Who doesn’t love a small town Romance? Given Jane’s observation in her 2011 RWA wrap-up that small towns remain very popular, apparently a lot of readers do. Given the comments to that post and various lamentations from readers online, there are many readers who absolutely despise the small town Romance.

While all genre devices have advocates and critics, the divide over the small town device seems especially wide. Critics charge it with being anti-feminist and reactionary, not to mention candy-coated fantasy. Advocates point to the strong family and community bonds, the often quirky characters, and (sometimes) a focus on more traditional social values.

I admit that I tend to avoid the most saccharine of the small town books; I’ve been wary of Robyn Carr’s books, for example. But among those I do read, I find some true diversity. For example, I’d put Jill Shalvis’s Lucky Harbor and Sunshine, Idaho books in the candy-coated category. Lucky Harbor seems a very idyllic small town, with the reunited sisters/heroines elevating domesticity to an epic level by deciding to refurbish and re-open the inn their deceased mother owned. The protagonists may have wild, difficult, unloved, even abused pasts, but somehow the current incarnation of the town seems to polish up even the roughest edges of life. It’s a bit like Lucille Ball meets Frank Capra. The insularity is rendered as charming rather than dark; community as a source of strength, support, and outstanding baked goods; and love heals all. It is, after all, Lucky Harbor.

But I’ve also read a number of small town Romances that have more of an edge. Victoria Dahl’s Talk Me Down, for example, brings heroine Molly Jenkins home to Tumble Creek in an attempt to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend. And while the town offers her a delicious diversion in the chief of police’s uniform (Ben Lawson),  Molly can neither escape her ex nor the scandalous implications of her secret career as an erotica writer. And who can forget Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome To Temptation, where Sophie Dempsey hopes to make a name for herself with a documentary featuring an old-time actress and ends up in a battle between her very warm feelings for the handsome mayor, Phin Tucker, and his mother’s feelings for her, which are much cooler and more disapproving. It’s pretty much a meta-novel on the small town Romance, where the “family values” aren’t always what they seem.

Still, the small town Romance seems to have a big reputation for being over-idealized, anti-feminist, and dangerously blind to the real problems that too much insularity can breed.

Part of the issue may be that inspirational Romances often make use of this device, as well, blurring subgenre boundaries. I know many love the Robyn Carr books, but the imagery of the “Virgin River” and the whole love and healing motif have kept me from reading the series. And I think we’ve all read those small town books in which the heroine seemingly inexplicably throws off the chains of her ambitious career and chic urbanity for the SAHW+M role, with the small town world idealized to the point where the heroine’s motives for choosing that life apparently don’t need to be carefully considered and explained to the reader.

The more traditional books in the small town panoply reminds me of some of the books within the sentimental novel tradition, characterized by novels like Fanny Burney’s Evelina and even Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and the domestic fiction tradition of the mid-19^th C. Books by women like Catherine Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe, which portrayed women learning how to make good choices, especially a good choice of marriage, which, as Cathy Davidson notes in Revolution and the Word, was probably the most important decision a woman could and would make in her life. These novels glorified domesticity as the ideal realm for women, motherhood as the pinnacle of a wife’s service, and reasonable sentiment as the greatest power for women to cultivate in themselves [recklessly simplifying all through this paragraph]. Novels like Eliza Wharton’s The Coquette demonstrate the perils that can befall women who ignore their good judgment in favor of unreasonable passions (unwed pregnancy, social humiliation, poverty, death, etc.), giving the sentimental novel a general ethos of moralism that may or may not be subtly subverted within the text itself. And some of those values have moved straight into a number of small town Romances.

Which, when you think about it, makes a certain kind of sense, especially given the social conservatism of marriage. And by conservatism, I don’t just mean in terms of moral values, but also of preserving a coherent, lasting social structure, which the West considers to be rooted in the nuclear family.  Combined with the small town motif, which brings to mind myriad cinematic and popular media fantasies (Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell, and Thomas Kinkade, for example), especially for Americans, there is a tendency, perhaps, to idealize and naturalize social conservativism. When you add a benign insularity to the mix, it can feel both comforting and claustrophobic.

