| < | 151617192021 | > |
This is number sixty-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
A CALL FROM A FRIEND got me thinking about the use of ‘they/them’ pronouns for a per-son. He’s a pretty open and I might even say liberal screenwriter, so his confusion on the subject puzzled me. In a 40-minute phone call, we seemed to have reached an understanding.
But I hear the question more than I like to admit in this ‘age of enlightenment.’
I heard a comedian recently who said, “I’m a comedian and my pronouns are he-he-he.” Yeah, it was very funny. Maybe you had to be there.
I think the confusion is less significant than alarmists want to think. We authors have been using ‘they’ as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender for more than a hundred years. The use of singular ‘they’ emerged in the 14th century! It wasn’t even criticized by rigid grammarians until the mid-19th century. In the 21st century, most writing style guides accept it as a singular personal pronoun.
“But it’s so confusing that a guy wants to be called ‘they’ when he’s obviously a ‘he.’” Really? When did they tell you they were a guy? It’s not that confusing if you’re minding your own business.
However, it is equally inappropriate to use ‘they’ when you know the gender and your audience knows the gender. It is used strictly for a person of unknown or non-conforming gender.
I think that some of the confusion originates in the acronym LGBTQIA+: Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender or Transsexual, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual or Androgynous, and (+) any other non-conforming identity, gender, or sexuality. In this acronym, we conflate sex (transsexual, intersex, and asexual), gender (transgender, queer, androgynous), and sexual preference (lesbian, gay, bi)—all three of which are remarkably different. But we lump them all together largely for the convenience of white cisgender heterosexual males.
Don’t get upset about the term ‘cis.’ It’s not an insult. In Latin, it is the opposite prefix of trans and is not an acronym. So, a cisgender male identifies as a man. A transgender male identifies as a woman. Cis=on the same side as birth assigned sex. Trans=on the opposite side of birth assigned sex.
Back to the use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. Like I said, we’ve been using it that way for hundreds of years. For example:
“Someone left their backpack in the office. Will they please return to claim it.”
No English speaker would think twice about this construction. We know exactly what it means. We don’t know either the sex or gender of the person who left the backpack. They are needed in the office.
So, that covers the first use. Sex or gender unknown, use ‘they.’
The second use is for a person who is known, but whose sex or gender is non-binary. If you simply make an assumption due to observable characteristics, you have an equal possibility of being right, wrong, or just offensive. Typically, people self-identify. That’s why a common question in today’s polite society is “What are your pronouns?” When a person does not fit in with either birth assigned gender or observable behavior, they will likely identify with ‘they/them’ pronouns.
When I released Devon Layne’s Double Take, the first of the five Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins series, it started setting personal records for readership of all my stories with nearly 10,000 active readers. In chapter 45, I revealed that the cute petite girl claiming Jacob as her boyfriend was transsexual.
I lost over 3,000 readers that day and endured an incredible amount of vitriol from those parting. None of them were actually missed that much. My favorite attempt to politicize it:
“God created two sexes. Democrats created all the rest,” was one comment.
Wow! Democrats must be the oldest political party in the world. I had no idea they were so influential to the ancient Greeks where we find transgender, pansexual, hermaphrodites, and asexual persons among both men and gods! Not to mention hetero, lesbian, gay, bi, bestiality, and possible intergalactic crossbreeding. This is nothing new!
The entire five-book Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins series including Double Take, is available on Bookapy as a collection or individual volumes.
I hear the sarcastic questions in my head.
“So, you must believe in men going into women’s restrooms.” “You must be all for transgender athletes unfairly competing against women in sports.” “You must…”
No, I don’t must. First off, these are two completely different issues. The first is covered by all manner of existing laws that prohibit public indecency in restrooms as well as other public places. Remember that transgender means displaying the characteristics and behaviors of the opposite gender from birth assigned sex. If a person identifies with the opposite gender to the extent of hormones for secondary sexual characteristics and behavior patterns of the opposite gender, then yes, they should be allowed into the restroom of the gender they identify with.
