the reality vs the romance

[kaigou]

[note: edited to reduce ambiguity in middle part]

Last year (has it already been that long? or am I confusing my fails?) there was the slight kerfluffle among we netizens between female romance writers of M/M fiction and gay (male) readers. This particular note was barely more than a footnote, but I saw it mentioned in a number of places: deriding stories as 'okay-gay'. The label means every character is "just fine" with homosexuality. There's no trauma, no bullying, no isolation, and friends discovering a gay character's sexuality don't respond with negatives but positives, if they even bother to give the character's sexuality that much thought. I didn't see anyone questioning this, which even at the time raised my eyebrows. I don't mean questioning whether it's okay (so to speak) to apply this label; I mean questioning the assumptions in the label.

A few months ago, CP picked up a copy of Boy's Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-cultural Fandom of the Genre, edited by Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti. Most of the essays are, frankly, rather pendantic, and some just repeat what's been said plenty of places elsewhere. Some are only barely related to the genre in question, and have little more than a few names dropped of BL publishers to tie the essay into the anthology's theme. (I note all that in case you're thinking it sounds like a good read. It has its bright spots, but of fourteen essays, few really stood out to make the cost worth it.)

One of the essays had a point that's been bubbling around for awhile now; the essay is "Gay or Gei? Reading 'Realness' in Japanese Yaoi Manga", by Alexis Hall. The author interviewed female (American, from what I gather) readers of yaoi manga, asking them about whether yaoi manga is realistic, and what elements 'make' a yaoi story realistic. The essay really cries out for a longer treatment. It packs in enough implications of intersectional privilege that it could nearly carry its own book if the author chose to unpack everything she's forced to gloss in an essay that's only about nine pages long. (I had quoted, but cut because it wasn't entirely relevant to this post overall, and its inclusion seemed to be misleading people on where/what is getting discussed here.)

Anyway, here's what really popped out at me. More like, smacked me upside the head. Of the readers interviewed,

...respondents emphasize certain characteristics as belying the "realness" of the yaoi manga text... [one respondent] mentions that the lack of prejudice in yaoi is a factor that makes it unrealistic. ... While violence and anti-gay discrimination are certainly present in the lives of many gay men, it is troubling that this association goes so far as to victimize gayness that any representation that does not fall within the confines of these negative factors are viewed as "unrealistic" or "idealistic"... In other words, this response suggests that "real" gayness is reached through experience of victimization. [emphasis mine]

It's not just a message that to be realistic, a story must contain certain negative factors. It's the corollary: that without those elements of life-sucks, the story is pure fantasy, with neither value nor validity.

The bit quoted above sent me back to a connection I'd made the first time I saw a (gay, male) LJ-poster deride a M/M story as "okay gay". It's an author's note (scroll down to the very bottom) from Matthew Haldeman-Time, a gay male novelist and short story writer. His was an approach I'd seen stated so explicitly, and it made an impression on me as being a valid argument. I think it bears repeating:

...if you're looking for fiction about gay men being harassed by homophobes, you won't find it here. My point is, there's enough of that in real life; this is my corner of the Net where I can do whatever I want, and I'm not going to waste time on bigots.
[...]
Homophobia is a daily reality, yes. It should be explored and combated and dealt with, yes. And there are many great places/times/ways to do so. But that won't happen at this website. Because, frankly, in addition to being an excellent way to explore the world we live in, fiction is also a great escape. This site is where I escape into a world where being gay and being bisexual and being straight are just the same, equally accepted, equally celebrated. Because that's the way that the world should be. And will be. This site is just ahead of the game in that area. But the rest of society will catch up. One day.

Stepping away from the hot potato of okay-gay, I started thinking about analogies. What else is unrealistic in fiction? What other facets do I see in fiction that I don't see in real life, that if I were honest (or cynical?) I would have to define the story/s as 'unrealistic'?

Well, just about any representation of women, in the romance genre.

I don't mean the female characters themselves. I mean how the world treats them, because that's a straight-up (err, sorry) match to the okay-gay concept. If romance novels were realistic, I'd expect to see a lot more female characters having to deal with love interests who have many good points but are still chauvinist jackasses in other ways. I'd expect to see anything from fewer female characters with title and responsibility and a fair salary to match it, to more female protagonists made miserable by the reality that 'pretty' (to paraphrase an online essay) is the rent women pay for occupying a body labeled 'female'. I'd also expect to see a lot more weary acceptance that this is just how things are: no smack-down on the jerkwads, no final showdown in which the female protagonist lays down the law and the chauvinist pigs amend their ways.

