On the Acceptability of Emotions and Romance

Today’s entry is going to talk a great deal about science fiction because the inspiration for this entry comes from two articles dealing with SF, but I swear I’ll tie it back to romance novels before the end of my rambling session. At least, I hope I will.

The first article is written by an SF writer, Debra Doyle. It’s an excellent and hilarious take on SF called the “Girl Cooties Theory of Genre Literature.” The whole thing is worth reading, but this part here is what sparked my interest:

We start by positing the existence of a body of sf readers and writers (numerically perhaps fairly small, but nevertheless extremely vocal) who are deathly afraid of getting girl cooties. “Hard sf” is their science fiction of choice, because it has the fewest girl cooties of any of the sf subgenres. No subjectivity, no mushy bits, none of that messy relationship stuff getting in the way of the classic sf values of hardness and rigor (and no, I don’t think the elevation of those particular values is coincidental.) Admixtures from other genres are allowed provided that the secondary genre also provides the reader with a low-cootie environment. Westerns don’t have girl cooties, for example, and neither do technothrillers. Men’s action-adventure is about as cootie-free as it’s possible to get.

The second article is actually a huge discussion on Electrolite sparked off by Vox Day, my favorite asshole Christian Libertarian whose views, interestingly enough, rarely seem Christian or Libertarian; if I had to categorize him, I’d call him ” authoritarian Bible Literalist and Ann Coulter fanboy with a bad Mohawk and massive chips on his shoulder regarding women, gays and Jews.” But don’t take my word for it, let the man speak for himself:

The mental pollution of feminism extends well beyond the question of great thinkers. Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics, so they either write romance novels in space about strong, beautiful, independent and intelligent but lonely women who finally fall in love with rugged men who love them just as they are, or stick to fantasy where they can make things up without getting hammered by critics holding triple Ph.D.s in molecular engineering, astrophysics and Chaucer.

Notice how both authors present a dichotomy to the reader: hard SF does not contain squishy emotional bits, just as squishy “romance novels in space” (cue large group of boys going “Ewwwww, cooties!” while secretly thinking that the new girl looks really pretty in her blue dress) are not hard SF. (The irony here is that Day himself doesn’t write hard SF; as Theodore Beale, he writes SF that’s heavily influenced by Christian theology and featuring angels, of all things. Dude, Sharon Shinn’s on the phone, and she wants her schtick back. But enough sniping at Day, who’s kind of beside the point to this discussion.)

Why the artificial separation? I know hard SF is supposed to focus on the rivetty bits, to steal a truly awesome phrase from Doyle, but ultimately, isn’t fiction about human struggles and conflicts, and don’t a lot of those conflicts involve messy human emotion? If one wants a book filled with speculative science unadulterated by The Squish, why read fiction at all? Why not pick up a scientific journal or a technical review?

But most fascinating of all, the stigma of romance novels is such that as soon as a love story appears on the scene, a book is deemed a romance and is therefore suspect, fuck the immaculately-researced quantum theory the author threw in as well. No other genre has this unique power, at least not to the extent romance novels do.

I think there’s a strong association between outward expressions of emotion, especially the “softer” emotions like love, and being a pussy-boy—let’s face it, the primary writers and consumers of SF tend to be men, though the landscape is changing every year. Pussy-boy emotions = womanish, and we ALL know that womanish = bad, mmmkay. Womanish is equivalent to using “product” on your hair and dishing in agonizing detail over the latest episodes of The OC or (glurk) The Gilmore Girls. It’s like a homophobe’s fear of unwittingly walking into a gay bar and getting hit on: “Dude, if I get my ass grabbed by guy wearing aviator glasses, chaps and a tank top with “Big Daddy” spelled out in rhinestones, does this mean I’M NOW GAY?” Similarly, the knee-jerk, almost violent contempt some types of men (OK, to be fair, a few women too, though they tend to be few and far between) express for anything even remotely hinting at a love story stems from a fear of instantly being overrun by those girl cooties, which will then magically cause them to spontaneously lose all dignity, adopt an affected drawl and morph into Carson Kressley. No, worse: a Carson Kressley who reads romance novels.

When you examine the roots of this attitude, I think it boils down to a species of gynophobia, which in turn has its deepest roots in widespread cultural attitudes that associate women with unreason and frailty; y’all do know the roots of the word “hysterical,” right? Women are more emotional than men, and emotions are a sign of weakness, emotions cloud your senses, emotions are not reliable, emotions interfere with clear thinking.

Or do they?

According to research by neuroscientists such as Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio, emotions don’t interfere with thinking—in fact, they’re

critical for effective decision-making. People who suffer damage to two important parts of the brain in charge of processing and regulating emotions, the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal (VMF) cortex, often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities. Other neuroscientists have found that making even rational, everyday decisions excite a lot of activity in the VMF cortex. But if you don’t want to believe the little bitch who loves to read books drenched in The Squish, listen to what a doctor with, like, an actual degree and stuff has to say:

“There’s an increasingly accepted school of thought in neuropsychology that there is a significant emotional component to all personal decision-making, and the brain scans in our study support that hypothesis,” said Dean K. Shibata, M.D., who performed the study at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, N.Y., and is now assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington, Seattle. “There is corroborating evidence for this. For instance, Antonio Damasio and other researchers have found that people who have had strokes or brain tumors that caused injury to the prefrontal lobes of their brains, where emotions are processed, have a very difficult time making even routine personal decisions, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment.”

The old reason/emotion dichotomy is wrong, just as many dichotomies often are. Reasoning and decision-making encapsulate a significant emotional component. Overpowering emotion may very well interfere with one’s judgment, but really, how often d’you find yourself in the grip of a monumental rage or overwhelming passion? (If you say “Once a day or more,” I say “Time to take your meds, dear!”)

My point is, boys and girls: It’s OK to feel. Really. It’s also OK to enjoy books that contain squishy as well as rivetty bits, books that are borderline romance (eeep!) novels like the girl-cootie encrusted tomes penned by Connie Willis and Catherine Asaro (who, by the way, has a PhD in Chemical Physics and has written journal articles with such bodice-ripperish titles as “Complex Speeds and Special Relativity”). Enjoying a good love story won’t turn you into a fag, or, god forbid, a brainless girl.

There. That was sort of related to romance novels. Wasn’t it?