All Eyes on Me

On Facebook, I frequently see ads for different companies that provide... let’s say romance content. Novels, comics, stuff like that. They’re clearly self-published and not high quality— they give you a sample chapter in the post, and they are too amateurishly written and poorly edited to be anything else. Whatever, there’s a lot of self-publishing in the Internet age. But even across different companies or mediums, there’s one element they absolutely all have in common without exception— a really prominent and explicitly codified element of coercion.

All of them. Every single one. They’re all heterosexual, and the woman is always sold, obligated, carried off, or biologically destined for the male romantic and sexual partner. I know this sort of thing has always been at least an undercurrent in the romance genre, at least the “sexy ravishment” kind, where the butch hero absolutely has to have the female protagonist, and his desire is part of the measure of her personal value. My view on the appeal of it is well explained in a line of Meredith’s in Dream Machine episode 2: “Sometimes... when you’ve spent your life afraid of being a slut... the only way you can enjoy yourself is when the decision is taken out of your hands.” It’s a way for women, the usual target audience, to indulge in a romantic fantasy like when they have a hard time conceiving of themselves taking any kind of sexual agency,

But in these on Facebook, the element seems even more literal and spelled out than that traditional “sexy ravishment.” The coercion is front and center, an explicit part of the scenario— “I am assigned to this man and there’s nothing I can do about it.” She’s sold to him. She’s in an arranged marriage. She’s marked by pheromones. Et cetera. Et cetera. I know there’s a market for that... but do these online romance novel companies produce no other kind of romance? Why are they ALL like that? It seems really... retrograde? Like, even less conscious of rape culture than the romances of generations past, as if it assumes that all women just really want to be relieved of the responsibility of choosing their own mate and just want to be handed over to a dominant man.

And I’m really not getting the draw here. I can get the “I’m flattered by how badly he wants me” aspect. I can even grasp the “he is the instigator and I am not responsible” or “we don’t need to discuss or establish consent for this because we are just so compatible” aspects. I DO NOT understand the appeal of the “I have literally no choice or say in this at all” idea. What is speaking to women in that? Is it the notion that you don’t have to look for your soulmate or doubt that you’ve found him, because that’s been pre-decided for you? Is it the assumption that more appealingly masculine men just take what they want? Is it just a thinly-veiled submission kink it’s assuming of the entirety of its readership?

I guess everybody’s got their kinks. I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with enjoying problematic storytelling tropes, as long as you understand what their meaning is outside of the world of fiction. But these are so SPECIFIC to something that seems to make such an unfair assumption of what women are like or what appeals to them. Is the product designed for a market that niche? But it certainly shows up for me just because I’m a woman, and I can’t imagine they would have so little variation in subject matter unless they thought that’s just what all or most women wanted.

This scene is another from Justin’s Wodehousian comedy adventure, meant to directly follower the opener #8 - “A Caper in Venice”, depicting Justin and his valet Peter Morgan arriving for the house party that will be the setting for the story.

This scene’s a little awkward. It’s got some clunky exposition and probably isn’t quite funny enough and needs punching up. But it’s intended to not only set the scene, but introduce you to what Justin and Morgan are like as people, and how they interact with each other. Justin is a whimsical, roguish free spirit who enjoys stirring up trouble and lives outside of convention. Morgan is his friend and loyal retainer, who attempts to be his voice of reason while he still supports him and backs him up, but is kind of his straight man and is noticeably more cautious. I also want to seed the problem dealt with in #10 - “On Your Terms” and #11 - “Need Someone”, where they care about each other, but the dynamic is not equal, and Justin is sometimes cavalier with that.

Also, notably, this show we will have the space to depict Justin as visibly bisexual. He always has been intended to be kind of a Kinsey 1 or 2, but in his previous appearance in Mrs. Hawking III: Base Instruments, it was tricky to make it present given his role in the story. Christian Krenek, the second person to portray him, had some good ideas to manifest it in small ways, but Justin would not be able to be terribly open with it in that company. While we want to make it part of his character and keep the story from getting too bogged down in the bigotry of the period, which would make the story a lot less fun, we also don’t like the idea of the characters reacting to it like modern people. So we’re trying to split the difference to have a little fun with it, without throwing the Victorian milieu out the window.


Photo by John Benfield

( Day #14 - Man of Philosophy )

Well, I've done it. As you may have seen on Facebook, yesterday I completed the first draft of the novel I've been working on, converting the story from my "Adonis" screenplay into a full-length prose form.


