The Traumas and Temptations of a Military Life: Jessica Scott's ALL FOR YOU

Romance novels are rife with military heroes, particularly those belonging to elite special operations forces. As military romance writer Kaylea Cross notes about the appeal of the subgenre, "writing about men and women who stand up for what they believe in, serve their country with honor and who are willing to do whatever it takes to protect the lives of their teammates and loved ones—come on, what's not to love about that?" Fighting men are sexy, military romances assert; fighting men who rise to the top of the military are sexy super-sized.

Most military romances I've encountered are of two types. The first type typically features an elite military group protecting the country (or the world) from a major threat while one of their members simultaneously protects a threatened loved one. The second focuses less on the heroics, and more about their aftermath; in these books, military men (or, less often, women) who have been injured or traumatized in some way by their war experiences learn to adjust to civilian life while they also fall in love. It's far more rare, I think, to tell a story like the one career army officer and romance writer Jessica Scott creates in her latest romance: a story that depicts active-duty soldiers dealing with trauma while still a part of the military.

In her "Dear Reader" note at the end of All For You, Scott is careful to explain that "this book is not meant as an indictment of our men and women in uniform or the military that we serve or the thousands of leaders who do the right thing every day and try to take care of their soldiers" (Kindle Loc 3777). A necessary caveat, given the often dysfunctional organization in which Scott places her two troubled protagonists, Sergeant Reza Icaconelli and Captain Emily Lindberg. Bad enough that half Iranian, half Italian Reza "look[s] like every stereotype of jihadi"; bad enough that Reza's commander cares more about stats and paperwork than about his soldiers. What's worse are army shrinks who've never been in combat put in charge of making decisions about which soldiers qualify for psychological help, and which are simply drug addicts or malingerers. Especially when the docs cite privacy regulations as an excuse for not telling Reza what's really up with his men. It's enough to drive a man to drink—especially one who's spent most of his adult life half-toasted, except when he's actively deployed. Keeping his promise to himself not to drink anymore seems a hell of a lot harder than storming a house filled with Iraqi insurgents...

Reza's especially irked by one particular soldier, Wisniak, a new recruit who keeps running off to the Rest and Resiliency Center even though he's never seen a single day of combat. To Reza's way of thinking, the Center is supposed to be "a place that helped combat veterans heal from the mental wounds of war," not "the new generation's stress card, a place to go when their sergeant was making them work too hard" (113). A place for men like Neal Sloban, who lost his bright laughing eyes and steady trigger finger after his third deployment, all "buried from too many head injuries and no time off from the war,"  (404). That the psych docs shelter Wisniak but seem ready to kick Sloban out of the army infuriates Reza; without his usual pressure-release-value (alcohol), Reza's far too ready to let his temper fly.

And let it fly he does, straight at Captain Emily Lindberg. Emily's life has been as different from Reza's as is fine wine from cheap beer. Growing up as the daughter of privileged white doctors, Emily hardly imagined making a career for herself in the army. Until she toured a VA hospital, that is, and saw the sadness and red tape standing in the way of military men and women desperately in need of mental health care. And after an engagement gone bad, that's just where Emily finds herself, rebelling against her privileged background and the wishes of her parents to serve her country and its fighting women and men. Making a difference is what Emily wants to do, but dealing with the army bureaucracy, and, even worse, with the "rampant hostility and incessant chest beating" of many of the arrogant army commanders makes her faith in the system weaker by the day. Just how much of a difference can she make when all she seems to be doing is putting out one fire after another?

From their first meeting, Reza and Emily regard each other as the enemy. Captain Lindberg is keeping Reza from helping his men; Sergeant Iaconelli is just another example of the arrogant asshat military man, unconcerned about his men. But as they are forced into each other's company, each gradually begins to realize that there's more to the other than first appearances suggested. And when the trauma of war makes an unexpected visit stateside, Reza and Emily find themselves taking much-needed comfort in one another.

Active-duty suicide rates at Fort Hood are the highest in the army, Emily notes early in the novel. Though Scott never articulates this directly, her depiction of life at Texas's Fort Hood (where she herself twice served as a company commander) makes it clear that the military's construction of ideal masculinity—stoic, aggressive, and above all willing to repress all emotional hurt—lies at the heart of many a soldier's unwillingness to admit weakness, or to ask for help when emotional trauma threatens to overwhelm him. Soldiers will find a way to deal with their emotional distress, Scott's story asserts, but the majority of their coping mechanisms—alcohol, sex, drugs, self-injury—will only lead to greater harm.

At one point in the novel, Reza describes combat as "the most potent of drugs," "a heady marriage of fear and adrenaline and death" which "rewired the brain like nothing else. And his blood was now hardwired to need the fix" (616). Part of why romance readers enjoy military romance is to vicariously experience this heady drug without ever risking becoming addicted.  Scott's romance is a heartfelt call for romance readers who idealize the military's members to recognize that the fix exacts a high cost from many real-life military men and women. Allowing such warriors a time-out, a space in which they can admit their weaknesses and ask for help, doesn't seem too much to ask in return.

Photo credits: Resilience and Restoration Center, Fort Hood

Jessica Scott, All for You

Forever, 2014

Did You Tell Your Parents When You First Became Sexually Active?

Having a teenage daughter in the house, one who is just beginning the journey of discovering and exploring her own sexuality, is flooding me with memories my own first forays into the overwhelming, exhilarating, and often embarrassing shoals of sex. The unrequited crushes of my junior high and high school years, both the ones I had on boys who didn't like me, and the ones boys whom I didn't care for had on me. The fiery blush that raced over my face when my male pediatrician asked "Are you sexually active?" when I'd barely even been kissed. The even more awkward talk around the kitchen table, my parents telling (and showing) me and my two younger sisters the box of condoms they had bought, the one they'd be placing upstairs in the linen closet, just in case we ever found ourselves in need—not that they were recommending we have sex, no, not at all! 

I never talked much with my friends about sex (Catholic high school). And I didn't talk with my sisters about it either. They are both younger than me, and both began dating at a much younger age than I did; asking them for advice about sex, or inquiring about their own sexual experiences, felt awkward, even prurient, and was more than this shy, introverted geek could ever bring herself to do.

And I certainly didn't talk with my parents about sex. I didn't tell them anything about my sexual experiences with my first boyfriend (during freshman year in college), or about the first boyfriend with whom I engaged in sexual acts that required the use of birth control, not at the time nor in the years since. I wonder, now, though, how much they knew, or picked up from my behavior at the time? Or were they not at all interested in knowing?

Not something parents are likely to hear from their teens...

Given my own teenage reticence on the topic, I've been thinking a lot (and reading a lot) about how best, and how much, to talk with my daughter about her own sexual explorations. Would I have appreciated it if my parents had tried to talk with me more about sex in the abstract/general? About my relationships and experiences in particular? Or would I have simply melted into the floor in a puddle of agonized adolescent embarrassment? (Both, most likely). 

Given that in our culture, sex is most often regarded as a private act, is it an invasion of teens' privacy to try and talk with them about it? How can a parent balance these rights to privacy with the need to ensure that their teens are taking proper care to protect themselves and their partners against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? (Just came across this fascinating book—Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex—which compares the ways parents in the United States and in the Netherlands treat teen sexuality; am looking forward to reading it!)

Did you talk with/tell your parents when you became sexually active? If not, did they know (or inadvertently find out) anyways? Did they engage you in conversation about it?

And are there any good romance novels out there that feature heroes and/or heroines who not only have to negotiate a new romantic and sexual relationship of their own, but who are also faced with the transformation of their own children from asexual to sexual beings? (The only one that's coming to mind is Pamela Morsi's The Lovesick Cure, which I reviewed here back in November of 2012, although it spends more time talking about why the teens shouldn't have sex than talking about it after they already have...).

Photo credits:

First time sex: Kathleen Hassen

The Politics of Baby-Marriage: Molly O'Keefe's INDECENT PROPOSAL

Apologies for skipping last Friday's post. Child throwing up in the middle of the night with food poisoning ("well, that apple did taste a little fizzy, but the caramel and chocolate were fine") = no brain space left for blogging. Luckily, the bout was short-lived, and everyone's stomachs and brains are back to normal. So, on with the book musings...

Genre romance is rife with familiar and oft-beloved tropes. The marriage of convenience. The secret baby. Lovers torn apart to later reunite, or potential lovers stranded together all by themselves. One of my least-favorite, from a feminist standpoint, is the "one-night-stand leads to pregnancy leads to 'we must marry'." Given the latest statistics on unmarried mothers (in the United States in 2012, 40.7% of all births were to unwed mothers, according to the Centers for Disease Control), few Americans still believe marriage should and must follow any pregnancy, whether planned or not. But its not the lack of historical accuracy that gets in the way of my taking pleasure in this trope, but rather the patriarchal assumptions that often accompany it when it makes its appearance in a romance novel.

No baby mamas here: an example of
the "we will get married" trope

My memories of the trope come from the category romance reading I did as a teen, as well as some more recent stand-alone romances, stories in which the male half of the relationship insists that, despite barely knowing the woman with whom he had sex, she and he must marry. His reputation/his family's reputation/the future of the child/his budding business deal/his run for political office demand that they avoid scandal, he insists, not willing to listen to any objection she may raise. But what it really all boiled down to was they must marry because the child is his. His rights as the father take precedence over hers, and since she is now the receptacle for his unborn child, he has the right to assert control not only over the body of the child, but also over the body of its mother. Typically, he is the one who has more power—financial, social, sometimes even political—and thus even if the heroine opposes the idea of marrying a relative stranger, even actively resists it, because of this power imbalance, she usually ends up throwing up her hands fairly early and succumbing to the hero's often less-than-romantic wooing. By romance's end, of course, the two relative strangers have bonded over pregnancy and childbirth, have fallen in love, and thus persuade both themselves and readers that their unplanned marriage was, of course, all for the best.

It's a true delight, then, when an author can take a trope with such sexist underpinnings and recast it in feminist garb. That's just what Molly O'Keefe does in her latest contemporary, Indecent Proposal, the fourth title in her Boys of Bishop series. Our heroine, white working-class Ryan Kaminski, might be the evil villainess in a less thoughtful writer's book; a girl who for years allowed her striking good looks to be her identity, who, selfishly, believed her looks entitled her to more than other people, even her own sister. A girl who not only stole her sister's boyfriend, but married him. A girl who's been estranged from her family for years. But Ryan's done a lot of growing up in the years since her modeling career stalled, since her husband turned out to be far less a prize worth winning than she'd originally thought, since she realized how much her selfishness and entitlement had not only hurt others, but also made her a person she doesn't even like. At thirty-two, working as a part-time bartender and modeling when she gets a rare job, Ryan may not be on top of the world, but she finally knows who she is: someone secure enough to offer an ear and a kind word to the people who come to her bar.

And the man she and her fellow bartender christen "Sad Ken Doll," the man who has haunted her New York City bar for the past three nights, surely could use a kind word. His sister's in trouble (see book #2, Never Been Kissed), and he doesn't think he's going to be able to help her. Ryan knows that a bartender should never cross the invisible barrier down the middle of the bar, knows that the employee handbook says "no fraternizing with the drinkers." But still, Ken Doll, aka Harry, is so sad, so floundering, that Ryan consciously chooses to "shove her first right through that barrier and put her hand over his" (10). And she gifts him with of a night of human connection, of truth-telling and of sexual passion, taking him just as he is, and giving of herself the same. Though she finds herself, as she is all too wont to do, falling a little bit in love with Harry, and with the "rare illusion of care" their night together creates, she's not surprised to find him gone when she wakes up the next morning. She's not expecting to see him again; she doesn't even know his last name.

Even after Ryan discovers that the condom a friend gave her did not do its job, she has no plans to track down the mysterious Harry. But it turns out that it doesn't take much effort to find Sad Ken Doll/Harry; as the privileged son of a scandal-ridden white southern governor, the brother of a recently kidnapped sister, and a candidate himself for the U.S. House of Representatives, Harrison Montgomery is on the news almost as much as is Taylor Swift. Unluckily for Ryan, her volatile brother Wes happens to be in the room when Ryan catches the latest news report on Harry's run for Congress. And Wes takes it into his own hands to confront Harrison Montgomery, even though Ryan insists that she needs time to think about how to deal with the shocking revelation of the true identity of her baby's father.

Not surprisingly, given his own father's philandering past and the hard-ball politics he's grown up around, Harrison had real doubts about the truth of Wes's claims. And when he confronts Ryan, he's ruder than an arrogant Mr. Darcy proposing to Elizabeth Bennet. But "Ryan had been pushed into plenty of corners, so she knew when to come out swinging" (77). And swing she does, even after Harrison proposes to rescue his sure-to-be-floundering-in-the-wake-of-a-sex-scandal campaign by asking Ryan to marry him: "Listen, Harrison, you broke into my apartment. Called me stupid. All but accused me of being a gold-digging whore. I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on earth" (84).

Harrison acts far differently than other "you're carrying my baby" heroes I've read. He takes little to no interest in the idea of the baby, or in the responsibility of impending fatherhood. All he wants is to not be like his scandal-ridden father, and to have the chance to do some political good in Washington. Thus his proposal is just that—a business proposal, not a claim on Ryan's body or on the baby. They'll marry, and, if he wins the election, they'll stay married, for at least two years. If she wants a divorce after those two years, he'll grant it, buy her a house, send alimony and child support, and step out of her life. In public, they'll pretend they're in love, but in private, they can be who they really are.

Harrison tells Wallace, his campaign manager, "she doesn't have a choice.... Neither of us do." And after her neighbors and her estranged family are besieged by the press, Ryan comes to the same conclusion: "There wasn't any other option but to agree to Harrison's proposal" (91, 98). This is the one point where the trope seems to fall back into its old patriarchal norms, taking away the woman's sense of being able to choose. To prevent the reader from thinking Ryan a gold-digger? Or simply to make the trope/plot possible?

Accepting may be presented as the the only option, but Ryan doesn't accept meekly; she hires her own lawyer and negotiates her "own terms for this indecent proposal," one which will benefit not only her child, but her family, as well (98). In a genre-referential moment, Ryan thinks to herself, "she was not going to show up at the Governor's Mansion like some impoverished historical romance heroine who'd been knocked up by the Duke" (110); instead, she does her homework, and is ready to hit back whenever anybody tries to demean or insult her. In particular, she refuses to accept the slut-shaming label of gold-digger. "Do you think your mother would have taken this deal?" she asks Wallace, Harrison's campaign manager, an African-American who grew up with a single mother in the housing projects of Chicago.  "When she found out she was pregnant with you. Do you think is some man had come out of the blue and promised to make sure your life was set up in a way she could never dream of making happen on her own, would she have done that?.... I think she would have. I think we both know your mother would have done anything for you. Including agreeing to this proposal" (114-15). After going a few more verbal rounds together, Wallace acknowledges her point.

Ryan may feel as small and alone as one of those historical romance heroines, but she refuses to act as if she is. And as long as she insists on her own value, insists that she's worthy of respect not because she's the mother of a future Montgomery child, but because she's intelligent, funny, a natural on the campaign trail, and a kind, caring human being, Ryan will be nobody's pawn. Not her mother-in-law's, not any reporter's, not any of the campaign's staffers'. And especially not Harrison's. For, as the balance of O'Keefe's novel delightfully and sexily demonstrates, Ryan has far more to offer Harrison than anything his contract could ever grant her.


Have you read other "one-night-stand leads to pregnancy leads to 'we must marry'" romances out there that move beyond the patriarchal trappings of the original trope?


Photo credits:
Condom failure: HIV-info.net
Gold Digger: Anti-Jokes

Molly O'Keefe

Indecent Proposal

Bantam, 2014

Feminist Lessons in an Unfeminist World?: Kit Rocha's BEYOND series

A few weeks ago, I became engrossed by the dystopian fantasy world created by erotica writer Kit Rocha (the pseudonym for co-writers Bree Bridges and Donna Herren) in the Beyond series. Well, perhaps not by the world itself, but for the sexual activities of the inhabitants of that world. For a fantasy, world-building is on the light side in Beyond Shame (2012) and its four and counting full-length sequels. Solar storms have decimated the country, leaving only one self-sustaining city, Eden in their wake. Eden is purportedly only for the "righteous"; those who live within "must abide by a strict moral code or risk exile to the brutal lawless sectors" (Author's note, "Welcome to Sector Four"). But hypocrisy lies just below the platitudes, and the sins of the powerful find their support in the eight lawless "sectors" which surround Eden. In each sector, gangs led by a kingpin (all men, with one exception) devote their energies to creating the means of sin—drugs in one sector, prostitutes in another, material goods in a third. Dallas O'Kane is the boss of Sector Four, where he and alcohol rein supreme.

Not everyone who lives in the sector is an O'Kane; to join the gang, you have to prove your usefulness and your loyalty. Once in, you're rewarded with brotherhood (and sisterhood; women as well as men are members), an ink tattoo with the gang's insignia, and lots and lots of sex, in both private and public. For the O'Kanes party not only by drinking their own hootch, but by getting it on with their own partners and with their fellow gang members, at the bar and back in their own rooms: "You can join in or you can watch, but that's pretty much all it is. Wall-to-wall fucking" (Loc 519). Eden puts something in the water to suppress fertility, so no one has to worry about pregnancy (and there's no mention of sexually-transmitted diseases; maybe the solar flare somehow eradicated them, too, along with much of the world's population?)

The only other possible place to live besides Eden or the sectors is on a "commune," described by the heroine of Beyond Shame as "horrifying places where farmers lived primitive lives of indentured servitude. No electricity or running water, only backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk and being bred until you died in childbirth" (Kindle Loc 140). The repression women experience in Eden (premarital sex is worthy of banishment), in sectors led by less enlightened leaders (where women are married without their consent, forced into prostitution, and/or physically and sexually abused), and on the communes makes Sector Four look like a woman's paradise by comparison.

And there is a lot of positive feminist energy in Sector Four. Lex, who will become the "Queen" of Sector Four in the second book of the series, Beyond Control, has gradually persuaded Dallas of the importance and value of including women in his gang. All the male members of the gang show women respect, unlike the men of the other sectors, or the men in Eden. And while sex is used against women in all other places in this post-apocalyptic world, in Sector Four, female sexuality is celebrated. Noelle, the heroine of Beyond Shame, is an exile from Eden, thrown out for being too curious about sex. Hearing about an O'Kane party she's been invited to attend, Noelle is both titillated and ashamed, a reaction hero Jasper, raised in the sectors, can't begin to fathom:

"Do you think I'm a harlot?"
"No. I think maybe you're a lady who likes to fuck."
"You say it so easily, like it's not the same thing at all."
"Because it's not. No one here is going to think you're a bad person." (Loc 526)

Noelle gradually comes to embrace her sexual self, moving "beyond shame" to acceptance and celebration.

Additionally, the romance arcs of the five full-length Beyond novels all revolve around men making stupid, patriarchal assumptions or choices, assumptions and choices that they have to take back by book's end in order to secure the affections of the woman (or in one case, the woman and the man) whom they love. Jasper chooses to break off his relationship with Noelle when she has the chance to return to Eden, but Noelle takes exception to his noble self-sacrifice, choosing to remain in Sector Four whether she's with Jasper or not. In book 3, Beyond Pain, Bren initially chooses to hold off on rescuing thirty-two people, most women, being sold into slavery, in the hopes of wreaking vengeance against the traffickers' leader, a man who betrayed him, but changes his mind once he realizes that his lover, Six, isn't about to sit quietly at home but is off to rescue the captives herself. In book four, Beyond Jealousy, former prostitute and current tattoo artist Ace bails on his ménage-a-trois partners Rachel and Cruz, leaving them before they, inevitably to his mind, leave his fucked-up ass in the dirt; only a male sacrificing for another male, rather than for a female, can pull these three lovers back together.

And yet... I can't help feeling a bit uncomfortable championing Rocha's series as unreservedly feminist. For one thing, the jobs women are allotted in Sector Four are pretty limited; as Dallas tells Lex when Noelle first arrives in Four, "If she's not willing to tend bar, clean house, or suck dick by the end of the week, she's gone" (Shame 193). Add to that short job list "exotic dancer" (several of the O'Kane women dance, from burlesque to complete stripping to being sexually whipped on stage), "bouncer" (one particularly tough woman), and "brewer," and you've just about covered all of the career possibilities for women in the sector. Men can go out with guns, protecting the business and enforcing the O'Kane rules, but women typically stay inside. When times are particularly violent, Dallas O'Kane dictates that no woman will go outside without a man accompanying her. Though Lex becomes "queen," no other women act as counselors or decision-makers when it comes to O'Kane business, a situation mirrored in the other sectors, all of which are ruled by men (with the significant exception of Sector Two, the sector devoted to prostitution). When it comes to leadership and decision-making, gender equality is only limitedly at play.

