80s Ladies Romance
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80s Ladies Romance
Shifty Seduction - an interview with ASU Professor Ron Broglio
Shifter romance emphasizes our primal instincts over the violence that mainstream entertainment prefers. Is shifter romance more about repression or revolution?
Hey, Ron Brolio, author of Animal Revolution and professor at ASU University. You are an expert in animals, the philosophy of animals, and you've written several books about it. And we are fans of romance, and we particularly talk about 80s romance, vintage romance. But we also read a lot of the current romance. And a huge subgenre in romance right now is animal shifters, where they're actually an elite group of people. The animal shifters are frequently like alphas. And it's actually like they have a human side and they have this animal side. And the animal side doesn't really seem to serve much purpose other than to show they're alphaness, but they operate in society as like superior. They have enhanced senses when their shifter side is they have superhuman vision, hearing, sexual capacity, of course, because that's the main thing with the romance. And so I wanted to ask you about your experience with the fantasy lore of animal shifters and how that's maybe either conflicts or jives with the philosophical aspect, because one of the things, I mean, I think a lot of us read the shifter Romans is just because it's fun because we like it, but there are people that think, you know, that it's just that it is like a cover for just a patriarchal fantasy, you know, that it just kind of accentuates the status quo of superiority. But in your book, an animal revolution, you talk about how humans are not very nice to animals. So, I mean,
SPEAKER_00:yeah,
SPEAKER_02:talk about your book that, in terms of shifting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, it's great. Thanks for having me here. And I've been interested in with animals is how we, obviously humans are animals, but how we make a distinction between ourselves and other animals. And this is usually done through the apparatus of what we call culture. As culture is the thing that distances us from the animal world. Culture is often the thing that prevents us or friction with the animal world or the world in general. So one of the examples I use is, for example, if you're eating, you don't eat with your hands, maybe you eat with utensils. Or driving, when you're driving, you're not touching the ground, you're gliding through space, unless of course you're in traffic. And even the clothing we wear is to kind of protect us from the external world, right? So All these cultural enhancements or cultural distinctions we have are ways of saying, I'm human and we're protecting ourselves from the thing that's outside that world. It's like trying to distinguish ourselves from the other animals. But what's really interesting to me is that we are animals. As much as we try to repress that or deny that aspect of ourselves, it shows through in a variety of ways, right? The animals kind of can hack into our cultural systems to remind us we live in the same world as they do. So ways that they do that, if it's a cow getting loose from a slaughterhouse, if it's the orcas who are attacking leisure ships in the Mediterranean, whatever it might be, they're reminding us, hey, your part, you humans, are part of a bigger world. So that's often my approach. Now, when we get to shifters in the capacity that you're talking about, I think it's interesting to think about what non-human capacities, what things about our animalness are they trying to remind us of, right? So how are they trying to say, you know, you're part of a much bigger animal world, and The sex or sexuality or sexual prowess, for example, is often, is also one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from other animals. We say, oh, you know, we have a culturally reified or a culturally established ways of courtship and sexuality. And animals don't have that in the same way. And so this is a way of distinguishing ourselves, but to say, you know, really, we too are or just like other animals. Like we're in the same earth, we're part of the same world. So these authors seem to be hacking into the capacities of the animal world to remind us of something that we often forget in our human world.
SPEAKER_02:Do you think it's a way to kind of get around The repression that sex is under now in our society, we're kind of under almost this new kind of Hays Code almost, where do you think these shifter genres arise a way to get out what really can't be repressed?
SPEAKER_00:You know, that's a really great way of saying it, that it becomes, there are a number of books, a lot of the authors, contemporary craft writers who write about animals, are using animals as a way of trying to talk about the human world. in a different way.
SPEAKER_02:To be a shifter, when we write these stories, are we just getting in touch with our animal nature? I mean, is the sex and the passion part and the enhanced ability part just the animalistic part of ourselves that we can't otherwise, it's not acceptable to admit to? It
SPEAKER_00:becomes a license, right? So you can say, well, This really wasn't a human thing. This was a fantasy thing with this enhanced animal capacity, right? So it becomes a way of kind of eliding or getting around this really basic problem.
SPEAKER_03:I'm going to jump in here and say, I think it's interesting. I almost wonder if it's more about wanting to connect to power and less about wanting to connect to animals, because when you think about your typical shifters and They're shifting into things like wolves. They're not shifting into bunnies or nematodes. They're shifting into predators, carnivores, animals that are seen as sometimes dangerous to humans or certainly more powerful in terms of the animal kingdom. What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00:So one of the things you might think about is, you know, I think that would make sense in terms if we think about carnality, flesh, being humans and being part of a world of flesh. Then you have this idea that, no, our animal nature, we often have this idea we're trying to keep in check our animal nature, our more bestial sides, right? And what this does is say, those sides have capacities that maybe we need to tap into, or they have powers and capacities that the society wants to repress. And the carnal element, as opposed to sort of like the idea of flesh eating, in some ways, you know, this is going to get out there, but this happens, I think, a lot with animals. The desire to be consumed. We want, you know, there's this desire for either absolute annihilation or absolute triumph. So either side of that, right? And this idea of, you know, tearing someone apart, being torn apart, right? being ravished. These are the kinds of language we use oftentimes. So the animal becomes a manifestation of that. It's interesting, I was thinking, and I write about this a little bit in Animal Revolution, about the edible complex in Freud. So, you know, in Freud's edible complex, you want to, much like Oedipus Rex, you kill your father and marry your mother. This is the desire of every young boy, supposedly. So, One of the things that happens in analysis of this child he calls Little Hans is Little Hans is looking outside and he sees a horse, a cart horse. He's really interested in the cart horse's big penis. And so Freud analyzes the kid and says, well, really it's about him wanting to be like his father. to have a big penis like his father, and replacing the father in his affection for his mother. And Freud calls this socialization. We realize we have the know. The know of culture is know you can't do that, and in that know is the law of the world. And so we live under that law. But other philosophers have said, well, you know, maybe Little Hans just liked that horse, and he wanted to be outside with the horses. He didn't want to be inside. He didn't want to be socialized. So I think there's an aspect of this where part of ourselves don't absolutely want to be socialized, don't want to fall within that realm. So we can maybe think of it that way as well, right?
