How H-rating really works (plus a reading update)

How exactly does the Helenometer operate? What constitutes H-rated reading, and what doesn’t? I feel the need to try and clarify this in my sometimes bumpy quest to read local writing, the krimi brigrade in particular. I must confess I myself find the criteria very confusing. The only clear, absolute rule: in non-fiction, the suffering of animals may not be described; in fiction, no animals may suffer. I’ll close the book (or any other medium) the minute an author expects me to engage with a narrator who deliberately hurts an animal, even if it’s “just” kicking the dog. (I remember the flashpoint of rage that made me chuck that awful Tuscan Sun woman’s book across the room: sitting in a piazza, she revels in the authentic sights and sounds of Italian life going on around her — including a pack of picturesque children “tormenting a kitten”.) The reasons for this go back to childhood traumas, which I am not going to get into at this point, although I strongly recommend that you do not allow your six-year-old to read Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.

I can also pretty much guarantee that I’ll loathe any “hero” who pants to get into the pants of children or teenage girls half his age (Lolita, which I couldn’t finish, made my skin crawl). And I can’t see the point of novels about heroes/anti-heroes who sexually harass their students/colleagues/servants/slaves, commit statutory or any other kind of rape, or resort to prostitutes.

For the rest, it gets very blurry. (more…)

A load off my chest

Reader discretion advisory: not strictly a bookish post. Breasts and medical procedures are mentioned. Sensitive and squeamish readers are advised to crack a beer and watch the boxing instead.

I was 15 the first time I begged my mother, on my knees, for breast reduction surgery. She came close to tears explaining that it was financially out of the question. Three years of sniggering, jeering and jibing at a supposedly good girls’ school had rendered me a wreck.

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The red-button word: writing about rape

Some of you know that I wear a very severe, dark hat as a researcher of sexual violence. In response to popular demand (well, two requests), I’m posting the chapter I contributed to Women’s Activism in South Africa, edited by Jennifer Fish, Hannah Britton and Sheila Meintjies, and recently published by UKZN Press. (For those who don’t want to wade through all 30-odd pages, I get stuck into the Zuma rape trial round about p. 19. Lawyers wishing to represent me may write to me offlist.)

But I thought I’d also explain how on earth I got here, especially given that everything I read or watch has to be H-rated (no animals or children to be hurt, no rape scenes, no excessive gore). As a child I had to be led out of a school screening of Greyfriars Bobbie in such hysterics that I was exempted from any school movies featuring tearjerking animals thereafter. I won’t watch films with rape scenes in them (with the single exception of Thelma and Louise, and that’s because Susan Sarandon’s deathless line “When a woman’s cryin’ like that, it means she ain’t havin’ any fun” is worth a thousand educational lectures).

It all started, strangely enough, at Princeton, during an annus mirabulis in which I was a President’s Fellow there. South Africa was in full transitional swing, Mandela’s name was on everyone’s lips, people drove across two states to take me out to dinner upon hearing that I taught in the same department as J. M. Coetzee (they were to be bitterly disappointed, poor things), and Princeton itself was having a brief moment of radical glory, with a left-wing ghetto that included Cornell West, Toni Morrison, Andrew Ross, Grant Farred, Homi Bhabha, and more. Everyone asked me and Grant (as the token South Africans) about the future of our country, and every time we brought up the subject of gender, people looked baffled. We were on the cusp of a (fairly) peaceful transition from the most-hated regime in the world to democracy — how could gender possibly be important, or even an issue?
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