https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/im-kinda-tired-of-this-book-trope-the-miserable/

Tonight I’m reading at Poolside Poets!

You can still get a signed personalized copy of my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster from Green Apple.

One of my favorite books of the year so far is Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall. It's a queer, sapphic retelling of Moby Dick — except that instead of hunting whales in the North Atlantic, this crew is after giant creatures that live in the soupy atmosphere of Jupiter. 

I was in the process of writing a review of Hell's Heart when the Washington Post killed my book-review column. I was going to say that retellings of classic stories like Moby Dick can so easily turn into karaoke — or pastiche — but that Hall manages to delve into the meaning of Melville's novel, which is the most quintessentially American of all stories, being about industry, man against nature, religion, fanaticism and homoeroticism. 

Hall has written a book about religious passion and pure profit — the twin pillars on which America was built — and how they fuck people up. The descriptions of whaling on Jupiter are utterly transfixing, full of weird details about the leviathans and other beasties that live inside the atmosphere of Jupiter, and the tech used to hunt them. Hell's Heart put me in mind of Malka Older's Mossa and Pleity novella,s which also use Jupiter to good effect — I'm so sick of Mars being everywhere, please give me more Jupiter books!

The ship, the Pequod, feels like a character in the book, and the long digressions about the spermaceti-harvesting and the mechanics of hunting — while gruesome and sometimes a bit upsetting — were legit engrossing.

I had two issues with Hell's Heart, neither of which got in the way of me enjoying the book a whole lot.

The first had to do with the snarky, chatterbox first-person narrator, who seems to feel the need to remind the reader constantly that we're reading a story, and that she's an unreliable narrator. I gather this is a popular narration style thanks to recent books like Dungeon Crawler Carl. I usually love a voicey narrator, but this felt like it was trying too hard, and the more the narrator talks about herself, the less well I feel I know her — because all that self-analysis feels like a smokescreen, or a rationalization. 

Hell's Heart added more evidence for my belief that first-person past-tense is the least immediate form of narration, in which we're the farthest from identifying with a character. (In a nutshell, first-person, past-tense is a character telling you about something that happened to them, which means they're talking about past events with a certain amount of distance thanks to the passage of time. And often, we're aware that this narrator is telling their version of the story. First-person/present tense, meanwhile, feels like we're right there in the moment with a character.

But I mostly wanted to talk about the second issue I had with Hell's Heart.

The protagonist, known only as I, is a former schoolteacher, masochist, and self-destructive slut. She sleeps with a lot of her crewmates, including Q, with whom she has a messed-up romance. We are constantly told how self-destructive I is, though her self-destructiveness remains mostly a matter of being on this voyage in this first place, plus her mostly offscreen hookups with various people. She's never more alive than when she's letting down the people in her life, particularly Q.

We're constantly told that I is a huge slut because she's such a messed-up person, because it's the only alternative to serious self-harm. That having sex with people is the only way she can feel anything. That "hate sex is the best sex." When she does have sex, it leaves her with an empty feeling, as though she was hoping for something more than what she got. She has sex with lots of strangers, because of her deep self-loathing and self-destructive tendencies.

And... I'm kinda tired of characters who only have sex with lots of people as a way of avoiding their issues, or because they're so messed up. I feel like I've come across this trope a fair bit lately, though I can't for the life of me remember what other books I've seen it in — that's what happens when you read up to a dozen books a month and the world is a trash fire. Hell's Heart is just the most recent one I've seen and one of the most explicit.

Anyway, I really don't have a problem with promiscuity being portrayed sometimes as a manifestation of a character's damage. Or with characters who use sex to distract themselves from their problems, or as an alternative to self-harm. It's seriously all good. I know that some people in real life do use consensual sex in less-than-helpful ways, and sex can be an unhealthy addiction, the same way that Pokémon GO! can be. 

Where I have a problem is if the damaged slut becomes the only kind of slut we ever see on the page. Which feels like it's becoming the case.

It's like any other issue to do with representation, really. If the only sluts we see are damaged and/or miserable, then the natural conclusion becomes that all sluts are messed-up individuals. Whereas, if we are sometimes seeing portrayals of happy, reasonably well-adjusted sluts who just really enjoy having lots of sex, then it's totally fine if we do sometimes see people who are fucking to keep from crying. 

Returning to the Pokémon GO! example above... I feel like any activity can become an unhealthy obsession, or purely a means of escape from a bad situation. Back when I had a string of terrible jobs in my twenties, I played Solitaire on the office computer so much that all I could think about was Solitaire. I started playing Solitaire in my spare time. I dreamed about Solitaire. It's just that when someone uses sex as an escape, an outlet, or a way of living on the edge, we see it as a problem on the same level as a hardcore drug addiction, because we've internalized so much Puritanical bullshit about the proper place for sex being a committed relationship in which you are hopefully making obedient, god-fearing babies.

