What Do We Owe Our Exes? Elle Kennedy's THE SCORE

The latest addition to Elle Kennedy's New Adult Off-Campus series, The Score, focuses on the developing romance between college hockey player Dean Di Laurentis, the "king of one-night stands," and Allie Hayes, the girl who makes "little Dean" (i.e., his cock) pine for her and no other. Yet Kennedy's tale isn't the "teach/tame the philandering bastard the folly of his promiscuous ways by throwing a good-hearted virgin at him" storyline typical of old school romance (a large part of the appeal of the novel is that Allie, though she's had far fewer partners than has Dean, is in many ways more sexually adventurous than he is). Neither is the novel about being simultaneously resentful of and jealous of a man's right to be more sexually active than a woman is, as are so many other good-girl-heroine romances. In fact, the key to the fantasy of Kennedy's romance is that the villain of the piece is not sleep-around Dean, but Allie's nice-guy ex-boyfriend, Sean.

Reading The Score made me laugh at Dean's bawdy seduction attempts as he tries to win over the one girl who says "no" to any repeat performances after sleeping with him one time. But it really made me think why so many young women hold on to romantic partners long after everyone around them knows that the relationship has long run its course. And how many young women feel guilty if they are the ones to call a halt. What, if anything, do girls owe their exes?

The Score opens with Allie receiving increasingly desperate text messages from Sean, whom she's just broke up with—again. For the fourth time in three years. After being part of a couple since freshman year, Allie feels "like such a failure" for not making it work with Sean. "No, I feel like a quitter," she amends her thought; a quitter because "The last piece of advice my mom gave me before she died was to never give up on love" (Kindle Loc 62). Women teach other women that it is their role to nurture relationships, to pour their energies into emotional care-taking; when such care-taking fails to achieve the promised results, women are often made to feel, or make themselves feel, guilty about it.

Sean isn't evil; in fact, he's often rather sweet. But he can also be pretty un-sweet, especially when Allie's goals do not align with his. Their latest breakup came after Allie realized that while Sean had been fine with her plan to move to LA after college to pursue an acting career at the start of their relationship, of late he'd been arguing against her going into acting at all. His dream is for Allie to join him in Vermont, playing the role of happy housewife as he works at his father's insurance firm. And the arguments he'd been using to convince Allie of the rightness of his dream have involved far more verbal abuse of her acting talent than celebration of the bucolic Vermont lifestyle.

And so Allie breaks up with him. Again. For the last time, she swears. Afraid, though, because of her "terrible habit of wanting to make everyone happy, eve if it means sacrificing my own happiness" makes her scarily susceptible to Sean's sweet-talking ways (1046), Allie calls on her roommate, Hannah, for backup. But Hannah, out of town for the night with her boyfriend, can only offer her boyfriend's house as an escape. A house which said boyfriend just happens to share with the incorrigible, highly-sexed Dean. Allie, who's not a one-night-stand kind of girl, starts off the evening determined not to heed Dean's inevitable come-ons. Yet Dean's surprisingly easy to talk to, and, after a movie, a joint, and more than a little tequila, Allie wakes up the next morning hung over and naked—beside an equally naked Dean.

Allie feels anything but satisfied, even though the sex she and Dean shared was fabulous. "I'm such a slut. Okay, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm just a twenty-two year old woman who had some no-strings fun for once in her life," Allie debates with herself after the fact. One-night stands make her feel "defiled," "ashamed," and now, having engaged in one only one day after breaking up with a long-standing boyfriend, more than a little guilty (721, 726). So guilty that Allie feels compelled to tell Sean what she's done when he calls with his heartfelt apologies and pleas for forgiveness and second (fifth?) chances). And later, when Sean tells her "I forgive you," Allie feels not just resentful ("because forgiveness implies that I'd done something wrong by sleeping with someone else, and that wasn't the case"), but also "relieved."

