Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

Romance novels have long been considered to be trashy, something that plenty of women read but should not brag about. Now there are feminists standing up for their right to read good romantic fiction. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels recommends the good stuff. There’s a great interview with the author here.

I liked this quote.

MV: Why should feminists read romance novels?

SW: It’s a 50-plus-year-old industry comprised mostly of women writers operating their own businesses and producing a genre about women’s self-actualization, pursuit of autonomy, and acquisition of sexual agency for an audience made mostly of women, who buy over $1.4 billion dollars worth of books a year. No, no, nothing feminist or even subversive about that.

Thanks to The Girl for pointing me in the direction of Erotica Cover Watch. This is a new blog that asks the question: why are only women featured on the covers of erotic books?

It’s a very good point and the topic naturally delves into the whole feminist issue of the male gaze and the continued way that straight women are still considered to be non-visual.

It all comes down to official marketing wisdom which says that women on covers sell and men don’t. That’s why women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan don’t feature guys. Indeed, I suspect Playgirl was one of the few magazines to flaunt this official rule and that was probably only because they were marketing themselves to gay men.

The funny thing about this is I remember having this conversation over ten years ago with Helen Vnuk, then editor of Australian Women’s Forum, the Aussie adult mag for women. The editorial staff were busting to put some of the hunky guys on the cover, especially considering they were delightfully naked in the middle. Nope, said marketing, not doable. And I think the bean counters then proceeded to bring out sales figures that showed the covers featuring couples didn’t sell as well as solo women.

It was the last act of defiance for AWF that their final issue did feature a guy – and he was pretty hot too as you can see.

I suspect that women are just trained to see other women on a cover as normal… and of course the continuing justification of the need to make sales turns it into a self-fulfilling prophesy. On top of that there’s homophobia, which dictates that a guy won’t want to be seen reading a book that features a hunky, half naked man, in case people assume he’s gay and – possibly – beat him up. Much safer to go with the girly pinup pic, right?

The compromise is, of course, to feature a couple, but that rarely happens either. Is it considered too raunchy? Or is it cheaper to only shoot one model?

In any case, I’m glad someone is making a fuss about this. Maybe next year’s Best Women’s Erotica, which is absolutely and utterly aimed at women, should have a guy or a couple on it. Maybe we should ask Violet and Cleis Press what they think.

Just a quick reminder – as of today there are only 2 weeks left before the close of the For The Girls erotic fiction competition.

The theme this year is “transgression.” Stories should be 2000 words max and written for a female audience. Entries close July 31.

Details of the competition can be found here.

Just wanted to whack up a couple of quick links today.

The first is this Canadian article on the growth of Yaoi – Japanese gay erotica made for straight women. I’ve written about Yaoi before, this adds another perspective.

Secondly I found this board post from a woman who works in IT. She is making a point about how IT is still an overwhelmingly male industry, at least in the way that women are “invisible.” Her description of the way computer magazines are always aimed at a male audience has distinct echoes with my complaints about porn. I like the way she offers a gender reversal to get her point across:

Imagine that pc magazines call you she and assume you have a husband/boyfriend. It jars every time you read that. Imagine if every pair of hands you saw fixing a computer in magazine pictures were female. Wouldn’t you feel a bit freaky? Imagine when you got onto a technical site, all the side ads were of naked men. Imagine people send you naked male porn as a thankyou when you post a helpful comment…

In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay called Why I Write in which he mused about the motivations of writers.

The cool thing is, they apply just as much to everyday blogging as they do to writing novels.

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose – using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

(Source.)

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was about 9 or 10, and while I make my living from writing, I still haven’t managed to write a novel, which has always been my grand plan. And I’m gonna do it… soon… I promise.

But still, I recognise my own motivations in Orwell’s list; it strikes a chord, I think. I found some inspiration in these words today, so I thought I’d share.