Several of my past posts have been inspired from things overheard at the latest New England Chapter of the Romance Writers of America Conference, and today's post is, too. During a workshop on sex positivity in romance, author Alyssa Cole noted that what counts as sex positive is different in different times, and in different places. As a reader and writer of historical romance, the first part of Cole's claim seemed obvious to me: what counts as embracing your sexual self looks a lot different in Regency England as it does in 21st century America. The example that Cole used—that the forced sex in the "bodice ripper" romances of the 1970s and early 80s may appear sexist and regressive to today's readers, but the trope can be interpreted as sex positive when put into the historical context of women's liberation movements and pushback against the same—was one with which I was also familiar.
The idea that sex positivity can look different not just across time, but across communities and cultural groups living during the same historical period, though, wasn't one that I had given a lot of thought to before hearing Cole's words. But of course my idea of sex positivity growing up as the child of white American parents who had grown up in the working class but who had through education moved into the middle class, likely looked a lot different from that of a child who grew up in the Australian outback, or under the Communism of the USSR, or on a Native American reservation during the same time period. Norms of culture vary not just across time, but across social group.
So I'm wondering: what does it mean to you to be sex positive? Have your ideas about what is sex positive/sex negative changed over time? Have they changed as/if you've moved from one social group to another during your life?
A while back, I wrote a post about romance writers who used the word "bitch" in their novels, and the possibilities of reclaiming that derogatorily-gendered term from its sexist roots for feminist purposes. Of late, though, I've been bugged by a quite different gendered insult, one that seems to be coming up more and more frequently in the contemporary romances I've been reading.
The word?
"She was jealous. You know how it goes," he said. "Of course I know how it goes. Doesn't make you being a douche bag okay." (Sarah Mayberry, Anticipation) Blake nods fervently. "Blast from the past, huh? Those are awesome. Well, not always. Sometimes they suck. You know who called me out of the blue last week? This douchebag I knew in high school—know what he wanted? For me to bang his girlfriend. . . . Turns out this chick's dream was to bone a pro hockey player, and the douchebag thought it would be a nice birthday present for her." (Elle Kennedy and Sarina Bowen, Us) "Guys? Thanks, but don't worry. I can handle myself," she said. "I can defend myself. And I can prove to this douchebag that I can code." Abraham's eyes gleamed. "Game on, Peach." (Cathy Yardley, Level Up: A Geek Romance Rom Com)
Ah yes, the oh so disgusting "douchebag." In each of the above romances, all of which featured empowered women and enlightened men negotiating their (hetero & queer) romance lives with skill, insight, and aplomb, the insult "douchebag" is tossed out to denigrate a male who denigrates women. In Level Up, heroine Tessa uses it to indicate that her fellow computer programmer colleague Abraham is a jerk for assuming that because she is a woman, she cannot code as well as he can. In Us, secondary character Blake uses it to indicate that a guy who thinks that giving his girlfriend a birthday present consisting of the chance to sleep with a famous sports star is a misogynist.
And in Anticipation, heroine Blue uses the term to describe the male protagonist, who, at the start of the story, is not at all ready for hero status. By calling Eddie, her best friend (and 10-year crush) a douchebag, Blue makes it clear that Eddie's penchant for ignoring her whenever he had a girlfriend, and then expecting her to be ready to party when he breaks up with said girlfriend, is not okay. Later in the novel, Eddie even applies the term to himself when he recognizes how poorly he treats Blue, "since you put your cock first pretty much every time," suggesting that he's moving in the right direction on the "respecting women" learning curve and getting closer to achieving hero status (Kindle Loc 774).
In all these books, "douchebag" is used as a putdown of sexist men. But I had always associated it with sexism, hence my distaste for the word. How did two such opposite connotations adhere to the same word? A short foray into the history of the douche seemed in order...
"Drop it, Douchebag!"
I first heard "douchebag" from the mouth of Sgt. Mick Belker, one of the more colorful characters on my favorite television show of the early 1980s, Hill Street Blues. Mick, an undercover copy, often dressed as if he lived on the streets, all the better to fit in when he was in the middle of an investigation. He talked to the criminals he arrested as if they were dogs ("Sit, hairball"; "Sit down, dog breath"); growled at them as if he were a canine; and rained a colorful shower of insults down on their witless heads, including the memorable "dog drool," "kidney bag," and, of course "douchebag." I could be wrong, but I recall "douchebag" changing over to "dirtbag" fairly early in the show's run, perhaps because the insult was considered too raw for prime time TV.