Artist's dramatization of actual scene from novel

I got very close last week, and completing it had started to obsess me. I had managed to get it down to one remaining scene, so yesterday I locked myself in my room and didn't let myself leave until I had it finished. My goal was one continuous story, not necessarily a good one, but a technically "complete" one, that flowed from beginning to middle to end. It came out to just barely under 43,000 words, in thirteen chapters plus a prologue. Not a very long novel— probably will ultimately need to be longer —but I think it's the longest continuous thing I've ever written.

Word count is a weird metric of length to me, as a dramatist. Drama never has a fraction of the word count prose does, and doesn't correspond to runtime nearly as much. In screenwriting, there's a rough one to one ratio of page count to minutes it takes to play out. Plays don't have standard formatting; you kind of have to work it out for yourself. But the sheer volume of words required for a full-length novel was pretty staggering to me. By contrast, all five Mrs. Hawking plays together total about 63,000 words— much smaller on average given the amount of work they represent.

Writing the book was very much not easy for me. As I've been complaining, I find prose to be incredibly difficult. Describing what happens in a way that doesn't feel overwrought, excessive, and awkward is much harder to me than designing the action (like one does for any sort of story) then expressing it in dialogue and a few stage directions to be built upon by performers. My first drafts tend to be wordy at the best of times, but I often felt unable to convey what was going on in a manner that didn't seem overexplained, or execessively formal. I tried not to worry about that too much at this stage, as too much attempt to edit as you go gets in the way of completing a first draft, but as a result the prose goes off the rails in a lot of places.

This is all to say I am very much not happy with the book right now. It's not representing the story the way I want, and the level of the writing is not up to the standard I want to put forward. It's the worst example to date of the problem I feel like I struggle with most frequently in my writing, that I did really great work building the story, but the words I used to express it are bad and wrong.

I can do pretty solid dialogue at this point, as drama has honed my ability for it through practice. But for someone as thoroughly verbal as I am, I find word use to be ABSOLUTELY THE MOST DIFFICULT PART of writing. Coming up with the ideas, what happens, the mechanical functionality of how the tools of narrative work? I'm awesome at that. Picking the right words that are pretty and expressive enough for narration? That's a brutal struggle.

I know this is part of the process. Drafting has allowed me to make good work time and again, and I know myself well enough to know that I'm better off having a finished first draft that I can iterate on than trying to edit everything until it's perfect before moving on. I never fucking finish anything if I try to work the second way. So history suggests that even just getting to this point is a HUGE step forward in ultimately making a good piece.

Right now, though, all I want to do is pick at it. I am keenly aware of its shortcomings in its current state, and I have a hard time leaving a project alone if I know it still needs work. But I have to get some distance from it, or I'll never be able to effectively think of new ways to convey my ideas where it's needed. So what I have resolved to do is not even LOOK at it again for at least two weeks. I put the first allowable date to return to it on my calendar. Hopefully in that time I'll forget what I was trying to do and be able to evaluate what I did do.

What has worked well for me in the past in writing plays and screenplays is to puke out a first draft, take some time away from it, then attempt a second draft on my own before I show it to anyone. I am definitely going to need outside feedback on this, and I've even got a few very generous people in mind. But I'd be embarrassed to show it to anyone in its current form, so I absolutely want to see if I can improve the quality of the prose before I do that. "The writing is bloated and awkward," is not feedback I'm looking for, 'CAUSE I ALREADY KNOW IT IS.

But I do need help to see if I've really used the novel form to its fullest. The overall story is one Bernie and I labored over when we were writing the screenplay and I'm very proud of that part of it. But it is very lean and focused, in the manner that stories for the screen must be, and it probably requires more expansion and fleshing out to really take advantage of the novel form. And I'm not a hundred percent sure I paced it in the manner a novel should be— the screen must move fast, and it may still feel too rushed. Still, I feel far and away the biggest problem is the quality of the prose.

