Imagining the Joys of a Progressive Political Future: Casey McQuiston's RED, WHITE, & ROYAL BLUE

Several of the workshops featured at this past weekend's "Let Your Imagination Take Flight" conference, hosted by my home chapter of Romance Writers of America, focused on "getting unstuck" and fighting writers' block. And I shared many conversations with fellow writers talking about the feeling that something is missing when we sit down to write these days, suggesting that this is an issue for many American romance authors at this particular point in history. Several colleagues pointed not to the prevalence of unpleasant weather currently plaguing America's northeast, but instead to the country's current political situation as the most likely reason why they are experiencing stress, lack of inspiration, and just plain burnout at the thought of writing about happily ever afters. It can be hard to imagine a more progressive future when you feel mired in an ever-expanding swamp of lies, constantly having to justify and defend the values, and the people, you hold dear.

Which was why it was such a joy to sit down post-conference and read Casey McQuiston's joyful but politically pointed romance comedy debut, Red, White, & Royal Blue. McQuiston originally came up with the hook-y premise for this book—the son of the American president falls for the youngest of England's royal princes—in early 2016, before the surprise of that fall's Presidential election. After said election, McQuiston herself felt blocked: "Suddenly what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parallel universe needed to be escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality. Not a perfect world—one still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic. I wasn't sure I was up to the task" (Acknowledgements).

I for one am amazingly grateful that McQuiston managed not to give up on this story. For rather than reading as a "tongue-in-cheek parallel universe," the love story of presidential son Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry of Wales served for me as a glorious vision of a more hopeful, progressive, and utterly achievable political future.

What does said future look like? It looks like a country willing to elect not only a female President, but a female amicably divorced from her first husband and happily married to her second. It looks like a country with two biracial first children (Mexican-American senator father, white President mother), who, with the "vaguely bisexual" granddaughter of the Vice President, serve as the country's most talked-about, and admired, twenty-somethings. It looks like a world in which the younger generation, comfortable both working and socializing in a multiracial, international, global world, serves as a model for their more cautious elders.

It also happens to look a lot like a classic enemies-to-lovers romance.

Staffers new to the White House are informed early on of three important things about FSOTUS Alex Claremont-Diaz: he lives at the White House, even though he's still in college (Georgetown is so close!); he often calls for coffee in the middle of the night while working on his college essays or his mother's reelection strategy; and he has a long-standing grudge against the youngest of Britain's royal princes.

A few years older than Alex, Prince Henry has always struck Alex as a dull stick-in-the-mud, undeserving of all the adulation and attention focused on him:

The tabloids—the world—decided to cast Alex as the American equivalent of Prince Henry from day one, since the White House Trio is the closest thing America has to royalty. It has never seemed fair. Alex's image is all charisma and genius and smirking wit, thoughtful interviews and the cover of GQ at eighteen; Henry's is placid smiles and gentle chivalry and generic charity appearances, a perfectly blank Prince Charming canvas. Henry's role, Alex thinks, is much easier to play.
     Maybe it is technically a rivalry. Whatever. (Loc 149)

Which is why attending the wedding of Henry's older brother is filling Alex not with delight, but with snark. As he tells elder sister June, "You can't just call him my 'arch nemesis'... 'Arch nemesis' implies he's actually a rival to me on any level and not, you know, a stuck-up product of inbreeding who probably jerks off to photos of himself" (93). And so, to the surprise of no-one, Alex can't restrain himself from taunting his "arch nemesis" during the very proper wedding reception:

The most annoying thing of all is Alex knows Henry hates him too—he must, they're naturally mutual antagonists—but he refuses outright to act like it. Alex is intimately aware politics involves a lot of making nice with people you loathe, but he wishes that once, just once, Henry would act like an actual human and not some polished little wind-up toy sold in a palace gift shop. He's too perfect. Alex wants to poke it. (229)

Poking polite Henry, however, quickly escalates into "Cakegate" (you have to read it to appreciate it), an international breach of etiquette so dire that requires major diplomatic efforts (and major acting) to patch up. As his mother's aide sternly informs Alex,

"Both sides need to come out of this looking good, and the only way to do that is to make it look like your little slap-fight at the wedding was some homoerotic frat bro mishap, okay? So, you can hate the heir to the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing" (311).

All Alex is convinced of is that a person who lists his hobbies as "polo" and "competitive yachting" has about as much personality as a cabbage. But with his mother facing a challenger criticizing her for her chilly relationship with her British counterpart, Alex gives in and heads to London for a whirlwind weekend visit with his "close personal friend" Prince Henry.

Alex prides himself on his ability to read others, and is convinced that he knows all he needs to about the stuffy, dull prince before he even gets off the plane. But during their tour through charity events, television interviews, and a false-alarm assassination attempt, "he keeps getting these little glimpses into things he never thought Henry was. A bit of a fighter, for one. Intelligent, interested in other people. It's honestly disconcerting" (623).

Even more disconcerting is the friendship the two develop via text message, and occasional in-person meetings, in the ensuing months. Because while Alex prides himself on his ability to read others, his ability to understand himself could use a bit more work. Especially when it comes to his own latent attraction to a not-quite-so-proper prince.

But can the son of the American president date a British prince in the middle of a re-election campaign? Especially if mom needs to win their home state of Texas in order to guarantee a repeat?

I've quoted so often from Red, White, & Royal Blue in the above review because so much of the pleasure in this rom com comes from McQuiston's distinctive, laugh-out-loud voice, told entirely from the point of view of its hyper intelligent but emotionally clueless main character. Though the story is told in the third person, it's also told in the present tense, which gives the narration both immediacy and a certain wry distance, both of which are perfectly suited to conveying Alex's character and charm. For example, after Alex sees a picture of Henry with a "mysterious blonde," the narrator tells us "Faintly, under it all, it occurs to him: This is all a very not-straight way to react to seeing your male frenemy kissing someone else in a magazine" (1655). Or the scene where Alex is trying to figure out whether he might not be as straight as he's always assumed by calling his former (male) best friend and asking, "This might sound weird. But, um. Back in high school, did we have, like, a thing? Did I miss that?" (5485).

No romance reader will want to miss McQuiston's glorious celebration of snark, sentiment, and the progressive political possibilities of a not quite straight royal romance.

And no writer could find a better cure for political-despair-induced writers' block than McQuiston's sparkling, effervescent romance.