I didn't really connect Mick Belker's insult to the print ads and television commercials I occasionally saw for a feminine hygiene product called a douche. I didn't use a douche, nor did any woman I knew. So it wasn't until my women's studies classes at college that I understand why being called a "douchebag" would be considered an insult, one applied exclusively to men.
A comment on a post on the Dialect Blog entitled "On the Evolution of 'Douchebag'" gives a succinct explanation of the sexism inherent in the term:
It is an insult more because a douche bag is used by a woman to clean her vagina. To call a man (you never call a woman a douche bag) a douche is the lowest insult. Our society is very male centered right now so it makes sense that anything having to do with the lowly woman would be a great insult to a male in this macho culture. It is the same as being called a tampon or a pussy. If it is female it is derogatory. This furthers the misconception of women as "unclean" or dirty, especially when menstruation is concerned.
A douchebag holds the water or other liquids used to clean a woman's (purportedly dirty) vagina (or, in some cases, stores the water after it has been used to clean said vagina). So, the insult in being labeled a "douchebag" lies in the word's association with women's bodies, in particular, women's sexual bodies. If you're a douchebag, you're not just disgustingly effeminate, you're marked by a particularly female taint. Hard to argue with the sexism of that.
But it turns out that the history of the word "douche" makes the connotations of the term "douchebag" a bit more complicated.
Douche, coined in the 16th century from the French word for "shower," originally referred to "a jet or stream of water, or the like, applied to some part of the body, generally for medicinal purposes." But by the early 19th century, the word had taken on a more specific meaning: "a jet of water (or a solution of water and other substances) introduced into the vagina as a means of cleansing the uterus and cervix, treating infection and haemorrage, or esp. preventing conception after intercourse" (OED) (note: the douche is NOT an effective method of birth control).
A medical technique became a commercial product in early 20th century America, when male advertisers began to sell douches as female contraceptives (albeit via euphemistic wording). From the 1920s to the 1950s, douches were aggressively marketed to women with one part shame and one part "science": "One most effective way to safeguard her dainty feminine allure is by practicing complete feminine hygiene as provided by vaginal douches with a scientifically correct preparation like 'Lysol'." Yes, that Lysol. (See this informative post by Historiann for more of the horrifically sexist details).
In the 1960s, after the introduction of the birth control pill, fewer women relied on douches for contraception. Drawing on the new popularity of feminist discourse, advertisements shifted away from male science and towards female sharing. Rather than panicked wives, ads began to feature reassuring mothers counseling their concerned daughters to use Massengill or other douche preparations to rid themselves of that "unfresh" feeling "down there." Or smart, intelligent women, who wanted to show their friends how to instill "confidence," or feel "natural" by douching. Douche as empowerment? Just check out the Massengill ad below.
You can still by douches in your local pharmacy, despite increasing medical evidence of their harmful effects (PubMed lists a 1918 "A Clinical Lecture on The Bad Habit of Vaginal Douching," pointing to a very long history of warnings against the practice). Why?
So, on the one hand, "douchebag" is a deeply sexist insult, one that relies on the belief that women's bodies and women's sexuality are by their very nature filthy and in need of cleaning, and that being the end recipient of the results of that cleaning is the most disgusting thing a man could ever imagine.
But on the other hand, the word points to the sexism of the men who created the douche as a commercial product, and used fear and shame of female bodies to market it to the female American masses.
Who would have thought that one small word could be such a double-edged sword?
What comes to your mind when you read the insult "douchebag" in a romance novel? Sexist insult? Or empowered dissing of sexism?
Since I've written about other romances by Alex Beecroft books in previous RNFF posts, I was originally going to make this review part of a "Short Takes" column, discussing Blue-Eyed Stranger in brief, and in the context of several other similarly-themed books. But when I started writing, I realized I couldn't do Beecroft's intelligent, provocative romance justice without devoting a full post to it...
How important is it not to lie about the past? At the start of Blue-Eyed Stranger, schoolteacher Martin Deng would say it is vital. Martin, whose father emigrated from Sudan to Britain, has made it his cause to teach history in a way that does not reinforce lies of omission about people of colour. As Martin reflects about traditional pedagogical practice, "The teaching of history in UK schools could so easily be an all-white thing. Not a deliberate glorification of the Anglo-Saxon race, nothing as egregious as that, but simply the underlying assumption that all the important things in world history had been done by white people, whether those people were British or Roman" (2). In contrast, Martin makes sure to teach his kids that "there have been people of colour in Britain since Roman times, and that people of colour had had a long and glorious history in the world.... Children who'd picked up the modern myth that all black people had once been slaves, and who therefore had rejected history as something they didn't want to know about, suddenly began to see themselves as kings and prophets and world leaders" (2).
