And this is why I love Lois McMaster Bujold

[trixtah]

Apropos to a discussion on her mailing list regarding why yer typical male reader doesn't seem to enjoy "romance", Lois expounded on her Theory-in-Progress as to why that might be:

First, gender formation. Gender formation consists of a certain amount of biology overlain by a lot of culture.  In our culture, gender differentiation goes into high gear at puberty, and consists to a large extent of a process of deletion.  The individual ejects or suppresses aspects of him/her/self perceived as belonging to the other gender, and the resultant cripples are called "young men" or "young women".  Maturity, to an interesting extent, consists of people reclaiming a lot of these lost aspects to become more complete persons again.

(My itals) Isn't that bloody awesome? I'm in love (if I wasn't already).

Then there's this about status:

Status and status emergency.  Status seems to me under-examined as a biological (as contrasted with a social) motive.  It's necessarily a group thing; no one has status as a lone individual, as it is created relative to the group in which the individual is embedded.  ... Lack of status can really kill one, in any crunch situation.  (Lifeboats, starving villages, the hunt, etc. See _Lord of the Flies_)   So humans have a *biological* need for enough status to obtain whatever their personal threshold may be to feel safe.  ... When a person drops below their comfort zone of status, they are thrown into a state of status emergency or panic behavior (often bad or wildly disproportionate) sometimes having little relation to any actual physical threat (see any internet flame war.  And a lot of real wars.)

Which results in this kind of thing:

Combining these two, there are three arenas of status/gender struggle: man vs. man, woman vs. woman, man vs. woman.  All overlap and all are combined with equally urgent needs for various kinds of cooperation amongst the participants, so at this point it all sort of goes fractal.  But anyway.

In the post-puberty, not-yet-mature mode, the social model goes: girls attract guys by out-competing other women in attractiveness/status, the latter being defined as (million ways again) anything from beauty to owning more cows.

Guys attract girls by *competing with other guys* to obtain victory/wealth/status: girls then happen automatically, without the guy having to actually, like, talk to them or anything.  (See: trophy wives.)

Note that both genders are focusing on guys.

Problems happen when the girl has way more status than the guy, throwing him into possibly-unconscious status-emergency mode.  Problems also happen when the girl has *so* much less status, association with her saps the boy's status, ditto status-emergency for him.  In the puberty phase, when social enforcement of gender roles is in high gear, boys also lose status in the eyes of their very dangerous peers by association with anything "girly"; tomboys have similar troubles, if less directly lethal.  (But not always: see rl murder of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, and about a gazillion other people who stepped outside of prescribed gender boundaries in an unsafe place.)  So guys have more directly visible status-motivation not to appear "girly" than girls do not to appear "tomboy", but the indirect pressure on the girls can be just as nasty.  (Many females do not read SF because they perceive it as a guy-genre, unwelcoming to them; many guys read it for the exact same reason.  Or rather, because the suspect sissy thing, reading a book, is redeemed by being strongly guy-associated.)

There follows more about "why guys don't read girlie romance" - and it's easy to see where Lois is heading here - but doesn't this Theory-in-Progress go way beyond that?

This kind of thing is why I regret not finishing a university degree. I wish I could think in that kind of way, and have the underpinning concepts to be able to construct a theory like that.

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

Icon love! (I made one from that pic for a friend).

I haven't read any Bujold yet, but her name seems to pop up with increasing frequency.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I just spotted your Dorothy Parker one, so I'll admire that one too. :-)

As for Bujold, there are certainly varying levels of reflection in the books (being space opera and fantasy), but I love the underpinnings of her writing. But here is a selection of quotes (http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Lois_McMaster_Bujold/) that have popped up in her earlier fiction writing, to give you a flavour - and there are great gems in her later stuff too. < /pimping>

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

It leaves traces, too. I was noodling through some writing last year, with the characters wandering through all kinds of situations. I could write dialogue, I could write comedy, I could write drama and sci-fi and whatnot.

Then they ran into romance, and I found myself completely out of my depth. I had *no frickin' idea* how to write even a low-key romantic arc.

First stop was the gf's extensive library, but Victorian potboilers and Jenny Everleigh (sp?) weren't exactly what I was after. Neither was the riotgrrl stuff, the Laurell K Hamilton, etc etc. (Although there was some sense of coalescence here and there, which may have helped.)