There are additional intersections in the way 'escapist' is treated as a dirty word and so often leveled at romance fiction. (To which I've always thought: if a whole lotta people are trying to escape something, it's usually a clue to me that the 'something' is not nearly as awesome as everyone's saying it is.) I mean, I can't escape this reality; it freaking sucks to be female -- even in this day and age -- for a thousand different reasons. I know full well the reality of not-okay-female world. I live in that world. But sometimes, I just want a break, and a chance to read a story in which I see hope of a day when I won't have to live in that goddamn world.

Perhaps, then, we need to understand the possible intentions or framework of a [specific] story, before we can judge it. Can stories have differing purposes and yet be equally valid as representations of our world?

Does a story intend to educate on some level, to create a series of events, populated by a group of people, that we could see as happening in the world right now, somewhere? Could in-story incidents appear in the reader's life -- and would the story then act as a kind of template? That is, the reader can think, it's just like that story, so now I have an idea of what to expect -- even if "what to expect" amounts to "it's going to suck from here on out". Does it present the world as-it-is?

Or does a story attempt to illustrate what the world could be? To open a reader's eyes, to give the reader a chance to spend some time in a world where rape jokes are treated as offensive and unacceptable by female and male characters; where when a woman says "no," a man stops; where an interviewer doesn't look at a female candidate and privately decide she'll probably be leaving in a few years to have babies, anyway, so it's not worth hiring her now. To imagine a world -- otherwise presented as realistically as possible -- where when a friend says, "I started dating this guy," everyone else in the room reacts with the same excitement given an announcement of, "I've been seeing this girl."

Those who prize only the former will often deride the latter as 'escapist', but I think the latter is more accurately aspiration. The former have their place and their value -- there is no doubt in my mind, at least, as to that. But the latter also have a value that should not be dismissed so out-of-hand.

Beyond that, could there be an additional intersection going on here, that makes women writers writing M/M more sensitive to the same issues Haldeman-Time raises in his author's note? Could it be that women writers who take the okay-gay route are instinctively applying the same 'negative-free-zone' (or at least a 'substantially-reduced-negative zone') as what romances in the past two decades have begin to apply to women's experiences? Could it be that we need to start seeing okay-gay in the same way that many women readers describe women-centric fiction: as a template in which the concept that 'women are also human beings' is not mutually exclusive with 'reality'?

The okay-gay stories don't have prejudice or bigotry on the pages, just as there are plenty of interracial romances where the "interracial" or "multicultural" aspect of the romance is an issue (or not) only to the two lovers in question, and the rest of the world doesn't even blink. Or stories with BDSM, where characters can enjoy their personal kink and the social reaction -- if there's any at all -- is simply, 'to each his/her own' with no knee-jerk panic or uninformed mob mentality. I wouldn't blame a single person who lives with that shit daily, any kind of discriminatory shit daily, to long for the chance to curl up with a book that shows life without that additional, constant, unending, subtle (or not-so-subtle) negativity. For that matter, even as someone who doesn't live with those particular types of negativity, I still enjoy the chance to curl up with a book that shows me that those things, too, could happen without that experience of victimization.

I don't think this approach makes a story invalid, of no value, not worth reading. As Haldeman-Time put it, I think it makes the story realistic... for a world that's not yet here. But it will come. Someday. And just as we need stories that show where we are, we also need stories that show where we want to end up.

Comments

[hakainokami]

I'm about to go to bed, but I wanted to reply because this really hit me; it relates to something that really bothers me in fandom sometimes- especially Star Trek and Gundam Wing. Its HOW many years in the future and there is still sexism/homophobia. Really? You can't imagine that hundreds of years in the future DADT and homophobia and sexism would be gone? Look at Canada! or one several other countries that don't care what sex their military personnel sleep with. More than one country today allows people of the same sex to get married. Sexism is in no way gone, but its a lot less in most developed countries than 30 years ago and even less developed countries are starting to try- why can't that trend continue? And look at Fullmetal Alchemist... its a shonen series so they pretty much skip the idea of sex entirely except for crushes and a few minor references, but since the authors never bothered to say why add DADT? If the series never addresses it, why assume its there instead of assuming its not?