Photo credits:
British/US flag pin: Athletic awards
Royal wedding cake: Getty Images
Hate to Love trope sticker: RedBubble 

Casey McQuiston

Red, White & Royal Blue

St. Martins, 2019

Protest Romance? The ROGUE DESIRE Anthology

If you're disheartened, disenchanted, or simply outraged by the current state of the U.S. national political situation, you can exercise your right to protest in myriad ways. Write to your elected officials to express your opinions. Attend rallies to support the causes you believe in, or protest against the policies you don't. Join a local or national political action group. Call your state senator or congressperson and register your concern.

Or, if you are a romance writer, you can pen a protest romance.

Several RNFF favorites, as well as a few unknown-to-the-blog other writers, have done just that, jointly publishing Rogue Desire. The anthology's tagline reads "When all else fails, find love," but the eight short stories in the collection are about more than finding a romantic partner; they are about how love and protest politics can and do intersect, and to what ends.

Potential leaker? Not looking too likely....

Several of the stories are pretty much wish-fulfillment, political protest-wise. Stacey Agdern's "Truth, Love, and Sushi" is one of them, setting forth the dream that that a child of an abusive authoritarian president will turn against him (calling Tiffany Trump, anyone?). Caroline Crosby's father has recently been elected president, and she has to decide whether to leak documents from a secret notebook detailing "Jason's [her father's] innermost thoughts, Sophia's [her mother's] infamous lists; and things that nobody would admit to in public, let alone write down in private" (Kindle Loc 3757). The leaking seems pretty much a foregone conclusion, even with the small threat that Caroline's youngest sister will be taken away from her if she spills. The romantic attraction between Caroline and her love object, a political blogger, is never to be, apparently, because he's the one through whom she's going to leak the documents. I didn't quite get that, to be honest; since they were already hanging out together in public, it seemed that Max would already be on suspicious folks' radar, even if Caroline stayed away from him post-leak. There's not much in the way of models of positive action that the average reader can take away from this story, either, but wish fulfillment does have its place as a coping strategy, no doubt.

Although at first glance, the story that opens the collection, "Grassroots" by Adriana Anders, appears to fall far less in the realm of fantasy, it still gave me pause. Veronica Cruz, a preschool schoolteacher, decides to take her protest local by running for city council. Odds seemed stacked against her—the local privileged white guy, Clint S. Rylie, may have cheated on high school tests to earn his "A's," but his attractive wife and kids and his financially well-endowed campaign attract far more attention to his campaign that Veronica's local canvassing does to hers. But after Veronica meets a hot blind blogger while on the rounds, she suddenly discovers people she's never met beating the campaign trail on her behalf. Apparently the hot blogger is a wildly popular Internet influencer with the online name of "Horde," and has asked his multitude of fans to get out for the cause. Despite being incensed by the guy's interference, Veronica ends up sleeping with him. But when it turns out that Horde has dug up dirt about Veronica's opponent and revealed it to the press, all without consulting her, she (rightly, in my opinion) blows a gasket. Winning an election due to another person's social media contacts, rather than to actions a candidate takes on her own, struck me as both a wish-fulfillment fantasy and pretty disempowering for Veronica....

I was surprisingly charmed by new-to-me author Jane Lee Blair's "My Delight Is In Her," which features a second chance romance between Kim, who turned down a chance to marry her boyfriend when he decided to become a Presbyterian pastor, and said pastor, Leonard, who is serving a flock in one of nation's capital's less privileged neighborhoods. Kim knows that congregants are always up in the business of their pastor's "First Lady," and wants no part of such a public life. She's chosen public service of a different sort: working in the Department of Labor: "I know they kept me because my skin color looks good on their graphics. I know it. But I'm gonna stay for as long as I can do the most good—or prevent the most harm" (4767). But when she spies Leonard at a protest march, then her date wants to take her to Leonard's church, and then she runs into Leonard again during an organizational meeting for a city-wide protest/prayer service—well, she can't help but revisit her original decision. While Blair states in her author's note that this story is not an inspirational romance, it has many of the trappings of one—protagonists who do not have sex before marriage; Bible verses providing inspiration; change in the direction of the romance that occurs via spiritual insight. But it also has a lot of swearing, some drinking, and an acknowledgement that sex and sexual drives are positive forces in life, not to mention an appealing sense of humor. This is Blair's first published work; I'm looking forward to seeing where her talents take her in future.

Political possibilities, not just romantic ones, are clearly present in the best three stories in the collection, by RNFF standbys Amy Jo Cousins, Emma Barry, and Tamsen Parker.* Paige Robinson, one of the protagonists in Parker's "Life, Liberty, and Worship," has chosen to stay on in her post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, despite her major disagreements with the policies being implemented by the new administration. Spin class is supposed to be the one place where she can chill from the stresses of her job and politics. But the nerdy guy who takes the bike in front of her, the one who wears t-shirts that are "walking billboards" for his fiscally conservative politics: "Stop the War on Small Business," "Keep Calm and Fight Socialism," and "What Would Milton Friedman Do?" is driving her up the wall (6255). Loathing him even while fantasizing about fucking him, Paige channels her rage into hellacious workouts. But when Paige discovers that the guy she's been calling "Dick" is Carter Cox, the conservative penning smart position papers for the Republican Study Committee, papers that she can't just dump into the shredder without another thought, she can't keep her mouth shut any longer, and her femdom tendencies come to the fore. Can a hate-fuck turn into a real romance? Only if one partner is willing to prove himself by taking political action...

