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People ask where do you get your ideas, and it's an exasperating question, as much as any thing else because it takes so long to answer. It's like asking, 'How do you write?' or 'How do you think?' Me, I tend to be a person of brief but intense infatuations. When we moved into a new house and all the walls had primer on them but no paint. I realized I would have to make some basic decisions about what colors the walls would be, so I decided to look at a decorating book or two. And then I found HGTV--do you know anything about HGTV? How to become a domestic God inside and outside your home? Want to know how to install bathroom tile? HGTV will tell you. Want to know how they installed the bathroom tile in Versailles? HGTV will tell you that. All over America, people are using mood lighting effects in their trailers because of HGTV. I watched HGTV obsessively and bought books and magazines and someone on HGTV recommended that you tear the pages out of magazines that showed rooms you loved. Don't try to find a particular room like bedroom of anything, just, if you love it, tear it out and stick it in a folder and at the end of the month, look in your folder and see what you've got. It will all look as if it could be in the same house. So I did--did I mention I went to Catholic school and not only do I infatuate easily, but I follow instructions? Some of those rooms had decorative painting effects, so now, when people walk into my dining room they say, 'Nice wallpaper.' Only there isn't any wallpaper in the room. My downstairs is painted in a pleasing range of colors from sage to that color of yellow you find in French vanilla ice cream. I don't have much staying power. We've been there seven years and I never got around to painting the upstairs rooms at all. Did I mention that my infatuations were brief? If I get infatuated with something, it has a decent chance of ending up in a book. I'm on-line one day--which is a great way to avoid doing any work at all, and in Gardner Dozois topic on Sff Net he's posted the table of contents for his next Year's Best. Someone points out that there are twenty-seven stories and four of them are by women. He also prints David Hartwell's Year's Best contents and there are twenty-five stories and four are by women. (They only have three stories in common.) I can't say that I think very much of this--it's not really unusual that there would be more men than women in an sf publication. It's usually true of Asimov's and F&SF and it's always true of Analog (there's an idea, an all woman written issue of Analog) and mostly I'm thinking about how much I prefer Gardner's Year's Best to David's because Gardner has published me in his Year's Best and David never has. Which is about as profound as my reasoning usually gets. Then I start feeling guilty, because it occurs to me that as a feminist I should be concerned with this apparent inequality. The only problem is that I don't think Gardner or David are being particularly discriminatory. So why do more men publish sf than women? It's not the first time the question has been asked and we all know a bunch of reasons why but I decide that maybe I should think in the other direction. Not the least of those reasons is because every year people ask Gardner and he explains that he picks the fiction based on merit and if more women wrote more sf he'd be able to put more of it in the Year's Best, and since Gardner pays me, I think it would be good not to talk about this in a way that seems to bash him. What do women publish in a lot? Romance. Half the fiction sold in America is romance. It's read nearly entirely by women. Women read guy books. I read The Hunt For Red October even if I skipped a lot of the sections about where the radar was built and all the schematic diagrams and stuff. I go back to SFF Net where my topic is languishing for lack of attention and I mention this. It's a great thing to do, because everybody I know who has a topic uses it, to some degree, to see how much people like them. Okay, not everybody, but I do. It works really well. People post a long discussion of bourgeois values in Jane Austin, among other things. I'm not really up enough on Jane Austin to have much intelligent to say, so I stick to the comments about romances and guys. Debra Doyle says something women have been saying for years, which is that women have a lot of practice thinking of themselves as other than female because until recently, only guys got to do a whole lot in books and movies. Remember, in the Sean Connery James Bond movies, nobody even blinked and eye at a girl named Pussy Galore. I mean, women went to Bond movies. Women enjoyed James Bond movies. And let me tell you, if as a woman you identify with the women in James Bond movies, you identify with people who die a lot. Lawrence Watt Evans points out that if guys want to get laid, romance novels are a good place to find out what women want, so why don't guys ever read them? Damon Knight posts in my topic for the first time! (Not that I'm impressed to have a Grand Master, an amazing writer, the editor of Orbit and a man whose critical facility has long impressed me post in my topic. Oh Gosh, no. I am a seasoned professional. I am blasé.) Damon says, in my topic, "What a lot