Tag Archives: feminism

Fucking hysterical!

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220px-Gynaecology-1822
Early gynecology exam. Doesn’t she look happy, ladies?

I was doing some research yesterday for my next book and while reading this book by Rachel Maines on the history of vibrators I found some very interesting pictures!

Vibrators were developed to save the fingers of doctors who were treating women, both married and unmarried, for ‘hysteria’ – a catch-all diagnosis that covered any and all symptom a woman could name. It was discovered that orgasm, or ‘paroxysm’ would clear up a woman’s general malaise. Marriage was a recommended cure for hysteria, but when that was not possible, or the woman was not receiving strong enough attention from her husband, it fell to the doctor to provide the necessary stimulation. In a purely medical setting, of course!

(I’m not going to go into how ridiculous it was that women’s sexuality was being medicalised, or that how orgasm was supposed to be both distasteful for a woman and yet necessary for her mental and physical health. They didn’t seem to understand that clitoral stimulation is needed for the vast majority of women to achieve orgasm.Hell, they hadn’t bothered to delineate the clitoris from the vulva or the labia until the late eighteenth century. I’m appalled at what nineteeth century women had to go through, and my inner feminist is raring to get going at this manuscript and give the doctor-hero what for on behalf of women everywhere.)

However, doctors (always male, naturally) found manipulating women to orgasm difficult and somewhat distasteful, so the use of hydrotherapy, electrotherapy and primitive vibrators was considered better than manual massage for their patients.

Hydrotherapy – sounds almost relaxing, doesn’t it?

douche

That…that does not look relaxing to me. When you consider that was often cold water, too, I think I’d pass, thank you very much.

Electrotherapy often involved the deliberate collection of static electricity and its application to sensitive areas, using small rollers. When you consider how new the application of electricity to everyday objects was back then, I think that I’d sidestep the electrotherapy too. Weird fact, though: the electric powered vibrator was available for home purchase well before the electric vacuum cleaner or electric iron. I guess women knew what was important back then, even if men didn’t!

This mighty beast is called The Manipulator, and is only a tiny fraction of the actual machine. It was powered by a steam engine (!) which was kept in the next room.

early vibrator

 

manipulator part 2

 

You hook it up to the underside of an examination table, which has a convenient piece cut out and off you go – modern, steam-powered orgasms.

Men, of course, were treated for nervous conditions too, but the numbers of men requiring this kind of stimulation were nowhere near the number of women who went through it.

All very interesting food for thought for The Ruttingdon Series Book 4!

 

The problem with spanking romances

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spanking

 

Oh dear. I think I might be about to say something controversial.

Won’t be the first time, and won’t be the last, so here we go: I don’t understand why spanking novels are as popular as they are. 

Yes, I know, I know. I only write spanking romances. It seems stupid of me to bite the hand that feeds me.

However, the thing is that I try to read as many other spanking romances as I can and I’ve discovered that many of them do nothing more than anger me. I wanted to know how other authors dealt with the problems that challenge me whenever I fire up the laptop, and instead I find that they don’t deal with them at all.

Alright, let me try and be more clear.

I’m a feminist. I believe in the equality of men and women. I also believe that sex is fun, and whatever you do in bed is perfectly fine as long as everybody is on board with it. If I choose to play a submissive role sexually it has no bearing on how I expect to be treated outside the bedroom. If I choose to extend that role into my life outside the bedroom, then I would expect to have the respect of the dominant.

The key words in the previous sentences are choose and respect. 

My problems as a writer, especially of a writer of historical fiction, are many and varied. My sentences run on too long, I disagree with my editor over the use of the Oxford comma, I seem disinclined to use exclamation marks and I seem incapable of writing a woman being sexually abused and call it a romance.

So many of the books I have read in the spanking genre seem to think that if the couple in the book have a disagreement, the dominant is perfectly within his rights to spank (or whip, or paddle) the submissive until she changes her mind. This is what I have real problems with. A couple will always have disagreements. They will argue, they will act in ways that annoy or frustrate the other. However, instead of talking out the issue first, explaining their point of view and their actions, so many books leap straight to the ‘punishment’ of the submissive for daring to disagree with her dominant. Only after the punishment, and often sex, does the dominant let the submissive explain her actions.

This makes me itch inside. I can understand a dynamic where one partner willingly gives up their authority over their body to another, and will accept judgement on their behaviour, leading to punishment. What I can’t understand is a submissive partner putting up with a dominant who spanks first and listens afterwards. How poor does your sense of self have to be before you’ll tolerate that happening to you? That isn’t a man acting without thinking because he’s so madly in love with his partner that his feelings are overwhelmed. That’s domestic abuse!

I don’t understand how readers want that. I don’t understand how writers think that it’s ok to write that.

The trickiest thing for me to write in my books is the idea of consent, especially as I write historical fiction. The idea of a man beating his wife was considered understandable then, even if it was something that made people uncomfortable. Even with that get-out clause, I still struggle. I don’t like reading about women being abused by their partners, so I won’t write that. Yet I still have to find a way to get her over the hero’s knee (or spanking bench, or library table, or…) and liking it.

It’s hard. I don’t think that I’ve managed to get it fully right yet. I completely understand that it’s tricky for everybody. I just don’t think that some writers are trying hard enough to show that there’s a difference between a woman willingly handing her autonomy over to a partner who cares for her well-being and a woman who’s in a relationship with somebody who likes the domination and punishment, but isn’t so keen on accepting that the submissive partner has the right to be listened to and cared for on more levels than just the sexual.

Just my opinion, but one that makes it hard to find what I consider “good” spanking fiction. If anybody has any recommendations, I’d be glad to have them!

