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Archive for category Feminist contentions

Interview With A Croatian Feminist, Anarchist, Speculative Fiction Writer, and Avid Genre Fiction Reader

Mar 7

Posted by Jessica in Academia, Blogs and blogging, Feminist contentions, Genre musings | 6 Comments

Milena Benini, a regular reader of this blog, won my last contest. When I realized I had to send her prize to Croatia, I let out a blood curdling scream and hid my wallet,  took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. It turns out Milena is, in her words, an

anarchist, blogger, cat-feeder, cook, dog-minder, editor, feminist, fire-horse, human being, illustrator, journalist, mum, mum, reader, Sagittarius, theoretician, translator, web-mistress, wife, woman.

I couldn’t fit all that on the address label, so Milena kindly agreed to answer a few questions for RRR. She’s also a writer of speculative fiction and has written a paper on the online romance community for her workplace, the Centre For Women’s Studies (more on both below).

1. Say a little about your blog and what you do there.

Well, my tag-line includes women, genre and politics. I have a whole group of posts about women I like and/or admire, particularly early sufragettes, but also some contemporary stars — anyone whose life and work I happen to appreciate. I usually try to post about them on their birthdays, with the idea that, some day, I’ll have a whole “feminist calendar”.

I also write about genres; my primary focus is SF (interpreted as Speculative Fiction, not just sci-fi), but I also talk about mysteries and romances. Oh, and I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly a romance. :)

I sometimes also talk about politics, although that’s mostly related to open-source issues and stuff like that, as well as women’s issues, and sometimes anarchism.

1b. Can you say more about your position on open source?

Writing this on a computer running Ubuntu and having given away a novel under a CC license, I think I can safely say that I am very much in favour of open source. FOSS has a pretty strong community in Croatia, although, as is the case everywhere, I think, a lot of people tend to keep away from it out of habit, or fear of the unknown. There is also the fact that people are often suspicious about things they get for free, because we’re very much conditioned to think that worth can only be measured in money. But there is also a growing number of people who can see the value of things like open source or creative commons. Mostly thanks to Cory Doctorow, probably. :)

2. Is there any way for those who do not read Croatian to read it? I tried Google translator but … unless you are in fact a drunk monkey at the keyboard, I cannot believe it does your words justice.

Oh, yes, Google translator is an endless source of humour, but very little correct translation. Unfortunately, I don’t think that there’s a simple way to resolve this.

3. How long have you been reading romance novels? What are your favorites?

Just about all my life. There is a very famous Croatian author, Marija Juric Zagorka, who wrote about a dozen historical romances — and they’re real monster-novels, one of six and one of twelve tomes! — and that’s where I started. Then I went on to the classics such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. When I started reading in English, I also passed through a — I suppose I should blush now — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss period. In my defense, I was very young at the time. :) . Then there was Georgette Heyer, of course!

I love Loretta Chase, Patricia Gaffney, Jennifer Crusie for the humour, and I also enjoy Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series, especially the first trilogy; Robin McKinley is also among my favourites… oh, there are too many to mention them all. I’ll also read anything with vampires in it — I even read Twilight! Research purposes and all that (I’m writing a book about parallels between vampire and spy fiction) — but, unfortunately, there aren’t that many really good vampire romances.

4. Do you read in English? Translations?

I read mostly in English, especially since translations of romances are few and far between in Croatia, not to mention usually more expensive (smaller print runs make for expensive books!). Furthermore, nowadays, I read a lot on my mobile phone, and there are almost no e-books in Croatian.

As for Croatian romances, I’m afraid the answer is — not any more. Apart from Zagorka, whom I have already mentioned (she was–and still is — probably the best-loved Croatian female author of all times, a very interesting woman who managed to also be a proto-feminist and one of the first female journalists in this part of Europe, and when she got poor in her old age her fans got together to feed and clothe her — a fascinating story, really), there was one woman who was pretty famous as a romance author some thirty years ago, but she stopped writing about a decade ago.

Oh, and there is one woman who writes under an English pseudonym and, allegedly, has a dayjob as a waitress. But we’re a small country (only 4.5 million people) and books are not a good way to make a living. In addition, romances are still mostly despised — even when there are actual romances translated, they’re never marketed as such. SEP is marketed as general fiction in Croatia, and Nora Roberts is invariably shelved in the mystery section.