Genuine 21st-century gentle romance seems to be a bit more difficult than I assumed it would be when I let my characters wander blithely in that direction. And now I'm too stubborn to *not* figure out how to write it.

Grr. I need some "How to write romance" books. And there's a statement that would have had my teenage self backing away in horror.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yes, those teenage traces have a habit of popping up in interesting ways. :-)

As for writing challenges, eep. Regarding background reading, I think it's important to read yer Austens and Jane Eyres, because a lot of the tropes are still with us (and they're good books). The same is true of the good Heyers. Laurell K Hamilton is really porn, so I don't consider them in the romance line.

I suggest you get thyself over to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com), and check out their reviews, especially the ones rated in the As. I don't agree with all of them (and I haven't read a lot, since I'm not exactly the demographic for het romance), but they're certainly good for a starting off point. Jennifer Crusie and Nora Roberts are the two authors everyone swears by at present. Oh, and I read Jo Beverley's Mallorean books recently, and I enjoyed them too (but they're Regencies as well).

Also, since we were on the topic, I don't know if you've read much Bujold, but A Civil Campaign has all the Austen and Heyer elements, but it's an excellent (character-centred) SF story. It's a good example of showing how the old tropes can translate to almost anything. Also, the POV is mainly from a male character, and I loved how Lois made him so convincing with his romantic fumbles (and catches).

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

*Early* LKH is chalk-full of sexual tension, but really isn't porn. Anita starts out, if you recall, as a Godd Little Catholic Grrl Who Doesn't Believe In Sex Outside Of Marriage. (Okay, yes, technically she's Episcopalian, but only because the Catholic Church excommunicated her supernatural ass--she still pretty much thinks of herself as Catholic.) So the first 3-4 books in the series are decent examples of a harder-edged romantic subplot with a resistant protagonist.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Nicely put, but I would argue, along with a lot of other people, that gender differentiation goes into high gear an awful lot sooner than puberty. I also have to say that perceptions of sci-fi as male should take into account the massive changes in gendered reading habits over the last few years. I'm also deeply suspicious of any use of 'biological' needs in arguments over human behaviour.
I like the term 'deletion', though, and her ideas about maturity. Remind me, did you say you'd read any Judith Butler? (beer really helps!)

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord yes, with the gender differentiation going on way before puberty. But I agree with the assertion that enforcement goes into high gear, and also that one's own consciousness of it increases at puberty. My mother bought me a Batman cape when I was about 7, and didn't bat an eye at my jumping out of trees shouting "Batman!" at random passers-by. The passers-by had some objections, tho'! :-) Cut to 5 years later, and the bitter bitter fights I had with my mother about wearing dresses/bras/sitting properly etc etc. I know that's just me, but I also know I wasn't the only one.

Children these days seem to be getting that intensive kind of conditioning earlier and earlier, but that may well have to do with increased sexualisation in the media.

As for the biological argument, I don't think Lois was prioritising that over social conditioning - just that it's an area which could do with some additional consideration. Of course, I can't be sure without asking, but she's definitely not of the biology = destiny school (except with regard to actual reproduction). Since her SF has the fairly significant plot device of "uterine replicators" for gestating babies, she's got some interesting notions along reproductive lines as well.

But, yeah, I can see how that statement could look suss - I've forgotten what dodgy theory of animal social organisation = human sociology theory (especially wrt polyamory) we're up to now. There are the wolves, or dogs. Chimps, or gorillas. Or bonobos. Oh yeah, the last one was deer (http://community.livejournal.com/dot_poly_snark/371720.html). Heh.

As for Judith Butler, alas, I haven't tried to read her when I have had sufficient beer. She's the "performativity as gender" chickie? (ah, just looked, yes). I wish someone would do a translation of her, because I find most of the theorists who derive some of their stuff from French academe write as if they're writing academic French. I haven't had the 4 years+ tertiary education to read her without rolling my eyes at her language, unfortunately (so too with Foucault, Derrida, et al, alas).

I think I know the broad outline of her ideas, and the influence she's had on gender (and queer) theory. I also think I agree with a lot of her conclusions (that we construct gender as a response to expectations, or "regulative discourse", I should say), but not all of them. I should probably try making my way though Undoing Gender, which is supposedly more digestible. Perhaps that's the translation I've been after. :-)

Thank you for the food-for-thought and I-should-read-more-of-this-stuff prodding! And yes, the idea of "deletion" with that connotation of reduction particularly appealed to me. So to with those ideas about maturity.

