Marie Brennan's Blog

It may seem odd that I’m following up a discussion of segregation on the basis of sex with one on pornography, but bear with me: they’re not as unrelated as they seem.

Pornography is notoriously difficult to define. There’s even a Wikipedia page for the phrase famously used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward to describe hard-core material: “I know it when I see it.” Subjective? Definitely. But then, what counts as obscene or purient material has always been subjective. In one society, the sight of a lady’s ankles might be titillating; meanwhile, over in Moche Peru, potters were busy making ceramics depicting anal sex, fellatio, and other explicit acts.

What is licentious is closely linked with what is hidden from common view. I recall reading a mystery novel written by an author living in Saudi Arabia, where the male protagonist mentally chides himself for gazing too long at a woman’s hands, the only part of her not covered by her burqa. He also overhears conservative imams on the radio railing against women “seducing” men with the mere sound of their voices. When almost everything is hidden away, the few scraps remaining become massively charged with sexual potential.

This means that, believe or not, what’s considered pornographic or titillating is a place for worldbuilding! Holly Black made great use of this in her Curse Workers trilogy, a contemporary fantasy where magic requires contact between the bare skin of someone’s hand and another person. Because this ability is widespread, gloves are a standard part of the dress code for everybody, a way of signaling that you’re safe to be around . . . and at one point in the series, the teenaged protagonist, snooping on his older brother’s computer, finds a stash of soft-core porn featuring women tugging their gloves off all sexy-like for the camera. We think nothing of seeing somebody’s bare hands, but when they’re normally concealed? You bet that would become an erotic sight.

By contrast, that which is routine will carry much less force. We tend to hide female breasts from view enough that even breastfeeding in public can be controversial, but in tropical regions where women traditionally wear nothing on top, it’s not a non-stop pornographic show: that’s simply normalized. Greece and Rome in antiquity were full of representational dicks — worn as jewelry, carved on buildings, molded into lamps, used as wind chimes — but those were to turn away evil, not to get people aroused.

In addition to shaping what is pornographic, your worldbuilding specifics will affect what kind of pornography is available to people. The Moche may have left behind a lot of sexually explicit ceramics, but those would have been elite objects; the average peasant toiling away in his field wouldn’t be able to acquire elaborately molded works made by skilled artisans, regardless of their subject matter. For most of history, pornography has largely been the domain of the wealthy.

Some things are ubiquitous. We’ve had the ability to scratch simple depictions of genitalia into wood, stone, or clay for tens of thousands of years, and boy howdy have people done that! But how often was it done for the purpose of titillation? That, we don’t know. It’s easier to be certain when we find sexualized graffiti in appropriate contexts, like the walls of brothels in Pompeii. We also have examples of extremely phallic objects going back to the Upper Paleolithic, though the earliest we can be sure of any of these being put to sexual use is ancient Egypt (where we have artwork depicting it in action). Was that use purely recreational, or somehow ritual in nature? Again, we often don’t know.

What really makes pornography take off, though, is printing technology. Prior to that, your smut had to be artisanally hand-crafted — expensive in both labor and resources. The common person could really only afford dirty talk and maybe some crude pictures scratched into a wall. Once you have woodblocks, though, and later on, movable type, it becomes possible to mass-produce both images and text for all kinds of purposes. Of course, early printing was often highly regulated, with governmental censors eager to quash anything that might corrupt public morals. We don’t have a great surge of obscene material from the late medieval and early modern periods. As printing became cheaper and more widespread, though, so was born an underground industry in pornography. Later on, audiovisual media did the same thing for sexual performances, allowing them to be enjoyed in privacy rather than only at live shows.

It isn’t all about getting people off, though. Some sexual works are created with an eye toward education, e.g. for married couples who needed to learn how to do the deed, and maybe even how to enjoy themselves better along the way. The Kama Sutra is an extremely famous example of this, though it’s much broader in focus than its pop-culture image presents; it’s more like a forerunner of the entire relationship-advice genre. Meanwhile, Edo-period shunga (erotic pictures) in Japan kept getting regulated not because the shogunate disapproved of salacious art in general, but because the artists kept slipping political commentary into their works!