“NO! They have to go the restroom of their birth sex.”
I love that one because I always pull up a photo of a friend of mine. He’s a little overweight, but has a nice beard, dresses sharply, is employed in social services, has a lovely wife, and has two great sons.
“So, this is the person you want going into the women’s restroom?”
“No! That’s what we want to prevent!”
“But this person was born with the assigned sex of female.”
“It’s dangerous!”
The last time I checked, there had never been an assault initiated by a transgender person of either sex in a public restroom. Compare that to the number of cases against senators and congressmen.
Well, what about transgender athletes?
I say this is a different situation. This should not be a question of gender identity. There are physical biological differences that separate genetic men from genetic women in sports—a physical competition. Those differences are exactly what Title IX was set up to protect with equal opportunities for both. I have no difficulty with the transgender athlete referring to herself as a ‘she.’ As an athlete, however, there is a biological advantage to a trans female over a cis female.
Yes, you could apply that to a lot of situations and I’m sure people will attempt to, even when it’s irrelevant.
Finally: It just sounds strange to use 'they' for an individual. Like I’m supposed to say, “They is going out tonight?” It sounds stupid!
And you would be stupid to attempt to use it that way. Substitute ‘you’ for ‘they.’ “You is going out tonight.” Yep, stupid. You see, we are quite accustomed to using a plural verb for a pronoun that could be singular or plural. (Or maybe you can go back far enough in time to separate the difference between ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ which isn't a difference of singular and plural anyway.)
‘You’ is a pronoun that can be either singular or plural and we always use the plural verb with it. We have no problem with it at all! Like ‘you,’ ‘they’ takes the plural verb whether used as a plural or a singular pronoun.
The only thing standing between you and accepting ‘they’ is your own stubborn entitlement to make judgments about other people. Just stop it, okay?
This could go on for a dozen posts, but if you haven’t gotten the point yet, eleven more posts won’t help. Next week: “Just Being Fair.”
This is number sixty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“IT’S JUST A STORY. Of course, no one would actually do that!”
Oh yeah? What I really want to say about this is that nothing is just a story anymore. I grant you that rational thinking human beings can distinguish between fact and fiction and identify when something is just a story for entertainment purposes only. I am doubting the prevalence of rational thinking human beings in our population.
How many “French Ticklers” were sold in truck stop restrooms, clearly marked “For Entertainment Purposes Only?” The packages went on to state “Not for the prevention of disease or pregnancy.”
“You have to use a condom.”
“Sure, I have one right here. You’ll like this.”
Nine months later…
May I remind you that L. Ron Hubbard’s series of science fiction books beginning with Battlefield Earth and including his pseudo-scientific opinion piece, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, spawned or gave legitimacy to the entire Church of Scientology?
No matter what genre you write in, you are responsible for what you’ve written. If you glorify “non-consensual sex,” you need to call it rape. You can’t hide behind a term that conceals what you mean. An “underage woman” is a child. Call her that. We wouldn’t have the blossoming of laws about depicting teens under the age of sixteen in sexual situations if there was no content that was irresponsible about this in the first place. (Content restriction for eBooks sold on Bookapy: No textual description of sexual acts or nudity of any character under 16 year old (the age of consent in Canada).)
So, I am a stickler about such mundane items as consent in fiction. I downloaded a free book some time ago to broaden my understanding of published erotica—A Time for Will by Libby Campbell. I was infuriated by the main principle that a dominant male can simply walk in and take over the lives of young women, enforcing his control with beatings, and the women will swoon over it. I couldn’t read past the fourth or fifth chapter, but unless one of those women sticks a knife in his back sometime soon, it is simply a false narrative glorifying a primitive man who expects women he encounters to simply obey him because he’s the man.
