cliterature

The more I think about it the more I see it.  It is often said of women that they fancy the bad boy, but they marry a good man.  But isn’t the same story told just as often about men?  Even Puss in Boots, the “cat” is willing to doing anything for the miller’s son, even thought see is set aside for the princess.  And most recently I have been reading an old adventure/romance called, robustly, The Pirate and the Lady, by Leslie Turner White (Ace, 1961).

The blurb and inside synopsis is very focused on the relationship between the pirate and his “insatiable” lady.  The lady, Genevieve, is a gorgeous 40-year-old who married to avoid the unfortunate fate of a cavalier family on the losing side, and found the respectable husband she never loved to be unpleasant and impotent,  and proceeded to cuckold him–repeatedly.  By the end of chapter two she has been surprised in bed with a sea captain by her outraged husband, shot him dead, protected and cunningly implicated her lover, and made a break for America with him to escape justice.

My kind of woman.

The sad-but-true aspect of the story is that this is not the woman the pirate marries in the final chapter.  That is, as usual, a juvenile daughter of an influential father whom the pirate has greatly impressed–the father being an earl who will get the pirate a knighthood as well as a wife (So sue me, the pirate and the father seem more in love than any other couple in the book).  And Genevieve?  Said father of the groom brushes her off in the closing scene:  ”Faint heart n’er won fair lady … As for your affair with the Lady Genevieve, that can be chalked off to experience.”

Overall it is a rather interesting book, being an adventure romance not clearly aimed at only men or only women. But it does seem that if there is an exciting older, femme fatale in the bed during act one, there with be a wedding to a princess in the epilogue. Just like the gay stories that end with some kind of suicide, or career woman old movies where she proves to the man that she is his equal… then marries him and quits work to raise the kids.  (Eat the cake too?  I don’t think so!)

Just like a woman might date James Dean, but marry Pat Boone –it seems men are meant to fantasize about fooling around with Lilith before they settle down with Eve. And when it comes right down to it, it looks like double standards right across the board. Of course, I am still reading this book (you caught me, I skipped over and read the last chapter ahead of time) and haven’t yet discovered the ultimate fate of fiesty Genevieve–keep your fingers crossed for her.  Maybe she settles down with a hot Jamaican and lives lustily ever after (however I suspect not).

“Altered Art” is basically something make out of scrap, discarded objects and other bits and pieces.  It can be scrap-booking, cyberpunk taxidermy or pretty much anything.  Recently I have been making cute little monsters out of old My Little Ponies and mythical creatures from scissors confiscated at airports.  (I just put the finishing touched of ‘My Little Cthullu’ and sprayed on that coat of sealant that means I have to stop fiddling with it).

I recently suggested that it might be fun to make altered art based on a page from a romance novel.  This is normally done by selectively blocking out some of the words to create a different message.  It is a method often used by the poets, but can be a fun exercise for anyone (well, I thought so).  As it happens, I wasn’t exactly stampeded by people taking up the challenge.  But what was lacking in quantity was more than made up for by quality.

 Bree Bridges came up with this stunning digital approach (shown below).  Bree is half of the wonderful writing team Moira Rogers.  So show some appreciation of her obvious talent by visiting her/them at moirarogers.com.  (Go on, go and have a look.)

And here is my rather less skillful stab at the same idea–which is not at all digital and predictably came out…well, a bit rude. (Quelle surprise).  And a little bit rude in an M/M sort of why.  (ditto).

If anyone else wants to have a go at it, please do send me the results and I will be sure to post it.  That would be worth at least 5 bonus points, maybe even as many as 10.

What, nobody wants a toaster?

When I was going through high school the New Zealand government was really pushing a campaign where the slogan was “Girls can do Anything”.It was a good idea to try and open up the vocational opportunities for women, and get girls to think about the issue when they were still at school deciding whether to pursue math and science subjects.

However the campaign quickly started producing some annoying side effects.  Because I scored well in chemistry, several teachers made a concerted effort to convince me to continue to to take chemistry.  But chemistry did not, for the most part, interest me–and other subjects did.  And while I was good at chemistry I was equally good at those other subjects.  The implicit message seemed to be that if, as a girl, I could excel in a traditionally male-dominated discipline I was under an obligation to pursue it. 

I get a similar feeling every time someone sees me reading a romance and expresses surprise.  Or they find I write romance and ask me why–as if, given that I am a reasonably bright professional women, an interest in genre romance is an almost inexplicable aberration.  Yes, I can and do read literature, scientific non-fiction, technical manuals and epic poetry and ancient Greek plays.  I also read westerns, thrillers, romance, fan fiction, comic books and erotica. 

 I don’t feel the need to justify my interest in romance.  Girls can do anything.  Girls can read anything.  Girls can write anything.  The operative word her is anything–including romance, stories with the goal of sheer gratuitous entertainment and various “chick” genres.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with chick stuff.  In fact, isn’t suggesting that an intelligent woman should not be interested in traditionally feminine genres and vocations actually reinforcing, rather than challenging, the deeply embedded-sexism that is still clinging to our culture?

The most recent survey that I can find* states that only 12% of romance novels with a contemporary setting included the use of condoms (in 2000)–and in several novels the heroine is shown as rejecting condom use when the hero mentions it. In the same study undergraduates who read romance novels had less favorable attitudes to condoms and were less likely to use them. I have two somewhat conflicting thoughts that relate to whether contemporary romance novels should depict safe sex.Firstly, I feel fiction should not be socially engineered. Authors should be free to write (publishers to manufacture and retailer to sell) any material they they wish. The contents of a novel may influence, but never cause a reader’s behavior. The reader remains responsible for what they read, and for everything they subsequently do. In fact, research is very ambiguous about how fiction may affect behavior. Most studies taken to show that media (such as television) influence behavior (such as violence) probably relate more to the suggestion of a permissive environment–rather than an effect on temperament or long term behavioral tendencies.

I realise (after much badgering) that most woman like the alpha-male, if not in real life than certainly in romance fiction. This probably accounts for the fact that 99% of heterosexual romance (completely made up statistic, but you get the point) has a power imbalance in favor of the male.  Some commentators assert that beta heroes are on the rise, but I have yet to see a great deal of evidence for this.

Mainstream romance beta’s still come in limited flavors: the nerd, the high fantasy (e.g. Taming the Forest King–Claudia Edwards), the gorgeous geek (e.g. Gone with the Nerd–Vicki Thompson) or the rich boy (e.g. A Lick and a Promise–Jo Leigh). And some of these stories still end with the heroine all overwrought that she has been too bossy. And if, like me, you shop in the AA shelves (that’s African American fiction), well, just be prepared to spend more time liking for beta male romance than actually reading it.

 However there has been a slight increase in beta-male romance (from basically none to just very little) and an increase in alphas with vulnerabilities.  For example the trope of the ‘wounded hero’ has become more popular–alphas rendered vulnerable by amnesia, magical curse or something less subtle like a gunshot wound.  And, in fact, wonder of wonders,  there might be some more books in the middle ground (like Joey Hill who writes beta men for readers who like alpha men).

My only hope is that somehow, the beta-hero and the flawed alpha will meet somewhere in the middle.  Some weird fantasy world where men and women have relationships that where who’s on top is just a matter of sexual positioning, not some kind of sociological statement (patriarchal or feminist).  Until then, I’ll keep hunting for the elussive beta and spend the rest of the time reading gay romance (where one can normally stop gender politics getting the way of a good love story).

In a recent Ledger article university professor Robert Thompson suggests that the new hip, handsome vampires of modern fiction are “an attempt to really start domesticating the notion of death.”  Others quoted in the article expand on the idea that fiction about the fashionably undead is all about anxiety and a fear of death threatening from all side on our globally-warmed planet.  And the vampire is, if course, a gothic figure–traditionally embodying in fiction whatever we most fear: damnation, isolation, crime, deviancy and, yes, even death itself.  But that was then.  Anyone who has read romances ranging from the late Victorian period to the modern day knows that vampires have gone through the looking glass.  Their meaning has, if anything, turn this traditional depressing meaning completely on its head.  Allow me to explain….

 Vampires in Victorian times were damned, early last century they are monsters, by seventies they are more scientific/less religious type of obligate murderer, but often conflicted about it.  The mirror-moment was around the time of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in which vampire’s could, and often did murder–but could live without killing.  And the vampire hero arrived by the 90s–a development epitomised by PN Elrod’s Vampire Files series in the 1990s).  From this point on vampires could be heroes just like anyone else–just heroes with special nutritional requirements and special powers.  Yes, in the new Buffyesque world there are still monster-vampires, but there are also hero vampires and other than the fangs the two have little in common.

But why, you might ask, are vampires so damned (literally and figuratively) popular in modern romance and erotic romance?  Well, when it comes to romance I think the vampire solved a peculiar problem.  These days we do not want the heroine of a romance story to be a swooning damsel in constant need of saving and seducing.  We want someone sensible, intelligent and proactive.  So the romance heroine now is older, often a professional, rarely a virgin and often more than capable of solving her own problems (if they are problems of a normal type).  Today’s romance heroine kicks ass.  But the thing is most women still want an alpha hero.  At a basic level the majority of romance readers still want to submit to a powerful brooding brute of a man–but without being a fainting, pathetic whisp of a girl.  Hmmm, ain’t life complicated in fantasyland these days.  So who can step up and  cherish, protect and to some extent even overpower a self-actualised kick-ass heroine… albeit on a strictly consensual basis. 

Because simply being a male is no longer any basis for being considered powerful enough to accomplish that end.  Enter the vampire.   Because even of you are a kick-ass female police detective, a marine, a relic hunter, or private eye (etc) you could be forgiven for being a little overwhelmed by an immortal with superhuman strength and psychic powers.  I mean really, woman’s lib only goes so far.  And the occult also pops out villains that even the most competent mortal heroine might need a little help to vanquish.  So the fact a vampire is dead is actually rather beside the point… and if you track vampire romances it is becoming more beside the point by the day.  The early vampire heroes of the 70s and 80s used to brood endlessly about their damnation and yearn to become human again.  The modern vampire hero is typically having far too much fun (including in the bedroom) to that sort of nonsense.  He is basically there to be uber-alpha, all that and a dash of magic. 

When we needed a man even a modern women could be a little in awe of, the vampire box was the closest brand to hand–with a little extra seasoning and a whopping does of re-engineering.  I mean, what else could we do?  Make the pixies more butch?  The ghosts more corporeal?  The zombie more, um, not so disgusting?  No, the vampire was the monster for the job.  Vampire heroes are not, in the gothic sense of the word, vampires at all.  Just the ultimate Mr. Tall Dark and Fangsome with an intriguing paranormal twist–the liberated woman’s caveman, with a cute foreign accent.  And if the academics are a little too attached with their gloomy gothic preconceptions to stop worrying and join the party, well, never mind.  The rest of us are doing just fine, even with death still out there all undomesticated in the new millennium.  That’s my opinion anyway, YMMV (your mythos may vary).

Much is sometimes made of how the recent upsurge in erotic romance is some new and outrageous development. The sex, the salacious covers, the gay and group sex! As a person who has been reading erotic books all my life I find this perspective a little naive. There has always been erotic fiction with lurid covers and options including gay, group, furry and so much more (erotic romance ebooks have a ways to go before I’ll consider them really decadent). Reaching to my bookshelf I pulled down a few examples.

First up we have The Velvet Trap (1971) with a cover showing two women and the tag line: “She spent one night with another woman–and never wanted a man again!” and the first line is: “Jan Flowers, from early childhood on, had always known the difference between a penis and a pencil.” That’s right, the word ‘penis’ in the very first sentence.

Next on the shelf is When Men Meet (1963). The blurb on the back ends: “In the arms of this voluptuary Cassius found himself helpless … a slave to unlooked for passions.” So that covers FF and MM within the first two books.  Beside that sits The Sign of Eros (1953): “Two Women … one man … a single love”. FFM, check.

Then there is In Bed We Cry (1943): “This gay and clever novel by the glamorous Ilka lays bare the secret intrigues and love affairs that take place in the smart atmosphere of New York’s ‘beauty and fashion’ world … the intense struggle for money and glamour, the casual love affairs, the pleasure-hungry of cocktail parties and night clubs.” Erotic chick lit, check.

Finally–because this is just an illustrative sample, I could go on–there is The Waters of Centaurus (1970) : “The Sea King was handsome, perhaps the most overwhelming male personality that Police Sergeant Sibyl Sue Blue had ever met … but he wasn’t human.”  Furry, or in this case scaly, check.

So before suggesting that the new incarnation of erotic romance, ebooks, the internet or any modern phenomenon is somehow creating a new wave smut hitherto unknown to womankind–look back. Exactly the same themes of alpha men, shape shifters, threesomes, orgies, furries, spanking, bondage, seduction and morethan seduction, slavery, fetish, role playing etc etc etc is there when you look back to the mass produced genre fiction of the day. Pulp novels, penny dreadfuls, medieval poetry, neolithic stone carvings… (no idle claim, I will show all of these, or at least pictures of them, in later posts).

And interestingly in all the cases where the gender of the author or artist can be determined, women have been represented in this activity. Women have not suddenly leaped into creating and consuming erotica, we are part of a long, rich and diverse tradition of treating sex like (shock, horror) it is alluring, amusing and just plain fun.  Like it is something to package for consumption and make money of, unapologetically or–if we must–anonymously.

Women, books and sexuality–not just for the new millennium.