For reasons not worth getting into, I was perusing the Kama Sutra the other day and laughing cynically at those un-PC parts they don’t usually include in the fun illustrated manuals.

For example, this gem under the section titled About Classes of Women Fit and Unfit for Congress with the Citizen, and of Friends, and Messengers:

Lovely, isn’t it? I wanted to laugh at this part too, because, well, just look at it. But the more I thought about it, the more I sadly had to admit that the attitude in this ancient paragraph is actually not so different from those of many people living and breathing and walking this earth right now.

I was ready to forget about this foray into antique sex manuals when a friend casually made a joke: he said his grandmother had a saying that “some women are for working and some women are for loving.” It was meant to be funny because he said it about a girl we both knew, with the insinuation of what kind of women she was (and isn’t it funny that in saying this, you already know which kind that is?).

I was offended on her behalf. It was the sexist Kama Sutra nonsense all over again. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why it bothered me so much. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what was irking me was the whole notion of categories of women in the first place. Because it’s not just an arbitrary grouping of characteristics, but it always comes with the understanding that some categories are inherently better than others.

You see it everywhere.

There’s the girl you have fun with, and then the girl you take home to meet your folks, marry, and have babies with. There’s the good girl and there’s the bad girl. The slut and the virgin. The Madonna and the whore (or, depending on your source material, a “public woman”, which makes prostitution seem more like a bizarre community service).

Here’s the thing, though: it’s all the same woman. A woman isn’t some product you can buy off Amazon. Life isn’t a porn website where women neatly fall into different niches according to their most salient features, and they’re offered up freely to you depending on your purpose for them. The infuriating thing is that you can never really win with these categories, anyway. If you decide you want to play up your sexuality, you get plucked out of all the other categories (i.e. you’re not a smart woman anymore, or a virtuous one) and put in a little box. In fact, I think so many romance and erotica tales rest on the heroine in question busting out of one box and claiming another one.

But again, she was always the same woman.

I have to admit that I had reservations writing a main character who was a mother. I noticed that I, too, was assuming that just because she was in the mom box, she couldn’t possibly be in the babe box. I was just as guilty as the people I was getting angry with for looking at all the wonderful depth inside each woman and chopping it up into mutually exclusive pieces. When I was brainstorming ideas for this story, I thought, “hm, she’s quite a lot older than him, that’s going to be a feature of this story, because it’s so unusual.”

But is it really?

Wasn’t I working from my own unflattering preconceptions about which women are “fit” and which ones “unfit” for, ahem, congress with our beloved bad boy hero?

When I realized I was writing this way, with all the unfair stereotypes I thought I didn’t take part in, I decided that I wouldn’t make Ally a cougar type. In fact, I wouldn’t make her a “type” of woman at all.

I like to think of myself as a complex, multi-faceted personality, so maybe I would give this character the same consideration. She isn’t “that type of woman.” She’s just herself. A little more experienced than David in some ways, in other ways not. A mother in some moments, a giggly, playful child herself in the very next moment. The hunter and the hunted. Good and bad.

In future, I would like to learn to drop the “some women are for X and some women are for Y” belief and just focus on ordinary women who find themselves doing X, and perhaps then doing Y. Characters in books can be archetypal. But if I want to make them seem like real people, I think I’m going to have to drop the idea that a character can’t be more than one thing at a time.

The erotica market functions on categories, I know, and if you didn’t know any better you might assume that the only people who ever really have sex are a pair of 20 – 35-year-old good-looking straight people. Everyone else gets a sub category, so you know that their variation of romance is more like a fun exception or a “kink.”

Don’t worry, I’m not about to foist some outlandish characters on my readers, but I think I am going to try mix up the categories a little. Just to see what happens…

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