Salvete omnes
Feb. 1st, 2010 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maculategiraffeThank you so much to everyone for your kind birthday wishes. I've been having a hard time lately, and completely off LJ, so I apologize for anything I've missed. Welcome also to people who showed up here after lit_gal's kind recommendation (such a frisson! Beautiful Broken is one of the stories I pretty much never get tired of rereading, so I'm having this "OMG she looked at me!" moment right now). I apologize that you've found me in the middle of a fairly severe depressive episode (for those who don't know, my husband died earlier this year, and I'm still kind of... dealing). I used to be better than this at responding, and hope that one day I will be again. In the meantime, please bear with me.
On the other hand, one of my coping strategies when I'm feeling on the brink is writing, so I have two stories that should go up soon, both SB 'verse, and I also have this, which isn't a story, more of a metathingy. See, for the most part, I've ignored the sporadic kerfufflings over whether girls are allowed to write m/m, whether it's exploitative or ignorant or what, because I don't really feel the need to defend myself on that point, but I've been having one of those things, you know, a headache with pictures ("An idea?" "Mmm! Mmmhmm!") about related issues in the Slave Breakers universe, so I guess here's my attempt to ramblingly articulate it. Contains spoilers for the whole Slave Breakers shebang, so if you haven't read it yet, fair warning. Also contains profanity, although if you're here at all, you probably don't so much have a problem with that.
In the Slave Breakers universe, I chose to invent a society where homosexual identity doesn't exist. That's not a new idea-- there have been plenty of societies where people engaged in homosexual activity without identifying themselves as homosexual. And within limited boundaries, homosexual activity hasn't universally been regarded as socially transgressive-- as it arguably isn't in-universe. It's fine for men to own male sex slaves and have sex with them at parties, and it's fine for Andrei's boyfriend to date Andrei for awhile, as long as he eventually breaks up with him and gets married to a suitable girl. Andrei's boyfriend's dad isn't "homophobic" per se, because he doesn't acknowledge the existence of homosexuality-- just homosexual activity, which is tolerated by his society to the same extent that non-marital (and therefore non-procreative) heterosexual activity is. He regards his son's homosexual relationship the same way a guy who eventually expects his son to run the family business would regard the son going off to art school in Paris for a year ("OK, sure, go ahead and get that out of your system before you buckle down"), and in fact was probably MORE ok with his son dating a guy than he would have been with him dating a girl unsuitable for him to eventually marry, because there was no question of his ever marrying Andrei, or accidentally impregnating him with an illegitimate kid.
Because, you see: although, in the fight to legalize gay marriage, we're trying like hell to define marriage as "permanent romantic commitment between two consenting adults," that definition has pretty much nothing to do with marriage as it's existed for the VAST VAST majority of human history, which is as a social institution designed around babies. Not designed around "one man and one woman" (that's pretty new, actually), and not designed around love or partnership or consent or even being of reasonable consenting age, but designed around babies. Legitimate babies. Bloodlines. To the point that in the Bible, although you can marry as many women as you can fit under one palatial roof (and then write a book of whiny proverbs bitching about how much you hate their screechy, nagging faces), you can also divorce your wife for barrenness (or, if you don't want to do that because you really really love your barren wife, repeatedly knock up her slave girl and officially declare those babies "hers," which is perfectly acceptable because what makes a baby legitimate is whom the female in question belongs to from a cultural and social and economic standpoint, and you own the slave girl as much as you do your wife).1