of nonsense there is in this [newsgroup]! …It's perfectly obvious why women read romance novels and men don't…" We will now have a moment of silence. Luckily I am saved by Debra Doyle who says, sensibly, "Okay, Damon, enlighten us. Why do women read romance novels while men don't?" Next thing you know, there are like twenty messages a day in my newsgroup, and I'm so happy I could just scream, even if Damon Knight thinks I'm silly. Okay, here's the argument, which is that romances are about establishing relationships with hunky guys and straight guys aren't interested in this. Of course, then we get back to the James Bond movies. I mean, if something has to be about what straight women are interested in, I don't care how hunky Sean Connery is, a James Bond movie is really a guy fest. So we kick that around for a bit. I keep asking, women read guy books, men don't read girl books. Why? Damon says, Why does there have to be a symmetry between girl books and guy books? I admit, I'm stumped by this one, so I go away for awhile and try to think, what is it about romances that bothers me so? So here's what I write back: Damon: Enormous numbers of movies, books and television shows are power fantasies. Cowboy books are power fantasies, spy books are power fantasies, Raymond Chandler wrote power fantasies. I would say that women read what men are interested in--that is power, violence and subjugation, for a number of reasons. 1) Oppression is like weather. It's ubiquitous. If you grow up being told that a movie like _Lethal Weapon_ is entertaining, you learn to like it. 2) To use a particularly obnoxious but clear metaphor, slaves are more interested in the master's culture than the master is in slave culture. As long as slave culture doesn't seem rebellious, that is. One rather extreme example of this is male heterosexual pornography, where male on male sex is gay, but bisexual females are the norm. There isn't an equivalent where women watch two bisexual men. Granted, the market of pornography for women is small, but it exists. I think my second point is problematical, not because it isn't accurate as far as it goes, but in the sense that it falls back on the old oppressors/oppressed dichotomy. It's an unsubtle understanding of a more complicated issue. For example, Chinese women invented footbinding, and footbinding was practiced by women on girl children. To say that footbinding was oppressive misses an essential point--that it was collaborative. Women did it to please men, and footbinding had very strong associations not only with sex (the arch of the bound foot was seen as a second vagina--and a proper married woman never, ever unbound her feet in her husband's presence--that service was primarily provided by prostitutes) but with the ability of the women to work. A perfect golden lily--that is, bound foot--was about four inches long. Longer bound feet were called silver or even iron lilies. But very rich men had wives and/or concubines with three and a half or even three inch feet. The women were crippled and couldn't walk, but they were beautiful, at least in the context of the times. Footbinding crippled women to make them more attractive to men, and in the sense that men found that helplessness attractive, and encouraged it, it illustrates an essential equation in the social power structure. But it was just a very visible aspect of a complicated social collaboration. A nasty collaboration, perhaps. But not something done by men to women in the sense that, say, slavery was done. I think women read lots of violent books, and I think until the late fifties (and maybe later) a real majority of category books were, in fact, guy books. But women read them, and read them now in larger and larger numbers, and have even changed them. And that's when I realize that there is a huge volume of guy stuff that women don't read or watch much: pornography. And oddly enough, romance has some similarities with pornography. Romance novels are relentlessly, fetishishtically categorized by setting, contemporary, historical (regency or Victorian) and by degree of explicitness. I mean one publisher may have five different lines of contemporary romance novels which differ by the amount of description the writer is allowed to have regarding sex--from the kiss and the fade to moonlight to pretty much insert tab A into slot B. Like pornography and the videos for big boob guys, or blow job guys, or anal sex guys, or girl on girl guys, or black on white, or Asian girls, or whatever. I find watching pornography a little like watching paint dry. I was initially interested in it for it's sinfulness, but five minutes into my first porn flick (Debbie Does Dallas) I found myself wanting to fast forward through the sex to get to where something happened. If you do that with _Debbie Does Dallas_ you can watch the whole movie in five minutes. Well, with this realization comes disappointment. I had all these germs of theories about how the repetition of the same basic plot in a romance novel was tied to oppression--see, during the London Blitz, when the bombs were dropping and no one knew if they'd survive the night, Trollope was terrifically popular in England because he provided a sense of domesticity and predictability, a kind of there will always be an England. So I thought