that when it comes to women and queer men and the western world's social constructs (definitely so in the US, not quite as much in the rest of the enlightened western world, damnit), that move into one's sexuality makes one a pariah... but more than that, it makes one almost like a contagious disease. The rape culture blames all violence on women; when she admits/dresses/explores her sexuality, she's inflaming all men around her, which naturally the men can't handle and immediately become slobbering beasts, lust-driven and helpless to stop from raping her. And when she's not raped, she's the reason men cheat on their wives.
Aaaaaaand... it's almost a perfect parallel with the way society whispers about the so-called Homosexual Agenda. Because the instant a queer man is there in the room, all he has to do is breathe on a straight man and OMG TEH GHEY. The whole homo-panic self-defense crap is predicated on the exact same logic as that which works so hard to control women's sexuality. It's a contagious disease that will infect every red-blooded man in a mile radius if we don't do something to stop it!
[Allow me a small bit of snark: My god, when I stop and think logically about how many laws/rules/constructs there are to put boundaries and limitations on non-white, non-heterosexual, non-cis-sex, non-male sexuality, I can only think: wow, someone give those white Anglo-saxon het men a fucking cookie! It's amazing with all these temptations that they can even function! And then I think of all the white het men who are textbook examples of the Peter Principle and I realize: no, even with all these laws and constructs, they still can't function. Wtf, over.]
I've skipped to the third because it's really a variation on the second, except this time the character owns his sexuality. (Sometimes it comes with an "I guess" kind of uneasy qualification, but in the four examples I found in my collection, three were more adamant than uncertain.)
Again, a less generous reading implies a certain amount of internalization, or at the very least, the tension I referenced before I began the list. It's a tension between one's sexual attractions and the social constructs hemming one in, which is why I don't say it's homophobia nor sexism, because in either the M/M version or the M/F version, the character is willing to push past the internalization and accept/acknowledge his/her sexuality.
Yet the "only with you" or "just for you" is, like the second example, putting a safe limit around this transgressive act. It's saying that although the character is breaking social constructs, there's no risk of running amok spreading the contagion of the bad-girl or the homo-boy. It's limited to just this specific instance. It's creating a separate shoebox, one in which society's rules can be safely suspended. Without self-incrimination or self-denigration, either, so long as a single all-important rule remains in place: these behaviors, this shoebox, will only be shared with one person.
Which, really, is the same style of monogamy that has been allowed to women as the only 'out' for generations upon generations, in so many different cultures (but especially in the western/judeo-christian world). This is the maneuver that allows a woman to be freely sexual, so long as it's only with her socially-acceptable husband in a culturally-blessed union. It's the maneuver that's also distorted into the madonna/whore complex, a shoebox inside a shoebox, where the larger one requires good-girl chasteness and the smaller one requires anything but.
Taking it that way, it's the source of my own dislike of the trope. It's not really freedom to just accept yet another shoebox, this one even more limiting than the first, seeing how it can only exist inside the first (and behind closed doors and shuttered windows, at that). It's a bit better than the second example, in that the character isn't denying that the erotic impulses are his/her own, but it's still not exactly fully free.
But is that really the best reading of it?
While considering this, allow me to also quote a real person.
That's not denying one's sexuality. It's not internalized homophobia, either, or any kind of internalized anything. Set aside the semantics and the phrasing and look at the heart of the statement that is effectively saying the same as the second and third examples, and you can see it's not shoeboxing oneself into a tiny corner of one's psyche, either.
It's simply being in love.
If you look at the statement through a lens of literature — where you expect some kind of realism, and certainly nothing resembling the unreality of a happily-ever-after (though HFN is common enough) — then, sure, that seems pretty idiotic. Never feel this way about anyone else? Ever? What, like this is it for you? Your one shot?
Well, in romance: yes.
That's the point of romance. That's the genre's foundation: that there's a True Love out there, somewhere, even if you need a pickax and night goggles. Once you've found that person, you'll move heaven and earth to stay with them, and you'll be together forever.
Even if you had something good in the past and lost it and think it's over for you, as soon as your romance story starts, you'll soon find that your past experiences pale in comparison and the love interest you may find — no, make that will find — is likeliest to be the un-likeliest of lovers. Maybe he's a Harley rider when your character's always gone for accountants; maybe he's an amateur chemist who likes to mess with fireworks; maybe he's not even a he, but a she.