A Room Of One’s Own

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I must admit that I’m a little bit afraid of Virginia Woolf – residual damage from being forced to read To The Lighthouse in the Upper Sixth, I think. All that fuss over a major character, to kill her off in a paragraph and not mention her again. Oh, groundbreaking literary style, I know, but oh Lord, so difficult to understand! I would rather have read more Chaucer and if that isn’t a searing enditement of my struggle with that damned book literary masterpiece, I don’t know what is.

(Looking back, I may have disliked my A Level Lit syllabus far more than I realised at the time. But hey, Don’t Look Back In Anger…oh wait, I didn’t like that one either….)

The one thing that I do agree with Virginia Woolf on is her idea that to write fiction, a woman was in need of a “room of her own”.

Now, I’ve benefited from the sort of education that Woolf was challenging the world to give to women. Because of that education I have a job that allows me to support myself independently of a husband. Of course, that job isn’t best-selling novelist, more’s the pity! But that job lets me borrow a shockingly large amount of money from a bank to buy my own late Victorian house brick by crumbling brick. In that house, I have a room of my own to write in, although I don’t tend to use it. I’m far more likely to be found on the couch downstairs with my netbook on my lap than in the spare bedroom where the desk and The World’s Oldest Computer live. Perhaps it’s because there are so many bits and bobs related to my job in there that I just don’t feel comfortable writing fiction in it. Perhaps it’s the dusty vibration plate machine staring balefully at me from the corner of the room sending me – hah – bad vibes.

I think I’m going to have to do something with that room – repaint it, perhaps, or move the job-related junk to another place. I could certainly shift the furniture around. I’m a dab hand at that, a gift from my loving mother who isn’t happy unless she’s rotated the living room furniture three times a year.

I can’t stay on the couch for much longer – my back is killing me! I’m certainly going to have to accept Woolf’s idea and create a room of my own.

If I had been alive in the nineteenth century, they’d have locked me in an asylum

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Feminism and the historical romance novel:  two concepts that I’ve found are pretty hard to reconcile with each other, if I’m going to be completely honest.

I am a feminist; I believe totally that men and women should have equality in all aspects of their lives. However, I choose to write about a time period where women were very much not equal.

Women were not educated in the same way that men were. Upper class ladies were taught the feminine arts – a foreign language (usually French) how to sing and play an instrument, drawing, painting or embroidery and perhaps, if their mothers valued it, enough mathematics to manage household accounting. The richer the lady, the worse her education often was; why bother to stuff your daughter’s head full of knowledge she’d never use as the wife of a man who could afford servants to run the house, write his letters and manage his accounts? Instead she practised her handwriting for placement cards and memorised the orders of precedence so that she did not commit a social faux pas.

In the UK, women did not get the vote until 1928. Some could vote beforehand if they met the property qualifications, but it took the efforts of the Suffragist movements and the social impact of the First World War to get men in power to understand that women were capable of taking a full role in the political life of the nation. They could hold drawing rooms and salons hosting famous politicians, they could even canvass for votes and appear on the hustings, but they could not enter a voting booth until 1928.  How utterly ridiculous.

Rules about divorce and child custody changed during the nineteenth century but they were always weighted heavily in favour of the men. In 1857 a law was passed allowing men to divorce their wife in court without needing an Act of Parliament if one case of adultery could be proved. Married women were not allowed to divorce their husbands. Custody of the children of the marriage was granted to the husband, who could ban his wife from seeing their children.

It wasn’t until 1882 that a woman was able to keep control of her money, property and earnings after marriage. If she married before then, her father would have had to do some nifty legal footwork to protect them from becoming the legal property of her husband.

A woman’s body was not her own – it was not seen as possible for a man to rape his wife, as consent was deemed to have been given from the moment of their marriage vows and could not be retracted by her. A woman disappeared as a legal entity once she married.

Who would want to have been a woman then? And why on earth would a committed feminist like myself write at all positively about the time period?

I find it difficult, I have to admit, to write female characters in a Victorian setting that do not set my teeth on edge. They would have been brought up with very strict ideas about what was correct and proper, and what women should and shouldn’t do. My heroines have to be defiant and ahead of their times for me to even think about liking them. I cannot write passive, submissive women, content with their lot in life as a second class citizen. It goes against every feminist bone in my body! I also cannot read a book with characters like that. Why do we like Elizabeth Bennet so much? Because she stands up to herself to Mr Darcy, that’s why. Politely (just!) and within the rules of early nineteenth century society, but she’s no pushover. Why has Jane Eyre lasted so long as a famous heroine? Because she would only accept Mr Rochester on her terms, not his. She may have been following the rules of society in not willing to be a mistress, but she stood up for herself against a strong and domineering character. It’s only once he is maimed and blinded that she takes him as her husband – note the word order in that famous line, “Reader, I married him.” I know who wears the trousers in that household!

I love nineteenth century writing. I grew up with the What Katy Did books, Little Women and Eight Cousins. I moved onto Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch.  All these books have strong female characters in them. Who among us did not admire brave Jo March, who cut off her hair to raise money for the family? Who didn’t cheer when young Jane Eyre told evil Mr Brocklehurst that the way to go to heaven was to stay in good health, and do not die? Who didn’t love Elizabeth Bennet for popping Mr Darcy’s balloon of priggishness?

These characters were all strong despite the awful restrictions placed on their lives. Although my writing can’t hold a candle to Eliot, Bronte, Austen or Alcott, these great authors have shown me that it is possible to create female characters that can be admired and respected despite their terrible context.

So at my keyboard I sit, trying to create a few fictional women who won’t let a few stupid laws and the ideas of a stuffy, overly-moralistic society stop them from being strong, independent and clever. And being somebody I wouldn’t mind having a drink with!