Regulations have run the gamut. In puritanical eras, the government usually tries to eliminate pornography entirely — with limited success at best. Such things will still circulate via private networks, especially among the elite, who have the wealth and influence to buy both the material and escape from the consequences of having it. In other times and places, normative heterosexual pornography is fine, but anything considered “deviant,” like homosexual acts, faces censorship. Or pornography is permitted, but it has to be packaged in a fashion that marks it out for what it is, e.g. with a plain paper cover in a certain color. Or it’s high art if it takes certain forms, like sculpture, but low art and banned if it’s available to the masses.

But again, bear in mind: what’s considered licentious will be entirely defined by social norms. Thomas Edison made a film in which a man and a woman kissed; some people considered that obscene when it came out in 1896. In 1999, it was judged culturally significant enough to be preserved in the National Film Registry. And whether licentiousness is a priori bad will also be culturally relative: some Hindu temples not only depict sexual acts, but are intended to arouse the viewer, because sexual desire is entirely compatible with religious experience. So from the perspective of a fictional world, it’s entirely up to the writer where they set their parameters . . . but how that’s received by their real-world audience will be another matter entirely!

The post New Worlds: Pornography appeared first on Swan Tower.

I realized today that I had never gotten around to updating my site with buy links for the print edition of The Atlas of Anywhere. So, uh, guess what! It’s in paperback now! And it includes my Hugo-winning poem “A War of Words,” so if you want to keep that one around in durable form, this is the way to do so.

The post Better late than never? appeared first on Swan Tower.

Segueing on from eunuchs and the notion of them guarding harems, let’s talk about contexts in which people tend to get separated on the basis of sex. Or gender — but in the types of contexts were this segregation happens, the concern is often very specifically about bodies, and what they’re carrying downstairs. When biological sex and social gender do not align, the dynamics get more complicated, as we’re seeing in the present day.

Some kinds of sex segregation are situational, being focused on a specific event. Rites of passage in certain types of society are often focused on initiating boys into the company of men and girls into the company of women; it therefore makes sense that the other group shouldn’t be present. Childbirth is another event that may be restricted only to women, with men having their own traditions to perform elsewhere. Even a girls’ slumber party may be off-limits to boys, any such intruders being driven away with shrieks of outrage and maybe some thrown pillows. But once that event is over, the space opens up again; the living room where the slumber party was held is not forbidden to men forevermore.

Where the separation is more about the space than a specific event, it’s most likely to happen in contexts that are both bodily and communal. Locker rooms and bathing facilities, for example, involve individuals stripping down in the company of other people, so we tend to have separate ones for men and women. The communal part is particularly important here: nobody thinks twice about the fact that toilets at home or on airplanes are all-gender by default, because they’re also single-occupancy. It’s only when the space is shared that hackles rise over a lack of segregation — though proponents point out that all-gender communal restrooms tend to be built in a way that offers more privacy to everybody, and that’s a good thing.

For many of us, it probably makes sense that anything which involves baring intimate parts of the body should be veiled from the opposite sex, outside special circumstances. But the “bodily” part of the above equation also extends in directions that may be less obvious to my average reader . . . like eating. We think nothing of men and women eating together, even in public! But in other places and times, women have taken their meals separately from men, even within the walls of their own homes — and a restaurant is right out. Regency England considered it barely acceptable for a woman of quality to dine in a private room at a commercial establishment, especially if she was traveling, but out in public? That was scandalous. (The French, ever risqué, thought it was just fine.)

The other broad category in which segregation may rear its head is religious contexts. Mosques very commonly have separate sections for men and women, for the very practical reason than Muslim prayer involves kneeling and bowing one’s head to the ground, which leads to a lot of time with the rear end of the person ahead of you being right in front of your face. In mixed contexts, it’s easy to see how this can get socially awkward and may distract people from the religious matters that should be their focus. Orthodox and some Conservative Jewish synagogues likewise maintain separate sections for men and women, again for reasons of modesty and improved attention to God.

Depending on the place in question, this division can be accomplished in a number of ways. The different sections can be marked by anything from segregated doors to a rope to a low wall to a curtain, depending on the degree of privacy required. This may run laterally through the space, so that the women are (usually) behind the men, or it may run axially, placing them side-by-side — the latter carrying a great symbolic connotation of equality, as it allows both sexes to be equally close to the front. Or the separation may be greater, with women in a balcony (echoed by the Women’s Gallery that used to allow English ladies to observe the doings of a wholly masculine Parliament), in a different room, or even in another building entirely, one constructed for their sole use.

Of course, when we think of sex segregation, we think above all of purdah — using that as a generalized term for the seclusion of women from public view, via clothing, architecture, and behavior, in all contexts rather than only specific ones. On the sartorial end, veils can hide a woman’s hair, face, or even eyes from view, while long skirts, long sleeves, and perhaps gloves conceal everything else, depending on the degree of concealment required. On the architectural end, pierced wooden screens serve a dual purpose: environmentally, they permit some air circulation while blocking most light, and socially, they prevent outsiders from easily seeing into the house, where the women are.

In English we tend to equate the word “harem” with a man’s collection of wives and concubines, but properly speaking, it’s the private part of the house, which by the principle of metonymy came to also indicate the women there. Male outsiders and servants may not enter; even male relatives may be restricted, with only the closest or those under the age of puberty allowed across the threshold. Meanwhile, the women themselves often face restrictions on their ability to leave — which, in extreme cases (like the wives and concubines of a ruler), might extend as far as prohibiting that entirely.

To be clear, although we associate this with the Muslim world, and perhaps with India, that’s not its only context. Noble and royal women in East Asian countries, for example, might only converse with men from behind a screen, because it was improper for them to be viewed directly. Early modern Spanish writings are full of the idea that women should stay within their houses and not go out, only grudgingly allowing for things like church attendance — indeed, Europe more broadly agreed that women should not be out in public any more than strictly necessary. Where there is patriarchy, there will be a desire to control the visibility, movements, and activities of women.

At least for elite women. Because let’s be clear: this kind of segregation is ultimately a luxury, and therefore not equally affordable by all classes. Somebody has to go out for food, water, and other necessities, and that work can’t all be done by men, because they’re busy with their own jobs. The private seclusion of upper-class women relies on the public activities of slaves or paid servants, many of whom will be female. Meanwhile, households living closer to the poverty line can’t afford that kind of help; their women might have to work at agricultural or commercial tasks just to make ends meet. They may still be barred from certain contexts, forbidden to attend the theatre or take a meal in a tavern, and they may be required to observe strict forms of modesty while they’re out and about, but they can’t be hidden away entirely.

Ultimately, then, while limited and context-dependent forms of sex segregation can be very commonplace, the blanket sort indicated by the term purdah is an expression not only of gender ideology but of economics. It can only occur where there is the wealth to support it, along with the will to enforce it.

The post New Worlds: Sex Segregation appeared first on Swan Tower.

As you can imagine, this essay will continue with a frank discussion of genitalia and modifications to same.

A eunuch is generally understood to mean a man who has been castrated, i.e. whose testicles have been cut off. Sometimes, though, he has been fully emasculated — meaning removal of the penis as well; this was usually the case with Chinese eunuchs — while on other occasions, the term refers to any man who is unable to procreate (e.g. because of impotence or chemical castration), even if he is intact. Unsurprisingly, it can also be slung as an insult against a man, questioning his virility.

We probably got the idea of eunuchs from animal husbandry, where castration of males is common enough that we often have separate terms for the two types: steers vs. bulls, geldings vs. stallions. Among livestock, it brings a number of benefits to their human owners; castrated beasts are less likely to attack people or other males and less likely to break down fences to try and get at females, while the small number of reproductively capable individuals makes it easier to control the population size and arrange for advantageous breeding matches. Neutered animals, female as well as male, also tend to live noticeably longer.

Among humans, the physical effects are similar. The removal of the testicles generally reduces sexual desire and its associated behaviors, while preventing reproduction. If performed before puberty — as it usually is with animals — the subject’s voice will remain high, he won’t grow facial hair or develop male pattern baldness, he’ll put on less muscle and retain more fat, and he may wind up tall and long-limbed, as castration interferes with the hormonal changes that stop bone growth. He also stands a good chance of living longer. Males castrated after puberty, by contrast, will generally keep the changes already experienced, though they too will not progress to baldness.

The social effects, though . . . those get very complicated.

Castration or emasculation can be a punishment, not only for the individual, but for the lineage they’re no longer able to perpetuate. As such, in a society where a crime taints the whole family, a male criminal might be executed and his sons castrated, stopping the line in its tracks. We’ve also often seen it as a fitting consequence for sexual crimes — a category that at times has unfortunately included being gay. Of course, reduction in sexual desire doesn’t necessarily mean its elimination entirely, not all sexual crimes are driven by desire in the first place, and there are ways to rape people without functioning testicles (or even a penis). And while there’s some evidence that castrated men are less likely to re-offend, it’s too scant for us to be sure of a firm causal relationship. Still, in some jurisdictions, convicts are offered a choice between castration (surgical or chemical) followed by release from prison, and serving a longer sentence while keeping their bodies intact . . . and some of them do indeed choose the former.

On the other hand, castration has sometimes been a thing people voluntarily seek out. Transgender women, of course, may pursue it in the interests of bringing their bodies in line with their self-image. Historically, boys with particularly pure singing voices might either be castrated or undergo a procedure that made their testicles atrophy, so they would retain their childhood range into adulthood; where women were forbidden to sing, these castrati took their place in music. And then in certain places and times, becoming a eunuch could actually be a route to opportunity, wealth, and power.

Though our modern democratic societies tend not to think this way, in cultures more organized around lineages and inheritance, a man who can’t procreate is seen as lacking the motivations that drive people to amass power for themselves, their heirs, and their broader kin groups — meaning that he can be relied upon to serve the interests of his lord instead. In East Asia, eunuch officials were often seen as extensions of the king’s or emperor’s will, in contrast with scholar-officials who might oppose it. How true this was in reality, of course, depended on the rulers and the officials in question!

That’s one kind of trustworthiness; another involves women. Unsurprisingly, eunuchs have also been trusted among sheltered female populations in ways that intact males were not. Probably the most common image of them in the West is as harem guards, because they were less likely to engage in sexual behavior with the women there, and incapable of siring children on them even if such transgressions happened. That’s not inaccurate, but it’s incomplete, as eunuchs served in a variety of domestic and bureaucratic roles related to such environments. They were the point of contact between male and female worlds, their own liminal status allowing them to cross over into both.

Liminal — and in many cases, lowly. Eunuchs were commonly servants or even slaves (with castrated slaves sometimes fetching a higher price), and as many of us know from other contexts, high-ranking people easily fall into the trap of forgetting just how much the servants around them are overhearing. Assumed loyalty plus invisible ubiquity makes for a great combination: is it any wonder that eunuchs sometimes doubled as spies? Of course this was not without its dangers; a servant or slave can easily be executed if caught snooping, and that loyalty may not extend in both directions. Still, knowing everyone’s secrets and passing them on to the right ears can be a route to power.

Eunuchs didn’t only wield power from the shadows, though. In both the Muslim and Chinese worlds, they could also rise to incredibly high rank — including military rank! The advantage of a eunuch general is that there’s not much point in him staging a coup to overthrow the ruler: what’s he going to do, start a dynasty that ends when he dies? Few people will flock to that usurper’s banner, given that they want stability, not a new civil war a few years or decades down the line. (I do wonder how many of those eunuch military officials were castrated as adults instead of as boys. I suspect more of the former, as they would have the benefits of puberty-induced changes to their bodies — useful if they’re expected to fight personally, instead of just directing the soldiers — but I don’t know for sure.)

In speculative fiction, eunuchs have tended to serve precisely one role: to code a society as a certain kind of “decadent” court, usually modeled on something like Muslim caliphates or the Ottoman Empire. They guard harems, and that’s it. But that’s been changing a little of late, with characters like the spymaster Varys in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or the general Ouyang in Shelley Parker-Chan’s Radiant Emperor duology, which is historical fantasy set in the transition between the Chinese Yuan and Ming dynasties. Both of those characters are singular, rather than belonging to extensive traditions of eunuch service, but they both reflect genuine dynamics around the roles castrated men can fill that aren’t guarding harems. I doubt we’ll see a flood of eunuch characters in Anglophone fiction any time soon — if only because it’s a topic that tends to make a lot of male readers uncomfortable — but it would be interesting to get some continued variety!

The post New Worlds: Eunuchs appeared first on Swan Tower.

Nine years and eight months ago, I earned my black belt in shōrin-ryu karate.

Today, I became a second degree black belt.

It was supposed to happen sooner. But right when the head of my dojo began saying that maybe it was time for me to prep for testing, a pandemic started. Which put a dent in my training. And even once classes began again, various factors meant I wasn’t able to go regularly. And then 2024 was, in hindsight, a rather abysmal year for my health. And and and, spring of this year rolled around, and I realized I was in danger of it being ten years since my previous test, and dammit, I did not intend to let that milestone pass without me at least trying to take the next step.

There were more than a few hurdles along the way. I’ve had wrist problems for years that meant I hadn’t been doing kobudo (weapons training), but you’re expected to do that as part of your test. So starting in August I began a crash course, scraping the rust off the sai kata I was expected to perform — not too bad; it was one I used to know well — and, uh, learning from scratch a long and difficult bo kata that I did not know in the slightest. I went so gung-ho on that, in fact, that I managed to give myself a repetitive stress sprain in my right ankle five weeks before the test (bear in mind that sprains take about six weeks to heal . . .). And then, to put the cherry on top of that sundae, I caught my big toe against the mat nine days ago and basically re-activated the hellacious sprain I had in that joint some years previously.

As I put it to several people, by the time I got to the test, I felt like I was being held together by chewing gum. Not even duct tape: that would have been an upgrade.

But these higher-level tests can only be done when our dojo’s founder is in town (he moved back to Okinawa a few years ago), and his next visit will likely be for the seminar in April of next year. That would be past the decade mark I was determined to beat. So, come hell or high water, I was going to drag my sorry carcass through the test — and I did! And, barring a couple of utterly bone-headed errors brought on by nerves (which got knowing nods of “yep, that happens” from other black belts later), I did acceptably well. I faced down literally an international panel of seven sensei — Shihan being in from Okinawa, and also we have a contingent of Germans from one of our sister dojo here for the fall seminar — whose collective belt rank totaled well over forty degrees, and I achieved ni-dan status.

You don’t get a new belt, of course. It’s still the same black belt as before. But there’s kind of a joke that a truly experienced black belt becomes a white belt again, because over time the black threads fray and break, revealing the white canvas core underneath, so that a truly high-level sensei’s belt can be tattered indeed.

And this afternoon, after I passed my test . . .

. . . I glanced down at my belt . . .

. . . and I found a tiny frayed spot on the corner of one end where the white canvas is peeking through.

I consider it my ni-dan badge. ^_^

The post The No Longer Littlest Black Belt Takes the Next Step appeared first on Swan Tower.

Nearly all of the essays for the New Worlds Patreon this month are going to be talking about genitals or other explicit topics, beginning this week with circumcision. You have been warned; now comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Circumcision appeared first on Swan Tower.

On November 12th, 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific, 1 a.m. UTC), I’ll be the Guest of Honor for a session of the Electric Sheep online reading series — for poetry! Yep, I’ll be reading my Hugo poem, “A War of Words,” and possibly something else if time permits. But I won’t be alone: my fellow finalists Mari Ness, Ai Jiang, Angela Liu, and Oliver K. Langmead will be joining us, along with Brian U. Garrison (the president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association) and Brandon O’Brien, who was Poet Laureate for the Seattle Worldcon. So it’s a heck of a lineup!

Attendance is free, but you do have to register in advance, and space is limited. If you’re interested in joining us, sign up now!

The post Electric Sheep online reading! appeared first on Swan Tower.

It seems fitting for Halloween that the traditional fifth-Friday New Worlds Patreon theory post should focus on weird critters — but in this case, real ones! Let’s talk about drawing inspiration for science fictional and fantasy species from the aliens we share a planet with: comment over there . . .

The post New Worlds Theory Post: Real Biology Is Stranger Than Fiction appeared first on Swan Tower.

How many people have ever been able to afford to retire, and what has “retirement” meant through the ages, anyway? The New Worlds Patreon has some thoughts — comment over there . . .

The post New Worlds: The Retired Life appeared first on Swan Tower.

Insurance is rather a hot-button topic these days, especially (but not only) in the field of healthcare. How did it even get started? That’s the topic this week at the New Worlds Patreon — hint, it involved ships sinking at sea. Comment over there!

The post New Worlds: Are You Insured? appeared first on Swan Tower.