Another bothersome issue: while the series celebrates female sexuality, and the characters are each devoted to different specific kinks (receiving pain, exhibitionism, watching, inflicting pain, controlling others during sex), all the women ultimately "submit" to their male lovers. The series casts sexual submission as powerful in itself—"This was pleasure. This was power, bringing Ace to his knees while she was on hers" (Jealousy page 74)—and something of which a woman should not be ashamed, something that is ultimately freeing, not constraining: "Begging was her final grasp for control, and being denied was permission to let go and float on freedom" (Jealousy page 263). I wouldn't have a problem with this construction at all, if only each woman in the series did not follow the same trajectory. But to construct female sexual submission as the only way to achieve sexual freedom strikes me as almost as limiting as constructing any type of female sexuality as shameful.

Finally, female sexual submission plays out symbolically in the concept of the "collar," a gift from a male O'Kane lover to his female lover, one that promises "that things were serious, that there would be no friendly visits to hookers or casual fucking with other friends. Well, or at least that they'd visit the hookers and fuck the friends together" (Jealousy 1708). Everyone gets an O'Kane tattoo, but only a woman gets a physical collar, or, if in a committed, long-term relationship, a collar tattooed onto her skin (the one exception comes in book 2, when Dallas and Lex, king and queen, get matching tattoos, each sporting the name of the other on the back of his/her neck).

Compared to Eden, to the communes, and to the other sectors, Sector Four seems the epitome of sexual freedom for women. But is this only because the other options Rocha allows her characters are so utterly sexist/abusive?

Curious to see what other Rocha readers make of the intertwining of sexism and feminism in these books...

Kit Rocha, Beyond series

self-published, 2012-2014 and beyond

Critiquing from Pleasure: Julie M. Dugger's " 'I'm a Feminist, But... Popular Romance in the Women's Literature Classroom"

I've been dipping with pleasure into the latest issue of Journal of Popular Romance Studies (4.2), with its dual themes of popular romance in Australia and a 30th-anniversary consideration of Janice Radway's groundbreaking study of romance readers, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. But it was an article in the "Teaching and Learning" section of the issue that particular caught my eye, an article about the difficulties students may encounter when reading genre romance in a broader course on Women and Literature. Professor Julie M. Dugger teaches a unit on popular romance in such a class, and writes about both the difficulties and the opportunities presented by such teaching in her article "'I'm a Feminist, But...': Popular Romance in the Women's Literature Classroom" (1).

As I often found when teaching college classes in children's literature, when students who have been trained in literary methods of analyzing a text are asked to analyze something other than canonical literature, they often have one of two reactions, neither conducive to productive learning. Some, committed to the critical literary reading practices they've learned and internalized during their college studies, assert that popular literature, unlike the literature commonly studied in the college classroom, is lesser, and thus unworthy of rigorous critical analysis. Others, more comfortable with popular reading practices than with literary analysis, practices focused more on the pleasure one takes in reading than in analyzing how texts work, object to applying the techniques of literary analysis to their favorite books. "You're overanalyzing this!" and "Don't ruin it for me!" were two common refrains in my children's literature classrooms, as I'm sure they are in any literature course that includes popular romance on its syllabus.

The situation becomes even more complicated when you add feminist literary theory to the mix. Many students are aware of the negative views many feminists have about popular genre romance, yet at the same time, those same students often take real pleasure in reading romance. As Dugger asks, "What is the women's studies critic to do when a genre dominated by women writers and readers appears to conflict with feminist ideals?" (1) Rather than attempt to ignore the discomfort that a student who is a fan of romance may experience when asked to analyze individual romances, or the genre as a whole, Dugger suggests, teachers should take advantage of this discomfort, for it "provides key opportunities for reflecting not only on romance, but on the assumptions in literary and feminist studies that might otherwise go unexamined" (1).

It's important to lay the groundwork for such an examination, though, to help students move beyond both discomfort and their refusal to engage. First, Dugger suggests, it is vital to explain that feminism has both criticized and praised romance as a genre.

The feminist case against romance:

• Romance endorses women's relational roles at the expense of their individual development
• Romance plots and characters validate abusive relationship patterns
• Romance novels are commercial, formulaic productions of very little literary value that perpetuate harmful media stereotypes (in particular, gender stereotypes) (6-8)


The feminist case for romance:

• Romances offer women a way to acknowledge their oppression and imagine a better future
• Romances challenge a male-modeled individualism
• Romance provides women with an alternative to a sexist high-culture literary canon (9-11)


Additionally, Dugger argues that it is vital to approach romance texts not just with suspicion—they are all sexist, and it's our job to point out their sexism—but also with an eye toward the pleasures they offer readers:  "If we really want students to analyze the narratives of romance—utopian as well as dystopia—especially when we teach in a culture that is so caught up in these narratives, we must enable them to work critically from their pleasure as well as their discomfort" (14).

Dugger offers the following suggestions as ways to critique from pleasure, ways that I think general readers of romance might appreciate, even outside of a college classroom:

• First, acknowledge that "all interpretive practices have strengths and weaknesses, and academic reading is no exception. Literary critical reading has its own limits, its own professional turf to defend, and its own forms of sexism.... Correspondingly, just as scholarly reading has its strengths, so too does pleasurable reading. We can encourage multiple modes of approaching a text."
• Use and integrate multiple venues of discussion (full class, small groups, online posts, etc.)
• Juxtapose high- and low-culture romances (to unpack why some texts are valued while others are not, and how a text or entire genre's association with women affects readers' perception of literary quality)
• Analyze pleasure: Why does a text give you as a reader pleasure? How do other readers of the same text talk about the pleasure it gives them? How does the text work to create such pleasure?
• Give air-time to both sides of the debate
• Don't be shy about announcing that you (in Dugger's case, the teacher) like romances (or admire people who do). Knowing that other smart women like romance can help readers confront the stigma often associated with reading such a devalued genre (14-16)

These practices both resonated with me, as things I attempt to do via this blog, and gave me food for thought about potential future RNFF posts. I especially appreciated Dugger's generous conclusion: "It cannot hurt to remember how often love is a positive force in human endeavor, whether it be romantic love for other people, or readerly love for the stories they tell" (17).


As a romance reader, do you find yourself conflicted over your reading? Are you able to read for pleasure and read analytically? If so, can you do so both at the same time? Or can you read in only one mode at a time?


Illustration credits:
Keep calm: Keepcalm-o-matic
Love 2 read: Read 2012

Wrestling with the B-word: Lucy March's THAT TOUCH OF MAGIC

Bitch: Feminist Responses to Popular Culture

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Smart women with feminist leanings have long been attempting to reclaim the derogatory term "bitch," suggesting that the qualities which it points to as worthy of insult are the very qualities that women should celebrate. As author Laura Wild argues,

To me, someone calling me a bitch means they think I'm aggressive, asserting my control, in charge, whatever, and they're probably threatened by that. I am those things, there's no reason why I shouldn't be, and the shock attached to the use of the phrase by whoever's saying it that suggests I shouldn't be those things is what annoys me most.

Such reclamation projects were on my mind as I read the second book in Lucy March's light comedic paranormal series about the small town of Nodaway Falls, That Touch of Magic. Its brash, foul-mouthed, rule-breaking protagonist, budding conjurer Stacy Easter, could well be termed a bitch in the positive, reclaimed sense. Her typical way of interacting with others is through snarky, barbed sarcasm: she greets the sight of her friend (and soon-to-be sister-in-law) Peach "It's Rosie the Riveter, the spank-me version." Peach simply replies, "Yay! She's being mean. She's okay" (26). Stacy wisecracks her way throughout the novel, not afraid to speak her mind, to take control of a bad situation, or to protest, loudly, when others treat her or her friends poorly.

The only thing (or person, rather) who leaves her tongue-tied is her ex-boyfriend, Leo North, who, ten years before, in a drunken, grief-stricken mistake, slept with another girl then left Stacy to study for the priesthood. Back in town for Peach's wedding to Stacy's brother, Leo, it turns out, did not end up taking on the collar. And it also turns out he's not just back in town for the wedding; his therapist recommended that he see Stacy once again, so he'd stop "thinking of you as ... well. Mine. He said you'd be different. He said those feelings would go away, and I'd be able to finally let it go and move on" (70). To Leo's chagrin, his therapist had it wrong: he's just as drawn to Stacy as he was ten years ago.

And Stacy knows her feelings for Leo are just as strong as they ever were. But tough Stacy isn't as ready to mend fences as Leo is: "I wanted to throw my arms around him, kiss him until neither of us could see straight. Bring him to my bed and keep him there forever. But that was weakness, and if loving Leo had made me anything, it wasn't weak" (72). Intriguingly, though, it turns out that Leo's transgression isn't the only thing standing in the way of a joyful Stacy-Leo reunion. Turns out that Stacy's embrace of reclaimed bitchiness is not as unambiguous as she makes it seem.

