well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men

Wake Up, Geek Culture, in which I think I am reading a geek shaking a virtual cane at people getting their anime too easily, too many people of the ungeeky classes being interested in geek turf, and remix culture because it's killing originality and then I got lost in the Etewaf, which is apparently really bad, but kind of sounds like my perfect life.

...I'm not sure.

I want to approach this from like, multiple are you kidding angles because hello, kind of my entire identity being geek, remix, and also, I like anime and God would I have killed to have access to it in my teens. Or like, knew it existed.

Academics have covered remix culture, and the mainstreaming of geekdom is like, a constant refrain everywhere, so not even going to bother, mostly because he froze me up at the Etewaf horror--very Lovecraftian, that--in which everyone has easy access to everything and that's like, really bad.

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked. Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did. Harry Potter books had what, a one to two year wait or average? Did you see that fandom? And let me just say, thank God Star Trek II didn't come out during internet culture and have the waiting period before Star Trek III came out: bloodshed, people.

Geek culture was expensive; it was very much the territory of middle and upper middle class who could afford to import direct from Japan or knew someone who could if the titles you wanted weren't here. Even domestic products weren't cheap or easy; it's not that long ago that VHS tapes were this new and exciting thing that allowed recording instead of staring at the television listings for a hopeful glance of something not a rerun of fifties era programming and being really disappointed on a daily basis. Cable still isnt' universally accessible even in the US, and certainly not in rural Texas, much less internet. Working class geek meant used bookstores because hardcovers or even new paperback were for birthdays, Christmas, and when it was something my entire family would want to read (which luckily, we overlapped taste in a lot of things). Buying movies was an event that was considered carefully.

[I'd love to hit a real discussion of classism in geekdom because along with shitty race issues and shitty sexism issues, geek cultural development wasn't just white and male, it was white, male, and specific to certain economic classes as well. It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

[I'm still boggling at people who are utterly shocked that POC and women attended and still attend sci-fi conventions and are interested in the same things that mainstream geek culture is; yes, we've been here all along, and the question you should be asking is not 'where have you been' but 'why didn't I see that?' No one asks that, though. It's weird.]

Geek culture was difficult unless you lived in a city; I was a geek culture of one at my school K through 12 and you think your clique had it hard? Please. I never even met a D&Der until college and a LARPer after that. I met geek culture in college without any geek socialization skills--and we do have them, believe it or not--and I was the geek that geeks didn't like, since I was a feral geek who developed independently in the high school library reading encyclopedias* from 1976 because I'd finished the fantasy section before my freshman year of high school ended.

[* Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accept no substitutes.]

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

[I am not saying they're bad; I'm saying, think about a world where my sci-fi pinnacle was Anne McCaffrey.]

Yes, yes, the icky mainstream are all making your geek all less than special; those of us who, let me say this again, were reduced to rapey incesty Thomas of white gold ringness and the Gor novels unironically shelved beside the sci-fi aisle saw the dawn of Amazon.com, hulu, and bittorrent like the second goddamn coming, okay? I waited half my life to fall madly, desperately in love with a million things and Geek!Seperis of the dark days before the internet and access to Amazon would like to say, are you kidding me?

[I won't even go into women in geek culture, because being a feral geek, my early interactions with geek (male) culture were so off that I didn't get the joy and delight of trading sexual harassment for interaction and second class acceptance. My regret, it's legion, really.]

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

Comments

[ithiliana]

P.S. I actually found the Gor novels in the public library!

*shudders* And I read all they had because, well, SF covers!

[seperis]

*glum* I read all I could get, too. I'm still amazed that books with so much sex-sex-sex-sex-sex have so little, you know, actual fucking. If I'm going to read about novels about women and their true wish to be raped because that's love and a woman's place and whatever, at least romance novels have people getting laid without the philosophizing.

Which make a weird argument about Gor versus Romance novels written by women; it's not that I'm saying "whee, bodice-rippers rapey rape yay" but Gor got my back up the way even really questionable romance novels never did. I'd walk out of a bodice ripper twitchy and irritable, but Gor is like, I want to set them all on fire; it's only recently I figured out it's because even the rapey-rape Romances are written almost entirely without a default male gaze.