The thing is, in the absence of the orientation concept, I might argue that sex with slaves (of either gender) in SB 'verse is actually roughly analogous to the kind of homosexual activity (not homosexual identity) that's been accepted by real societies in the past. Take "boy-love" in classical Greece-- adult men having dalliances with teenage boys was an accepted thing, to the point that there were terms of courtship, and a technical term for your boy fighting alongside you in war, and Zeus was pretty much universally acknowledged to be madly in love with his male page Ganymede, and nobody was like "But... he's married, and also he knocks up every remotely bifurcated female he can outrun, so... what's with the boy?" because hello, that's a totally different thing. (See also: Apollo and Hyacinthus.) Because boys are on a completely different plane than women; you can take your pleasure with them, you can love them and court them and lay your head in their laps and write romantic poetry about them, but the idea of marrying them is ludicrous, because your relationship is nowhere near the concept of procreation, which is what marriage is about. I mean, your emotional and physical relationship with them can be better than your marriage, even, but you're still never going to marry them, because: babies. So I think the sterilization of slaves in SB 'verse is at least partly what makes it socially OK to sleep with them even if you're married or dating, because it's qualitatively on a different plane from marriage-- an explicitly inferior one in this case, but the important part is that it's qualitatively different-- so society can safely tolerate these liaisons, even if they're actually highly romantic and emotional in nature.2
That isn't to say it's impossible to transgress with a slave (or a male lover), either in real-life societies where it's been considered acceptable to sleep with them,3 or in SB 'verse. In the latter case, Bran's reactions to things are a pretty good indicator of what IS considered transgressive, because he's a rule-follower-- he has a very strong need to know what he's SUPPOSED to do-- so when Holden goes to suck his cock, or asks Bran to penetrate him, we can get kind of an idea of how things like that tend to be regarded in general, by Bran's shock and discomfort. Yves doesn't give that much of a shit about social mores-- he has a very strong sense of moral right and wrong, but as far as norms that can be expressed in terms of "it just isn't done!" Yves' attitude is more like, "And yet... I'm doing it, and my master likes it, so, you know, fuck off." Bran's much more susceptible to the "just isn't done" line, so through his eyes, we get to see more of what in Holden's behavior ISN'T generally done. Like, even with his almost unconditional need to please Holden, he has a very strong mental block to get over when it comes to topping Holden, because... it isn't done that way. A lot of the things Holden does aren't done that way; his transgressive behavior with slaves has to do with his sporadic refusal to adhere to the master's socially prescribed role-- both sexually and emotionally. And for a while he can do that in private, without risking the ire of society. But not forever. Eventually, he's got to, well, come out.
Holden and Alix, having "crossed over" (the literal etymology of "transgress") the line between slave and free, have a troubled relationship with social mores throughout-- we see that at the very beginning of "Bran," where their facade of impeccable social correctness drops as soon as they're in the car away from Dunaev ("Son of a bitch!"). In point of fact, I'd argue that Holden and Alix's marriage, in the social context, is mildly transgressive, even though it's a legal heterosexual marriage. Because Holden and Alix are ex-slaves-- because they are creatures explicitly without fertility, procreative dead-ends (and Valor, "their" child, was born of another woman whose social role dictated that she not conceive4), as far as society is concerned, there's no point to their marriage. I think they have a great marriage, personally, but that's because I'm one of those damn hippie liberals who wants to redefine marriage so it's actually about love, not the potential for procreation (my husband was sterile, too), and in the society Holden and Alix primarily mix with, bloodlines are still paramount, so they're still pretty much just playing house. Cutely playing house, acceptably playing house, have-them-over-for-dinner playing house-- but playing house.
