the “new” blog

Hi all,

this is just a quick message to let you know the new design of my blog is up and running. I had to move it to a new host, so if you’re subscribed through wordpress or by email, you won’t receive any more updates from this site.

To have a look at the pretty new site, head over to annacowan.com. You can resubscribe through wordpress in the usual way. To subscribe by email click on the “follow” button in the bottom right corner and enter your email address.

I’ve got a fabulous list of guest bloggers lined up all the way to Christmas, so head on over.

Thanks for reading!

Anna

there be monsters ahead

This is just a quick note to let you know that the next time I post, things are going to look a bit different around here. (Sneak peek on the left!)

The redesign has been in the works for a while, and I can’t wait to launch it next week. I love writing this blog and all the thoughts it lets me explore and the discussions that come from it. 

To celebrate I’ve lined up the most ridiculous series of guest posts, but there’ll be more on that – and all the pretty giveaways – when I post next week on the brand-new blog.

That’s it!

Oh wait, I promised monsters, didn’t I?

the marriage that knows itself

I want to talk about marriage, but I’m going to start by talking about sex.

One of the difficulties in writing sex scenes as a feminist writer is that so much of female desire is learned. What women have learned to be aroused by has traditionally been shaped by male desire.

It’s tricky.

I don’t want to just write my heroines as objects of desire – but just because it’s learned doesn’t make it any less real. In fact, when our learned desires come into conflict with our educated feminist ideas, they can gain a level of taboo that only heightens them.

So how do you write what’s genuinely arousing, without playing into an idea of female sexuality that doesn’t allow for real female pleasure?

As far as I’m concerned, Cara McKenna has figured it out.

Her characters are self-aware when it comes to sexual desire. They understand the role fantasy and objectification play in arousal, and they allow it to heighten their arousal.

In Curio, Caroly visits a Parisian prostitute to lose her virginity before her thirtieth birthday. Caroly is intelligent and self-contained – she’s almost cold. She’s no blushing virgin. Perhaps it’s because the whole premise of the book is about exploring sexual desire that I could see how McKenna sets her characters apart from their desires.

The following extract is a good example of what I’m talking about:

His hand abandoned mine to its clumsy devices. I measured him with light caresses, loving how tense the rest of his body had grown.

“You feel harder than I expected.”

“This is how I felt when I thought of you the other night. Thinking of you made me hard then, just as your touch does so now.” He was quiet for several strokes, save his labored breaths. “Do you like it?”

“Yeah.” Bolder, I wrapped my hand around him as much as possible through his slacks, squeezing to discover how thick he was. He moaned and I felt different, as I never had before—powerful and beautiful and wild.

“I’m the first,” he murmured.

The idea that he was fetishizing this experience gave me permission to do the same. I’d already grown quite fond of Didier—surely fonder than was rational, given our perhaps six cumulative hours of acquaintance—but reducing him to a stiff, suffering cock was electrifying. I’d always loathed this idea, openly lavishing a beautiful man with my admiration. As if such a fortunate specimen deserves more validation. But of course it felt nothing like that with Didier. I adored this glimpse into another side of him, a darker, cockier version of the man I was just coming to know.

“Kiss me,” I said.

He did. He turned and kissed me as no one ever had before, urgent and demanding. I ached for his hand on top of mine again, dictating—perhaps even forcing—the friction. But I was in charge. I imagined teasing him this way until he begged to be taken out and given release. I imagined denying such a request, degrading him with my refusal until he lost control, quaking and pleading and erupting beneath my hand, inside his clothes, perspiration shining on his forehead.

But of course I wasn’t ready for that. Indulging the idea was breakthrough enough.

In most romances with a virgin heroine, the virginity fetish is naively expressed in the narrative itself. By which I mean – the reader has the virgin fantasy by reading the book. McKenna adds another layer by having her character consciously experience the virgin fantasy, about herself, and allowing it to heighten her arousal.

McKenna separates her characters from their fantasies. When a novel becomes the fantasy of the reader, the characters are essential players in the fantasy and can’t be separated from it. In the above excerpt Caroly plays with different fantasies – different ways of constructing herself sexually – but none of them defines who she is.

In her essay Expressing Herself: the Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power Sarah Frantz explores the rise of the hero’s point of view in romance. She argues that

[b]y having ever-increasing access to the inner confessions of the hero’s mind, the reader can trust in his romantic transformation as he abandons his belief in a masculine economy of use (hence all the rakes and libertines among romance heroes), and recognizes the superiority of and adopts a feminine economy of exchange (hence the requisite exchange of vows at the end of the romance).