It's also got sex scenes, which I feel... some type of way about. I really do feel like, given the subject matter, they need to be in there. But they're certainly not my forte, as they don't require a lot of specifics in drama. In this case, my trouble is compounded by two issues. The first I wrote about back in 2014 and unfortunately not much has changed— I'm a big child about sex scenes and feel embarrassed, like somebody's going to judge or laugh at me for how I conceive of them. I worry about this even when I choreograph intimacy on stage, that somebody will find something I designed to seem sexy to be weird, silly, or even creepy. The second issue is that the setting of this piece in particular in an alternate-world ancient matriarchy, with entirely different power dynamics between the genders. Any sex scene I write in that world is going to have to meaningfully incorporate that difference in dynamics— but it's still got to take into account my audience's frame of reference comes from being socialized in patriarchy. I mused on this issue in 2015— I need my story's interactions to feel like they're from the different world, while STILL communicating in a way my audience can understand if I want them to get the right impression. THAT'S HARD.

I am trying to keep sight of the fact that it's an accomplishment that I finished. It was a lot of work, it was hard for me, and I finished. That's a big deal. I have always had a hard time celebrating accomplishments like that if I'm still not feeling good about the product's quality. But, one step at a time. I made something new, from an idea that is important to me, in a form I've never worked in before. And I am that much closer to making it something special.

That's something.

Having some thoughts, not totally formed, on a concept you hear about but isn’t that well defined. Excused how rambling and inconclusive I’m being because of it.

People talk about formative influences, the stuff we experienced as children that shaped our outlook, nature, or tendencies going forward. One kind in particular is when we’re just starting to grow into our sexualities but they haven’t really been formed yet, and we develop an early awareness of the hotness of people. And I don't just mean childhood crushes, which can be purely affectionate in nature. The joke people make is, usually when referring to some sexy figure from entertainment we liked when we were children, is “That’s the moment that I went through puberty.” Or something like that.

Obviously this is an exaggeration. Rarely does one lightning-bolt moment set things in stone going forward. But there’s definitely a sense of holding on to the experience of finding somebody attractive for the first time, or one of the first times, at an early age. The classic example I can think of is the way certain men talk about having seen slave Leia in the Star Wars movies as kids— it’s not like everything changed for them in a moment, or resulted in anything particularly specific, but it made an impression that stayed with them to this day.

But when people talk about this, they’re pretty much always talking about it happening to boys, not girls. For girls, the closest analogue to this phenomenon seems to be the “teen crush,” when young girls obsess over some celebrity, such as the New Kids on the Block, Justin Beiber, or One Direction. However, in these cases, the target of these crushes is usually presented in a desexualized manner, and the girls’ feelings are characterized as affection rather than lust. I’m trying to think if there are any exceptions to this, and the only one I can really think of is Elvis, who was not considered as neutered as some of the other teen heartthrobs seem to be.

I’m wondering why this is. The answer may be simple misogyny, treating male sexuality as a given while erasing female. Like, some might say that girls do not have the kind of visual responses to attractive people the way that boys do, and are therefore unlikely to be so affected simply by hotness, but more by emotion, affection, and validation. But as I’ve mentioned, I reject the notion that girls are inherently different than boys. Socialization does of course play a role, and perhaps girls are taught to contextualize their feelings differently, which may contribute to us (and them) seeing their growing attractions as less sexual and more emotional.

Or is it that these youthful romantic obsessions are not true analogues to the phenomenon? Are these in fact more about affection, while moments of sexual attraction occur in other contexts? I don’t think that boys necessarily conceptualized every girl they thought was hot as a girl they had a crush on. It would not surprise me if girls were the same. I mean, did every girl who had that poster of Rob Lowe hanging in her bedroom obsess over his ever move? Or did they have it because they thought he was hot, while focusing their emotional energy elsewhere?

An obvious place to seek a data point, of course, is to look back on my own earlier years and see if I have any such formative experiences. As a grown woman, when it comes to pure sexual attraction, I tend to experience it as is more stereotypical of a man, so one might guess that I’d be likely to have such moments in my youth that set my sexuality that way. In fact, however, I was such a bizarre child that even such a question as “who were your crushes as a kid?” is almost too complicated and difficult to discuss.

I mean, to a certain extent, everyone is their own kind of weird and at the very least men and women are not monoliths. We’re all going to have lived slightly different kinds of lives. But without getting into it too deeply, my maturation process in this respect was complicated by 1) the preoccupation that I might be asexual, which lasted from about age 13 until at least 17, and 2) the fact that my being was consumed with an obsession/romantic fixation/otherwise inchoate longing for Draco, the dragon character from the film Dragonheart, which burned with the intensity of a first love and shut out any other romantic attachment or attraction.

What’s that you say? “You were a weird kid, Phoebe.” YEAH, NO KIDDING.