SPEAKER_02:So is animal representation in romance, do you think, more of an example of the revolution or the human repression?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so it's both, right? So it's the repression. It's a notation on the repression. It's like, notice how much we're repressing this. And it is the revolution in the sense of we're going to create another realm where other things are possible,
SPEAKER_01:right?
SPEAKER_00:And this will... often happen in fantasy is there's something we can't talk about directly in a more realistic novel so we can imagine it through the character of an animal. Also, it begins to excuse a lot of things because we don't blame animals the same way we might blame humans, right? So you say like, oh, well, you know, the animal did this, so it didn't know what it was doing, right? Or that's its nature. It's natural for it to you know, to do whatever it does. William Blake, the author William Blake said, one law for the lion and the ox is oppression, right? So you can't make a lion, you know, be a vegetarian and you can't make an ox eat meat. So there are certain animals that have their way and maybe it's very possible this allows or channels or it excuses particular kinds of behavior.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And it's, I mean, A lot of the shifter themes are all about, they're all, everything that was hugely maligned and rejected in vintage romance and the bodice rippers and the historicals, everything that people dislike about that is represented in the animal shifter stories because they have this faded mate. They have like, they sense, they smell their mate and they, and the mate, the woman usually doesn't, Whether or not she's interested, he can sense that she is because her body is giving off this sense, so he can overpower her, and that's okay. But, you know, it is not okay to read a rape fantasy in a historical romance novel now.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right. So this becomes a way of excusing behavior or writing behavior in a way that, well, in the fantasy world, this is possible, right? Because there are these things. They're animals.
SPEAKER_02:And there is, so I guess the sexual metaphor and the animal symbols, you know, that is what is really interesting to me as far in terms of romance.
SPEAKER_00:Here's another thing. Let me ask, you know, another thing that interests me about this, I write about this in a little bit in Animal Revolution, is fur, the role of fur. So humans often, we don't have as much hair. As most animals, right? As most mammals. And there is this, you know, you look at most male models, you look at, you know, the bodybuilders, etc. They're hairless, right? Or they have very little hair. The whole idea being that culture elides or is outside of nature, right? And hair becomes the symbol of animalness and nature-ness and friction, right? right? The kind of like frictiveness of hair. So it's interesting when we think about reverting to an animal state, we can also think about the role of hair as the bestial, right? As this larger friction of this otherworldliness. So I've often found that interesting as well. You know, there's a whole Sasquatch genre of romances. I don't know if you know about these. Bigfoot sexual fantasy stories. And
SPEAKER_02:here are the tentacles one, right? The tentacles.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the Sasquatch, I mean, it's what we want in Bigfoot is to both, we want to explore what it means. Here's the animal side of something that's someone or something that's human, but knows it's animalness. So could it communicate across that divide across that bridge. And I think that's one of the things that's been fascinating about that kind of work. And if we think too about sex as this other world that we can fall into that has a whole other mode of communication and engagement, and then you kind of come out of it into the cultural world, that there is that animal component to it, this kind of just carnality of sex that then you can come outside of and say, okay, now we're civilized again, but then you can fall back into. And I was also lovely.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And it's strange to think about how it's, there is this, I mean, it's fun. It's really, it's a pleasure in thinking about the animal fantasy part of this. Right. But it's also, but it's also a way of keeping it separate because it's like, you have to be this uncontrollable animal side in order for it to be acceptable. Right. And then you have to come out of it to be, you know, acceptable in society. It has to be completely separate. Whereas, I mean, like in the in sex and like in the ancient Hindu traditions, for example, sex was like part of a ritual as a worship. It was like it was an elevated thing. It wasn't necessarily a separate philosophy that had to be kept in a closet, so to speak. But the animal also gives some people say that. It's a negative that animals kind of that is kind of just perpetuating a fairy tale, the message that the patriarchal hierarchy is AK. But on the other hand, there's like the Omegaverse where men can be pregnant and it kind of allows for it does allow for different expressions of gender and sexuality in an animal hierarchy.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. You know, it's interesting. There's an artist who has done a series, Susie Silver. she had a collection of artists that did some works on alien sexuality. It was the Institute for the Study of Alien Extraterrestrial Sexuality. So they were all queer artists. And the whole idea of kind of being queer was you are often seen as alien in different ways, or your sexuality might seem alien or different in certain ways. And so they were able to express this through artworks that were, imagine these, what would alien sex look like, right? What are the possibilities within alien sex? And all of a sudden, there are a lot of limits, our so-called natural limits or the blinders or the limits we put on ourselves are dropped because you can think much more expansively. So I think there are these opportunities in multiverses, et cetera, to let's imagine much larger ideas of how sex and sexuality can work. And rather than using it as simply a social regulatory platform. Right. And this is one of the things, you know, I was thinking of the philosopher Michel Foucault. So Michel Foucault, French philosopher who spent most of his life looking at how society micromanages, uses ways of micromanaging the human body. So whether it's schools telling you how to sit, how to stand, form lines, the military and how to do much of the same, assembly line construction where in assembly lines you perform certain acts over and over again. So anyway, the modes of regulation of human bodies. And the reason he was really interested in that is later in his life, he actually got to a three-volume set on the history of sexuality, is he's a gay guy. And he had, you know, he was bathhouses, BDSM, the whole thing. But he always saw that as deviant to the accepted culture, the accepted French culture. So for him, he was very interested. in understanding how do societies regulate us, even in these kind of minute ways, right? Almost not at the, just at our cognitive level, there's in our minds, but even within our bodies, what we can wear, how we can wear it, et cetera. So I've found that kind of work really interesting. I also like to look, I don't know, have you ever done this? Now I'm getting off topic a little bit, but, you know, go back and look at what people wore in the 70s. It's totally different. Yeah. It's amazing what people got away with in ways that I don't think we do today, you know, just like in normal life.
