Long post, will circle back to Cleis at end
Okay, back on the desktop system, so it's linky time.
The Arts & Letters Daily
essay about 'twee' that caught my eye. I don't agree with everything the writer says. But I do note that my own aversion to unremitting 'cute' and 'soft' showed up very early in my childhood, and certainly informs my reading and writing choices today.
An asexuality
website that mentions twee.
A HuffPo
aside about second-week earnings of the Fifty Shades movie.
Another HuffPo
piece, published before the Fifty Shades movie released, with some interesting observations about what the movie (in contrast to the books) might do for young women's sexuality. The director apparently sparred with E.L. James during filming, to weight the power dynamic more in Ana's favor (true of real BDSM relationships, and sadly lacking in the books.)
From the vantage point of my late forties, I have seen how attitudes to actual adventure have changed over the years. Even with the AIDS scare, the mid-eighties were a wild time. But as employment patterns shifted, college costs and student debt rose, and real wage gains remained stagnant for most of the American working population, I noticed that my younger colleagues and friends were not cutting loose as much - if at all.
Their college focus was not about discovering themselves, but about getting high-enough-paying skills and degrees that they could pay off debt and have some security. They worried about dropping high-risk teen activities like skateboarding and surfing, because they recognized they were one medical emergency from bankruptcy. Many of them came to twee movements apparently out of a sense of safety, peace, and childhood nostalgia.
My ten or so friends who are really twee fall solidly into lower to upper middle-class upbringings. They tend not to read graphic erotica, or at least don't admit it. My friends who grew up in rougher areas, with more financial uncertainty, may be more open to sexuality, but they are just as focused on financial stability over random encounters in clubs.
These are great conditions for romance and sexual tension, for demisexual relationships, for asexual friendships - but completely opposite in worldview from raw erotica and the more graphic erotic romance stories.
Violet Blue and Allison Tyler, along with countless other fearless erotica and erotic romance writers, have been open and honest about sex writing and lifestyles. Cleis Press was one among many small publishers who forged respected markets out a genre 'ghetto' that many lit-fic and light romance publishers ignored or insulted.
But now Fifty Shades is just the most visible of properties bringing erotica and erotic romance to mainstream audiences. Like the gentrification of raunchy, seedy art neighborhoods, I worry that Big Five and intermediate publishers will push the small quirky presses aside. Or buy them out and give them the Disney focus group treatment, swabbing the grime off and making the leftovers palatable to wider markets.
But focus group readers in those more-polished markets may not know great erotica and erotic romance to begin with, so I'd side-eye publishers who rely too much on them.
Whether I seriously consider Cleis again depends on what Start does with the imprint in the next year.