In many of the small town Romances I’ve read, while the heroine’s life simplifies in some ways once she moves into the small town environment, it becomes more complicated in others. Often, the other ways involve a developing romantic relationship. I’ve enjoyed a few books that feature a hero’s return to a small town, notably Theresa Weir’s Bad Karma and Jill Shalvis’s Instant Attraction, both of which feature men who are grappling with deep emotional trauma. Victoria Dahl’s Good Girls Don’t features a hero who has returned to small town life from Los Angeles with deep physical and emotional wounds to heal. More often, though, it seems that it’s the heroine who is the focus of the small town idealization, which may add to the difficulties some readers have with this device.

Despite the difficulties protagonists may face from the small town environment – everything from criminal activity to nosy neighbors, interfering eccentric family members, and cute dogs – there does seem to me to be a benign fantasy element to most of the small town Romances I’ve read. Many of the overwhelming choices the heroine has to make have been stripped away; her priorities change to be more emotionally and romantically charged; and the romance seems to play a significant role in resolving some or all of the problems plaguing the heroine in her “old” life. What I’m not sure about is how many of these fantasy elements are exclusive to small town books and how many are Romance genre staples, magnified in a different way when combined with the small town device (economic prosperity comes to mind here).

In fact, the small town fantasy reminds me quite a bit of Nancy Friday’s theory on the submission fantasy, namely that it’s “a chance to relieve ourselves of all responsibility for the delicious, forbidden sex we crave” (Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age, 2009). Instead of being forced to submit sexually as a way of feeling free from the burden of responsibilities and choices, the heroine submits to a new life, which is often undertaken with great reluctance or even active resistance, and which strips her of many of the previous responsibilities and choices she previously had. It’s a submission fantasy of another type, more emotional than sexual.

My own view is that it is definitely possible to create a small town fantasy that does not look like a somewhat reactionary idealization of life before second-wave feminism, although it may be difficult to do that without satirizing the small town fantasy. Not that it isn’t possible, but for me that possibility is exercised in well-crafted romantic development that enhances rather than substitutes for other priorities in the heroine’s life. Or, if the heroine chooses to leave her big city life behind, I need to feel that her choice is as independently and intelligently made as we would expect of a choice to pursue a position as a NYC corporate CEO.

But what do you think: is there a dividing line for you in what small town books you love versus those you despise, or are you an unabashed lover or hater of this subgenre of Romances, and why? Do we overgeneralize small town books in the genre? Can/should small town Romances should be more socially progressive, or is the benign community ethic and the fantasy of the simpler, healthier life the necessary appeal?

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You are well known for your cute toy filled book trailers (Stud Club Trilogy / Maya Banks’ Highlander Trilogy) and I was tempted to do a lego review for this book. After all, I have a castle.

I bought some canons.

I have minifigs where the girl’s boobs look like they are busting out of her top like any decent romance heroine.

I don’t have a carriage but I did debate buying one. I have cows though which can depict a gentle, pastoral setting.

But alas, my Lego helpers have abandoned me for other things.

A Night to Surrender is the battle of the sexes story. It’s a very cute and sweet romance. At times, I just wanted to squeeze the book it was so darn adorable.  However, the battle of the sexes stories are notoriously difficult to do because you have to make sure that you don’t demonize one sex in order to elevate the other. On the macro scale, I thought you were less successful in portraying this because the entire story is about how this bucolic retreat for women was made better by a male outsider coming in and changing the male/female dynamic. On the micro scale, I felt that the two protagonists were portrayed as much more balanced.

Spindle Cove has gained the reputation as a retreat for women, so much so that it is called Spinster’s Cove by some (a term probably coined by a male to be derisive). But Spindle Cove is a safe place for women to come. Susanna Finch is the daughter of the only local “gentleman”, Sir Lewis Finch, albeit an ignored daughter, and is the leader of her community. She is revered by both the men and the women. A gentlewoman by the name of Mrs. Highwood is considering sending her three daughters to stay at Spindle Cove. Susanna realizes that the bookish Minerva and the slightly asthmatic Diana whose treatment at the hands of male hacks has led her deeper into illness could do very well at Spindle Cove where they would gain self confidence and good health. Susanna’s plans to enfold the Highwood girls into the town’s embrace is placed in jeopardy by the arrival of Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bramwell. Bram plans to convince Sir Finch that Bram is fully capable of going back into battle despite his gimpy right knee.