SPEAKER_02:I know. And it's, I mean, even in the 80s, how did we get there? Can we go back? Because we should, it's just wild that we're going backwards. I can't imagine as a child of the 80s where we are right now. When anything, pretty much anything went in the 80s, you know, we were so promiscuous and wild and, you know, cross-gendering with our makeup and dress. And wow. And somebody said on Twitter the other day, you know, teenagers in 80s movies had better sex lives than adults now in movies, you know, because it's so just shut down and sterile. I
SPEAKER_03:do think that's somewhat regional. I grew up in Indianapolis, and trust me, not everything went. Oh, really? Yeah, I think your upbringing in New York, I think, is different than my upbringing in a conservative Midwest family living in the Bible Belt. Okay. But, you know, I wanted to touch back on something that Ron said that I thought was really interesting, and it kind of piggybacks with something you said, Pam, in that when you were talking about the French philosopher and talking about How do we police our bodies and our clothing? And your separate part about thinking that culture is, you know, it's a common phrase to say, well, that's what separates us from the animals. And that is seen as a good thing, right? We have opposable thumbs. We're different than this. We wear clothes. We drive cars. I wonder, is that an innate need to feel superior that goes regardless of gender or structures related to gender or do you think that is kind of intertwined with our systems of power that do tend to be patriarchal like is it is it an instinct that we want to think of ourselves as different from animals because it protects us or is it because it gives us external power
SPEAKER_00:Right. Those are really, and you can go either way on this, but I often see that difference as, you're right, a power over the earth itself, right? So we often think of we're separate from the earth so we can do whatever we want to it, right? Even, you know, this goes back in some ways to the Bible where Adam names all the animals, is given power over those animals, right? So there's that kind of like sense of a hierarchical distinction. The other thing that Foucault did in terms of thinking about how society affects our mind is he did in a book called Discipline and Punish, he was looking at prison systems. Jeremy Bentham had this thing called the panopticon. And in that prison system, all the jail cells were visible from a central tower. So the police in that central tower could see all the prisoners. So they had to behave. Eventually, Foucault says, you wouldn't need a jailer in that cell tower watching you because they would police themselves. In other words, you would internalize the idea that you're always being watched. And so you would begin to behave a certain way. And his idea with that is that's how culture works. We've internalized social policemen as a way of regulating our behaviors, of what's acceptable and not acceptable. And that goes both socially and also in the bedroom, which is kind of crazy to think about because there's usually not anyone else watching. So it's a really interesting... idea of how we self-regulate. So in some ways, while it might be power over the animal world, culture has a power over us. And that animal portal, the shifter portal, allows us to escape that being controlled. It allows us some other kind of freedom. And oftentimes, when we're reading, that's what we want. It's the
SPEAKER_02:same kind of thing people were looking for in the 70s and 80s bodice rippers when they had to be overpowered in order to enjoy the sex.
SPEAKER_00:someone else's pleasure and your own pleasure is an incredible freedom, right? I don't have to make the decisions anymore. I don't have to decide all these things about what I'm spending money on, what I'm buying, what I'm cooking for dinner, the kids and the chores and the laundry or whatever it might be. Instead, I can just give myself over. And that's often the idea that one of the pleasures of submission, is that kind of freedom.
SPEAKER_02:And so, I mean, overall, I think it's a good thing. I mean, I read that we're able to do this with this genre. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:well, what it does is, to me at least, it expands our capacity. We think our capacities are fairly narrowed. But in fact, they're incredibly large. Sexuality and sexual fantasy allows us to get beyond very narrow limits of what we think our emotional, psychological, and physical capacities are. That's kind of one of the beauties of it. Oh, there's another thing about, we haven't talked about it, but it's kind of related, is Ovid's Metamorphosis, which is like all these gods turning into... animals to rape women or to like overpower a woman. And, you know, like Zeus becomes a swan so he can take Leda or a woman is being chased by a man and she's fleeing him. So she becomes a tree so that he can't rape her or something. So all these kinds of relationships between the human animal world and Abed is absolutely fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:But then when he wants to rule the world, it goes back to being human.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Human form, human form divine.
SPEAKER_02:So do you think, could we say that the, would it be correct to say that the social media platforms are like our panopticon now that we're never going to get away from? Like, can we overcome this at all? Because, you know, that's such a controlling, that's such a factor in, you know, controlling behavior.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it kind of feeds us what we think our desires, what they think our desires are. So it learns what we like or what we like to look at and just kind of continues to feed that. And one of the great things about books is they really are portals to other spaces. And they get us out of these other kind of regulated worlds. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Before you go on, because this is kind of like what you said and something that Pam said, but if we do look at how the bodice rivers uh the the historicals the women being overcome and i read a lot of those books as a young person and i liked them and i have discussed with pam that so i'm 50 now as a 50 year old woman who's been you know married for almost 25 years i have children i see those books differently as our culture has shifted to the me too experience and the things like that has changed it seems as if whether intentional or not, authors of shifter romances have been like, all right, well, this is our workaround, right? We can't do the kind of rape kind of, she said no, but she really meant yes, that we did in the 70s, even if we're not the same author. So we are putting this in a shifter form. But if my understanding of your book, Animal Revolution, is that there needs to be more of a respect of the, similarities between species and that sometimes animals kind of assert that, like in your example of the cow escaping a slaughterhouse. So if we come to a point where we evolve, that we recognize animals as more alike us than not, where will romance go then? What will the vehicle be that we can express that desire to be overtaken, to have the freedom of not making a choice. I mean, I think that's an interesting thing about where romance might evolve in response to cultural evolution.