In the grand scheme of romance the details are just window-dressing: all that matters is that one way or another, it'll be true love. The things we say in real life — "I can't see myself ever finding someone else half as awesome as I find you" — are in there, just turned up to eleven. That includes the fabulously awesome smexxing, if that's part of the storyline. The same magical-smexx offered by the straight hero that's enough to turn Plain Jane into a frenzied sex goddess — well, no surprise the same magical-smexxing could turn a good man queer.
This part of genre romance's message is simple: when love hits you, there's nothing you can do to stop it. Including protest about your heterosexuality. Too bad, buddy, you're in romance land now!
Okay, so saying "gay for you" is an awkward version taken out of context, implying a limitation or an ability to take it back if in future the premise -- "we're in love" -- no longer applies. And I still find it a bit suspect, thinking that perhaps the GFY phrasing is due to the author's own socially-constructed tensions about expressing one's sexuality (in any form), especially considering I find similar maneuvers in some M/F stories. The intersection here is that readers' own values may come into play, because they respond (like we all do) to stories that reflect their own perceptions -- which means purchase, and that means editors select similar stories to capitalize on what's clearly liked by the readers, and on around and around.
All the same, this is still romance. The motivation behind the phrase remains valid even if the conclusion is a little uneven; the premise will never not apply. It's a happily ever after, because this is fiction, but it's echoing what we wish were true in reality.
Even for those characters starting the story as experienced far-from-virgins, a lot of romance (for all humans, really, I think) is rooted in taking that which was everyday and making it wonderful and breathtaking. A walk in the park was, well, just a walk, but now it's a marvelous way to spend an hour because it's with the one you love. Flowers, meh. Flowers just to see someone smile? Worth every penny and minute.
And that, I think -- when I pry apart the romantic element to poke at it -- is because what romance and falling-in-love do is take us back to the first time (as readers). Back when sex was brand-new, and so was love, and the two aren't wrapped up together necessarily because society tells you so, but because you're discovering both at the same time and so as the body goes, the heart goes, and as the heart rises, the body follows.
That is why -- if you were lucky enough to first experience sex within some kind of love -- if you think back, you may recall yourself unable to comprehend every feeling this way about anyone else. You were sexual, of course, hell, you just took your clothes off and got horizontal, so no denying that! -- but it's a sexual that's tied intimately to the love you feel for this person, no matter what that person's sex or gender might be. Those are almost, sometimes, irrelevant, because being-in-love means uniting at such an intimate level that it's entirely possible to say, "I've always liked boys, but then there was you, and I'm falling so hard."
The state of being in love doesn't allow room for thoughts like, "oh, this is run of the mill, and I'll go through this a few more times in my life." I'm not saying we lose the intellectual component, as any self-protective inner voice will undoubtedly tell us that we might get our heart broken, but emotionally? No. Falling in love means not having any brakes on the bus. You just fall, and plenty of people in my life (and even a few more in the comments to the previous post in this topic, if you want to go see) report that this is exactly how they felt upon falling: this is the one person I'll ever feel this way about, body, heart, and soul, and that's exactly how I want it to always be.
In short, the GFY trope isn't internalizing something destructive; maybe its true intent is to affirm something wonderful and rare. Never feel this way about anyone else? Ever? What, like this is it for you? The only person you'll ever truly love? The end to all your searching?
In romance: yes.
And in real life? Oh, we can only wish we would all be so lucky.
[ back to part one ]
In part one, I went over a bunch of the social pressures exerted on women in re sexuality, and took a break right after I'd reached the point of seeing how well men coming to a point of (homo)sexuality maps neatly onto the route women take in becoming sexual beings. That's got to play some role, I think, in what makes the m/m genre so attractive for many women readers, albeit sub/unconsciously.
FYI: I have three reasons for using M/M and not "gay" or even "MSM".
While some publishers use "gay/lesbian" or "LGBT" to designate non-het romances, almost all of them will mark individual stories with "M/M", "F/F", "M/F", or whatever multiples that apply. This is far more inclusive, if you ask me, because it sticks with the simplest definition: male, female. Additionally, using "gay" erases bisexual characters from the story's description, and I kinda take that personally.
