"The bear is 'like a dog, like a groundhog, like a man: big.' One night, by the fire, he begins to lick her with a tongue 'capable of lengthening itself like an eel,' and 'like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered and the bear licked away her tears.' Lou becomes lyrical and hazy with love for the bear; a sort of delirium descends on her. She wants him to devour her, but he is good, and gentle, 'once laid a soft paw on her naked shoulder, almost lovingly.' Can Lou get what she wants – from a man, or a bear? Eventually, the bear, by sheer dint of being of a bear, injures her.... When Bear was first published [in 1976], to great acclaim and some controversy, the feminist and women’s liberation movements had been burgeoning for some years in North America and Europe.... Just how linked to sex should feminism be? And what kind of sex, for that matter? The 'sex wars' of the 80s were on the horizon, and heterosexual feminists were grappling with men as objects of desire who can nonetheless always pose a threat. [The author] is playful, slyly winking on these questions; riffing, for example, on age-old misogynistic associations of women’s genitals with fish, as when Lou buys fish for the bear, which repels her."
That's on the occasion of a new edition of the book, but I'm only seeing an old (expensive) edition on Amazon for us United Statesians.
From the quotes in the article, I'd say that the book is comic erotica.
I like the question "Just how linked to sex should feminism be? And what kind of sex, for that matter?" The answer to the second question can't be with a bear. But it can be literary fantasy.
This gets my "pornography" tag because I want the tags to be neither too broad nor too narrow. I collect things that are useful to think of together, and that includes all sorts of thoughts about why the things the tag gathers together are different from each other.
IN THE EMAIL: A reader named David writes:
I was unfamiliar with Bear until now, but I feel as if it, if you’ll excuse the implication, ploughs similar ground to Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon about 30 years earlier.
In the story, in case you’re unfamiliar with it—and this is from pretty long-ago memory. A scientist does selective breeding to make a smarter sheepdog and is able to breed one (Sirius) with Human-level intelligence. He raises the dog along with his daughter Plaxy and they form a complicated relationship, to say the very least!
It struck me at the time I read it as deeply feminist, though what do I know? Being a man and all. Also, it’s written by a man, which may or may not disqualify it.
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