5. What are some attitudes towards romance novels you’ve encountered?

Well, I have to stress that mine is not a typical situation: I am very much a part of the SF community — which is a lot stronger in Croatia than the romance community — and I don’t have any problems there, because we’re all outsiders together, in a way. And people in the SF community — at least here in Croatia — are not afraid of romance novels; in fact, there are several people who also read them, and when I post about romance novels, people generally react favourably.

Also, at the Centre for Women’s Studies, my interest in any genre was always welcomed, but they are all great women anyway.

6. Can you say a little more about the speculative fiction community in Croatia?

I think it’s more or less the same everywhere: SF-fans are viewed as those strange people who walk around with false pointy ears and recite poetry in Klingon. Even if you don’t speak a word of Klingon, you get marked as such once you publicly proclaim your interest in SF…

In Croatia, the SF community is something of an exception in its attitude towards women: for example, our national SF-award, SFera, has the largest percentage of female award-winners of all Croatian literary awards. I understand that this is something of an anomaly, caused probably by the fact that our fandom was started by grownups and not teenagers, so the more mature outlook rubbed off on the following generations.

7. What is the difference between “SFF” and “speculative fiction”?

Well, “speculative fiction” is the broader term. People first began using it when the borderlines between genres started getting blurred — particularly in the seventies, with New Wave — and it’s getting more and more used today because it’s often impossible to tell if something is science fiction or fantasy. When you look at people like China Mieville, for example, it’s impossible to define him as “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “horror”: there are elements of all three in his work. And “speculative fiction” is a nice umbrella-term for all the genres that, at heart, start from the question “what if”. A lot of people who are interested in one thing are also interested in another, whether as readers, writers, or both. So it makes a lot more sense to use one name for the whole thing.

8. Can you name a couple of your favorites in mystery and speculative fiction?

In mystery, I am a great admirer of the grandes dames — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh — and from the newer authors, I have to single out Martha Grimes, who is doing weird and fantastic and wonderful things while staying strictly within her genre. And SF is my first love, so the list is very long… Terry Pratchett, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Moorcock for the classics; Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod and Cory Doctorow for the new voices; Steven Brust as an all together great guy; ditto for Neil Gaiman. And Robin Mckinley and Melissa Michaels, who also do strange and wonderful things. I think I better stop now…

9. Is there a Croatian romance community?

Not really, I’m afraid. There are two or three blogs that cover romance as one of their interests, but only one blog that I know of that focuses exclusively on romance. And in the “real life” sense, there’s nothing.

10. What did you say in the article you wrote?

Well, it’s basically an overview of the development of the romance community on the Internet, and it includes a (very) short history of the genre itself. The article will be published a special edition of the Centre’s magazine “Treca” (The Third, in female form — Croatian is much more gender-specific than English). There was a whole semester devoted to popular culture intersecting with feminist issues, and my article is part of that.

I tried to show that the Internet has given an opportunity to smart, educated women who like romance to get together and discuss their genre in a way which was difficult before the Internet. And I also tried to outline the way in which the genre has started looking at itself, after long being the object of fascination and disgust for outsiders. I find this somewhat similar to what happened in SF — at one point, SF fans got fed up with outsiders telling them what their genre was like, and started developing their own theory, combining it with the “official” academic approaches and reaching new and exciting things. And now we see a similar process at work in the romance community, which has to deal with the added problem of romance being, to a very large extent, a “female” genre, which is often the reason why it gets so much criticism, regardless of whether the bias is shown openly or not.

The thing is, although genre lit in general has not been overlooked in Croatian academic circles, romance is usually almost completely left out in such analyses, or is dealt with in a very offhandish manner. That’s why I was trying to give people a place to start, especially young women. I mentioned your analysis of ethics in Patricia Gaffney as an example of how romance can be approached not as a phenomenon, but rather as literature.

11. What is the Centre for Women’s Studies?

Well, it’s so far the only such place in Croatia, because our academic community is not really too keen on feminism, at least not in the upper echelons, where decisions are made. The Centre organises all kinds of educational programmes, publishes books, holds workshops, etc. One of the things I do is maintain their web-site, and there are at least some pages in English, so you can take a look if you want.

12. How about a blurb for your book?

Yes, I published a novel at the blog, because I wanted to see how that would be accepted in Croatia. It’s a fantasy novel with a strong romantic element, although I wouldn’t call it exactly  romance. :)

Kalaide, priestess of the Moon, is trying to hold her home together in the midst of war when a strange prisoner is brought: Enaor, an Elder, who lost his family, his city, and almost his sanity in the war for which he blames Kalaide’s gods — and his own brother. With the unnatural winter gripping the land, the two must form an unexpected alliance in order to survive… and maybe, just maybe, save the world as well.

Hvala, Milena! Thank you!

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Attitudes Towards Women in Loretta Chase’s Don’t Tempt Me

Jul 31

Posted by Jessica in Feminist contentions, Genre musings | 21 Comments

I read a romance recently that disappointed me in a particular way — it seemed to uphold views of women that are very negative, even misogynistic.

Before going further I want to preface this with a reflection on my career in philosophy (you’ll see why in a minute). As a new undergraduate I enrolled in a course called “Philosophy of Woman” with a textbook edited by Mary Mahowald of the same name. As a  philosophy major, I was excited to learn what the tradition said about my gender. The textbook took us from the Bible to the twentieth century, and — surprise! –  almost everything in it was derogatory. Then, as now, I was mostly interested in ethical theory, and from Aristotle’s claim that women cannot be virtuous due to their reason’s inability to control their emotions, to Kant’s claim that women know nothing of duty or obligation, to Hegel’s rejection of women’s access to the universal, except through males. Heck, even women in philosophy, like Simone de Beauvoir, seemed to claim that women can only achieve transcendence by essentially becoming men.

Overwhelmingly, the view of women in the western philosophical tradition is that they are lesser versions of men, with diminished mental capacities, and little self-control, who are vain, superficial, and shallow. As Nietzsche put it “One half of mankind is weak, chronically sick, changeable, shifty.”

This was a blow, but I did not give up my philosophy major. I did not give up reading and enjoying Aristotle, Hegel, or Kant. And I did not even give up reading and valuing the very texts from which the passages in Philosophy of Woman were excerpted. 20 years later, I am still studying and learning and teaching philosophy. The tradition is rife with misogyny — almost more so in what it leaves out than when it bothers to mention sex, which is rarely –  but sophisticated (feminist, deconstructing, heck, just careful) readings reveal nuances and tensions within even the most straightforward dismissal of women.

What does this have to do with romance?

Well, I’m going to talk about a recent read, and I want to compare my reaction to my relationship to the philosophical tradition. I have read and enjoyed books by this author, and will continue to do so. And even the book under discussion in this post gave me some moments of genuine enjoyment. In this post, I want to talk about something that really bothered me, but it doesn’t reflect my attitudes toward the book as a whole, other books by this author, or the author herself.

Loretta Chase’s Don’t Tempt Me was my 6th book of Ms. Chase’s after Lord of Scoundrels, the Carsington series, and Your Scandalous Ways. She’s an author I enjoy and will continue to read.

In Don’t Tempt Me, the heroine, Zoe, has just returned to London after being kidnapped and held captive in a harem for 12 years.

Her four sisters, or the “Four Harridans of the Apocalypse” as the hero, Lucien, refers to them, are the portrayed as shallow, narcissistic, stupid, vain, and selfish. Physically, they are ridiculed. They’re compared to dumb animals, a “quartet of crows”, and the two pregnant sisters’ large forms are frequently described in unflattering terms. And they act it, screaming, weeping, gesturing wildly. They don’t care about Zoe, but only their own reputations.

In an early scene, Zoe mentions that she escaped the harem with jewels. Her sisters freeze. Zoe thinks,

“When it came to jewelry, women the world over were the same. If her future and everything for which she’d risked her life had not been at stake, she’d have laughed, because her sisters behaved exactly like the harem women they scorned.”