Intriguingly, it is the two men in her life who do the most to convince Allie that she does not owe Sean. Allie's tough father tells her he's glad she broke up with Sean:

    "Boy was too needy," Mr. Hayes continues. "I didn't like the way he looked at you."
     "How did he look at me?" Allie asks warily.
     "Like you were his entire world."
     She frowns. "And that's a bad thing?"
     "Damn right it is. Nobody should ever be someone else's entire world. That's not healthy, AJ. If your whole life is centered on one thing—one person—whatcha going to be left with if that person goes away? Absolutely nothing." He gruffly reiterates, "Not healthy." (3427)

And Dean urges her to drop the name/blame game:

    "But I wasn't kidding when I said I'm not into casual sex, okay? Every time I think about what we did this weekend, I feel—"
     "Horny?" he supplies.
     Yes. "Slutty."
     I don't expect the flare of irritation I glimpse in his eyes. "You want some advice, babe? Erase that word from your vocabulary."
     I suddenly feel guilty again, but I'm not sure why. Very reluctantly, I join him on the couch, making sure to keep some distance between us.
     "I mean it," he continues. "Stop slut-shaming yourself. And fuck the word slut. People should be able to have sex whenever they want, however many times they want, with however many partners they choose, and not get some shitty label slapped on them."
     He's right, but . . .  "The label is there whether we like it or not," I point out.
     "Yeah, and it was created by prudes and judgmental assholes and jealous pricks who wish they were getting laid on the regular but aren't." Dean shakes his head. "You need to stop thinking there's something wrong with what we did. We had fun. We were safe. We didn't hurt anybody. It's nobody's business what you or anyone else does in the privacy of their bedrooms, all right?"
     Oddly enough, his words succeed in easing some of the shame that's been trapped inside me since Friday night. (1315)


And this, perhaps, is where the fantasy of this romance lies: not in the fact that sex-loving Dean falls for sexually adventurous Allie, but that sex-loving Dean proves to be a sex-positive feminist, while nice-guy Sean proves to be a sexist asshat (examples of which come later in the story). Allie may need validation from men, as so many romance heroines do, but ultimately this validation is about affirming her rights—to her own plans, her own desires, and above all, her own sexual selfhood—not the rights of her male partner.

Or maybe there are just a lot more sex-loving sex-positive male feminists out there than when I was in college?

Elle Kennedy

The Score

Off-Campus Book #3

2016

Surfacing Nice Guy Sexism: Alisha Rai's A GENTLEMAN IN THE STREET

Per Sylvia Day's useful definition of erotic romance, an erotic romance does not only feature hot sex scenes; it must also must use said scenes to depict and develop the character and romance arcs of its protagonists. And because erotic romance depicts sexual interactions in far more detail than mainstream romance, it often features empowered female characters, characters who break free from slut-shaming double standards to embrace their own sexuality, within said sex scenes. To discover an erotic romance that does all of the above, AND calls attention to the internalized sexism that can plague even the nicest of male characters, though—that's an erotic romance I'm immensely jazzed to write about for RNFF.

A little over a week ago, romance author Heidi Cullinan wrote a blog post in protest of the shallow article about the romance genre that recently appeared on the influential culture web site, TheMarySue. In addition to refuting many of the anti-feminist claims put forth about the genre by that article's author, Alex Townsend, Cullinan compiled several lists of romance novels that provided evidence to back up her refutations, including "Women in positions of power in romance."

Akira—soon to be #19 on the Fortune 500 list of female CEO's?

I discovered Alisha Rai's erotic romance, A Gentleman in the Street, on that list. But after reading Rai's romance, I'd argue that her accomplishment consists of far more than just giving her female lead a job as the CEO of her own company, A. M. Enterprises, which owns and operates "high-end bars and nightclubs in some of the most sophisticated places in the world: London, Dubai, New York, Miami" (Kindle Loc 477). For her novel actively explores the misogyny deployed to contain and restrain powerful women, including her protagonist, 34-year-old Japanese-American Akira Mori. What's more, it explores this not through some obviously evil, deluded, sexist villain, but instead through the story's main love interest, shy white nice guy Jacob Campbell.

Jacob's feckless doctor father and Akira's disapproving mother married after only a month's courtship, and divorced almost as quickly. Jacob and Akira were already old enough to be out on their own at the time of the marriage (good boy Jacob in college, bad girl Akira living off a trust fund from her hotelier grandfather), but even after only a few family get-togethers, each found him/herself unexpectedly, and unhappily, attracted to the other. Jacob, worried that the strength of his lust for Akira might lead him to act irresponsibly toward his family, as his father always has when he meets a new woman, treats Akira with all the distance and even contempt he can muster. And Akira, used to acting outrageously to try and attract the attention of her emotionally distant mother, dons the role of provocative temptress in response. Not that it's all an act; Akira's sexual tastes run to the free and kinky, even if with everyone besides her mother and Jacob she tends to keep that side of her life private.

Fast-forward fourteen years. Both Jacob's father and Akira's mother are dead, and Jacob and Akira have each crafted successful careers for themselves, Akira as the head of the above-mentioned conglomerate, Jacob as a writer of spy novels and surrogate parent for his younger sister. What still hasn't changed, though, is Jacob and Akira's apparent dislike of each other, a dislike that neither recognizes as a cover for their uncomfortable attraction to one another.

Early in the story, after an unexpectedly emotional encounter between Akira and Jacob turns sexual, Akira thinks to shock Jacob and drive him away once and for all by inviting him to watch another man have sex with her in a closet during a tony fundraising party. But Akiri is the one left reeling by Jacob's unexpected willingness to play voyeur. Turns out that Jacob is not as vanilla as he's always led others to believe.

When Akira challenges him to explain his shocking behavior, Jacob finally admits his long-time lust for his erstwhile stepsister: "I just can't look at you without... without wanting you" (971). But Jacob's admission of his passion doesn't lead to romance happily ever after; in fact, Jacob's confession makes Akira majorly pissed off:

It was nice when a man you desired reciprocated the attraction, but not when that man was otherwise repelled by you. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. "You made me think you despised me for fourteen years, and now I find out it was because I committed the cardinal sin of attracting your lust.... Guess what? I reserve the right to not be punished for your desires." (990)

A fascinating passage, particularly because earlier in the novel, Jacob had punished his younger sister for calling Akira "slutty": "Judging her isn't your place.... Plus, she could have been naked, and it wouldn't give you an excuse to call her slutty" (446). When sister Kati protests, saying "Even Mei [Akira's mother] used to call Akira a slut," Jacob has real trouble controlling his anger. "I don't care what Mei said. I have never... called any woman a slut, let alone Akira. And I didn't raise anyone in this family to do so either" (446).

Actress Anna May Wong, who was often restricted
to playing stereotypical femme fatale roles
in early American films

Jacob clearly recognizes the sexism behind calling a woman a "slut," but at the same time, he hasn't seen how his own disapproving reaction to Akira has been silently slut-shaming her for the past fourteen years. He even made the villainess in his first novel a rich, sexy, mouthy, beautiful, shallow, unlikeable heir to a fortune, and an Asian to boot. She may have been Korean-American rather than Japanese-American, as Akira is, but even Jacob's younger brothers realize that "Lidia was Akira." And guess what? Jacob killed off femme fatale Lidia in that first novel, symbolically if unconsciously punishing Akira for "making" him desire her. Just what she accused him of. Men, even nice men, Rai's novel suggests, may be as prone to internalizing sexism as women are.

Jacob is appalled by what his brothers and Akira have shown him about his own behavior:

He prided himself on being a good man, a progressive man.... He could posture about disapproving of Mei calling her daughter a slut. He could take away all of Kati's electronics. But at the end of the day, was he really much better? He may not have said the derogatory words, but his aloofness could easily have been taken as disapproval. It didn't matter he hadn't intended it. What mattered was how he had made her feel. (1157, 1175)

And, good guy that he is, Jacob knows he has to make it up to Akira. Even if he has to act out, rather than just dream about, "the Pandora's box of [sexual] fantasies he had kept contained in his brain for the majority of his adult life" (1158). And given his fourteen years of disdain, it will take a lot of proof before Akira will let Jacob into not just into her sexual life, but also into her emotional one.

Let the erotic games begin.


Photo credits:
Female CEO's: Huffington Post
Anna May Wong: noirwhale

Alisha Rai

A Gentleman in the Street

self-published, 2014

Slut Shaming, University Style: Sarina Bowen's THE SHAMELESS HOUR

In a Wonk-o-Mance blog post in April amusingly entitled "Herpily Ever After," romance author Cara McKenna mused about why there are so few mentions of sexual transmitted diseases in contemporary romance. After her initial instinct to "get uppity" about their absence, well-aware of the way that our "sex-shaming culture still clings to the belief that STIs are punishment for moral failings," McKenna reined in her initial instincts, noting that for most sufferers, dealing with a sexually-transmitted disease today is akin to dealing with pollen allergies or wearing contact lenses. And, like other similar banalities that people deal with on an everyday basis, STIs only belong in a story if they have some meaningful effect on a character or on the plot in which he or she appears. McKenna definitely believes that there should "be more visibility and frankness in our culture around STIs," but doesn't necessarily think that romance fiction is the "place to champion such a movement."