[lillian13]

When I worked for Waldenbooks, I used to handle the SF section, and we still used paper orders. I would always fill them out and say that we had 10 copies of all the Gor books. I kept this up until we sold the last one, by which time they had all gone out of print.

[come_love_sleep]

Bless you.

[ithiliana]

Well, the romance novels back when I read Gor didn't have any actual fucking as described in the text -- ok, Kathleen Woodiwiss' did and a few more -- but yeah, even when there was the hero raping the heroine, it was all about true love, and they ended up together, and it was all about what the women author and (I assume) the women readers wanted -- I have issues around romance novels, but I know that part of it was my honorary dude socialization to disdain anything liked by women.

I remember ONE Gor novel in which the man ended up in submissive slave position (the totally fucked up skewed view that naturalized some weird BDSM stuff in Gor was also horrific)--but of course it didn't last.

I still wonder which librarian ordered those paperback Gor novels and if they even realized what they were.

[seperis]

it was all about true love, and they ended up together, and it was all about what the women author and (I assume) the women readers wanted -- I have issues around romance novels, but I know that part of it was my honorary dude socialization to disdain anything liked by women.


Yeah and no. There are some fantastic essays on it, but the thing is, the traditional approach to the romance and most especially the ones involving hero/heroine rape has been badly chokered by assuming that women identify exclusively with the female heroine and are celebrating or at least not fighting traditional patriarchy and rape culture. Even from the bodice-ripper-rape perspective, today the part of the male protagonist, every day the part of the male protagonist, is being played by a woman.

It's one of the reasons I kind of suspect men hate romance novels so much and disdain them as female fantasy; it's deeply uncomfortable to read a female gaze dressed in male skin, and it's even more disturbing when there's a male villain, who is almost always the definition of a evil rapist.

Or to put it another way; in non-Romance literature, or chick lit, which is a useful term right now that encompasses female friendship, one of teh characters is raped and she goes to her best friend for comfort and support, and the friend is angry and horrified and would do anything to help. In a lot of romance novels where the heroine is raped by the villian, you could quite literally do a pronoun fix and it's almost identical when she goes to the hero. Even the healing cock theory of rape recovery that's so popular in romance doesn't involve much actual cock or penetration; the "healing" is in the foreplay, focused exclusively on the female body, often with a metric ton of soliloquy on how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, gorgeous, not your fault, you're not dirty, I want to help, not just things to reassure the victim, but things women say to each other.

...I have a huge thing on how the rape in Romance novels is rarely examined except from the point of view of patriarchal attitudes instead of exploring what, exactly, is going on in those scenes and why. There's a ton of undiscovered country in there, the most interesting of which is that in a Romance novel, if the hero does rape the victim, he might actually admit it, torture himself about it, and apologize for it.

That's not to say I'd drag them out as feminist literature because they live and breathe the structure of rape culture, but the entire set up forces the what's absolutely antithetical to rape culture as well--teh victim is believed, acknowledged, and the rapist admits guilt and regret.

(Note: this ins't a defense of novels that romanticize rape, so much as wondering why no one is exploring the fact that part of the fantasy is being acknowledged by the rapist as his victim, that it wasn't her fault, that she did nothing wrong.)

[torachan]

Eh, I don't know about that. I read a lot of rapey romance novels and none of them had a villain raping the woman. It was all the hero raping her because no means yes and he knew she really wanted it (which of course she did). And there was no trauma, just oh, he really loves me and it's clear because look how much he wants me! (Which is the same sort of thing you see in a lot of fanfic and BL manga.)

(Which is not to say that the stuff you're talking about doesn't exist. I just didn't come across it. All I came across was rape = love.)

[seperis]

I apologize; I re-read what I wrote and realized I completely skipped out on clarifying and it reads like I'm talking about all or even most of the genre, which no.

It was all the hero raping her because no means yes and he knew she really wanted it (which of course she did). And there was no trauma, just oh, he really loves me and it's clear because look how much he wants me! (Which is the same sort of thing you see in a lot of fanfic and BL manga.)

Oh boy, yeah.

The problem is, like the entirety of literature, it's ninety percent crap, but unlike the entirety of literature, the genre itself is dismissed instead of jsut saying ninety percent of it is crap. And I get frustrated with that because while yes, there is a rape problem and a sexism problem in Romance, every genre has a high or higher fail rate and none of them are as casually and sneeringly dismissed as Romance. Possibly because no other genre is written almost exclusively about and for women.

