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

Some of the people sniping at Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as being equivalent to Harry Potter for angsty teenyboppers except not particularly well-written made me stop and go: “Wait, Harry Potter was well-written?” (This is clearly because I am such a superior reader with superior tastes in all my literature, and anyone who thinks Harry Potter is awesome is wrong. And stupid. And racist. And a killer of puppies. Just so we’re clear about where I come from when I make statements of aesthetic judgment.) My pointless and incredibly silly snobbery when it comes to children’s and YA fiction aside, what struck me about some of the comments in Pharyngula that dealt with Twilight was the offhand dismissal of the series, not merely because they weren’t especially well-written (I myself couldn’t finish Twilight, and in that regard I’m totally in agreement that it’s the Harry Potter of vampire teenyboppers), but because they were obviously written for a teenage female audience in mind. There’s much casual contempt for literature that deals with the emotional and the female, and I see it as a logical extension from a culture that devalues female experiences in general; that teenage female romantic experiences in particular are singled out as being especially frivolous and assumed to be Not Worthy of Serious Thought isn’t anything new, but it still chafes at me when I see it pop up.

I am also fascinated--FASCINATED--that Harlequin has become shorthand for romance, all romance, the way it has, since books published under the Harlequin/Silhouette imprint cover only a very specific niche of romance. It’d be as if, in attempting to define ice-cream, somebody didn’t address the ingredients, or the characteristics that make ice-cream, well, icy and creamy, but instead chose to refer to it solely by a rather slapdash association of flavor and brand name, sometimes resulting in rather jarring juxtapositions if you know ice-cream well. “My mom’s a huge fan of Breyer’s Phish Food, but I just don’t get it--the thought of eating bits of unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough in ice-cream makes me want to hurl,” sez somebody, and it’s all I can do to not leap up like an obnoxious bastard and say “DUDE, Phish Food is Ben and Jerry’s, and for the love of God, it doesn’t have chocolate chip cookie dough anywhere in it, and really, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T EAT ICE-CREAM AND THEREFORE ARE UNQUALIFIED TO COMMENT ON WHAT WE’RE EATING, AND I’M GOING TO JUMP ON YOUR HEAD BECAUSE YOUR NEXT COMMENT IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE HOW EVERYONE WHO EATS ICE-CREAM IS A FAT WHORE. SEE HOW I’M JUMPING ON YOUR HEAD? JUMP. JUMMMMMP.”

Right. Now that I’m thoroughly craving Phish Food (AND have successfully squelched my desire to act like an obnoxious bastard on somebody else’s comment board--at least this time): PZ’s question at the end intrigues me. Where DID this surge come from?Because people attributing the surge to Twilight are wrong. Twilight hit just as vampires and paranormal romance were huge and getting even bigger. JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood had hit the scene like a hundred-khilitohn bhomb the September previous to Twilight‘s publication. I’m not necessarily interested in tracing the whole trajectory to its source, because I think the current paranormal romance scene is not a direct reaction to, say, the disturbing eroticism of Dracula--I think Anne Rice’s novels are a better candidate for that.

Personally, I think the current paranormal romance boom is the direct descendant of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is more urban fantasy than a creature driven by older, more Victorian mythologies and sensibilities.

Regardless of what the Anita Blake series has become, and regardless what people may think, the popularity of the books and its unholy progeny is due to more than the thrill of reading taboo-busting inter-species nookie; somebody in the comments quoted a Powell’s Books employee defining the genre as “women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it’s not a normal human man"--which made me go HAAAA, but also made me go “Oh, come ON, judging all of paranormal romance just because you were forced to page through the Merry Gentry series is hardly fair. I mean, taboo-busting inter-species nookie is pretty hot and definitely a factor in the popularity--and really, God bless our prurient motivations, because so much brilliant art would have gone (and continue to go) unexpressed if it weren’t for horny artists sublimating their unspeakable urges in beautiful ways, and I really don’t see any inherent wrongness in reading something to get your rocks off (but oh God that’s another topic for another time). But slapping the “It’s the Sex, Stupid” label on the phenomenon is too simple, and falls into the old “Psh, it’s porn, that’s why they like it” dismissal that covers everything and explains very little.

My theory is: it’s also about women, and putting women in control, and how we’re still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet.

The surge of demand for women in a dominant role--as pursuers and protectors and warriors--has been a long time coming, and I think it says something interesting about us and our level of comfort with and/or inability to suspend disbelief about women owning a certain sort of cultural power that most of the asskicking happens in Not Quite Earth, and that many of the heroines are Not Quite Human. The current crop of paranormal romances owe a lot to Anita Blake, but they owe much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.