SPEAKER_00:Right, yeah. Do you want to kind of expand on that a little bit, what you're seeing in some of these romances and how they might be moving that way? That's interesting.
SPEAKER_03:You know, Pam can speak better to shifter romances. I've read a few, but that's not really my genre, but Pam can probably talk to you a little more about that.
SPEAKER_02:What do you mean in terms of The hierarchies are there, but they have different world building things where you'll have dragons that mate in threes, where you'll have two men and one woman. You have a lot of gay couples that are normal in some worlds. And then you have the Omegaverse where you have alphas who can impregnate anyone and who control everything. You have the omegas, which are like the breeders that are impregnated and they... They go into heat all the time, and that's their thing. And they can be male or female. There's a big subgenre of males who get pregnant.
SPEAKER_03:I guess, not to stop you, but I think kind of where I was going was the more traditional of the Fabio character who was on the cover of all those books. He is now the alpha male werewolf. He's the alpha male werepanther. The fact that it's okay to be overtaken now, it would not be okay for a woman to be overtaken by a human man, but because it's a wereperson, it's, oh, that's their animal nature. So what happens if we stop othering things into animal nature? Will it become less okay to be, will people eventually say, Well, no, it's still wrong. Like, even though he's a beast, that's not that different. And so it's not okay to be overtaken by the alpha male who shifts into a panther. That's kind of my thought process.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So in some ways, do we need the, you might think it was the veneer of the animal shifter, or can we just, we can just say, no, you know, as humans, these things can happen. That can be part of the fantasy world.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. I think we're a long way from that. as we can see in the movies and TV and how everything's so repressed now there. I don't know how we would get there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And also, you know, it's interestingly, it'd be interesting, even if we did, you might ask the other thing is what might be lost by that? Like the, it's almost allegorical, but like the, the idea of being associated with particular kinds of animals gives us a different flavor of or a different way of thinking about ourselves that can also be a real capacity for us.
SPEAKER_02:But that's kind of, when we kind of not touched on the, our society has kind of put violence over sex and you kind of talk about like the bonobos and the sex, make love, not war. So can you, that would be
SPEAKER_00:more. Oh my gosh. Yes. So there's this book called The Inheritors and it's by William Golding. William Golding did Lord of the Flies. But around the same time he wrote Lord of the Flies, he did this book called The Inheritors, which was, when you start reading it, you're like, okay, this is some kind of primitive human and a primitive human group from maybe 20, 25,000 years ago, and they encounter another group. And then you begin to realize that, no, the one whose perspective I'm reading from isn't human. It's a Neanderthal. And they're encountering the humans. And the Neanderthal thinks that the humans should be friendly. Clearly, they're out to just greet them. And in fact, you know, the humans were out to kill them. And one of the things, you know, we often ask is, why aren't there other intelligent life forms, right, on Earth? And of course, there are. There may intelligent, you know, dolphins and elephants, etc. But the other answer to that is the reason there aren't intelligent hominids is we've killed them all. We've killed the Neanderthal. So there have been historically other ways of being with other dispositions. And one of the things I do talk about in Animal Revolution you mentioned is the bonobo, which resolves things through sex much more than through aggression. Their sex can sometimes be aggressive and sometimes be playful, but It's almost sex, you know, mutual masturbation is like, it's like a handshake for them, right? It's like, you know, or a way of comforting each other. So all of a sudden you see, you know, what that gives you a window onto again is maybe there are other ways of other types of social arrangements,
SPEAKER_02:right? I think we'd have to down in our society, we'd have to value violence a little less in order to raise the sexual acceptance more because
SPEAKER_00:The amount of violence we accept in, say, video games and in movies and not sex is kind of really interesting. What we often want is the titillation of sex, but not actual sex and sexuality and the full spectrum of that sexuality, right? With the tease of sex and sexual play as if it were provocative or erotic. but without it becoming overly, without exploring the other aspects of sex and sexuality. I mean, I do wonder like, you know, if, all right, so this is, use this or not, but do things like, where does something like Bridgerton sit within this kind of thing, right? Which shows more sex than like most TV shows, right?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:but displaces it onto an imaginary 19th century or something.
SPEAKER_02:That is kind of like progress, maybe, I think, because finally we're getting some, I mean, the sexuality back in film and television. I mean, it kind of just went away for a long time. And so I think I'm glad to see that. I think it's kind of a progress there, and it's still not any close to what it used to be, but at least it's there and represented. So I think
SPEAKER_03:that's a little breakthrough. It's interesting, though. So I read the Bridgerton books. I watched the first season and then I read all the books and I really enjoyed the books. And there's a lot of controversy right now after this particular season. It's interesting that you say that because while, yes, they've shown a whole lot more sex, but they've couched it kind of in a period of time that we thought of as repressive. I'm going to give spoilers here. Hope you don't love Bridgerton. The end of the third season, which just happened, teased a major plot change in that they're predicting a female-female relationship where that particular relationship in the book was definitely a female-male relationship. And there's a good amount of pushback on social media about that. Anywhere from someone who says, you know, if you disagree with this, You're homophobic. We need to get with the times. We need to have representation. And I have other people who say, I agree, we need representation. I just really liked this particular character in the book. And if you created new characters who were in a female-female relationship, I wouldn't have a problem with that. So it's interesting because I think it kind of shows where people started pumping the brakes on like, oh, we can have this sex, but maybe not that sex. I don't know. Like I said, it's very... And I'm personally conflicted, like I said, because I liked the book. And that particular book was one of my favorites. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around it being told in a different way. And
SPEAKER_00:this is a way they can create controversy, right? So controversy is a way of social media hits, interest, etc. By shifting things from the way the book was, then all of a sudden people were either as you said, either scandalized or disappointed that it's not like the book or perhaps telling people to go read the book if they want something different. And so it becomes a part of a larger conversation, which is kind of interesting. I don't know if you've seen the movie The Challengers, which is out, or Challengers, which is two men tennis players who are in competition, top tennis, young tennis player men in competition for a woman, but also men falling in love with each other in a way. So it's a really interesting, um, you know,
SPEAKER_03:I haven't seen it, but my 18 and 19 year old saw
SPEAKER_01:it. They
SPEAKER_03:had mixed. One of them was like, and I just think it was a very good movie. And it's interesting because, um, My daughters are not straight, so they are very much a part of the LGBT community and have many friends of different both sexualities and genders. So I don't know if that played into it or not, because one of them was like, yeah, I liked it. And the other one was like, I just thought it was kind of crappy movie. But she didn't really elaborate because they're teenagers.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Well, you know, I think there is. something to say for, you know, not changing the source material. Like you, when you talk about star Wars, I mean, I'm really, I am not a fan of that because they fundamentally changed like Luke Skywalker in a very bad way. I think, you know, they, they brought them down from a hero to, I mean, it was just, I'm not going to get into that, but so there is, that's a valid argument, but on the other hand, Bridgerton is different. I think because it's already the whole world and the television show is already completely different and people love it. They have no problem with the Black characters and all these different changes that were made for the show. So to specifically be unhappy with, you know, all of a sudden a gay character instead of a, you know, a substitution of a gay romance instead of a hetero one is, I think, that's not a positive complaint that the internet is making. In this case, so I think there is a way to tell, that's an interesting thing about what's the difference between a valid objection to changing the source material to just a bigotry, an expression of that, which I think more in this case it is because why it doesn't matter in this case. It would just be another expression of a sex and romance in a show that explores lots of different expressions of it.
