Thursday, December 15, 2011

What best-selling romance novels tell us about women

1. That women are not in control of their lives

Here is the opening of the trashy novel I got to read on the train:
Maddie drove the narrow, curvy highway with her past still nipping at her heels after fourteen hundred miles. Not even her dependable Honda had been able to out run her demons.

Or her failings.

Good thing, then, that she was done with failing. Please be done with failing, she thought.
That's from Simply Irresistible by Jill Shalvis. Shalvis cranks them out and her offerings sell well. She knows her audience.

And you get a picture of her readership from that opening. And every female character is a loser like this. Even, if not especially, the ones who seem to really have it together from the outside. At some point the hollow sham that is their outer life is pulled away to reveal turmoil. Women who read these things really, really want to believe this is true of other women.

2. That women cannot control their impulses to eat and have sex. Yeah, I know, it sure doesn't feel that way from the outside but none of Shalvis's characters are capable of making intelligent choices in this area. They always want sex and a hot fudge sundae. Now!!!

They sometimes say no to sex but they always, and I mean always, want it. A typical character will tell some guy she can't have sex because she is "not ready for it" but be unable to stand up and leave for fear this will reveal that there is a puddle on her chair. 

BTW: If a frat boy at any university were overhead portraying women the way a lot of women's fiction does, he and his frat would be banned from campus and sent to re-education camps in Siberia.

3. That women want to be loved for who they are but want men who are perfect physically and emotionally. They also want contradictions: the ideal man is apparently emotionally solid as Gibraltar but has a deep emotional troubles that, while they don't effect his ability to function successfully in the world even a tiny bit, including rescuing the heroine from her countless screw ups, do give the heroine an opportunity to get angry at him for not being open with her. Not open so that she can help mind you—she is a helpless feeb and can't help herself—just 'cause.

Meanwhile, women are utterly incapable of doing the simplest task without screwing up because of their emotional pasts.

4. That women want a father figure who give them great orgasms.

The father figure is the key part of it. In Simply Irresistible our heroine and her sisters are ostensibly brought together by their deceased mother who leaves them a dilapidated hotel. This gets stated over and over again even though all the evidence is that said mother was a drugged out hippie incapable of boiling water. The male hero actually solves all the problems and acts as a father figure picking up our heroine after he repeated failures and sitting her on a couch with a blanket and feeding her hot chocolate while listening sympathetically, always taking her side and then giving terribly good advice that the heroine never follows.

And then he give them great sex that they can't resist but they still get angry at him because, well, because they have contradictory needs that are somehow his fault.

5. That the heroine's only real problem is that she doesn't have the courage to allow herself to take the things that she really wants. She realizes with a jolt that all her failings have been because she hasn't been selfish enough. Of course, it's not called selfishness in the novel: there it is described as not having the courage to grasp at the things she really wants. This "problem" gets solved on the last page.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds a lot like Catherine (Cathy?) of Wuthering Heights fame. You called Heathchiff a sociopath a while ago - I agreed. But I dislike Cathy for all the reasons you give here - I believe she is something of a sociopath too.

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  2. I also don't like Cathy, although I don't think she is nearly as bad as Heathcliff. Using violence against women and children is a special class of evil whereas Cathy is only really irritating.

    I don't think, though, that anyone would accuse the Bronte women or their heroines of being unable to control their sexual impulses. Rather, they don't seem to have had any.

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