The thing is, that trope is--so ridiculously common and mocked and laughed at and the women who write it ridiculed for all the reasons under the sun and accused of supporting rape culture and contributing to the idea that women really want to be raped. I can't speak for the genre, but I can speak for the familiarity of the scenario, since it's a fairly accurate representation of getting around the requirements of female sexual purity, female sexual desire, and female sexual gatekeeping.

It's an offensive trope, but not because it equates rape with sex, but because its' existence is based on the idea that women are sluts if in any way sex exists outside of male control and independent of male desire. Romance novel rape is one of the ways around teh conundrum that women only have sexual desire in response to male desire, only to the man they are Meant to Be With, and only after he tells her what desire is is, because anything less than complete innocence is, y'know, slutty. She can't initiate it, because that would mean she knows there's something to initiate (knowing is slutty), and when he initiates, she has to say no (saying yes is slutty), she has to make it clear to him she doesn't want it (wanting it is slutty) so he has to make her, and it had damn well better be because he loves her with intent to marry (otherwise it's slutty), and with all conditions fulfilled--and that's a lot--she's permitted to enjoy it.

I hate this trope, I hate it, but not because I think the women writing it are encouraging men to rape or women to think it's love, because really, men rape even with active discouragement and women do not want to be raped no matter how many people point at this and wag their fingers and tell women they are contributing to rape culture and therefore basically causign women to be raped. It's because it's depressing to realize that this is perfectly compliant with patriarchal standards of female behavior, and the part everyone complains about and demonizes is the part where rape equals love, because without love, it's rape equals slut, and women know nothing is worse than being a slut.

I really, really hate this trope, and even so, I get why it's so popular.

[torachan]

Yeah, totally. I admit, I used to be judgey about that sort of plotline, but now I understand why people write it.

[seperis]

I ended up categorizing it under YKINMK for a generation or two. It'll either die out or become so foreign (God willing) that it will become just another kink and nothing related to real life interactions. Even now, though, its' modified a lot from what it used to be, and it's heartening to look at Loretta Chase for example, who lip services Regency and then flips the dynamics to offset male power with female economic independence and female careers and responsibilities.

..and then Catherine Coulter writes the goddamn Rebel Bride and I still haven't forgiven that yet.

[everbright]

!!!!!!!!

Okay, so thank you for looking into my head and telling me why I can't read romance novels anymore without wanting to burn the thing.

[seperis]

I've spent serious time twitchy on that one.

[seperis]

Sorry, I was falling asleep while writing the last comment and didn't finish.

Eh, I don't know about that. I read a lot of rapey romance novels and none of them had a villain raping the woman.

My references were based out of a set of fairly popular tropes; The Socially Acceptable Reasons Not to Be a Virgin When You Meet True Love. There are two across the board, three if you add in a lot of new and contemporary, or period romance based in cultures that were okay with divorce. Maybe four for very specific circumstances, but two standard: widowhood and rape.

Under rape culture, it's very hard not to give consent, and when I say that, I mean, you have to prove a lack of consent because everything is consent, right up to walking in the room with a rapist. So when it's written, it's signaled heavily both textually and subtextually because she has to cover all the bases--every base--for the heroine herself (author as unimpeachable, unbreakable witness) since women don't get benefit of the doubt so the author will shove it down the reader's throat. Hard. But for a very good reason.

Again, speaking in genre, the victim of rape walks down dark alleys, goes alone into rooms, does all the things she shouldn't and is told not to do. It sometimes reads really--overkill (like, does her shining goodness need to shine that much beneath his filthy hands?)--but I mentioned the author as witness for victim? She's also witnessing for the reader, for whom being raped for doing the 'wrong' thing will never not be a possibility. The author just spent however many pages following the victim before she was a victim who made all those mistakes that get you raped (room! man! existing!) and clarifying over and over and over she didn't want this.

[This formula also applies to spousal rape, btw, and Romance acknowledges spouses can rape.]