In the most popular series of my career, Living Next Door to Heaven, with over 2.1 million downloads, I presented a group of precocious teens who band together to form an agreement of what is acceptable and not acceptable behavior with each other. The intent was that signers of the agreement could safely date each other as they desired. In book two, The Agreement, the terms are spelled out.
The Group Dating Agreement
1. I will always treat everyone in the group fairly, equally, and with respect.
2. I will not be jealous of anything that anyone else does or engages in with anyone else in this group (male or female).
3. I will always receive the explicit consent of my partner(s) before engaging in any potentially sexual activity and will respond in compliance with their wishes.
4. I will always have the option of declining any advance of any kind from any partner and it will be honored.
One of the items most feared by the teens was that they would progress too fast and be pressured into behavior they didn’t really want to participate in. The agreement guaranteed every member the right to refuse any act without question, and the guarantee that no one would try something without asking first.
“May I kiss you?”
“On the cheek. It’s too soon for anything else.”
“Okay.”
It was easy! Or who can forget the sexiest words Brian says he ever heard:
“I give you explicit permission to touch me anyplace above my waist, inside or outside my clothing while we’re kissing.”
The Agreement and all ten books in the Living Next Door to Heaven saga are available on Bookapy.
If something as simple to understand as consent can’t be worked into your writing, why not? Is it because you don’t believe consent is necessary? Do you have telepathic powers that let you hold that conversation without speaking it? It is never too late to ask, give, or refuse consent.
Oh, but maybe that worked in my particular story of these particular teens, but it’s too cumbersome and unromantic to actually include explicit consent in a fiction story. We’ll just assume it.
No, you won’t assume consent in a mind-control story. You will explicitly rape the controlled person.
And if you are having trouble with consent—which many of us do because we never practiced it before—then we haven’t adequately explored ways of asking for consent.
I offered my lips to her and she met me with passion. (Silent consent and participation.)
“Let’s go to bed.” “Make me.” (Yes, that latter is explicit consent. There is a definite buy-in to the game.)
“You could pin my hands behind my back and kiss me any way you wanted and I’d just be helpless to resist.” (Not only consent, but explicit instructions on how to exercise it.)
There are thousands of ways to include consent in your erotica and other fiction. We have simply become so used to imposing our will or having another’s will imposed upon us that we forget that consent is mandatory. I return to the initial premise: Non-consensual sex is rape. It is not romantic, even if we think the victim enjoyed it.
In my Team Manager series, Dennis and his girlfriends/teammates establish just three rules: No means no. Never without protection. Never in front of the children (or parents). Easy rules the group could abide by. Coach Ardith was even more explicit.
“Let me be perfectly clear on this,” Ardith said. “‘No’ means no. ‘Stop’ means no. ‘I’m tired’ means no. ‘Not now’ means no. ‘I’m not sure’ means no. ‘I don’t know’ means no. ‘I’m not ready’ means no. ‘I’m not protected’ means no. ‘No’ does not mean ‘convince me.’ If it’s not a yes, it’s not consent. Does every single one of you understand this?”
Well? Do you?
This is probably the least popular rule I follow and promote in writing erotica. It is, however, one of the places in which writers of erotica can influence the shape of society. I’ve done nothing but rant this month. Next week, the rants continue with “Getting to They.”
This is number sixty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I GUESS I just pronounced myself anathema. There is little in the American English language that currently creates such a backlash as the word “woke.” And that is a case of lumping things together so we can dismiss them all instead of dealing with the one thing that makes us uncomfortable.
I hear that “woke” means having men in women’s restrooms. That “woke” means taking away everyone’s guns. That “woke” means rewriting history and denying cultural heritage. That “woke” means political correctness. That “woke” means you can’t compliment a woman on her looks. That “woke” means allowing the country to be overrun by illegal immigrants. That “woke” means increasing taxes to pay for foreign aid instead of helping veterans. That “woke” means giving handouts to people who are too lazy to work. That “woke” means paying millions of dollars to forgive student loans instead of making them work to pay them off like everyone else. (Except large corporations and banks who get their debts forgiven all the time.)
