Fish and Fiction
Feb. 12th, 2007 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouseI’m down to one tetra, which Mason has named (just to be confusing) “Piranha.” Dip, the powder blue, dwarf gourami is alive and well, despite some white spots on his fins. Today, as a consolation prize for his entire pod of tetra dying, I bought Piranha a couple of more aquatic plants… which I am unlikely to kill—though I’m not making any promises.
In other news, I finally finished reading CARNIVAL by Elizabeth Bear. I ended up with a contented, satisfied feeling mostly because the romance of the novel worked out when I really, really didn’t expect it would. Boo-yah for happy endings. I’m still not sure how I feel about the role reversals in this book, though I thought they were handled with a lot more care and planning than in A BROTHER’S PRICE, with which I had serious problems (and which I’ve already critiqued here and in other places). Bear, for instance, made room for gay boys (and gay women) and had any number of dissenting factions with starring roles in the book, no less, who didn’t like the political/cultural system that put men/boys into the position of being property. That made the culture seem much more believable than the one of A BROTHER’S PRICE.
However… I’m struggling to articulate my issues around this whole girls-on-top/boys-on-bottom phenomenon and what bugs me about it. As I confessed last time I brought this up, I think part of my hyper-awareness of these kinds of books is that I have a world that exists in my head (and not yet on paper) that is one of these gender-power-reversed worlds – the whole feminist utopia gone bad/good/weird thing. In fact, I wrote a proposal (that I haven’t yet sent off) for Bold Strokes Books with a heroine who is from this place… which is actually a future Russia, though how _that_ happened I have no explanation for yet. Anyway, the point is, I’ve done a lot of pre-thinking on how a world with these kinds of issues might work, and I always find myself thinking about my own world when visiting someone else’s.
Plus, despite Bear’s strenuous argument to the contrary, I think there is a certain amount of titillation (for a lot of folks, myself included) in putting guys in chains. I know that most people don’t make a distinction in this kink, but there IS a difference between S&M and B&D. Dominance is a completely different kind of turn on, and I think that even when there’s no bondage as part of that (although “owning” someone is certainly, IMHO, a type of bondage), it can be kind of exciting for some to imagine having that kind of control over someone (even if it’s not in a sexual way, I think there are sexual overtones or maybe under tones, as in subtext.) And, even though Bear never explicitly shows us the seedier side of men-as-property, it’s easy to imagine given some of the stuff she does say – there’s a scene where the main female character, Lesa, runs her fingertips over the cheek of the sleeping Robert, whom she reverse to has “her favorite” and there is a discussion about how the heroes of the gladiator like competitions are studded to the highest bidder. There’s also the comment that when Robert, who runs away (ala a slave), will be physically punished upon his return…. Those are sexual situations in which there is a powerful one, who has at their disposal the power of coercion, and a powerless one – that’s dominance in my book. I’m not saying it’s bad (in fact, it works for me), but to deny it’s NOT there is foolish.
I’ve started RECURSION by Tony Ballantyne, but so far I’m not terribly excited. I don’t think this is necessarily the fault of the book, however. I might just not be in the mood for it. I think after Bear, I want light and silly, and I’ve got PLUTONIUM BLONDE by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem that I’ve been anxious to read. I loved their RADIOACTIVE RED-HEAD, which I read out of order and am probably the only person in the world who would have recommended that book for the Philip K. Dick (oh, wait, I _was_.)
Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print for today.
In other news, I finally finished reading CARNIVAL by Elizabeth Bear. I ended up with a contented, satisfied feeling mostly because the romance of the novel worked out when I really, really didn’t expect it would. Boo-yah for happy endings. I’m still not sure how I feel about the role reversals in this book, though I thought they were handled with a lot more care and planning than in A BROTHER’S PRICE, with which I had serious problems (and which I’ve already critiqued here and in other places). Bear, for instance, made room for gay boys (and gay women) and had any number of dissenting factions with starring roles in the book, no less, who didn’t like the political/cultural system that put men/boys into the position of being property. That made the culture seem much more believable than the one of A BROTHER’S PRICE.
However… I’m struggling to articulate my issues around this whole girls-on-top/boys-on-bottom phenomenon and what bugs me about it. As I confessed last time I brought this up, I think part of my hyper-awareness of these kinds of books is that I have a world that exists in my head (and not yet on paper) that is one of these gender-power-reversed worlds – the whole feminist utopia gone bad/good/weird thing. In fact, I wrote a proposal (that I haven’t yet sent off) for Bold Strokes Books with a heroine who is from this place… which is actually a future Russia, though how _that_ happened I have no explanation for yet. Anyway, the point is, I’ve done a lot of pre-thinking on how a world with these kinds of issues might work, and I always find myself thinking about my own world when visiting someone else’s.
Plus, despite Bear’s strenuous argument to the contrary, I think there is a certain amount of titillation (for a lot of folks, myself included) in putting guys in chains. I know that most people don’t make a distinction in this kink, but there IS a difference between S&M and B&D. Dominance is a completely different kind of turn on, and I think that even when there’s no bondage as part of that (although “owning” someone is certainly, IMHO, a type of bondage), it can be kind of exciting for some to imagine having that kind of control over someone (even if it’s not in a sexual way, I think there are sexual overtones or maybe under tones, as in subtext.) And, even though Bear never explicitly shows us the seedier side of men-as-property, it’s easy to imagine given some of the stuff she does say – there’s a scene where the main female character, Lesa, runs her fingertips over the cheek of the sleeping Robert, whom she reverse to has “her favorite” and there is a discussion about how the heroes of the gladiator like competitions are studded to the highest bidder. There’s also the comment that when Robert, who runs away (ala a slave), will be physically punished upon his return…. Those are sexual situations in which there is a powerful one, who has at their disposal the power of coercion, and a powerless one – that’s dominance in my book. I’m not saying it’s bad (in fact, it works for me), but to deny it’s NOT there is foolish.
I’ve started RECURSION by Tony Ballantyne, but so far I’m not terribly excited. I don’t think this is necessarily the fault of the book, however. I might just not be in the mood for it. I think after Bear, I want light and silly, and I’ve got PLUTONIUM BLONDE by John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem that I’ve been anxious to read. I loved their RADIOACTIVE RED-HEAD, which I read out of order and am probably the only person in the world who would have recommended that book for the Philip K. Dick (oh, wait, I _was_.)
Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print for today.