In these high flying media conglomerate days, I never expect to find insightful commentary on gender issues in anything mainstream. Newspapers? When even the supposedly liberal New York Times dedicates half of an article about a reproductive rights march that totaled about a million people (the largest march on Washington ever) to the 150 protesters that bothered to show up, there's no hope. Movies? Aside from a few good ones that manage to sneak in, I think I can sum the situation up by noting that filmmakers believe that female characters must either be almost entirely eliminated from movies (such as in Bee Movie, which didn't like the fact that bee hives are almost 100% female in real life, and made all the bees male), or be sex vixens or romanticsimps , for the most part. Books? OK, this is where it gets interesting. I brought two books to read on a recent flight. One was an acclaimed literary novel, the other an "exotic thriller" that was a huge best seller. In both books, I found fascinating ideas about gender roles, gender identity, and sexuality.

Taking a business over pleasure approach, I decided to read The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, first. (I was reading it for my book club.) The short but extremely dense novel is about Binh, a gay Vietnamese chef who cooks in the Parisian home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. I always see male authors praised for their "true" portrayals of female characters, but rarely are female authors credited for writing complex male characters. Truong does such a good job with Binh that my friend Alex kept thinking the book was written by a man. Interesting, isn't it?

Further, Binh's observations and commentaries about gender and sexuality, as well as racism, colonialism, and classism, cut as sharply as the knife he uses on his own hand at times. Food seems to provide many excellent metaphors for social issues. This may be a lot for under 300 pages, but somehow it works. I Had an Idea This Morning observed:

...the story is massively annoying and also impossible to put down. The author must have been trying to set some kind of record—her narrator, a gay Vietnamese cook working in the Parisian kitchen of Gertrude Stein, wrestles with gender issues, sexuality issues, class issues, ethnic identity issues, child abuse issues and cultural issues. But Truong is a good writer, and somehow she manages to keep this goofy overload from weighing down her story.

My book club, consisting of four extremely smart women and me, wrestled with all the issues, and barely tackled half of them. If you read The Book of Salt, I'd love to know what you thought.

I bought my other book, Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, because I thought it would be one of those gory, hard-boiled, guilty-pleasure reads with no redeeming value whatsoever. The book's blurbs all gushed about how it was an "exotic thriller," so I assumed this meant junk food for the brain. I could not have been more wrong. Especially reading the book back-to-back with The Book of Salt, I was slammed with lessons on how social attitudes about sex, sexuality, and gender differ in Southeast Asia and western culture. As Det. Sonchai Jitleecheep navigates around Bangkok (properly called Krung Thep) trying to solve the murder of an American Marine, and more important, Jitleecheep's former police partner and best friend, fascinating discussions about Buddhism, prostitution and its sociological and personal costs and benefits, transgender identity, gender reassignment surgery, and sexual orientation.

Mainly Mysteries discussed the book in a book club, and found that the murder mystery was a pleasant side note to all the other things going on in the book:

Several people didn’t really care about the mystery; they were more intrigued with the cultural background, and the quite unusual characters... Several people didn’t really care about the mystery; they were more intrigued with the cultural background, and the quite unusual characters... Sonchai’s mother was especially popular among the group, a real survivor who lived a life that’s “just the way things are.”

Also striking was how in Thailand, the bar girls leave their small villages uneducated and dirt poor and end up rich and pampered in Bangkok (oh, they earn it all right), and practically holding up their village’s economy single-handedly. Perhaps I should rephrase that… this is a rather perilous narrative. We got into trouble a few times discussing this; the double entendres kept snaring us inadvertently.

What I loved about this book most was the way prostitutes, johns, and prostitution were treated. The nuanced discussion and cultural context in the book was fascinating, and after reading it, I felt particularly depressed by the pathetic way American media treated the whole Eliot Spitzer situation. (Although I've spilled enough ink about that already, I do think that the recent headline made me more perceptive to the ideas Burdett presented.) There was absolutely no Madonna/Whore treatment of the prostitutes, compelling reasons were given for why a man might want to pay for sex and what typically happens when he does, and the economic role of prostitution in Thailand and how it affects individual psyches were all thoroughly explored. For more information on Burdett's research, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP)-east blog points to an October 2007 article in The Herald Tribune. (The article notes that Bangkok 8 is being made into a movie, which depresses me. What are the odds that all the great feminist aspects of the book won't be lost in Hollywood's typical handling of hookers, sex, and Asia? Sigh.)

Incidentally, both Truong and Burdett were lawyers before they began their writing careers. Had I known that law school provided such a fertile training ground for excellent narratives that explore sex and gender, I may not have dropped out over 10 years ago.

Suzanne also blogs at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants and Live Active Cultures