I'm using the term "political correctness" here, although I'm not a big fan of the concept. "P.C." as commonly used calls up an image of a kind of mincing hyper-sensibility. I find that if that's the meaning you prefer, you are probably a fan of simple solutions -- the kind which tweet great, but which are bring on even more troubles.
Human variety is infinite, as are our human cultures, so what is ideally called the "real world" is a deep and complex ball of what one Dr. Who was pleased to call "wibbly wobbly." And this goes for sexuality, too, as our desires and needs and expressions thereof are as unique as a series of dots placed on the slope of a bell curve.
Everyone knows that things in the public arena have changed since #Metoo, but that doesn't alter the history of men and woman and relationship an iota. Much as we disapprove, we can't remake the past, not if we're interested in making an attempt to write good historical fiction. Books of mine have, however, fallen afoul of some readers. I'm sorry, of course, because the complainants are often young women who are fighting real life battles with sexism in the office, on the streets, and in their own nests, too, as women struggle to be treated justly.
Some parts of our world are rapidly re-framing toward equal rights; others want to put the "ladies" (as they like to say) back in their "breeder/janitorial" place. Remember, we live in a world infused with Old Testament stories, the place where some modern men continue to find justification for their coercive, dismissive male behavior toward "weaker sex."
Fan Girl
Of my books, My Mozart has the largest P.C. problem, because the affair between a young singer and the composer is the story. Back in the '80's when I wrote about a young artist who gifts her virginity to an admired older man in a mentor position, it didn't occur to me that I was in for serious flack from my Sisters. All I can say in my defense is that at the time I wrote, I was not living an artist's life in a big city or reading gender studies at uni, but was a wife of twenty years with two mostly grown kids and a full time job. I imagined I was hip about gender/sex, but the world where my basic opinions on such matters were formed was the 1950's, a time when, post-war, women were being pushed out of work places and back into the house. Years later, I'm still working toward a better understanding of "woman."
The older man/younger woman love affair is not an unfamiliar one in the world of the arts, or even in corporations, from law firms to universities to oil companies. The fact that such sexual relationships are unequal in power or that such things do happen is not what the readers are worried about, however. It's whether these stories should have been told in ecstatic terms when they are, in fact, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, especially so for the less experienced and therefore more vulnerable person in the equation. Abuse of power is rampant in unequal relationships; it's plain old monkey domination with sex thrown in.
What am I actually talking about in My Mozart? What's the book about? Perhaps it is simply Eros, a Being who can be relied upon not to give a damn about P.C. Erotic love is the most mysterious of all emotions--not the least because it is hedged about with so many cultural taboos. It is certainly the least susceptible to the blandishments of reason. Were the Greeks right about Mighty Aphrodite, that She swept all before Her? That desire is wired into us, and so we not only write poems, plays and books about this "crazy little thing called love;" we enact it in our lives. Sometimes it ruins us, sometimes it redeems us, sometimes it takes turns doing first one and then the other or both at the same time. It probably won't last, that obsession, that fire.
But you'll never know until you serve some time in that primal temple.
~~Juliet Waldron
*I've actually had more readers chastise me for writing Red Magic whose hero and villain both acted like proper 18th Century males toward the teen heroine. Set in 18th Century Germany, RED MAGIC tells the story of a young woman’s transition from rebellious girl to adored--and adoring--wife. A forced marriage brings her to her husband’s mysterious mountain home, where she uncovers a legacy of magic. Prejudices hinder the coming of love between the newlyweds, as well as the weird attraction the young wife feels toward her husband’s magnetic, foreign servant.
Red Magic is available at:
