Chrononautic Log: Sex: Still what it used to be

Sex: Still what it used to be

11 o'clock, June 6, 2003

Jed Hartman has an editorial over at Strange Horizons called “The Future of Sex”, on sexual relationships in future human (and posthuman) societies in SF, and the lack of diversity thereof. I probably should be posting this over in the SH forum instead, but I didn’t get around to reading Jed’s editorial until this morning, and now it’s awfully crowded over there. (Any thoughts about making the SH forums threaded, by the way, Jed?)

Part of the problem, I think, is that it’s extremely difficult to create a believably complex alternative sexuality. Too often the writer can only manage to come up with one, more monolithic than heterosexual monogamy has ever been, and the result is either dystopia or a utopia verging on wish-fulfillment. To evoke a universe of diverse sexual alternatives is even more difficult, particularly in a short work, particularly if the work is supposed to be about something else entirely. Make a character’s relationship — but not the type of relationship — an important facet of the story and the problem grows exponentially.

Take a story like Gibson and Swanwick’s “Dogfight”, which turns on what is essentially, structurally, romantic betrayal and rape. Make Deke a bisexual hermaphrodite and Nance a lesbian. Now does Deke still betray Nance because s/he’s a lowlife fuck, or because of the fundamental instability of a relationship between two people whose desires are at right angles to one another and who can never actually touch? A worldly and open-minded reader may conclude that it’s still because Deke is a weak-willed junkie hustler, but a lot of readers will be distracted by the exotic sexuality. (Not that such a reading wouldn’t be interesting, but I’m not convinced that it would make the story more powerful.)

For a concrete example, take Charles Stross’ “Lobsters”. I’ve talked to more than one person who hasn’t been able to see past the S&M to the essentially political humor of Pamela’s expropriation of Manfred’s genetic material — though I admit the sex adds a dimension to the story that a simple tissue sample, for instance, would lack.

There was a phase SF went through in the 70s and 80s where experimenting with sexual relationships, sometimes to an almost baroque extent, was practically de rigeur — often within a fairly unimaginative male-dominated heterosexual context, true, but there was a point where polyamory and kinky human/alien sex were almost as much a genre trope as the ubiquitous household cleaning robot.

Like that robot, you’d find them in stories that were really about something else entirely — used merely for false exoticism, to punch up the “future-ness” of an otherwise very contemporary civilization. Benford’s In the Ocean of Night is a good example — you get the feeling the stuff about the collapse of Nigel Walmsley’s triad relationship was put in as filler to pad a fix-up of several short stories out to novel length. (And even at that it’s not enough, as he has to throw in a new worldwide religious cult as well.)

If it wasn’t false exoticism, it was gratuitous pornography, and aimed generally at a very conventional heterosexual male libido — the “pudendolls” that turned up in one of Aldiss’ Helliconia books, for instance, or the surprisingly large subset of the stories in Medea: Harlan’s World that turned out to be about women having sex with (possibly nonsentient) living hot-air balloons.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this seemed to die off about the same time that AIDS, a social-conservative backlash, and maybe even the coming of age of a second generation of career women (as one of my Santa Cruz professors was fond of putting it, “All the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ accomplished was to make women more sexually available to men”) took the edge off the Swinging Seventies. Nor, given that decade’s renewed respectability, would I be surprised to see it make a comeback in SF over the next few years — SF lagging, as usual, a few years behind social change in society at large.

I admit I’ve got my own hangups. I put down Swanwick’s Jack Faust, for instance, when it stopped being about technological and social change and started being about fucking. But for my part, as both a reader and a writer, having read enough of this done badly back in the day, I feel like I’ve been there and done that.

To be honest, I’m tired of false exoticism of all kinds; it’s one thing to weave your exoticism in deftly to create an exotic texture, but against a cozier and more conventional background, it sticks out — the well-worn example of Heinlein’s “the door dilated” notwithstanding — like a sore pseudopod. I’d rather read a powerful story that’s conservative in its choice of characters and props, than a story weakened by a token nod to false diversity.

That said, I’m all in favor of increasing all kinds of diversity in SF characters’ lives. But like everything else in writing it’s something a writer has to develop an ear for.

And read by straight, white males, don’t forget.

I’m pretty sure that “straight, white, female” is the second most common demographic among protagonists, writers and readers.

That’s not a whole lot more interesting, but the fact that it was much less common even twenty years ago gives me some hope for the future.

Seems kind of self-perpetuating, doesn't it? SWMs write stories about SWMs which are read by few others besides SWMs because non-SWMs are less likely to identify with protaganists, so the genre retains a lot of its ethnic, cultural and sexual homogenity.

Obviously, there are exceptions, and you're right about more females participating, but it's still a pretty insular field.

Makes me think of one of Nick's Rules Of Blogging that you shouldn't go on about "Gee, There Are An Awful Lot Of Black People In 'Matrix Reloaded'." It's a shame that diverse casting is still considered worthy of comment.

Rachel, I could argue that what Reloaded had was more ‘alternative’ casting than ‘diverse’ — but good point.

The question of what sort of protagonists are easy to identify is an interesting one. I have an easier time identifying with Zhang in China Mountain Zhang or Sparrow in Bone Dance than I do with someone like Cryptonomicon’s Randy Waterhouse, with whom, superficially, I might be expected to have a lot more in common.