The tension all this causes-- Holden and Alix's neither-fish-nor-flesh-nor-fowl status, their secret refusal to regard slaves as disposable, Valor's existence, Holden's transgressive desires vis-a-vis his slaves, and so on-- continues to be an issue throughout the series, until finally Holden's discomfort with Lee and the relationship he's supposed to be having with the kid helps push him towards the realization that he's really only acting out acceptability to society, and if he's going to be true to himself and his lovers, he has to "out" himself, publicly declaring not his homosexual identity (still doesn't exist in-universe) but another, equally important kind of emotional and sexual identity for which there is no name. He has to drop the facade of acceptability and come out as something society does NOT accept.5
I suppose my point is that while the Slave Breakers universe avoids direct comment on the real-life male homosexual experience, it does try to take on some of the issues that I see as relevant to that experience-- issues of love and attraction and identity and legitimacy and transgression-- in the context of alternate-universe male/male romance. And it's the failure to do that, in some form, that I do sometimes see as problematic in female-written slash. What does bug me when I'm reading m/m fic is when the two men seem to have been transposed onto an otherwise unaltered traditional m/f storyline. I know this is a really subjective thing, and I've seen complaints that such-and-such in such-and-such a m/m story "acts like a girl," but for me, it's not about their behavior (my husband was the homemaker and Valentine's-Day-observer and crier-over-Terms of Endearment in our marriage, so I just don't see it as that simple), it's about the arc of the relationship towards social acceptability, and sometimes that's just STUNNINGLY conventional. I mean, of course, sometimes it's as blatant as "I'm rewriting Jane Eyre, except that they're both guys," and sometimes it's subtler-- but the plotline that BUGS is the one where the two men move as though inevitably towards an exact social equivalent of heterosexual marriage. The classic male/female romance moves towards marriage, right, because marriage equals social acceptability. Imposing a plotline like that on a male/male story just bugs the crap out of me (let's not even talk about mpreg), because it imposes a contrived cultural legitimacy on the homosexual experience in a way that I find naive and parochial. It whitewashes the element of transgression that is still an inherent part of homosexual identity in our culture. But then, I find that plotline just as problematic when it involves a man and a woman, because seriously, in this day and age, fuck that,6 so maybe those aren't my thoughts on yaoi so much as they are my thoughts on any kind of romance.
So anyway, how bout them Yankees?
1The Bible makes it pretty clear that Jacob was sentimental about Joseph and Benjamin because he had this crazy romantic thing for Rachel, not because Joseph and Benjamin were objectively distinguishable from Naphtali and Dan, or the rest of the kids for that matter, in the eyes of anybody else. Society doesn't care whether you loved your kids' mom or not; you can care, but you're not supposed to translate that into actual hierarchy, to be like "Yeah, Reuben, you're the oldest, but Joseph and Benjamin are more special to me because I actually gave a shit about their mom, so Joseph gets nicer clothes." I mean, it worked out OK for Joseph, but that's because the Bible, like all folk tales, loves plotlines that transgress established social mores: youngest chosen over oldest, shepherd boy chosen over blood prince, ninety-eight-year-old woman gives birth to great and fertile nation, kid born amid cow shit turns out to be the Chosen One, etc.
2Holden's early relationship with Yves has, in fact, a few parallels with the Athenian ideal of a relationship between an erastes and his eromenos-- you were supposed to court him, protect him, see to his education, provide for him financially, fondle him and sleep cuddled up with him, etc.-- although nineteen is too old for an eromenos, and I don't think an erastes was supposed to be married. But in a minute I'm going to talk about how Holden and Alix's marriage is weird anyway, and not for the reason you think (i.e., not because they're both kinda gay, because in-universe, there's no such thing), but for a reason that is... sort of parallel.
3There's a whole other essay here that I'm not going to attempt to write at the moment, about race and the concept of miscegenation, and how in real life, whether it's socially okay to sleep with your slave has generally depended on whether babies might result that would not be cool with everybody. Thus, in Rome, it was fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would just be slave babies which was cool with everybody, and in Israel, it was fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would just be YOUR babies which was cool with everybody (except your bitter barren wife who drove your poor slave girl out into the desert with her kid to found a nation with a gigantic grudge against your wife's eventual kid), but in the American antebellum south it was NOT fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would be part slave race and part master race and thus hugely confusing and disturbing. I mean, clearly everybody did it anyway, including Thomas Jefferson, but you were at least supposed to be embarrassed about it. (And obviously I'm talking about men, here-- women are a whole different kettle of fish, no pun intended-- but it's generally not been okay for women to voluntarily sleep with anyone at all because shameless wanton hussies etc.) But what I'm talking about in this bit is cases where the fact that NO babies will result is what makes it okay to have something on the side. Which is also exactly what makes it NOT okay to have that same side dish for a main course, if you see what I mean (because marriage = BABIES).
4People who shouldn't be able to conceive conceiving-- see above re: postmenopausal Sarah and virgin Mary, and also princesses locked in high towers away from all male contact-- is one of those Transgression Tropes that mythology in general is in love with.