So you have slogged through all of that, including a carefully annotated version of This Is Really Really Rape, because you're trying to get the audience to that one place where they get exactly what they came here for, and because the audience is women, we honestly to god believe we have to hurt ourselves to get it:

Even the healing cock theory of rape recovery that's so popular in romance doesn't involve much actual cock or penetration; the "healing" is in the foreplay, focused exclusively on the female body, often with a metric ton of soliloquy on how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, gorgeous, not your fault, you're not dirty, I want to help, not just things to reassure the victim, but things women say to each other.

And now you get fifteen pages of wish fulfillment.

I mean, think about this one. We have an entire trope set, and not one of these tropes by itself is uncommon, soldered together so the author can tell women it wasn't their fault they were raped, and that it was horrible, and that one day, it'll be better, and it's okay to recover. But we don't have three to five years, we have a few pages of a book and this is supposed to be allegorical and make you feel good--healing sex, metaphor for "being a victim doesn't mean you can't one day feel better." Rape doesn't ruin you.

Having said that, I do not say this is always done well, but that's not the point anyway. What works here is the message, and that part is what has to get through.

Whoo. Sorry about that. Anyway, thanks for commenting and pointing out I didn't clarify my subject. I hope this somewhat clarifies what I was talking about.

[out_there]

Having said that, I do not say this is always done well, but that's not the point anyway. What works here is the message, and that part is what has to get through.

That is incredibly interesting. I'm not a romance reader -- I barely read published books these days -- but those are themes I've seen over and over in slash fandom, and they resonate with me. Even if the story seems melodramic and overwrought, there's still something very satisfying about that kind of tale, those stories where there is definite, announced reassurance to the main character.

I hadn't put it together in this way, hadn't considered the why behind the fact that it works, it resonates and touches us emotionally. But it definitely does.

[seperis]

Most romance tropes can be boiled down workarounds to society-mandated limits, to be honest. I mean, it's a mistake to read any single genre through a single model and I don't think every Romance novel written for women by women can be modeled under this either, but to assume these tropes are popular because women just couldnt' imagine anything else or weren't capable of anything else is functionally insane.

The thing that I think does make this a wroking model is Romance novels have continued to use distilled versions of these tropes while updating; a sane person would not say Jude Deveraux RapeLoveYay!Novels are at all equivalent to Loretta Chase's NoRapeYay!Novels, except if I broke them by trope, perfect equivalent. Okay, Loretta is also a better writer. But how women view society has changed, and Romance novels are social-cultural barometers. They weren't created to Imagine a Better World, or Look, One Day You Can Do This, they were created to talk about what is happening right now, with is invaluable in itself.

(This is a vast, vast generalization of Romance, which itself is a catch-all for "things women like", since a lot of what is labeled as Romance especially in the last ten years has no trope affiliation, but whatever, that's an argument for another day about women and how they're treated by genre.)

[harpers_child]

just jumping in here to ask, has anyone done a study looking at the correlation between female authors writing rape romances and how many of them have been raped? i think the current statistic is one in four women have been raped. i can see how writing about the guy who says "your beautiful, amazing, gorgeous, good, not dirty, it wasn't your fault" could be helpful.

[seperis]

Specifically, I've never found one that had documented research, but a lot working from general anecdata have come to similar conclusions. It's just hard to find ones that approach with a feminist perspective and with an understanding of rape culture and a working understanding of the entire act of writing erotic romance in this form is a rebellion in itslef against patriarchal attitudes on women and sex.

The history of Romance in the bodice-ripper/erotic form and the evolving tropes aren't just a story; there's a huge conversation between women, about women, and what women are and want that's developed over the years. And its' a conversation that was almost entirely invisible to men, possibly even male romance novelists.

God, I'd kill for a sympathetic, feminist, positive study of the tropes of Romance lit and erotica. There's so much there that we're missing.

[dejadrew]

Do you know the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and their recent book, "Beyond Heaving Bosoms?" It's not... exactly scholarly (I don't think scholarly works are allowed to use the phrase "man-titty," more's the pity), but it's pretty much exactly that: an upbeat, unashamed celebration/analysis of romance's tropes and quirks as they've developed over time.

[lebannen]

Very weirdly, a bunch of second hand Gor books turned up in my secondary school (age 11-16) library. And yeah, I read them. One of the many things that didn't worry me at all about my English teacher at the time, but now make me wonder.