[kaigou]

Well, FMA would be an outlier, since technically it takes place in 1910... so if you really want to go realistic (although that's kinda, hrm, dubious seeing how the 'real world' doesn't actually have automail or alchemy) then you'd probably have to introduce more anti-sodomy laws into the world-building. Which is kinda the opposite of your argument, err, sorry! (heh)

As for science fiction, I think that's also a tough one. I mean, certainly, you could posit a world where there's no -ism of this type or another, but sometimes there's also a value in including that -ism or -phobia regardless, because you're using the not-this-world as an analogue for the actual real world. The original Star Trek used alien races as stand-ins, to get viewers to think about racism or sexism or whatever from a different perspective (that is, without incurring potential knee-jerk reactions of familiar hot buttons). But on the flip side, a writer could also include sexism in a future-story as realistically (for the world-of-now) as possible, as a way to bring it into stark relief: "holy crap, wouldn't that be less of an issue by then? wouldn't that be something everyone's over!?" and maybe then some readers -- who'd never given it much thought -- might say, "should that really be a permanent part of our human existence?"

That's one major value of realism in fiction (regardless of genre), and it can be a really powerful part of it. I also think in some ways it's more powerful than the aspirational/escapist version, because the 'reality' resonates with us as 'people right now might be experiencing this very situation' whereas the instance of, say, a woman being given a raise equal to what her male peers make gets the reaction of 'wow, that'd be nice, but she's maybe what, one in a million and very lucky to boot, and fictional anyway'. The problem for me is when readers declare that stories that lack this as-it-is type of power are therefore totally powerless.

And, as you point out, sometimes it's equally valid to exclude such aspects of reality, as part of the author's means/goals in getting some part of the story's meanings/themes across. As I said (or implied, maybe, now that I've revised slightly, uhhh, long day and it's not even lunchtime yet!), sometimes there's just as much value and meaning for a reader, to get to read something where the bastards are not grinding anyone down.

[jae]

Here's the thing, though: some of us DO want the real. So when you talk about "the point of a story" (as if all stories were alike!) as being aspirational, you are completely discounting what people like me (and yes, there are lots and lots of others like me--you may not know any of them, but I do) want to read, what we want to write, and what we want to watch.

The more a story is about what real people really experience now, already, somewhere in the world, the more interesting it becomes to me. I have never heard the label 'okay-gay', but I know the phenomenon of which they're speaking, and I'm not interested in reading stories like that. It wouldn't feel real to me, so at some point in the course of the reading, I would stop. There is nothing wrong with this, just as there is nothing wrong with what you want to read in a story. There is room for all kinds of stories in this world. And I don't want what I want because I want my stories to be "educational," either--I want what I want because it is what I enjoy.

I'm very angry as I write this, kaigou, and I'm spelling this out because I know that my anger doesn't tend to come across in print. But I've had this conversation in fandom so many times. So here's my angry, jaded appeal that no one ever listens to: Please don't write about theories that are in essence sweeping generalizations that squeeze people out who want different things out of stories than you want. Please. Please.

-J

[kaigou]

I think my rhetoric may've moved too fast, then. The crux is probably paragraphs 16 and 17 (not counting quoted sections). Those paragraphs are not two mutually exclusive options. I think in hindsight my wording may've been ambiguous, since I was relying on the rhetorical progression to make it clear that the two alternatives are equally valid. Basically, I'm arguing for exactly what you appear to think I'm arguing against.

Here's a simpler outline of the post's progression:

A. The label 'okay-gay' is a derogatory term applied to certain stories, to mark those stores as invalid, of no valuable, due to not showing the world as-it-is with prejudice, bigotry, etc.
B. Here's an academic's analysis of the implications buried in the assumption that a mandatory requirement for a 'realistic' story be that it includes social negativity/homophobia.
C. Here's a writer's explanation for why he's chosen to exclude those negative elements from his story.
D. Here's one way/purpose/value of a story, to present the world as-it-is (paragraph 16).
E. Here's another way, to present the world as-it-could-be (paragraph 17).
F. Here are all the reasons that (E) is valuable and potentially important to readers.
G. Here are also some reasons why some writers (mainly, women) may be more sensitive to the inclusion/exclusion as a facet of fiction that appeals to them.
H. Conclusion: that the as-it-could-be is a valuable and valid presentation of potential reality in fiction.

