The Love of a Good Woman (or not)

[medicineseller9.livejournal.com]

I love this community; it’s such an outlet for frustration with yaabis and hypocrisy. We’re all aware that homosexuality is clearly an uncomfortable subject for LKH, and for Anita, her proxy. This is evidenced throughout the text of many different books. What I’m not sure has been properly explored, however, besides the unpleasant themes of sexual exploitation, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, is the hypocrisy of sexual expression in Anita’s own worldview. There is a jarring contrast between what she says she believes in, or what she’s uncomfortable with, and what she actually does.

 

 

First, let us take Anita’s discomfort with pure homosexuality. It is clear that there are no entirely gay characters, whatever LKH actually writes. For example, the British vampire stripper Byron was said to be gay when he first turned up, professing he wanted to sleep with Jean-Claude but had been turned down; and then he slept with Anita. I believe this is another incidence of casual rape in LKH’s novels. She gives no feasible explanation for Byron actually consenting to sleep with Anita – what matters is that she needs to feed off him, he’s available, and Jean-Claude does not stick up for his right not to consent. Afterwards, it is lamely suggested that he doesn’t mind terribly and that it was somehow a fantastic experience for him. In "Cerulean Sins", it is said that Belle-Morte and Musette do not believe that it is rape if the rapist has previously had consensual sex with their victim before, or if the victim has had an orgasm. This is very similar to a fundamentalist worldview in some Muslim countries that if a woman had an orgasm while she was being raped, she consented, and that it was adultery or extramarital sex. I think this seems to be LKH’s abhorrent viewpoint: Byron physically enjoyed himself, so he must have liked it.

 

Asher isn’t allowed to be just gay either. It is expressed in a contradicting manner in the text that he sought out Julianna because Jean-Claude wouldn’t love him just for himself, which would suggest he is gay and was compromising for his bisexual partner ("Danse Macabre") but in the same book, and in "Cerulean Sins", it is made to look more like bisexuality. Anita cannot simply be a compromise for Asher like Julianna was, LKH makes it so that he desires her for herself as well – in "Burnt Offerings", rather than having an actual fight with Jean-Claude or thrashing out their mutual issues and grief, Anita is injected to magically kiss it better and somehow that dissipates his anger towards Jean-Claude. In turn, Jean-Claude stays by Anita’s side the whole time. With the history between them, it would have been expected for Jean-Claude to actually leave Anita briefly to try and sort things out with Asher alone. In the rest of the books, they sleep chastely next to each other when they die for the day, but otherwise they are never alone, and Jean-Claude is clearly too afraid of Anita to just have sex with him when she’s absent. (Either that, or he cannot get it up without a woman being there. Either way, there is no gay sex happening in an Anita Blake novel without Anita being present.)

 

Anita clearly has a jealousy problem, but is intolerant of other people’s possessiveness in a monogamous society. It’s one of the issues that is never truly addressed. She admits to it, but not like it is a fault to be rectified – it is just a fact, the status quo, a law to be abided by. The same thing happened in "Cerulean Sins" after she was scared shitless by Asher rolling her and got all uppity about vampire powers. Despite being confronted by the knowledge that she was two-faced, she was a liar and a hypocrite, she was cutting Asher and Jean-Claude off from each other and from the pleasures that could only be experienced by them because of their vampire heritage – was she moved? No, she sat stubbornly where she was and went into a black and white denial of these unpleasant home-truths. It was wrong, she said, for Asher to have used vampire powers on her even though she asked him to and he should have read her mind and known that. (How, it is not explained.)

 

Anita’s homophobia doesn’t prevent her, however, from participating in a threesome with Jean-Claude and Augustine (I refuse to say Auggie, as it is not an appropriate derivative of the name and detracts from the character; if she wanted him to seem like a Master of the City rather than some cartoonish fop with a silly name, she shouldn’t have done that or used it so consistently.) She watches him and Jean-Claude kiss and even have sex, and admits that it "flat out does it" for her with her usual stilted phrase, yet this seeming change in viewpoint mysteriously never gets around to letting Asher and Jean-Claude have hot gay sex, with or without her. There was also that threesome with Jean-Claude and Richard that had definite weird homoerotic undertones, but Richard reverted to type (Anita type) immediately afterwards.

 

Anita is also freaked out by lesbianism, or sex between women, yet she has lesbian smooches with Thea in "Danse Macabre" and metaphysical sex with Belle-Morte. When Sylvie is the only wolf in the room who could help swallow her beast, she conveniently forgets that she is gay and wanders off, when before in "The Lunatic Café" I think it was, Sylvie hinted she found Anita attractive. In "Danse Macabre", I also found an intriguing passage (page 188 in my copy):

 

"In college I had a friend, a girlfriend, a girl who was a friend. She and I went shopping together. Slept over at each other’s dorm rooms. I undressed in front of her because she was a girl. Then toward the end of college she told me she was gay. We were still friends, but she went into that guy category for me. You don’t undress in front of people who see you as a sex object."