Amy Jo Cousins' protagonists are also on different sides of the political spectrum, although their divide is not one of party, but of technique. Polite, well-behaved diplomat's son and future law school student Kaz Shamsi "had no patience for the anti-fascist protestors who had sprung up since the election and seemed to like fighting as much as the fascists did, no matter what they said about denying Nazis platforms. When shit got violent, brown and black bodies were the ones who ended up suffering most, from the violence or the inevitable police action in response to it" (2191). So when a masked antifa protester fleeing an angry mob during a DC immigrants rights rally that Kaz has brought a group of undergrads to attend jumps on his borrowed motorcycle, Kaz is tempted to tell him to get lost. No Pakistani immigrant needs to get mixed up in some white boy's rebellion. But when Kaz spies the protester's rainbow duct tape armband, he knows he can't leave him behind. High-speed chases get the adrenalin pumping, though, and some seriously close contact leads to an unexpectedly hot make-out session with the still-masked antifa. Who, it turns out to Kaz's enormous embarrassment, is none other than the annoyingly outspoken undergrad in one of the sections he's TA'ing. I really loved the way Cousins showed how people with different opinions can argue forcefully, but respectfully And how even people committed to political protest can make major mistakes. But also how they can learn from them, as seen in this hilarious, but educational, exchange:

     "Man, fascists really don't like it when you make fun of their dick size." 
     "Neither do I, because that's body-shaming, transphobic bullshit and we're supposed to be the good guys."  Shit. His teacher voice shot out of him involuntarily at the most inappropriate times. Or hell, maybe this was the appropriate time. Having saved this kid's ass—he ripped his eyes away from the sweet curve in those black cargo pants—the kid deserved to sit and listen to a lecture. "Do better."
     "Yikes. I will. Sorry. I'm new to the revolution," the guy said as he swung a leg over the rear fender and hopped off the bike. "I can make fun of them for misspelling their signs, right?"
     Kaz tried not to roll his eyes. Newbies. "Is making fun of someone's lack of education or potential learning disability really the hill you want to stake your flag on?"
     "Fuck." The guy reached for his hood as if to shove it down, then froze and dropped his hands with an abortive gesture. "This shit is complicated." 
     .....
     "Yeah, it is if you're doing it right . . . . Repeat after me: my revolution will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit." (2318)


In Emma Barry's "Kissing and Other Forms of Sedition," reckless presidential tweeting leads Graham to fear that nuclear armageddon might be all too nigh. Will he die before declaring his long-time love for fellow state legislative assistant Cadence? Damn no, he won't. But Graham and Cadence's night of passion fires Cadence to political, not just personal, heights, and she drags cautious Graham on a road trip to the capital, where she hopes to crash the house of the Secretary of Labor and try to convince her to "get the ball rolling on the Twenty-fifth Amendment process and remove the president from office" (3247). Unlike several of the other stories in the collection, this one doesn't have a too-easy ending, but it does push both its protagonists and its readers to think about just what love means—not just romantic love, but patriotism, love of one's country.

Like democracy, Rogue Desire is messy and imperfect. But it will definitely give you a few moments of entertaining respite from a politically infuriating world. And it might just give you a few ideas about how to begin to make that world a bit less infuriating.


* Tamsen is an NECRWA chaptermate and fellow board member of mine, who was kind enough to send me an ARC of this anthology. No board votes or chocolate chip cookies were exchanged during the writing of this review.

Photo credits:
Tiffany Trump and her father: Metro.us
"First Lady": Michelle Lesley Books
Immigrant rally: Huffington Post

Rogue Desire

A Romance Anthology

Indie published, 2017

Politics and Intersectional Feminism: Alyssa Cole's LET US DREAM

On the eve of the American election this past November, I was planning to celebrate the country voting in its first women president by reading the recently published anthology Daughters of a Nation: A Black Suffragette Historical Romance Anthology. Four stories, each featuring African American women fighting for the vote on behalf of both their sex and their race at four different points in U. S. history, these stories promised to point out both how far our country has come in widening the franchise and how far it still has yet to go.

But after the shocking outcome of November's election, celebration was no longer on my mind. I set the anthology aside, and split my reading time between political reporting/calls for activism and old romance favorites, books that I could depend on to give me welcome comfort in these painful political times.

But as the Women's March on Washington approached, and I began to read media stories about tensions between white women and women of color involved in planning and participating (or not participating) in it, I found myself turning back to Daughters. And in many ways, I'm glad I waited, for reading its stories, in particular Alyssa Cole's Let Us Dream, helped me as a white feminist to understand those tensions in a way that more analytical, theoretical writing hadn't.

The 15th Amendment: the "right of citizens of the United States
to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States
or by any state on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude." 

The first three stories in the anthology (Lena Hart's In the Morning Sun, set in 1868; Piper Huguley's The Washerwomen's War and Kianna Alexander's A Radiant Sun, both set in 1881) give readers slices of history likely unfamiliar to many contemporary readers: efforts to educate free blacks in Nebraska in the wake of the Civil War; the tensions in the African American community over whether to campaign for female suffrage for all races, or to focus on ensuring black men's right to vote was not curtailed; the efforts of African American washerwomen to strike for a better wage; black women's suffrage in Wyoming, the first state in the union to give women the vote. All include sweet romances, too, some interracial, others between black men and women who do not always agree when it comes to women's rights.

But Let Us Dream was the story that really made me sit up and take notice. Not only because Cole interweaves the political themes of her story so tightly with the arc of her romance, but also because those political themes strike just as resonantly in 2017 as they do in 1917, the year in which Cole's story is set.

Bertha Hines has spent years dancing to the tunes of men: first her father, who pretended to be East Indian rather than African American after witnessing how differently men from India were treated, and who taught his daughter how to dance in a sari, as if she had been born in India, too. And then for her pimp, later her husband, Arthur, owner of Harlem's Cashmere club/whorehouse. But now that Arthur is gone, leaving the Cashmere to Bertha, Bertha has no desire to hitch her star to another man's wagon, thank you very much. She'd rather spend her time teaching the women who work for her all about government, so they'll be ready to vote when New York finally grants women suffrage.

From the Puget Sound American, 1909

But when a friend sends Amir Khan to work as a dishwasher in Bertha's club, he and Bertha immediately begin to set sparks off of each other. Amir, a Marx and Engels-reading socialist who left Bengal to see the world, is just as stubborn, and just as devoted to social justice, as is Bertha. But in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigration from Asian Pacific countries, Amir is an "undocumented alien," with as few political rights as Bertha. A situation that has striking parallels to this past week's presidential executive order barring immigrants from seven primarily Muslim countries—particularly as Amir is not Hindu, but Muslim.