Secondly [as also mentioned in comments], in the past decade or so, I've learned to associate MSM with 'mainstream media,' thanks to too much political-blog reading, I s'pose. The last time I ran into MSM for any other use was years ago, enough that when seeing the term again & getting its definition, I had to sit there and rack my brains for why I recalled a certain phrase with the term.
It was from Whitman Walker Clinic paperwork/information, and frankly, that use of MSM isn't one I associate with happy things like romance. No, it reminds me of parties where someone'd raise a glass to absent friends, and I'd find myself averting my gaze so my older friends could have a moment of privacy while they got their party-faces back in place. I get that some folks in the slash debate seem to think this is a great term to use and I get the intellectual reasons why, but for me, no. It's not. It's loss and pain and sadness, so you'll just have to deal with the fact that I won't be using it.
Also, a few notes because I'm not sure I made this completely explicit before now.
- I'm not talking about who is writing it.
I'm only talking about what the audience gleans, possibly, from such a storyline, and what might be making it a popular story-line — and romance readers are overwhelmingly female. Like, 99.9% overwhelming.
- I'm not addressing appropriation.
Bigger fish than I can address here, right now. Maybe later, but beyond this particular scope.
- I'm not talking about slash or fanfic.
Except, that is, to note in passing that the WNGWJLEO might be one source of the GFY popularity in published original fiction. (The WNG trope is actually very rare in published romance fiction; the one or two times I've come across it, I've gotten a strong sense that the story has its origins in a fanfic.) So basically, some of the aspects concerning slash-as-problematic may apply, or they may not, but that's for others to tackle; I'm setting a firm line that fandom, fanfic, and slash, are outside the edges of this post and its focus on published genre romance.
- I'm aware I haven't specifically mentioned F/F or lesbian relationships/women.
That's for several reasons, none of which are because I'd rather ignore it. One is because I've never encountered GFY in published F/F romance, but I've also not read as much comparatively, so someone else will have to feedback me on that if I'm offbase. Another reason is because regardless of eventual attraction, all women do experience the same pressures related to sex solely because of being female. At the same time, lesbian (and other non-het) women also sit on the queer side of things, so some of what twigs for a queer man will twig in related ways for queer women, even as what twigs for a straight woman will also twig in related ways for queer women.
In other words, a lot of intersection going on there, and I need to read more in the F/F genre — and do a bit more turning-over of the underneath — before I could even begin to analyze. Even then I'd still rely a lot on my lesbian-identified voices in my flist/dwircle to keep me from misreading thanks to my own perspective, so it seems wisest to consider that a further-step (being more complicated) rather than speak from partial ignorance and end up with foot-in-mouth disease.
In the meantime, I think a lot of this applies, but I could be wrong (and welcome the setting-right, and you know who you are!).
In other words, a lot of intersection going on there, and I need to read more in the F/F genre — and do a bit more turning-over of the underneath — before I could even begin to analyze. Even then I'd still rely a lot on my lesbian-identified voices in my flist/dwircle to keep me from misreading thanks to my own perspective, so it seems wisest to consider that a further-step (being more complicated) rather than speak from partial ignorance and end up with foot-in-mouth disease.
In the meantime, I think a lot of this applies, but I could be wrong (and welcome the setting-right, and you know who you are!).
And now, back to playing around in the hermeneutical sandbox.
Most of the discussion in the last post was applicable to more than just the GFY trope, as the GFY trope itself is really just a subset of the coming-out story. And that, in turn, has its roots not just in coming-out stories within the queer community, but in romancelandia's own fascination with the virginal heroine. The two mesh neatly together, so it's no surprise that the first-time (of love and lust) and the coming-out stories would create a popular mashup.
The resolution-point, the payoff, in the romance genre has traditionally been the "I love you" point. Older stories, it's when the hero confesses he's always been in love (despite acting like a dick for 90% of the story, of course); there seems to have been a transitional period during which sex was okay in romance, so long as it came with the "I love you". More recent bordering-on-erotica stories often have the sex coming well before the payoff, but the happy-ever-after (HEA) is almost always in there, although sometimes it's cast as an happy-for-now (HFN).
Where the GFY trope takes the coming-out story and does this kind of soft-shoe is at this payoff point. That's part of what, it seems to me, makes the trope such a sticking point. For a queer reader, or a queer ally, the "I love you" point — wrapped up as it is in both love and sex, per stock romance expectations — is most honest when it recognizes both the love (to want to be emotionally attached to same-sex) and the sex (to recognize, including public/political, one's sexuality). The GFY trope succeeds on one level and appears to backtrack completely on the other.