5Not that you have to be an activist to be "out" in that sense, mind you-- Andrei himself is a mild-mannered, unaggressive, but not at all secret transgressor. He's not acting out for social change, just acting out his desires, both by owning a sex slave he doesn't desire (or sleep with) and by seeking a permanent commitment with another man. He doesn't actively resent or fight society's strictures-- he's just aware that his happiness lies outside them, so he lives outside them in his own quiet and private way. And Holden respects that, which is why Andrei is probably the person outside his immediate household Holden likes and trusts the most.
6I mean, fuck it in all days and ages, pretty much. The great writers always have, which is why I love Shakespeare, who was no slouch in the "writing romantic poetry to other people's penises" department himself. And the great thing about Jane Eyre is that (spoilers!) the "Reader, I married him" contains an unspoken "once his deranged snapping turtle of a wife died in the process of blinding and crippling him while I was off getting hit on by my hot cousin and becoming independently wealthy," which isn't exactly the narrative arc of, say, Pamela.7
7The narrative arc of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in case you were wondering, is as follows (spoilers!):
PAMELA: Oh, sir, please stop trying to rape your humble fifteen-year-old maidservant.
MR. B: But you arouse my hot blood! Hold still.
PAMELA: I will not hold still, for if I did, you would lose all respect for me and consider me but a shameless wanton hussy.
MR. B: You're damn right I would. HOLD STILL.
PAMELA: No! These are unsafe working conditions! I am going home to my loving parents!
MR. B: Oh, for God's sake. *pistol-whip*
PAMELA (waking up): Where am I?
MR. B: I had to kidnap you. Don't worry, I wrote a letter to your parents telling them you were a whore. Here, as a pledge of good faith that I won't rape you until I feel like it, sleep with my dour and terrifying housekeeper. She said something about making you her Jezebel. I think that means "prison bitch."
PAMELA: Oh, sir, this is not genteel behavior!
MR. B: I MUST FUCK YOU.
PAMELA: Alas, for my predicament! I would run away, but this property is surrounded by bloodthirsty cows and an insurmountable waist high fence. All I can do is faint!
MR. B: Your fainting moves my heart. Please let me fuck you?
PAMELA: Oh, sir, if you like it, then you better put a ring on it.
MR. B: Oh, FINE.
PAMELA: Yay! My virtue has been rewarded!
lit_gal's kind recommendation (such a frisson! Beautiful Broken is one of the stories I pretty much never get tired of rereading, so I'm having this "OMG she looked at me!" moment right now). I apologize that you've found me in the middle of a fairly severe depressive episode (for those who don't know, my husband died earlier this year, and I'm still kind of... dealing). I used to be better than this at responding, and hope that one day I will be again. In the meantime, please bear with me.On the other hand, one of my coping strategies when I'm feeling on the brink is writing, so I have two stories that should go up soon, both SB 'verse, and I also have this, which isn't a story, more of a metathingy. See, for the most part, I've ignored the sporadic kerfufflings over whether girls are allowed to write m/m, whether it's exploitative or ignorant or what, because I don't really feel the need to defend myself on that point, but I've been having one of those things, you know, a headache with pictures ("An idea?" "Mmm! Mmmhmm!") about related issues in the Slave Breakers universe, so I guess here's my attempt to ramblingly articulate it. Contains spoilers for the whole Slave Breakers shebang, so if you haven't read it yet, fair warning. Also contains profanity, although if you're here at all, you probably don't so much have a problem with that.
In the Slave Breakers universe, I chose to invent a society where homosexual identity doesn't exist. That's not a new idea-- there have been plenty of societies where people engaged in homosexual activity without identifying themselves as homosexual. And within limited boundaries, homosexual activity hasn't universally been regarded as socially transgressive-- as it arguably isn't in-universe. It's fine for men to own male sex slaves and have sex with them at parties, and it's fine for Andrei's boyfriend to date Andrei for awhile, as long as he eventually breaks up with him and gets married to a suitable girl. Andrei's boyfriend's dad isn't "homophobic" per se, because he doesn't acknowledge the existence of homosexuality-- just homosexual activity, which is tolerated by his society to the same extent that non-marital (and therefore non-procreative) heterosexual activity is. He regards his son's homosexual relationship the same way a guy who eventually expects his son to run the family business would regard the son going off to art school in Paris for a year ("OK, sure, go ahead and get that out of your system before you buckle down"), and in fact was probably MORE ok with his son dating a guy than he would have been with him dating a girl unsuitable for him to eventually marry, because there was no question of his ever marrying Andrei, or accidentally impregnating him with an illegitimate kid.
