Ravenous Wednesday with Special Guest Lisa Brackmann!

Good morning, Ravenous Wednesday Regulars and any new guests we have amongst us today! If you're new, belly up to the bar and ask for your favorite beverage (if you're a regular, you know the drill and where I hide all the alcohol). In honor of our guest today, we also have a full range of dim sum (hot pork bun, anyone?).

Today is one of our special guests in that she is not a Ravenous Romance author. However she is a staunch supporter of RR and a frequent visitor on RR Wednesdays.

I have known Lisa for many years; she is, in fact, largely responsible for my love of reading and for introducing me to Classic Star Trek via the Trouble With Tribbles episode. So it's a pleasure to host her here today and I'm hoping her post on gender expectation and dynamics will provoke some interesting conversation!

Lisa's debut novel, Rock Paper Tiger, has been favorably reviewed in Publisher's Weekly (Starred review!), the New York Times, and the Boston Herald, just to name a few. Most recently RPT received a little blurb in (wait for it) the July 30th issue of Entertainment Weekly. Can we give a WOOT for Ms. Brackmann? A SQUEEE will do nicely too.

And, as you can see, her cat Ghost likes it too! Yes. I really did have to include this picture. :-)

Here's a brief blurb on the book:

Iraq vet Ellie McEnroe is down and out in China, trying to lose herself in the alien worlds of performance artists and online gamers. When a chance encounter with a Uighur fugitive drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, Ellie must decide who to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors and operatives claiming to be on her side – in particular, a mysterious organization operating within a popular online game.

And now on with the post! Please welcome Lisa Brackmann!

I know I shouldn’t start a post with a disclaimer, but I think I have to start this one with two.

Here I am, your guest on Ravenous Wednesday, and my book is not romance, erotic or otherwise. ROCK PAPER TIGER is a quirky thriller, character-driven suspense.

Second disclaimer: I don’t intend this post as any kind of reviewer bash. I’ve gotten a lot of positive and insightful reviews ((rather than flogging them here, if you’re interested, check out my website). It’s been one of the most gratifying things about the publication process—feeling that my work has connected with others, both those who read professionally and those who read for enjoyment.

Okay, I hope that’s sufficient disclaiming. Because among the reviews I’ve gotten for the book, there were a few lines from reviewers that had me scratching my head, and that I think might point to some larger issues in gender dynamics that would be interesting to discuss.

My main character, Ellie, is a twenty-something woman, lost in Beijing. She’s an Iraq war vet, recovering from traumatic injuries, physical and mental, and coping not very well with getting dumped by her husband, whom she followed to China and who has left her for a Chinese woman (who presumably lacks Ellie’s considerable baggage). Ellie is unhappy, unstable and barely hanging on to a fragile new life she’s trying to create out of the ruins of her old one. Her sort-of boyfriend, the artist, Lao Zhang, is more of a “Friend with Benefits” than a real lover, and that’s as much as Ellie wants, or at least as much as she can cope with. A chance encounter with a dissident Uighur fugitive crashing at Lao Zhang’s place drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, and Ellie finds herself on the run, chased by Chinese and American agents whose motives and loyalties she can only begin to guess. Her only clues come from a secret society operating within a popular online game—and she doesn’t know who the players are, or what game it is that they’re really playing.

So that’s the background.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t mind negative reviews—you know, we all want to be perfect and our every sentence loved, right? But I don’t expect that everyone is going to love my book or even like it. Heck, I doubt if anyone could beat me up about deficiencies in my work as much as I can beat up myself.

Where I do get confused is when a reviewer misinterprets my intentions—when I’m being misread, in the literal sense of the word.

I wonder, is it me? Did I not write that clearly? Am I letting something out of my head that I didn’t mean to? Where did we go wrong here?

One of the reviews that had me the most perplexed was one that stated I had portrayed Ellie as “sexy” and yet the book is “curiously chaste” and that, well, most of the men in it aren’t very nice, or are at best, “idealized.”

I’m guessing “idealized” refers to the artist, Lao Zhang. I can’t really discuss this without giving away too much of the plot, but, yes, he’s idealized. He’s hardly in the book; he’s “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and that’s the only way an idealized partner can exist, in the fantasy space of your own head. We’re free to create whatever version of him we want to, like an avatar in an online game.

Let me state what my actual intentions were. I didn’t intend for Ellie to be a “sexy” character at all. I described her as being cute, in a standard, all-American kind of way. She goes off to war as a 19 year old, and in her own words, she fucks around (and the language here is intentional­—more on that later). She finds a regular partner in the man who will become her husband, Trey, but their relationship begins in a dangerous, poisonous atmosphere, where violence and abuse are embedded in the environment.

It’s a war zone. On top of that, think Abu Ghraib.

By the time Ellie gets to China, she is injured in body and soul, fearful of intimacy both sexual and otherwise, trying to find a place in the world at the same time that she pushes away any kind of real connections. She spends a lot of the book questioning her relationship with Lao Zhang, what it actually means, whether he really cares about her and how much she should risk for their friendship.

She’s a mess. And I’m trying to understand how this translates to “sexy.”

Is it because she’s able to find sexual partners in a war zone? I mean, you’re in a situation where the ratio of men to women is something like six to one (at best), you’re young, you’re reasonably cute—not so hard, right?

Is it because she talks about sex in terms of “fucking”? Is that sexy talk?

