"There Was a Time Once, Remember, When We Were Not Slaves"

“There was a time once, remember, when we were not slaves…”

"Or if not, invent..." That is, at least as I remember it, a quote from author Monique Wittig that really reached into my gut and twisted them up for good. I ran across it when I was doing the research for my first book, a nonfiction work about women, sexuality, and body image called Loving the Goddess Within: Sex Magick for Women (1991.) I wanted to look at how sex in general and women's part in it became a taboo. However it did, it has had a devastating impact on all our lives who live in patriarchal cultures, and that's just about everyone.

One thing we lack, as both women and men, is a culture and in particular a literature that offers the widest possible range of ways to look at who we are as people with both gender and sexuality. Just the other day one of the news programs did a story about how men in films have far more lines than women. In 2011, this is still true. That saddens me, if it does not exactly surprise me. One reason I wrote Beloved Pilgrim was to write as real a woman as I could portray based on my own sense of myself. It is not a perfect portrayal.. there is no perfect woman or man. But after a life of writing men characters I admired, it was time I wrote a woman. I have as much trouble finding examples as the rest of the world.

The burden laid on all our shoulders by this paucity of well rounded characters hurts women, of course, but it hurts men, particularly straight men, as well. Reading Anel Viz's P'tit Cadeau I was struck by a scene where one man breaks down and sobs on the chest of another. That is not a scene you will find very often with straight men. You will find it with two women, a woman sobbing on a man's chest, and a gay man on another gay man's or perhaps his father's. You will rarely if ever see a straight man sobbing on the chest of a woman. It offends our sensibilities. What a terrible thing to dump on a gender of real, breathing, feeling human beings. I realized with that scene I had one more clue to why I so enjoy novels about gay men. Straight men are just too repressed.

Now I am reading Catherine M. Wilson's The Warrior's Path which is Book I from her "When Women Were Warriors" series. It strikes me that a book as well done as this helps provide an opportunity for both men and women to see a world that presents another paradigm about gender and sexuality. We all need new stories about us and our pasts, our heritage, our identities. Books like Wilson's are a start, and of course there are others. But how much better if we can do something better? For one, stories from a perhaps speculative place and time when the "archy" is neither matri- nor patri-. Better yet, if we can write actual historical fiction, not just speculative, where men and women are drawn as they really must have been at heart, clinging not to our notions of male and female but as they coped everyday with the need to survive in often dangerous situations.

I am going to give this more thought, wonder how I might take a character like my Elisabeth and make her even more a person, neither male nor female in her approach to her life and others in it. It is so tragic that women, who make up more than half the world, just do not find mirrors in our culture and literature. yes, we are there. Lots and lots of us... but is that really who we are? Ay, there's the rub.