Leaving aside the issues of personal sexual preference and the importance of consent between non-damaged partners, let me explain why Sudden Bondage is so problematic to me in mainstream romance. I get that bondage is trendy right now, but I don't read romance for the sexy-times-rawr, I read romance for the character conflicts. If you take someone who has trust issues, who has an abuse history with control needs and you bind them without consent you don't get the gentling-the-wild-horse fetish that ends up on the author page. You are far more likely to get violence, panic, racing heartbeats, more distrust and an end to your relationship. This person is not going to be thinking "Wow, so hot after all" they are going to be thinking "Oh my god, please stop, don't touch me, I have to get away." You are also unlikely to get the kind of casual we-will-see-what-happens agreement that some characters in romance offer. Your character is wondering why their lover isn't respecting their boundaries. You character is wondering why their lover thinks they have to be cured rather than appreciated. Sudden Bondage tells me you don't understand abuse issues. You don't understand anything about this character point you've decided to use and I will hate your story proactively from that moment forward.
Like any group of people, abused children are not all the same. Some like double dark chocolate, some like vanilla, some like spumoni, some eschew ice cream entirely. Being one myself and having known a considerable number as well, I will say the adult abuse survivor of romanceland generally resembles an actual adult abuse survivor about as closely as a manatee does a mermaid. (Yes, I meant to make the fictional version the manatee. Manatees float dumbly along in the ocean occasionally eating their own waste while mermaids have complex and varied lives. There was a documentary and everything.) In my experience, adult survivors of abuse have many challenges. We don't think like the other kids. We don't have the same needs as the other kids. Our emotional triggers are not theirs. We are also endlessly resourceful. We seek and appreciate fun. We value the human ties and freedoms that we've attained. Respect and consent are not abstract concepts to us. We do not believe in doing things for someone's own good. Put me in a room of people and I go to the ones laughing the most, smiling the most and making the best jokes. Someone beat the crap out of them and then it stopped. It's time to live. It's time to appreciate life.
In fiction the adult survivor is shuttered down into themselves. They cannot form attachments. They do not trust their own instincts. They are trapped in the mental prison their parents built for them, broken until the fictional lover gently leads them into the light. I dunno, man. Maybe this is true of some I haven't meant. Maybe it's true of adults who were in abusive relationships. After years of exposure to some of the most fucked up family situations to walk the planet, I can tell you it doesn't line up with what I've been or seen from kids who grew up and got the hell out. My old man dies and leaves me a vast estate? I'm not gonna cry in my pillow about upholding his mantle. I'm gonna throw a party that makes Puff Daddy look like a cheapskate. My lover thinks they know what I need more than I do? I'm getting a new lover yesterday.
It's obvious to me when a writer approaches abuse from a place of pity instead of a place of experience. Some writers do a great job with abuse from their research and intuition. Nora Roberts is pretty much perfect in her handling of male and female abuse survivors. Courtney Milan does a nice job as well. (No WAY Mark lives in that house, I am still saying.) It's totally possible. But like Brenda Joyce's historical black friends your abuse adult is a stereotype with little rooting in plausible reality. You might want to get that looked at.
This is one of the issues that affected my ever-growing writer's block: the realization that I have no way of knowing how to draw certain characters whose experiences are too far outside my own. I got stopped when I had a character-black woman in the 1950's. How the heck could I give her dialogue and responses that would ring true? I couldn't and admire the people who can. Also, I think you hit the nail on the head when you pointed out that response to childhood abuse and adult abuse are very different as is the combination of physical/psychological abuse and individual manifestations of PTSD and "oboy, let's let you experiment with ways to fix me!" generally isn't one of them.
ReplyDeleteI wrote what (in retrospect) was probably a stunningly racist short involving Asian-American characters before I realized I didn't want to write for real. It was met with praise from my far right friends and polite silence from the left. I like to talk, I like to write opinion pieces, but being A Writer was someone else's goal. Setting it down made me a thousand times lighter.
DeleteI read bondage used in this way in 'relationships' as trying to force-form the other into someone who meets our needs. It isn't just a poor understanding and representation of survivors and PTSD or of D/s and bondage alone although both things are true.
ReplyDeleteThese are stories whose sub-text is that fit with us, others must be made to fit into the shape and space in our lives we reserve for connection. Just as an abused child is made object it reifies that status. I hate such stories with a visceral passion.
I loved it that Smite wouldn't even enter the house. I almost kind of bought it that Mark could live there. His sense of his mother was a lot more complicated.
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