The answer, I think, is not in whether the story is about queer men, or some invisible woman pulling the puppet strings. What if it's in the readers' own values? No, I don't mean in the sense of internalized homophobia, as there's little in the texts to support that. Nor do I think we can blame internalized sexism, either. I think it's a little more complex than either.
The trope's message, and its appearance in stories, has a pretty consistent — if somewhat vague — presentation. I went looking for actual examples, but hunh, not so many in my own collection, though I could think of almost a dozen titles or cover images of ones that qualified. Errr, that's because it takes a helluva lot to get me to like this trope, so the least bit of fail and the GFY-using book would end up in my "donotkeep" folder, which I didn't bother to save when the harddrive died. Not like I was expecting to ever open those books again... But I still did find enough, and whittled it down to three statements that seem to be the main variations.
Note: no direct quotes. That just seems kinda rude, since I don't know what lurkers reading this might take out-of-context quotes as critical of the authors, and that's not my intention here.
- I’ve always been gay. I just didn't believe I'd ever fall in love.
Taken completely out of context and looking at the first sentence again, my immediate thought it that it does seem like it harbors secret homophobia. While brushing up on the texts containing this example, I noted among my titles almost twice as many M/F romance novels with the same conclusion (by either the hero or heroine). Hmm. It's actually surprisingly common, if my collection of about 400 titles could be considered roughly representative.
In M/F versions, the premise (as stated by the woman) is more of, "I've always enjoyed sex." So again, the parallel between the two sexuality paths. And, again in a character-history closely matched by the M/M romances, the heroine's belief seems to be predicated on the fact that liking sex is the reason she didn't expect to find love. (And that, I say, is a really damn sad commentary about our society, that this would be so popular, obviously striking a strong chord with readers.)
In one particular example, the heroine was pretty wild during her early teenage years, drinking, drugs, sex; she cleaned up and came back as someone else, someone respectable. In doing so, she wrote off her chances at love: because to really be loved, you can't be loved halfway, but who would love the wild teenager that still hid inside her?
Given the M/M romances have analogous characters verbalizing nearly the same fears (that their sexual exploration is inverse proportion to their chances of love), I'd have to say this isn't the author's own pressure twisting the story. It's the author recognizing that social pressures can twist a person into being convinced that sex (and any pleasure thereof) comes at the cost of ever having love.
And, being a romance, naturally this fear is proven wrong. True love does eventually arrive, and always in the form of someone who loves the person for their sexual empowerment and their heart.
- Actually, I do prefer girls. You're the one exception.
This one, after some thought, doesn't strike me as an authorial fear limiting the character, either. In context (and even out), it's really a very virginal kind of statement. Again recalling the mapping, "to like girls" for a boy is to be "good" in society's eyes, while "to stay chaste" for a girl is to be "good" in society's eyes.
On the M/F side of the genre, this trope plays out as a former good girl who does retain some longing to fulfill society's expectations — to be good, to not sleep with someone without marriage, to not do wild and crazy things in bed. At the same time, she's acknowledging that the hero's just got her so beside herself that, oh, hell, for him, she's willing to toss off those social expectations.
Yes, we could go into a complete side-discussion on whether or not this is actually an improvement. After all, hiding in there is the dubious undercurrent of whether the virgin (het woman, though it could apply to a non-het man) has just traded out of one shoebox into another, and both the "stay chaste" and the "sleep with me" are corralled and controlled by a man. It's not a completely simple and always-positive shift, and potentially disastrous in the hands of an author intending to show the darker side (or just clod-handed enough to unintentionally imply the darker side). Fortunately we're not talking about romances written in the '70s and '80s, so we have a slightly better chance that now it's more positive.
Either way, in this statement, the virgin (of either sex) is effectively not entirely in control of his/her sexual agency; s/he is responding to and/or seduced by external pressures. From a psychological point of view, perhaps it's not the best, but that doesn't change its universality, in that you can find it in people of all shapes, sizes, sexes, genders, cultures, and so on.
