August Clarke
I think, as we’ve discussed before, that uh, there is a startling lack of depictions of lesbian sex in the wonderful moment we’re having where there’s lots of really great Sapphic–writ large–stories and genre fiction. And when there is sex between women, um yeah, they’re never wearing a dick. And I think that this is a pretty critical problem of world building and a lack of ingenuity and interest in the fact that sexuality makes culture, too. If we are world building, a society, a culture, sex and sexuality is part of that culture.
Every culture has sex as a business at some point, every culture has sex at some point, probably. We have neolithic dildos, in fact, right? Like it is a sort of transcultural phenomena that we make prosthesis as a part of our experiencing each other and being with each other, and I think to a certain extent this might be a discomfort with depicting women’s sexuality period. Or women’s sexuality as active.
I think that there is a much greater representation of protagonists, or at least point of view characters who are sexually inexperienced and who need their love interest to guide them into sexuality and show them all of the ropes and do unto them. I really struggle to think of point of view top characters in genre fiction, period.
C.L. Clark
Period. Regardless of genres, genders, or gender pairings or anything.
Clarke
Yeah, it is almost always the perspective of the bottom or—I think assigning top and bottom to men, women couples is weird and doesn’t work, in fact–but it is either the bottom’s perspective or the woman’s perspective, usually. Or occasionally you might get a man’s perspective and drawn her as well and indeed men in genre do have sex here and there.
But I think that with that lack of world building interest, we also have a loss of the technologies we produce as queer people to be with each other. A thing that I was really concerned with in writing this book was making sure that there was a subcultural aspect to the queerness here. Which necessarily pairs with there being queerphobia in this world. If you have a queer normative world, which—that’s a huge thing in itself. But if you have a world where at the very least same gender attraction is not policed, and is sort of normative in this space, and there’s no pushback at all, then you have no reason to make a subculture. And then you, by extension, have no reason to make sex toys that are appropriate for the kind of sex you wanna be having, right?
Clark
I feel like you could still have it, it just becomes a mainstream item like any that you buy–you buy your cups, you buy your crockery, your silverware, you buy your dicks.
Clarke
And indeed, why don’t the couples in fantasy also have dicks that they wear? Get into it.
Posted 5 days ago.