The argument is essentially staged to argue against the position that there is only one measure of the validity or reality of a (gay) romance: in other words, those who believe paragraph 16 is the only appropriate approach to a story. I was approaching the argument as though it's with people holding that position, thus, I didn't need to elaborate strongly on paragraph 16 because it's already something they agree with. Nor did I structure my argument to say that (E) is the 'only' way, over/above (D), because that's not a position I agree with, myself; had that been my path, the remainder of the post would've been structured very differently, with as much time spent tearing down (D) as I spent building up (E). If someone already believes in (A), I doubt I could convince them otherwise; my goal was more to get the (A) audience-readers to recognize that (E) has value as well, using the examples gathered in (G).

However, the fact that you missed the segues in there tells me that perhaps I was too ambiguous in this movement, and that I need go back and include clearer markers rather than rely on close reading to track the argument's progression. So it's good you pointed that confusion out, because (as is hopefully obvious by now), it's not a conclusion I intended to have anyone draw. I'll be editing... once I've had some caffeine and am no longer quite so zombified.

[jae]

It wasn't just the words you didn't use that made it come across that way. It was some of the words you did use. You have now edited, so I can't quote you directly (which is incredibly frustrating, given that we were still in the middle of a conversation about the words you used in this post and the intent behind them), but the original version of the post clearly stated that the very purpose of a story was to be aspirational. So yes, of course it read like you intended to be saying that realism in storytelling was less valuable--how else could something like that have been read?

But your editing suggests that you'd rather cover those issues up than engage about them, so...*raises hands in surrender*

-J

[kaigou]

Yeah, I do edit. (Sorry, and I don't mean that facetiously -- but I tend to write a lot in the first go-round, and then realize that I probably didn't need a hundred words to say that, so I find a better way to put it. It's not a matter of "I don't want to discuss this" but "the way I presented might've been creating a problem unintentionally, so if I put it more concisely, then that's possibly half the battle at least insofar as not making it harder on myself by confusing myself and everyone else with a hundred more words than needed".)

What you're characterizing as "covering up rather than engaging" is would be more accurately called: "okay, I guess what I meant to say didn't make sense to you, so maybe I should put that differently so my point is clearer". Haven't you ever had a conversation where you've said, "wait, I don't think you understood what I meant, let me put it this way, instead"? When you finish your redo attempt and the person understands, that doesn't mean you changed your opinion or you're backpedalling or "covering up rather than engaging". It just means you found a better way to put the same points you'd believed all along.

It means your first communication didn't work, but your second did.

That's the way I've approached this conversation, but you seem to be determined to convince me that (a) I believe something completely opposite of what I do really believe, and that (b) my attempts to clarify are tantamount to lying about my position. You may be angry about what you think you read, but I'm just plain hurt at the way you're insisting on vilifying me -- and then getting mad at me for not defending a position that wasn't even the position I was arguing for in the first place! If you can't give me the benefit of the doubt at some point here that I'm not being malicious nor devious, then I'm not sure what else I can do.

[jae]

I don't think you're being malicious or devious, so that much is easy. I think you wanted to argue that stories don't have to be set within the real world in order to be valid, but that you did so by dismissing those stories that are set within the real world. Once you realized that you weren't just preaching to the choir, i.e. that there are some people reading your journal who weren't going to take it as a given that all writers of m/m slash would of course prefer the aspirational kind of fiction, you changed the post because you realized that your overgeneralization was distracting from the actual point you were trying to make.

So I think the reason for the changes wasn't malicious, but I also think you made those changes without really understanding the kind of story you were dismissing in the original version of the post. Or for that matter, the kind of argument the original version of your post was engaging with, which you found in the book your original post quoted. I don't think you understand why some of us female slash writers prefer stories about true-to-life situations, and I don't think you understand why some gay men would be bothered by stories that do not depict true-to-life situations.

In any case, I'm not vilifying, I'm arguing. And I'm doing that because I think you're wrong. I think your original post demonstrated that wrongness in a more obvious way than the current version does, but the comments that you're making suggest that you still don't understand. And I wish you would listen to the other point of view, and maybe ask questions about it in an effort to understand better.

-J

[shippen_stand]

At one point in my life I was dressing a statue as a part of a day that included so many impossible things. The owner of the statue looked at me and said, "If you put today in a book, no one would believe you. [Famous literary author he knew] said he was always criticized as fantastic for the the things that came straight from his experience."

Fiction is generally a pack of lies, especially when it is most True.

As with you, the thing that struck out most was this: In other words, this response suggests that "real" gayness is reached through experience of victimization. The full experience of being gay involves discrimination, from mild to extreme. The full experience of being female involves sexism, from mild to extreme, and the constant potential threat of rape. (Yes, men can be raped, and it sometimes happens as part of harassment of gay men--just as much an expression of power as raping a woman. Statistically, it's less likely.) So when a male author writes a convincing female character, do we discount it because he hasn't experienced sexism? Or because he's a male writer, do women read the unconscious sexism in male character behavior and that helps us mark the character as realistic? Or if the writer has written an idealized world where sexism does not exist, do we believe the character because it is what we would want the world to be?

Men have written successfully from a (straight) female point of view. Women have written successfully from a (straight) male point of view. Why does it seem so wildly unlikely that straight woman could write from a gay male point of view? There's a valid argument that gay men are not women with dicks, and a lot of female m/m romance writers tend to do something like that. The earliest slash I read was rife with feminization of characters. Men can be emotionally vulnerable, but they don't generally express it in traditionally feminine ways. And not all men are the same. And, and... The experience of victimization is a part of what makes up the character of any gay person. That cannot be denied. The story may not always require depicting that part of a gay person's life. But when it should, then it should.

Rambling post rambles. Sorry.

[kaigou]

Hrm, I think you're conflating two sections. Maybe I should just remove the first quoted part altogether, since it doesn't really have a bearing on what I'm saying here, which is completely independent of who's writing or what they are in relation to what they're writing. (When it comes to "you must be X to write Y," I've essayed already against that one plenty of times, and wasn't up for retreading it here, yet again, not to mention it's beside the actual point of the post.)

The story may not always require depicting that part of a gay person's life. But when it should, then it should.

That is exactly my point, well, flipped around a little: that a story that does not require depicting that part of a gay person's (or woman's) life should not have to contort itself sixteen ways to Sunday just to include that part solely to gain the moniker of "realistic" and therefore avoid the derogatory label of "okay-gay" (or even "okay-female"). There are other -- equally valid -- ways to measure the value of a story, rather than only using the ruler that a story must show us how much the world sucks.

[jae]

I am glad you are now stating that reality-within-storytelling is just as valid as the aspirational kind of story (even if I don't believe for one second that you actually believe that). But your last sentence is a complete strawman. Stories that strive for ultra-realistic scenarios can do far more than "show us how much the world sucks." Real people have real wonderful experiences within the actually existing world, and that can happen just as easily within a fictional story as well.

Do you need an example of this, within the genre of fanfiction? I could show you hundreds, but let me be so bold as to show you one of my own. "40 Miles North of Presidio" is a coming-out-to-oneself story set in the "Friday Night Lights" universe. The character doesn't experience victimization about his sexuality, not even a little bit, but it is very clear that this story in which both bad things and good things happen is set within the real world of rural Texas. There are implications of that all over the place, and the point-of-view character has a huge inner struggle with those implications, because that is the kind of story that I like. But nowhere does it require that he become a victim.

Now, you may not like that kind of story. That's totally legitimate. But please don't talk as if that kind of story doesn't exist, or lump it in with stories that are All About Victimization.

-J

[shippen_stand]

I conflated them on purpose, because of the sometimes-heard opinion that "okay-gay" is based on a complete lack of understanding of what modern gay life is actually like. I don't think I missed the point; I looked at the entire post through that specific lens. That might not have brought me to your point.

[kaigou]

Sorry, my bad! I thought you were referencing the quoted section illustrating intersections of privilege, which I blocked out during editing, since I was thinking that had made a bigger impression (whether it's okay for this person to write about that topic w/out first-hand experience) when the bulk of the post wasn't really revolving around whether a work is valid based on the author's experience. It seemed on longer thought to be a quoted section that would just muddy the waters.

I get the argument that okay-anything is based on an unrealistic interpretation of a state of being (whether this is female, gay, black, jewish, etc). And I do think that there are plenty of times in which a story does require --as you noted in your first comment -- the inclusion of those negative elements, because that's part of the state of being represented in the story. But I think to deride stories that do not contain those negative elements is too much of a generalization, and that sometimes there's a valid (or at the very least, aspirational) reason behind an author's choice to leave out or set aside or just not see the need to address those negative elements.