At least one romance author begs to differ. Only a few days after McKenna's "Herpily" post appeared, Sarina Bowen published the fourth book in The Ivy Years, her New Adult college romance series set at a thinly-disguised Yale. The Shameless Hour not only uses romance to call for the very visibility and frankness around STIs that McKenna is looking for, but also explores the linkages between STIs, slut-shaming, and the policing of young women's sexuality.

Readers of earlier books in the series will remember Shameless's heroine, Bella, as the student-manager of Harkness College's male hockey team. Bella has had, and continues in this book to have, an active sex life, one which she refuses to feel shame over, even when friends on the team make stupid remarks ("Who does Bella like? I need this intel for the season-opening bets.... There's a pool going on which freshman Bella goes home with first" [Kindle Loc 357]). Such comments grate on Bella: "It was true that I'd had a lot of sex with hockey players. (One at a time, usually). But the players weren't saints, either. And nobody was starting a betting pol about any of them. Double standard, much?" (357). But Bella won't change her behavior just to conform to unfair sexual norms, even though she knows there's a price to be paid for nonconformity: "The truth was that people were always going to talk smack about me because I didn't hide the fact that I'd had more than a few sexual partners. Girls who played the field got called names. I knew the drill" (370).

Talking smack is one thing, but public humiliation is another. After Bella is diagnosed with chlamydia, the most common STD in the United States ("Well, yippee. It isn't every day you find out that you've got the good kind of STD" [1408]), she's faced with the task of informing the one guy with whom she had sex within the transmission window that he infected her, and needs to get checked himself. Not freshman Rafe, with whom she had a mutual consolatory one-night stand early in the semester, but her most recent hook-up, Beta Rho frat boy Whittaker.

Bella's nurse counsels her that her partner may not believe her, since "over half the people who carry [chlamydia] don't have symptoms" (1417). Thus readers aren't surprised when Whittaker, an entitled jock, refuses to accept responsibility. More than that, he actively blames Bella, orchestrating a particularly public form of revenge against her, one involving permanent pens, misogynistic words, and photos uploaded to a fraternity boast and prank web site. Even though the nurse who treated Bella tried to interrupt the linkage of STDs and female sexual freedom—"Bella, would you be feeling the same way if you'd caught the flu from a partner? ... This isn't a message from God. There's no reason to panic or to feel any shame" (1408)—after Bella's experience, she can't help but burn with shame.

Bella's protective alpha hockey team friends rally around her, but their questions—"Was the ink the worst thing that that happened to you that night?" (1969)—just add to her humiliation. Bella withdraws from her friends, even from her job on the hockey team itself. And she decides not to report Whittaker's fraternity, or Whittaker himself:

He'd want to know if I'd been assaulted, just like Rafe had tried to ask, too. In their minds, it was the worst thing that could've happened to me. And maybe they were right. It's not like I had any experience with that.
     But I'd had enough experience with other kinds of assholery to know public humiliation was no trip to Hollywood, either. I wasn't about to make my own life worse by making a complaint against the fraternity, because there was no way I'd prevail. The Beta Rho national chapter probably wrote their own slut-shaming tactical handbook. (1977)

This is a romance novel, though, so justice does eventually get meted out, both of the official and unofficial (i.e., Bella playing a decidedly feminist prank on the entire Beta Rho fraternity) kind. And Bella finds unexpected support, and friendship, with her next-door dorm mate, when she's never had a close friendship with someone of her own sex before.