Because, you see: although, in the fight to legalize gay marriage, we're trying like hell to define marriage as "permanent romantic commitment between two consenting adults," that definition has pretty much nothing to do with marriage as it's existed for the VAST VAST majority of human history, which is as a social institution designed around babies. Not designed around "one man and one woman" (that's pretty new, actually), and not designed around love or partnership or consent or even being of reasonable consenting age, but designed around babies. Legitimate babies. Bloodlines. To the point that in the Bible, although you can marry as many women as you can fit under one palatial roof (and then write a book of whiny proverbs bitching about how much you hate their screechy, nagging faces), you can also divorce your wife for barrenness (or, if you don't want to do that because you really really love your barren wife, repeatedly knock up her slave girl and officially declare those babies "hers," which is perfectly acceptable because what makes a baby legitimate is whom the female in question belongs to from a cultural and social and economic standpoint, and you own the slave girl as much as you do your wife).1
The thing is, in the absence of the orientation concept, I might argue that sex with slaves (of either gender) in SB 'verse is actually roughly analogous to the kind of homosexual activity (not homosexual identity) that's been accepted by real societies in the past. Take "boy-love" in classical Greece-- adult men having dalliances with teenage boys was an accepted thing, to the point that there were terms of courtship, and a technical term for your boy fighting alongside you in war, and Zeus was pretty much universally acknowledged to be madly in love with his male page Ganymede, and nobody was like "But... he's married, and also he knocks up every remotely bifurcated female he can outrun, so... what's with the boy?" because hello, that's a totally different thing. (See also: Apollo and Hyacinthus.) Because boys are on a completely different plane than women; you can take your pleasure with them, you can love them and court them and lay your head in their laps and write romantic poetry about them, but the idea of marrying them is ludicrous, because your relationship is nowhere near the concept of procreation, which is what marriage is about. I mean, your emotional and physical relationship with them can be better than your marriage, even, but you're still never going to marry them, because: babies. So I think the sterilization of slaves in SB 'verse is at least partly what makes it socially OK to sleep with them even if you're married or dating, because it's qualitatively on a different plane from marriage-- an explicitly inferior one in this case, but the important part is that it's qualitatively different-- so society can safely tolerate these liaisons, even if they're actually highly romantic and emotional in nature.2
That isn't to say it's impossible to transgress with a slave (or a male lover), either in real-life societies where it's been considered acceptable to sleep with them,3 or in SB 'verse. In the latter case, Bran's reactions to things are a pretty good indicator of what IS considered transgressive, because he's a rule-follower-- he has a very strong need to know what he's SUPPOSED to do-- so when Holden goes to suck his cock, or asks Bran to penetrate him, we can get kind of an idea of how things like that tend to be regarded in general, by Bran's shock and discomfort. Yves doesn't give that much of a shit about social mores-- he has a very strong sense of moral right and wrong, but as far as norms that can be expressed in terms of "it just isn't done!" Yves' attitude is more like, "And yet... I'm doing it, and my master likes it, so, you know, fuck off." Bran's much more susceptible to the "just isn't done" line, so through his eyes, we get to see more of what in Holden's behavior ISN'T generally done. Like, even with his almost unconditional need to please Holden, he has a very strong mental block to get over when it comes to topping Holden, because... it isn't done that way. A lot of the things Holden does aren't done that way; his transgressive behavior with slaves has to do with his sporadic refusal to adhere to the master's socially prescribed role-- both sexually and emotionally. And for a while he can do that in private, without risking the ire of society. But not forever. Eventually, he's got to, well, come out.
