Date: 2007-05-09 07:25 pm (UTC)
Well, from what I've read - and my own experiences - she's got a lot of unresolved and unthought bigotry going on there. Plus ... really, her sexuality is very ... whitebread in a strange way.

But I'll start with the basics (keeping in mind that I stopped reading after Obsidian Butterfly, with a quick, repulsed, glance through NiC).

She has, as far as I'm concerned (and, just like everything else BDSM is not a monolithic culture), much of the simple basics wrong. The relationship that Anita and Merry have with their men is, at the heart, abusive to the men (and certainly portray the women as selfish, nasty people). There is some very questionable consent going on and I don't just mean the lack of safe-word type stuff - not everyone uses safe words. But between the various magical ardeur type stuff and the 'you'll get killed/have no sex ever/be punished by your boss/ if you don't fuck Anita or Merry - you've removed choice from the relationship. And instead of playing with that power dynamic game, she pretends it isn't there by saying that everyone 'loves' A or M and wouldn't mind being nothign but a fucktoy - no matter that the characters were presented as powerful, ambitious people. If the genders were reversed in these books, I think that everyone would see how ugly the situation actually is more easily but our culture doesn't have such an easy time recognizing sexual abuse when it's woman on top.

Her concept of BDSM, as a positive thing, seems to be nothing more than getting slapped or pinched, bitten or fucked hard. She doesn't seem interested in the exploration of sensation - which, to me, is often key to BDSM, because there are a lot of different sensations the characters are ignoring - ass play, spanking, toys - even if you didn't want to go to whips etc there's still a lot of stuff she doesn't explore. If you're going to say that oh, Merry likes to be bitten then she'd probably like to have her nipples clamped, or her lips (both places) or so on - but no one even suggests/tries that. If Anita likes multiple men in public, well there are places that you can go and be put in a sling and be fucked by a line of men. If she likes big cocks, she'd probably like vaginal fisting/extreme penetration. There are, IMO, impulses that are there in the characters but the author is not acknowledging. And when sideline characters show they are interested in more than what the main characters are, they are labeled perverts.

She's awfully judgmental of anything sexual that her/her characters don't enjoy which I feel pretty strongly is not a characteristic of most BDSM practitioners - if you're in the freak box yourself, it doesn't do you any good to point fingers at the other freaks. She has real problems with homosexuality/lesbianism but seems fascinated with the idea that 'the love/fuck of a good woman can turn a gay man straight'. I also think there's some unacknowledge self-hatred or self-disgust at the sexuality being written about here - LKH bends reality into a pretzel to insure that no one has to sit down and really think about what they're doing or search for a way that allows the characters to regain any self-respect. While I don't really care about LKH's private sexaul mores, her writing suggests that she both is facinated by what she's writing and is also, possibly, repulsed by it. In other words, she's got hang-ups that she's pretending aren't there.
(Cont>>>)
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