I didn’t entirely understand what Frantz means by “economy of use” and “economy of exchange”. Google tells me they’re actual economic terms, but the only academic references I found came from Frantz.

As far as I can tell, the masculine economy of use is a one-way relationship that involves the heroine satisfying a need for the hero; it requires nothing of him in exchange. The feminine economy of exchange is a relationship that passes back and forth and requires each party to give, take and be transformed by each transaction.

By getting inside the man’s head, by watching him fall in love, women are fantasising that they can understand and control the patriarchy – and also that they are freeing men of the constraints of patriarchy “into the emancipation of feminine exchange”. But Frantz goes on to point out that

romances seem to be “violat[ing] the cardinal rule of patriarchy, famously articulated by Jacques Lacan: the Phallus must remain veiled.” In lifting the veil from the hero’s thoughts, romances are pretending to readers that all the secrets of patriarchy are revealed as secrets they already know and control. However, the romance hero’s confessions are of course not representative of what a “real” man thinks—the narrator is seducing herself when she looks into the mirror of the romance novel. The reader believes that she is lifting patriarchy’s veil to find … “mortal men standing behind it, somewhat sheepish, perhaps, at having been exposed, but maybe a little relieved as well.” However, female authors and readers are actually lifting the veil to reveal a nonthreatening phallus that they themselves have created, one that bears little relation to the reality of patriarchal power structures besides their own fantasies about it…*

Frantz goes on to showcase some rather hair-raising examples of the power exchange in romance novels. In one instance the heroine likens herself to God – the ultimate patriarch – and her male lover becomes a supplicant. It’s a gutsy and appealing reversal, and it throws a powerful light on gender dynamics.

But the problem is, as Frantz points out, that it’s a woman looking into a mirror. It doesn’t bear on the reality of living with a subconscious, internalised view of the world that privileges men.

From within this world view all the signifiers of power are still male: God the patriarch, the breast milk spilling from erect nipples that becomes phallic. It’s a world trying to describe itself from the inside, with the language of power structures that already exist and which say – Female is defined by being Male or Not-male.

I think it’s incredibly difficult for women to re-imagine gender and power from within a patriarchal world without still privileging the great devirginator.

Partly this is because, as I said earlier, we learn desire a certain way and realising it’s biased doesn’t make it any less arousing. But partly it’s because we live subjectively in the world, and don’t have the words to describe ourselves from outside it.

What we do have is the ability to acknowledge and describe the way we react in the world.

This is why McKenna’s approach appeals to me. Her characters aren’t women trying to become powerful by becoming masculine or not-masculine. They’re individuals who recognise their patriarchal desires as separate to who they are as people – but who consciously embrace their desires, for their own pleasure.

McKenna’s approach acknowledges that gender and desire are constructed. It also acknowledges that there’s no way to live separate from how you are constructed.

Which brings me, finally, to marriage.

The feminist critique of romance that the patriarchy is brought into the “feminine economy of exchange”, represented by the exchange of wedding vows, bothers me.

Why is marriage the sphere of women? (Why is there a sphere of women?) What makes us so invested in the idea of marriage? What makes us tie our sense of success and accomplishment and status with the idea of marriage?

I don’t actually have an answer, because I would need a couple of degrees in sociology and anthropology and psychology and maybe even politics and history.

But I think it’s important to ask the question – and to reflect on it. Which isn’t the same thing as dismissing the fact that marriage is, for the most part, a female domain, or that women are emotionally invested in and fulfilled by it.

I would like to see romance address the idea of marriage the way McKenna addresses the idea of sexual desire – by having characters self-aware enough to acknowledge that their desire for marriage is learned, then choose it consciously, because of what it will add to their life.

When special k and I got engaged at 24, there was definitely some fetish attached to it. I would look at him – this vibrant, slim, intelligent, funny boy – and it gave me a thrill to think that I was turning him into a Husband. The idea of belonging and possessing is a fetish – just as a wedding ring is a fetish object.

None of that makes the fact of marriage in my life any less significant. It’s one of the most powerful forces that works on me every single day. But I know it’s constructed, and when I embrace that fact it empowers me to act out the Wife in ways that contribute to my life, and to be an individual outside of being a wife.