And she finds surprising support from another unlikely quarter: her one-time hook-up Rafe, a boy who is in many ways her exact opposite. Dominican to her white; working class to her ownership class; family-loving to her family-rejected; serious to her casual. Especially when it comes to sex (favorite line: "I don't do casual, because I don't want to feel like the most convenient dick in the neighborhood" [2887]). Despite his own sexual mores, Rafe clearly appreciates Bella, in all her outspoken, sexually liberated glory:

"Someday," he said, "you might have a daughter..."
     "People keep warning me that karma is a bitch."
     He shook his head. "That's not what I mean at all. You'll have a daughter, and she'll be able to tell you wahtever is in her head. And you won't hit the roof you'll just deal with it, you know? The girls in my neighborhood, they hit high school and all the aunties start heaping on the guilt. 'Don't wear short skirts, because the boys will think you're easy. Don't let him kiss you. Don't let him touch you. Go to confession.' It's crazy." (2421)

For Rafe, though, friendship is rapidly transforming into falling, and falling hard. But when he scrapes up the courage to ask Bella to be his girlfriend, she says no, and counteroffers a friends-with-benefits deal. When Rafe in turn refuses, Bella accuses him of slut-shaming her. But he immediately protests: "I think you're amazing, and I've said so every chance I get. Don't put words in my mouth. I never said your way was wrong. It's just wrong for me" (3121). Is wanting a relationship with Rafe the same as giving in to everyone's desire that she be a good girl, that she stop rocking the sexual double standard boat and settle down with a guy, instead of playing the field?

In The Shameless Hour, Bowen dissects the ways that privileged men often use shame to control female sexuality, and the corroding effects of such sexual shame on young women. But in Bella and Rafe, she also provides strong role models for both women and men who want to reach a place of both shamelessness and caring when they embrace their own sexual desires.



Photo/illustration credits:
Chlamydia statistics: National Chlamydia Coalition
Slut Shaming poster: Betrayed Mermaid

Sarina Bowen

The Shameless Hour

Rennie Road Books

2015

Feminism in THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES

My significant other recently finished up a long-term project at work, and we celebrated this weekend by catching up on our viewing of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an updating of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in video-blog form. Though I've never considered Austen's class politics all that progressive, I always took it for granted that when it came to gender, Austen was an author well worth feminist praise. But watching the final twenty episodes of LBD, and thinking about the decisions the writers of the series made in order to update the story for a 21st century audience, made me realize how, at least in the case of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet's feminism is established in large part at the cost of another young woman: her younger sister, Lydia.

(Note: Spoilers ahead for both Pride and Prejudice the novel and for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. If you haven't yet seen LBD, give yourself a Thanksgiving treat and check it out here. And can you truly call yourself a lover of romance if you've never read Pride and Prejudice???)

Updating the story of P&P for a contemporary audience presented series developers Hank Green and Bernie Su with some clear feminist challenges. Marriage as the only option for a gentlewoman? Daughters not allowed to inherit their father's estate? Money as a vital (if not the only) reason for forming a romantic alliance with another? Few such dated references to nineteenth-century patriarchal assumptions would fly with contemporary viewers, even if presented in updated dress.

LBD's Charlotte, Lizzie, Lydia, and Jane

But with only a few missteps (see Su's explanation/apology for the slut-shaming in the early episodes here) Su and his all-female staff of writers managed to create an updated vision of Pride and Prejudice that simultaneously hews to the novel's storyline and themes and presents women as mistresses of their own fates. Jane has a job in fashion design (albeit a low-paying one); Lizzie is in grad school, pursuing Communications; even Lydia attends community college. The Bennet "estate" is no longer entailed, although the family is experiencing financial difficulties, the details of which the parents do not discuss with their children. Mr. Collins is no longer a relative looking to marry a Bennet sister out of guilt at his future inheriting of Mr. Bennet's estate, but instead is presented as a (rather inept) businessman bearing job offers. Charlotte pursues the job offer Lizzie rejects, not because she has no other options, but because she is more pragmatic about her career than is Lizzie, and is willing to accept a less than ideal work situation in order to bring her closer to her goals. Each of these updates struck me as not only in keeping with the spirit of Austen's original story, but also respectful of contemporary women's abilities and rights.

Lydia running off with Wickham in the
2005 film version of Pride & Prejudice

As I've been slowly catching up on the episodes since watching the first this summer, though, I've been wondering just how the writers would deal with the one episode in the book that seemed both vitally important to the plot and yet inherently, unfixably sexist: the shame that Lydia brings upon her family by running off with Wickham without the benefit of marriage. In 2013, a woman having sex outside of wedlock is hardly viewed as scandalous, never mind an act destined to rain opprobrium down on her extended family. But in Austen's book, Darcy's intervention to bring about Lydia and Wickham's marriage is the straw that breaks the back of Lizzie's dismal opinion of her former suitor; if he's willing to put himself in the midst of such a shameful situation, he must truly love her, Lizzie is forced to recognize. How could the writers omit such a scene but still convince Lizzie of Darcy's worth? How could they leave it in, and still maintain their progressive depiction of women?

