Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Suppose for a moment that words can take on three dimensional qualities, like sticks, stones, etc.

I present for your perusal my imagination’s depiction of Joss Whedon’s quote from this article in the Globe & Mail about sexism in popular culture as a perfectly warm and friendly bathtub of water that I can curl up in for hours and won’t ever get cold:

“Women’s inferiority - in fact, their malevolence - is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkas,” wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon on a website recently. “I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards… Women are weak, manipulative, somehow morally unfinished. The logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are expendable… There is a staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted.”

It’s not that this quote makes me happy, but it’s comforting that there are people who Get It.

[Thanks to Emily for the link.]

Oh yes. The judgment of women’s physicality, that pubic hair, cellulite, wrinkles, and any signs of humanity that might possibly be unattractive - Hillary Clinton has long been the subject of that judgment. Even before she ran for president, any unflattering picture of Hillary was eagerly published by the media. I remember (but can’t find) a very unflattering pic from possibly 1992 or 1991 of Clinton adjusting a mic cord behind her head that was all over the front pages of newspapers. In color. Because, you know, that’s news.

The funny thing is, like I said in my comment to that entry, as I read the Safran article that bashed American and British women’s personal upkeep, I thought he sounded more like a woman criticizing another woman - even more specifically, he sounded like what I say. To myself.

Please pass the kick in my own ass, thanks, because I need one.

So back to romance and how that fits in. (It’s not all about me. It’s all about romance. I’m generous. Not narcissistic. Except for the whole blog thing, which is gleeful narcissism.) Brindel’s accusations that romance is the shield of the attacking patriarchy and the endless question of whether romance novels and feminism (and related words and concepts) can sit on the same park bench and feed the ducks leads me to more questions.

Does romance propagate the narrow standard of physical perfection in women? I go back and forth. For every plump heroine or heroine who is unapologetic about her curves, her desire not to have children, her status as a “real” woman, there’s a heroine who undergoes a makeover as part of her evolution towards her happy ending. For every imperfect or historically impossible heroine in a Regency, there’s one who oddly has smooth and hairless legs. Do heroines embrace or subvert that standard of physical perfection?

It’s quite a question considering that romances are read by women mostly, and the question of whether the reader relates to the hero, the heroine, or both, or neither, still hasn’t been resolved in my debating mind.

However, there is a growing prevalence of stronger heroines, especially in paranormals, where the heroines are often superpowered or muscular and possessing of combat training. There’s ass to kick, and there’s heroines to do it. For every perfectly marvelous makeover heroine, there’s about three vampire hunters, two psychic warriors and a partridge in a pear tree. Because you know, paranormal heroines put the romance in “necromance.”

So my vote, as I continue to ponder the question, is that romance affirms the stronger woman and subverts the stereotypical sexism, as opposed to embracing the standard of beauty that reduces women to fractions of their parts, but I’m always happy to be told I’m totally utterly wrong. In a nice way.

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