Creating a Safe Space
Hi ya’ll.
Taking a turn this week. As I do so much “book talk” on social media, I’m trying something different in this blog space.
This past week I was able to attend Wild & Windy, a romance book conference here in Chicago. There’s so much I can say about my experience, 96% of it positive:
-I made some incredible new friends.
-Got to meet dream authors (Sadie Kincaid, Shantel Tessier, & Sara Cate to name a few.)
-Met some NEW authors (Kaydence Snow & S.J. Tilly went right up my TBR list)
-I was wowed by the effort and care that Nicole and Michelle, the organizers, put into the event.
-The volunteers went above and beyond to help and support not just me, but all the attendees.
-The panels were a good number, and the topics were interesting
I already have next year in my calendar. I can’t wait.
But…something happened. In one of the panels, I’m not saying which because I’m not naming names, the moderator asked a question that I found distasteful: “Have you ever tried out your sexy scenes with your partner?”
My stomach roiled when I heard it. I couldn’t believe she asked that. I give immense credit to the authors at the receiving end of that question who handled it with grace and poise.
Why It FUCKING Bothered Me
(get ready for some good ol’ fashioned profanity ya’ll)
There’s already a stigma around romance novels being…p-o-r-n. Which is fucking bullshit. These incredible authors already get flack for the nuanced, complex, stories they work so hard for, just because the stories contain sex. They tell stories about people, and people have sex. They don’t shy away from this basic need humans (and sometimes monsters) have to connect with each other physically. They create a safe space in their books for us to explore, learn, grow, and enjoy. That question, for me, took away that safe space. It reduced all their hard work to merely something that titillates, and EVEN WORSE pried into the author’s sex lives in a completely inappropriate way.
These authors were not there on a panel discussing their sex lives. That was not the topic listed or expected. As one of them responded (paraphrase) “You would never ask a mystery writer if they’ve practiced stabbing someone, would you?” No! YOU FUCKING WOULDN’T!
Women’s sex lives are under so much scrutiny in this patriarchal, purity focused society. (Honestly, that sentence deserves its own blog post, so I’m going to leave it alone right now.) To ask a woman in a professional setting about her sex life is wildly inappropriate. If it were any other workplace, that’s an HR violation if I’ve ever heard one. To reduce the effort these authors put into their stories and merely a means for inspiration for their own sex lives is demeaning. They deserved better.
So did the audience. Watching these authors have to face that question, made me uncomfortable, made me feel like this wasn’t a safe space, and made me question (for a moment) if this was the right space for me.
Luckily, those new friends around me had a similar reaction to the question. We connected about our disappointment and our hope for something better in the future. That hope is what I was left with, which is one of the reasons I love this community so much.
We are fighting the good fight. Together.