Martin's getting pushback from the head of his school, though, for his teaching practices ("You're giving the children a false impression of the past. A parade of freaks and exceptions do not constitute history" [8]). Martin is incensed; as he well knows, the flip side to the joy of discovering yourself in the formerly all-white past is "Fury. Because finding out that you'd been here all along also meant finding out that you'd been lied to all this time. Deliberately lied to so you would carry on feeling small and foreign, so you would feel you had less of a right to be here than your neighbours" (8). Lying about the past reinforces the prejudices that keep the oppressed feeling that oppression is their due.
Black Vikings in the Madrid Skylitzes (12th century AD)
Martin finds a measure of relief from school politics in his hobby—organizing and participating in a historical reenactment society he recently founded, a group focused on medieval Viking life. Yet even here, proudly declaring that there were black Vikings in the past, Martin can't be completely himself; out and proud about his race, he keeps his sexuality hidden: "But God it was hard enough being one minority. He really wasn't sure he could face being two" (24).
If Martin is frustrated by being too conspicuous, Billy Wright has the opposite problem. Because of both his reticent personality and his ongoing battles with crippling depression, Billy often feels that "if I don't remind people I'm here all the time, they forget I exist" (21). The only time Billy really feels seen is when he's wearing a mask, the costume and painted face of a morris dancer.
A error over performance scheduling at a festival both groups are attending sets Martin's Vikings in conflict with Billy's Stomping Griffins, a conflict only exacerbated by the morris dancers' makeup: "Look, I've got to ask you this," Martin says to Billy as they are waiting in line to purchase lunch for the two groups in an attempt to mend fences via food. "You do know how offensive the blackface is, don't you? Are you meaning to be racist or are you just doing it by accident?" (45). As Billy tries to explain, though, history is multi-faceted, with one group's symbol of oppression signifying something completely different to another:
Well, the blacking comes from Victorian times, when morris dancing had been made illegal. Um, the Victorians thought of it [morris dancing] as aggressive begging and decided to stamp it out.... the dancers could be accused of demanding money with menaces. It meant that the householders could set the police on them and have them arrested.... So the dancers got into the habit of going dancing in disguise. All year round, they'd had strips of cloth sewn inside their jackets for extra warmth, but now they turned their coats inside out, so they couldn't be recognised by their clothes. And they rubbed soot all over their faces, so no one could recognise those either.... So you see, it's a disguise thing. It's not a racist thing at all" (46-7).
And it gets even more complicated, Billy notes, since because most contemporary people are not aware of the hidden history behind morris dancing, they simply assume it is racist: "So on the one hand, I don't want to ruin your day, and I don't want to make some guy in the crowd who is a racist feel good about himself. But on the other hand, this is what they did" (47). How important is it not to lie about the past?
Martin offers a solution to this particular problem, one grounded in his own practice: "Maybe it's something you can explain when you go on... You'll have a microphone and a crowd. A good opportunity to education them, yeah?" (49). Given all they have in common, including their sexual attraction to each other, it's hardly surprising that Martin and Billy end up dating.
But there is one difference between them that proves less tractable: Billy is openly out about his sexuality with his fellow dancers, while Martin is not among his fellow Vikings: "I've got a new society to hold together and I stand out enough for the colour of my skin without having any more minority ticky boxes against me. I'm just... waiting for a better time to tell the rest of the garrison. When things aren't quite so precarious" (54).
Billy initially accepts Martin's terms, veering between hope—"Martin could practice being out while he was at Billy's, and once he'd realized for himself how much better it was, it might just spread, automatically, into other areas of his life" (128)—and despair—"You're going to give in forever, you know. You always do. You have no fucking backbone at all. He's never going to change, you're never going to change. You're going to carry on being dishonest for the rest of your life" (135). Billy ultimately must decide if loving Martin is worth lying about not just the past, but about the present, too.
Imagining the past, Martin muses, is comparable to putting oneself in another's shoes, seeing with a "stranger's eyes":
"Encountering the minds of people from history was like encountering aliens. Funny and bizarre, unsettling and uncomfortable, sometimes even repellent. But you always returned form it with a refreshed perspective, so that just for a little while, before habit kicked back in, you could see your own world with a stranger's eyes, and all the thing that were normally invisible showed up like cancer cells tagged with radiant dye" (98).
And seeing with a stranger's eyes lies at the heart not only of studying history, Beecroft insists, but at the heart of love.
Photo/illustration credits: Black Vikings: Africa Resource Morris dancers in blackface: BBC News
