Don’t ask how I got here, or why, but I’m in New York tomorrow (Thursday) and early Friday. I arrived in time to catch the last hour of NYC Feministing Happy Hour, sponsored by the bloggers at Feministing and ParadigmShift NYC (their motto: “Use the F word.”)
As usual I was too shy to introduce myself to anyone I hadn’t met before (if there’s anything more useless than being a shy extrovert) but then someone else, another newcomer, introduced herself just as I was about to leave. We talked for a few minutes and then I saw Rachel Kramer Bussel (who for some reason I keep running into all over the country) and suddenly had two people I could introduce. :-) And suddenly, ice broken, we had a nice conversation about erotica for women.
Rachel’s got a new book out, and I mean literally just out — she’d just gotten copies herself, called Fast Girls: Erotica for Women
It was good to talk with her about that — she felt a little singled out last year by Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd in their issue-advocacy blog Erotica Cover Watch. Madden and Lloyd were forcefully advocating for what they called “man candy” on the covers of books and magazines when their content is written by and for heterosexual women. The tendency in the publishing industry, even for highly-progressive women-owned, women-focused publishers, is to put women on the covers. Rachel is generally sympathetic to the sentiment but said that when she’d brought it up in the past publishers told her that in genre-branding terms consumers assume men on the cover signal that the content is written for gay men while women on the cover signal more general-purpose porn… which incidentally may contain gay-male content. Rachel, who’s pretty pragmatic about it (and points out that authors and editors rarely get more than “no, not that one” veto power over covers anyway) while Madden and Lloyd were specifically trying to rock that boat.
Anyway it was pretty clear that whether that was the intention or not she felt like she was being attacked and not just her ideas. I personally happen to believe, strongly, that Madden, Lloyd, and others are right that that boat needs to be rocked I think it’s also important to remember that the people on the receiving end exist as, well, people as well as online personas. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should back off when we feel strongly that someone else is mistaken. It does mean, though, that our posts often have more impact than we imagine.
For the record, Rachel’s new book does have the genre brand of a woman on the front cover. What struck me, though, is there’s another picture of the same woman on the back and in that one she’s making direct, intelligent, and confidingly confident eye contact with the reader. Which, if publishers are going to insist on their genre cliché‘s might be a nice way to “brand’ the sub-genre of erotica for women. Assuming their faces are shown at all — not a safe assumption in the first place — women on the covers of most general-purpose erotica are generally shown looking inward or away.
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Oh, and because I stayed to talk instead of shyly going home early I was there for a raffle drawing. And I won a gift certificate for my choice of writing and ethical-leadership workshops from the Woodhull Institute! Which looks cool but also looks like they’re all set in New York (one’s in San Francisco) so if you’re interested and in or near New York and you’d like a $100 discount to one of the workshops drop me a line and I’ll mail you the certificate.
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Shyness notwithstanding I had a great time. Maybe next time I’ll introduce myself to someone else first. :-)