When Zoe is presented at court, Lucien notes “some of the ladies compressing a little more tightly and edging away from Zoe, as though in fear of contamination”. He thinks of them as “stupid” and again they are described in unflattering animalistic terms — bobbing plumed headdresses — that Lucien fantasizes about knocking off. Zoe notices, too, and compares the women in attendance unflatteringly to the women in the harem. The harem women were “silly”, “like spiteful children”. To compare, Lucien is described by Zoe in animalistic terms as well, but flatteringly, “prowling” like a “tiger”.

Zoe later says, comparing her sisters to women in the harem, “In the harem, we had outbursts all the time, much worse than this. Women screaming, threatening, complaining, hysterical.”

Lucien has a mistress, Lady Tarling. In this scene, Lucien is explaining gently to her that he will need to take Zoe under his wing so she is accepted in the ton. He brings her jewels, and Lady Tarling, of course, “knows exactly what becomes her”.  Again, women are portrayed as superficial gossips, competitive cats, nasty beasts:

“Lord Tarling’s handsome young widow was not on the patronesses’ list. Lady Jersey had taken in her dislike.

‘I preferred you not learn about it from one of the cats who will be there,’ he said. ‘or from the newspapers. They were likely to give you the wrong impression altogether.’

‘It must be a curious impression, indeed, to result in such a gift.’ She gave a little laugh. Her silvery laugh was famous. It was gentler and prettier, many thought than Lady Jersey’s tinkling laughter. This was but one reason Lady Jersey loathed her.”

Lucien explains that he has taken Zoe under his wing, and then this…

“‘My goodness.’ She moved away from him to the nearest chair and sat down hard — but tightly clutching the box, he noted.”

Later, when Lucien calls upon his mistress to break it off with her, he gifts her with jewels again, and we are told, “For what small regret she might feel, the magnificent brooches were more than adequate consolation.”

Again, in these scenes, we are expected to understand that women are competitive, jealous, and more partial to jewelry than anything else.

Later, Zoe and Lucien have an argument, and we get this, in the narrator’s voice:

“Zoe expressed her disgust with him in the time-honored fashion of women everywhere, by shopping exhaustively.”

When Zoe is mad, rather than having a rational disagreement, she flounces off, suggestively, “Zoe stormed out of the vestibule, hips swaying, skirts swishing.”

When Zoe and Lucien become engaged, Harrison, Lucien’s house steward, (who has already noted that Zoe “had her hooks in” his master) explains to his underlings that “Everyone knows there’s little in ladies’ heads but fashion and scandal.”

Lucien’s friend Adderwood notes, “women change their minds. They’re famous for it.”

Besides Zoe, the only female character who is deemed to have any value is Lucien’s aunt, probably because she is crazy. She says things like, “My ankles, as you know, have inspired odes.”. She’s “colorful” — but not really anyone to take seriously.

Am I saying that there are no women who are vain, stupid, shallow, and selfish? Of course not! Meljean Brook, Sherry Thomas, Nora Roberts, Jo Beverly, and many, many other authors have gifted us with very flawed heroines. But it’s one thing to portray flawed women, and another to use broad stereotypes as a shorthand to character. I object to the latter on both aesthetic and moral grounds.

Compare Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Was there ever a more laughable crew than Elizabeth Bennet’s family, especially her mother and sisters? But I can describe each sister and her unique character in detail to you. Mary Bennet and Kitty Bennet are laughably funny, but in very different ways. They are ridiculous, but never ridiculed. And Mr. Bennet does not come away as merely the male victim of these crazy women. No, his role in the family dynamic — his lassitude, his shirking of responsibility, his blameworthiness for the situation in which the Bennet family finds itself — is carefully developed as well.

The negative attitude towards women that comes across in Don’t Tempt Me is not just a view held by one character. It permeates this book. Nearly every character, including the heroine, and even the narrator (with whom I do not confuse the flesh and blood author) has a low opinion of the mass of womenkind. Of all of the women in the text, Zoe alone is fully fleshed out and portrayed as an individual.

It reminded me of old school romances that never questioned the misogynistic hero’s attitude towards Women, merely it’s applicability to Our Heroine, aka, The Exception that Proves the Rule. Reading those old romances as a teen, of course I identified with the heroine, not those vain, shallow ninnies who were always trying to bring her down. But at what price?

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The Breast Pump Battle: A Losing One for Women

Apr 4

Posted by Jessica in Feminist contentions, Navel gazing | 20 Comments

Years of militant pro breastfeeding campaigns combined with an American economy that requires two incomes and doesn’t tolerate maternity leave have fueled sales of breast pumps and a culture of mothers expressing milk.

In case you have been living under a rock for the past 15 years, this is from the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement (published in 1997, updated most recently in 2005. Full text here.)

Although economic, cultural, and political pressures often confound decisions about infant feeding, the AAP firmly adheres to the position that breastfeeding ensures the best possible health as well as the best developmental and psychosocial outcomes for the infant.

“Our message is that breast milk is the gold standard, and anything less than that is inferior.”

This message has been picked up by everyone from NOW to politicians (Iowa Senator Tom Harkin advocated warning labels on formula like we put on cigarettes). We have the “Liquid Gold Awards“, and ads produced by the AdCouncil in 2004 (never aired, by the way) that compared feeding formula to bullriding when pregnant.

Now, all of a sudden, the pendulum has reversed direction.

First it was Jill Lepore in January in the New Yorker:

Pumps can be handy; they’re also a handy way to avoid privately agonizing and publicly unpalatable questions: is it the mother, or her milk, that matters more to the baby? Gadgets are one of the few ways to “promote breast-feeding” while avoiding harder—and divisive and more stubborn—social and economic issues. Is milk medicine? Is suckling love? Taxonomical questions are tricky. Meanwhile, mamma ex machina. Medela’s newest models offer breakthrough “2-Phase Expression” technology: phase one “simulates the baby’s initial rapid suckling to initiate faster milk flow”; phase two “simulates the baby’s slower, deeper suckling for maximum milk flow in less time.” These newest machines, the company promises, “work less like a pump and more like a baby.” More like a baby? Holy cow. We are become our own wet nurses.

Then it was the Atlantic’s “Case Against Breastfeeding”

After a couple of hours, the basic pattern became obvious: the medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature. It shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. …  So how is it that every mother I know has become a breast-feeding fascist?

And then Judith Warner of the New York Times weighed in. And it was the Warner that pissed me off enough to write this post.

Warner’s editorial questions the notion that formula is poison and mothers who use it are child abusers. That’s all to the good. Like Lepore and Rosin, Warner also points to the ways in which the focus on pumping has distracted us from looking for ways to support women who want to stay at home and breastfeed. Yes, she’s right.

But in doing so, she refers to pumping as “a grotesque ritual”, and suggests that pumping leaves women who do it without a “semblance of physical dignity”.

She concludes:

I hope that some day, not too long in the future, books on women’s history will feature photos of breast pumps to illustrate what it was like back in the day when mothers were consistently given the shaft. Future generations of female college students will gaze upon the pumps, aghast.

I became pregnant with my first child almost 10 years ago, and, being very unhappy with my job, I went on the market at the same time. When I was in labor, my family fielded phone calls from interested potential employers, and I conducted phone interviews from bed (I had a c-section). I pumped and pumped to be able to leave enough milk, and when my eldest was 6 weeks old, I got on a plane with my Medela Pump In Style and flew 1500 miles away to interview for a new job, where my potential employers scheduled breaks every two hours to allow me to pump some more.

I never took more than 6 weeks maternity leave, so I have done a lot of pumping in my time.  I never felt “undignified” or “grotesque” while doing it. I felt it was a way to provide a nutritionally superior form of nourishment, a way to keep my milk supply up for the breastfeeding I wanted to do when I wasn’t working, and, sometimes, a way to feel more connected during the day to my babies.

I had a very hard time breastfeeding, especially at first. It hurt, for one thing, which meant, according to the dogma, that I was doing it wrong.  Not only was it not supposed to hurt, but I was supposed to have orgasms when my milk let down! I remember reading one book, the Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, in which the author mentions that she took one of her post c-section prescribed Vicodin before breastfeeding to cope with the pain.  That admission was a wonder to me, and I clung to it.

Maybe things have changed, but at the time, there were two kinds of women who did not breastfeed:

1. The head-in-the-sanders, like the family of physicians into which I married, who wouldn’t breastfeed if you paid them. They didn’t deny the potential benefits. Rather, they refused to get into it. They just didn’t want to do it, and they didn’t.

2. Those who tried breastfeeding but, for “medical reasons” couldn’t do it.

For my part, I found breastfeeding, which I did for at least six months exclusively with each child, at times, wonderful, but also a major source of stress and a major cause of a gendered division of parenting labor that I had wanted to avoid.  I look back now at the amount of stress brestfeeding created, and I wonder if formula feeding (or mixed feeding) might not have been the right choice. I wondered why women who chose not to nurse had to either (1) appear selfish, or (2) come up with a medical “excuse” (and yes, lots of women have real medical reasons — mastectomy, chronic illness, etc., but my point is that many feel forced to come up with “medical excuses” to avoid the censure of the breastfeeding brigade). I longed for a space in breastfeeding discourse to talk about the family as a whole, about legitimate needs and goals of nursing mothers, about the role of fathers in all of this, and about the structure of the American workplace which, at the time, was not conducive at all to nursing (that has changed quite a bit in a decade, as Lepore outlines).

So, I am glad this conversation is happening. But I resent the implication by Lepore and Warner that pumping is a terrible thing, and that the correct stance is that all mothers stay home full time with their infants. This admission may shock you, dear reader, but my preference would not have been to stay at home full time for 6 months or a year, even if that option had been available (which it wasn’t). Why are these columists assuming it would (or should) have been? My preference was to work part time, which, being an academic, I more or less got to do, albeit covertly. But what about families where dads stay at home full time by choice or necessity? Why not advocate as well for flexible work schedules, for quality affordable day care, or — gasp!! — for more fathers to get involved in caring for newborns?

How did a reasonable corrective to hysterical breastfeeding discourse become an attack on the breast pump and those who use it, and a mandate that in a just society all women would become stay at home mothers?

When the pendulum swings on these issues, why does it always have to swing so far?

Review: Practice Makes Perfect, Julie James (with discussion about feminists and gender politics in romance)

Mar 12

Posted by Jessica in Feminist contentions, Reviews | 27 Comments

practicemakesperfect

My Take in Brief: I loved it, but you should click to one of the other reviews listed below for a more traditional review. In this post, I mainly explore feminist themes in the book.

Hero and Heroine: Both workaholic, intelligent, great looking, successful junior litigators at a large Chicago law firm, both hoping to make partner any day. J.D.’s the wealthy, conservative, golf enthusiast son of an admired judge. Payton’s the vegetarian feminist daughter of a single mom communist PETA loving hippie (and yes, I thought this an oddly WASPish name choice for this character, too). Thanks to their differences in worldview and the competitive environment of the firm, they’ve been antagonists trying comically to one up each other for 8 years.

Plot: The book is pretty light on plot, but as the novel opens, Payton and J.D. are in the final stretch of their 8 years bids to becomes partner. Long time rivals and antagonists, their boss asks them to team up to court an important client.  Sparks fly as the two ditch their prejudices and get to know each other as human beings, not just walking political slogans.

Excerpt here.

Word on the Web:

Babbling About Books, Katiebabs, A

Book Smuggler, Ana, 8

Book Binge, Rowena, 4.5 out of 5

Thrifty Reader, Ames, A

Romance Novel TV, Buffie, 4.5

All About romance, Ellen, B

Amazon.com, 4.5 stars after 6 reviews

Fun Factoid: This book feels a lot like a farcical romantic comedy — kind of like the one with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones, or the one with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. It turns out the author is a former screenwriter, and herself viewed PMP in these terms.

Sad factoid: James’ next book has a suspense subplot. Sigh.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The Duchess Redux: Reviewing for Politics or Pleasure

Dec 13

Posted by Jessica in Ethics, Feminist contentions, Genre musings | 15 Comments

When I posted my review recently of Victoria Janssen’s The Duchess, Her Maid, the Groom, and Their Lover, I thought it was mixed. After describing the book as lots of sex without as much character development or plot as I would prefer, I wrote that:

I would cut about 80% of the sex and rewrite this as an erotic romance with a strong focus on Camille and Henri’s relationship.

I thought that was a pretty cheeky comment, kind of like ending a review of an Agatha Christie by saying “remove 80% of the mystery and focus on the butler’s battle with cancer and that would be a great book!”. To my surprise, several people responded with “sounds great!”, and my review was mentioned by a few people as a positive one.

[Please note: the rest of this post contains material inappropriate for children.]

Read the rest of this entry »

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Bookworm award/meme: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Dec 8

Posted by Jessica in Blogs and blogging, Feminist contentions | 5 Comments

So, Lori tagged me with a Bookworm award.

She obviously did not read the post in which I indicate that meme participation is one of the Ten Things I Never Do Online.

Here’s how it works. Open the book closest to you, not your favorite or most intellectual book, but the book closest to you at the moment, to page 56. Write out the fifth sentence, as well as two to five sentences following there.  Then send it along to five other people.

In the interest of not being an ingrate, I decided to follow half the rules. Hence this entry.

Unless I am in my bedroom, and not just there, but actually either in my closet, or in my bed, the closest book to me will be nonfiction, and that is true at this moment. It’s Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1934-1992), who described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”.

Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches, was actually reissued last year, but I have the 1984 version (see image), and page 56 is amazingly appropriate for a romance blog.

It is from a speech Lorde gave in 1978 at Mount Holyoke, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power”. She defines the erotic as a feminine, spiritual power that women have been taught to devalue, except in a superficial sense.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, psychic, emotional, or intellectual, forms the bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens in response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.

The self-connection shared is also a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply of all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand for ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize  all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.  And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

I wonder whether Lorde’s definition of the erotic is really captured in the lingo of weeping pussies, penis barbs and explosive orgasms. That’s the central question of this blog, actually, but I’m not even close to trying to answer it directly.

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Runaway Train: Uncontrollable Hero Lust in Romance

Nov 21

Posted by Jessica in Feminist contentions, Genre musings | 38 Comments

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“If you touch me again,” [Zachary] said raggedly. I won’t be able to stop. I’ll take you right here, Holly … do you understand?” – Where Dreams Begin, Lisa Kleypas

***

He bent his head beside hers. “I can’t help myself,” he murmured roughly. “I can’t — stop myself.” — The Shadow and the Star, Laura Kinsale

***

I couldn’t stop now if all the forces in hell got in the way,” he said, and he was parting her legs with his own…” — The Waiting Game, Jayne Ann Krentz

***

“Tell me if I’m too rough, Or tell me to stop altogether, if ye wish. Anytime until we are joined; I dinna think I can stop after that.” –Outlander, Diana Gabaldon

***

“Be sweet”, I said, the first time I had spoken.

“I can’t. Next time I’ll be sweet, I swear.” –Living Dead in Dallas, Charlaine Harris

***

His face lowered to hers, so close that she felt his ragged exhalation against her lips. “Emma, you can trust me with your life. But I am not your brother. You cannot trust me in this.” – Duke of Shadows, Meredith Duran

***

She smiled. “We’re engaged. You can touch me.”

“No, actually, I can’t.” He straightened and picked up the paring knife again. “If I touch you, I’m not certain I’ll be able to stop.” –The Serpent Prince, Elizabeth Hoyt

***

“Lucinda,” he breathed, his arms shaking a little as they held his weight, “This is your last chance to esc-” –England’s Perfect Hero, Suzanne Enoch

***

“Don’t move, or I won’t be able to stop myself.” –Dreaming of You, Lisa Kleypas

These examples weren’t hard to find: they’re from my own book shelf.  Historicals are overrepresented, due both to the fact that I have more historicals in my house than any other subgenre of romance, and also because historicals, featuring so many virgins, probably lend themselves to this kind of talk.

Still, I don’t think it would difficult to find many other paranormal and contemporary examples (and if you have any in mind, please share).  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that male lust as a runaway train is pretty common in romance, or at least in romances published in the last several years, probably because driving men wild is a powerful fantasy for many women readers.

Note: I write at length — and many people comment at length –about author and reader responsibilities regarding rape in romance in this post.

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"Somebody stop me!"

It just so happens that I was reading the classic Lois Pineau essay, “Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis”, this week. (Law and Philosophy 8, 1989, 217-243).

In that essay, Pineau defines date rape as nonconsensual sex that does not involve physical injury (actual or threatened). 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 (this is the mens rea, or “guilty mind” — criminal intent — requirement).