* I wanted to say something about this that didn’t really fit in the post. I don’t think all romance is disconnected from reality – not even the reality of “real” men. Frantz quotes Laura Kinsale’s theory that romance is an internal reality check that allows us to become adult, which requires us to turn away from “adventure, from autonomy, from what-might-have-been, and […] mourn the loss and deal with it”. But I think it goes further than coming to terms with our social reality.

I was really taken with this blog post about the reluctance of feminists to to deal with heterosexual relationships. For me, feminist romances dream up new ways for the world to be. They play with ideas about truly equal heterosexual relationships. They don’t look only at emancipated women, but at what their equal partners could be. They create a new set of expectations – a reality that we can live into, and create by living into it.

I would also like to thank Sarah Frantz for sending me her essay. Such nerd-joy to bring my literature degree and my love for romance together!

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Okay, so you had to be there. And a man. And from the fifties.

We saw A Funny Thing last night at Her Majesty’s theatre. A musical about a Roman slave who has to match-make the hero and heroine to gain his freedom. I had problems.

So I get that it’s high farce, and camp as hell and in the first couple of minutes they even sing morals tomorrow, comedy tonight. But while I could kind of see the alternate universe where most of the audience was laughing, I just felt a bit horrified.

It wasn’t something I could just set aside, or lighten up about.

It wasn’t about me Making a Stand for Women Everywhere, or anything so complicated. It was simply that the story I was watching unfold on-stage appalled me.

Just to get it out of the way – yes, the farce is brilliant. The different story elements build seamlessly on top of each other then resolve like a deft magic trick. The slapstick was mostly funny, the script was mostly clever, and Geoffrey Rush on stage is a revelation.

But.

All the women in the show – with one exception – are courtesans/flesh. In the opening number they were wheeled on stage in a cage, dressed in skimpy bits of hessian. As cavewomen, maybe? It didn’t bother me – I figured it was just a kind of visual gag. Haha, treating women as just flesh? LOL, no. That would be stupid and wrong.

The next time we see the women, they’re paraded out one by one for the benefit of a lowly male slave who’s convinced their pimp he’s free now and cashed up. They weren’t in hessian this time – they were in gorgeous, amazing costumes. And it was somehow worse.

I think it was worse because although it was campy and over-the-top and slapstick – it had no layer of irony or self-awareness. The women were actually being paraded across the stage as objects of desire, for the audience as well as for the characters. And the men – lowly slave, airhead hero, pimp – were evaluating them.

Um, uncomfortable.

Not to mention the eunuchs (I’d kind of rather not). Apparently if you take away a man’s balls he becomes incoherent and baby-like. A kind of idiot animal.

Of course, the courtesan the hero is in love with is the one pure courtesan on the face of the planet. She’s a virgin. She is also apparently so stupid she can’t even count.

At this point I was trying to reason with myself and I was like, “Okay, but the hero’s a virgin and an airhead, too.” Yes, myself replied. He is also the free son of a senator; she’s a courtesan who’s been sold to a man she’s never met.

So, no – watching a woman play the blonde bimbo on stage, getting laughs for explaining that the only talent she has is being lovely, wasn’t funny. It just made me sad and uncomfortable.

There’s a distinction in humour here that was in force throughout the play, so I’m going to try and define it.

Because the tone of the play is funny, it’s easy to say, “Yes, but it’s poking fun at the idea of a blonde bimbo, it’s not taking the blonde bimbo seriously.” But who’s making the joke, who’s the butt of the joke and who’s laughing at the joke?

The joke of the airhead blonde virgin never felt to me like it had a punch-line that was kind or powerful to women. I didn’t feel like it was going, “Haha, and this is what’s traditionally the ideal woman? Traditional ideals are crazy, yo!” It felt like, “Haha, women are so stupid and compliant.” And I know that makes me seem humourless – but I find the way humour obscures an issue troublesome. Because it’s really hard to define why it’s still not right, when it seems to be making fun of itself.

Maybe it’s simply the context of gender inequality. The airhead hero is funny because it’s playing against the existing/unquestioned assumption that a male hero is powerful, manly, intelligent and supreme. The airhead slave heroine is discomforting because it plays into the assumption that women are submissive desire objects. If the play itself had set up some other assumption about women for it to play against it wouldn’t have upset me in the same way.

I tried to read the kindest possible interpretation into the play, and came up with the airhead heroine as a subversive image of the feminine: When a woman is so deeply compliant that she’ll do whatever any man tells her to, she becomes somehow un-graspable. No man can have her when any man can have her. No man can ever grasp the woman as a person because she is reduced to an object.

But I just don’t think the play was being that complex.

The one woman who isn’t a prostitute is the hero’s mother. I loved the pants off Magda Szubanski’s performance! The mother is a powerful matriarch who is still a fully sexual being. I think this interpretation owes a lot to Szubanski’s performance, though, as the mother is treated in the story as a shrewish wife whose own husband can’t stand her – and finds a middle-aged woman’s sexual desires off-putting.

I enjoyed the second half of the show. I’d become a bit numb to the sexual politics and the farcical elements of the play started to really pay off. Also, there’s an excellent piece of cross-dressing by the head male slave of the hero’s household.

I honestly don’t understand why this play has been revived without a single speck of self-awareness.

I can think of so many interesting ways it could be subverted, the most obvious being a gender-swap version – parading men across the stage to be assessed by the women. Three women singing about how nice it is to have a male servant around to ogle when he bends over would at best be confronting and at worst vaguely refreshing. Three men singing about ogling the female servants they’re going to be sexually assaulting later on is just yuck.

The only reason I can think of to revive this naïve performance is as a celebration of cultural heritage. Like watching a movie from the 60s, but it’s a play. But that got me thinking – there are parts of our cultural heritage that just don’t beg reviving. If this play had been about white masters and black slaves, I just don’t think any amount of humour would cover up how deeply wrong it is.

The only way that play could be revived would be to have the black slaves prove some supremacy over their white masters, in a subversive commentary on the original play.

Our airhead virgin heroine? Well, she got the guy in the end, I guess. Woo women!

the cross-dressing duke lives!

So the big news this week is that I sold My Lady Untamed! After three years of writing and rewriting, 150,000 words scrapped and then more writing and rewriting, I’ve found a publisher who loves it just as much as I do.

At the beginning of the year my brother gave me the contact for a non-fiction editor at Penguin Australia – the wife of a barrister he shared chambers with. I went to talk to her about what it takes to get into the industry as an editor, but we ended up talking about what I was writing.

As soon as I told her I was writing romance, she called another editor in from down the hall. It was Sarah Fairhall, who was busy building Destiny Romance at the time, ahead of its launch in August. She was excited to meet me, because she’d been trying to explain to Marketing that young women read romance, too. She gave me her card and told me to send her my MS when it was done.

A month ago I’d finished another major draft. The five agents at the top of my list had all passed on my book, and I was waiting for another round of beta feedback before I did another set of edits and sent it to another round of agents.

I was feeling quite desperate about it all – feeling like no one would ever even see, or get it, and what on earth was I going to do next? So I sent it to Sarah, thinking at least she might feel obliged to give me some feedback.

She called me a week later, and made an offer for it. She said she and Carol, the editor, hadn’t stopped talking about it for days. I can’t even describe the feeling of having a publisher express their love of my book – and more than that, get my book.

I asked for a couple of weeks before I responded to the offer – which was pretty hard, when the offer was made on a Penguin Australia letterhead!

Destiny is a digital-first imprint, which means they publish e-books which may or may not be followed by a print edition – and it’s also based in the Australian market. That wasn’t what I’d imagined for MLU. 

I contacted another round of agents, letting them know there was an offer on the table, and asked their opinion on whether MLU had a chance in New York. The answer was the same across the board – too risky for New York, for a newbie author.

I felt like I had to go through that process, just to be sure I was doing the best for my book and my career, but I was pretty stoked that accepting the Destiny offer was my very best option. I had a long phone call with Sarah after I accepted their offer, and it left me feeling so excited about the whole process.

Especially after talking to people who saw the subversive elements as too risky for publication, it was great talking to Sarah who wants to celebrate how different my book is. E-publishing really is an exciting extension of the industry that allows a wider range of books to be published and is in a position to champion subversive literature.

Plus, their new offices are just down the road from my house! My book will be available internationally, but I gotta say, it’s exciting being able to just pop into the office for a chat with the editors, and to be near local media, ready to take part in the local press events Destiny organises.

It’s looking like the e-book will be out around April next year, and it’s likely MLU will get a print edition too, which would be so exciting.

I can’t believe this book is actually going to be done!

Feel free to ask me anything about the process. I ended up signing with an agent, too, which is its own whole thing, so I’ll post about that next.