Holden and Alix, having "crossed over" (the literal etymology of "transgress") the line between slave and free, have a troubled relationship with social mores throughout-- we see that at the very beginning of "Bran," where their facade of impeccable social correctness drops as soon as they're in the car away from Dunaev ("Son of a bitch!"). In point of fact, I'd argue that Holden and Alix's marriage, in the social context, is mildly transgressive, even though it's a legal heterosexual marriage. Because Holden and Alix are ex-slaves-- because they are creatures explicitly without fertility, procreative dead-ends (and Valor, "their" child, was born of another woman whose social role dictated that she not conceive4), as far as society is concerned, there's no point to their marriage. I think they have a great marriage, personally, but that's because I'm one of those damn hippie liberals who wants to redefine marriage so it's actually about love, not the potential for procreation (my husband was sterile, too), and in the society Holden and Alix primarily mix with, bloodlines are still paramount, so they're still pretty much just playing house. Cutely playing house, acceptably playing house, have-them-over-for-dinner playing house-- but playing house.
The tension all this causes-- Holden and Alix's neither-fish-nor-flesh-nor-fowl status, their secret refusal to regard slaves as disposable, Valor's existence, Holden's transgressive desires vis-a-vis his slaves, and so on-- continues to be an issue throughout the series, until finally Holden's discomfort with Lee and the relationship he's supposed to be having with the kid helps push him towards the realization that he's really only acting out acceptability to society, and if he's going to be true to himself and his lovers, he has to "out" himself, publicly declaring not his homosexual identity (still doesn't exist in-universe) but another, equally important kind of emotional and sexual identity for which there is no name. He has to drop the facade of acceptability and come out as something society does NOT accept.5
I suppose my point is that while the Slave Breakers universe avoids direct comment on the real-life male homosexual experience, it does try to take on some of the issues that I see as relevant to that experience-- issues of love and attraction and identity and legitimacy and transgression-- in the context of alternate-universe male/male romance. And it's the failure to do that, in some form, that I do sometimes see as problematic in female-written slash. What does bug me when I'm reading m/m fic is when the two men seem to have been transposed onto an otherwise unaltered traditional m/f storyline. I know this is a really subjective thing, and I've seen complaints that such-and-such in such-and-such a m/m story "acts like a girl," but for me, it's not about their behavior (my husband was the homemaker and Valentine's-Day-observer and crier-over-Terms of Endearment in our marriage, so I just don't see it as that simple), it's about the arc of the relationship towards social acceptability, and sometimes that's just STUNNINGLY conventional. I mean, of course, sometimes it's as blatant as "I'm rewriting Jane Eyre, except that they're both guys," and sometimes it's subtler-- but the plotline that BUGS is the one where the two men move as though inevitably towards an exact social equivalent of heterosexual marriage. The classic male/female romance moves towards marriage, right, because marriage equals social acceptability. Imposing a plotline like that on a male/male story just bugs the crap out of me (let's not even talk about mpreg), because it imposes a contrived cultural legitimacy on the homosexual experience in a way that I find naive and parochial. It whitewashes the element of transgression that is still an inherent part of homosexual identity in our culture. But then, I find that plotline just as problematic when it involves a man and a woman, because seriously, in this day and age, fuck that,6 so maybe those aren't my thoughts on yaoi so much as they are my thoughts on any kind of romance.
So anyway, how bout them Yankees?
1The Bible makes it pretty clear that Jacob was sentimental about Joseph and Benjamin because he had this crazy romantic thing for Rachel, not because Joseph and Benjamin were objectively distinguishable from Naphtali and Dan, or the rest of the kids for that matter, in the eyes of anybody else. Society doesn't care whether you loved your kids' mom or not; you can care, but you're not supposed to translate that into actual hierarchy, to be like "Yeah, Reuben, you're the oldest, but Joseph and Benjamin are more special to me because I actually gave a shit about their mom, so Joseph gets nicer clothes." I mean, it worked out OK for Joseph, but that's because the Bible, like all folk tales, loves plotlines that transgress established social mores: youngest chosen over oldest, shepherd boy chosen over blood prince, ninety-eight-year-old woman gives birth to great and fertile nation, kid born amid cow shit turns out to be the Chosen One, etc.