Pineau claims that it’s very hard for a woman to prove she did not consent to date rape thanks to some mutually supporting myths, the whole of which she calls the “aggression-acquiescence” model of sexuality. One is the myth that male sexual desire is “so hard to control.”

The rationale, I believe, comes in the form of a belief in the especially insistent nature of male sexuality … At a certain point in the arousal process, it is thought, a man’s rational will gives way to the prerogatives of nature. His sexual need can and does reach a point where it is uncontrollable, and his natural masculine aggression kicks in to ensure that this need is met.

Pineau claims that this myth works with other myths, like that women have a disproportionate burden for controlling men’s sexuality, for example, by not being sexually provocative, to invalidate nonconsent. (She’s offering mainly conceptual analysis, but there’s lots of empirical data for the prevalence of the myth of uncontrollable male sexuality among rapists. Prosecutor and law prof Andrew E. Taslitz, in Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom, gives a number of examples of these myths at work, to support his general thesis that “what storytelling theory teaches us is that patriarchal tales are of enormous power, weighing heavily in favor of the defense. The power disparity is so great that it is very difficult for the victim’s story even to be heard” [NYU Press, 1999].)

Catharine Peirce Wells thinks that Pineau’s proposal to allow mere silence or unenthusiastic encouragement to count as nonconsent is harmful to men. In “Date Rape and the Law: Another Feminist View” (Date Rape: Feminist, Philosophy and the Law, Ed. Leslie Francis, Penn State University Press, 1996) Wells has this to say:

[Consider] a typical romance novel. The handsome hero sweeps a charming but inexperienced woman off her feet. She doesn’t object, nor does she offer much encouragement. For her, the romance of the situation is enhanced by the fact that she feels overwhelmed by the hero’s strong (single-minded) and silent (noncommunicative) pursuit of sexual pleasure. Certainly, the woman who “succumbs” in such circumstances does not have a self-empowering view of her own sexuality. And perhaps there are many women who would find the hero neither sexy nor ethical. However, if millions of women buy such novels and describe these scenes as ‘sexy’, can we really convict a man of rape when he interprets his partner’s conduct in the context of this story? Is it unreasonable for a man in this society to construe such silence as consent? Under such circumstances, shouldn’t we at least require that the woman say “NO!”?

Wells contends that the popularity of romance novels proves that Pineau’s definition of date rape is too all encompassing, not leaving room for a very popular and socially accepted type of seduction which both women and men enjoy. (She doesn’t consider that what women may enjoy in fantasy is not that enjoyable in reality).

None of the romance scenes I listed above are rapes. In several of those scenes, the hero does in fact stop, despite claiming that he cannot. And the ensuing or eventual sexual encounters are very satisfying to both consenting parties.

However, it’s undeniable that those passages make sense to readers because of a pervasive myth about male sexuality, and it’s also undeniable that this very myth plays a certain unsavory role in rape, whether legitimizing it in the eyes of the perpetrator, or in the eyes of the court (or the eyes of the victim).

[Consider those lines -- in a contemp or paranormal -- coming from a woman. Would they feel as normal?]

How do you think this common romance “trope” functions in these examples?  Does it shore up problematic myths about uncontrollable sexual urges of men? Or does it serve, pace Wells, to re-conceive the myth of uncontrollable male sexuality from a woman’s point of view?

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A Rape by Any Other Name

Sep 24

Posted by Jessica in Feminist contentions, Genre musings, Soapbox Derby | 45 Comments

Warning: This Post May Be Triggering for Some Readers

Reading Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold led me to consider the question of rape in romance. This is more a set of observations than a coherent essay, hence the numbers. Actually, this is a rant, and it’s probably a day late and a dollar short, but if a blogger can’t indulge in bully pulpit blogging from time to time, what’s the point?

0. This post isn’t about any and all rape in fiction. It’s about rape by the hero of the heroine in a romance novel, presented positively, or in such a way that the real harm of rape is minimized or ignored.

1. I spent some time reading online threads about Claiming the Courtesan, and about the Gaffney, and I noticed it’s hard to really have a good discussion about this because of all the red herrings.  So I want to say, in this first bit, that this is NOT about the following: censorship, labeling romance covers, or kicking people out of the genre.

Read the rest of this entry »

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