Pseudo-conservatives wrap anything up that they dislike and refer to it as “woke” in order to keep from acknowledging the one simple thing that it is:
To be aware of and concerned about social injustice.
And believe me, neo-liberals contribute to the same load of crap by claiming that whatever their current cause is amounts to being “woke.”
My earliest writings—we’re talking about the 70s and 80s—carried the same themes that my current writings do. Equal rights. Civil rights. Women’s rights. Antiwar. Anti-discrimination. Freedom to control our own bodies, families, money, and thinking. Freedom to be who we are and not who the government or a political party tells us we have to be.
It strikes me as strange that political parties that claim to be in support of no government regulation, and personal rights (like freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom of assembly, etc.) are also the ones voting for regulation of those very things. Please don’t tell me I am anti-Republican or anti-Democrat because I consider both to be equally bad about this.
One of the things that surprises me is how one side will take a position that it ordinarily would be opposed to if it weren’t for the other side being opposed to it. For example, show a picture of a young woman standing on the American flag and the right will want to crucify her. But show a picture of the American flag with a blue or black stripe replacing a white stripe, and the same people will talk about how it patriotically honors policemen or fallen first responders.
No, my friends. It is desecrating the American flag just as much as standing on it or burning it! That is not the flag we pledge allegiance to. It has been defaced! But since the left doesn’t like it, the right must declare themselves in favor of it, ignoring the actual law regarding display of the flag. (While you’re at it, check out what the law says about wearing the flag or using it as decoration on vehicles or clothing. It’s pretty specific about what is allowed.)
Fly a thin blue line flag (blue stripe against a black field) if you wish. Fly a rainbow flag if you wish. Fly an MIA/POW flag if you wish. But this law-abiding patriotic author objects to you flying a desecrated American flag. That’s not “woke.” It’s simply obeying the law.
So, why do some people object so strenuously to the term “woke” and insist they are anti-woke because they are conservative?
It’s really pretty simple.
If I lump together all the things that some people claiming to be “woke” believe (gun control, gay marriage, men in women’s bathrooms, open borders, etc.) then I can be against it and ignore the fundamental item of being aware of and concerned about social injustice.
So, scrap the word “woke” from your vocabulary. It has become burdened with so many extra items, the people who use it on either side of the aisle are using a meaningless term. If you are truly anti-woke, stand in front of a mirror, and declare to yourself, “I am unaware of and don’t care about social injustice.” Then you get a free pass to be whatever kind of asshole you want to be.
As for me, I will continue—as I have for forty-five years as an author—writing stories that bring attention to racism, women’s rights, voter rights, antiwar, gay rights, freedom of religion rights, the entire Bill of Rights, and these unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If you insist on calling that “woke,” then go back to sleep and live in your dreams where real life can’t interfere.
If I have any readers left after that rant, I’ll invite you to join me as I continue to explore the responsibilities of an author of erotica. Next week: “Consent in Fiction.”
This is number sixty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THIS IS PROBABLY not as dire a blog post as the title sounds. No one I know is dealing with an incurable disease at the moment. At least not one you’d recognize readily. That’s because a lot of chronic conditions aren’t easily seen by other people.
I have a friend who deals with chronic pain that would cripple me every single day, but people talking to her or interacting in public don’t have a clue that she is in pain. I have a friend whose depression manifests itself in anger and sleep. People who aren’t aware might call her lazy because she sleeps an entire day or two days or more at a time. Since writing about my heart condition and procedures, several people have written to me to describe similar conditions and how it sapped the energy from them.
The simple truth is we don’t know what is bothering other people. So, when we encounter a person who says she is depressed, a typical response is “What do you have to be depressed about?” As if depression requires a cause and it can be cured by just being happy.