But it’s quite possible that my status as a member of the privileged race, class, sex, and sexual preference gives me a freedom that somebody without those privileges wouldn’t necessarily feel.

Good post, David!

One comment for now: it seems to me that you're presupposing that the stories worth telling are the ones that use conventional sexual mores as a backdrop. It's true that if you applied other sexualities to existing stories, it would change both the stories and readers' perceptions of them. For example, if the characters in any conventional love-triangle story were poly, many fine tragedies would end with happy-ever-after. Lancelot, Guinevere, and Arthur would've formed a lovely kingdom-ruling triad, for example, and our source of most Arthuriana would be an obscure minor work called La Vie d'Arthur.

But that difficulty in slapping other sexualities onto an existing story is all the more reason to consider telling different stories. Rather than telling the story that relies on the characters being straight and monogamous, how about telling a story that arises from some of the characters not being straight and/or monogamous? I can't tell authors "You're telling the wrong kinds of stories, go tell the kinds of stories I want to hear"—but I suspect that a lot of authors could find very fertile ground for stories by starting out with characters of unusual sexuality rather than trying to tack that on (as, as you noted, false exoticism) to an existing story.

And the bit about readers getting hung up on non-mainstream sexuality in a story is definitely a good point—but it presupposes that readers aren't into any of this alternative stuff. Which, to be fair, most readers probably aren't. But a fair number of speculative fiction readers are, and they're not seeing people like them in these books. Another useful exercise for authors might be (I just thought of this, so it may not be as interesting as I currently think it is) to look at a story you're starting to write with the assumption that the majority of the readers will be, say, gay. Or, for that matter, South Asian. Does having that different audience make a difference in how you think about the story? Not sure.

It's a very good point (that you touched on in passing) that in a short work, it's easier (and often better) to rely on various kinds of shorthand than to try to flesh everything out, and the easiest shorthand we have for sexuality is a presumption that everyone's straight and monogamous (and gendered, and so on; I'm using "straight and monogamous" as shorthand here, of course). Because those are the unmarked state, they take fewer words to explain. On the other hand, readers are pretty familiar with the notion of homosexuality these days; if you set a story in a standard Terran-future-in-space, and had the male protagonist be married to another man, you might have to expend a few extra words on the topic but not many. (My presumption here being that differences between treatment of sexual orientations are likely to be reduced over time in much the same way that differences between treatment of genders are; and now we run smack-dab into the "does portraying a gender-blind society do a disservice to feminism?" question that a WisCon panel attempted to address, but that's a whole 'nother topic.)

Anyway, lots of good food for thought; thanks!

Jed, I didn’t mean to imply that I think stories told against a backdrop of conventional sexuality are somehow more worthwhile than those that aren’t. If you’re constructing a future society, sex is one of the things you owe it to your readers to think about, along with religion and race relations and politics and economics. Assuming any of those things works just the way it did among the Anglo-American middle class in the second half of the twentieth century is slacking, pure and simple. (No matter how many Grand Masters do it.) And if you’re throwing a relationship into the story just to make a character more three-dimensional, by all means stop and think about whether, in terms of your future society, it really makes sense for that relationship to work just the way relationships do on Dawson’s Creek.

(And there are plenty of excellent stories to be told by foregrounding those issues — China Mountain Zhang would have been a much shorter book if Zhang had been straight and pure Han Chinese.)

I think the stories that most concern me are the ones that sexual mores don’t really enter into at all; and that’s where markedness comes into it. If I tell a story in which the characters’ physical appearance never comes up (and the names are fantastical or sufficiently Anglo and bland), the reader will most likely assume the unmarked state — that they’re white. Likewise, if their love lives never come up (and there aren’t any stereotypical secondary cues), the reader will most likely assume the characters are straight, probably serially monogamous with occasional affairs, et cetera.

As a writer, this annoys me to no end, because if it’s important to my conception of the story or the characters that they be marked in some way — but not so important that it actually drives events — I have to work some artificial trickery to get the information into the story. There are times I’d love to be able to assume that the majority of my readers are gay, or South Asian — funnily enough, I’ve had both of those situations come up recently — but I can’t. (And even a gay reader or a South Asian reader, in the context in which my stories are likely to be published, is probably going to make the same assumptions as the unit-spherical Anglo-American straight reader.)

But we’re getting into post-structuralist territory here. (If you read the Neveryon books as if they were written by Gene Wolfe, and the Book of the New Sun as if it was written by Chip Delany, and both of them as if you were John Norman....)

And, okay, I’m a writer — artificial trickery is my job, and I should stop whining about having to do it.

Just — can I please not have any more of those novels where the protagonist is supposed to be a 24th-century bisexual African woman and yet somehow behaves like she’s a larger-than-life 20th-century straight white American man?

Hee hee -- good points all around, and I love the idea of reading Neveryone as if it were written by Gene Wolfe and I were John Norman. I'll have to try that some time.

And yep, full agreement on that last paragraph in particular.

Omigod! Playing follow-the-comment-spam (an entertaining way of reminding oneself of older posts... it adds a lot to the Chrononautic Log experience) has led me to the horrifying realization... the threaded forums at SH are YOUR FAULT!!!!

You have penance to do, Moles. Swiss laundry is just the beginning!

Chrononautic Log

Sex: Still what it used to be

11 o'clock, June 6, 2003

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