all these pink collar women in dreadful dead-end jobs, holding the family together, squeezed between taking care of their children and their aging parents, were reading romances because it was an anodyne against the relentless drudgery and disappointment of their lives. But you know, guys don't have to be oppressed to like pornography, it's just that the male brain is probably likely to respond to visual stimulus. Women don't have to be oppressed to like romance. People read this stuff for the jolt of wish fulfillment. Porn doesn't have to be good (which most of it isn't.) There just has to be a lot of it. And the same is true for romance. It's very painful to have come to this decision, by the way. I mean, I don't much like romance novels anymore, and haven't since I was in my late teens, but I really liked the idea of having a handle on difference. But I had one idea. Remember, this is about where my ideas come from? And that idea was that romances are porn for women. If you notice how long it took me to get this one rather meager idea, you get a clue as to why the question, "Where do you get your ideas," get hard to answer. Particularly when asked by a serious middle school student. The other thing I have to tell you is that having gotten this idea, I felt compelled to KEEP GOING. Luckily, Damon gave me something to keep worrying at. He asked me if I was comfortable with the evolutionary model as a way of explaining the differences between men and women. This is the whole hunter/gatherer thing where the guys are out there maximizing the chances of spreading their genes around by being promiscuous, while women are desperately trying to get guys to stay with them to help them raise the child. It's in the guy's best interest to get as many kids as possible, but women aren't going to have as many chances, since the number of children they can have is so much less. So women want to have guys stick around and invest a lot of time in their kids. I'm simplifying this a great deal, but that's the basic model. So porn for guys is about sex, and the bog moment is the money shot. Porn for girls is about enduring relationships. Except romances aren't about enduring relationships. As soon as we get to the enduring relationship, the romance is over. Romance is about everything leading up to the enduring relationship. Well one of the other things I do when I'm trying not to write is to watch The Learning Channel. The Learning Channel has taught me a lot of things, most of them useless, but one of the things they did mention on a TLC program about love and relationships--the one narrated by the guy who was Chris on Northern Exposure--was that studies in different hospitals showed that both in the U.S. and in Europe, and regardless of social status or income, if you did DNA testing on every child born at the hospital and every man who signed the birth certificate as 'father' about 15% of the time, DNA said it wasn't true. Now these studies didn't interview the dads and say, by the way, did you know the kid isn't yours? And some of the time, the dad probably does know that the kid isn't theirs. But getting pregnant by one guy and getting another guy to raise the child doesn't fit in with the evolutionary model. And more and more animal studies are showing that females often cheat because there may be an evolutionary advantage to having a bunch of, well, call them lovers because 'back-door man' is a little to anthrocentric, is that the lovers are invested in the offspring, too. Because they never know if it isn't their offspring. So there might be good evolutionary reason to cheat. So what is the thing that romance novels are about? My theory is that they're about passion. Think how many romances require the guy to prove his love by risking, life, fortune and sacred honor? At the very least, in a romance the guy has to take passion and love as seriously as a woman. It's got to be the most important thing in his life, his first priority. Love (and passion) have to matter. I mean that same TLC series talked about adultery, and it said men were more likely to have a fling, women were more likely to fall in love outside of their marriage. And trust me, although the evidence is anecdotal, I know a lot of women who have gotten involved with married men and believed that 'he was going to leave his wife just as soon as (fill in the blank.)' I'm not saying that women don't have flings, and men don't fall head over heels in love. But for me the key is passion. And that's my second idea. Romances scratch the passion itch, and women are turned on by passion from a male they see as desirable. (In guys where they don't see it as desirable it's called 'stalking'.) Which doesn't even get into slash fiction, the place where romance and porn become one. So there's two ideas. Of course, I haven't used them in my writing yet. Although I figure I will. It takes me so much work to come up with this stuff I figure I've got to use it. But next time you hear someone ask a writer, where do you get your ideas from, and the writer answers snidely, 'A post office box in Schenectady,' you can take the wounded questioner aside and explain to them what they'd have to sit through--as you just have--if the writer offered to really answer.
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