That is not the only echo, past to present. In the story's opening, Bertha attends a meeting of the Colored Women's Voting League, where the "good women. Upstanding, pillars of the community" assert that there is no friction between white and black women of the suffrage movement ("Bertha was tempted to ask why they needed a separate organization—and a separate building—for Negro women if there was so much unity, but that would have been low. Besides, she knew why. They all knew why") (Kindle Loc 4124). They also express their discomfort with the presence of Bertha, former sex worker and current owner of a house of ill repute, especially after she challenges them to include "the poor laundress, the illiterate maid, the downtrodden prostitute" in their outreach efforts (4125). The Voting League's leader tells Bertha "we have limited time and resources an where we direct them is of the essence" and that "Once we win the right to vote for all women, we'll be able to better use of power to uplift" (4138). Bertha leaves, but not without imparting one last shot of her own: "Uplift? You mean the same patronizing lies women have been fed by men for generations? That we've been fed by Whites since the end of the war?" The rifts that the media honed in on in regards to the Women's March on Washington—tensions between whites who want to focus on women, and POC who wanted to send a more intersectional message, and "good" women who are reluctant to inclue "bad" women (sex workers) in their ranks out of fear of weakening their position—are not new ones, Cole's story reminds us; they have existed for years, for more than a century.

Both Bertha and Amir are angry about their political mistreatment, and the lack of social justice they and others like them experience daily. And both use words as weapons, defending themselves from any perceived attack on their pride and self-determination the other appears to threaten—even if said attacks are not intentional. It takes an equal exchange of knowledge—Amir will teach Bertha how to really do an Indian dance, and Bertha will teach Amir about American and New York government—before either can move beyond the strong fronts they've erected to protect themselves from prejudice and abuse to glimpse the truer, more vulnerable person standing behind them. And even once they have caught that glimpse, it's still all too easy to make assumptions, to respond with anger instead of patience when misunderstandings inevitably arise and feelings are hurt. Trust takes a long time to build, even between people who have the shared experience of being oppressed.

There are so many telling scenes, so many quotable lines in Cole's story, I can't begin to do justice to them here. So I'll just end with the one I really needed to hear after the end of the first two weeks of American's current appalling, disheartening presidential term. One of Bertha's girls asks:

"Why does voting matter? I'm just thinking about how Du Bois and everyone got all hopped up over getting Wilson into the White House. Wilson talked a lot of stuff about making things better for us, about justice and kindness, and look! Things are worse than ever with him in office. More segregation. More injustice. Hell, forget Wilson; the suffragettes didn't even want us at that parade of theirs." (5022)

In response, Bertha spins a story, one with a telling, and prescient, moral:

"One time, a long time ago, I met a john who talked so sweet. Looked rich. Smelled good. Came in here telling me I was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen, begging me to put it on him, all that nonsense. I thought he was swell. Classy. Let him convince me to go back to a room with him. . . . That man threw me on the bed and started trying to get crazy. Thought because he was paying for it, he could do whatever he wanted. but I screamed and the man running the hotel bust through the door and pulled him off me. . . .  What I'm saying is, I bet on that man. I thought he was the best choice of the pickings that night. I thought he was gonna do right by me. And I was wrong. That didn't mean I didn't go back to work the next night. That didn't mean I never got fooled again. When you're trying to survive, sometimes you're gonna encounter liars. Politicians are the worst of them. But there are good ones too. You take your chances there like anywhere else in life because the only other options is giving up." (5036)

One of the many great signs at
the Boston Women's March

Scream and holler, go out and protest, take your chances, and go back to work the next night (or day), no matter the result. And above all, don't give up. Messages that I took to heart as I went out and joined thousands in Boston's Women's March, and that I continue to hold close as ever more disturbing news oozes out from our nation's capital.


Illustration credits:
15th Amendment: New York Times
Puget Sound American: South Asian American Digital Archive
Rise Up: Photo taken at the Boston Women's March, January 21, 2017

Kianna Alexander, Alyssa Cole, Lena Hart, and Piper Huguley. 

Daughters of a Nation: A Black Suffragette Historical Romance Anthology

Maroon Ash Publishing, 2016

Romance Novels in the Wake of the U.S. Presidential Election

With the exception of romance novels that take place in political settings, romance and politics seem, on the surface, to be worlds apart. Romance is about entertainment, about escape; politics is about the real world. I'd like to take this space today, though, to think about the ways that one might influence the other—and what obligations romance writers have, or might want to take on, in the aftermath of this week's United States presidential election.

Some ideas, and some questions, in no particular order...

I'm thinking about the increase in depictions of LGBTQ rights and identities in the romance genre over the past five to ten years. Not every romance reader is a fan of romances with protagonists who are not heterosexual, but the increase in both the numbers of non-heterosexual romances published over this period and in their readership has been marked (See Jessica Freely's post, "Reading Gay Romance," on the Popular Romance Project's web site for more info). Such books provide happily ever afters for readers who identify as LGBTQ, stories that contest the insistence that such lives must always be ones of victimization and oppression. But they also serve to inform and educate those who have not encountered an openly LGBTQ person in their lives, or who have been raised in environments that demonize such identities. The evidence so far is anecdotal, but I've read many a comment on romance blogs which suggest that reading such books has opened the eyes of many a reader who had been taught by school or church or community that homosexuality and homosexuals were by nature evil and other. Though not without its downsides (objectification; #ownvoices, etc.), I take this as a generally positive movement in the field, one to celebrate. Romance is about entertainment, but it can also serve a positive social purpose: as they say in education, it can be both a mirror (to LGBTQ people) and a window (to those for whom such identities are unfamiliar).

Survey of readers of the Goodreads male/male romance group

Are there other identities that romance could be working to portray? What other mirrors and windows are we lacking? What identities do romances portray obsessively (biker, billionaire, duke), and why? What other identities do romances deliberately shun?

I'm thinking about race here, of course. Would so many white women voters have been able to bring themselves to pull the lever for a presidential candidate who utters openly racist statements if they had regularly "met" people with racial and ethnic identities different from their own via their romance reading?

How much does the restriction of romances with African American characters to African American only lines create, rather than reflect, the belief that white readers will not be interested in such stories? And how can we, as romance readers and writers, push back against such restrictions? How can we encourage cross-race reading among white readers (as readers of color have, by default, been forced to read white romances for a very long time)?

How can and do romances model cross-race relationships? Not just between lovers, but between friends? Is there room for both "we are all humans/I'm blind to racial difference" type of romance, as well as the romance that openly grapples with the struggles different racial and ethnic groups have on both an individual and a group level?

Intersectionality is more often used to think about women of color, but can we also used it to think productively about white working class identity and romance readership? According to RWA,

• The U.S. romance book buyer is most likely to be aged between 30 and 54 years.
• Romance book buyers are highly represented in the South.
• Romance book buyers have an average income of $55,000

RWA used to list information about educational attainment of the readership, but such information no longer appears on the site. Given that the average starting salary of a new college graduate in 2016 is projected to be $50,566 (Money magazine), the average romance reader is likely not a college educated one (although the readership does, of course, include many college-educated readers).

Romance readership, then, seems overlaps to a great extent with the women who voted for Trump. Many proponents of the romance genre have argued that romance is by its very nature feminist; do these demographic figures, and the presidential voting results in this election, call this claim into question?

I'm also thinking a lot about class. I'm thinking about the Trump message, "Make America Great Again," and the desire that lies behind that message: a desire to return to an America where white working class men could earn a respectable wage. Are there romances that depict this demographic, that play out against a background of the disruptive shift from a manufacturing to a technology/service economy? That show this desire in a positive light, rather than link it to a racist identity? What might such a romance look like?

Do small town romances feed into the desire to "Make America Great Again"? In what ways? Is there a way to write a small town romance that is not falsely nostalgic? 

"Socially responsible daily behavior": only one small
spoke in the social change wheel

Romance, and the novel itself, are about individual characters, rather than about groups. And so they portray change happening most often on the level of the individual: if Darcy can get over his prideful nature, and Elizabeth can stop judging people, they will be able to unite as a couple and live at Pemberly happily ever after. But political and social change comes about far more often through group movements than through change on the individual level. Is there a way that romance novels can incorporate depictions of group organizing as a positive force? Where are the romances that are set against social justice organizing/work?

I'm also thinking about religion. Why is religion been restricted to the subgenre of the Evangelical romance? For many people, on both ends of the political spectrum, religion plays a major role in their lives and identities. It also often plays a large role in social change. Why is romance as a genre (with the exception of Evangelical romance) so wary of religion?


And, of course, the obvious question: what about the depiction of masculinity in the most popular heterosexual romance novels? Do romance novelists who write alpha male heroes contribute to the normalizing and acceptability of offensive male behavior, such as that embodied in our current president-elect? Do the alpha males of romance, who are strong, aggressive, and often offensively mouthy but who inevitably learn to meet our heroine's emotional needs, hold out a deceptively hopeful picture of American masculinity to female readers? Do such depictions provide validation to women who say about real life men, "oh, he says some pretty bad things, but underneath he doesn't really mean them"?

Can romance writers ask our business organization to be more proactive in fostering social justice? In particular, I'd like to see Romance Writers of America track the number of romances published each year by the identities of their characters. And to track the number of romances published each year by the identities of their authors. So we can track over time what, if any, progress is being made by people of color and LGTBQ people in our books, and in our industry.

Perhaps it is a utopian vision, but I can't help but wonder if there is some way for romance, or for RWA in particular, to foster cross-geographical, and cross-political party discussion, as well. Via panels at the annual convention? (Any writers interested in participating in a panel discussion about how to write a feminist romance, please let me know...). Via a pen pal exchange between red state and blue state writers? When we get out of our insular bubbles, and get to know people who are different from ourselves, sympathy, rather than intolerance, come to the fore. What other ways might we as a community foster communication across political lines?

Romance readers often say they read romance to escape from the grim realities of their daily lives. But romance novels are not apolitical. The escapes they depict can either encourage readers to accept and/or ignore the oppressions that exist in their everyday lives, or encourage them to recognize and fight against them.

Romance readers and writers, what are your thoughts and feelings in the wake of this week's election?

Photo credits:

Gay romance readers: Popular Romance Project
Voter chart: FiveThirtyEight

Social change wheel: Der Viator

A Romance Novel a Trump Supporter Could Love: Christine Feehan's SHADOW RIDER

I usually do not spend time here on the blog writing about romance novels that strike me as distinctly anti-feminist. But after reading an ARC of popular romance author Christine Feehan's latest contemporary/paranormal romance Shadow Rider, I couldn't help but feel that writing about how Feehan's novel worked could, weirdly enough, help me understand why some women might be supportive of Donald Trump's candidacy for President of the United States.

Let me explain what I mean...

Shadow Rider is the first in a series about a powerful Italian American family who "keep the neighborhood safe" (Kindle Loc 492). Rumors abound about just how the Ferraro family does so. Are they playboys? Assassins? Mafia? No one in their Chicago neighborhood seems to know, exactly; all anyone will admit is that the Ferraros are sexy, predatory, and dangerous—and that they will protect those who respect them.

A damsel in major distress winds up in Ferraro territory, and is almost instantly "claimed" by the eldest sibling in the predominantly male Ferraro clan. Stefano Ferraro feels an immediate "primal reaction" to his first sight of Francesca Capello, a reaction that he quickly discovers is because she, like he and his siblings, is a shadow rider, someone who can move through space via shadows.

J. R. R. Tolkien and other theorists of fantasy literature argue that in order to make a reader willing to suspend his/her disbelief, a fantasy must create a logical, consistent secondary world, and for many fantasy readers, the appeal of the genre lies in the detail of its world-building. Feehan's book, though, is not interested in exploring the hows and whys of the shadow riders' abilities, never mind the efficacy of their business model (the Ferraros hire themselves out as executioners, only killing the bad guys, of course. Am I the only one who found it hard to believe that a family could earn millions of dollars from innocent people who pay them to kill off evildoers?). Feehan only provides a brief description of what it takes to ride the shadows, or to conduct an assassination business. Nor does she give much in the way of backstory or explanation for how their paranormal powers came to be. Readers well-versed in fantasy conventions would likely find the book unsuccessful because of its weak world-building. But Feehan gives readers something else that makes them willing to suspend their disbelief in her very lightly sketched paranormal world: a hero who, through magic, becomes a larger than life protective figure, both for the book's heroine and for the readers (predominantly female, I'd guess) outside of it.

Because Francesca, unlike Stefano and his siblings, does not understand her own power as a shadow rider. Francesca is running from the murderer of her sister, a politician who has gotten away with his crime by making Francesca appear unstable and thus discrediting her eye-witness account of his atrocity. Francesca has no money, no family, and only one friend when she arrives in Chicago, and continually makes decisions that put her even further in physical and sexual danger. This is a woman in need of protection, Feehan's story asserts, in need of a powerful, dominant, domineering man to keep her safe, not only from her sister's murderer, but also from her own poor choices.

