letter from the editors: kinktober
Hi boba balls that have been soaking in the sweet syrup of literature and ready to get sucked up by the big straw of our magazine,
On October 5th, a couple other Big Straw members and I all randomly showed up to the same talk, which was Race & Romance: Coloring the past, coloring the future. Dr. Margo Hendricks talked about her experience in academia with naming pre modern critical race theory, as well as her newer job as a romance writer! We got very quickly onto the topic of sex, which led to how in the West we don’t see the romance genre as Serious Literature, even though it captures a very specific part of the human experience. People, as you might know, can have sex. And people might even enjoy having sex. Dr. Hendricks argued that the romance genre is special in that it focuses on the ways people enjoy having sex. Contrast this to the sex scenes in movies. How often can you tell what they’re even specifically doing, let alone if they’re enjoying it? It’s almost like we just assume they like it without the actual characters’ inputs.
So this got us as co-editors-in-chief thinking about how we might want to push that genre forward as well. Why not? Isn’t what we consider most amateur writing in the romance genre? It seems like with the democracy of the internet, writers began to be able to explore the space of sex and kinks. While these movements existed before the internet, I think forums, then fanfiction sharing sites, then social media really opened up the space to the mainstream. Never has it been easier to look for things that you might like during sex. Even in the 2000s, Sex and the City was considered revolutionary for talking about vibrators on TV. Now we have websites to match your kink preferences with your partner(s) so you can kick start conversation on it.
And isn’t it subversive to reread modern history in the terms of romance?
Why is it that we can read romance as a major force for historic stories such as the Trojan War, or even for characters like Napoleon? But we can’t read into those things to understand people like Oppenheimer, whose tumultuous dynamics with his fellow scientists can be seen as a type of caring and love that you see in relationships?
As we discussed this in our meeting, one of our group members noted that it was Kinktober on Tumblr. Why not have our own celebration of sex and romance in our magazine? So this October, look forward to a bunch of articles about romance writing, about smut, about sex itself, and so on. Hope you enjoy this month of writing!
Your big straw creators,
Seoyoung + Phyllis.