Weird Sex Books Can be Art, Too

 I was listening to my Play Later queue on my favourite podcast app - like my Youtube Watch Later playlist, it's rather unwieldy and extensive - and as usual, I ended up adding a recent episode that caught my fancy. 

This one happened to be about what might be the most notorious Canlit book, or even the most notorious Canadian book, of all time - Bear. 

Yes, I'm talking about the book where a woman falls in love with and has sex with a bear. That book. 

Content warning for sexual subject matter and allusions follows - if you couldn't tell by the title. Read at your own risk. There will also be spoilers for this and a few other books. As an additional note, I refer to "men" and "women" in this post, but it does not encompass the issues faced by fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community - although those issues are most comparable to the ones faced by those society perceives as women.

In case you want to follow along, here's the podcast.

Source.

Wait, come back

First off, I'm not going into any of the really explicit details. Here's the thing about sex - although many people, particularly Americans, have been trained into puritanical instincts of shock and fear at the mere mention of it, it's part of life. And sex on the page and in media isn't just about the physical act. It can show you things about the characters' relationship to each other. Masturbation or fantasies, solitary sex acts, can be used to show a character's mental state, self-esteem, or even frame them in the societal perceptions of others. 

One thing that's interesting is that - the entire thing is consensual. Yeah, yeah, I know, bestiality - but there isn't a sexual assault or aggressive force. Modern Amazon erotica, fanfic, and Litererotica certainly include more forceful encounters, as well as accidental ones, but this particular book takes a rather gentle approach.

(I am not endorsing bestiality in real life; animals cannot adequately consent. But it's okay for books to do weird, transgressive things; the issue of consent in fantasy and fiction is a thorny one that I won't get into here because it's so lengthy. The too long, didn't read version is - it's fine, because it isn't real life.) 

That said, the leisurely pace and naturalistic descriptions, as well as the exact use of the bear's tongue that you're expecting, lend a focus to female pleasure. That's somehow still a taboo topic even in this post Fifty Shades of Grey world; the MPAA has different standards for female and male bodies - to say nothing of nonbinary and trans bodies. 

But the world of literature has always smuggled in strange, weird, kinky things in the name of art. That might partly be because of the titillating thrill, but these peculiar pecadilloes are usually meant to show something about the world and characters, as I said previously.

So what's the book really about? 

The issues of settlers versus the Indigenous people, accommodating nature, the constructed world versus the natural one; gender differences, fantasy, fairy tales (Indigenous versus Western) - there's so much in this book. 

It's not even the first time I've noticed weird sex things in a literary fiction work - or Canlit in general. Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle had weird, kinky waltzing in an attic, with a taxidermist; Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood include some creative descriptions of dancing sex workers dressed like bird and lizard girls, as well as more disturbing child-related content (which is, of course, never condoned). Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, from the English Patient series, includes a vivid description of snowballing. Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers includes both explicit and implied allusions to - well, the kind of sexual acts that one imagines when writing a novel during a summer of heat stroke. Anal sex, threesomes, forced masturbation - there's a lot. The poetry of Leonard Cohen and Shane Koyczan also spare few details. Timothy Findley's The Wars has a very, very specific description of gay pony play involving a scarf, as well as a sexual assault.

And that's just Canada. We're not even talking about Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath breastfeeding scene or the fact that Lawrence of Arabia (the first book, apart from Bear, that I haven't read) included lengthy descriptions of sexual assault that - allegedly - were the author's fantasy, and did not happen. But why are all of these books not considered smutty or derided as "trashy" romances? 

Not like other girls 

One thing about the interview, and about literary fiction in general, is that there is a sense of disdain directed at works intended to titillate women, or rather, political women (i.e. those who are perceived as women by society, whether or not they identify or are such). Somehow, it's fine to talk about sex as long as you don't get too turned on. In practice, of course, this means that men can write about pretty much whatever they want and still be considered Literary or Respectable. But if a woman(+) strikes a certain tone or is anything less than documentarian or even sneering in her interests - Lady Oracle's dismissive attitude towards romance comes to mind - then surely, it is but the frippery of feminine creatures. (More about this can be found in Dangerous Books for Girls, an excellent work.)

Despite critiquing the sexual prudence and hypocrisy of the Victorians, it would seem that Bear is not above the same snobbery. Victorians and their earlier counterparts panicked at the thought of women fantasizing, perhaps - gasp! - demanding more from their husbands, or worse, not marrying at all! Alexandre Dumas (pere) alluded to this in The Count of Monte Cristo, when Eugenie Danglars runs off with her lover, another woman, though he was fairly sympathetic to the character, who he described as "Sapphic." Victor Hugo even ridicules "The Thenardiess," Cosette's abusive mother, for "reading too many trashy novels" in Les Miserables, because her daughters get "ridiculous" names. 

Misogyny. It's just misogyny.

It's so tiresome. As I explained to my partner when sharing the podcasts, "when men write weird sex books, we accept them as transgressive legends; when women do it, we point and laugh." That's not to say we shouldn't accept and enjoy humour - Bear is intended to be humourous in tone at times, for example. But if we don't recognize the inherent absurdity of artistic situations, we can't fully appreciate their gravity. In folklore, "animal wives" and even "animal husbands" are a specific subcategory of the Arne-Thompson index.  Fantasy and science fiction offer the suspension of disbelief that allows authors to get away with sometimes terrible things - Piers Anthony's depictions of grown men having sex with youngish teenagers and his many, many sexual assault scenes come to mind. 

But what's perhaps worse is that concepts which would be labeled as romance if they were written by a woman completely fly under the radar when a male author is involved. Boy, are there a lot of litfic books about A Younger Attractive Woman (who is either Terrible or Perfect) who Revitalizes the Life of an Older Man. It's Manic Pixie Dream Girls all the way down. 

Is this an actual problem? 

Well - frankly, people can write whatever they want, and one can choose whether or not to read those books; that's not censorship, that's just personal choice. But I would encourage readers to try and think about how they talk and think about books, and try to take down the internal double standards we hold. This is a big problem for men - they can often recognize creepy behaviours from others, but not themselves, as a formerly male friend of mine verified. 

And of course, this lack of respect also affects women's literary careers. Men, and white people more broadly, not only get away with more, they get more money. And after a year of, to put it mildly, massive disruption in the publishing industry, we need to demand better for our PoC peers and ourselves going forward. 

And as another friend put it, "Explain why you dislike Twilight, and if the reasons are The Wrong Ones...Byeeeeeee." 

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Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their two cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi