Archive for category Genre musings

Does Kristan Higgins write romance novels? I’m thinking No.

I read my first Higgins recently, her 2009 release,  Too Good to Be True. I enjoyed it. I quickly read two others, Catch of the Day (2007) and Just One of The Guys (2008). And I’ve started — but haven’t finished (I need a break, for reasons I will explain below) Fools Rush In (2006).

You can hardly find a contemporary writer whose is more embraced by the mainstream romance community than Higgins. By my count, Kristan Higgins now has seven books in print, all with Harlequin. COTD won the RITA for best single title contemporary, as did TGTBT. The Higgins covers all feature romantic couples. Higgins books are reviewed in Romantic Times, on most romance blogs, etc.

But even though this defies all logic, I do not think Higgins writes romance novels. I think she writes women’s fiction.

Higgins novels (please understand this is the shorthand I am going to use for “the 3.5 Higgins novels I have read”) start with a heroine who is unhappily single. They are written from the heroine’s first person point of view. The heroine really wants to find (or, in cases where she has identified him already, get with) her true love, feels she is getting old, and envies her happy-with-spouse-and-children sister or brothers. She then hooks up with the wrong guy or guys — often comically, but sometimes with a fervor that takes her right into TSTL/unsympathetic territory. At the very end, she hooks up with Mr. Right.

And when I say “at the very end”, I mean it. Higgins heroes aren’t around much in her books.  The heroine spends so little time even thinking about the heroes that I don’t even get a sense of who they are through the narrator’s eyes. So, for example, in TGTBT, the hero went into business with his brother, to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, but the brother stole the money and ran, leaving the hero in debt, and in prison. In COTD, the hero had an early failed marriage and a teenaged daughter. In JOOTG, the hero had a troubled childhood, and, later, a broken engagement. These events are Very Big Deals. But the reader never gets to see, really, how these past events are overcome by the heroes. Higgins heroes have no – or almost no — character arc.

The journey to the HEA is hard to discern from the heroine’s journey toward self-acceptance, whether that means acceptance of her unorthodox or boring career choice, her unfeminine or otherwise unspectacular appearance, or something else. I believe it is this factor that has led so many to read these unquestioningly as romances. But I think it’s the heroine’s journey to self- acceptance that matters. It happens to involves, partly, a romance, but it could have involved anything else — scaling Mount Everest, fighting cancer, defeating negative influences, etc.. For me, a true romance novel convinces the reader that the ONLY way for that heroine’s character to grow was to fall in love, and specifically to fall in love with the hero.

All of the heroines have difficult families which pose the biggest barrier to their self-acceptance. These family relationships are, in my opinion, more central to the books than the romances. Higgins heroines have especially difficult relationships with their sisters. In TGTBT, the heroine’s sister actually stole her fiance. In COTD and FRI, the sister is the “beautiful/perfect” one, while the heroine feels inferior. There’s no sister in JOOTG (as the title implies), but it’s the relationships with the four brothers and the parents that delay the HEA.

One common way to define romance is to use the industry definition from RWA. According to that, first, a romance requires:

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

In my view, there is a difference between the heroine’s search for love and “two individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work.” Higgins books are about the former.

Second, a romance requires:

An Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

I would say this condition is met, with reservations. As I’ve said, a lot of the Higgins books are about other relationships — the parents, the sisters, the brothers — and these are often going very, very badly. People are left at the altar, cheated on, and some of these marriages end in divorce. So while, as a reader, in feel optimistic about the hero and heroine, there is so much pessimism in the other important relationships, that it is hard to feel optimistic overall about love. This is perhaps more true to life, but less true to the spirit of the genre. I don’t know if “emotional justice” really triumphs in Higgins’ fictional worlds. In this, she reminds me of Jenny Cruisie.

So those are the formal elements of romance. But there is also a set of informal expectations readers have, to which I now turn.

One informal expectation is that contemporary romances which are not inspirational let the reader in on the developing sexual relationship of the h/h, with varying degrees of explicitness. Failing that, the reader is let in the sexual tension which builds in an unconsummated relationship. With Higgins, there is neither sexual explicitness, nor sexual tension. She closes the door on the hero and heroine when they enter the bedroom. Other writers, like Julie James, have done well with the more subtle approach to sexuality, but James excels at sexual tension, which serves just as well.

Again, while it is not a de jure requirement that the hero and heroine stop sleeping with others after they meet, it is uncommon to have, as we do in JOOTG, the heroine sleeping, regularly, with another man, and accepting his marriage proposal, 77% of the way into the book, while the hero is also sleeping with someone else, with whom he has a long term relationship. Again, in TGTBT, the heroine makes out with her former boyfriend toward the end of the book — after she has started sleeping with the hero — and kind of enjoys it. In FRI, again, the heroine is sleeping with another man regularly, well into the book, long after she has met the hero. This is probably more realistic, but less romantic.

Putting all of these things together, I contend that Higgins breaks both formal genre rules and unofficial genre expectations, and she breaks too many, all at once, to count as a romance writer.

So what is she? A women’s fiction writer.

Here is women’s fiction writer Marilyn Brant on the difference between Romance and Chick Lit:

I used to be a book reviewer for Romantic Times, and I read quite a few of both. My way of differentiating between romance and any other genre is that, in romance, there is one hero and one heroine. The protagonists may have had multiple relationships in their past, but neither of them becomes seriously involved with anyone else once they get together. The romance requires a relationship arc, which results in a happy ending, in addition to an individual character-growth arc. For chick lit or light contemporary women’s fiction, the heroine’s romantic interactions are often elements in the novel, and they may even play a major role on occasion. However, the main focus of the story is on her personal journey to greater self-understanding. Whether she ends up with a man or not is irrelevant, but she needs to have learned something from her experiences over the past 300-400 pages and, in my opinion, be in a better place (mentally, spiritually, etc.) than she had been at the beginning of the book.

For romance, the HEA is a necessary condition for everything else. In women’s fiction, while there may well be an HEA, the other elements of the book don’t require it — it’s contingent. Kristan Higgins is a very funny writer, a compelling writer, a writer I feel happy comparing to Jenny Cruise and Susan Elizabeth Phillips in certain respects. When she focuses on the romantic elements of her plots — that first kiss, the HEA — I am riveted. If she decided to write a straight romance, I am pretty sure it would be one of the best romances I ever read. But she hasn’t, in my opinion, written one yet.

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Sexuality and Same-Sex Romance: Placeholders, Power Dynamics, and the P-word

A guest post by romantic suspense author Jill Sorenson

Assuming that most romance readers aren’t familiar with all of the terms above, I’ll start with a few definitions.

  1. Same-sex romance.  In addition to the ever-popular m/m (male/male), there is also a little-known subgenre called f/f (female/female).  Same-sex romance doesn’t necessarily mean gay romance.  It refers to a sexual relationship or sexual contact/experimentation between two characters of the same sex.  These characters may or may not identify as gay or bisexual.  F/f and m/m romances are often written by straight authors.
  2. Gay or LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) romance, on the other hand, is usually written by gay or LGBT authors.  The characters identify or “come out” as LGBT.  Some authors of gay romance dislike having their books labeled m/m or f/f.
  3. Straight romance, aka heterosexual romance or m/f (male/female).
  4. Placeholders.  I believe this term was coined by Laura Kinsale.  It’s a theory about the reader’s identification with a character.  Many m/f readers “take the place of the heroine” and fall in love with the hero, for example.
  5. Sexual politics.  Macmillan defines this as “differences in the amount of power men and women have in a society or group.” Some readers are turned off by the sexual politics in m/f romance.  Or are they just turned off by the “weaker sex”?  M/m gets a lot more credit than f/f for having an equal power dynamic.
  6. The P-word.  It’s pussy, people.  This one makes so many female readers uncomfortable, I’m almost afraid to use it!

