rivers_bend

a conversation about re-reading books on twitter this morning made me think about books I have re-read. One that contends for top spot (with Tabitha King's One on One and Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon) is A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. It is not unproblematic, but my biggest narrative kink is society creation (see also the Pern books), and for that it is brilliant.

It was written in the 1950s. This is the source of much that makes me cringe, including the line about Jean (the main character) avoiding a fate worse than death. A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH. Already in the story, she has been a prisoner of war and as such has been marched hundreds of miles over the course of months watching her friends die around her, has been hit, starved, threatened... She's lived through hell, basically. But this fate she avoids, this terrible fate to which dying is preferable, is having sex with a man she's in love with, who loves her back, whom she's travelled across the world to find, and whom she plans on marrying. Yes, better that she should DIE than make love before saying "I do". (not even fuck. these characters are total MFEO OTP characters.)

and then I look at my tumblr dash, and all the girls and women delightedly objectifying men, and wanting to get all up on their junk, and playing fold-of-cloth or peen, and making grabby hands at boobs, and shouting NOW KISS at Kristen Stewart and Jennifer Lawrence, and having no kind of shame about sexuality at all. I can't think that a single one of them would think death preferable to sex, no matter how they cry about drinking bleach and lying down in traffic because someone is too sexy for their shirt. #datingmyselfwithlyrics

And I think, YAY, HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

and then I look at the politicians and the laws they are making/trying to make about women's bodies. And some of them were alive in the 50s, and that fate-worse-than-death thing is a real life cultural reference for them, and the rest of them were raised by people who grew up then, and clearly didn't move with the times. But can we move with the times now? Can we do that? Because this whole thing were women can and do watch porn and get off to it, and talk about their desires, and take control of their own sexual experiences is REALLY AWESOME.