“Sure – it’s a good book. A fun read. But bruh, all that incessant male gazing going on…”
I can’t help but to agree. Rereading the book itself, I marvel at that I stuck with it for some 22 volumes as I did. I’m even more amazed that the series ranks as one of the greatest I know. I’m agog by the fact that I ever read past volume one. And yet, here I am, five books deep, again, with no intention of stopping.
And so, instead of putting it down, I try to understand it. I try to rationalize it. And maybe, just maybe, it couldn’t have been written any other way…
Which leads us to genre constraints. Maybe certain settings, certain fields, carry with them inherit problems. Unavoidable tastelessness that cannot be removed without warping the very framework of the story’s setting. Maybe the filth is just so ingrained in the tapestry that if removed, it unravels the background into something unrecognizable.
Or maybe, if it’s such an ingrained part of it, we can’t unravel the setting fast enough. Maybe it’s served its purpose and should be done away with.
The books in question are set in a magical realism/detective noire contemporary world. Think magic and trolls mixed with dingy P.I. offices and canvas dusters. Which is cool and neat, but were it for all the damsels in distress cum femme fatales, for every female character (be they victim or strong agents of their own right) is described by a thirsty male eye – because that’s just what noire is all about, is it?
Can it be different? Can Bogart really swagger through the shadows like he does if he wasn’t lured to the case by a pair of waggling ankles and a smoke-screen hiding the curve of lips? If it were but for a job without desire or allure by the human equivalent of a venus flytrap, why wouldn’t the sly detective just hand the case over to the cops the very first time he was shot at? And why would a sullied white knight cling to that kernel of good heartedness if the job was just a job?
Have another example that I’ve considered while reflecting on my own book, The Last Box. Set in the near-future and hyper-capitalistic London, the novel is firmly rooted in the cyberpunk genre, where the digital world bleeds into our own, with burgeoning cyborgs, business lords, and the sanctity of life going for a penny. And also, the hyper-commercialization of sexuality. Because how can humans do differently than trivialize intimacy to a commodity at the end-stage of capitalism, which is the very point of cyberpunk. Will a world not be sexually exploitative when titillation has become cheaper than clean water? How else can you possibly imagine capitalism degenerating us, but to make whores of us all?
How can Victoria-era-inspired steampunk be anything but colonial? How can a military epic be anything but fascist? How can we have fantasy without racism? How can we eat the cake without the tooth ache?
I’m not sure we can. But neither do I think we should abandon genres that have inherit problems just because we don’t approve of the baggage. What we do need to do though is to meet that baggage and process it. We can’t just let the issues pass us by uncommented like set dressing. We need to address it. We must, ‘lest our blind spots warps to acceptance.
So; the noire detective self-consciously defends himself by being “old fashioned” and “lonely”, while his female colleagues and friends berate him for being a chauvinist. The years pass from book to book, and the chauvinist white knight is broken by failures to protect all those damsels and relents. He grows, begrudgingly, little by little. So too, in The Last Box, it becomes apparent that the young honey pot vigilante uses sexual appeal like armour to insulate herself from actual connection. She obfuscates herself from sight by luring the gaze with a decoy.
None of that excuses it. It can’t. There are no excuses. But it comments, it reflects, it resists – maybe feebly – the stains and rot. And in so doing, no matter the failure to fix anything, at least it doesn’t promote tacit acceptance through silence.
/Sebastian Lindberg 13/2-2024