My inspiration for this blog post was a feeling of frustration towards m/m “purists” who express negative attitudes about straight romance and women.  Not all m/m readers hold these views, but there are those who think m/f romance is lame and sexist.  Others don’t want girl cooties in their smokin-hot manlove.  They certainly aren’t interested in reading about two women.

Because I write straight romance, I read f/f romance, and I’m a woman, I take offense.  In some ways, m/m seems like a rejection of female sexuality, an erasure of women.

But my self-righteous indignation is just an initial reaction.  Romance readers can be sensitive.  I get emotional.  You know how it is.  This post isn’t actually about male vs. female or “us vs. them.”  My agenda isn’t to shame m/m fans or rally around f/f.  It’s an attempt to understand why we read what we read and like what we like.

Let’s begin with placeholders.  Earlier this year, I read an interesting comment at Smart Bitches from a reader who only buys books with blond heroines, because she’s blond, and she likes to imagine herself in the heroine’s place.  This is an extreme example of place-holding, no?  Maybe it’s even “replacing.” I’ve also seen some Bitchy ads in the sidebar that feature middle-aged women fantasizing about getting it on with romance novel heroes.

Although I think the placeholder theory has merit, I don’t take my reading engagement that far.  I’ve never pictured my real-life self in the book, shoving the fictional heroine aside.  I don’t want to paste my face over hers, if that makes sense.  But I am inside her head, inhabiting her space and feeling her emotions, not just passively watching the action.  I am becoming her, rather than replacing her.  I can also slip into the role of hero, and especially enjoy sex scenes from the male perspective.

Not everyone experiences romance novels the same way I do, of course.  Obviously, there are various levels of engagement.  It may depend on the book, the reader, the situation, the sexual pairing—any number of variables.  The variable I’m most interested in is the reader’s relationship with her sexuality.

M/m creates a sexual space that’s difficult for me to get into.  I feel more like a voyeur than a participant, one step removed.  Part of this may be my unfamiliarity with the subgenre, or my general disinterest in two guys having sex.  I can also understand why some gay people feel objectified by this “eroticization of the Other.” Not that my reading of f/f sex is any less offensive, ideologically, but it feels more innocent because of my ability to lose myself in the story and connect with the characters.

For other women, the sexual space in m/m feels totally natural.  In a fantastic thread stemming from Robin/Janet’s thought-provoking piece on ethical responsibilities beyond the book, author Heidi Cullinan said:

    “Sexual identity is so hard to define. I can’t tell you why I am so at home in m/m, but I am. I’ve had it explained that this is some sort of psychology, or something, about how it’s my way of accessing my inner male, or how I wish I were male—honestly? I don’t know. I just know that I love it. Somehow it does feel like it’s about my sexual identity, but I can’t explain it. I am intellectually (and yes, often physically) attracted to gay men.”

It follows logic that some women find it easier to identify with gay men, sexually.  They aren’t just attracted to men, but attracted to the fantasy aspect of being a man, having a man’s strength and sexual power.  This is an odd concept for me because I’ve never felt that way. I love being a woman. I like sex scenes from the hero’s POV in m/f romance because I relish his enjoyment of the heroine, not because I’d fancy having a penis instead of a vagina.

But I can’t assume that all women, gay or straight, embrace femininity the way I do.  I’ve heard that some lesbians love m/m.  Say what?  Here’s a comment from another interesting thread about the differences between straight and LGBT romance at Babbling About Books:

    “It’s worth noting that a lot of GLBT sex is similar to straight sex in limited ways. It’s not as simple as one person penetrating another. If what every straight couple wants most in the bedroom is different, queer couples differ even more dramatically from each other. Just from an f/f standpoint, stone butches, often those who present as most masculine and would seem simplest to slot into the m part of the m/f trope, are so uncomfortable with their female body and experiencing female pleasure that they would rather their lover fellate a strap-on than give them direct stimulation.”  –Thursday

When I saw the above comment, I thought of a puzzling scene I’d just read in a lesbian romance.  One of the heroines wore masculine clothing and lived as a man.  She used a strap-on during sex and reacted with arousal when her lover caressed it.  I didn’t understand what could possibly be pleasurable about donning a fake penis or having it touched.  But now I get it.

Sexuality is more complicated than liking men vs. liking women.  It’s also about which sexual parts we identify with, and they may or may not match our biological parts.

I have another theory, on the opposite end of the placeholder spectrum: some readers actively seek out characters that are not like them.  They are different from the blond reader who only reads blond heroines.  Rather than inserting themselves into the novel, they want to visualize or “become” someone else.

I can understand the fantasy aspect of this tendency.  Although I have to identify with a character in order to inhabit his or her space, it feels more comfortable for me to become someone else.  I rarely make an appearance in my own fantasies, in fact.  It’s one of the reasons I started writing romance.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve created characters in my mind and imagined them making love.  To each other, not to me.

Is part of the popularity of m/m the anti-placeholder?  If it’s impossible for the reader to imagine herself in the scene, taking the man’s place, does the fantasy become sharper and more pleasurable?  A pure escape, not grounded in reality or spoiled by any of the reader’s real-life experiences, separate from the reader’s sense of self?

As an aside, I don’t mean “escape” or “fantasy” in a negative way at all.  I see these as healthy, important facets of the romance genre.  Feel free to disagree!

On to sexual politics.  Many m/m readers enjoy the lack of traditional gender roles in a romance “between equals.”

At RRR Jessica’s, I read the following comment, which I believe was made by m/m aficionada Dr. Sarah Franz.  “F/f romance doesn’t work to dispel power dynamics the way m/m does because readers are women.”

My initial reaction to this statement wasn’t positive.  It sounded like another diss on f/f, very similar to the constant criticism of all romance as “for/about women (therefore lacking value).”  Then I read it again, and realized I’d misunderstood. Now I think it means that women have been historically oppressed by men.  When we write and read about two hot guys doing it for the female gaze, it’s like taking a piece of that power back.

I still don’t know if I get this power dynamic thing, or agree with the concept that m/m “does it better.”  I do know that m/m celebrates men, and I like men.  I like open-minded readers and rainbow coalitions.  But when penis = power, are m/m writers really subverting stereotypes by championing male sexuality?

Maybe m/m isn’t pro-feminist, or even gay-affirmative in some cases, but I’ve read many comments from readers who say the subgenre has changed their views about sexuality.  They are more accepting of differences and knowledgeable about the gay experience.  This is a good thing, and I think it happens when character portrayals are authentic.  I know I’ve gained a wider perspective from reading f/f.

Which brings me to my last point.  Again, I can thank m/m readers for bringing the issue to my attention.  Why do we have such a serious aversion to the word “pussy”?

M/f authors also discuss this troublesome dilemma, on Twitter and everywhere else.  Flowery euphemisms are out, clinical terms a turn-off.  There is no “perfect word” for female genitalia. We bemoan the fact that guys get all the sexy slang terms, like cock.

The words for lady parts are so unappealing they make some readers sick.  Several m/m authors claim it’s the reason they write about men.

Oddly enough, I’ve never heard anyone complain that there’s no sexy word for anus.  Authors can’t wrap their minds around “moist channel,” but they’re hot for “rear entrance”?  What is that about?  Why are we so comfortable with cock, and uncomfortable with cunt?

Well, I’ll tell you, fine reader!  I think it’s the actual parts, rather than the representative terms, we react negatively to. I, for one, like pussy.  I’ve used it in sex scenes.  It doesn’t freak me out.  I’m not offended by cunt, unless you’re calling me one.  I can appreciate female parts just as much as male parts.  I like sexy words.

I’m not trying to tell authors what to like, or which words to use.  But I do think we devalue female sexuality when we shy away from descriptions of female genitalia.  If moist channel doesn’t get your juices flowing (ha), choose something else.  Make up new words.  Be creative.  Find your own way.

Or…write about hot man-on-man love. Just don’t do it because you hate girl cooties.

Thanks so much for reading!  Comments welcome.

Questions:

Do you have the placeholder experience while reading, or are you more of a voyeur?  Does the sexual pairing (m/m, m/f, etc.) make a difference in your engagement with the text or your enjoyment of love scenes?

How are power dynamics different in same-sex romance?  What appeals to you about m/m or f/f romance?  What turns you off?

Which slang terms do you like or dislike?

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What Does The Romance Genre Say About the Good Life?

I haven’t made you work in while, have I? Grab some coffee, gingko biloba, Adderall (kidding!) or do your pranayama cleansing breath, because we are going to do some philosophy today.

I gave a paper recently, the theme of which was “What is the Good?”. My contribution focused on the connection between health and the good. But on the ride home, as I was listening to my audio of Jo Goodman’s Everything I Ever Wanted (a Compass Club book — South’s story, with the actress India Parr. Review coming.) I started to think about whether there is a take or a vision of the good life that pervades the genre.

In part A of this post, I give you some background on philosophical approaches to well-being. In part B, I talk about the view of the good life found in the romance genre. If you’re pressed for time or not feeling very philosophical today, I think skipping to part B will work just fine.

A. In philosophy, there are three basic types of theories about the good life, or well-being:

1. Hedonism — a hedonist thinks there is but one thing that determines how well your life is going, and that’s pleasure. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do’. Bentham tended to think of pleasure as a kind of sensation that pervades all different kinds of things we enjoy, and believed that the more pleasure we could experience, the better our lives would be.It didn’t matter much what the pleasure was. Or, as Bentham put it, “pushpin is as good as poetry.”

There are a number of problems with this view, the first being that it doesn’t feel the same when we experience different kinds of pleasurable activities. Another problem is that it seems to lead to the conclusion that the beings with the simplest lives will have the best lives, such that if you could change places with a lower life form that  — say, a clam — you should.

One solution is to claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that not all pleasures are equal. The best life is really the one with the most higher pleasures, by which he meant pleasures of the intellect. It is not true, Mill said, that people would consent to be changed into a clam or a swine, even if they knew the clam or swine had a more contented life, because most people prefer a life with the kinds of pleasures only humans an experience, like friendship, love, reading, great food, spirituality, walking, music, fulfilling work, etc. If our pursuit of the higher pleasures means we get frustrated more, or have less overall contentment, so be it. It is still a better life from a hedonist’s point of view because the pleasures we do get outweigh those elementary pleasures a swine enjoys.

Whether Mill’s version is really still hedonism is something philosophers argue about.

2. Desire theories are motivated by a seemingly insurmountable problem with hedonism, which is that if hedonism is true, it looks like you could be put into an “experience machine”, which simulated any of the experiences that give you pleasure (including the higher pleasures of which Mill wrote) and that would have to count as equally good as actually experiencing those things. That is, if your well-being is determined solely by how you feel, inside, and not by the causes of the those feelings (i.e. really writing a great novel, versus being hooked up to a virtual reality machine that makes you feel just the same) then we have no way to say the person who spends her life in an experience machine is worse off than the person who really has all those great experiences. And we want to say that, I think.

So maybe it’s not the pleasure, but the satisfaction of the desire.  And the only thing that will really satisfy your desire to be a great author is writing a great book. Taking a pill or getting into a machine that simulates the feeling will not satisfy the desire.

Desire theories say your life is going well is your desires are satisfied. A really simple version won’t work, though, because we all have desires that should not be satisfied if we really want to be happy. So, for example, satisfying the desire to punch someone in the face, or grab a stranger’s butt, or do something rash or downright tragic — like an adolescent suicide — is not a desire that should be satisfied.

So desire theorists modify the theory to say that your desires should be informed (you wouldn’t really desire that dangerous drug if you knew how addicting/harmful it is, for example, or you wouldn’t desire to go out with that cue guy if you knew he was a serial killer. Still, though, if you really hols this theory about well-being, you have to accept that any informed desire contributes to someone’s well-being, even a really odd one, like a brilliant mathematician who is not mentally ill choosing to count blades of grass all day, every day.

For a desire theory to work, the person has to desire the thing for it to contribute to her well-being. So if the brilliant mathematician is informed, and not mentally ill, and desires the grass counting, then that’s the good life for her, and there’s nothing we can say about it. We might think that her working as a mathematician would better contribute to her well-being than sitting outside the math lab counting blades of grass, buy if SHE doesn’t desire work as a mathematician, then it doesn’t contribute to her well-being, no matter what others might think.

This kind of situation makes many people question “desire theories”. And it points to a seemingly deeper problem: if I want to be a great novelist, what I think is good about that is the great novel, not my desire to write one. My feeling good at having the desire satisfied is a result of the fact that I have created or done something good. What’s “good” isn’t that my desire is satisfied. These theories view the satisfaction of the desire as what’s “good”, but for many people, what’s “good” is independent of our desires … it’s the desired thing or state of affairs itself.

3. Taking off from that insight, we have what are often called “objective list” theories. As the name implies, these theories say that our well-being consists in a list of things, and that these things are independently, objectively good, such that if someone doesn’t desire them, no matter — they still contribute to that person;s well-being.

Parenting involves a lot of objective list making. I know that eating their vegetables and brushing their teeth and limiting their time on the computer is good for my kids, regardless of what they think, prefer, or desire. These things contribute to their good, period, so I enforce them. Think also of loved ones or friends you may have thought of as making a mistake: marrying the wrong person, taking illicit drugs, quitting school, etc.  They are satisfying their own preferences and fulfilling their desires, but you try to convince them that their choices will not be good for them. Maybe you make arguments and give reasons. In such cases, you are acting like a person who believes in an objective list theory of the good.

A lot of people have a very negative reaction to this kind of theory of well-being. they say that everybody decides for themselves what contributes to their own well-being — it’s totally subjective. And besides, how can one theory fit all humans? We are all so different!

One response is that while objective list theories tend to be paint in broad strokes. You might have a list that includes things like health, friendship, justice, and happiness, but individuals can specify for themselves exactly how each good contributes to their own well-being.

Take “health”, for example: what is it? Is a gifted young runner with a progressive disease who will lose her leg eventually, who asks for an early amputation and a prosthetic so she can start training for the Olympics making a healthful decision? We have to figure this out. And autonomy is on most objective lists. So, for example, when my kids become adults, it will be a part of their well-being to feel in control of their lives, free from the undue interference of their meddling mother.  To go back to the health example, respect for autonomy is why we let patients make their own health care decisions, even those that might compromise their health. Yes, health is a value, but so is directing your own life. Finding the balance between respecting your kids’ autonomy and protecting them is one of the challenges in parenting.

Now, what goes on the list? How do we know? Well, there are a few different approaches one might take. One approach I am sympathetic to is championed by Martha Nussbaum. It’s called the capabilities approach, and it begins by asking the kind of question Aristotle would ask:  what activities typically performed by human beings are so central that they seem definitive of a truly human life?

In answer to this question, she ends up with a list that includes: a life of normal human length, bodily health and integrity, senses, imagination and thought, practical reason, affiliation, getting along with living plants and animals, and autonomy (control over your environment, both political and material). The reason she uses the term “capabilities” is to allow that some people might not choose to actualize all of these possibilities, but they should at least have the chance to. So, for example, someone can choose as an adult to never use her imagination, but a society that actively discouraged, or even failed to encourage (for example by cutting all funding for art and literature in schools and elsewhere), citizens to use their imaginations would be thwarting a basic condition of human well-being.

But, in general, the way you come up with an account of the good is via intuition, reflection, and conversation. It’s not written in the stars. And I don’t think anyone can get through life without reflecting at least occasionally on whether their life is going well. To ask yourself if your life is going well is to presuppose some account of the good. I think this asking this question about our lives is a unique and vital human capacity.

B. The vision of the good in romance novels

I’m just going to make some suggestions here, with minimal argument, and I invite you to add to them, or disagree with me.

I think, in general, we get an objective list account of the good in romance novels. Think of all those rakes that need reforming — this is not hedonism. I could be persuaded that a sophisticated desire theory fits, but the commitment to love and marriage is so strong that I can hardly think of a happily single character in romance fiction. It’s never enough that the heroine and hero end up with an HEA: we have secondary romances, and sequel after sequel in which all the brothers and sisters and cousins and friends get married. EVERYONE must be happily in love.

So, I think an objective list account fits, and I think that romance novels portray a world in which romantic love is a necessary condition for the good life. But not just fleeting romantic love: it has to be enduring, part of a very deep emotional, supportive bond. Not only that, but it has to include fantastic sex. So, it’s a very robust conception of romantic love. Love in romance novels is not just a feeling (“I’m in love love loooooove”), but a way of life.

I also think material welfare is a key component of most romance novels. And not just material comfort, but significant wealth. Pretty much the entire subgenre of historical romance is confined to the peerage (and if one partner isn’t, then s/he is either (a) elevated by the end (she was a duchess all along!), or (b) marries up. I’ve never read historical wherein the poor partner drags the rich partner down to the gutter with her. And then there’s those Harlequin Presents with all the sheiks and billionaires.

Of course, you do have the contemps, especially single titles, but also Blazes, Superromance, and other Harlequin lines, that have middle class couples. And urban fantasy tends to be populated with scavenging nothing-but-her-dagger-and-tramp-stamp-to-her-name heroines. (Someone should write a paper on the economic landscape of UF romance). But in the main, middle class (by which I mean salaried, home/condo and car owning, not pay check to paycheck living) and up is where most heroes and heroines end up.

Another key component is physical and mental health. Theoretically, this needs to be distinguished from freedom from disability, because disability can coincide with otherwise excellent health. But in practice, most heroes and heroines live both healthful and disability-free lives. Sometimes, it’s a major part of the story to bring the hero and heroine back to a state of complete health, whether it’s getting over PTSD, addiction, battle wounds, smallpox, a curse, etc. I can think of a few books in which disability persists to the last page, but none in which disease or general ill health do.

While physical beauty is not part of health in my opinion (indeed, the things we do to achieve physical beauty often have deleterious effects on our health), I’ll stick it in here, because the hero and heroine are usually good looking. At worst, they are “plain” at the start and their beauty grows in their lover’s eyes as the book progresses. But even in those cases, the reader is usually cued in to the fact that the character was good looking from the start, but the hero or heroine was unable to see it (for example, the contemporary hero usually prefers statuesque blonds, and the heroine is a curvy redhead. The reader knows that curvy redheads — and this one in particular — are quite attractive, but the hero doesn’t see it at first.

Affiliation is another one. Most heroes and heroines have loved ones, whether they are family or friends or fellow members of the Bortherhood. It’s a key component of many romances that broken relationships, especially with family, such as parents, are repaired.

Autonomy — I think this one is crucial, especially for the heroine. She may end up in quite a traditional feminine role, but it’s always presented as an informed choice — which also happens to be in her best interests.

Integrity — can you think of a hero or heroine who utterly lacks integrity? At worst, they come to have it in the end. Of course, it depends a bit on how you define integrity, but think of it as standing for something, not being a will o the wisp when it comes to your values and sense of self.

Moral virtue — There’s a bit of a debate in philosophy over whether one can have moral integrity without virtue. For example, would a person whose only goal is the accumulation of wealth, who lets no friendship, regard for justice, or anything else to get in his way, really be a person of integrity? Luckily, we don’t have to worry too much about integrity and moral virtue coming apart in romance novels because I think we almost always have both. And by moral virtue, I don’t mean sexual purity (although there is often that with regard to the heroine), but rather a good character, described as honest, just, unselfish, etc.

I can think of a few things, such as spirituality, that would be on many people’s lists of what is necessarily for their well-being which are mostly absent in romance (except the Inspiration romances, of course). And there’s little concern for the environment or nonhuman animals (the occasional domesticated pet nothwithstanding). Also, political autonomy, i.e. active democratic participation, is pretty nonexistent.

So what do you think?

Penis v. Clitoris: Romance Superior Court, County of Erotica

[Don't mind me. I'm having a bit of fun here with some trends in the description of female sex organs in romance.]

Judge’s chambers. Mediation attempt.

In attendance: Plaintiff Mr. Penis, his lawyer, Phil O. Centric, Defendant Ms. Clitoris, her lawyer Uta Russ, and the Judge.

Judge: Why don’t we start with you, Mr. P?

Mr. Penis: [agitated, upset] Sure. Ok. Here’s the deal. We used to have rules. They worked. I’m the doer, the action guy, if you know what I mean. [leans towards Ms. C] She’s not even so much in the picture. It worked great.

Then one day, she demanded concessions. So I obliged. We made the hero’s arms do things no human arms can really do: reach in there, give her attention. Contracts were drawn up, it was a done deal. Everybody wins.

Now? All bets are off. You should see what’s going on. Females. [disgusted] You give ‘em a goddamned inch…

Mr. Centric: Your Honor, what my client is trying to communicate, is that he has been more than fair in ceding territory… but he is on the verge of what might best be called identity annihilation …

Ms. C: [outraged] Identity annihilation? I’ll tell you about “identity annihilation”! How about having to keep yourself behind a hood? Unknown, secretive, quiet, passive? You don’t know what it was like! All those years I didn’t even exist in your world!

Mr. P: [angrily] No, you didn’t! Because we didn’t need you! All we needed was me and Mrs. Vi Gina. Would god she was here, because she would set your young ass straight. We fit like hand and glove. She knew her place, and it worked. I gave, she took. I plunged, she received. Everybody knew who was the man and who was the woman.

[Suddenly the door to the conference room swings open. In walks a rather slippery looking woman with protuberant lips, and an older balding man with round spectacles and a beard, clutching a cigar.]

Judge: Ms. Gina, Mr. Freud, so glad you could join us, Please, sit down.

Ms. Gina: [organizing her folds] Thank you, Judge. I’m sorry we’re late.

Judge: Perhaps you could introduce yourselves.

Ms. Gina: Yes, well, I’m Mrs. Vi Gina, formerly the star of love scenes in erotic and other romances.

Mr. Freud: I’m Sigmund Freud. And if I had my way, you would always be the star, Vi. She [Baleful look to Ms. C] doesn’t understand the importance of your work to femininity. In order for a woman to be a real woman, she needs you, Vi. She needs to stop trying to be a man.

[Vi glances uncertainly between Ms. C and Mr. Freud]

Mr. P: I don’t think any of you get it. She [He gives an angry one-eyed glare at Ms. C] is taking over my role. Do you even know what she’s been up to? Phil, tell ‘em.

Mr. Centric: [clears throat] Your Honor, what my client contends is true. Despite making several generous concessions in the new era, which we have come to know as A.B.R. [After Bodice Ripping], his territory continues to be encroached upon by the Defendant. For example, she is recently described as “swollen”, “throbbing”, “hard”, and “engorged”, all terms which had heretofore been reserved for my client. Not to mention “ejaculate”.

Mr. Freud: Sounds like a nest of unresolved complexes to me. Maybe I should propose a panel at the next RWA?

Ms. Russ: [interrupting] That’s in the books because my client is those things. My client, after suffering in silence through year after year of invisibility …  after scores of romance novels in which all the heroine needed for the O of her life was mindless plunging, with nary a minute of foreplay, now refuses to hide her true self and her real needs.

Mr. P: [outraged] Mindless?? Mindless!! That’s defamatory! It was hard work getting those virginal heroines to …  [looks at his lawyer] Do something!