SPEAKER_00:You know, that becomes interesting. It's like where, as we're talking about what is the future, is what are the forms by which that will get expressed, right? Like, will some of the, you know, the HBO, Netflix, Hulu, etc., will they begin to develop these out further? As, you know, is there a social appetite for beginning to explore these things? And I don't know that. People are interested oftentimes in talking about sexuality, but you rarely see, statistically at least, I guess, in surveys, people's sex lives are down in the last decade. So while sexuality and its expressions have expanded, for many people, they've lost actual sex. I don't know what to do about that.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. I, that's why I'm glad. That's why I want to talk about it more. This is one of the reasons why I want to do this podcast. So I want to like, I'm being more open on social media about, because I feel like I'm older. I'm in a position where I can talk about these things with less consequence than maybe some, but, but, and I think putting it back out there needs to be done to make it, to de-stigmatize sexuality and sex and to, that's how we're going to get to progress to have multiple sexualities and genders be acceptable because you have to, I mean, if you can't even talk about it, that's going to be an obstacle.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, when, you know, I did not have role models growing up that were ideal in any sense of that, right? And so the questions are becoming, you know, what are the models by which we think about these things?
SPEAKER_02:And so, you know, it's wild. I think I read you were going to be a Jesuit pastor Brother once? Or was it priest? It's brother. I went to Jesuit high school and they were brothers. But there's no Jesuit priest, right? It's brother?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there are priests and brothers. Yeah, I was in the Jesuit order from age 18 to about 28. So... But
SPEAKER_02:that's a power. I mean, everybody... I never know. Any Jesuit brother or priest I ever met was like a scary... They are like... The alphas of the spiritual world.
SPEAKER_00:We used to say they're the Marine Corps of the Catholic Church. But yeah, so it was poverty, chastity, and obedience. And those are really intense vows to maintain. But I used to joke, poverty will keep you chaste. But in fact, that was a time where I was actually running from I was both running to a lot of things. I wanted to do a lot of service. I believed in a lot of the social work and the social work aspect of the Catholic Church, living in Tijuana and in housing projects in New Orleans, etc. So the social aspects. And I believed in the education, Jesuit education being very strong. But in other ways, I came out when I was about 28 with... The sexual knowledge probably of a 16-year-old, you know, so like I just didn't, I hadn't really been on dates. I hadn't done all the things that people do in their teens and 20s. So it took a long time to catch up, right, to begin to realize. And I think that's one of the spaces where, as we were talking about models and models for sexuality, that could have been and would have been really powerful for me growing up. Right. And I think for a lot of folks, you know, Monica, you talked about, you know, growing up in the Midwest and those models also might have been kind of enclosed, right, or limited. And so one of the things that we can do is to allow people to explore a variety of ways of being. And fantasy is a great mode because there's a certain safety in fantasy as well. Right. It's like, let's just explore whole other worlds, human animals and aliens and all these other capacities and multiverse capacities.
SPEAKER_02:So when you talk about like the taboo, then is that like making things not taboo, like taking it out of that realm? Because we sort of need taboo, right? If there isn't any, what would that be like? I mean, we kind of got away from, that's what kind of makes the excitement there, right?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Yeah, the violation. The violation of the taboo or having these limits and then crossing the limits. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Can we have a balance there? Is it possible even to have a balance that's healthy? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And without an absolute sort of denigration of those who cross those boundaries, right? So in order to allow for... you know, taboos and, but also to realize the complexity of human desire.
SPEAKER_02:That's the other big thing. There's a lot of like, at least in all the romance discourses, a lot of policing of people's desires and pleasures and what's okay to read and write and what's not. And that's one thing I would kind of push back against and why I am all for the, this genre and all the genres, because I mean, we just, Should not start going there. We should talk about it and evaluate it, but not in moralistic terms.
SPEAKER_00:Right. It's interesting. It's also if you think about who's reading stuff, right? And you think, well, okay, what is the readership like? Who's interested in this? How do they find it? Because sometimes authors won't write something because they're afraid there's not a readership for it. But if we can imagine, yeah, in fact, there is that readership something I'm working on or I feel or I'm interested in, there must be someone else out there. I'm not the only person. Then I think that becomes much, the capacities become much larger.
