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*chokes on coffee*

I’m not sure what to address first. As a reader of romance, am I its worst enemy for pointing out what works for me, what doesn’t, and what trends I wish would die already? I’m “bashing” the genre if I call an author to task for phoning it in and asking me to pay retail for it? Hardly! I’m the customer, and if the product isn’t up to my standards, I say so.

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to agree with me, or even listen. I’m one of two Bitches with a hot pink website, and if you don’t agree, there are at least a few other sites that might agree with your opinion. I fail to see how calling a book or a series on its flaws is bashing the genre, or specifically what damage I’m wreaking by doing so in the first place. You really think an editor says, “Well, Sarah didn’t like it so we can’t publish the sequel?” HA! As if!

After a description of what a “Mary Sue” is, the writer continues:

Mary Sue is often used against female authors who write anything with romance or sex in it. Often by those who are not happy or uncomfortable with the topic or the author. Americans are especially uncomfortable with sex. We use sex to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. But we are extremely uncomfortable with the topic to the extent most school districts won’t even teach sex education for fear it will encourage kids to experiment. Really? Then why do we discuss the dangers of drugs and alcohol? Should we worry that they will try that too? But I digress.

Oh, yes you do. I’m not sure how you got to American obsession and discomfort with sex from Mary Sue-ism and sexism against female authors, but I can only guess that the barge between those two points was named “Anita” and the accusation that’s being refuted has to do with her status as a gleaming orifice™.

No one suggests murder mystery authors secretly harbor a desire to go out and slaughter people enmasse. Do western writers all want to live out on the plains punching cattle and riding horses all day long? Do war authors all secretly harbor a fantasy of mass destruction of people and places? Would they act on them if they could? I don’t know, maybe a few do or would but I haven’t seen any of them say so. Yet, let a woman write about sex in a book and suddenly folks are positive that she is writing her sexual fantasies out on paper. I know there is the occasional author who has said it is so. But if any woman puts sex to paper a minority of readers are sure she is sharing her deepest, darkest fantasies and they want to pillory her for it.

I am officially dumbfounded. And I have to at this point surmise that the writer is indeed discussing Anita and the backlash against her gleaming orifice-ness™, so I will answer using that example.

Mystery books, westerns, and even fictional tales of war often feature sexual scenes. Sex, as part of human nature, is therefore a logical part of a human experience, and no matter the genre, good fiction is an account of a human experience. Yes, romance writers, readers, and the genre itself are held up for ridicule due to the sexual content, much of it purply purple in its purple prose, and yes, authors have marketed their books or dedicated them to their husbands and boyfriends or girlfriends with thanks for the help with “research” (My reaction: Do Not Want!) but if the problem being addressed here is the non-stop sexxoring in the Blake series, I think the point of the criticism has been missed entirely.

Sex is natural, sex is fun, but sex is Not a Plot. And in my opinion, the latter books in the Anita series are more sex than plot, and less about Anita’s evolution as they are about Anita’s orgasms. All ten of them. On one page.

Just because a female character enjoys sex doesn’t make her a bad person or is necessarily a reflection on the author.

As to whether Anita = LKH, I truly, truly do not want to go there. I rarely assume that the author = character in any book I read. But the concept of a Mary Sue is not always a clear and direct parallel, to my understanding. It’s wish-fulfillment in simple and obvious form, and in terms of fiction, it’s often elementary, self-pandering, and utterly boring. This is partly why I don’t read that series any longer.

I do, however, read a lot of romance in many, many different subgenres, and I do appreciate a female protagonist who enjoys sex. I also appreciate a well-written and evocative sex scene. Not once do I think, “Man, this author is messed up since she apparently likes what-what in the butt given how many times the hero and heroine use the back door.”

If anything is reflecting poorly on the author, it’s the continual unraveling of what used to be one of the best female protagonists I’ve ever read. I fail to see how I’m romance’s worst enemy as a reader for saying that and saying it often. I read the books up to a point and had to stop reading them for specific reasons. I’d have to say that those who dismiss the genre without ever having read it are far, far worse of an “enemy.”

The ranting argument rapidly falls apart, and really, I’m having a hard time following the rest.

So maybe everyone’s happily ever after doesn’t include belonging to a single someone for the rest of your life. Nothing wrong with that if it does or doesn’t. But if romance as a genre wants respect, then its own readers need to start by respecting themselves and others. Then books won’t have to transcend genre before they get respect and recognition. We need to accept that not everyone is us. And for those that are not us, then they too have the right to be different, to seek out different things that may not appeal to us. And that we can do that without trying to pass off caustic remarks as wit and intelligence simply because we disagree. If we want respect, we need to learn to give it.

I’m sorry, what now? I never said Anita had to be monogamous, and I never said that multiple partners was a bad thing. I said her character went from multi-faceted to, well, being a gleaming orifice™.

More importantly, there are some people who prefer a monogamous pair in their romance, and having a preference is not in and of itself disrespectful. They have a right to their preference just as I have a right to prefer certain qualities in the fiction I read.

I think what’s missing here is the definition of respect, and clearly yours differs from mine. If I give my time to read a book, and I don’t like it, it’s not respectful for me to tell everyone on the internet “This sucks. I didn’t like it.” It is, however, well within my right to say, “I really, really didn’t enjoy this, and here are 137 reasons why I didn’t like it,” thereby backing up my argument with my opinion.

Just because my opinion isn’t favorable to you doesn’t mean I’m necessarily disrespectful. And I’m well aware you probably aren’t directing this screed at me personally - though I do suspect that the target defined as “Anyone who isn’t us” is anyone who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and who refuses to accept whatever is published in the Blake series as the Gospel of Everything That Is Right With Romance Fiction Amen.

And yes, I’m being caustic, but I’m irked at being told I’m disrespectful because I don’t like a particular set of books and detail a laundry list as to why I don’t.

Turning the argument that there are flaws in characterization and plot into an argument that those leveling the criticism have problems with sexuality, gender, or respect is a profoundly silly way to make a rebuttal.

However, the writer of this rant does raise a big issue that we deal with repeatedly here: why does romance “get no respect?” Is it because romance, as Nora Roberts once said, is the “hat trick of easy targets: the celebration of emotions, relationships, and sex?” Or is it more that the genre continues to flood with books of poor quality, and those that disagree with that claim attempt to silence those who protest with accusations of lack of respect and sexual frigidity? I think the answer might be somewhere between, or, to use the Smart Bitch Term of the Year, a conflation of the two.

And you know, when I think of genteel and tasteful, I immediately think of All Over You, Wife by Contract, Mistress by Demand, or the upcoming Promoted: Nanny to Wife. Nothing says genteel and tasteful like Harlequin, eh? Those words go together like Kidnapped and Spanked by an Alien.

Yeah. So right off the bat of intellectual superiority, Zacharek has demonstrated that she doth not know whereof she sneers. Add to that some eyebrow-raising sentiments about movies being venues for us plebes to gaze at the beautiful people (which makes the Oscar-certainty of a beautiful woman uglying-up even more thought-provoking) and the assertions that the movie attempts to snap itself into the modern template of romance, and you have some room for some mighty morphin “BITCH, PLEASE.”

It’s not enough to dislike a movie, but her lazy parallel of “it’s so bad it’s like a Harlequin romance” is the ultimate expression of how poor the film is. I’m not sure I have the energy to summon a response, since her initial premise is so marvelously lame.

Fortunately, responses that do a Bitch proud line up to give the author of this fine review that mighty morphin smackdown which it so desperately needs. Well done!

I think this may be my favorite part:

Please refrain from using comparisons when you are ignorant about what you’re citing.

It’s clear that you despise romance, that you despise romantics, and that you despise this movie. Your comments on this movie’s merits as art may be dead on, but I question your credentials about the rest of what you’ve said.

Well said, PoisonIvy!

I’m curious - which ones of you appeared over there to (once again) defend the genre?

Feldhahn argues that romance readers can become “unbalanced” by the distortion inherent in romance, and gets right down to the age-old comparison of romance to pornography, albeit porn for chicks. Pointing her right-leaning finger at erotica, she argues that the pornography is bad enough, but then there’s all these women seeking an unattainable ideal based on reading too much romance with rugged, sensitive heroes. Seems us romance types are not spending enough time “find[ing] the hero in our husbands and not in the pages of a fiction book.”

Thank God she stopped short of mentioning the words “family values,” though the hint was there in broad stroke.

Setting aside the deep faults of the first commentary, the rebuttal has plenty of butt in it, too, starting with the condescending and utterly trite argument that romance, erotica, or not, “at least women are reading.”

Stop patting me on the head. You’ll mess up my hair.

While Feldhahn asserts that erotica novels - which, duh, aren’t the same thing as romance novels, not that these two would care to examine the difference - promote addiction, and create unattainable romantic ideals, Glass responds that erotica has been shown in a recent study titled Pornography: Research Advances and Policy Considerations to have “no adverse social implications.” Thank heaven. I’d hate to think reading about human sexual and emotional relationships might make me antisocial any more than I already am.

Neither writer can tell the difference between erotica and romance any more than they can tell the difference between a sound and completely idiotic argument. Moreover, both come across as women who doth not know whereof they speak, who likely have never read a romance novel nor an erotica novel.

My overwhelming reaction to this condescending bulltripe? Exhaustion. Not only can I not tell if they’re arguing about erotica or the sexuality of romance novels, but again the idea of reading romance and now erotica is called into question as some rubric against which to value the intelligence and relative mental stability of the reader, to say nothing of the old lumping together of romance AS porn for women.

On one hand, so what, if it is? It’s not but even if it were chick porn, so what? God forbid we have orgasms or even sexual knowledge. But more to the point, romance isn’t pornography any more than merely reading it will turn a reader into an imbalanced harpy who finds limitless anger in the fact that her husband isn’t “strong, rugged and breathtakingly handsome, yet sensitive, patient listeners and utterly unselfish.”

If anything, I want to know why “journalism” like this hasn’t caused a decrease in the number of people reading newspapers. Oh, wait....

Candy: First of all, this sentence by Feldhahn was had me rolling:

The male heroes are all strong, rugged and breathtakingly handsome, yet sensitive, patient listeners and utterly unselfish.

Has this woman read a romance novel? Romance novel heroes can be accused of any number of things, but being sensitive, patient and utterly unselfish listeners ain’t one of them. Unless she’s confusing the gay best friend in chick lit with a romance novel hero?

But really, I’m so goddamn sick of the whole “Romance creates unrealistic expectations in women!” argument. Most right-leaning douchebags eventually gave up on the whole “RPGs will make your children Satan-worshipping elf-wannabes who will STAB YOU IN YOUR SLEEP” scenario; why won’t they do the same with romances? Why the insistence on assuming we’re weak-minded fools who are unable to tell fiction from reality? Fiction can have transformative powers, it’s true, but when somebody decides to break up with a wonderful husband because of a romance novel, I think that person has more serious issues than a romance novel addiction to deal with. The DSM-IV would be a good place to start.

The funny thing is, the sorts of people who love to blame romance novels for the breakdown of the family are usually the ones who go on ad nauseam about the importance of personal responsibility, especially when it comes to social issues. Pregnant with an unwanted child? Gay? Brown and po’? SUCK IT UP, BECAUSE IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT TO BEGIN WITH, AND IF YOU TRIED HARD ENOUGH, YOU WOULDN’T BE ANY OF THESE THINGS. But once something like, say, violence in video games or the manly (but sensitive! Don’t forget they’re so sensitive!) heroes in romance novels rear their heads, they’re all for warning people off lest the poor, unsuspecting victims shatter their fragile psyches against the ramparts of oiled man-titty. As soon as blame can be attached to something that directly affects them, you won’t see a group of people so eager to pass on the buck. God forbid that the kids do awful things because they had shitty parents or because they’re being, y’know, kids, or that the woman left her husband because he’s a terrible spouse.

The rebuttal didn’t get my dander up quite as much as it did Sarah, but the derailment into Pornolandia made me raise my brow. I tend to question studies that claim violent porn increases propensities towards sexual violence--my gut feeling is that people who voluntarily seek out violent porn (not kinky BDSM stuff--I’m talking snuff porn and rape porn) on a regular basis probably are inclined in that direction to begin with. Linking causality for this sort of thing is incredibly tricky.

And all this clucking and flapping over female porn always makes me wonder: are female orgasms so terrifying? Seriously, why are people so damn worked up over women getting turned on and rubbin’ one out? Every time a woman masturbates, are TWO kittens killed instead of just one? I want to know, because I’d like to know how many kittens I’ve killed last week.