Ms. Russ: The Plaintiff makes my point, Your Honor. Times have changed. In A.B.R., we often don’t have virgins, and even when we do, we have women readers who know that it takes more than mere penetration to …

Mr. Centric: Let the record show we take strong exception to the use of the word “mere”. Let us not forget what we are dealing with is usually, with all due respect to Mrs. Gina, “tight” and “small”. But Your Honor, this goes well beyond decency. We have Ms. Clit doing things like “dancing”, “craving attention”,”humming”, “twitching” … Really. [scoffs] Are those acts a tiny nub of flesh can accomplish?

Ms. C: Tiny nub of flesh? I’m not just a nub, people. I extend way back inside the body, even behind our expert witness, Mrs. Gina. And don’t get me started on Mr. Delusions of Grandeur over here: “wide as a heroine’s wrist”? Who’d you have to bribe to get that description, hmmm?

Mr. P:[splutters] I…I…

[a collective "ewwwwwww" from the table]

Mr. P: Er, sorry. Got a little carried away there.

Vi: [rolls eyes] It isn’t the first time … [sighs longingly at Ms. Clit] And I love it that you do those things!  I really really do!!! [gratefully gazes at Ms. C]

Ms. C: Vi, have you been working out? I can’t help but notice when we’re doing our scenes together how strong you’ve gotten. “Milking”, “sucking”, “grasping”… you can more than hold your own. [nods at Freud] You don’t need this guy.

Mr. Freud: [looks disapprovingly at Vi] Vi –  What’s this? We’re supposed to be witnesses for the Plaintiff! [puffs angrily on his cigar]

Ms. C: Please. I think you need to go work on that oral/phallic issue you’ve got going there.

Mr. Freud: [harrumphs] Sometimes, madam, a cigar is just a cigar. [exits room in a puff of smoke]

Ms. Russ: Back to the issue at hand … my client is correct, Your Honor. Moreover, she has more nerve endings than the Plaintiff.

Ms. C: Yeah, I do. And you know what else? I am sick of being rediscovered. For 400 years, I have been discovered, hidden, rediscovered. Well, rediscover this, haterz! [Throws her hood off. Everybody gasps in awe.]

Mr. P: [sadly, knowing it's over. ] Can’t I keep “erect”?

Ms. C and Vi togther: NO!!!!!

Mr. P: [in a plaintive voice] “Rigid?”

[Ms. C glances at the judge in exasperation.]

Judge: I think we’re done here.

[The others collect their papers, shuffling out of the room.]

Mr. P: [Not giving up] How about “Hard as a bullet?” I don’t even get proprietary rights to that?

Judge: [Gently] I think it’s clear, Mr. P, that everyone wins when we share.

Mr. P: Ok, but … [thinking fast] “silk on steel”, “velvet shaft”,  “tumescence”, “blue veined custard chucker”, “purple headed womb broom” ???? [Looks hopeful] Those are still mine, right?

Ms. C: [laughing] I wouldn’t pay you for those, P. In fact, I’ll go out on strike if they try describing my ass that way. But a word to the wise:  if my neighbor Ms. Cervix ever catches you using “womb broom”… [shudders] … I can’t vouch for your safety…

[Vi whispers to Ms. C. Together, they look over at Mr. P.] Hey, P, why don’t you join us? We’re heading over to one of our favorite bars.

Mr. P: [smiling] After you, ladies. [sotto voce] The pink torpedo at your service.

[Ms. C and Vi roll their eyes. Laughing, the three exit the room.]

Review: True Blood and Philosophy

There are now two series dedicated to philosophy and popular culture. The original, Popular Culture and Philosophy series (Open Court) began with Seinfeld and Philosophy in 2000 and is now on volume #52, Manga and Philosophy.  One of my very first publications was a review of Seinfeld and Philosophy, and I contributed to the 4th volume in that series, Buffy and Philosophy.

The newer series, Philosophy and Popular Culture (Blackwell) launched in 2007 with 24 and Philosophy. True Blood and Philosophy, which I received gratis as an examination copy, is the 20th volume in the series.

Within the philosophical community, there is some debate about the value of these books. And by “debate”, I mean that some critics see these books in the same way an evangelical Christian sees a darkened sky and oceans turning to blood. For two examples, check out this post, or this one.

My own feeling is that the discipline is in pretty bad shape if two lightweight and fun book series can destroy its credibility. The trick with these books, especially for the cynical professional philosopher, is to go in with the right expectations. As Blackwell puts it:

Our goal with the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series is to get philosophy out of the ivory tower by publishing books about smart popular culture for serious fans. With each volume in this series we seek to teach philosophy using the themes, characters, and ideas from your favorite TV shows, comic books, movies, music, games, and more.

Few if any of the essays in these books constitute philosophical research. The best of them of make contributions to the academic study of popular culture. But many don’t even do that: they are content to connect up a Philosophy 101 concept or problem (free will, personhood, the social contract, the problem of identity, etc.) with an aspect of popular culture in order to help readers (fans and students) understand philosophy in light of a pop culture phenomenon with which they are familiar.

If you read these volumes with the same expectations you would have for an issue of peer reviewed academic journal, you aren’t being fair.  I suppose some critics object to using examples from popular culture to teach philosophy (and by “teach”, I mean both in formal settings like classrooms, and the kind of self-teaching average fans might do when they pick up such books at Borders). That may be because they think popular culture is harmful (we should all be reading Proust instead), or because they don’t think using popular culture to teach philosophy works.

I have no comment on the former, but for the latter I will need to see some argument. What I know, after being in the front of a philosophy classroom for 12 years, is that starting from a place where students feel knowledgeable and comfortable can work very well to introduce them to a subject they have likely never directly encountered, a subject which in the absence of direct knowledge, signifies for many students obsolescence and irrelevance … if it signifies anything at all.

So what I look for first in such books is accurate philosophy. It is not easy to teach philosophy in the bite sizes necessitated by these short essays, and brevity can distort. Connecting philosophy up to popular culture also requires knowledge of and sensitivity towards the material. In reading this series, if I get something really insightful about the pop culture object of reflection  — something that could be developed and published in a peer reviewed popular culture studies journal –  I am delighted. And if I learn something about philosophy, or am made to see philosophical connections where I hadn’t, I consider it an unexpected bonus. A final requirement is restraint in the use of puns.

On most these counts, True Blood and Philosophy succeeds. It is divided into five sections, with three essays each: one on ethics, one on politics, one on sexuality and gender, one on the supernatural and divine, and one on metaphysics. The list price, $17.95 for a softcover, may be prohibitive for some readers, but Amazon has it new for $12.21 and there’s a Kindle edition for $9.99. As is typical for such collections, the contributors range in their connection to the discipline of philosophy, from tenured associate professors in the field to an undergraduate student (the latter being the daughter of one of the editors). There are also contributions from academics trained in art history, public policy, English, and political science. A few contributors hail from non-academic life: editors, contractors, and human resources specialists.

An initial concern I had about this volume was that at most two seasons of the TV show True Blood would have been aired before it went to press. Knowing that the book series on which it is based, Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, is now in its 10th installment, and that the show, which has great ratings, will likely continue into several more seasons, I questioned the rush to get this out. My concern was alleviated to some extent by two factors (1) most of the contributors seem to have read the books, and often make reference to them in the essays (so, a big spoiler warning for fans), and (2) the essays deal more with world itself, not on detailed character examinations or plot. Since most of the world building is complete in the first two books/seasons, it mostly works.

The volume focuses very heavily on vampires. Those looking for more on the shapeshifters, weres or fairies that populate Charlaine Harris’s world will be disappointed. Perhaps a casualty of taking their cue more from the show than the series, there is also less focus on Sookie than I would have liked. The books are written in the first person, and Sookie is a very complex and interesting character. Most of Sookie is lost in Alan Ball’s vision, which is extremely androcentric.  One essay,”I am Sookie. Hear Me Roar: Sookie Stackhouse and Feminist Ambivalence”, by Lillian E. Craton and Kathryn E. Jonell, reflects on the difficulties of feminist alliance (many of Sookie’s enemies are women), complicated by the different social locations women inhabit, some of which may place them (Tara) at a disadvantage relative to their white middle class sisters (i.e. Sookie), the double edged sword of female sexuality — both empowering and dangerous for women (Maryann, whom the authors see as the ultimate victim of female sexuality), and Sookie’s struggles to maintain her independence and autonomy while dating and working for men who have the potential to overpower her. On this last:

Sookie’s conflicted emotions about workplace relationships and her ongoing attraction to vampires complicate the potential of True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries as feminist social commentary. Sookie’s biggest challenge doesn’t seem to be fighting oppression, but sorting out her own desires.

This essay raises several important issues, any one of which could constitute the subject of an independent investigation, and it is too bad the editors didn’t make room that that approach. It’s also compromised, in my view, by trying to cover both the television show and the books, which differ markedly in their treatment of these issues. Alan Ball’s version of  the character of Tara, for example, as a constantly victimized, ineffectually perpetually angry, shortsighted (to the point of stupidity) black woman is nearly unrecognizable to readers of the novels, who know Tara as a white woman with a level head who overcame a horrendous childhood (and, yes, who makes mistakes). The same goes for Maryann. And while the Sookie of the TV show is just a plucky gal with telepathic abilities, in the novels, Sookie is an incredibly astute, complex character, who recognizes that she is disadvantaged by her gender, her “disability”, and her economic status.

Some of the essays are very straightforward explications of basic philosophical concepts. For example, the first essay, “To Turn or Not To Turn”, by Christopher Robichaud, explicates the concept of informed consent using the example of Bill turning Jessica into a vampire (“vampires need explicit, informed, noncoercive consent before they’re permitted to turn the living into the undead”), while “Pets, Cattle and Higher Life forms on True Blood”, by Ariadne Blayde and George A. Dunn, is effective at exploring moral ranking among kinds of being (“The assumption that human beings occupy the highest rung on the great ladder of being ins challenged in True Blood by the existence of a species that seems to be superior to us in every way, possibly even in their kinship with the divine.”). “Signed in Blood: Rights and the Vampire-Human Social Contract”,  by Joseph J. Foy and “Honey, If We Can’t Kill People, What’s the Point Of Being a Vampire: Can Vampires Be Good Citizens?” by William M. Curtis, both consider what it would take for vampires to have rights and function as full citizens. Are vampires just another unique subculture claiming its rights, which our liberal democracy should accommodate, and what would that require (would a “life sentence” for a criminal vampire be cruel and unusual punishment?). The question of “what is natural” and how we define it, so important to debates over sexuality and new reproductive technologies, is addressed by Andrew Terjesen and Jenny Terjesen in “Are Vampires Unnatural”. Patricia Brace and Robert Arp explore connections between the social and moral status of vampires and and gays in “Coming Out of the Coffin and Coming out of the Closet”. Finally, criteria of personal identity are explored by Sarah Grubb’s “Vampires, Werewolves, and Shapeshifters: The more they change, the more they stay the same”.

A standout, especially for readers who know something about vampire mythology, is Bruce A. McClelland’s “Un-True Blood: The Politics of Artificiality.” McClelland, who has published a book on vampires and their slayers, situates True Blood within the evolving vampire lore. He wonders whether

the attempt to bring vampires into the human world  by encouraging them to consume TruBlood represents a drive to ensnare them in our same dependencies and lack of freedom that characterize our society, one that many would characterize as lacking belief, trust, or a deep link to nature.

Another very interesting essay is Fred Curry’s “Keeping Secrets from Sookie”, which explores the epistemological questions raised by Sookie’s telepathy, such as “whether anyone could possess any kind of knowledge that even the most powerful telepath couldn’t learn using her powers?”.

There is quite a bit of overlap in the essays, especially on the moral status of vampires, and their connections to other marginalized subgroups. This overlap was made even more manifest by the choice of the same quotations (Eric and Sookie’s discussion about whether humans are to antelopes and as vampires are to lions, for example) and sources (No fewer than three essays discuss Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?”). Many of the essays rely on a pseudo documentary about vampires, from the first season’s DVD. something many readers will not have seen. And some of the essays, in trying to keep a light tone, go a bit too far, for example Brace and Arp’s final exhortation that:

coming out of the coffin or the closet these days requires courage. Let’s hope, pray, and act so that in the future anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, religions or race, whether living or dead, can find acceptance along with basic human and civil rights in Bon Temps and your hometown, too.

I wish the editors had waited a couple of years to publish this volume. Perhaps a few more seasons of True Blood would have drawn more essays on other aspects of the narrative, such as Sookie’s problematic conception of her telepathy as disability, fascinating communities like the werepanthers of Hotshot or the weres of Shreveport, the complex relationship of Southern identities to various forms of Christianity, to name just a few.

Overall, though, this is a fun book for fans of the show with no philosophical background, and a good resource for teaching our vampire-loving students some basic concepts in philosophy. The brevity of each essay left me with more questions than answers, but that’s what good philosophy teaching does.

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Review: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

Sunshine, a fantasy by Robin McKinley published in 2003 and reissued in 2008, won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature (McKinley’s acceptance remarks here). I regret very much reading the screed against readers which the author posted on her blog. I’m sure we all feel that way at times about the people we deal with, but I think it says something when you let those kinds of comments stand as a public statement of your relationship with your audience. As a reader who just discovered McKinley and went to her website to find out more about her and her books, I felt insulted, slightly pissed, and deflated. I am not sure that’s what I would be going for with my author website.

But I will leave off that distressing discovery, surprising and interesting as it is, and talk about Sunshine, which was also surprising and interesting, but in a good way. I listened to Sunshine, which is written in the first person. First person often works quite well on audio, and the performer did a great job with it. Sample here.

I finished this book last week, but have had a hard time starting the review. And then I read this blurb by Neil Gaiman and figured out why:

A gripping, funny, page-turning pretty much perfect work of magical literature that exists more or less at the unlikely crossroads of Chocolat, Interview With a Vampire, Misery and the tale of Beauty and the Beast. It’s not quite SF, and it’s not really horror, and only kind of a love story, and it’s all three while still being solidly Fantastique.

Sunshine is the story of Rae — nicknamed Sunshine — a twenty something baker, content with her life working in her step-father’s cafe, where her boyfriend Mel is one of the cooks. She has the usual family issues, including a very strained relationship with her mother, and when she decides to head out one day to the lake to get away, Rae ends up being captured by vampires and brought to an abandoned mansion. The Others are known to exist in Rae’s world, where wars have decimated cities, and they include witches and demons, but vampires are the most feared and hated.

When Rae discovers she has been captured to provide a yummy temptation for Constantine, a vampire who is also a prisoner, she is sure this is the end. But Rae relearns some sorcery her grandmother had taught her as a child, and she and Con are able to escape. She learns that her father, whom her mother left and who has never been in her life, is (or was? We never know for sure.) a powerful sorcerer. Rae and Con now have a kind of bond, which develops as they realize they have to battle the vampire who held them captive if they ever hope to return to some semblance of a normal life.

In the meantime, The SOF — Special Other forces, a kind of CIA dedicated to the eradication and/or neutralization of Others — are interested in the events at the lake mansion, and in Rae’s mystical powers. Sensing an alliance with SOF is not in her — and certainly not in Con’s — interest, Rae has to finesse her relationship with them, while also keeping her family in the dark. She is confused about her growing relationship with Con, a creature she is supposed to revile, but who grows on her in unexpected ways.

