The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [131]
I didn’t plan to be the spokesperson for women’s sexuality. Really, I didn’t. But I had too many people in the publishing industry tell me that my books were disturbing, not because of the violence and sex, but because a woman wrote the sex and violence. And even worse my main character, a first person point of view, was female. I had one well-known mystery editor tell me that the Anita books would never have sold as straight mystery. This was when, I think, only three books were out, so we hadn’t even crossed the sexual divide. No, her objection was to the level of violence. A straight mystery heroine was not allowed to be that violent. If I’d been a man, and, or, my main character had been male, then it would have been okay. I really thought that we’d come further than that in this country. Guess I was wrong.
Anita and I are very different people, but one trait we do share. If you tell us we can’t, then we are more determined than ever. Stubborn. Contrary, my grandmother would say. So be it. What everyone kept telling us was that the sex had gone far enough. Had my editor told me to slow down, tone it down? No, she hadn’t. It was other people, at other publishing houses, and it was other writers, mostly male, who told me I’d gone too far. Then I started hearing from other countries. Americans think that we’re backwards when it comes to sex, and the Europeans are having lots more sex, and kinkier sex. It’s true that the European fans are more bothered by the violence and hardly at all by the sex, but if they were bothered, it was again about the fact that I was a woman and so was Anita. I began to hear from women in this country and in others, that they had been raised to believe that women didn’t enjoy sex. That womens’ appetites were less than mens’.
Who starts these stories?
The truth is that some women do not enjoy sex. Some women do not have the sexual appetite of a man. The truth is that some men don’t enjoy sex. That some men don’t have as large a sexual appetite as some women.
I think this idea that men are sexually predatory and we women are just victims, gets both men and women in trouble. If a man isn’t that interested in sex, he’s considered less of a man. If a woman is more interested in sex, she’s a slut. Both of these are false assumptions.
People say I’m a feminist, but in truth, I am an equalist. I believe that everyone, male and female, should be free to be whom and what they are. Not to fit into some tight cultural box. The best quick example I have in this country is the double-standard for strippers. A male stripper has a female customer tear off his G-string, and the police arrest him, not her. A female stripper has a male customer tear off her G-string, and the customer is thrown out of the club and arrested. The idea is that men should be okay with sexual contact, because they like it, and women don’t like it, so they should be protected from it. That is unfair, and untrue. Assault is assault, no matter who’s stripping whose dignity.
By the way, who decided that men don’t want doors in the bathrooms? I know a lot of men who’d like a little privacy, if they could get it.
Now all this talk about sex may be misleading, since there is no sex in The Laughing Corpse. But there is something in this book that also was new and different when I started out. Mixing genres.
It took more than two and a half years to sell the first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, because nobody knew what to do with it. The mystery houses thought it was horror. The horror houses thought it wasn’t scary enough, and called it fantasy or science fiction. The science fiction houses called it fantasy. The fantasy houses called it horror. Etc. . . .
I was literally told that mixed genre fiction does not sell. Period, end of story. Since the last five books