2Holden's early relationship with Yves has, in fact, a few parallels with the Athenian ideal of a relationship between an erastes and his eromenos-- you were supposed to court him, protect him, see to his education, provide for him financially, fondle him and sleep cuddled up with him, etc.-- although nineteen is too old for an eromenos, and I don't think an erastes was supposed to be married. But in a minute I'm going to talk about how Holden and Alix's marriage is weird anyway, and not for the reason you think (i.e., not because they're both kinda gay, because in-universe, there's no such thing), but for a reason that is... sort of parallel.
3There's a whole other essay here that I'm not going to attempt to write at the moment, about race and the concept of miscegenation, and how in real life, whether it's socially okay to sleep with your slave has generally depended on whether babies might result that would not be cool with everybody. Thus, in Rome, it was fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would just be slave babies which was cool with everybody, and in Israel, it was fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would just be YOUR babies which was cool with everybody (except your bitter barren wife who drove your poor slave girl out into the desert with her kid to found a nation with a gigantic grudge against your wife's eventual kid), but in the American antebellum south it was NOT fine to sleep with slaves because any resulting babies would be part slave race and part master race and thus hugely confusing and disturbing. I mean, clearly everybody did it anyway, including Thomas Jefferson, but you were at least supposed to be embarrassed about it. (And obviously I'm talking about men, here-- women are a whole different kettle of fish, no pun intended-- but it's generally not been okay for women to voluntarily sleep with anyone at all because shameless wanton hussies etc.) But what I'm talking about in this bit is cases where the fact that NO babies will result is what makes it okay to have something on the side. Which is also exactly what makes it NOT okay to have that same side dish for a main course, if you see what I mean (because marriage = BABIES).
4People who shouldn't be able to conceive conceiving-- see above re: postmenopausal Sarah and virgin Mary, and also princesses locked in high towers away from all male contact-- is one of those Transgression Tropes that mythology in general is in love with.
5Not that you have to be an activist to be "out" in that sense, mind you-- Andrei himself is a mild-mannered, unaggressive, but not at all secret transgressor. He's not acting out for social change, just acting out his desires, both by owning a sex slave he doesn't desire (or sleep with) and by seeking a permanent commitment with another man. He doesn't actively resent or fight society's strictures-- he's just aware that his happiness lies outside them, so he lives outside them in his own quiet and private way. And Holden respects that, which is why Andrei is probably the person outside his immediate household Holden likes and trusts the most.
6I mean, fuck it in all days and ages, pretty much. The great writers always have, which is why I love Shakespeare, who was no slouch in the "writing romantic poetry to other people's penises" department himself. And the great thing about Jane Eyre is that (spoilers!) the "Reader, I married him" contains an unspoken "once his deranged snapping turtle of a wife died in the process of blinding and crippling him while I was off getting hit on by my hot cousin and becoming independently wealthy," which isn't exactly the narrative arc of, say, Pamela.7
7The narrative arc of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, in case you were wondering, is as follows (spoilers!):
PAMELA: Oh, sir, please stop trying to rape your humble fifteen-year-old maidservant.
MR. B: But you arouse my hot blood! Hold still.
PAMELA: I will not hold still, for if I did, you would lose all respect for me and consider me but a shameless wanton hussy.
MR. B: You're damn right I would. HOLD STILL.
PAMELA: No! These are unsafe working conditions! I am going home to my loving parents!
MR. B: Oh, for God's sake. *pistol-whip*
PAMELA (waking up): Where am I?
MR. B: I had to kidnap you. Don't worry, I wrote a letter to your parents telling them you were a whore. Here, as a pledge of good faith that I won't rape you until I feel like it, sleep with my dour and terrifying housekeeper. She said something about making you her Jezebel. I think that means "prison bitch."
PAMELA: Oh, sir, this is not genteel behavior!
MR. B: I MUST FUCK YOU.
PAMELA: Alas, for my predicament! I would run away, but this property is surrounded by bloodthirsty cows and an insurmountable waist high fence. All I can do is faint!
MR. B: Your fainting moves my heart. Please let me fuck you?
PAMELA: Oh, sir, if you like it, then you better put a ring on it.
MR. B: Oh, FINE.
PAMELA: Yay! My virtue has been rewarded!