Besides the fact that #2 made me feel like a freak and worry that I might actually be insane, it did shockingly little to resolve the question of #1 either way. But the upshot is, while that experience CERTAINLY had powerful and lasting effects on me, I’m not sure it counts for what I’m discussing now. I mean, current-day Phoebe tends to form monogamous romantic attachments based more on the total experience of a particular person, while on a pure attraction level is drawn to very normatively physically beautiful guys. That’s… about as conventional as you get, and it certainly didn’t result from any formative attractions.

Heh. That weird little kid had no idea she’d go from THAT to spending a good portion of her time ogling pumped-up, shaved-down pretty boys. I wonder if child-me would be relieved or grossed out.

But enough about my personal madness. I may be speculating on a phenomenon that doesn’t really exist. It may be I’m blurring the affection and emotion of crushes with the development of plain sexuality. It might be that people’s attractions, even as they are growing in for the first time as they mature, might not strike them as strongly or particularly as I imagine. It occurs to me as a write this not everybody may have had moments where that first, visceral reaction to a figure has a powerful or enduring effect on you.

Hell, it’s only happened to me twice, that “lightning-bolt moment,” which it may amuse you to know were Draco and Steve Rogers. I’m a person who maintains very little in the way of sensory memory, but I recall every visceral detail of sitting in that movie theater seeing Dragonheart for the first time and Draco came bursting out of that waterfall, twenty goddamn years ago. When Steve Rogers emerges from the chamber in all his gleaming physical perfection, it is not an exaggeration to say it CHANGED me. I don’t know if these are in any way comparable, or even examples of what I’m talking about— if only that they happened at ages nine and twenty-four respectively, vastly different points of my life and development, and only one was of a purely sexual reaction.

I don’t know. Female friends, do you have any examples of the phenomenon that I’m talking about? Who was, for lack of a better term, your “slave Leia” in this regard?

Edited to add: Comments screened now, in case that makes you feel more comfortable responding.

Watched season 3 of Orange is the New Black and really enjoyed it. It's an exceptionally good show, telling lots of stories you don't often see on television.

One thing that puzzles me about it is that, for all their wide perspective and dedication to depicting people without sufficient representation, the show simply refuses to refer to "bisexuality." It's really strange. They have a number of bi characters on it-- Lorna Morello, for example, and of course the lead character Piper. But they never use that word.

There's a bit of a running gag about how Piper's people seem to be unable to understand that she can be attracted to either of those genders. When she's with Alex, they all continually ask if that means she's gay now. On top of that, the lesbian characters bitch about how much it sucks to fall for "straight girls" like her. It's a pretty clear and seemingly accurate depiction of biphobia. I get that. But I feel like the fact that NOBODY-- not even Piper herself --can seem to actually call it for the bisexuality that it is comes off as super weird. I mean, she must have heard the term somewhere, right? Why wouldn't she use it to respond to the people who want to box her into one thing or the other? It's almost like the SHOW is biphobic, with its weird refusal to give the obvious name to the situation.

That seems weird, given how much the show seems to embrace the notion that people don't always fit into your little boxes. The only other thing I can think of is if they're trying some weird foreshadowing for the idea that Piper ISN'T actually bi-- that she really IS gay, and that eventually she's going to completely give up the pretense of being interested in men at all. And her refusal to assert herself as bi is a small way of indicating that label doesn't really represent her.

I actually think that's a little silly, even if that's what they're going for. People can be different things at different stages of their life, and no one stage is necessarily less true than any other just because it was transitory. Refusing to use the term bi comes off to me as weirdly biphobic in the same manner as the biphobia of characters in the show.

Sex scenes are really hard to write.

Not that drama, my usual medium, requires it very often. Even screenplays aren’t supposed to have so much detail about such things, beyond what you need to convey the feel of the scene. So even Adonis, the only major work I’ve written to date of which eroticism is a significant part, shouldn’t need a blow-by-blow, if you’ll pardon that unfortunate pun. As I’ve mentioned, I still feel a bit awkward trying to write sexy stuff, partially out of a lingering prudishness and partially for fear of it not coming off the way I want it to. But it’s important for this story, so I want to get it right. And, despite the mandate to not do the director or cinematographer’s job by writing a novel in the descriptions, the setting of this story makes it tough to convey the feel without some specificity.

