this discussion made me think of It Had to be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. The first time Phoebe (who had been raped as a teenager but Dan didn’t know this at the time) and Dan made love, she asked him if he could stop at various times and each time, he did. Then she consented to things going further until after penetration, she again asked him to stop. He pulled out and was quite frustrated but there was never any question that he would accede to her request. At this point, he just thought she was a bit of a nutter or maybe the world’s worst tease but he pulled out anyway. It was this action that gave Phoebe the confidence to trust that Dan wouldn’t hurt her and that if things got too much, he wouldn’t be “overcome with lust” and unable to stop.

My description above may sound like Phoebe was testing him – she wasn’t, at least not consciously. The scene is told using both POV’s so the reader is not in the dark about what’s really going on. I thought it was a great scene and it’s one I just about always remember when I read a “I can’t stop” scene. For Phoebe, the greatest gift from Dan she could receive was not that she was irresistible to him (although I do see the turn on in that (when it’s totally consensual of course), don’t get me wrong) but that he could subjugate his own (very strong) desires for hers – the idea of “self sacrifice” if you will and I think that is just as sexy as the other.

p.s. on the blog’s main page, I can find this entry, but without its title and link to comments. I had to link to the comments from another comment.

Thank you for the link. (I am meaning to get over there and post. I wanted to see what others had to say first, though.) If I can take even a teensy bit of credit in motivating you to write on this, I feel this whole blog’s existence has been justified.

RfP,

Thank you for the link. In the Taslitz book I mention in the post, he has a chapter on gendered language which is relevant to Pineau in in specific way: silence. While women are supposed to be chatty and men silently putting up with it, in fact, all the data shows that men command more verbal space in public. Given this, he asks what we can infer when women are silent in date rape scenarios.

Although date rape, by Pineau’s definition excludes include violence or its threat, your point that in sexual assault situations silence may be warranted is excellent.

Carolyn Jean,

Thank you for giving me a reason to consult the Urban Dictionary today.

“Consent is determined from the perspective of the man: the court has to be persuaded that the man believed, sincerely and reasonably, that the woman did not consent”

One important angle on this is whether men and women define consent differently, and men’s understanding of women’s speech. Have you read Deborah Cameron? I recommend The Myth of Mars and Venus and her earlier Verbal Hygiene.

The Myth of Mars and Venus makes the case that men *do* understand consent in the same manner as women, but cultural myths give specious plausibility to excuses having to do with the woman’s communication skills (e.g. “She never came out and said NO”). This excerpt gives a few highlights of Cameron’s arguments:

On non-consent that’s indirectly stated: “Some individuals – for instance, people with autism – may indeed find indirectness confusing …. Does Gray [author of Men Are From Mars] think that maleness is a disability? And if he really believes men cannot process indirect requests from women, how does he explain the fact that men quite frequently make indirect requests to women?”

Describing a university tribunal over two accusations of rape: “Nobody asks him why he did not consider the possibility that by saying she was tired and then apparently falling asleep, MB was communicating that she wanted him to stop. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn’t want to have sex.”

Cameron also points out that the advice to firmly say “NO” (and the subsequent question, “Did you make it clear?”) can be counter to what safety classes teach (don’t antagonize; stay alive).

Despite all the problems inherent in generalizing about the genre and about male sexual aggression, I *do* think there are subversive and female empowering elements in the use of the “uncontrollable hero lust” tropes in Romance. Just as there are reactionary or regressive elements, too, IMO.

My sense is that what counts is our *attention* to how we continue to generate these tropes, a more thoughtful consideration of what IMO too often amounts to the automatic mimetic repetition of various tropes through the genre. As long as we’re talking about it, in other words, we’re okay. As soon as we stop thinking and questioning, though, we’re abdicating more than just our right and ability to critically question the genre.

There are certainly examples where this conceit is not used so (upon reflection) positively, I know I’ve read one recently where hero did a good job arousing virgin, then when he got to penetration, he lost her and just completed with excuse that he couldn’t pause now. He goes back to work later (The Scarlet Spy, I think) and meets her needs much more thoroughly but there you are.

But like any attempt to take the specific to the general, close reading and contextualization of the uses of this myth is time consuming and difficult but important. The devil is in the ‘counting’ or ‘weighting’ as you jump to the fun generalizations.

Your point about us knowing what is in the heroine’s mind is so important. We have an advantage the hero (or the jury) does not. I think that point, added to the earlier ones (from Marg, Carolyn Jean, Mojo) that the hero is like this only with the heroine, are very important in contextualizing these quotes.

Carolyn Jean,

My point about subversive meanings in these texts is an attempt to be open to the possibility that romance doesn’t (only) thoughtlessly replicate pernicious gender norms, but also creates a space where women may safely test out and subvert those norms.

One of the things feminist theory has had to face in the last 20 years is the fact that even with institutional and legal barriers removed, a lot doesn’t change in terms of attitudes, so a lot doesn’t change in terms of the old age problems sexism [too simple, I know] causes (lower wages, less political power, women subject to more violence, etc.) So feminist theorists have turned to the way norms are conveyed not in these explicit and overt ways but in all kinds of texts, like pop culture texts such as film and television, and even bodies themselves are texts in this sense. Comcomitantly, one of the strategies feminist theorists have explored, in addition to the usual strategies of looking at laws, at government, etc., is introducing counter myths, counter images, etc., to free up rhetorical or conceptual space to re-conceive gender ways that allow power to be distributed more fairly and more for the common good.

In that context, I was wondering if women’s use (as authors and readers) of a myth like the myth of uncontrollable hero lust in romance may in fact represent taking a myth which perpetuates male power and subverting it by recontextualizing it as a part of respectful loving lovemaking in which male and female power is distributed fairly. I mean, he says he cannot stop, but it’s not actually uncontrollable in any of those scenes. It’s very interesting to me that this particular myth occurs in contexts in which the sexual scenario is at the absolute height of respect, open communication, and and emotional attunement (say what you want — these heroes are amazing in bed) — the exact opposite of the rape scenario.

Tumpkerin,

Yes, I agree that reading meaning into female production and consumption of rape myths is very hard to do. There’s the horizontal problem that Laura and Robin have pointed out — what something means to one reader may differ for another. And then there’s the vertical problem — how do we go from our minds to the text and to the world at large?

I agree that we need to be very careful with both these vertical and horizonatal problems.

But I am unsatisfied with that as an answer to the question of how romance relates to women’s interests (again, with the acknowledged need to contextualize which romance, which women, which interests).

I think the recognition of how hard this is has to be the FIRST thing we do, not the LAST.

And I think that romance lovers have to acknowledge that if we can’t make easy and fast assumptions about negative impacts of romance on women, then we can’t make easy and fast positive ones either. So claims that romance taught us about sex or love, or that romance gives us hope, or that romance taught us everything we ever needed to know (as in the new Smart Bitches column) should, in fairness, be subjected to the same scrutiny.