Sir Finch is a “celebrated innovator of fireams and artillery”, is an advisor to the royals, and as such has enormous pull with the British military. A recommendation from Sir Finch all but guarantees Bram’s return to active duty.  Bram believes that his place is life is one of a soldier.  It’s all that he knows how to do and it’s how he measures his self worth.  Not soldiering feels like a diminishment to Bram.

Bram is then tasked with mounting a 24 man militia to march in the midsummer year’s fair. Bram eagerly accepts this challenge before realizing that finding 24 able bodied men to serve in the militia in Spindle’s Cove may be more difficult than spotting comets without a telescope. His cousin says that there are no men in Spinter’s Cove what with the women in the town completely emasculating anything that may have balls and stalk between their legs. Bram, however, is completely undone by a smart woman and Susannah with her talk of battle strategies and her competency with a gun nearly has Bram swooning.

The introduction of Bram, Colin, and their manly men set the town a flutter and none of the ladies can talk of anything else.  While some the book is a clever poke at societal expectations such as when Bram is told that he should marry and raise a family and give up soldiering, something undoubtedly told to hundreds of girls, there is also an unconscious undertone that something is wrong with Spindle Cove.  Before Bram comes to town apparently none of the men could stand up to Susanna and thus their tavern is turned into a teahouse and the smithy is not banging out horseshoes and swords but fashioning clasps on lockets. The truth is that Susanna is a good leader and the overt text of the story acknowledges this toward the end.

The story is funny and charming. The sexual tension between Susanna and Bram is immediate but believable. Susanna and Bram, both individually and together, are sharp and fulsome characters. There are no wasted scenes and the dialogue is snappy. I also felt that Susanna and Bram made a great couple and that their strengths and weaknesses overlapped. The story is very romantic with both characters making big gestures (and Bram making the biggest).

But I admit that throughout the book I felt uncomfortable. The idea that you seem to be heralding is that a balanced community is better than an unbalanced one, i.e., that everyone will be happier if the men are integrated in a equal fashion with the women. I think that this worldbuilding works better on a grander scale as in a science fiction where the entire world is unbalanced.  When the Cove, however, is one bastion of retreat for women where they can come and be judged not on the basis of their ability to pour tea and bear offspring, but on their intelligence and capabilities, does it really need to be changed? “They included the sickly, the scandalous, and the painfully shy; young wives disenchanted with the wrong men…All of them delivered here by the guardians to whom they presented problems, in hopes that the sea air would cure them of their ills.” The book goes on to say “No ‘cures’ were necessary. They didn’t need doctors pressing lancets to their veins, or daily doses of poison. They just needed a place to be themselves. Spindle Cove was that place.” Did Spindle Cove need to change? It seemed like a question that was never asked, let alone, answered. The absence of that debate, particularly given the stance of the leading female protagonist (aka heroine) was one that made this book a B- rather than a B.

Best regards,

Jane

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Surrender of a Siren by Tessa Dare
2. REVIEW: Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare
3. REVIEW: A Lady of Persuasion by Tessa Dare

*****

Sarah and I are conducting a reader panel at RT in 2012. It’s very cool because the readers are the panelists. We’ll be choosing the panelists from those readers who sign up for the workshop. I’m pretty excited about this and hope it is as awesome as we have envisioned it in our minds. The time and day hasn’t been confirmed but it will be Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Registration will be open by September 15.

*****

Have a bunch of books that you would like to make into ebooks but don’t have the time or equipment? 1dollarscan will accept shipment of your books and send you a PDF in return for $1. This PDF isn’t a reflowable text that you can use on your smart phone or ereader. It is merely a scanned image of each page in one big PDF. Depending on the quality, you could take that PDF and turn it into a ePub or Mobi using an OCR engine, but that would be very time consuming. Still, if you have a bunch of books you bought from 10 cents at goodwill and are tired of them clogging up your closet, this might be a good option for you.

*****

In the Phoenix Sullivan thread and in the comments to Sarah at Smart Bitches review of Grand Sophy, some commenters appeared unable to separate their love for the book and their love for the author from the text itself. When I read this article at Wired about the brand attachment that some tech owners have, it all made sense.

The paper notes that its conclusions challenge some assumptions from previous literature on brand connections. It had been assumed that brands are treated more like an interpersonal relationship and that brand loyalty is indicative of relationship strength. Instead, the Illinois researchers believe people treat brands as they treat themselves, leading users to feel more affected by brand failure instead of less.

*****

A site called Bad Reputation has a great article about the representation of women in fantasy.  Juliet E. McKenna writes that fiction is important because many people will never sit down and watch a documentary or read a lengthy newspaper analysis of the perfidy of sexism. She points out that Young Adult fiction is doing a much better job of presenting texts that challenge kids to think about the existing worldviews and adult fiction writers should not undo all that good work:

So it’s vital that epic fantasies on the ‘adult’ shelves don’t undo all that good work. I really do not want my teenage sons unconsciously absorbing notions of male privilege and entitlement in stories where a woman’s importance is always defined by who she might choose to sleep with, or better yet, save her precious virginity for. Where women who transgress male authority are invariably punished by supposedly indifferent twists of fate. I don’t want my niece and god-daughters reading stories which imply that true happiness lies in meekness, submission and doing the cooking and mending to facilitate so much more valuable male heroics.

I have been reading Bruce Lanksy’s collection of retold fairy tales and fables beginning with Girls to the Rescue Book #1 with my daughter. It’s a wonderfully female empowering series as it shows the girls as wise, brave, and clever.

*****

There have been a couple of seismic events in technology this past week. (Yes, I am not overstating this).  The first was Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobile.  Motorola has always been a preferred device manufacturer of Google’s but most every one says that this acquisition is about the thousands of patents Motorola owns.  This places other Android devices in jeopardy although Google promises it won’t preference any of its own devices over those manufactured by other corporations.  Amazon tablet is rumored to be an Android based device so it will be interesting to watch and see what happens.

The other huge event is that Hewlett Packard is going to be moving away from hardware manufacturing.  Everything I’ve read suggests that HP is killing the hardware and focusing solely on software. It purchased Autonomy for $10.3 billion to shore up its software division.  HP came out with a tablet device called the HP Touchpad that ran WebOS. HP will no longer be producing products with WebOS.

By discontinuing WebOS products, Apotheker is backtracking on a strategy he announced just five months ago to put WebOS software on every Hewlett-Packard computer. The operating system runs the company’s TouchPad tablet and a range of smartphones.

I would be careful about buying one of those.

Related posts:

1. Thursday Midday Links: Is Harlequin Trying to Move the Brand Away from Romance?
2. Book Scanning for Libraries Becoming Hot News
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To what? “Go to bed” was too wishy-washy, “make love” had implications, “screw” was tacking, and “fuck” was just plain awful.

Was she going to buckle under just because of a language barrier? How would a man do it? How would Jake do it?

Why wouldn’t Jake do it?

Right then she knew she could never be the sexual aggressor, no matter how much she wanted him. Whether her reluctance was rooted in cultural conditioning and biological instinct made no difference, because women’s liberation got all tangled up when it hit the bedroom floor.

I absolutely love this passage from Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Glitter Baby, because I think it eloquently expresses one of the central tensions in genre Romance – namely, the apparent conflict between principles of female “liberation” and sexual politics. On the one hand you have Fleur’s perception that “real liberation” means the ability to distinguish sexual desire from the sometimes twisted games of love and relationships. Then you have the ambivalence over language – how to express this liberated desire in terms not meaningless or already loaded with meaning. And then Fleur’s realization that she could never take the sexual lead with a man, which is tied to this incredibly cryptic logic at the end of the meditation, “women’s liberation got all tangled up when it hit the bedroom floor.”

But what does that mean, exactly? Does it mean that all the principles of what we tend to associate with feminism become moot when it comes to sex? Does it mean that we have not yet evolved to the point where we can separate sex from ideas of gender and from sexual politics and game playing? Or does it mean that feminism is all well and good but there is something in the “nature” of men and women that means our sexual desires will always run up against our principles of gender equity and female empowerment?

This dilemma is apparent in more than a few SEP novels, and it echoes more generally through the Romance genre as a whole. The very nature of the genre, at least in heterosexual Romance, where even the most “liberated” heroines ultimately end up in a committed relationship with the hero, could be read as a case against defining female liberation as the ability to express sexual desire separate from the games of love and relationships.

The recent article in Psychology Today, “Why Feminism is the Anti-Viagra,” suggests that women are neurologically “wired” for sexual submission and psychologically inclined toward “dominant men.” While the authors point out that both male and female brains contain the wiring for submission and dominance, they suggest that the choice is made in the womb, pushing a biological rather than cultural explanation for their argument. The obvious answer to the question posed in the title, then, is that encouraging equity between men and women is responsible for the diminished sexual desire that –according to the authors – is “the most common sexual complaint” among women.

Note the logic here: women complain of diminished sexual desire; women are neurologically programmed for sexual submission, while men are neurologically programmed for sexual dominance; therefore, feminism is destroying female sexual desire. Where do Romance novels come in? According to Angela Knight, they reflect the “natural” way of things:

“I think this is one of the problems we’re having in romance in general right now: our heroes have gotten a little too PC. We’re portraying men the way feminist ideals say they should be – respectful and consensus-building,” . . . “Yet women like bad boys. I suspect that’s because our inner cavewoman knows Doormat Man would become Sabertooth Tiger Lunch in short order. In fact, this may be one reason why EroRom is gaining popularity so fast – writers feel free to write dominant heroes with more of an edge.”

So if we take Knight’s word for it – as well as the authors of the “anti-Viagra” article – Fleur could never be the sexual aggressor because she’s simply not wired that way, and whatever feminist principles she possesses are getting in the way of her sexual satisfaction.

Unless, for example, we subject the entire argument to a reversal of logic. Instead of the argument above, let’s try this one: If we had no inequality between men and women, we would not see sexual submission or dominance as symbolic of that inequity. But because we do have so much inequity, it’s easy to see sexual behavior and sexual desire through that same lens. However, isn’t it possible that these two things are completely separate? That we can enjoy equity in the boardroom and power plays in the bedroom?

After all, what is one of Romance’s most potent fantasies? It’s the brutish hero who is “tamed” by love. Think of the famous scene at the end of Linda Howard’s Dream Man in which the knuckle-dragging Dane literally passes out from sympathetic labor pains as Marlie gives birth to their child. Or how about Gray’s transformation in After the Night from an abusive jerk who bullies Faith without conscience into a crazy in love and proud of his independent and accomplished woman hero. And what about Bastien from Anne Stuart’s Black Ice, a man who goes from soulless assassin to profoundly domesticated house husband and father – a man who uses his lethal training to make the house safe for his wife and children, even doing the carpentry work himself.

As Susan Elizabeth Phillips argues in her essay for Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women,

The romance novel has – Abracadabra! Zap! Pow! – produced two completely integrated human beings. It has produced the new male – strong and intensely physical, but possessing all the sensitive, nurturing qualities of the female. And it has produced a new female – a heroine who possesses all the softer qualities traditionally assigned to women but who has none of a woman’s physical limitations because his strength now belongs to her.

Now Phillips’s argument is premised on the notion that women are physically weaker than men, so I would substitute the physical limitations with social, economic, and political limitations, and I have a number of other quibbles with the way she is conceptualizing this idealization. But I think her notion that the Romance often integrates the hero and heroine by redistributing the characteristics each possesses and lacks is a good place to start responding to what I see as a conflation of social equality and sexual play.

Although I’ve quoted this passage from Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman’s Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape several times now, I’m going to do so here again, because I feel that the statement is paramount to what I’d like to see in our conversations about sex and power in Romance – namely a paradigm shift away from requiring our sexual fantasies to a) line up with our social ideals, b) become anecdotal evidence that some sexual fantasies are anti-feminist and even pro-rape, or c) be used as evidence that feminist ideals are not “natural” or even desirable:

So often it seems as if the discourse is focused solely on the “no means no” model — which, while of course useful, stops short of truly envisioning how suppressing female sexual agency is a key element of rape culture, and therefore how fostering genuine female sexual autonomy is necessary in fighting back against it. We wanted to talk about how to make the world safer for women to say no and yes to sex as we please.

One of the things I’ve noticed in discussions about Romance novels is a deep suspicion of feminism and a perception that feminism amounts to man-hating or political extremism. We’ve all seen the “I’m not a feminist but…” comments, as well as the assertions that submission fantasies represented in Romance perpetuate rape culture and give a mixed message to men who apparently cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality.  Even though research demonstrates that “[d]espite the increased prominence of rape themes in popular culture, prevalence rates for rape fantasies appear to have been relatively stable over the past 4 decades,”  decades during which gender roles have also undergone quite an evolution.

Despite the superficial opposition between these two positions – suspicion of feminism and suspicion of submission fantasies – I believe that they both reflect patriarchal assumptions about women and sex. In both cases, women are being judged by a different standard, encouraged to sexually submit according to her “nature,” or resist submission because it gives men the wrong idea and reflects patriarchal conditioning. One of the things that really bothers me about this ‘submission fantasy = perpetuation of rape culture’ argument is the way in which it makes the subconscious sexual fantasies of women responsible for the criminal actions of men. How is that resisting patriarchal assumptions and entitlements?

What if we started to view female sexuality from a place of “yes means yes,” though? What if we simply assume as a matter of course that our sexual fantasies neither will nor need to match up with the rights of both men and women to enjoy the same legal, political, economic, and social opportunities? That men can be stay at home fathers without being emasculated and that women can ambitiously follow career without being de-feminized? What if, in other words, we reject the shame and judgment around our sexual fantasies and freed ourselves from the idea that we have to be all of one thing or another? I imagine that might have a powerfully positive impact on female sexual desire, especially if it means that women won’t have to carry most of the domestic work as well as whatever out of house work they are pursuing, as well. Because I think exhaustion is to blame for the depletion of sexual desire among women, and my idea of liberated, feminist sex is the acceptance of female sexuality as healthy and robust, without shame and judgment and the need to defend our own desires.

Does Romance offer that? Should Romance offer that? Or is the genre idealizing a negative fantasy of female – and male – sexuality?

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This is only tangentially related to romance books. Oh, what am I saying? This is not at all related to romance books by even the most strained reading but it is an issue that has been on my mind for sometime.

Earlier this year, there was an article about Katie Couric and her somewhat provocative magazine shoot in Harper’s Bazaar. I didn’t find this particularly provocative but the Washington Post article suggested that Couric as a sex symbol was challenging the norms of what a woman can look like and still be taken seriously.

But the most striking aspects of the glossy feature are the images by photographer Francois Dischinger. They are an audacious celebration of a powerful woman as a boldly sexy one, too.

There’s nothing reserved or hesitant in the sex appeal on display in the four-page story about Couric. The images are a full-throated, even exaggerated, rebuke of the notion that a woman must dress in a prescribed manner — Suze Orman suits, full-coverage blouses, sensible heels — to protect her IQ, her résumé and her place in a male-dominated work culture.

The problem that I saw with the Couric piece is that she could not dress like that on camera and still be taken seriously. In other words, her dress was for magazine article about Katie Couric and her fashion taste, what she thinks about botox, and her desire to remarry.

Following that was this summary of the Chicago Bar Association’s “What Not to Wear” presentation at Above the Law about how young female associates should dress at Big Law (big law are the big law firms around the country, but mostly in NY where first year associates earn six figures and work 80 hours per week).

"Looking sexy in a law firm is disrespectful" – Mary Nicolau. Absolutely. No one should be able to see your cleavage and your skirt or dress should be knee-length and not too tight. The partner you're working for is someone's husband/father/boyfriend. Show some respect.

…

"ladies, have some respect for yourselves. There are a lot of married men at law firms and you do not want to tempt them." Or, as the Honorable Benjamin Goldgar said, do not reveal your form in court because male judges will be distracted and female judges will be resentful. And, finally, if I need to interview for a new job because I wore red shoes, a side pony, a scoop neck dress and no hose, then I will be sure to bring my belongings in a paper bag and ask for spare change on my way out of the interview. Thank you Chicago Bar Association for reforming a former sleazy girl lawyer.

Recently a banker sued her former employer claiming she was fired because she was too attractive. Apparently her sexiness was too distracting for the male bankers she worked with. She was told to refrain from wearing turtle necks, pencil skirts, three inch heels (my entire shoe wardrobe), fitted suits.

Then the managers gave her a list of clothing items she would not be allowed to wear: turtlenecks, pencil skirts, and fitted suits. And three-inch heels. “As a result of her tall stature, coupled with her curvaceous figure,” her suit says, Lorenzana was told “she should not wear classic high-heeled business shoes, as this purportedly drew attention to her body in a manner that was upsetting to her easily distracted male managers.”