SPEAKER_03:And going along with that and kind of something you said, Pam, about social media and social policing and things like that, it seems to me that social media can work in both ways, right? On the one hand, you can Sign on to something anonymous and ask questions about things that maybe you don't feel like you can talk about. You could admit, I want to read a book about an alien with three penises and I'm user one, two, three, four, five. So you don't know who I am. You're not going to see me at the grocery. On the other hand, you have the side of social media of, People who are saying, no, you can't be interested in that. You can't be interested. They're kink shaming, that type of thing. And I think it's interesting how, I mean, I guess that's just the overall how social media can be used for good or evil, right? It's a form of social policing, but in some senses, I feel like we've lost some of our social policing skills. And people say things these days that they wouldn't say before then, and they probably shouldn't say it now. So I don't know, I'm kind of rambling here, but I'm just, I'm thinking about, is social media a way to have those authors find their readership and then have the confidence that that's going to turn into dollars, right? Because I don't think these people are writing, I mean, some people write for fun, but ultimately, I think even self-publishing on Amazon, you got to spend a little money. So you'd probably like to make some money too.
UNKNOWN:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the filter's definitely gone. The anonymity, yeah, but I think it's in a negative way. I mean, to have the social influence of like shaming, to keep society, you have to have some universal, some common values. Now people are able to say what they want to say terrible things without repercussion through anonymity. Whereas, you know, it would be better if we could use it, the platform to enforce, to encourage, you know, healthy acceptance, to discourage the bad behavior. You know, where people, where you would be shamed for saying those things, not for having, you know, not being comfortable to have the freedom to say any terrible thing under it. You know what I mean? Maybe I'm not saying that right, but it's, I don't see a lot of people, when somebody gets on and says bad things anonymously, I don't see a lot of, there's not a lot of huge immediate
SPEAKER_03:pushback. There's not even a lot of huge immediate pushback when you put your name on it. I mean, they're still invited to the block party, right? And I'm always like, nope, you're not invited to the block party. Those are really hateful comments. Or, you know, I always jokingly say I'm surprised at neighborhood groups where people, for example, next door, I hate next door, but you have to use your real name. You have to sign up with your real address that you can't, you know, you could, you know, put your picture up there, but you do have to have your real name and your general location. So the chances are, of you running into someone who commented on Nextdoor are good. And I always say to myself, someday I'm going to be at the grocery and you're going to have three items and I'm going to have 55 items and coupons and a check. And I'm going to remember what you said on Nextdoor and I'm not going to let you go ahead of me because that's going to be my own personal social policing. But I think overall, yeah, there's not a lot of pushback. And you said something interesting, Pam, which is that we, for social media, I think to encourage acceptance, There needs to be a shared set of morals. And I wonder if we don't have that right now. And that's why it's so difficult for social media to bring that sort of purpose.
SPEAKER_00:You know, one of the things you might also consider doing that might be really interesting is talk to some craft novelists about how they're writing sex and how they're writing about sex in ways that open an exploration while maintaining a kind of Beauty of the novel itself as well. I just read Little Rabbit, which I think New York Times has reviewed and is pretty highly considered. And that was a dominant submission novel across generations. So the woman's 23, I think, and the man's 52 or something. And it's the complexity of age and the complexity of dominance and submission. And it's really well written. I've been trying to think the name of a novel that was based off of the Florida woman who was a high school teacher who was having an affair with one of her students. There's a really good novel on that as well. And so you get into the minds of the character in a different way, and you begin to explore thinking, desire, And there's, you know, it's not judgmental like this is right or this is wrong. It's I'm interested in what kind of mind is thinking these things, what kind of desires are there. And those are interesting.
SPEAKER_02:So, yeah, we can't really. Are they all OK, though? Are any trope or any theme or should we? It's
SPEAKER_00:not to say it's necessarily okay. I mean, look, you can read a novel about, you can read Silence of the Lambs and not be like, well, okay, I'm going to go out and find a few people to flay. But it becomes an interest in human psychology in those cases. So it doesn't always necessarily condone behavior as much as we are intrigued by the varieties of human behaviors.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and understanding when you read things that you're indulging in fantasy and being able to separate, which I think is one thing that is lost in the internet is separating the fantasy from the reality and just not assuming that because you enjoy reading something or writing something that you want to do that in real life. And we seem to understand this in other genres, but not so much in romance.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's actually really interesting. Yeah. Do you also write? Yes.
SPEAKER_02:That's fine. A lot of people who read them want to start writing them, and that's just because we like it so much. We want to start writing them. I
SPEAKER_03:am not a writer. I went to law school and was an attorney for seven years, although I've been out for 18 now. But I did plenty of writing back then, and I think that finished my career. creative bone off. I like to read a lot. And I, you know, one thing that you kind of said, Pam, about, because you and I have discussed this before, about accepting that something is fantasy. I think along the lines goes with people have different lengths to which they can personally accept that fantasy. And that may change in their life based on their experiences. And sometimes you don't know till you read it. There's a A popular book right now called Haunting Adeline and it had all this buzz. And so I was like, I'm going to read this. And it had a lot of trigger warnings and it was a very honest trigger warning. But I had not read that type of book before with those particular triggers. And it made me realize after reading it that I was like, nope, this isn't mine. Do I accept that it's very popular to other people and that they like that and that they can see that as a fantasy and not that they want to go out and engage in dating violence or things like that? Yes, I do understand that. Could I personally get past that to enjoy it as a fantasy? No, I couldn't. So to your question of, you know, should we be policing what types of material is out there for adults or people who are like adults have at least the ability to make those decisions? My thing is no. You know, I don't mind that those books are out there. I just don't want to read them. So, but, you know, that's obviously always a choice about what you choose. You know, you don't like that television show, change the channel.