Stacy herself often deploys the b-word; it appears 16 times in the book, most often spoken by or thought by our protagonist. She uses it to describe her over-the-top narcissistic mother after Mrs. Easter insults Peach during the rehearsal dinner ("You have captured my son's heart, and he's a good man,, so there must be some great virtue in you.... It is my sincere hope that you will find your way back to Jesus, and repent of the poison you have injected into my good boy with your whorish ways"): "She's a hellbitch, Peach" (50-51; 56). When Mrs. Easter tries to return to the rehearsal dinner to spew more vitriol, Stacy uses the word again, threatening her mother with a pretend potion: "If I hear one word from anyone about you being a bitch to anyone, not just Peach... if I see one expression on your face that isn't kindness and delight, all I have to do is get a drop of this on your skin, a single drop, and your face will break out in wrinkles they can see from space" (62). In this sense, being a bitch is being selfish, being completely uncaring of the feelings of those around you.

Stacy also deploys the male form, "son of a bitch," when she wants to insult men who act in a similar, unfeeling way. Initially, when Leo first attempts to explain and apologize: "You slept with someone else, then left me to become a priest, you son of a bitch!" (68) and "You son of a bitch!... You left me" (69). And later in the story, when she discovers that Desmond Lamb, a fellow (male) conjurer has less than benign intentions towards her and the other women of Nodaway Falls, she uses it on four separate occasions to signal her contempt for his selfish, unfeeling attempts to use others for his own gain.

Yet despite her contempt for those who do not feel for others, tough, brash, rule-breaking Stacy is really worried that it is not her mother, or any of the unfeeling men in her life, but Stacy herself who is the true bitch. And that a bitch, even of the reclaimed variety, is not someone whom anyone can love. She attempts, mid-book, to apologize to Leo for their breakup:

     "It's... me.... I'm ugly.... Not physically, okay. I know I'm pretty physically. But inside, where it matters. I'm an ugly person."
     He huffed in the darkness. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
     "You should have left.... You saw me for what I really was.... Oh, come on. You saw me. When I was screaming at you, when I was throwing things at you... I saw the look on your face.... I scared you.... When I get angry, I get ugly. I know that. And once someone has seen that... I mean, how can I expect them to want to be around me?" (180-81)

Stacy has internalized the cultural message (and her mother's message, too) that her emotions—in particular, her anger—are bad, hateful, making her worthy only of being shunned. Over the course of the novel, then, Stacy will have to go beyond a surface reclamation of "bitch," digging deeper into both the sexual and emotional connotations of the earlier derogatory usage before she can rest easy in the reclaimed, celebratory sense of the word.

According to the OED, the word "bitch" stems from the Old English bicce, or female dog. But by the sixteenth century, the word was just as commonly used as an insult aimed primarily at women, in particular at "lewd or sensuous" women, women whose sexuality was seen as threatening because uncontrolled. Today, its connotations include both this earlier sense, as well as a more general sense of a "malicious or treacherous woman"; when applied to an object, it also indicates something "outstandingly difficult or unpleasant."

Significantly, it is during Stacy's sexual reunion with Leo that she is finally able to channel the magical power which Desmond inadvertently granted her. And only after Leo challenges her, mid-sex, to reject the assumptions that derogatory bitch-hood projects ("I'm not ugly. I'm not vicious.) and embrace instead the strength inherent in reclaimed bitch-hood ("I'm powerful") can she take control of that magic. Viewing both her emotions (especially her anger) and her power as equally worthy of celebrating, Stacy comes to reject the construction of bitch that argues that a powerful woman can only be powerful if she lacks sensitivity to others.

Only after fully embracing reclaimed bitchiness can Stacy counter the unfeeling Desmond when he lofts the b-insult (in its earlier sense) in her direction during their final showdown. And only by forcing Desmond to reconnect with his own detached emotions, rather than shunning the power of her own feelings, can Stacy ultimately prevent Desmond from harming the people she loves.


Do you think "bitch" as a word is worth reclaiming? Are there other romance novels which use the word in a feminist, rather than a derogatory, way?


Photo credits:
I'm Not a Bitch: Life Inspiration Quotes
Leymah Gbowee: Working Women in Aid and Development blog

Lucy March

That Touch of Magic

St. Martin's, 2014