Friday Links: Whither f/f, the BDB, Sensitive Porno Guy, Author Advice to reviewers

Dec 16 2011 Published by under Friday Five, Links

1. Over at All About Romance, Sandy is bored bored bored:

I just can’t get excited about yet another Regency featuring yet another Miss and yet another wallpaper duke.

Ditto paranormal  and those fated mates.

And spare me from all those small towns are the bestest places in the whole wide world brand of contemporaries.

And, for anyone who might suggest that category romances might fit the bill, as someone posted on an AAR message board a few months ago, when did millionaires get replaced by billionaires?  Greek (b)millionaires, Spanish and Italian aristos, it’s all just the same old.

I have to admit, I need a good long break from Regency London.

2. Another day, another set of Tips on Writing Reviews … from an author:

A friend of mine recently finished reading the advanced copy of Nickels.  She wanted to write a review for it on Amazon, but wasn’t really sure where to begin or what to include.

Just as I felt a few weeks ago that it was unlikely that a reader would read an author’s blog, yet not know how to write an Amazon review, I find the scenario that a reader savvy enough to get ARCs doesn’t. There’s nothing objectionable in the advice given here, but I really have to wonder, when as consumers we are inundated with requests to rate and review everything we purchase, why authors think readers need special help. Posting a review for a book on Amazon is really not different for most people than posting a review of a waffle iron, something obvious to anyone who has clicked a book reviewer’s name only to see all the nonbook items they review.

3. Porn That Women Like: Why Does It Make Men So Uncomfortable? from Slate (via @JessicaScott). This essay on “sensitive” porn star James Deen is so full of fail, I don’t know where to begin, but I did want to point out the Jewish stereotyping: the figure of the sensitive Jewish lover sounds nice, but it’s a bit too close a cousin to the stereotype of Jewish men as unmanly for my comfort. Anyway, it turns out Deen stars in porn films featuring rape scenarios and really rough play. check out the comment thread for arguments for and against the idea that this kind of porn is “porn women like”.

4. LEGO, once the last bastion of gender neutral toys, has come out with a gender coded pink set for the girl this holiday season. check out this post for an analysis of how far Lego has fallen, and tell me that comparing the old Lego ad from the 1970s to today’s doesn’t break your heart a little. Oh, and for everyone who says LEGO is a “boy toy”… I have two boys and a basement full of LEGOs that they never so much as sniffed at (via @vassilikiveros).

5. The Fancy Reader has some excellent suggestions for what would make good steampunk romance, for example:

different perspective of social construction, e.g. race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Remember: if you can change the history of a country, then you can change its laws and attitudes. Surprisingly, a very high percentage of authors failed to take advantage of this very best thing about steampunk. Most seem to show that the best they could do is associate women with traditionally male-dominant professions (professor, pilot, engineer, scientist, pirate, etc.) while keeping all major characters white and straight. If you set a story in Britain, consider the possibility of taking advantage of Britain’s neglected/ignored history: black, Indian and East Asians Britons; many were certainly born and raised in Britain before 1880s.

6. If you aren’t yet tired of feminist rants against the portrayal of women in J. R Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood, here’s one from Fangs For the Fantasy.

7. Here’s a post from a blog intriguingly titled Requires Only That You Hate on lesbians, where are the lesbians.

Lesbian visibility is pretty bloody terrible in the fiction I enjoy, or even fiction I don’t. So the schtick of those graduated-from-HP-fanfic YA writers, who are ever so lauded for their beautiful wonderful inclusivity? It’s nine times out of ten about hot, hot gay boys. Hot, hot gay boy angst. You’d be lucky if one of the girls in the background… somewhere… likes other girls… somewhere… honest.

We still really don’t see much f/f written, reviewed or talked about in the romance world. And, I hasten to add, I don’t read it and have no interest in it, despite that fact that I do occasionally read m/m. Carina Press, Harlequin’s digital first imprint, is publishing some m/m but not, as far as I know, f/f. Does it not sell? Or is this one of those self-fulfilling prophesies (“if you don’t publish it, they won’t come.”)

8. I’ve been reading a lot of m/m this week as I do annually for Ham/mukah, and I got so sick of first person point of view, I actually sought out third person, and had a hard time finding it. On Twitter, someone said first person is easier than third because of the “pronoun problem” in m/m, and I can see that, but I suspect there is something else going on, although I have not read enough m/m to say what exactly. I will say that anecdotal evidence suggests that the first person narrator is usually the thinner, smaller, and more introspective of the couple. I’ll stop there before I get into trouble.

9. Last day of grading today, I hope.

10. This blog — the first real hobby I have ever had  –  hit half a million page views this morning. Thanks so much for reading.

 

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10 Shocking Things About JR Ward’s Lover Awakened!

Feb 09 2011 Published by under Reviews

…that I noticed on a reread. No, they probably won’t shock you guys, careful readers that you are. But I must have read this one in a rush back in 2007, because when I reread it — and re-enjoyed it –  three years later, I was shocked! Shocked I tell you! By the following:

1. The Black Dagger Brotherhood aren’t undead. They drink blood, but they also eat and digest food. They are warm, with beating hearts and lungs that pump air in and out. They normally do not feed on, and are no threat to, humans. The traits they share with more traditional vampires are their need of blood for sustenance, their immortality, and their vulnerability to sunlight.

The contrast between the BDB and what I would call “real” vampires is heightened in the text whenever possible: the BDB refer to the Lessers as “the undead”, and refer to their 50 degree F body temps, for example.

In terms of the literary vampire tradition, and also in terms of the folkloric one, being undead — having once been a human with a mortal life — is the sine qua non of vampirism. So I think the Lessers are truer vampires than the BDB.

2. The worldbuilding is thin. We are told so little about the vampires outside the BDB that they may as well not exist. These non-BDB vamps are referred to — unhelpfully — as “the aristocracy” pretty much every time they are mentioned, as in:

He hated the aristocracy he was stuck in, he really did.

A couple of females from the aristocracy used to run the Winter Solstice party.

You know how the aristocracy is.

Here’s an example of how the home of a member of the aristocracy is described:

The manse was formal and wealthy befitting the aristocracy.

Really evocative, huh?

Another example of thin worldbuilding is the adding of “h” to regular words as if that alone makes them unique. There is no special lore or history or tradition that distinguishes “ahvenge” from the way the average reader would understand “avenge”. So why bother?

Finally, and this may be a better example of “inconsistency” than “thin worldbuilding”, but here goes: Bonding. With reference to every other bonded couple in the BDB, bonding is powerful and inescapable. Z and Bella bond — his pores emit the Oldh Shpice and everything — yet even at the end of the book, he is still telling himself, and anyone who will listen, that Bella can have a happy life with some other guy … even if she is pregnant with her and Z’s baby. Ok, either “bonding” is an ironclad, unbreakable combination of instinct and tradition, or it isn’t. Which?

3. Nice boys. The BDB are supposed to be alpha, and edgy. Bad boys. And they are indeed really big and strong. They have to be, as warriors who fight the Lessers to protect their species. They are avid lovers, possessive of “their females”, etc. The text reinforces this constantly, as when we are told Zsadist smells of “distilled male power.”

But, on a second read, I noticed that they are, deep down, the kind of boys any momma would be proud of. Here are a couple of examples:

a. Butch is at the club, and is approached by a random prostitute:

He knew where this was headed. He’d end up doing her in one of the private bathrooms over there. Would take maybe ten minutes, if that. He’d get her off, do his business, then beat feet to get away from her.

Did you see that? “He’d get her off” is the first order of business.

b. Bella is in her “needing”, which means every unmated guy in the house wants to have sex with her. Add a bunch of warriors, “massive straining erections” and free flowing Grey Goose, and you’ve got trouble. At one point, Z physically attacks another brother. Afterwards, this:

Z swung his leg up and dismounted, letting himself roll onto the floor. … he wondered idly what had happened to the blunt he’d been smoking. Glancing over at the window, he found he’d had the decency to balance it on the sill before he’s launched at Vishous like a rocket.

Musn’t burn the carpets!

c. Phury’s use of “Red Smoke.” What is red smoke? It sounds ominous every time it’s mentioned. Have we finally found a true bad boy? Um:

Red smoke was just a mild muscle relaxant, really, nothing like marijuana or any of the dangerous stuff.

He relied on blunts to keep him level, just like other folks used cocktails.

4. The crying. Talk about leaky faucets! Suzanne Brockmann’s Navy SEALS have nothing on the BDB.

Here’s Butch, thinking about having sex with a prostitute:

And it was really just masturbation disguised as sex. No big deal.
He thought of Marissa … and felt his tear ducts sting.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

And Revhenge, when Marissa is drinking blood from him:

As she sucked at him vein, he had the absurd impulse to cry.

John Matthew, the pre-transition BDB member-in-training, when he finds out a female friend has died:

John burst into tears. He didn’t mean to.

Z’s twin bother Phury:

There was no reply. So Z glanced over again — just as a tear slid down Phury’s cheek.

But the biggest crybaby of all? Is Zsadist. There’ s a lot of crying when he’s enslaved, but we’ll give that a pass. Here are just a few of the instances of weepage in the “present” time of the narrative:

When he thinks Bella has been incinerated:

He scrubbed his face and then stared at his palm. there was wetness on it. Tears?

When — again, late in the book, Z thinks he has lost Bella:

And then he thought of Bella. Tears came to his eyes…

At the end, when Z realizes Bella loves him and all is well:

He reached up and touched her face. He was not going to cry. He was not* –
Oh, to hell with it.
He smiled up at her as the tears started rolling.

And the brothers are not the only boys who cry.

(There’s a lot of distancing language around the tears, as many of these quotes indicate.)

A male lesser thinks his lover is dead:

O wiped desperate tears out of his eyes.

A civilian male vampire awaits his death:

A tear snaked down his bruised cheek.

5. Fear of a giant penis. I pondered the genre phenomenon of the heroine being scared of the hero’s penis in another post. But in Lover Awakened, the hero is also terrified of it! In fairness, it is described as “twitching wildly” and having “punch action”, which sounds ominous indeed.

Zsadist:

he glanced down at the tent between his legs. Christ, that goddamn thing in there was huge; he looked like he had another arm in his pants. And hiding a log like that would require scaffolding.

Bella:

His arousal was enormous. A perfectly beautiful, rock-solid aberration of nature.
Holy … Moses. Would he even fit?

6. The branding. So constant! And, often, inconsistent with who these guys are. Consider this example from Butch:

He figured this session with the shrink was an hour, so his Patek Philippe’s long hand had to take forty-seven more trips around before he could stuff the kid back in the care and bust on out of here.

Now, Butch is a cop with who refers to ZeroSum — the club in town — as “frickin precious”, and whose distinguishing fashion feature has so far been his Red Sox hat, pulled low.

Why are we told that the gym bag issues to new BDB recruits is a Nike bag? Or why say “He was flushed with sweat from his head to his Nikes” instead of “toes”?

Or,

with a curse, Butch leaned onto his knees, put his hand up to his forehead, and looked down at his Ferragamos.

Or,

the diamond eyes were sharp, undimmed even by the Grey Goose

Or consider John Matthew, a young kid who has lived on the streets his whole young life. Is this really how he would describe Butch on first seeing him?

This Butch O’Neal was … well, the man was dressed like a GQ model, for one thing. Under a black cashmere coat he had on a fancy pin striped suit, an awesome red tie, a bright white shirt. His dark hair was brushed off his forehead in a casual, finger-brushed way that totally rocked out. And his shoes … wow. Gucci, really Gucci … black leather, red-and-green band, shiny gold stuff.

To me, this read like the way an adult female romance novelist would describe Butch, not the way a homeless teen would. The addition of slang words like “stuff” and “rocked out” doesn’t help: it only seems more incongruous with the acute observation of the way Butch’s hair is “finger brushed”.

7. If I told you I was reading a PNR, with a heroine who had been abused and enslaved, escaped slavery and became a kick ass fighter, was sexually inexperienced and insecure, felt she was ugly and unworthy of the hero, tried to fix him up with her sister, misinterpreted his desire for her as pity or self-loathing, and had thoughts like this:

…she really would have preferred bringing him something, some [food] that she’d made. Not that she knew how to do that. Christ, she couldn’t read, couldn’t work a damn washing machine, couldn’t cook.

And what if I told you, in the end, despite all her kick-assedness, her weapons, and her tough talk, the hero is the one who kills the bad guys and saves the day?

You wouldn’t bat an eye, right? Been there, read that. But I’ve just described (and quoted) Zsadist! I think Ward did something pretty interesting here with this subgenre. She took all the tropes of the PNR kick ass heroine … and made her a man.

Which leads me to …

8. Bella rocks. I had a memory of Ward heroines as wishy washy. Not this one. She is the one who is sexually experienced. She is the one who is sexually assertive and confident in the relationship. She exhausts him sexually, to the point where he can’t even move. She is the one who breaks it off when her needs aren’t being met. And she is the one who avenges herself. Here’s a bit of representative dialogue:

[Bella:] Do us both a favor and don’t try to think for me, okay? Because you’re going to get it wrong every damn time.

Z follows her unto the bathroom, where she is starting to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “If I …uh, hurt your feelings or something.”
She glared at him. “I’m not hurt. I’m pissed off and sexually frustrated.”

She is not remotely afraid of Z, as this passage shows:

Zsadist didn’t speak a word. Just stared at her, all power and male strength.
“Did you come to loom at me?” she snapped. “Or is there a point to this?”

And at the climax, not only does Bella save herself, but she saves two Brothers and a fellow kidnapped female. She kills the Lesser at close range, with a knife. When she turns to the nearly dead Zsadist to offer him her blood, and he refuses, she has had it:

“Shut up,” she told him, and bit into her own wrist. “Drink this or die, your choice. But make up your mind quick, because I need to check on Phury and then I’ve got to get the two of you out of here.”

9. The homosociality, by which I mean the most important and charged emotional connections are really between the men, not just the Brothers, but between the Lessers, the Brothers and the Lessers, etc. And also, the … I want to say “latent homosexuality“, but that term so often goes hand in hand with homophobia, which is not really present at all, I don’t think, in the text, that I hesitate to use it (although there is a lot of explicit distancing from homosexual orientation, so I’m not sure). There are way too many examples to even begin to cite them between the brothers, not least of which is that the only sexual release the very horny Butch has in the text is due to interacting with Vishous, or, more humorously, that when Z arranges a meeting with the Lesser who has kidnapped Bella, they decide to meet in the back row of a theater playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But here I will just point out that even the moments which you might think of as the most masculine, and therefore the most hetero (because in our culture, masculinity and heterosexuality are still strongly linked), i.e. the fight scenes or scenes of conflict, are seething with male-male erotic tension. Here are two examples:

“You picking a fight with me?
You going to kiss me before the sex? the Reverend murmured, still playing,
...
Phury laid a hard one on the male’s mouth, the kiss a punch between faces, not anything remotely sexual.

At one point, Z thinks:

he wanted to fight his enemy with a desperation that was downright sexual.

Looking back on this series, and on the growth of m/m romance written for women romance readers in the past few years, I have to wonder (and I am certainly not the first to do so) if the popularity of the BDB reflected, in part, that its mostly female het audience was ready, even if it didn’t know it yet, for more explicit m/m couplings.

10. The BDB was always urban fantasy. I stopped reading the BDB at book 5. At the time, I told myself it was because Ward had moved from a traditional romance novel to UF. I remember feeling vindicated when the books started being labeled UF. But you know what? She never wrote a traditional romance novel with the BDB. In LA, you have whole chapters devoted to people other than the h/h, even to the enemies of the BDB. I honestly cannot recall another romance novel which spends so many pages on other characters, not just a secondary romance, but equally important characters and plots. I think it’s a sign of how skilled Ward is at writing romance that many people –ok, I — didn’t notice this at first.

I know some of these points are critical, but the BDB got me reading romance, something for which I will be forever grateful, and it’s the only romance series I reread periodically. I still have a very soft spot in my reader heart for them, especially this one.

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Two JR Ward Papers at the Pop Culture Association Conference

Apr 09 2009 Published by under Academia, Vampires

This was an 8:00am session at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting (April 2009) with 4 papers, 2 on Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 2 on the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Since the caffeine had not kicked in until the Ward papers, I present my notes on those only.

Maria Lindgren Leavenworth, Umea University, Sweden, “Lover Revamped: Sexualities and Romance in the Black Dagger Brotherhood and Fan Fiction”

This was a fantastic paper.

Fan fic addressed [you can Google these]: “One Treasured Memory”, “Skin to Skin”, “Forever Lovers”

Fan focus on gaps in the source text and develop alternative readings. Slash text challenges heteronormativity in the source text and recasts relationships as m/m erotic relationships. Slash may seem to offer a great deal of freedom, but the heteronormative framework of the source text is quite limiting.

The vampires’ vampirism does not seem to matter in the BDB. The main thing is the relationships.

Homosociality and homosexuality is a blurry line in the BDB. Homoerotic attraction is presented as problematic in the text, while homophobia is rejected. Homosexuality is fine, just not with them.

V. repeatedly states that “everything about Jane feels right”, a rejection of homoerotic desire as something that needs to be cured.

This tension is addressed in the slash, but the desires are presented as unreal or temporary. They are written as dreams, or as events, the memory of which can be destroyed via magic. Denial of homosexuality as extending beyond this particular association.  This attraction jeopardizes Butch and V.’s friendship and the relationships of the BDBD.

A temporary space where homoerotic desires can be explored has, but there are no real consequences for the characters outside the space.

Women are presented as being attuned to the sexual tension, and allow V. and Butch to engage in sexual activity.

Refers to simultaneous orgasms as a “perpetuated myth of the genre”. Hah.

“Genre itself is limited to heterosexual desire”, so Ward is limited and even the fanfics are limited.

[Maria attributes this to the genre, not the Ward.]

She also notes a tension between the opening up of the universe on Ward’s own website by having the characters “show up” and be interviewed, yet her militant protection of her own copyright and rejection of the use by fans of her material.

Jessica Price, University of Cincinnati, Women’s Studies and Gender and Sexuality Department “Heteronormativity and Masculinity: Sexuality and Gender in JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood”

[Price make a number of interesting points. I can’t say I felt them gel. As with many papers at this conference, the difference between a fan and a scholar was not coming through to me on this one.]

Price mentions attending a Ward signing. She asked Ward whether there would be more homosexuals in the BDB. She notes that at the signing, the idea of more homosexual men was received with great interest, but when she asked whether there would be a lesbian warrior was greeted with silence.

Ward herself said she “writes men”. Price notes that Ward herself has admitted to being influenced by fan desires.  On the other hand, Price notes that Ward has said “The stories in my head are in charge”.

Price notes the tension here in Ward’s account of how she writes. Price asks, “So why can’t Payne show up in Ward’s head and say ‘I want to fuck a woman?’”

Representation of alternative sexual expression – “V. has very specific ways of having sex” [My note: we all have “very specific ways of having sex”. We just don’t call vanilla hetero sex “a very specific way” because it is widespread and normative.]

Notes that female characters are either virgins, women who do not enjoy sex, or prostitutes.
Jessica notes that Ward participates in her own fan fiction, inserts herself as a character interacting with the brothers.

Xhex [Price pronounces it “Hex.”] is only example of sexuality without a penis in the BDB. But Xhex will be paired with John Matthew, thus denying her her own book.

The BDB attempts to queer the notion of the romance novel. Asks the reader to open their minds to different sexualities and gender performances.

Audience questions:

Q: How has the imposition of the romance genre changed the vampire genre? It is a very different experience of the vampire, and it has becomes so huge.

A1: Candace: “The literary vampires often cannot get a hard on, They use fangs instead. With the romance novel vampires…good lord.”

A2. Jessica: “Yes, it’s a hypersexuality. It’s all about getting inside something.”

A3. Candace talks about a novella in which the heroine gives Viagra to the vampire hero!

[My note: raises the question of whether vampire romance needs vampires.]

A4. Candace described Lara Adrian’s series as “BDB lite.” Says “You’ve got this lovely situation where vampires do not turn human lovers, but if they mate, the woman gets all the benefits of vampirism without bad consequences. It’s an interesting take on it.”

Sarah F: Would be interesting to do a study on how the genre affects how vampires are constructed. [My note: there have been negative studies, on how romance and the proliferation of vampires across genres has diluted the originary vampire myth and is “not really vampire.”]

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