Well, not entirely unexpected. The author mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an inspiration, and when a book has a female protagonist who has unexpected powers to fight the bad vamps alongside the one good vamp, who may or may not become her boyfriend, all the while keeping her concerned mother and regular human friends in the dark and keeping her normal human life afloat … well…

And yet, it feels worlds away from Buffy. For one thing, this is not a funny book (with all due respect to Gaiman). And Rae is not very likable.  She’s extremely egocentric, not just in that she’s most concerned for her own welfare, but in that she really doesn’t even think about much that doesn’t directly relate to herself. She isn’t funny or sharp or that insightful. So when you are in this book, you have to be willing to be deep inside the head of a very ordinary person. A person who is probably much more like you, the reader, than most protagonists.

For another, very little happens in this book. There’s the gangbusters kidnapping and escape in the opening chapters, which for my money was the best part of the book. But the next big action is the climax. There are several hundred pages in between of just sort of being with Rae in her world, as she copes with the events out on the lake, tries and fails to go back entirely to her old life, and eventually becomes a new, better and stronger person. But she knows herself, and I really liked that about her:

One of the things you need to understand is that I’m not a brave person. I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can produce character references. But that’s something else. I’m not brave. Mel is brave. His oldest friend told me some stories about him once I could barely stand to listen to, about dispatch riding during the Wars, and Mel’d been pissed off when he found out, although he hadn’t denied they happened. Mom is brave: she left my dad with no money, no job, no prospects—her own parents had dumped her when she married my dad, and her younger sisters didn’t find her again till she resurfaced years later at Charlie’s—and a six-year-old daughter. Charlie is brave: he started a coffeehouse by talking his bank into giving him a loan on his house back in the days when you only saw rats, cockroaches, derelicts, and Charlie himself on the streets of Old Town.

I’m not brave. I make cinnamon rolls. I read a lot. My idea of excitement is Mel popping a wheelie driving away from a stoplight with me on pillion.

Another really great thing about this book is the way the Others and magic are described. The vampires are really really awful — including Con. They look terrifying, smell bad, move in ghastly ways. In this, McKinley keeps much closer to older vampire mythology than the latest heartthrob vamps. But I especially loved the way in which Rae’s growing sense of her own magical powers is described. For once, the magic felt to me, not like a Hollywood special effect, but truly magical:

I watched the wiggling bark. It occurred to me that this was new. I’d been seeing into shadows, but merely what was there, as if there was a rather erratic light on it. This was something else. Which gave me something I could bear to think about, so I thought about it. A few more minutes passed and it seemed to me it was as if I was watching the tree breathing. I found a leaf in shadow, and looked at it for a while; it twinkled, as if with tiny starbursts, but rather than thinking ugh—weird, I kept watching, till there seemed to be a pattern. I thought, it’s as if I’m watching its pores opening and closing. I looked down at my hands. The shadows between the fingers gleamed like a banked fire. The tiny shadows laid by the veins on the backs of them were a tiny, flickering dark green edged with a tinier, even more flickering red. The daylight part of the veins looked as it always did. In the shadow places I could see the blood moving.

I was sitting in sunlight, not shade. I automatically chose sun if there was any sun to be had. I remembered the sun on my back the first morning at the lake, like the arm of a friend. I closed my eyes.

Sunshine feels very much like the first book in a series. So little happens in its pages, compared to similar books in the subgenre, that it’s a shock when it ends as abruptly as it does. As a reader, I have had almost no contact with anyone besides Rae. I wanted to know more about her boyfriend Mel, her stepfather, her mother — who is virtually nonexistent — her powerful father and his family — also nonexistent.

I am on the fence about this. Part of me feels like the book is half baked, that some of these things really should have been explored to make the story complete. We don’t even get to know much about Constantine, and nothing about whether his odd alliance with Rae will become an intimate friendship, a romance, or something else. The other part of me just enjoyed the wonderful writing and marveled at how fresh this author could make an oft-told story feel.

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About that Psychology Today Article on Harlequin…

Psychology Today has a blog column called “Love’s Evolver”, and a recent article called “How Much Do Romance novels Reflect Women’s Desires?” was getting some discussion on Twitter yesterday.

Taking down critics of the romance genre is not my usual bailiwick — there are other bloggers with much bigger audiences who can marshall community responses much more effectively – but I thought I might have a different perspective to share.

In the article, Maryanne Fisher, an associate professor of evolutionary psychology at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S., studies Harlequin romances (she doesn’t actually read them, finding them “formulaic”. Guess she doesn’t read mystery, thrillers, spy novels, sci fi or fantasy either!), and draws some conclusions about women’s desires. Here’s what her “research” shows:

So, basically, women are reading stories where they meet a ‘bad boy’ or cad and then he manages to turn around and become a doting dad. She gets the best of both worlds! And the way that this dual-hero is solved for readers is the hero claims that he’s loved the heroine since the very start, and that reason he had to behave so badly was to hide the fact that he was overwhelmed by his love for her. Either that, or she made him see the error in his ways.

What woman doesn’t swoon at this? What woman can resist wanting a daring, confident, attractive man who also is so deeply in love with her that he can’t even look at another woman? And he wants to marry her, on top of it all. She’s having her cake and eating it too. She gets all the benefits without any of the costs. The cad won’t expect hot, casual sex and then take off- he becomes the dad, who, given his history, isn’t boring.

A lot of romance readers chimed in, on Twitter and on the article itself, to point out the many problems here:

  • that all women read romance for the same reason
  • that all Harlequins – let alone the whole genre! — can be summarized in this way
  • that we can jump from what romance readers read to what romance readers actually desire in real life
  • and from there to what all women desire

The author’s “research” was reported in the Guardian earlier this year:

Theorising that mating instincts, developed over thousands of years, mean that women want a wealthy, fit, fertile, committed man, the researchers speculated that titles published by Harlequin – the owner of Mills & Boon – would be heavy on words such as baby, father and paternity; wealth, tycoon and billionaire; marriage, engagement and bride; and handsome, attractive and athletic.

Cox and Fisher concluded that Harlequin romance novel titles were “congruent with women’s sex-specific mating strategies, which is surmised to be the reason for their continued international success”.

(By the way, folks might be interested to know that several HQN authors, such as Sharon Kendrick and Penny Jordan, felt very positively about the study, which included scanning and retrieving these buzz words in some 15,000 Harlequins, narrative apparently being totally irrelevant to this study of … books.)

But here’s the thing: the author is an evolutionary psychologist, which means she doesn’t have to worry any of these things. She can read every romance novel in existence, and the conclusions she draws from it about human psychology will still be undermotivated. Leaping from small poorly chosen samples to grand claims about what all humans are wired to be like is what evolutionary psychologists do, and they do it with special relish when they are proving retrograde things about gender, love, and sex.

Take a recent Time Magazine article, “The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older Women Lust”:

A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America’s most sexually industrious.

As per usual, Time breathlessly and uncritically reports this study. But doesn’t it worry a thinking person that some three-quarters of the participants in the study were recruited on Craigslist????? This isn’t just a limitation of the study, it is a tragic flaw.

Here are some more “findings” from a 2005 piece in Slate.com by Amanda Schaffer:

One of EP’s academic stars, David Buss, argues in his salacious new book The Murderer Next Door that men are wired to kill unfaithful wives because this response would have benefited their distant forefathers. [Former Harvard President] Larry Summers took some cover from EP this winter after his remarks about women’s lesser capacity to become top scientists. And adaptive explanations of old sexist hobbyhorses—men like young women with perky breasts and can’t stop themselves from philandering because these urges aided ancestral reproduction—are commonly marshaled in defense of ever-more-ridiculous playboys.

Starting to see a theme here?

Check out about this gem on women’s innate preference for the color pink:

“We expected to find gender differences, but we were surprised at how robust they were,” said Anya Hurlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University. “They appear to give biological and not simply cultural substance to the old saying: pink for a girl and blue for a boy.” Using rapid reactions to flash cards, the survey, published in today’s issue of Current Biology, is the first to show that human colour preference can be broken down into two spectra: red-greenness and blue-yellowness. While men plumped for a wide variety of favourite tones across both, women overwhelmingly went for the red end of the red-green axis.