By turning Austen's Lydia, characterized by "high animal spirits, and a sort of natural self-consequence" into a victim.

In the novel, Lydia's character functions both as plot contrivance and figure of laughter. That laughter stems from her inappropriate behavior, behavior that other characters denigrate left and right: her father, Bingley's sisters, Darcy, and most cuttingly, Elizabeth:

"If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character will be fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt that ever made herself and her family ridiculous. A flirt, too, in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation....Vain, ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled!" (Chapter 41).

Much of the proof of Elizabeth's specialness depends on this contrast between the wild, vain Lydia and her better-educated, far more witty, and far more well-behaved sister. We're never invited into Lydia's point of view; the text invites us to identify so closely with Elizabeth, insists that we take her values for our own, that I've rarely thought to question its depiction of Lydia, or its judgment of her behavior.

In LBD, Lydia's character initially seems an uncomplicated updated version of Austen's Lydia: a party girl, more interested in going out drinking and ogling cute guys than in her schoolwork or in any creative endeavor comparable to Jane's fashion designing or Lizzie's vlog. But even in some of the early episodes, the writers of LBD give Lydia a line or two indicating that her wild behavior stems in part from her feelings of being ignored by, or left out by, her two older sisters. And when Lydia makes her own series of spin-off vlogs, vlogs that show us the story from her point of view, we get an even stronger sense of Lydia's motivations. Not just the story of her interactions with George Wickham, but also her thoughts about her role in the family. Lydia becomes more than just a figure of fun, or a negative foil against which we are to judge the less wild Elizabeth. She's granted a depth of character, one which invites us to regard her with sympathy, not just laughter or scorn.

And then the final twist: a truly manipulative Wickham woos Lydia, tells her he loves her, convinces her to allow him to videotape them having sex, then, unbeknownst to Lydia, sells the sex tape to a website, which begins a countdown to the big reveal of "YouTube star Lydia Bennet." Romantic abuse and sexual betrayal, rather than joint flight into sexual ruin, is the updating the LBD writers choose to make their story relevant to 21st century audiences.

When I first saw the big reveal, I was impressed by the writers' decision. They've taken a caricature and turned her into a human being, one for whom we, like Lizzie, have great sympathy. Lydia learns a much-needed lesson, and, through her, women watching the vlog learn to be wary, both of lying, manipulative boyfriends and of the dangers of Internet overexposure. "The Internet is forever," as Lizzie reminds Lydia, and through her, the unthinking women among her audience. Lizzie learns that her earlier slut-shaming of Lydia led in part to Lydia's low opinion of herself, and to her willingness to listen to Wickham's lies. Lizzie and Lydia grow closer as a result of the experience, women supporting one another in the face of male abuse.

But then I began to wonder. After Wickham's betrayal, Lydia become a pale, wan, lifeless vision of her former self, far from the vivacious, teasing, flirty young woman featured in Lizzie's early vlogs. Even after being saved from true Internet exposure through Darcy's purchasing of the web company with the rights to her sex video, Lydia never seems to regain the high spirits that characterized her in the early months of the show. In contrast, the Lydia of the book does not buy into the judgments others make of her, even after her "ruin": "Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless," the narrator describes her after she returns to Longbourne as Mrs. Wickham (Chapter 51). Though the text dooms Lydia to a less than fulfilling marriage ("His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; her's lasted a little longer; and in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the claims to reputation which her marriage had given her [Chapter 61]), it makes it clear that her high spirits remain intact.

So which is worse? A Lydia we're encouraged to despise, but who refuses to (or is too stupid to) despise herself? Or a Lydia with whom we're invited to sympathize, especially after she becomes a victim?

Shaming the Slut-Shamer: Anne Calhoun's UNFORGIVEN

Slut-shaming was in the news last month, after researchers from Cornell University published a study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships suggesting that women, even women who have had many sexual partners themselves, judge other "promiscuous" women more negatively than women who have had only two sexual partners. Ask to read two near-identical vignettes about women who differed only in the number of sexual partners they'd had, and then asked to rate said women, study participants judged the more sexually active women more negatively on nine out of ten friendship attributes, including competence, warmth, emotional stability, and morality. Disheartening news, to hear that so many women fear being associated with another girl who might be labeled a "slut" almost as much as they fear being smacked with the label themselves.

