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Five Decembers Q4: Love and sex
The book makes a very clear division between love an sex, mainly in the prominence of prostitution throughout the book. The prostitutes are portrayed as victims, but their clients are treated as innocent. Despite that, McGrady is almost immune to those base needs, only having sex after knowing someone well.
At the same time, the women in the book only have small, passive parts. The exception is Emily Kam, who identifies Smith and takes drastic action to avenge her father and survive the war.
Is this an accurate reflection of period attitudes? Does it have a place in a modern book?
Comments
Let me expand and clarify the question. I know what it means, even if I didn't express it!
People in history commonly held views that are now considered sexist, racist, and so on. In this case, it's the idea that women should not exist as agents in the public sphere. When a modern book uses that historical setting, should it portray those sexist, racist etc views? Portray them with criticism? Not include them in the book?
@Apocryphal reminded me of another question to raise here. McGrady generally comes across as the standard hardboiled detective: tough, physically able, shrugs off the mental trauma of killing, comfortable with people's baser instincts. In contrast to that "alpha male" stereotype, he's naive and hesitant when it comes to women and love. Is that a contrast that works in this book and/or for this character?
I don’t know if there’s a ‘should’ when it comes to this. Each author should consider what they want to communicate and write it accordingly. That said, if they don’t portray sexism with some criticism they will likely alienate their audience. And not portraying it at all does a disservice to those who lived through it, IMO. But there may be circumstances where that’s the appropriate solution.
Paul and I had to weigh these issues when writing Mythic Babylon, and it wasn’t easy. We kept slavery in, and you can play a slave character if you like. We didn’t feel it was necessary to add any ‘slavery = bad’ disclaimers - none of our readers are in doubt about the morality of slavery. Keeping slavery in the game, if anything, allows privileged people the chance to broaden their horizons by getting a taste from the other side, which I think is valuable for empathy, and it can easily be excised from the setting at the group level if desired.
The place of women was a little trickier. As near as I can figure, women were losing agency as time went on in the ancient near east. Our book’s time period is somewhere in the middle of this. We softened this in the setting because we wanted women players to have full agency, but we didn’t completely obliterate the historical place of women. We wrote a section about women characters and did our best to emphasize the opportunities, rather than the barriers.
There’s a new western film on Netflix, The Harder They Fall, and my wife and I heard an interview with the director on the radio this week. All the characters in this movie are black. The director spoke quite a bit about the historicity. He said ‘all these people existed’, he just mashed them all together into one place and time. He wasn’t aiming for strict historicity, obviously, but I think in his view the film was no less accurate than other westerns (which normally portray women as sex trade workers or people needing rescue, and blacks as being servants), it just reframes the focus. I’ll see if I can find a link to the interview when I can get back to my PC, if anyone is interested. Anyway, that’s quite a different approach to the issue.
The erasure point is interesting and important. Actual history was, in many case, more interesting and diverse than we're currently led to believe. Which means authors have to balance representing something in line with current popular understanding (e.g. 1940s America was all about white men), as it actually was then (e.g. plenty of non-whites in the Wild West), and what we would wish the past to have been (e.g. more prominent women.
I don't really have a point here, other than to call out those three aspects.
Is he naïve and hesitant? Or is he simply inexperienced except (presumably) with prostitutes? I agree that he doesn't seem to want to make advances to a woman he respects and potentially) loves, but routinely waits for them to make an explicit offer. We are told that in Takahashi's house he had never even been upstairs in three years, let alone made any advances towards Sachi (those three years spent almost entirely inside the downstairs part of the house must have been pretty dull. other than the language lessons
).
It seems to me a bit like the classic Mother-Madonna-Whore cluster, in which people, typically men, either idealise or denigrate women into specific extreme cases rather than respond to them as complex individuals.
Yes, it's a classic problem in lots of media - I have read all kinds of agonised blog articles by both women and men authors as to how far to include "modern" attitudes to race, gender, sexuality etc in a historical book, tackling precisely the issues outlined here. I don't think there's a single right answer and it depends in part on the expectations of your target audience (eg a Regency Romance author will have quite different ides of how to tackle it than a gory pulp-style story following a gladiator in ancient Rome).