I have heard—even received email—about homeless people just needing to get a job and shape up. A few years in prison would wake them up. But not one person is willing to give a job to a homeless person who has no address, hasn’t had a bath in weeks, has only the clothes on his back, and drinks a little too much wine. That latter, by the way, is something you can get by with if you are clean, have a change of clothes, and have an address. Then you just like to party.
I’ve dealt with homelessness in several of my stories. Model Student book 5, The Odalisque, has scenes in a Tent City in Seattle. It drew horrendous venom from some readers who genuinely felt those people should not have what little they do have. “Throw them all in jail for a year or two. They won’t be living on the streets after that.” Really? How many former convicts are living on the street? For that matter, how many Vietnam veterans?
In my Nathan Everett book, The Volunteer, I wrote about a chronically homeless man, trapped in his own mind as he wanders from handout to handout. The good, forward-thinking Unitarian congregation, who were devoted to a movement to end homelessness in King County in ten years, were appalled when I noted that since they’d started their campaign, homelessness had been on the increase and that there were many people on the street who would never not be homeless.
In Devon Layne’s Not This Time, the main character launches her own campaign to help the homeless. Her first endeavor was to give them an address. It might surprise you to know that without a permanent street address, you cannot get a driver’s license, collect social security, get health insurance, vote, get a passport, or get a job. But we still jump up and down and say the freeloaders should just get a job.
My theory is that we seldom know and understand what is needed in order to improve our own lives, and other people never know how to improve our lives.
Of course, I started this post talking about incurable illness. When I first started writing erotica, my daughter was in severe depression. She had never been fully engaged in school. She hated the college she chose. I picked her up at her dormitory on multiple occasions—literally carrying her—to go to the emergency room because she was in such severe muscle spasms that she could not get up off the floor.
I decided to write a story about a depressed college student at a similar arts college, and thus began the Model Student series. I learned in a most painful and direct way about some of the serious aspects of depression. I passed those on to my readers.
Unlike the premise of other literary works, especially of erotica, I found that you cannot just cure depression. You can treat it. You can mitigate some of the problems. You can control it with drugs to some extent. But it is always lurking in the background, ready to spring forward with the slightest trigger. In some stories, the person suffering from depression has sex for the first time and is suddenly cured! Not so in Model Student.
Oh, sex is great! Don’t get me wrong. It brings with it a kind of euphoria and feeling of well-being with the release of endorphins. That lasts for an hour or two. Then depression may be aggravated by guilt, pressure, expectation, and exhaustion. If that is the only way the depression is being treated, it may eventually seem that sex is just another chore to endure and there is no joy in it.
Authors and readers: You cannot cure depression by ‘making the character happy.’ Your character may have all the appearances of being happy and still be depressed. You may put your homeless character in a shelter and he is still homeless. You may make a strongman out of a 98-pound weakling and still have him weak where it counts.
And when you acknowledge the difficulty, realize there is such a thing as ‘not having enough spoons’ to get out of bed, understand that tears may always be a heartbeat away for what seems to be no reason, then your writing may be not only sensual and erotic, but comforting and encouraging at the same time.
This all sounds terribly ‘woke,’ doesn’t it? Well, good. That’s a start, but it is by no means the end of things. Next week: “What It Means to be a Woke Author.”
This is number sixty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
LET ME START by saying: I know of no impending deaths, either of people I know or characters I write about. I am in good health and was given the all-clear by my cardiologist this week. Relax. A little.
What I am talking about is the death of a character in a story that so upsets readers that they have to sit back and decide whether they will continue reading the story (or watching the television series or movie). I know many people, for instance, who continued watching Game of Thrones, despite their favorite character having just been killed. I dealt with it in every season finale of NCIS in the first sixteen seasons. (Once they were no longer on Netflix, I quit watching.) At the end of each season, I had to decide whether the show was worth watching with so-and-so dead.
On the other hand, a typical response to a death in one of my stories—which are supposed to be entertaining erotica—is met with a lengthy rant and declaration that they will no longer be reading the story and have just voted it a one.
