The Bitchery is ever good about sending us the funny and the WTF links, which of course we pass along to you.
For your Valentine’s shopping needs (though not work safe, beware ye who click here), Tania forwarded me a link to Em & Lo’s “Sex Toy” promotion video. If only QVC had a naughty late-night toy hour. I’d totally tune in.
And in other, more disturbing news, Theresa notifies me that a theatre in Florida has had to rename their performance of The Vagina Monologues after a woman complained that she “was ‘offended’ when her niece asked her what a vagina was”. The performance will now be known there as “The Hoo-Haa Monologues.” This particular performance is being staged by a group of law school students raising money for charity, though the BBC article doesn’t mention what charity.
Sadly, the Bitchery surely could have helped this woman with many a suggestion for a different euphemism, or perhaps a heaping slice of “clue cake” might have been better for this person who fears the word “vagina.”
I’m awaiting a performance of “The Glistening Orifice Monologues” at my local theatre, to be sure.
LovelySalome was kind enough to forward me a rather scathing attack on the omnipresence of ChickLit courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.
Trouble is, all her columns are for Times Select readers, and as I am not one, I don’t have linkage abilities. And personally, I try not to circumvent subscription-only services by copying and pasting the content here for free, since, well, the Times? Kind of cranky about things like that.
Dowd is of the opinion that women who enjoy ChickLit are stupid fools who are blissfully and blithely ignorant of that’s wrong in the world as they indulge in pink-covered lipstick chronicles of fluffy nonsense. She found the ChickLit shelved with literature fiction and cries horror at the stupidification of women readers who pick up their Kinsella books shelved next to Kipling.
So what else is new? It’s a retread of every other accusation leveled at women-authored and women-marketed literature. I’m not personally a fan of chick lit, as I cannot suspend reality long enough to believe there are that many British women working in advertising and publishing who find husbands in the bottom of a cocktail glass. But the article seemed so familiar in its condescension.
LovelySalome wrote in her email: “I would agree with her on certain points, if my knee-jerk antagonism toward her snootiness didn’t stifle genuine debate. I mean, we’re fostering the war on terror by indulging in chick lit? Do they even know that chick lit authors can’t sell their MSS because the genre is dying?”
One quote that I will excerpt, until the Times rattles a saber at me, is as follows:
Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers, Manolo trippers, girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”
I wonder what Dowd would have to say about a survey of historical romance? Good thing our books are housed in their own special shelves.
There’s been a bit of a Interweb kerfuffle regarding Anne Stuart’s recent comments about her publishers in an interview on All About Romance. Miss Snark picked up on and gave ole Anne what-for for her lack of discretion and for being an ungrateful tart; Dear Author then picked it up and expanded the topic by lobbing around some more links and opinions.
Franky, much as I enjoy Miss Snark’s writing and respect the hell out of her, because bitch has claws and she’s not afraid to use ‘em, I disagree with her. Anne Stuart’s awesomeness as a person has ratcheted up several notches in my estimation. Why? Because she said something something a lot of people have thought for a long time but were too chickenshit to say out loud.
Harlequin, the same publisher largely responsible for trends like amnesiac virgin brides, secret babies and boardroom mistresses, is accused of caring more about slots and numbers than the quality of the end product. Quel choc! That Anne Stuart, man, she is one wacky-ass bitch who has no idea what she’s talking about. Or if she does know what she was talking about, she shouldn’t say anything, because speaking up would be bad business, and God knows that’s paramount.
Look, if people didn’t speak up when the system is broken, how the hell is change supposed to happen? And speaking as a reader, I do think things aren’t going as well as they could be. An author has finally spoken and and is saying that publishers have fucked up, and are continuing to be, shall we say, less than satisfactory in their treatment of authors--and she’s not doing this in a bugfuck-crazy, going-down-in-flames, trainwrecky way like, ohhh, say, Dara Joy, but in a reasonable and honest (if snarky) tone. I say she deserves props, and I’m damn glad that she seems even more awesome as a person than she is an author.
Anne, you probably have loads of things better to do with your time than to fill up your particular Internet tube (that is not at all like a dump truck) with Smart Bitches, but on the off-chance you are reading this, I say to you: Good job, and I pretty much agreed with everything you said about your publishers, including your wistfulness about not staying with Avon, because goddamn you produced some fine, fine reading material while you were with them.
Here’s a tangent for you: Avon in the late 80s to mid-90s was unstoppable. During that time, they published the best work of many of my favorite authors, including Laura Kinsale, Loretta Chase, Lisa Kleypas, Anne Stuart, Karen Ranney and Jo Beverley. In fact, I noticed a precipitous drop in quality when Stuart and Beverley1 moved from Avon to Zebra and an equally steep rise in quality when Ranney switched from Zebra to Avon. Coincidence? I really, really don’t think so. Similarly, Loretta Chase, while I’m happy enough to dance on tabletops that she’s writing again, hasn’t quite written anything for Berkley that can compare with the brilliance that was her output for Avon--well, with the sole exception of The Last Hellion, but the less said about that book, the better.
The big exception would be Kinsale, who has remained consistently excellent, but then she’s LAURA FREAKING KINSALE.
However much the editors for the Avon Romantic Treasures and Avon lead titles between 1988 and 1997 were being paid, it probably wasn’t enough.
Notes:
1OK, so Beverley was writing for Kensington/Zebra already with her incredibly convoluted Company of Rogues series, but she started the Malloren series with Avon (My Lady Notorious, by far the best book by her that I’ve read), then moved on to Zebra (Tempting Fortune, which was mediocre at best), and then finished the series with Signet (which books were fun installments to the saga, but not nearly as good as My Lady Notorious). Those of you who disagree with my assessments, please know that I have impeccable taste. It’s so impeccable, it’s Platonic. Just so you know.
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To start things off, let me just say I’m still having trouble believing we were mentioned obliquely in the New York Times. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m tickled as can be that we were considered even remotely worthy of mention, but as I wrote to a friend earlier: “Yeah, you know you’ve TRULY arrived when the NYT dismisses you as shrill, humorless, uncultured, oversexed twats. (...) It must’ve been a slow news day or something--the complete lack of newsworthy items like, ohhhh, sex scandals involving underage congressional pages or bills that infringe on Constitutional rights being passed must’ve made the brouhaha in our little corner of teh Interwebs an especially attractive story prospect.”
Reading that beautifully condescending article, which utilized some of the most execrable, stilted sexual metaphors this side of Bertrice Small while maintaining a delicately prudish air (our blog name is “not printable in most newspapers”? What, are we now the Website that Dare Not Speak Its Name?) has finally brought a lot of thoughts that have been kicking around in the back of my brain to the fore, as has reading this snippet of a comment posted by Robin in the original post about the Greater Washington Initiative ads:
Don’t you think this is because there is still such a moral dimension to reading—not just in whether or not you read, but what you actually read, as well?
I practically leaped in excitement when I read that sentence, in that “By JOVE she’s got it!” way that often accompanies a revelation that expresses a half-formed thought I’ve never been to articulate, but on thinking more about it, I’m not sure what to make of that yet, though I hope to figure it out as I discuss it with people in the comments. I do know that there’s a tendency to make assumptions about people’s intelligence based on what they’re reading, part of which is informed by class snobbery, part of which is informed by sexism, and part of which is defined by how trends in the literary canon inform what we view as high art vs. low art vs. not-at-all-even-close-to-art.
Romance novels make people intensely uncomfortable, which they express as deep disdain and/or complete dismissal. Hell, I’m still a bit squeamish about revealing my love of romance novels to new people, and I have friends who look at my bookshelves (which somebody once described as “schizoid in the very best way") and bemoan how they don’t understand why I like romance novels when I have so many good books to read.
I think the roots of this disdain lie with our cultural discomfort with emotional and sexual intimacy. Besides the usual explanations, most of which are variations of “Oh, America is such a Puritan country,” I personally think that some it’s a reaction to the way both have been exploited by people who use it to sell everything from greeting cards to phone plans to insurance. Sneering at sentimentality makes us feel smarter; we’re not taken in by this blatant manipulation. We’re better than that, smarter than that.
But it’s not just the fact that romance novels deal specifically with squishy emotions that makes people uncomfortable. I think a big stumbling point for people lies with the happy ending. It’s unfashionable right now for our Art to be happy. The subjects can certainly yearn for happiness and attempt to seek it, but most of the time, the best we’re willing to give them is bittersweet closure. I’m certainly not qualified to say why the Aesthetic of Unhappiness has so much cachet right now, but I have a feeling a lot of it has to do with the brutalities of WWI and WWII.
However, and I’m going to get a lot of shit for this, I also can’t deny that romance novels are their own worst enemy. This genre is rife with bad, bad, bad writing. Yes yes, I know, other genres have awful books, too, Sturgeon’s Law, etc. etc. But I don’t know of any other genre in which books as all-encompassingly awful as what Cassie Edwards has published become bestsellers. I mean, I’ve read some horror and fantasy that’s almost as bad as the worst of romance, but these authors don’t become minor bestsellers with whole shelves dedicated to them at the bookstore. There’s bad, and then there’s romance novel bad, which is this whole other universe of awfulness (and bless her heart, Mrs. Giggles realized this ages ago, and dared to speak up about it).
And the most hellish thing is, when people make fun of romance novel stereotypes, I can’t even run in and say “You are completely talking out of your ass.” The truth of the matter is, it’s not that hard to pick up a romance lousy with foot-stamping heroines who shake their auburn tresses as the heroes growl menacingly at them. Perhaps it’s just as well that the author of that little piece didn’t know romance novels well enough to hit us where it really hurt, like, say, secret babies and virgin widows.
And the covers...oy, the covers. If you’ve spent any time on the site at all, y’all know what we think of the covers.
But all this is irrelevant, really. Romance novels can be (and often are) turds of the first order. The question is: can anyone make an informed judgment about somebody’s intelligence and/or moral character solely based on what they’re reading, especially something as ephemeral as a snapshot of what somebody chooses to read on the bus or the train? I don’t think so. God help me, I’ve read and enjoyed Dara Joy, but I don’t think I’m any dumber for being fond of her over-the-top prose. We read what we read for a multitude of reasons, and making that sort of judgment is reductionist to the point of retardation. The part that bothered me the most about the ad wasn’t that it was making fun of romance novels, it was the fact that it presented a false dichotomy. I don’t see the contradiction or tension between the same person reading, say, Savage Thunder and Phenomenology of Spirit. And I mean, c’mon, Plato? Plato is for pussies. A reasonably bright 11-year-old could read and grasp Plato. And yes, I’m aware of how obnoxious my one-upsmanship is, but goddamn, people who assume I’m stupid and uneducated simply because I enjoy a bodice ripper every now and then can suck it, and suck it hard. Because asswipes making snap judgments about me based solely on what I read are part of the reason why Sarah and I started this website in the first place.
Alert Bitchery reader JMC was forced to change seats on the DC Metro this week. Why?
Because she didn’t want to face this crapful advertisement.
The Greater Washington Initiative, creators of that lovely ad, is an organization attempting to market the greater DC area to businesses looking to expand, touting high percentages of residents with advanced degrees and other hallmarks of smarthood. They’d love that expansion to land in the VA/DC/MD area, but I guess the romance novels will have to be part of the yard sale before the businesses move on into town.
Oh, the rage. JMC said, “Romance readers are uneducated and less desirable employees, apparently. And having a degree or an advanced degree obviously makes people smarter, too, in their minds. Forget the fact that I’ve known some people with advanced degrees who are dumber than a bag of rocks and utterly unproductive human beings.”
I know those same people - I think I was in grad school classes with some of them.
Once again, the romance reader is portrayed as dumb, uneducated, and - get this - economically undesirable. Well, it will be my pleasure to make sure that Smart Bitches, LLC, never expands into the DC metro area.
A website that reviews romance novels from a couple of smart bitches who will always give it to you straight. No bullshit. No gushing--unless the author really deserves it.
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The doctor was on her tea break.
Not the best sentence in the batch, but I got stuck there. Describing the Indian public hospital experience is challenging…
Um, yeah, I’d like one please. I should give fair warning that my review might not be all that witty/interesting. I’ve got the bitch part down. Maybe not so much with the smarts.
see what i mean. i started that post at 12 and really posted it at 3!!!
*shaking head*
From Cassie Edwards Investigatory Extravaganza: The First Post
im not here to cast blame, or say who is right or wrong. but topics like this always kinda trip me out. esp since the same kind of outrage is never directed towards other issues in writing. llike race and…
From Cassie Edwards Investigatory Extravaganza: The First Post
