Twitter is delightfully random in its interconnectedness. Via a series of re-tweets, I saw a link to the following passage a little while ago. I never would have seen it otherwise.
"In a lot of the chick lit, depicting women slightly older than me, the sexual maturity is that of a nine-year-old, maybe. The sex is just this giggly and ridiculous activity one is subjected to in order to make a man stay in your house and marry you. There’s no honest expression of female sexual desire, the kind you find even in those old cheesy feminist manuals like Our Bodies, Ourselves. We’ve gone backwards." --British novelist Zadie Smith
I have several problems with the above.
1. Why on Earth would anyone use "chick lit" as a barometer of anything significant? Chick lit is a specialized form of writing, aimed at a tightly-defined audience. It has not pretensions of saying anything important about life, or love, or sex, jacket blurbs to the contrary. Decrying that chick lit portrays immature views of female sexuality is like saying that Popular Mechanics doesn't provide good plans for a nuclear submarine.
2. "There's no honest expression of female sexual desire." What is honest? Ms. Smith doesn't know any women who just want to live with/marry a guy? She obviously travels in more enlightened circles than I do, because I know plenty of women in that situation, and for many of those women good sex (hell, any sex) is a bonus. And that's as honest as it gets, girlfriend.
3. "Cheesy feminist manuals like Our Bodies, Ourselves." I suppose viewed from 40-plus years down the road, OB/OS might seem cheesy. But even a cursory examination of the history of feminism shows that OB/OS and other books were putting out necessary information, that many/most women not only needed, but didn't know they needed. It started the conversation about things that no one was talking about, ever, before that time. That is seems quaint or cheesy now shows that it did its job admirably.
4. I see a lot of that "honest expression of female sexual desire." It's really everywhere -- youtube, tumblr, thousands of blogs, twitter, etc. There are thousands of self-published works where women are expressing very honestly their most private, crazy desires. Even in some mainstream literature -- a certain class of "enlightened" woman might not like Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, but one can't argue that it puts sexual desires out there that chick lit would never touch.
5. Ms. Smith concludes that "we've gone backwards." Absolutely, positively not true. No one's "honest sexual desires," man, woman, straight, gay, bi, Dom/me, sub, whatever, are ever going to be mainstream. Highly idealized/constrained visions of sex -- chick lit, Playboy, romance novels, etc. -- are always going to have a certain people. But those things will continue to exist and/or thrive is not an indicator of a lack of progress -- it's the way of the world. But that there is Fifty Shades of Grey, a website for every fetish imaginable, The Adventures of Terri and Jennifer, Literotica, many many websites devoted exclusively to erotica by women, countless tumblrs and blogs where women, straight, gay, and bi, are writing very frankly about sex (and relationships), is an indicator of progress. The best kind of progress.
What one might want to see in terms of progress, from an academic/theoretical standpoint, one often won't see, because the world, especially the parts directly reflective of human nature, stubbornly refuses to comply with notions of how people should be evolving.
But to say we've gone backwards in the "honest expression of female sexual desire" is to be not paying attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment