When I read this post about depictions of heterosexual sexiness in fiction, over at Foz Meadows’s blog, about a billion things popped into my head and so, rather than choke her comment page with my ramblings, I thought I’d do a full post on it.
To me I think there are two different aspects to how sexiness works in fiction. One is about escapism, and the other is about biology. First – the science (and I don’t claim to be an expert).
Research I’ve come across over the years indicates the basic things that guide us to our sex partners are attributes associated with reproductive success.
In women the curvaceous and healthy body are the main physical signifiers, alongside nurturing and protective behaviours.
In men, broad-shoulders and a narrow waste are indicators of health and youth (both of which, from memory, point to good sperm motility), but physical strength and signifiers of status are also important as they suggest the mother and child will be protected (physically, nutritionally etc).
Obviously these are things that attract us to a stranger across a room, as opposed to things we might be attracted to on getting to know someone better. It is also what attracts us to protective and nurturing behaviours from a stranger.
In this context it makes sense that we cast sexiness in terms of exhibitions of strength, wealth or protectiveness for male characters, because this points to the biology. Even more so where attraction first flares between characters when they are relative strangers or, as so often in romance plots, they dislike each other.
If you want to write this kind of sexiness then there has to be an excuse to show these attributes, like imminent danger. And if you want your love interest to be personally touched by the display of male sexiness then what better than to have her be the one saved / hauled bodily from peril?
Now I’m not defending the one-sidedness of this seen in a lot of fiction. Most men I’ve talked to don’t find the old submissive, ‘women are weak’ stereotypes sexy at all, and they like a woman who takes control. What they don’t like though is a woman who they can’t do anything for, because that means they can’t show their desire to care for their partner. This doesn’t have to be charging to the rescue, of course, it could be any kind of usefulness, but it’s a good reason to have the guy come to the woman’s aid at some point in a story.
In genres that aren’t about the intricacies of relationships, it seems to me that the sexual attraction is generally kept simple and leads more to ‘pleasure sex’ than ‘relationship sex’, even if a relationship also develops.
So as the characters aren’t engaging in pages of dating and conversation before the attraction kicks in, narratively we’re likely to reach for those sexy attributes I mentioned above. From that point of view, there’s a reason a lot of sexiness is written in a stereotyped kind of way.
Now for my second point – escapism. Regardless of whether you want to escape by gaining control or by giving it up, how much less stressful things are when you don’t have to negotiate anything. Fiction lets you experience this in safety, and the easiest way to write this is to have one person in control of events and the other following along.
Fair to say that a survey of books would probably give the impression women want to give up control and men want to take control, but I’m not sure that’s either entirely true or entirely untrue.
I think social conditioning still carries a lot of the dominant man/ passive woman stereotype, so when we ‘write what we know’ it bleeds through. I wonder though, if as writers and readers we are looking for something less complicated than our real lives. Seeing as the sexual revolution gave women more control and men less, maybe some women’s escape is to give up control and some men’s is to take it?
I’m not claiming to have the answers on that one.
What I will state with certainty, is that how men’s attractiveness is defined past straight sexiness, depends a lot on genre. That goes for women’s attractiveness to some extent also.
The fact that there are some truly depressing stereotypes you find again and again in fiction isn’t just about gender stereotyping of course (e.g. brainiacs of either sex are rarely cast in the love interest role in books I read, unless they also happen to be lookers). Nor is it limited to what makes characters attractive to each other (and by extension, us).
I tend to think that it’s often in writing character flaws that we fail most heartily. (The outwardly strong woman who is inwardly angsty and has body image problems. The arrogant man.) Some of the worst stereotypes, including sexist ones, seem to me to pop up here.
So what am I saying in a nutshell?
If science is correct, then we are going to write sexual attraction in ways that we associate with stereotypes because there’s a biological aspect to those stereotypes, but that we need to look long and hard at what we do beyond initial attraction to allow other attributes the space to be sexy if we want to move away from narrow and negative stereotypes.
Now, go cuddle up to someone sexy (real or fictional).