So as I've been thinking about writing the sequels, the challenge presented by this story in this regard is complex. The world of it is a matriarchy, with all the attendant socialization that would entail. But our audience is socialized by patriarchy, and view our story with all its baggage. So our characters and our audience have different cultural backgrounds coloring how they perceive things.

We know we cannot overcome our audience’s baggage completely, so we have to present things that will read to them, given the context they bring to it, if we want them to get it. Still, we want to present a world that is believably shaped by the fact that it’s a matriarchy. So we have the huge challenge to present the matriarchal cultural influences and practices that still have the correct implication to viewers with their real-world, patriarchally-influenced outlook.

How does that relate to designing sex scenes? In short, we need to make ours fit the standards of the world but don’t come off as weird rather than sexy to the audience.

For example. While by no means the rule, or present in every case, in general I think it’s fair to say that there’s an assumption in a straight couple that the man takes the active/dominant role. In our matriarchal setting, we flip that assumption so that role is assigned to the woman. But to modern American eyes, there’s a lot about the man being the passive partner— and I don’t even mean penetrated, just passive —that reads as unmasculine, or even gay. And that is not what we’re going for. We’re trying to present that gender expression is not the same as power dynamics, and that would undermine it, implying that there is an equivalence between masculinity and dominance.

Our culture does have imagery we associate with hetero female sexual dominance, but they tend to be of aggressive, BDSM-oriented dominatrices. Since Aidan is a victim of violent rape, we’re leery of making his consensual sexual experiences read in any way as violent. It totally wouldn’t be fair, but it might make people question what was different before to make the non-consensual events so traumatizing. I don’t want to evoke any unfortunate parallels.

So I need to figure out a scene that is female-dominant, not emasculating, not violent, and despite its unconventionality, is still hot to the audience. Jesus, that’s a tall order.

I have some ideas, but as I said, it can be tough to figure out if something’s going to be sexy, especially if it’s something unusual. I haven’t exactly written a ton of these, especially nothing under such particular parameters. And I know it seems I’m being weirdly narrow, but so much of the script is challenging enough without balancing it with something more conventional.

I managed to be off-book for rehearsal tonight! Not perfectly so, I had to call line a fair bit, but I was acceptably able to go on my own. I'll have to do some reviewing for tomorrow, but I'm close to where I should be. We ran the whole first act Sunday night and the whole second act just now, and I think we're in pretty good shape.

I am very much enjoying the process, and I'm also relaxing into the company and the role. I was nervous going in because my acting felt stiff-- probably a self-perpetuating cycle there --and I was terrified that someone was thinking "Oh, she got the role because she's pretty, not because she can act." But I'm doing better and better, and I find I really like my castmates. They're all really good actors and, it turns out, very fun people to work with. I love a cast I can laugh and joke with between scenes.

Tonight was kind of amusing. In the script, I have two scenes where I each kiss one of two of my castmates. The first is Larabee posing as Godfrey Norton at our wedding, then Holmes near the end of the show. We hadn't rehearsed either for real yet. While I was ready to put it in whenever everyone else was, I am, however, accustomed to the director declaring "Tonight we'll be doing the kissing," or something like that. Tonight, our first night off-book with it, our Sherlock just kind of went for it. I confess I was a little thrown. Though it surprised me, I had no trouble going with it, and as I said to the gentleman playing Holmes, good for him for just going for it. I always admire people who don't bother with stupid little hangups and don't waste the time being awkward.

The timing was a little bit weird too, because we're supposed to hold it until the lights go out, and because the stage manager was a wee bit slow declaring the transition we had some people teasing us about just hanging out like that. I said I read in an acting textbook once that a stage kiss isn't supposed to last more than four seconds. One of my castmates thought that was oddly specific, so I said I thought the idea behind it was that when people kiss, after four seconds it no longer seems realistic for them to just press their lips together. After that point the kiss needs to "progress," shall we say, basically transitioning to a makeout if it is to stay believable. Of course, that meant  that when we ran the scene for the second time, the SM started chanting, "One thousand one... one thousand two..." causing Holmes and I to break with laughter. I flipped him off, but he rightly said, "You asked for it!" and I had to concede, that yes, he got me there. :-)

What this also suggests is that if the lights are ever late, we've got four seconds until we have no choice but to escalate. ;-) Did the Victorians even have makeouts? Well, since the scene is obviously supposed to imply they go to bed together after the fade, I guess it wouldn't be totally inappropriate.