 

This is a strikingly masculine belief – guys are always mocking each other about being gay, and pick on men that are, because they are afraid of being sex objects to other men. Every gay man must want to have sex with them; every gay man in the changing room is a predator who is surreptitiously sizing up their equipment and their asses. It might explain a little of Anita’s conflict. On the one hand, she has a flash of the same red-blooded women who read yaoi because two sexy guys getting it on is really exciting for them. Anita is attracted to homoerotic undertones between pretty men, but on the other hand she is repulsed by it as she does think kind of like a man – that it’s wrong and dirty, and in the same way that some straight men believe lesbians can be cured by experiencing their penis, Anita believes that no man would ever be gay if they had been with the right woman (or her).

 

Anita would be an incredible poster-child for the ex-gay movement. "Sign up and bonk Anita, and those pesky feelings will just go right away!" (warning: the church takes no responsibility for death or injury caused by proximity to the doom-crotch).

 

But if being seen as a sex object freaks her out so much (and clearly it does, she threw a fit when Graham wanted to get into her pants and when guards started wearing red shirts despite her agreement with the policy) why does she continue to have public sex with multiple partners? Why did she participate with Augustine in a threesome in the middle of the room where the Masters had been meeting? Why did she have sex in the car with Graham in it – and getting a taste of her addictive sex mojo – if his presence bothered her, or if public sex bothered her?

 

Another hypocrisy – how does Anita choose her sex partners? Clearly she didn’t have sex with Graham as she didn’t find him attractive, but she didn’t want to bed Requiem even though she did find him hot?

Comments

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

I knew a Wiccan online who labeled herself as a (I think) "Dark Road Dianic" and her description of her religion was about the most sexist thing I had ever heard of. According to her, it was basically all about making your man happy and being a "feminine" woman and "not being a man". Apparently, the whole role of the Goddess is to serve and please the God.

I nearly threw up on my laptop screen, especially when she talked about how she thought "women should keep their nose out of politics". I'm an atheist, and used to think that being a bigoted and intolerant asshat because of religion was limited to Christianity...I have come to find that it is rampant among atheists, Wiccans, whatever. The moral is, I guess, people are people, and jerks get into everything. As if the sexism wasn't bad enough, she and several of the other members at the board (which was mostly Pagan of various flavors) were really disgustingly anti-Christian to the point where even I wanted to chuck something at them all. Tolerant my ass. We had this one poor Christian guy who pretty much had to apologize every two seconds for nothing, and this same woman got away with comparing his religion to "a box of dead kittens" despite the rules saying that criticizing another's religion wasn't cool. I guess that only counts if you're criticizing Pagan faiths there, though, because those in charge joined in, and I even got some crap for my atheism once they realized that rejecting ALL religion means I also reject theirs.

No, I'm not trying to stereotype all Pagans as being this way, I'm just pointing out my own experiences with the bad apples of the bunch. I am grateful, though, because like I said, it helped me realize that you can't bank on a person being open-minded and such just because of their faith.

And yeah, share a story! C'mon, I told ya mine! =D Albeit totally without being asked...

[medicineseller9.livejournal.com]

There's a horrendous trend towards excluding men in the Pagan community and acting like it's all about women, so I wrote an essay defending guys called "The Need for Masculinity" and posted it on Witchvox. Most of the emails I got were overwhelmingly positive, from men and women. I got two from raging, pissed off feminist/Dianic Wiccans about how I'd betrayed the sisterhood and my gender. And then, Googling the essay as people cross-posted it as there was a permission to redistribute (and I wanted to see the comments they put elsewhere) I came across this hilarious gem:

http://the-goddess.org/blog/2006/08/check-out-this-witchvox-article.html

It will make you choke with laughter or weep for what people like this have corrupted feminism into. There are indeed bad apples amongst Pagans, and they usually have a mask of righteousness.

[medicineseller9.livejournal.com]

Can I friend you? :D

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

Okay! Definitely! Please do! I'm really flattered, actually. I, er, wanted to ask you the same thing because you seem super intelligent and I love your posts (I didn't post in the last topic because I didn't feel I had much to contribute, but I followed it all the way) and the discussions they've sprung, which I've learned alot from, but then I thought, well, I'm a 19 year old girl, my LJ is full of moaning, nobody wants to read that. But if you're up for enduring that, please do! And I can't wait to read that link. As a radical feminist myself, it really pisses me off when angry women corrupt it into an excuse to rage against men, which is distinctly anti-feminist since it's so sexist. It's wrong, and it gives the rest of us a bad name.

[denelian.livejournal.com]

for the record, the Wiccan rede "An ye harm none..." INCLUDES being gay r whatever (i am sure you know this, but it bears repeating) and the whole fucking POINT is tha Godess and God are kinda equal, and feminism and Wicca should be best friends. i hope i never EVER run across that woman. i am very very vanilla, but I DON'T CARE what other people do. i have two rules - 1) don't hurt anyone and 2) don't involve me. period. i wish EVERYONE would leave EVERYONE ELSE alone!
i sometimes think that LKH is only Wiccan because she thinks it is "edgy"

argh!sorry, done ranting.

[yaoihuntresse.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised.