I love library book sales. I love used bookstores. I love thrift stores. Why? Cheap paperback books. I used to scour the thrift shops of the East Village for hidden romance treasures, certain in the knowledge that they knew not what they had. And indeed, they didn’t. The following proves it.
I bought this in a bookshop located in the upstairs of an old 18th century building in St.Ives, Cornwall, UK. I can’t remember how much I bought it for but I was stoked by the fact that at that time none of Heyer’s books were in print in the United States. Read More…
Over at All About Romance Abi Bishop has written a post on fat heroes and heroines in romance.
Fat and love. Love and fat. The question, as far as fat in romance is concerned is this: Will the reader find a fat hero/heroine believable as a romantic lead? Or does being fat preclude having an erotic experience because fat is somehow a signifier for that total lack of sexual attractiveness? A recent survey (conducted by me, just minutes ago) of internet porn has concluded that there are a lot of fat, ugly, and fat n’ ugly people fucking a lot, in various positions all for the titallating enjoyment of viewers across the world. That said, if fat people can fuck in amateur porn and get a lot of viewers, why is it so unbelieve that fat people can fall in love and fuck both other fat people and thin people. Another survey, also conducted by me via observation of couples over the years and repeated viewings of the old TLC show A Wedding Story, has suggested that people pair off in the strangest manner. I postulate three kinds of pairngs off: Read More…
On Monday I start my graduate work, both the classes that I teach (how to write to freshmen) and the classes I am taking (three plus a colloquium). As such, I will be wonderfully overwhelmed. I am already overwhelmed. Thus, I will be updating this blog more infrequently than I already do. I will be frequently infrequent.
Moreover, I’m beginning to wonder whether this blog is worth it or not. I’m not sure I’m saying anything different about romance that the twelve hundred other blogs on romance aren’t already saying and saying better. I wondering if I should even bother continuing with it with my work load the way it is going to be.
This is a long way of saying that you should probably not expect too many updates in the future.
Over at All About Books, Rike has posted a blog about inequality in romances and marriages. Comments, right off the bat, became very defensive about posters own marriages and what-not . . .
However, I do think that Rike has a point and as I was thinking about it, I realized that this is actually the main reason I hate the ingenue as a heroine. To me, the naive but beautiful ingenue encapsulates everything that is wrong with male/female relationships: that in order to be in relationship not only do women have to sacrifice themselves totally and without the man having to do anything either but aslo that in order to be in a relationship a woman has to start out on an unequal footing or else she cannot expect to incite desire in men. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have had a long standing disgust, nay antagonism towards relationships between younger women and older men. Invariably the man has money, perhaps not wealth but definitely is comfortably set. The woman is, if not strictly speaking beautiful, then at least very good at approximating it with the use of plastic surgery and yoga (see Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker for references). She is also invariably neither as accomplished as the man nor as innately intelligent/smart. When I see this in real life it makes me want to light people on fire. The only reason I don’t is because I never seem have a convenient Molotov Cocktail on hand.
This is not love, people. This is prostituition in its most insidious form. It is an exchange, not of souls or even of bodies, not of minds or of hearts but of economic factors between the wealth of money and the wealth of beauty. I do not believe any of the men on Millionaire Matchmaker really want to find love. What they want is to buy love. This is why they are going to a matchmaker. And she’s not an old school yenta of the Fiddler on the Roof variety. Oh no, she is a pimp, bringing these men only the best products, the most appetizing of merchandise. Every woman on that show adheres to current standards of “beauty” with no deviations at all, not in dress, not in hair, not even in face. There is nothing remotely individual about these women. I suspect it must be something in the water in L.A. making them all into Stepford Ho’s. Not that I, personally, would want to have my body anywhere near these “millionaires” as most of them are so phenomenonly unattractive both in body and mind that one is literally gobsmacked with the idea that sexual desire could ever be possible. Can a vagina dry heave? Read More…
The romantic comedy genre is full of really, really bad movies featuring douchie male leads and women who can be politely described as harpies. Think Made of Honor in which Michelle Monaghan berates Patrick Dempsey for his sex-toy bridal shower (an accident on his part) like a prudish little schoolmarm instead of a sophisticated 30-something woman living in New York City. No woman I know . . . and let’s be honest I know a lot of freaks and perverts, you know people who vote Democrat so my point of view is clearly skewed. . . would ever have a hissy over something that silly, especially something that was so clearly a mistake. They’d probably love it. But then, I don’t know very many harpies.
It isn’t very often you get a rom com these days with lots of witty banter and the sort of classic sexual chemistry of opposites at odds that you find in older films. In fact, the romantic comedies of the 1930’s and 1940’s (It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby) tend to have strong female leads and charming heroes whereas in modern romantic comedies, as I stated above, the tendency is adhere to gender stereotypes like something out of a Parade magazine or Andy Capp comic strip; misogynistic gender roles in which the man is a semi-retarded, ugly little doofus and the woman is mega-hot but total naggin, manipulative bitch. The fact that these sorts of comedies out number the witty-banter ones 10 to 1 is rather disturbing.
Two Weeks Notice, however, is an exception to this rather depressing rule. It features Hugh Grant playing my favorite of his roles, the lovable cad and Sandra Bullock as a type-A lawyer with a social conscience. However, Hugh Grant always comes across as intelligent and never dumb and Sandra Bullock is sweet, if neurotic. There’s a great deal of back and forth but it is never cruel or mean-spirited. Moreover, nobody’s fiance gets dumped at the end (number one rule of modern romantic comedies is that anyone who is engaged/married at the beginning of the movie will not be so at the end unless they are the quirky side-characters), nobody tries to date three different people at once, nobody interrupts a wedding at the last minute to make a declaration of love, and nobody learns a very important lesson about the true meaning of Christmas or whatever.
Instead you have Hugh Grant doing his best to channel Cary Grant at his goofiest and a plot based on the coming together of opposites. I think, though, that it is Sandra Bullock’s character that really makes the movie. She plays Lucy, an intense, politically liberal, do-gooder. She’s honorable and kind and a little manic but never really a bitch. She wants the world to be a better place and she’s determined to make it that way. When she gets stressed out she over-eats (one of the few heroines, movie or otherwise who does. Who the hell stops eating when they are stressed? Answer: No one, that’s why Americans are fat, because they are stressed out and poor. I hate heroines who don’t eat. It is a lie!) until she makes herself sick. She’s an overachiever but she doesn’t nag or manipulate. She’s just blunt. I find this very refreshing. I like her. I know her. She’s a character who is more like the women I actually meet than the majority of female characters in romantic comedies who are caricatures of certain aspects of female traits. Take for example the excerable He’s Just Not That Into You. Now I have three sisters, the majority of my friends have been and are women (I went to a small liberal arts college. The straight male population was minute), I have worked in female dominated fields most of my life and I have rarely come across a woman as desperate as the character Gigi or a little ho like Scarlett Johannsen’s character or a nagging, frigid bitch like Jennifer Connelly’s character. Nor do I encounter very many women who define themselves totally around their relationships with no outside interests or concerns. These are not the women I meet. Sometimes the women I know occasionally act like one of these stereotypes but these behaviors are not their defining characteristics nor the a representation of how they are the majority of the time. The fact that women are depicted in such a consistently awful light in romantic comedies is just disheartening. Therefore, I love the fact that Sandra Bullock’s character is nothing like any of these. She may be intense and dutiful and a workaholic but she’s not a bitch, at least not in the bad sense of that word. She’s flawed but likable and realistic nor does she spend the entire film punishing Hugh Grant for some absurd mistake. It is more a film about them coming to the realization that they love each other. One of my favorite scenes is one in which they go to a lunch, order the same salad and proceed to switch, whilst carrying on an entirely separate conversation, various pieces of food from their plates. George takes all of Lucy’s beets and then dumps all his ice cubes into her water. She stills all his croutons. Its very charming and the sort of thing very close friends, family or married people do.
I would like to see romantic movies go back to the old-fashioned sexual tension of something like a Katherine Hepburn and a Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib, a Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or even a Woody Allen and a Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It is curious that as gender and sex roles have changed and become much more loose and malleable, as women have gained power socially and politically that the heroines of romantic comedy films have become less charismatic, less powerful and more and more bitchy and weak. Seriously, what’s up with that?
I leave you with a clip montage from Two Weeks Notice brought to you by some person on YouTube
Jarvis and I have had a long relationship, a relationship that goes back to 1995.
Picture it: Utah in late February of 1996. Grunge is dead. Eddie Vedder is spending most of his time in Washington D.C. doing god only knows what, Kurt Cobain has been in his grave two years, and most of the new music coming out are the bands that are the copies of the copycats. Sad. What’s a newly minted rebellious 15 year old girl to do?
Right now, everyone firmly believes that the next big thing is going to be Ska and with the Big Band revival a la the Brian Setzer Orchestra there’s a lot of horns playing on the radio. My parents are in Europe with my two youngest sisters. Neither I nor Elizabeth can drive at this point so my cousin Ammon (Whatup, homey?) is “babysitting” us. This entails hanging out and driving us around. We all have tickets to Ska Patty’s Day, a series of rock concerts over a week featuring different Ska bands. We drive between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley attending events, skipping school and generally slacking. Ammon is delighted to be driving my father’s delicious little sports car and all of us stay up way too late.
In this column over at The Frisky, Natalie Krinsky very rightly points out the problem with today’s romantic comedy: namely, that women are expected to settle but men never are. There’s an implied entitlement in movies and television shows like Knocked Up and Everybody Loves Raymond that insists that men deserve the best in female companionship despite their inability to stand-up to their Italian mothers or to get a job and stop smoking pot.
In the comments section of the column, blog reader Sassmouth mentioned the film Say Anything as another example of a film in which a nice, but loser-y fellow wins the affections of a woman far above his touch. I think it is important here to say that the issue is not that the “nice guy” hero doesn’t deserve love but the inherent desire to control women by putting hot, smart, powerful women with yutzes. As if by sticking them in a relationship with the most average, mediocre man on the block will curb the woman’s hotness (both physical and metaphysical) making her more palatable to a culture that fears both female sexuality and female power.
I do not think this desire to push women into settling for men less than their equals is anything new. Regard Pride and Prejudice in which Mrs. Bennett encourages Elizabeth to marry Mr. Collins despite the fact that the marriage would have been miserable for both parties. Mr. Collins was both a bit of a prig and rather awkward but he was not a bad man. He would not have been cruel or vicious. And yet is that enough? Why are women expected to settle for men who are merely nice? Who simply aren’t brutish? Why is this good enough? Read More…
The trouble with rakes in romances is that the author is constantly telling us that they are ever so bad and ever so nototrious and oh so dangerous but then they don’t actually do anything rakish except throw out a few sexual innuendoes and maybe get the heroine to try oral sex.
The topic for this post has been brewing for some time but I realized I really needed to write about it yesterday. What happened yesterday? Well, I was on a plane. The romance selection in the JFK Hudson News is crap . . . . although not as crap as the selectionin the Phoenix airport. So there I was, waiting for a flight and I needed something to read. I had read all the books I brought ith me so I was lacking distraction. The book I wanted The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie was not there. So I got Always A Scoundrel by Suzanne Enoch. Now I had heard good things and I really enjoyed London’s Perfect Scoundrel. So yeah!
Now I finished the book on the plane which either tells you how fast I read or how long the plane ride was. I liked it. It wasn’t a stand out in my brain but that’s not the point. The point is that the hero, Lord Bramwell Johns, is not a rake. Oh it says he is, everyone says he is but he really doesn’t do anything particularly rakish. I mean, the villain, the Marquis of Cosgrove was definitely a rake of the debauched variety. Now there was an interesting fellow! Clearly a sociopath and yet I found myself wanting him to be the hero because he was actually a rake so there was something to reform.
This is not a lone problem, isolated to Ms. Enoch’s lastest book. Most of the time in romances we are told that so and so is The Most Vile Rake In Christendom and yet he doesn’t do anything particular vile. I have decided that this is a threefold problem because I like things that come in threes.
First off, it is a problem of world view. The author relies too much on her audience knowing about Romanceland, the Regency period etc. She does not establish, separtately within the confines of her book the social mores and taboos of that world. This is not easy to do. One has to show how people view class, race, gender, and morality. This is hard because there is not one view on any of these things. Let’s take JK Rowling for example. There are many weaknesses in the Harry Potter books but the one thing that Rowling did brilliantly was to establish how the world functioned not just on a practical level (with Quidditch and brooms) but on a moral level with the way that different wizards and witches related to and regarded Muggles, Voldemort, the non-human personages like golbins and so on and so forth. Rowling consistantly displayed what the standard, status quo approach was and what the violation of those standards were whether they were the Klu Klux Klan like activities of the Death Eaters or Hermione’s SPEW (The House Elf Liberation Front).
The thing is you can do this with a few sentences or with a character’s throwaway comments. Not every activity or dialogue needs to go back to the plot. World views need to be presented. Part of this is an historical issue because people tend to think of history as static rather than dynamic. Of course, there were certain standards by which the London ton operated but not everyone held to these standards. The standards that we read about are a middle ground, a mainstream status quo. The ideal of behavior and social interaction, not the actuality. An aristoicratic Tory family is going to have a very different view from even an aristocratic Whig family of how the world should be. A Lord interested in science is not going to have the same regard for manners as a Lord obsessed with fashion. Therefore there has to be some establishment either by a description or dialogue, secondary or passing characters that defines how the world is and whether the main characters are violating that is.
The second problem is that I don’t believe that anyone actually knows what a rake is, because we don’t have them anymore. They are extinct. Read More…
The ingenue may be my least favorite heroine type. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my dislike of the ingenue is not only active but that it borders on hatred. There is no objectivity when I am faced with an ingenue. I cannot divorce myself from my knee-jerk, visceral reaction to her character which can be summarized as violent disgust.
I am partially writing this blog post in the hopes that by explaining to you, my audience, why I loathe this particular character type so, I will also explain it to myself.
As far as I can tell, not having read the entirety of her works, Barbara Cartland is the Grand Dame of the ingenue. Every single heroine is sweet, innocent, nauseatingly naive and in grave danger. Many would argue that this is not an ingenue but rather a heroine who is TSTL. Rather! But here’s the thing : What really is the difference between Ingenue & TSTL? No, I ask this in all honesty because quite frankly I do not believe there is a difference. I am willing to have my mind changed. I just have yet to meet the heroine who is an ingenue without being TSTL.
Oh I can hear you, Lady Blog Reader, out there now saying “What about Merry Wilding from The Windflower? She was quite the little ingenue but not TSTL?” Read More…