Francesca is a resistant romantic heroine, one who protests a lot about Stefano's protective (domineering) behavior. Luckily for Stefano, Francesca's only friend, Joanna, serves to undercut Francesca's early doubts: "It isn't wow. It's creepy," Francesca protests after Stefano thrusts money into her hand and orders to her to buy herself a coat and new shoes during their very first interaction. Joanna disagrees: "It's wow and you know it. He's hot. He's rich. He's interested in you" (606). Not only is Francesca wrong, she's ungrateful, Joanna asserts, which is a big feminine no-no: "You are so stubborn, Francesca. If I had an opportunity like you have, protection from the Ferraro family, and a thousand dollars to spend, believe me, I'd be counting myself lucky, not resenting it" (772). Readers who enjoy Feehan's story want to believe that a domineering, violent man isn't "creepy," want to believe that his attentions are "wow." And that in exchange for their acceptance of his domineering ways, said domineering man will offer them protection from a cruel, violent world.

And so Francesca, though initially verbally feisty, fairly quickly becomes a behaviorally submissive heroine. Though she continues to protest when Stefano tells her what to do and how to act, she always ends up giving in: "There was no use fighting him on it. He was going to get his way. Both of them knew it" (361); "There wasn't any sense in arguing. Stefano was a law unto himself" (2778); "There was no point in protesting. She was being steamrolled, but she'd asked for it. Stefano was a force" (2837).

And of course, at heart, Francesca really likes the way Stefano tells her what to do and hauls her bodily around when she resists: "She secretly liked that he was bossy. It made her feel as if he could really protect her from anything, although she knew better" (2405). Because of course, "Stefano might snarl, he might even manhandle a woman, but he would never hurt her. Never. She knew that instinctively, like that was written somewhere in stone" (2556). Therein lies the heart of this novel's appeal: a violent man, one who will protect me and will never harm me, is what I need to be safe in the world.

Francesca, unsurprisingly, is also lacking in self-confidence in the looks department, a busty, curvy Italian girl who cannot imagine herself being appealing to hot, sexy glamour boy Stefano. But luckily for her, she has what no other woman outside Stefano's family does: the ability to breed future shadow riders. Because Stefano is not attracted to Francesca because he wants to train her as a shadow rider, to bring out her latent talents. Rather, he sees her as the key to his future, to the future of his family: "His first duty was to Francesca. He should have ensured her safety before anything else—even a job. Without her, there would be no future generations" (1800).

Stefano, like his brothers, "had been raised to respect women. To treasure them. To protect them" (1163). They will deal death and violence, thereby keeping their women safe and sound. Ferraro females will, in turn, provide a safe haven for their men, a sense of warmth, of tenderness, of family to which the Ferraro males can retreat to, to take a break from their "world of unrelenting violence" (1017).  It's almost as if we've been transported back to the nineteenth century, when the doctrine of "separate spheres," which dictates that men fight out in the cruel public world while women keep the private home fires burning, first arose. Unsurprisingly, then, Stefano tells Francesca towards the end of the novel, "You don't ever do violence, Francesca, not unless it's self-defense or in the defense of our family. I won't have that on your soul. You're going to be my wife. The mother of my children. You're about love and softness. Not killing. Never that" (6282).

Not surprisingly, Stefano expects Francesca to stay at home with any children that the two will have: "When we have children, I want you to be with them, not working in some fucking deli so you can call yourself independent. You're never going to be independent" (4960). And again, though Francesca initially resists, eventually she caves and gives up her job.

The readerly desire that Feehan's novel appeases is a desire for a world of separate spheres, a world that asserts that women and men are inherently different and that distinctive gender roles are the norm. And in particular, that men will fight, violently at times, to keep their women safe. "Stefano was larger than life. A throwback to an era gone by when men were fiercely protective of women and children. Where having a code meant something. Giving his word and keeping it was a matter of honor" (5558), Francesca thinks. Whether that world ever actually existed is moot; it is the fantasy that it did, and could again, that appeals to Feehan's readers.

"I have so many women that really want to have protection,
and they like me for that reason." 

And, I'm guessing, to many of the women who support Donald Trump.














Photo credits
Behind Every Succesful Man...: Buzzfeed
Trump supporters: Conservative Tribune

Political Disagreements and the People Behind the Rhetoric: K J Charles' A SEDITIOUS AFFAIR

My heart always sinks whenever I open a piece of mail from a political candidate, or an organization whose work has become the subject of political debate. The rhetoric deployed in such mailings is most often of the ad populum type, an emotional appeal that speaks to negative concepts rather than the real issue at hand. Such appeals tend to demonize the person, party, or organization which are in opposition to the person, party, or organization making the appeal, using overblown language to insist that if I don't send money, the world as I know it will in all likelihood come to a bitter, nasty end, all at the hands of those being demonized. While I often agree with the candidates or groups whose letters clog my mailbox, I can't help but be turned off by their insistence that no good/intelligent person ever could/should/would disagree with their position.

how much political mail have you been pulling out of your
mailbox this season?

Being in the midst of a presidential election year (year and a half?) made me more than receptive, then, to the quite different message in K. J. Charles' latest m/m historical romance, A Seditious Affair. Its two protagonists could not be further apart when it comes to political beliefs and assumptions. Dominic Frey, God-fearing English gentleman and conservative Tory, believes in the natural order of society, with aristocrats at the top and the poor at the bottom. He is committed to his job at the Home Office, working to suppress radical and seditious calls for English government to be violently overturned. A realist, a man of means, and of power. Silas Mason, bookseller and printer, believes that the rich oppress and tyrannize the poor for their own aggrandizement. He is just as committed to his job as is Dominic Frey, although that job is the exact opposite of Dominic's: selling radical political tracts by day, printing seditious pamphlets advocating democracy by night. An idealist, a man scrabbling for means, one who must fight for every bit of power he can take.

If these two men met in the street, they'd likely sneer, or spit on each other's boots. Yet Dominic and Silas share a secret that brings them far closer than either might ever have imagined: a sexual preference for other men. In particular, men who get off on the power games involved in dominance and submission, power and shame. After they meet, anonymously, in an "assignation house," it is this shared secret identity, not the myriad differences between them, that keep them coming back each Wednesday night, week after week, for more than a year.

And soon it's not just for the sex, but for something more:

He couldn't remember which of them had started it, whose chance comment had begun an argument. Had no idea now when the first bottle had been laid out and waiting on his arrival, what day he had said, Have you read . . . and how long after that before the Tory had handed him a book and said, Tell me what you think. He didn't know when the fucking had become just one part of the night's pleasure, the thing they did before talking (238).