Speaking of maturity, one of my thoughts is that a community shows its maturity by an increased tolerance of deviance (as one also does in a personal sense by tolerating it in oneself). Know of any academic bods who addressed that one? I know Foucault went on about deviance and societal responses to it, but did he also discuss the conditions for greater acceptance?

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

The Batman cape is definitely better than what you might have received if your mother was ordering off the Discovery Science (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2006/12/science-is-fun.html) site.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, that's disgusting. I don't know if it's just my perception, but I sense a real backlash going on for girls in some respects. Sure, it's cool to play soccer and go to Scouts. But make sure you always wear PINK and you always have to decorate yourself with kiddie makeup, and forget about learning about boring science stuff, because only nerdboys do that.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

And guess who's had a couple of glasses of wine this evening? Blah blah blah. Really, I should feel right at home with the French academics, given my level of verbosity! Pot, meet kettle.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Go, bebe. I would have been AT LEAST as bad, but my cold meds are knocking me in the wrong direction. Bah.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Eep. Hope you feel better soon, lovey.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

I'm also deeply suspicious of any use of 'biological' needs in arguments over human behaviour.

I note that elsewhere, Lois talks about "a certain amount of biology overlain by a lot of culture." She really does lean in the direction of "nurture" over "nature".

In this particular usage, I suspect she's casting about for a way to say "a need that is more fundamentally 'real' than the many completely-artificial social constructs of patriarchal capitalist Western society". "Instinctive" would probably be the term I'd've picked, though it, too, is problematic and I'm not entirely happy with it myself.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, but any attempt to define a universal/innate/instinctive will always make me unhappy. It's all the damn wishy-washy cultural theory I wound up studying. It makes me a right fascist whenever someone pulls out the word 'real'! I would say that the completely-artificial social constructs you're talking about are no more real or unreal than any other cause for behaviour, and the same applies to 'biological' forces. Which are the stronger for any one individual, well, it depends.
I'm babbling. Ignore me.

[(Anonymous)]

I concede that my use of the word "real" is just as unsatisfactory as "instinctive". There's an I-think-valid concept that I'm trying to work with, but I don't seem to be able to come up with the right terminology. (All that damn cultural theory I *didn't* study, in my case....)

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

Interesting stuff, is the full text available anywhere?

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Go hie thee off to the Lois Bujold Mailing List (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), sign up, and join in the fun! (First post's free, and you can quit any time you want.... *evil chuckle*)

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

(Sorry for jumping all over your LJ like this, but, um, Bujold, construction of gender, how it interacts with status...how could I NOT?)

Note that both genders are focusing on guys.

??? *tilts head, squinches up eyebrows, concentrates*

Sorry, but I don't see that. The two parallel gender-specific sentences do appear in all important aspects to be exactly that...parallel. The precise choice of words differs, and the final clauses of the sentences don't exactly track, but ISTM that each of them can be boiled down to:

A attracts B by competing with other A's for status.

The final clauses, as noted, are not parallel, but if I may be allowed some indulgence I'll posit that in each case the conclusion is that "and the higher-status A's then attract B's more because of the status itself than because of any particular inherent quality of the A's" (this is more or less explicit in the "guys attract girls" example, but requiring rather more of a "leap of faith" in the "girls attract guys" example).

It is, as always, quite possible that I've thrown out the baby with the proverbial bathwater when I tweaked the statements to enhance their parallelism, but if so I'd muchly appreciate it if someone could point out where I went wrong.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I don't think that that sentence was so much what Lois actually said in the previous statements, just a side note: "By the way, we should know that high-status boys are the beneficiaries of all this carry-on".

That assertion I tend to agree with (although there may be some exceptions), but Lois just didn't expand on it there. Perhaps because it's pretty self-evident, most of the time.

It's not so much As competing with other As for status so as to get Bs so much for boys, I think. Girls/women don't seem to compete for status as an end in itself as much as boys/men do. There are many many exceptions, of course, but it's pretty easy for a woman who seems to be all about gaining status to be tarred with the "dyke" brush, still. However, it's fine for a guy to be purely "success-orientated" without having to geneflect at the altar of "sacrificed (wo)manhood". High status men don't need to seduce their mates; I think the women still generally do.

</ insert standard disclaimer about <i>all men and all women not neatly falling into any categories defined>