Style Selector
| Descriptive Disparities and Faceless Fucking |
| Written by Amanda Gannon | |||
| Tuesday, 14 February 2012 05:25 | |||
 I HAVE A PENIS! Once upon a time there was a successful and well-regarded author whose books I tried and failed to read. I tried her first book, and I couldn't stand it. The dealbreaker was a two- or three-page description of her hero detailing his utter perfection. This would have been tiresome on its own, but I could have forgiven it if it hadn't been immediately followed by a description of the heroine, which amounted to "she had blonde hair and green eyes." Three lines, maybe four. Really? Really? If you, gentle readers, ever write anything longer than a grocery list, please, please don't do this.Sure, you don't want to launch into a six-paragraph description of your heroine as she happens to pass by a mirror just to try to even things out. That's fixing one problem (bias against characters the writer does not want to screw) at the expense of creating another (yet more boring infodump, which, no matter how hard you want it to be, is not actually about what makes your character noteworthy, but about how badly you want us to think they are hot . . . and is therefore about what is happening in your pants right at that very moment, which, even in porn, is just a little weird). My problem is not so much with technique, although the technique here was seriously flawed. It was, if memory serves, a third-person omniscient scene, not subjective, and therefore it could not be explained away as "Sexerella was not into chicks. Furthermore, she was not a narratively-appointed narcissist who spent hours contemplating her physical appearance in the nearest reflective surface. She was, however, totally into dudes. Specifically, she was into Captain Horsecock."As you see, any lack of interest in the female character was the author's and was not coming from the subjective viewpoint, the mind, of another character. That is my problem. Obviously the author was really into guys – and this particular character – and not so much interested in women. And, you know, as far as personal preferences go, that's fine. I sympathize with that. That's not a moral failing. But you can't afford to play favorites professionally. You see the other side of the coin with male authors who can't seem to stop describing their heroine's tits long enough to mention that there are some hot guys hanging around. And these flaws color the entire story. Folks, I have problems with this kind of fiction. It's declaring flat-out that your work is for one orientation only, and it seriously limits who can get anything out of it. It also says unflattering things about your flexibility of viewpoint. As I said, not being attracted to men or to women is not an issue, but what kind of writer are you, really, if you can't cope with writing a character who is attracted to sorts of people you aren't? What does that say about you as a writer? And I hate to say it, but what does it say about you as a person if you don't care that you are doing this? The obliviousness is the aggravating part.Catastrophic failures of technique aside, even a very good author can screw up this way. I'm going to out myself, here, and point a finger at some stuff that even we have been known to do. First, I've read (and really dug, and written) a lot of porn where the women were all totally hot, but the men were much more varied in appearance . . . and were still getting ass like you would not believe. Interestingly-scarred, articulately ugly, portly, etc. Which is nice. Variety is nice. Showing stuff that's not considered sexy as sexy is nice. But that's not what was happening – those characters were usually more like animals in a freak show, there to accentuate or dehumanize or give the character a chance to demonstrate their sluttiness or generosity or what-have-you, or to lend "realism" to the piece. Sorry, I didn't see any fat, scarred-up, scary-assed, gold-toothed Amazonian chicks getting all up in Captain Horsecock's shit with the "Do me NOW, you rampant stallion!" And any claims to realism go out the window when the men are jus' folks, but all the women are still hot. Second, in group sex scenes, sometimes, you run into the problem of disposable male characters who are only there to provide a stiff cock. They are quite literally filler. The scene is constructed so that they don't really matter. They're furniture, playground equipment; they're there to demonstrate the sexiness of the main character. Now, it's hard to pull off, but you can have sexy faceless anonymity, which is sort of a "this space intentionally left blank," but that's fundamentally different from "he is a dude, he has a dick, he is sticking it into this hot chick, and nobody gives a crap what the rest of him looks like, because she is the important part." So the failure here is not so much attributable to facelessness – which can be hot and absolutely has its place, even if it's not easy to convey – but to a kind of person that is immune to the appeal of someone outside of their preferences, and who doesn't even consider that important. This sort of person plays to a very narrow audience and doesn't even try to compensate for the enormous empty space where everyone else ought to be sitting. It doesn't even occur to them to do so. I also feel duty-bound to point out that you almost never see the same sort of facelessness attributed to female characters. The faceless sex angle isn't often played out with a male protagonist subjected to the attentions of faceless female characters. If you want another example, maybe more immediately relatable, this problem is all over action movies. Only now are we beginning to see big dumb action movies with hot girls and hot guys. Only now is the entertainment industry starting to catch on that there are people out there – freaks and mutants though they may be – who find men attractive, and would prefer to watch movies with hot women and hot men in them rather than watch movies with hot women and ugly dudes . . . and that these movies don't have to be romances or "chick flicks" or whatnot. The obliviousness is so profound that even when male sex appeal is present, it sails right past some people. There is, for example, at least one critic out there who claimed that the female demographic's eager acceptance of the bare-chest-fest that is 300 was due to the "strong female characters." Right. It had nothing at all to do with Gerrard Butler, Michael Fassbender, Tom Wisdom, or any of the roughly 297 other oiled-up shirtless dues in man-panties that I Would Totally Do Right Now. (Admittedly, Lena Headey is all kinds of awesome, but . . . strong female characters? Really? Even my dad noticed that Gerrard Butler is hot.) We, as readers of, like, books and crap like to think we are better than people who only watch TV and movies and say stupid shit like "If it was such a good book, how come there's not a movie?" And we, as writers, like to think we are working for these people of distinguished tastes and refined sensibilities. Why, then, as an audience, do we put up with – in books or movies, I don't care – stories that trade heavily on one kind of attractiveness (usually female) while ignoring everything else? More importantly, why, as writers, do we perpetuate that? As for Hollywood, I can pretty safely say that it's a bunch of rich old white straight dudes who are genuinely too stupid to realize that many people find men attractive or are too bigoted to think that matters. I can't say why this is a problem for writers. I can say it's just sad. It's sad that we ignore certain kinds of sexuality because they aren't sexy to us when it's really not that hard to throw folks a bone (I apologize) and give them something to perv on as well. As I said, this is something that we, too, could do better on. I think that scene by scene it's okay to do it, but the prevalence of the problem on a wider level, across the genre, kind of compels me to try to do less and less of it all the time. At the very least, I promise never to write you a three-page description of some hot guy, and follow that up with "and this chick was sort of pretty, if you like that sort of thing." That would be like writing six pages of foreplay, and then saying "And then they fucked." Which is a rant for another day.
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