To explain: no matter who we are or where we come from, our culture is going to shoebox our sexuality, whether this be a big shoebox or small, it's still a shoebox in the end, and very few people are able (or willing) to escape. Just about any culture does have some pretty serious punishments for transgressions. Not that it always needs to carry those out, because our own internalized hang-ups about our sexuality will do the punishment on the society's behalf. We berate ourselves, denigrate ourselves, judge ourselves as perverted or unworthy or secretly unlovable, and all we're doing is thwacking ourself with the stick society's handed us. That's internalized self-hatred (of any stripe).
This particular version of the GFY trope is getting around that, by taking the 'crime' out of the person's hands. She wanted to be a good girl, but the hero's magical-smexxing just carried her away. He wanted to keep liking girls, but the hero's magical-smexxing just swept him off his feet. The admission that "you're the one exception" takes this terrifying reality of breaking social rules and puts a safe fence around it.
Remember that when it comes to women and queer men and the western world's social constructs (definitely so in the US, not quite as much in the rest of the enlightened western world, damnit), that move into one's sexuality makes one a pariah... but more than that, it makes one almost like a contagious disease. The rape culture blames all violence on women; when she admits/dresses/explores her sexuality, she's inflaming all men around her, which naturally the men can't handle and immediately become slobbering beasts, lust-driven and helpless to stop from raping her. And when she's not raped, she's the reason men cheat on their wives.
Aaaaaaand... it's almost a perfect parallel with the way society whispers about the so-called Homosexual Agenda. Because the instant a queer man is there in the room, all he has to do is breathe on a straight man and OMG TEH GHEY. The whole homo-panic self-defense crap is predicated on the exact same logic as that which works so hard to control women's sexuality. It's a contagious disease that will infect every red-blooded man in a mile radius if we don't do something to stop it!
[Allow me a small bit of snark: My god, when I stop and think logically about how many laws/rules/constructs there are to put boundaries and limitations on non-white, non-heterosexual, non-cis-sex, non-male sexuality, I can only think: wow, someone give those white Anglo-saxon het men a fucking cookie! It's amazing with all these temptations that they can even function! And then I think of all the white het men who are textbook examples of the Peter Principle and I realize: no, even with all these laws and constructs, they still can't function. Wtf, over.]
- Yeah, I am gay/bisexual. But I'm only gay with you.
I've skipped to the third because it's really a variation on the second, except this time the character owns his sexuality. (Sometimes it comes with an "I guess" kind of uneasy qualification, but in the four examples I found in my collection, three were more adamant than uncertain.)
Again, a less generous reading implies a certain amount of internalization, or at the very least, the tension I referenced before I began the list. It's a tension between one's sexual attractions and the social constructs hemming one in, which is why I don't say it's homophobia nor sexism, because in either the M/M version or the M/F version, the character is willing to push past the internalization and accept/acknowledge his/her sexuality.
Yet the "only with you" or "just for you" is, like the second example, putting a safe limit around this transgressive act. It's saying that although the character is breaking social constructs, there's no risk of running amok spreading the contagion of the bad-girl or the homo-boy. It's limited to just this specific instance. It's creating a separate shoebox, one in which society's rules can be safely suspended. Without self-incrimination or self-denigration, either, so long as a single all-important rule remains in place: these behaviors, this shoebox, will only be shared with one person.
Which, really, is the same style of monogamy that has been allowed to women as the only 'out' for generations upon generations, in so many different cultures (but especially in the western/judeo-christian world). This is the maneuver that allows a woman to be freely sexual, so long as it's only with her socially-acceptable husband in a culturally-blessed union. It's the maneuver that's also distorted into the madonna/whore complex, a shoebox inside a shoebox, where the larger one requires good-girl chasteness and the smaller one requires anything but.
Taking it that way, it's the source of my own dislike of the trope. It's not really freedom to just accept yet another shoebox, this one even more limiting than the first, seeing how it can only exist inside the first (and behind closed doors and shuttered windows, at that). It's a bit better than the second example, in that the character isn't denying that the erotic impulses are his/her own, but it's still not exactly fully free.
But is that really the best reading of it?
While considering this, allow me to also quote a real person.
"I didn't go gay for him, don't get me wrong. But I can't see myself feeling this way about anyone else."
That's not denying one's sexuality. It's not internalized homophobia, either, or any kind of internalized anything. Set aside the semantics and the phrasing and look at the heart of the statement that is effectively saying the same as the second and third examples, and you can see it's not shoeboxing oneself into a tiny corner of one's psyche, either.
It's simply being in love.