SPEAKER_02:Right. That is not happening in romance. Censorship does not always tend to win, I've noticed, you know, then it's like, okay. And I've always think it is never okay. You have to allow, you know, you can't be criticizing these books in terms of what's acceptable, what is okay to write about. And that's one of my objections to some criticism about the vintage romance and the bodice rippers. I'm like, well, you know, that's, don't read it then. You know, I'm more in, Don't read it. Don't try and forbid it for other people. But there's a surprising number of contemporary liberal-minded people that don't agree with that view. So that's what, there's a lot of what you'll see in the dialogue online about romance novels is this is terrible. You know, you can't, this is influencing. Suddenly, if it's the wrong subject to them, this is something that's gonna influence society. So we can't have this out there.
SPEAKER_00:This might be an interesting question as well, is how has the online community changed the way romance novels were?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's interesting. They have changed a lot. Well, there's a lot more. It's always been a genre that is formulaic, which is fine, but they've, well, they've added a whole layer of politics to it and political correctness that... In some ways could be so, I mean, like some things like it is not necessarily bad. Like they all mandate. Now you have to talk about consent. You have to talk about wearing protection. And that is like in every, every single contemporary book, like even in some of the monster ones and in the, that are about. So no, there are genres that obviously that don't conform to that, that are about non-consent, but. The other way it manifests is in the quality of the book because a lot of them, they're getting shorter and shorter. The story element is changed, the story structure, because it's impossible to write conflict and tension when so many things are not okay to write about politically. And so a lot of the books are just beyond formulaic into terrible and boring because they can't say anything. Mm-hmm. And so it is all about sex. It's either just straight up porn or it's this ridiculous, cheesy romance without any sex in it.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. So are there particular online venues that are the most popular for the romance novel genre that people go to? Is it like Reddit threads or?
SPEAKER_03:TikTok. TikTok is huge. If you go in there and you look up hashtag smut talk, hashtag romance, see all those things, you're going to find a ton of stuff. I feel like just because TikTok has overall become a platform that went from silly dancing videos to a lot of people communicating information. Like I said, I have teenagers, young adults, and they get a lot of their like actual information, like information about world events from TikTok.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I think that's also another area for obviously for a podcast is just social media, online forums and the romance novel.
SPEAKER_02:And I also think we should have a whole one. You talked about symbolism and mythology because I love that and love the mythology. I know you talked about the fur, but there's also the male appendages and the penis. A lot of them have two and they're enhanced. You know, they've got these special knots and things that are designed to make for female pleasure. And, you know, what does that, you know, it's really interesting to talk about that in terms of actual human sex, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, it's also, since we're talking about appendages and we're also talking about social relations. There is Ursula Le Guin, a fantasy writer, wrote a very short piece on the carrier bag theory of fiction. And her idea was that often we have heralded the man who's out there with the spear killing the animal for meat. He says in primitive cultures, while that happened, it wasn't the only thing. You had to have a lot of people who had bags who were gathering wood, gathering berries, gathering nuts, gathering all the other stuff in the hunter-gatherer communities. And her fiction actually looks at, she's almost like an anthropologist. She looks at social relations through this idea of not the singular hero male, but through as I said, the carrier bag theory, the idea that how do we carry a society through cooperations or where those cooperations fall short. Left-handed darkness is one of our very kind of famous examples of that. But yeah, so the carrier bag theory, again, appendages as being either a spear or a bag, right? Either the phallic or the vaginal in turn. And to see those prosthetics as symbolic of both sexuality but also social relations.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, even in the Omegaverse genres, there's not a lot of women in power in the Alpha position. It's almost always the male. I mean, obviously nothing, I'm sure there are some that are female, but it's predominantly vastly masculine dominated. I
SPEAKER_00:will say, just as a teasing this out, I have a friend of mine, Matt Bell, who has been finishing a novel that is about social relations, much in line with Ursula Le Guin, with a leading female or gender-switching protagonist. And it would probably be out in another year or so. But I think there's some really interesting work being done.
SPEAKER_02:Is he talking about that? I haven't seen. I used to see him on Twitter, but I haven't seen. No,
SPEAKER_00:this is like so vocal. So he's you know, this is still in production.
SPEAKER_02:That'll be interesting.
SPEAKER_00:I think there are a lot of people who are working on these varieties of materials.
SPEAKER_02:By the way, we don't have a lot. Have you read anything about dragons when you come across your animal research? Like the dragons, the dragons are like they're not real animals, but they are. are animalistic and they're like the elitist snobs of the animal shifters because they have the typical dragon stereotypes of the wealth collectors and they're the smartest and the strongest.
SPEAKER_00:They've been around forever. Dragons have been around forever. The initial coding of dragons was with greed. So if you went back to Tolkien and The Hobbit or something, You know, why does the dragon have the hoard that he sits on all the all the gold and all just because of greed? It's not there's nothing there. He can't cash it in for anything because he's a dragon. But but it's simply this desire to obtain things. But the dragon genres have changed so much because now you have. a lot of Asian dragon stuff coming in as well. So there's all kinds of different kind of codings that go on along with the dragon. And, you know, if the dragon's associated with the serpent and the serpent with either the fall in the biblical tradition or kind of a phallic figure. So
SPEAKER_02:that's kind of interesting. You talk about the fall and the serpent because in many of the dragon worlds in romance, they are the top dog, but they are all afflicted with this curse where the females have been wiped out and they have to start meeting with humans because they're invincible on the one hand and immortal, but yet they've been afflicted with this curse and they are being wiped out unless they find a way to adapt with humans. So I'm really interested in what's behind that world building.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so if we think of those powers or that greed that they have as not just a power, but also as a curse. They're cursed with this capacity that they have to fulfill. And can they adapt to the human world, right? Life has moved on beyond them, right? This is, you know, as an older guy, many things have moved beyond me, right? Can I adapt to the world today? So we often think about that. What is lost in those adaptations and how can... one generational figure, one proclivity or one sets of desires and interests adapt to a different world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I do think overall, we need to allow more things to be acceptable to be written about in romance. And we have to get rid of that. We have to get rid of this censorship and to make the stories better. For one thing, you know, everybody complains about it. And then our complaints are directly related to this censorship. And a lot, some people don't want to see that. I think that are going to need to. They want to see their own causes represented more.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I used to, in teaching fiction, I used to sometimes assign students to take a novel, say Frankenstein or something, and add a chapter. Write something that you think should have gone on or goes on there that's unspoken in it. And that exercise... is really useful for providing a license to explore a whole bunch of stuff. So as a writer, you know, sometimes take something you like, but where you've seen it being inhibited and write an interstitial chapter that explores some of the stuff that you wish they had pushed the boundaries of.