And now I’ve pretty much reached the extent of my over-thinking about this particular bit of romance, it’s your turn: feel free to overthink paranormal romances in the comments. Or, you know, don’t. Do you read it mostly--even solely--for the hot sex and because you have a hard-on for angsty immortals? Sing it loud, and sing it proud.

Please note: The Sundance Channel version is rated TV:MA, and according to the Sundance website, the four parts air on May 19 and May 20th/21st at midnight and 1am. Check your local cable listings to see if that same schedule applies in your area, and if you have parental controls enabled on your DVR, it might not record things that are designated with a TV:MA rating.

As narrator Martin Torgoff says, the documentary explores why the US is a “sex drenched” culture, and how it got to be that way. If you’re looking for insightful depth of commentary, this isn’t it. The style of this particular type of documentary runs so fast through decades of change that it seems to encourage through name dropping and celebrity interviews the Google-research of its viewers. I happen to watch tv with a computer on my lap, as does Hubby, so as we watched Parts 1 and 2 on Friday night, he was curious about the supreme court cases mentioned, while I was curious about Sandstone, Plato’s Retreat, and Bette Midler’s career in the bathhouses of New York City. As a habit, we Google while we watch - and this documentary is perfect for our obsessive multitasking viewing style. Our search history, it is a kinky place.

The style of narration, which is edited together with musical clips, archived footage, and contemporary interviews, is similar to the other VH1-umentaries, but it works for this subject as well as it did for The Drug Years (which I watched multiple times whenever I encountered it on tv) because the undertaking is so multi-facted. The sexual revolution encompasses several major socio-political uprisings, from feminism to gay rights, and touching on all of them requires a deft flexibility that doesn’t always flourish in documentary work. I don’t know that the series actually explained why we’re a sex-drenched culture, though I agree that we are. I always figured it was part of the Puritan morality that was part and parcel to the founding of the whole damn place, concurrent with that fear that someone, somewhere, was having an orgasm and must be stopped. The documentary seems to attribute the drenching to the excess and then the backlash, with the two sides washing over each other since the early 1990’s but I don’t think a firm conclusion was ever erected.

Also, I wish that the individuals being interviewed were identified with more alacrity, because there were times I was fascinated by someone’s attitude or with their commentary, and wanted to know who the crap they were, and had to wait until the subtitles got around to telling me who they were and what they’d written. The expectation that I know who Erica Jong is? Not a stretch. I do know who she is (and I totally got a kick out the idea that the woman who coined the term “zipless fuck” and wrote candidly about assertive female desire was a classicly elegant woman in a black dress and pearls). But New York Magazine columnist Ariel Levy, who wrote Female Chauvanist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, was onscreen about three or four times before she was identified, and I was Googling the text of her comments to see if they could tell me who she was. I get that the focus is on what these folks have to say rather than who they were (though why Cybill Shephard, exactly?) but some of the elements of who they are inform the fact that they’re talking to me.

I was fascinated by the uncensored nudity, not because it was nudity (look, boobs!) but because it was nearly naked or naked people who looked normal, and not toned, airbrused and post-production edited within an inch of their actual skeletons. Even the Playboy bunnies serving drinks had jiggly bottoms, which isn’t what I’m used to seeing from Playboy.

Some of the highlights:

1. Watching Hugh Hefner get his ass verbally handed to him on The Dick Cavett show by feminist Susan Brownmiller.

2. Footage of the aftermath of the Harvey Milk and George Mosconi assassinations, and the outrage following Dan White’s manslaughter conviction.

3. Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of Cosmopolitan in constrast and comparison with Playboy

4. Two words: Bathhouse Bette. Love her.

As I watched, I kept trying to figure out where, when, and how romance novels would hook into the sexual revolution. There’s no doubt in my mind that they are related, especially since The Flame and the Flower debuted in 1972, and romance novels were among the first depictions in popular culture of female sexual fulfillment at the hands (and mouth and mighty, mighty wang) of the hero, born partially out of his sexual and emotional compulsion to please her - to say nothing of the rape motif of early romance and the critical presumption of ambivalent sexual attitudes on the part of the early romance reader. There’s a good bit of revolution present in the repeated narrative of a mighty wang, meeting the powerful va-hay-hay, and going on over there to live happily ever after.

As I chew on the role of romance novels in the revolution, it makes me ponder the possibility of a documentary that would weave the two together, examining the socio-political climate as romance novels hit the market, and the changes therein as the genre flourished. Sex: The Revolution examines pornography, and pro-sexuality texts like the Masters & Johnson studies and the Kinsey reports, and of course The Joy of Sex, but there likely wasn’t enough time to take a left turn into narratives that embrace female sexuality like those found in romance novels (and no, I’m not saying they’re porno. Far from it). If you watch the documentary, I’m curious what you think of it. Let me know.