In contrast, men asked to read about and then rate other men expressed no such negative judgments on their more sexually wanton fellow males. Amanda Hess at slate.com warns against using the results of this study to jump to the conclusion that it's women, not men, who are the key policiers of other women's sexuality. Men may not judge other men for being sexually promiscuous, but study after study has demonstrated that the tables turn when its a question of a woman sleeping around.

Anne Calhoun's latest contemporary, Unforgiven, hits many of my personal and ideological sweet spots—a lovers-parted-then-reunited plot, a heroine comfortable with her own sexuality, a romance which doesn't mistake sexual intimacy for emotional intimacy, and the aesthetic pleasure of a darkly understated narrative voice. Yet even without any of the above, Calhoun's novel is worth a feminist's read, for the way in which, with subtlety and power, it allows us to see the male privilege at the heart slut-shaming.

Twelve years ago, guilt over his role in the death of a fellow schoolmate sent wild-boy Adam Collins fleeing into the Marines, leaving behind the girl with whom he'd shared everything except sexual intercourse. When he returns to the small South Dakota town to serve as the best man in a friend's wedding, he finds that little has changed—except for the reputation of his former girlfriend, Marissa Brooke. As Adam's soon-to-be-married friend Keith reports, "Her reputation's worse than in high school," right before he goes on to describe several of the men she's slept with since Adam left town. "And those were just the guys who lasted more than a night or two," Keith proclaims, then pronounces the final slut-shaming blow: "Marissa will make your bathroom or your kitchen or your sun porch look like something out of Architectural Digest, but she had a string of men teaching her what she needed to know, and she paid them the old-fashioned way" (117). Adam later hears similar talk in the local cafe, expressed in words so like his friend's that he realizes "Keith was the one to frame Marissa in that particularly unflattering light," the one to spread the malicious gossip about town (180).

Keith envisions women's sexuality as a bargaining chip, something they use in order to gain something else from a man—prestige, money, or, in Marissa's case, construction skills. As a lawyer, the son of the town's lawyer, and soon-to-be-husband of town banker's daughter, Keith knows that in the usual way of things, he would be the one in power, not Marissa, whose ne'er-do-well father could not afford the taxes to keep their family home.

But Marissa refuses to play the game the way Keith envisions it. She makes this clear after Adam, upset by the gossip, asks her "Why carry on like you did? You know how this town talks" (187). Marissa goes through several layers of explanation—from "I've liked every man I've had sex with. He's liked me" to "I got lonely. I wanted someone to touch me but I didn't want to have to promise undying love or link the rest of my life to his just to be touched"—until she gets to the heart of the slut-shaming impulse: "Good girls make the trade or keep their legs closed. I didn't do either. That makes me a slut."  (186, 187).

Keith takes for granted that as a man, he has the right to power, especially to power over female sexuality. But Marissa refuses to give credence to any such belief. "She turn you down?" Adam asks. "Twice.... Told me to go fuck myself the second time," Keith admits "without blinking an eye" (117). Disrupting patriarchal power structures by taking ownership of her own sexuality, Marissa presents a threat to Keith's self-image, a threat that he works to contain through slut-shaming discourse.

But not all men engage in the slut-shaming game. Adam proves this through his recognition of Keith's underlying ruthlessness while he slut-shames Marissa—"[Keith] laughed, the tone of the chuckle knowingly regretful, the way people did when they were about to say something cruel disguised as advice" (117)—as well as through his respect for Marissa and her decisions. And, most surprisingly, by his refusal to slut-shame another woman at the end of the novel, one whose sexual behavior was far more morally questionable than Marissa's ever was. An unexpected and gutsy move, both on Adam's part, and on Calhoun's, to refuse the "evil other woman" trope in favor of acceptance of other people's weaknesses—an acceptance that for Adam, leads to an acceptance of his own.

So major RNFF kudos to Anne Calhoun, not only for refusing to fall into the slut-shaming trap, but, through both Adam and Marissa, for showing us ways to work our way beyond it.



Photo credits:
Stop Slut Shaming: Motley News and Photos
Slut definition: Megan Ann Ward Poetry

Anne Calhoun, Unforgiven.

Berkeley Sensation, 2013.