SPEAKER_02:That's a great idea. You must have seen some great papers on that.
SPEAKER_00:It was a lot of fun. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Are you still teaching that? I mean, you're still teaching...
SPEAKER_00:You know, because I'm running a humanities institute now, I rarely have the opportunity to teach, and mainly I'm teaching either animal stuff or philosophy. But, you know, I'm teaching Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals probably next year. And Genealogy of Morals is about how an overpowering morality of the hero class, the so-called hero class, is taken over by the slave class. So the slaves... have resentment at the power of the powerful. So they say, oh, only the meek shall inherit the earth, only those who are weak or strong, et cetera. And so they change morality in order to try to make the powerful feel guilty about being powerful. And so they gain power over the powerful through their weakness. And this is often read, you know, you can do this in terms of sexuality of saying, oh, you know, people are having no sex or straight sex, end up policing everyone else because they're saying, oh, no, all those other things are wrong. And we're going to shame you into thinking they're wrong. And so we're going to police your sexuality, kind of bring you back into the herd. So that's. Kind of how genealogy, part of how genealogy in Warhol's works. Right.
SPEAKER_02:But importantly, if we're going to not police sexuality, we also can't police the people that are drawn to the patriarchal sexuality either. And that's just another valid avenue. So, but a lot of, I don't know that we can take the attitude of toppling it and eradicating it and making everybody, you know, you have to just allow multiple things to exist. And that's one of those multiple.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So rather than it being homogenous or singular, it's a heterotopia, you know, it's heterodox as multiple things and some topia being spaces, multiple spaces that can be different and conflicting, but also coexist.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Right. So if you were going to add a chapter to your book about the animal revolution, what would be a romance topic for that chapter? Do you think there is one? I know you don't read them, but I mean, could you imagine a suggestion for romance?
SPEAKER_00:So either I would have done the Ovid, the obvious Ovid move and talk about, or the werewolf move, you know, with... the power of werewolves and shape-shifting in relationship to nature and change. Or, you know, I do have the chapter of the role of hair, the role of hair in culture and animality. And you could extend that out into a much more romance and sexual capacity.
SPEAKER_02:Well, so finally, though, you were... To bring it back to your book, I think this has been categorized as speculative nonfiction. Is that true? What does that mean?
SPEAKER_00:Right. The one thing I did not do in the book and I wish I'd done is all the stories in the book took place. They're actual events. Some of them I cite the date or the newspaper they came from. So they all took place. So that's where it's nonfiction. It's speculative because what I'm doing is I'm weaving them together. in an unusual way with the premise that animals are in revolt against humans. They're just not telling us because it's their revolution. There is one chapter that's obviously speculative and fictional, which is on George Washington's teeth. The facts about the teeth are true. It's just what he thought about those teeth. I speculate what he thought. So I just kind of fill in a little, you know, so for a few paragraphs there. But everything else actually happened. All the animals biting him back against humans and the jellyfish taking over a nuclear aircraft carrier. The cows
SPEAKER_02:escaping from the slaughter was really disturbing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So all of those happened. You know, the woman who lives with 300 rabbits. So they're really interesting stories. I collected them from about 2005 to about 2017, 2018. after having so many of them decide, okay, I need to weave these into something. And it was finding, you know, I'm mainly an academic writer, but this is a non-academic book, anyone can read it. And so it was finding a way of telling those stories that kept the spirit and wonder of these animal worlds. And so hopefully Animal Revolution does that.
SPEAKER_02:So is that what you want people to take away from it mostly? More of a more, just a more respect, a greater respect for animals?
SPEAKER_00:More respect to like, look out there and realize there's a much bigger earth that we humans and animals live on. We're in different worlds, but we have a shared earth. And what does it mean to negotiate that space together?
SPEAKER_02:By the way, one last thing. I know we're running out of time. Did you ever consider monster theory? I didn't,
SPEAKER_00:but you know, I guess that would be Jeffrey Cohen's work, you know? And if you haven't, Talked with Jeffrey. He would be a really good person to talk with. He spent his early career writing and collecting stuff on monster theory.
SPEAKER_02:That seems like it would be really interesting in terms of our romance questions.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right. Monsters often monstrate. They show something that we try to repress.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They demonstrate, monstrate, they show. Do
SPEAKER_01:you have pets?
SPEAKER_00:Dogs. Boxers. All right. I'm just curious. They're fun. How about yourself?
SPEAKER_02:I do. I have two cats. I had a dog, but he died. But he was great. We've had dogs and cats. I love cats, even though they're snobby killers. I let mine
SPEAKER_03:outside. And I am not a pet person. We didn't have pets growing up, and I'm not a pet person. I understand that they're super important to many other people, and I have friends who have been very attached to their pets, but I'm fine without them. It's fine for it to be someone else's pet.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I know you probably have to go,
SPEAKER_00:but yeah, thanks so much. Thanks
SPEAKER_02:for
SPEAKER_03:talking to us. It was very
SPEAKER_02:fascinating.
SPEAKER_03:I will. I have two sun devils, so I'll tell them to look up maybe their music major. So I don't know if they'll make it over to the humanities, but, but if they have room in their schedule for some, for some elective credits and they get upper divisional, I'll send them your way.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Sounds great. Yeah. Let me know how this goes. I'm interested to see how you're.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, you will. So thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Great. Thank
SPEAKER_03:you. Have a good one.