Charles gradually and organically reveals Silas and Dominic's different assumptions about the way the world works, both to the reader and to each other. For instance, at the beginning of the story, this exchange about their differing responses to reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shows their almost polar opposite views:

   

1831 edition

 "I finished the book," the Tory said.
     "Oh, aye? What'd you think?"
     "Good. Terrifying. Strange. I can't understand why you would like it."
     "Why would I not?"
     "I wouldn't have thought you'd agree with it." The Tory gave him a wry smile. "After all, its burden is the need for man to keep in his place—"
     "What?" said Silas incredulously.
     "The overreaching man dares to play God and pays a terrible price. Abuses the natural order and creates a monstrous thing."
     "Bollocks," Silas said. "That ain't what it's about."
     "It's what happens."
     "No. What happens is he creates, he's responsible something that should be"—Silas waved his hand—"great and strong, something that he owes a duty to. And he says to it, The hell with you. Go die in a ditch. I'll have my big house and pretty wife. And it says, You don't get to live in a grand house and ignore me. Do your duty or I'll tear you down. Treat me like I'm as good as you, or I'll show you—"
     "That I'm not,: the Tory interrupted. "The creature murders—"
     "Because he ain't given a chance to live decent," Silas interrupted right back. "You treat men like brutes; you make 'em brutes. That's what it says."
     "No, you create brutes when you distort the rules of nature and the order of things," the Tory retorted. "That's what the book's about. It's obvious."
     "It's not." (193)

Dom dislikes talk of rights and equalities, believes revolutionaries "intended to steal land from its rightful owners and share it out amongst what they called 'the people'" (367), and that the "Peterloo Massacre" is a "melodramatic nickname" for "the unfortunate incident at Manchester," "nothing more than a tragic misfortune" (305). Silas meets with those who "could no longer bear the stranglehold of the rich on England's neck" (205), and has been part of the struggle for the rights of the common man ever since "he'd had his eyes opened by Eupehmia Gordon, a radical firebrand and agitator for the rights of women, at the age of sixteen" (205).

Hard to imagine two people with such differing philosophies of life could ever find enough common ground to be anything more than casual lovers, no? Yet over the course of their weekly meetings, Silas and Dominic's understandings of one another gradually begin to change, because each begins to listen to the truth of other, not to dismiss, but to engage:

Arguing with Dom was damn near as good as fucking him. When those dark eyes narrowed in thought, when he bent that formidable determination to confront Silas's beliefs—not to ignore or dismiss, but to take them on at equal value, so that the pull of his attention became a physical thing—then Silas understood what it was to be important. (1412)

But even as they come to appreciate each other in private, by challenging each other's taken-for-granted beliefs, pointing to each other's hypocrisies, and insisting each recognize the complexity of what they've always seen as black and white issues, their public lives are putting them on a crash course for disaster. Especially when Silas finds his fellow radicals, made desperate after the passage of the repressive Six Acts of 1819, not just writing about overthrowing the government, but planning to stage an actual coup. "Pure pathetic fantasy," thinks Silas; "great chance to show the people that the repressive laws are vital" think the spies in the Home Office. And there are Silas and Dom, caught in the middle of the impending fiasco that will come to be known as the Cato Street Conspiracy.

Is it possible to disagree with respect? To become less absolute in one's convictions, to learn from those we've been taught to demonize? And yet still fight on behalf of one's principles? By way of William Blake ("Without contraries is no progression"), Charles' romance answers all these questions with a resoundingly hopeful "yes."


Photo/illustration credits:
Political junk mail: The Suburban Times
Frankenstein, 1831 edition: cbc books

K. J. Charles

A Seditious Affair

Loveswept, 2015

Short Takes: New Books from RNFF Favorites

Today, a few brief shout-outs for new releases from authors whose previous work has been featured in past RNFF columns, all featuring heroines as tough, determined, and whip-smart as any you're likely to find in contemporary romance today.

Emma Barry, Party Lines (The Easy Part #3)

When Michael Picetti, deputy campaign manager for one of the leading Democratic candidates for President, finds himself sitting next to an Economics Today-reading, politically-obsessed Latina on a flight to pre-caucus Iowa, he automatically assumes his seat-mate is a liberal like himself. An assumption that Lydia Reales, Assistant Deputy Campaign Manager for Voter Outreach for Scott Stafford, Republican Presidential candidate, is all too used to hearing, and that she takes deep pleasure in scuttling, much to Michael's chagrin. Yet their almost-meet-cute is not the last; their campaign trail paths keep crossing and throwing them into each other's path, a path each is far too intrigued not to follow.

Neither Michael nor Lydia is an idealist, ready or eager to genuflect at the feet of candidates they know are far from faultless. But each is deeply committed to the central tenets of their respective political parties, as well as to the thrill of the campaign trail ("This job makes me feel like pure, concentrated awesome," Lydia tells Michael (Kindle Loc 576). And both are used to committing themselves 150% to their jobs. But as their antagonistic acquaintanceship merges into no-strings-attached sex, and then to friendship, cynic Michael finds himself unexpectedly wanting more. Can professional and personal desires, never mind political differences, be reconciled? Filled with fascinating details about life on the presidential campaign trail, the frustrations of both racial stereotypes and racial tokenism, and the precarious position one is put it not knowing whether the lack of appreciation one feels is due to sexism, racism, personality conflicts, or a combination of all of the above, Party Lines makes for a fittingly feminist conclusion to Barry's outstanding D.C. insider trilogy, The Easy Part.

Cara McKenna, Give It All (Desert Dogs #2)

On the outside, lawyer and PR manager Duncan Welch presents as cool, controlled, and utterly contemptuous of anyone who lacks his class, looks, and intelligence ("I'm exceedingly difficult to date. I posses a winning combination of impossibly high standards and stunted empathy," he opines with biting wit [969]). But when he's accused of taking bribes during a casino development project in largely working-class Fortuity, Nevada, Duncan's highly-polished surface develop a few telling cracks. Cracks that popping extra Klonopins, downing more vodka and tonics, or engaging in some obsessive-compulsive cleaning doesn't seem to fix. Cracks that never-get-attached bar-owner Raina Harper is all too interested in breaking wide-open.

The combination of English-born Duncan, an orphan who has never experienced love, and Raina, a half-Latina heroine who feels "my heart's spent," "most of the things a woman feels for a man" having been "used up" by her care for her recently deceased father, make for an unusual, dynamic romantic pairing (989). As does Raina's gender-bending admission, one accepted rather than demonized by the narrative, that "I don't like feeling like I'm being take care of by anybody... I'd much rather be needed than do the needing" (981-84). Care to guess who ends up doing the rescuing at the story's climax?

Courtney Milan, Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

Milan proves herself as adept at contemporary romance as she is at historical in this deeply intelligent story of a relationship between two people from vastly different social classes. The titular "trade" results from immigrant Tina Chen losing her cool when, during a discussion of food stamps in class,  fellow college classmate billionaire tech genius Blake Reynolds makes a thoughtless comment ("No matter what we do, we always have a permanent underclass. The only question we have is how we treat them, and what that says about us" [p. 10]). Tina knows that that "we" sweeps people like her and her family conveniently out of sight, and that Blake, and most of her fellow classmates, have no idea what it means to live outside the bounds of middle class comfort. "Try trading lives with me. You couldn't manage it, not for two weeks," Tina challenges. To her utter surprise, Blake takes her up on the challenge, and offers her his lifestyle—money, car, apartment, job—if she'll pretend to be his girlfriend for the next few weeks. 

What makes the story intriguing is that Blake's acceptance of Tina's challenge stems not from a manly desire to prove himself, but from his desire to run away from his own fears, fears that are gradually revealed over the course of the story. And tough-as-nails Tina has more than a few fears of her own, fears that have, ironically, kept her safe in a world filled with uncertainty of the financial and emotional types. And nothing about falling for a billion-point-four-aire genius with a brash, overbearing father and a boatload of psychological baggage says "safe" to Tina. Even if said genius proves to be far more than the stereotypes of a "winner of the nepotism lottery" might suggest. I especially loved the way that Milan presents each protagonist's difficult parent, a parent who in another author's hands would have clearly been labeled "villain," as rounded, intelligible, and above all sympathetic, complementing the book's larger themes of looking beyond the surfaces and understanding and confronting one's fears.

The Anatomy of Courage

On Thursday morning, I woke to the sound of ten teenagers whispering and giggling as they stole downstairs in search of breakfast after a sleepover celebrating the end of their final exams. But my smile faded as I turned on the radio in search of the morning's news and heard of Vladimir Putin's sexist jabs at former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. As reported in the Huffington Post, Putin's comments came in reaction to questions from French journalists about statements Clinton reportedly made comparing Putin's aggressive policies toward Ukraine to Hitler's imperial tactics during the 1930s. Putin's response to being compared to Hitler: call his opponent a girl. As reported in HP:

What Hilary is thinking:
"What? You're a sexist pig? I think the world
already knows..."

"It's better not to argue with women," Putin said, per a transcript of the interview posted online by the Kremlin. "But Ms. Clinton has never been too graceful in her statements.... When weak people push boundaries too far, it's not because they are strong but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman."

As much as I'd like to embrace the fantasy that such obviously sexist statements are only made by dictatorial leaders of countries with clear anti-American sentiments, my week has been far too filled with everyday examples of how men's bodies, in particular the two ellipsoid glands constituting the sperm-secreting organs, so often function as stand-ins for strength or courage. And how often women and their bodies end up on the weaker end of the binary of strong/weak.

Exhibit A: A post on the Lady Smut blog on strong women in romance entitled "Women with Balls," in which Elizabeth Shore notes:

In romance novels, self-assured strong women are alternately described as fierce, independent, headstrong, strong-willed, or plucky. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that last one, either. But for this post, I'm going with balls. It's an all-in-one kinda word that sums up so much of what I love in women like Pat [Benatar]. Women who don't take any shit, who can kick ass when needed, who have courage and confidence and heart but whose feminine side and kind side remain front and center. They are sexy femme fatales, these ballsy women, and I'd sure love to be in the club.

Exhibit B: Serena Bell's "Loveswept" romance, Hold on Tight, which I very much enjoyed reading, with one niggling exception. In the midst of a secret-baby story, we have a heroine who is clearly on a feminist mission—to build a world for herself and her son "where bossy men didn't tell her what to do or what to feel" (Loc 1185). And it is equally clear that our hero, an alpha male soldier struggling to come to terms with a war injury that cost him a leg, respects her and her desire for independence and self-determination. But, perhaps not surprisingly given the potential elision between loss of leg to loss of penis/masculinity, said hero continually uses gendered body terms when he thinks about strength and weakness:

She's going to kill me, Jake thought, and then Really? I must have left my balls in Afghanistan. (Loc 902)

This was a situation that called for him to be a grown man with big balls who stuck to the program" (Loc 1092)

Mira could figure it out. Handle it. God, she could handle anything. She could take life by the balls ten times over, and she pretty much had. (Loc 3334)

...as much as he wanted to run and hide, he hated that man. Soldiers engaged, and even if he wasn't one anymore, he wasn't going to be a fucking wuss. (Loc 1427)    [FYI, the OED reports that the origins of "wuss" are uncertain, but are perhaps a blend of "wimp" and "puss"].


Exhibit C: A discussion on the Self-Publishing list-serv about whether an author should feel mean if she refuses to allow her agent a cut of her self-publishing income, which included the following reply from an author

[Author refused permission for me to include said quote, even if I removed her name from it...]


While there's a huge difference between the examples I've cited and the overt sexism of Vladimir Putin, I can't help but be struck by how often we, as well as those kids who woke me up this morning, find ourselves surrounded by images of testicles (males) as strength, pussies (females) as weakness. It's not such a simple thing, as the author of the quote from Exhibit C points out when she notes how gender norms (whether socially or biologically constructed) teach women to be less forceful than men if they want to be thought to be "nice" or "good" or "feminine," often much to their detriment. And as the examples above demonstrate, testicular imagery can and is often used to praise women, as well as men.

Blogger FatGirl vs. World's proposed award:
because "female" = FE (iron) + male

But even when women are cheered for being "ballsy," the usage still echoes of male privilege, at least to my ear. An echo I wish those eight girls and two boys who spent the night sprawled out on the floor of my daughter's room did not have to be confronted with each and every day.


Does your sexism radar beep when you come across "balls" and "pussy" wording/imagery in a romance novel?  Or does it not bother you, if the book is not sexist in other regards?





Photo credits:
Clinton and Putin: The Wire
Iron ovaries: FatGirl vs. World