[jae]

Yes. Yes. Yes. That is the kind of slash story I want to read, and the kind I want to write. Said story doesn't have to be about victimization (which is a lovely little strawman if I ever saw one), but I don't want to read it if it is contextualized against a world where no discrimination could ever happen. The very idea is just completely unappealing to me.

-J

[shippen_stand]

That's what I was trying to get to. The experiences shape the gay characters, just as sexism shapes women, regardless of whether a specific story deals with discrimination/victimization. This is why I think "okay-gay" criticism from LGTB people has an element of, "You have no idea what my life is like. How can you write it as if everyone in the culture thinks it's okay to be what I am. Trust me, I know they don't." It's a valid point.

[branchandroot]

*nods* That's been my explicit framework for years--that the Gael Baudinos of the world can write their current-or-past-realistic explorations as they like, but that isn't what I want to read. So I write what I do want to read, which is more the kind of world I'd /like/ to live in.

The critique I actually lend credence to sometimes is the one about how constructing a world in which bias X doesn't exist can make it easier for an author to stop thinking about bias in general, which can show up in some pretty unpleasant ways. But given how universally not-thinking-about-bias shows up, in all generes and approaches, I am unconvinced that the "no bias X" part is directly causative, by itself, of any "only my experience exists" part. Or, for that matter, that an inclination to excising bias X is indicative of a tendency to "only my experience". So I tend to throw that into the "any author has to stay aware of potential erasures, duh" bin.

[kaigou]

The critique I actually lend credence to sometimes is the one about how constructing a world in which bias X doesn't exist can make it easier for an author to stop thinking about bias in general

Absolutely, except that it seems to me that such erasure takes a slightly different path -- I mean, usually when an author's heading down that road of "we don't have to think about bias" -- that most likely they're writing from a position of privilege, and their inclusion of any bias-related things (people, sexes, ethnicities, etc) are relatively minimal. Like... oh, say, writing about the US antebellum period and not having any speaking lines given to any black characters, and not having anyone express the least bit of racist word or thought. That's erasure, and that's different from positing a world in which there are plenty of black people, and none of them have to deal with being treated as inferior due to skin-color. I mean, I suppose it's possible that an author might have two main protagonists who are both gay men, and leave out bigotry because the author "simply doesn't want to deal with it", but I don't see that as being the same kind of erasure that comes from the "not having to think about it" mode that I think you're meaning, or at least that I'm reading out of what you're saying (or maybe just riffing off what you're saying and heading off into my own reality? because it's rather nice here, for the most part, this morning, barring a few natural disasters).

Anyway, from what I've seen of writerly attempts, if the writer wants to erase or avoid nasty things like sexism in the workplace or racism in the classroom, the writer is more likely to just not have or show any women in the workplace, or any PoC in the classroom: there! now we don't have to deal with that nasty stuff (which in turn makes me wonder if writers realize that the logic has become: the reason we have that nasty bias stuff is because of these characters, as though getting rid of women would miraculously clear up any and all sexism forever and ever amen. I mean REALLY. It's a lot harder to peg when the author is being purposefully avoidant of that nasty real-world stuff when the author is also writing about the very characters -- women, LGBTQ, PoC, etc -- who'd be erased in the first example due to raising the problems by their mere existence.

Hrrmm, or maybe the avoidance in the second instance makes it even more noticeable, because we expect to see bias/negative when we see members of a certain class?

I guess part of it is also that I think it's really kinda sad, that our measure for "this is realistic" when it comes to fiction is "does a gay man have to suffer homophobia". I would like to think that the experience of suffering homophobia is not what makes a gay man a 'real' gay man, and that our next generations who -- I sincerely hope -- have to deal with less and less of it will not, therefore, be considered "less real" as gay adults, simply because we managed to make the world a better place. Honestly, isn't that kinda what the argument is, underneath? And if I extend it back to the analogy of women's fiction, isn't the message then that to be a "realistic" representation of a woman, she (person or fictional character) must suffer some form of sexism? Aren't there other, better, less destructive ways to determine whether a story is "realistic", because when I flip the argument over and look at its logical conclusion (that the sole measure of "real" is that one suffers negatives), it's both depressing and, well, sad.