If you look at the statement through a lens of literature — where you expect some kind of realism, and certainly nothing resembling the unreality of a happily-ever-after (though HFN is common enough) — then, sure, that seems pretty idiotic. Never feel this way about anyone else? Ever? What, like this is it for you? Your one shot?
Well, in romance: yes.
That's the point of romance. That's the genre's foundation: that there's a True Love out there, somewhere, even if you need a pickax and night goggles. Once you've found that person, you'll move heaven and earth to stay with them, and you'll be together forever.
Even if you had something good in the past and lost it and think it's over for you, as soon as your romance story starts, you'll soon find that your past experiences pale in comparison and the love interest you may find — no, make that will find — is likeliest to be the un-likeliest of lovers. Maybe he's a Harley rider when your character's always gone for accountants; maybe he's an amateur chemist who likes to mess with fireworks; maybe he's not even a he, but a she.
In the grand scheme of romance the details are just window-dressing: all that matters is that one way or another, it'll be true love. The things we say in real life — "I can't see myself ever finding someone else half as awesome as I find you" — are in there, just turned up to eleven. That includes the fabulously awesome smexxing, if that's part of the storyline. The same magical-smexx offered by the straight hero that's enough to turn Plain Jane into a frenzied sex goddess — well, no surprise the same magical-smexxing could turn a good man queer.
This part of genre romance's message is simple: when love hits you, there's nothing you can do to stop it. Including protest about your heterosexuality. Too bad, buddy, you're in romance land now!
Okay, so saying "gay for you" is an awkward version taken out of context, implying a limitation or an ability to take it back if in future the premise -- "we're in love" -- no longer applies. And I still find it a bit suspect, thinking that perhaps the GFY phrasing is due to the author's own socially-constructed tensions about expressing one's sexuality (in any form), especially considering I find similar maneuvers in some M/F stories. The intersection here is that readers' own values may come into play, because they respond (like we all do) to stories that reflect their own perceptions -- which means purchase, and that means editors select similar stories to capitalize on what's clearly liked by the readers, and on around and around.
All the same, this is still romance. The motivation behind the phrase remains valid even if the conclusion is a little uneven; the premise will never not apply. It's a happily ever after, because this is fiction, but it's echoing what we wish were true in reality.
Even for those characters starting the story as experienced far-from-virgins, a lot of romance (for all humans, really, I think) is rooted in taking that which was everyday and making it wonderful and breathtaking. A walk in the park was, well, just a walk, but now it's a marvelous way to spend an hour because it's with the one you love. Flowers, meh. Flowers just to see someone smile? Worth every penny and minute.
And that, I think -- when I pry apart the romantic element to poke at it -- is because what romance and falling-in-love do is take us back to the first time (as readers). Back when sex was brand-new, and so was love, and the two aren't wrapped up together necessarily because society tells you so, but because you're discovering both at the same time and so as the body goes, the heart goes, and as the heart rises, the body follows.
That is why -- if you were lucky enough to first experience sex within some kind of love -- if you think back, you may recall yourself unable to comprehend every feeling this way about anyone else. You were sexual, of course, hell, you just took your clothes off and got horizontal, so no denying that! -- but it's a sexual that's tied intimately to the love you feel for this person, no matter what that person's sex or gender might be. Those are almost, sometimes, irrelevant, because being-in-love means uniting at such an intimate level that it's entirely possible to say, "I've always liked boys, but then there was you, and I'm falling so hard."
The state of being in love doesn't allow room for thoughts like, "oh, this is run of the mill, and I'll go through this a few more times in my life." I'm not saying we lose the intellectual component, as any self-protective inner voice will undoubtedly tell us that we might get our heart broken, but emotionally? No. Falling in love means not having any brakes on the bus. You just fall, and plenty of people in my life (and even a few more in the comments to the previous post in this topic, if you want to go see) report that this is exactly how they felt upon falling: this is the one person I'll ever feel this way about, body, heart, and soul, and that's exactly how I want it to always be.
In short, the GFY trope isn't internalizing something destructive; maybe its true intent is to affirm something wonderful and rare. Never feel this way about anyone else? Ever? What, like this is it for you? The only person you'll ever truly love? The end to all your searching?
In romance: yes.
And in real life? Oh, we can only wish we would all be so lucky.
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Date: 10 Mar 2010 08:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 10 Mar 2010 01:35 pm (UTC)