As I wrote about before, I spent years writing erotica for various zines, magazines and anthologies, and I also was heavily involved in sex positive community and organizations. I was even trained as a sex educator by a venerable San Francisco nonprofit, San Francisco Sex Information. I really believe, in the words of Dossie Easton, that "sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." With the acknowledgment that you should of course try not to get a nasty infection, and that enthusiastic consent is a must. And consent begins with communication.

My queer praxis includes community building, mutual aid, fighting against exploitation, and a whole bunch of other things. It also includes smiling happily upon anyone who is having a good time in the bedroom (or the nightclub bathroom, or the Tesla dealership, or wherever). As I wrote in one short story a while back, some of the most important and enduring communities have grown out of people just trying to get laid. 

I see sexuality as one of the most glorious aspects of human nature. It's sensual, it's creative, it touches every aspect of our identities and sense of self. (And yes, of course, some of my favorite people in the world are asexual, and I have nothing but love and respect for those folks.)

And yeah, it's important to talk about the negatives — even beyond the stuff about consent and safety I mentioned earlier. When I was brand new to San Francisco, I was an intern at magazine about sex called Black Sheets, which published a "Bad Sex" issue full of essays and fiction about sexual encounters that just were... not good. Celebrating the splendor of consensual sex between adults can, and often should, include honesty about all of our messy human business — including feelings but also boundaries and a whole mess of other stuff. 

And it should go without saying that I'm not arguing that sluts need to be completely well adjusted in every way — that's a mistake I made when I first started writing erotica, in fact — just that I don't want emotional and psychological problems to be the main reason they're getting busy every single time. 

My favorite recent narrative about an unapologetic joyful slut is the Red Sonja comic by Gail Simone and Walter Geovani. Their version of Red Sonia has a lust for battle as well as the regular kind of lust. After defeating a monster or a tyrant, she loves nothing better than to go to a tavern, find some good looking men and women, and get have some well deserved rest and relaxation. 

Here she is using her reward from saving the kingdom to visit a brothel:

There's no right or wrong way to deal with the ongoing assault on queer identities — people are doing amazing things with horror and dark twisted tales about disaster gays. For me personally, though, a big part of my defiance against the sweaty clammy hoard of religious authoritarians — and the bleating centrist pundits that these holy overlords keep on a tight leash — is to be defiantly, raucously, joyously horny. In fact, before I settled on the idea of a trans rebellion against sumptuary laws for my story in the recent anthology We Will Rise Again, my first idea was to write about people using raw sexuality to fight back against oppression. It was going to be called, "Horny for Justice." I still wanna write that story at some point.

When I feel like things are getting more hopeless and the Dirks of the world are getting too powerful, I immediately want to write some truly obnoxious and beautiful smut. Writing about people seizing control of their own sexuality helps me to feel less helpless in the middle of a tide of repression and sexual control-freakery. That's my cry of defiance. On a related note, I've decided to start writing erotica again in 2026 — stay tuned. 

If it wasn't for sluts, I wouldn't have any community at all. If it wasn't for sluts, much of your favorite art, music, poetry, and other culture would not exist. Anybody with a disobedient body should feel some kinship with sluts — and I'll never forget the talk I heard Carol Leigh, AKA Scarlet Harlot, give back in the day about solidarity between sluts and sex workers, which expanded my view of our shared oppression so much.

So here's my plea: I don't even need to see fewer characters who are having lots of sex for mostly negative reasons or to deal with negative stuff in their lives. But I am begging authors to throw in a few happy sluts, who are just getting some because getting some feels good and brings them  closer to other people.

Fuck it, I'll do it myself.

Music I Love Right Now

Instead of shouting out a particular artist, I wanted to alert y’all to a website that has done serious damage to my bank balance: munckmusic recordings. This is a repository of live recordings of New Orleans music, and it contains pretty much every show from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival going back at least twenty years. There are tons of live shows by artists like Allen Toussaint, Trombone Shorty, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Dumpstaphunk, and many others. It’s thanks to this site that I’ve gotten to hear Dumpstaphunk cover “Unfunky UFO” by Parliament, not to mention Washington covering “The Chicken,” the classic James Brown/Pee-Wee Ellis instrumental previously immortalized by Jaco Pastorius.

But if there’s one concert I’d like to draw your attention to on this site, it’d be the 2016 tribute show to the late, great, Allen Toussaint, featuring folks like Davell Crawford, Art Neville and Bonnie Raitt performing many of Toussaint’s best songs. It’s truly extraordinary.

https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/im-kinda-tired-of-this-book-trope-the-miserable/