Or is it simply because she’s described as being physically attractive (if not a knockout beauty)?

Is being interested in sex on certain terms “sexy”? Is not being interested in sex when you’re running for your life through Bumfuck China “chaste”?

To me, “sexy” implies not just physical attractiveness (if at all), but a certain confidence in the expression of one’s sexuality, plus, an intention of engaging with others in a sexual way.

I wonder if with this I’ve hit one of those weird, gendered walls that I sometimes encounter and that still surprise me. Though I’ve had really awesome, insightful reviews written by men, the few that have had me shaking my head, going, “huh?” were written by men, and the “huh?” aspects always seemed to deal with the main character and with gendered notions of femininity, sexuality and appropriate behavior.

One of my favorite mixed reviews went something like this: “She (Ellie) exists in a drunken, drugged haze, constantly drops the F-bomb and uses all manner of gutter language, and she doesn’t care who she sleeps with.”

Well, okay, then! Now that we’ve hit for the whole “Madonna/Whore” cycle, let’s move on to the “gutter language” discussion.

A few reviewers mentioned Ellie’s R-rated language, and I’m pretty sure not a single one of them was a woman.

I found some support in this notion I had that the reaction to Ellie’s profanity might be a gendered response when I came across this review of Chevy Steven’s debut, STILL MISSING, which is a big hit for her and St. Martin’s Press.

I’m not going to review her book (no book reviews for this debut author), but I’ve read it, and I’ll tell you a little about it.

STILL MISSING deals with a 30ish realtor, Annie, who is kidnapped by a sexual predator and held captive in a mountain cabin for a year. We know all this and we know that she escapes on the first page, because she’s telling the story to her shrink. We find out that her during her year in captivity, she was horrifically abused, beaten and raped. Much of the story is about her life afterwards, how the trauma affects her, how she is and is not able to heal.

What I found admirable about this book is that it in no way eroticizes her ordeal—there’s nothing prurient about it. The story is brutal and unpleasant, and it doesn’t hide the unpleasantness under a veneer of “Happily Ever After.” Annie will never be the same, and the central question of the book is, how does one mend after an experience like that? Is recovery even possible?

You can definitely argue the plusses and minuses in STILL MISSING—what works and what doesn’t, is it misogynistic or isn’t it, lurid or no? I am not going to get into any of that. But I will mention a few statements the (male) reviewer made that had me flabbergasted.

First: “Early in the novel, I wondered if its intended audience was mostly men, because, let's face it, men are more likely to rush out and buy a rape fantasy than women.”

Um.

I don’t even know what to do with this statement.

But I will try to unpack it.

First, I’ll go out on a limb and say that rape fantasies—emphasis on fantasy here, people—are popular among some women as well as some men. Not not NOT actual rape, but fantasies of dominance and submission.

And, did I mention the “not erotic” aspect of the storytelling in this book? I mean, we all have our kinks, and it’s possible that I just don’t have this particular one, but, at no time during my reading of STILL MISSING did I go, “Oh! This is a rape fantasy that I’m sure many men would enjoy!”

Please, men, read the book and tell me if you got off on it. I know I didn’t. And I really don’t want to think that men rushed out and bought the book because it’s, you know, “sexy.” You could make the case that it’s an examination of a certain kind of sexual kink, but STILL MISSING goes out of its way to make that kink the opposite of “sexy.” Even if you bought the book with an expectation that it’s going to be good, kinky fun, I can’t believe you’d feel that way after reading it.

And if you did, I’m calling the cops.

The next thing that flabbergasted me: the main character, Annie, is described as having “a potty mouth.” The reviewer concludes that his main objection to the book was, in fact, its “gratuitous profanity,” and, I quote: “I am far from a prude (ask anyone), but even in this world of dirty talk I think there are words we'd rather not have to wallow in when we're curled up at home with a book…Is this deluge supposed to make us think Annie is hip or cool or sophisticated? Do Stevens and her editors think this stuff (a synonym they should have considered) sells books? Not to me.”

Oooh-kay. We have a main character who was abducted, imprisoned, raped, beaten, starved, otherwise abused, and finally escapes to find that her entire life is in ruins. She’s, you know, just a tad pissed off about all of this. What is she supposed to say?

“Oh, phooey! My life is really stuffy.”

Yeah, that works.

I ask myself, if this were a male character, would his use of profanity be called into question? Would it be considered inappropriate expression? Or is it somehow worse if women are the ones dropping the F-bomb?

I should mention here that a prominent female reviewer objected to Annie’s profanity as well. I will also say that I totally didn’t notice the profanity, or if I did, it seemed completely appropriate to me. Again, your mileage may vary.

So, UnBound, Ravenous Wednesday Peeps…here are the questions I pose to you:

What is “sexy”? Does it imply agency over one’s own desire, or is it all in the eyes of the beholder? “Gutter language,” more okay for men than for women? Is female anger less acceptable than male, and is the expression of it therefore somewhat confusing to certain readers?

Discuss!

Lisa Brackmann has worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio, an issues researcher in a presidential campaign, and was the singer/songwriter/bassist in an LA rock band. She still takes pride in her karaoke-ready repertoire of bad pop hits and an embarrassing number of show tunes. A southern California native, she lives in Venice CA and spends a lot of time in Beijing, China. Her three cats wish she’d stay put.