Yes, because getting adults in the west who have been socialized their entire lives to associate pink with feminine to respond to flash cards is the way to prove something about our prehistoric ancestors.

Or this (from a WSJ review of Adapting Minds)

Evolutionary psychology claims that men prefer fertile, nubile young women because men wired for this preference came out ahead in the contest for survival of the fittest. The key study here asked 10,047 people in 33 countries what age mate they would prefer. The men’s answer: a 25-year-old.

Evolutionary psychologists don’t bother taking the time to reject plausible alternatives to their view, for example, that our engagement in useful behavior could be an accident, a predisposition of our physiology rather than a trait selected by our environment, or learned behavior. Evolution is right, but there are a lot of other players in the game — other evolutionary pressures and non-evolutionary ones that must be accounted for. But evolutionary psychologists just … don’t care.

So rather than telling the author to read more romances, or to actually talk to romance readers, suggest she find a new research paradigm. Because no amount of knowledge of the romance genre or its readers will justify the leaps an evolutionary psychologist believes she is entitled to take.

Finally, if you object to the study, consider why Harlequin hired the author as a consultant. Is Harlequin hoping to increase sales by tapping into EP “research” to pick its titles? Looks like it to me.

Romance Roots: Jane Eyre

My romance reading has mostly been confined to late twentieth and early 21st century titles, but of course the genre did not spring up ex nihilo. Pam Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) situates contemporary romance within a tradition she traces back to 1740′s Pamela. Among the earlier books Regis analyzes is Jane Eyre, along with Pride and Prejudice, Framley Parsonage, and A Room With a View). Regis chose them for their chronological distribution, representation of different styles of English literature, popularity with critics and public alike, quality, and vivid heroines. She writes, in a statement that may not be widely accepted by today’s readers, “In a genre whose focus is the heroine, novels portraying intense, vigorous women provide the purest account of the genre.” (p. 55).

Regis departs from earlier efforts to define the romance novel by focusing on narrative elements (courtship and betrothal) rather than themes (“love relationship”). According to Regis, a romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines. It has eight elements, and Jane Eyre has all of them.

1. Society Defined: near novel’s beginning; probably in some way flawed.

Society, especially Jane’s place in it,  is a major preoccupation of the novel

2. The Meeting: usually near beginning — hero and heroine meet.

A gripping meeting that brings together so many elements, including the Gothic, romantic, and feminist elements of the novel. An enigmatic man on horseback literally falls at our heroine’s feet!

3. The Barrier: series of scenes — reasons why they cannot marry.

The biggest one, obviously, is that Rochester is already married. Also class and gender issues (her I mean the internal barrier presented by Jane’s reluctance to be a charity case, even in the context of love). And then the fake barriers Rochester erects, as in his courtship of Blanche Ingram.

4. The Attraction: scene or series of scenes — reason they should marry.

Like an old school romance (by which I think is normally meant a romance written in the 1970s through the 1980s), we only directly get Jane’s version of falling in love. But how wonderfully Bronte captures the complex, uncontrollable, emotion, based on both things that can be named, particular qualities (his respectful treatment of her, his kindness, etc.), but also on the primal or inchoate, as when Jane says “he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine; — I am sure he is, — I feel akin to him, — I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely.”

Rochester holds his own, though, as in chapter 23 when he describes their connection as a “string somewhere under my left ribs tightly and inexplicably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame”.

They become beautiful in each other’s eyes, in that mysterious way love makes possible.

5. The Declaration: scene or scenes in which hero declares love for heroine and vice versa.

Chapter 23, baby. Jane says “whereever you are is my home — my only home”, and later Rochester says, “You-you strange-almost unearthly thing!– I love as my own flesh.”

6. Point of Ritual Death: moment when union between hero and heroine seems absolutely impossible.

For Regis, this is the moment when Jane, after feeling Rochester, finds herself on the steps of the cottage at Marsh end and thinks, “I can but die”. I would personally put it at the moment after Jane learns about “Bertha”, and is mechanically taking off her wedding dress and pondering what it all means (“I looked at my love … never more could it turn to him”.) Jane’s taking leave of Rochester might be another.

7. The Recognition: point when author gives new information overcoming barrier.

Jane dream Rochester needs her. She returns to Thornfield to find it burned down, and Rochester’s wife perished.

8. Betrothal: hero asks heroine to marry him and she accepts (or vice versa).

We get two of these.

Regis’s discussion of the novel is brief (as indeed is every discussion in this book. It is quite focused.). She notes that Jane Eyre showcases the flexibility of the form, and incorporates elements from other genres, such as the quest-plot, the northern (England) Gothic, Bildungroman, feminist themes. She notes the overriding theme of freedom — Jane’s — which supports a claim against the supposed natural antipathy between feminism and the romance novel to which she has already devoted a whole chapter. Indeed Brontë “finds the romance novel form a natural medium for this theme” (p. 87).

For Regis, the novel is all about freedom — not only Jane’s, but Rochester’s which is bestowed by Jane herself. Does Jane achieve “real equality”? Critics are split, with some arguing that while there may be a “mythical” equality, when romance triumphs, equality is necessarily sacrificed. Others note that Jane herself earned her triumphs, and was not saved by a prince.  The latter is Regis’s view. As she puts it, Jane “is profoundly bourgeois, but bourgeois values of independence, individualism, and freedom have been the goals of her quest: her marriage to Rochester is simply an extension of these, not a concession to literary form” (p. 91).

[What does "feminist" mean in discussions of Jane Eyre? In Regis, it seems to refer to a popular contemporary conception of feminism. Was Brontë influenced by the feminism of her day?]

A partial list of random things that remind me of contemporary romance novels:

  • Anachronisms (as in the apparent conflict between Jane’s comment that Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion is a new book (published in 1808), but then reading Byron’s The Corsair (1814). (see interesting discussion of chronology here).
  • Rochester’s diminutive pet names for Jane, as when he calls her “my little sceptic.”
  • The heroine as an orphan, as vulnerable, as isolated.
  • The dark, brooding hero who is older, richer, and more powerful (her employer) [Regis at one point claims that "Jane controls the courtship from the platform of her profession". (p. 88) I found that very hard to see.]
  • In general, the power issues between hero and heroine
  • The heroine’s lack of bodily control (control of passions) around Rochester
  • The false courtships
  • Rochester’s guests and the scenes when Jane is forced to sit with them reminded me of Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold.
  • The hero in disguise!

A partial list of things that diverge from contemporary (by which I mean, published today) romance novels:

  • The hero is married
  • The extended courtship of Jane by another man
  • The emphasis on Jane’s journey, including her childhood
  • Jane’s religious identity

A few of many things worth thinking a lot more about:

  • Jane’s art — is it just a plot propeller? Or is it more significant? Does it express her self-image?
  • Christian morality — A contemporary reviewer wrote that “No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” (more reviews here)
  • Postcolonial readings. How is to to read Jane Eyre after reading Wide Sargasso Sea? Can you root at all for Jane and Rochester the way one is supposed to in a romance?

Finally, did I like it?

I would say I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. Like any good genre reader, much of my pleasure came from situating the text within the genre. As a moral philosopher, I enjoyed Jane’s struggles with principle and emotions and Christian morality. But as a reader simpliciter (whatever that is)? I wasn’t transported by the prose, although I found the plot gripping (despite knowing how it was all going to unfold). There were stretches of slogging. Glad I read it.

Tell me what you think:

Have you read Jane Eyre? Did you like it?

If you read romance, and this IS a romance, why wouldn’t you consider reading it?

They say this is one of those books that, while being widely assigned by English teachers in the US,  is also pretty popular outside the classroom. Why is that?