[branchandroot]

and that our next generations who -- I sincerely hope -- have to deal with less and less of it will not, therefore, be considered "less real" as gay adults, simply because we managed to make the world a better place

Alas, I have seen exactly this attitude crop up sometimes within the circle of feminism, so I expect it will happen. Which depresses the everliving fuck out of me. I mean, yes, it's necessary be aware that things are not perfect and we need to keep going. But it's good that my little freshers look at me like they've never heard of anything so outlandish and ridiculous when I give them the "employment makes a woman less fertile and anyway their brains are smaller" articles from post WWII to read. It's good that they don't have that in their worldview, and they are not any less feminists (or women) for having grown up without it!

I think I need to go read some Third Wave authors and console myself, now.

[opusculus]

This is a really interesting post. I wonder how much of an overlap there is between audiences who enjoy "focusing on bigotry is the only way to write" or "aspirational escapism only please". I've noticed in these kinds of discussions it's easy to present them as completely mutually contradictory, and in my experience...I don't know if I'd consider that true or false. I know most of the stories that stick in my head forever are the ones that deal with prejudice without making the entire story defined on it, but I don't think I'd enjoy them nearly as much without the background of fluffy aspirational stories where no one has to deal with that crap. For me personally, I don't think the potential reality has anything to do with me enjoying bigotry-free stories so much as giving me enough of a break from current reality to have the energy and desire to engage in a story that handles issues well. Happy fluff gives me energy, and I appreciate that.

On the other hand, I personally despise stories that have no redeeming aspects to anyone whatsoever and which are entirely depressing (or even mostly depressing). I know that there are people who love them, and I wonder how many of them are the people who despise escapist lit.

M/M fiction, in my experience, seems oddly weak on stories in the middle. With most other issues - racism, sexism, etc. - I can think of stories that touch on the existence of bigotry without making it the whole focus of the story. Some can even maintain the escapism anyway. With m/m, off the top of my head I'm coming up blank. I can think of fluffy up the wazoo, and the occasional really depressing story, but not really much in between.

I'm not really sure where I was going with this.

[kaigou]

I wonder how much of an overlap there is between audiences who enjoy "focusing on bigotry is the only way to write" or "aspirational escapism only please"

At least one, if we're counting me! (err, well, I like both types, that is, depending on my mood.)

I brought up the issues in women's romance as analogy to this non-mutually-exclusive presentations in genre romances, because it's become considerably more popular in women's fiction to show women being successful, strong, and finding a man (or woman) who respects the protagonist and doesn't treat her like crap. When you think about how that's a major, major genre of fiction and I don't hear anyone attacking it as being "unrealistic and therefore not representative of how it really is and therefore not valid as a way to spend any time" -- let alone using that lack o' realism as grounds to argue that the authors are therefore unqualified to write because they don't include realistic-bad parts... it seemed to me that maybe there's something in that comparison worth picking apart. Why is it that the same approach in mainstream romance (sometimes by the same authors) is accepted as okay in one genre (to reduce/remove the everyday sexism women face) but not okay in another genre? And the undercurrent that really bothers me: why is it that male gay-romance writers can have happy non-negative stories and not get this label, while women writing the same genre are ridiculed? Yes, there are additional intersections and dynamics going on there, that are quite problematic.

Problem is, I think it's a topic that's a real hot button for some, which means I've already edited several times to try and make sure I don't get misunderstood -- because the hotter the button, the faster a person will leap, and higher, as well. When I edited to clarify (and to avoid being leaped on any further), I ended up substantially reducing the significance of the part where I was trying to tease out the dynamics of what's going on. I'll just come back around to it again, later, as I always eventually do, and next time be as explicit as possible as to where I'm going. I just don't have the energy to try it yet again on this post.

Bottom line: I think both types of fiction are equally valid and have their place. I just don't like deriding one approach as worthless and elevating the other to exclusion of the first. Obviously anyone else's mileage may vary, as is always true when we're talking about personal taste.

[maire]

I like what I'm hearing here, which is that you think the unrealistic 'okay-gay' story is just as capable of being a good work of art as the realistic story, and that lack of realism need not be held up as a judgement against a work. Have you read Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories'? I feel it makes roughly the same point, although more generally. The section on escape feels particularly relevant to me.

(I didn't, FWIW, perceive you as making any judgement about the validity or enjoyability of realistic stories beyond the implicit one of assuming that they are generally regarded as capable of being worth while.)

[mediumrawr]

For better or worse, a story needs to interact with the audience and their expectations. Recognizing that an audience's expectations can be problematic has value - refusing to write stories that use those expectations, in one way or the other, is bad writing.