This has happened more than once. Deaths in my stories seem to happen out of the blue. Everyone is totting along joyfully and then all of a sudden X has been brutally murdered. It affects me as much as losing my closest friend would, because I have invested a part of myself in this character. I am so devastated that I cannot continue.
But we do.
Despite the number of people who write to me to tell me they read my stories to escape from reality, not to have their nose rubbed in it.
“I get enough of this on the daily news!”
“You’ve broken the contract with your readers!”
“At least I know how the story ends because for me, it ended today.”
And yet…
And yet, we are seemingly obsessed with having every mundane detail in a story the way it would be in real life. “That’s not how it would really happen.” I got that even in Devon Layne’s outer space fantasy story, The Assassin. “Actually, the tides would be so severe on such a planet that they would wipe out every living thing on dry ground daily.”
In my currently running serial, Follow Focus, there are many things to criticize. It's a historical novel, set in the early seventies. It cost me about five or six hours of research per hour of writing time. There were so many details about pay scales, cameras and film, open embassies, war, politics, and real estate that I was overwhelmed by the amount of research.
And what bit of the story was considered unbelievable?
“It’s called Toad in the Hole, not Toad in a Hole.”
A mistaken article.
But what no one is expecting in that story is for a character to die. And since the story is available for both online reading and eBook, I’ll give the spoiler: No one does.
Follow Focus and the entire Photo Finish series are available at Bookapy.
So, that all begs the question of why put a tragic death in my entertaining erotica stories at all?
The answer is simple. My characters become living breathing personalities that insinuate themselves into our hearts. I’ve sometimes told people that the characters I write are often more real to me than the people I meet. But as real people, I can’t write them without being real. And life contains those tragic moments just as it contains the first time making love to your one and only. Dealing with tragedy is a necessary step in becoming an adult.
I spend much more time exploring how the remaining characters deal with the death, are changed by it, and survive past it than I do describing the death itself.
It’s not always a death that drives this forward. It can be a loss, a breakup, a tornado, a failure. They all drive the characters forward.
And sometimes, they drive us forward as well.
We relive a similar incident in our lives and experience the emotions again. We gain the opportunity to deal with a life tragedy vicariously, through the experience of these characters.
I seldom set out to kill a character. I knew when I wrote Nathan Everett’s For Money or Mayhem that someone important to Dag was going to die. I didn’t know who or when, but that was the theme of the Seattle Digital Noir mysteries. When I realized who and how that character would die, I was devastated. It was a defining moment in my life. Everything I knew about life changed that day. My relationships changed. My lifestyle changed. My emotions changed. Nothing was ever the same again.
When an eleven-year-old little sister died in one of my Devon Layne series, I didn’t even know she’d died until the next chapter. I thought I’d saved her! And I was crushed when I found out I’d failed. That is as an author. I can only imagine that it also affected my readers, based on the number of emails I received.
Suddenly and unexpectedly.
The death of a fictional character opens both author and reader to forming a deeper relationship with other characters. It sucks us further into the story. We are either severed from it or we become part of it. We are emotionally invested in it.
Understand that I have no “justification” for the death of any character in any of my stories. Even in real life, justification of a death is trite and hollow.
“She was 96. She had a good life.”
No! She had a long life. She was miserable throughout. She was mean and heartless and no one was really that sad to see her go. Saying she had a good life is trite and meaningless. She left the world a better place because she was no longer in it.
There is no reason for a death in a story. It usually surprises me. It comes suddenly and unexpectedly and is a turning point for me as an author because I must give up or turn it into something that changes people. And no matter how entertaining my stories may be, how sexy the love scenes are, how successful the characters become… You do not read one of my stories exempt from being changed.
I’ve often read stories that have a depressed individual suddenly cured by having sex for the first time. Hah! It doesn’t work that way. Next week, “Dealing with the Incurable.”
| < | 151617192021 | > |