This is, of course, just the claims the female banker is making and there is no evidence but it is also consistent with what the folks on the CBA panel on appropriate office attire were saying. It is consistent with the dress policy at the Big Law firm of Weil wherein women must wear a garment with sleeves when representing the firm or meeting with clients. Because elbows and shoulders are simply too sexy?

I contemplated this and ranted about with my girlfriends. When I first started practicing, there had been an anonymous survey circulated amongst the jurists about appropriate dress. Appropriate dress for women was dark suits, hose, low heeled shoes, modest jewelry. No pantsuits were allowed. Fast forward a decade and pantsuits are allowed but open toed shoes would probably make the men in the black robes pass out in dismay.

Women can either look too pretty or not pretty enough. A v neck shirt is too provocative. Naked arms are too provocative. High heels are too provocative. On the other side, we can’t look to frumpy or disheveled because that shows we don’t really care about ourselves.

Ironically, many women think a man in a well tailored suit is very sexy. There is an entire romance line devoted to the hot sexily suited man (Harlequin Presents) yet I can NEVER imagine a man being taken aside saying “your suit is distracting the staff here. Please tone it down.”

As a the DailyKos columnist blogged on Monday, it is hard for men to look sexually provocative in their clothes. They don’t have a lot of clothing choice. But even if a man were to wear a tight fitting jeans at work and a t shirt that showed off his pecs and pipes, would anyone ever think of complaining that his clothes were too distracting? Or that they aren’t able to take him seriously because his body was too provocatively displayed?

For me, whether the banker’s suit is true or false isn’t the issue. For me, the issue is that we have to have this discussion at all about whether a woman’s work clothes can be too sexy, so sexy that it prevents the men around her from performing their jobs. I know that there is such a thing as appropriate and inappropriate dress (i.e., black lace camisole with a pair of pants wouldn’t be appropriate for the office but a v neck? Sleeveless? Heels too high?)

Have we come very far in terms of judging a woman based on her work? Is it fair that a woman can be deemed to be dressing too provocatively? Should we have to downplay our sexuality? Is that appropriate or inappropriate? Are we women responsible for inciting the lusts of men around us or should they be expected to be able to put that aside and just do their work?

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
2. REVIEW: Wrong Dress, Right Guy by Shirley Hailstock
3. REVIEW: Dress Rehearsal by Jennifer O’Connell

I recently finished reading Linda Howard’s Death Angel. This will not be a review, as I have no idea how to go about reviewing this book. If I were to judge on the usual criteria – plot, characterization, prose – it’d be maybe a B or a B-. But the story made an impression on me that surpassed what any mere letter grade could convey. I spent most of the book on a rollercoaster between kind of pissed off and really pissed off. After reading it, I fell into one of my periodic "why is the romance world so hostile to women’s sexuality?" funks.

Warning: I can’t say more without revealing big spoilers for Death Angel. Please do not continue reading this if you plan to read the book and don’t want to be spoiled.

Drea Rosseau is a gangster’s girlfriend and Simon is an assassin. They meet cute when Simon asks the gangster, Salinas, if he can have sex with Drea in lieu of payment for services rendered. Drea, after initially being horrified at the idea, fallz in the luv with Simon from the orgasms and all, which Salinas, being a boor (as well as a gangster, drug dealer and killer) has thus far failed to provide. She begs Simon to take her away, and he refuses, telling her, "once was enough." (Did I mention that this is the hero? And that he kills people for a living?)

So, Drea gets mad and runs away from Salinas, but not before stealing a bunch of money from him. Salinas sends Simon after her; not to retrieve the money, but to kill Drea. Simon tracks Drea with laughable ease (he’s your typical romance novel assassin/spy/Navy SEAL/what have you in that his abilities seem just a hair short of supernatural; he always knows just what the heroine is going to do and how to deal with it. Must be nice).

Drea gets into what turns out to be a fatal car accident while Simon is chasing her on a deserted road. She is understandably afraid that Simon intends to kill her, while Simon still isn’t sure what he plans to do, even as he tracks her to another state. But anyway, Drea crashes her car and dies. And goes to-some sort of heavenly waiting room? I’m not real clear on that part. Anyway, she is told (not unkindly) by the angels there that she doesn’t belong. Then one angel comes forward and says that he brought her there to give her a second chance – it turns out that he’s the son she gave birth to at 15 who died shortly after birth. He thinks Drea deserves a second chance, because as she lay bleeding and in labor, she prayed that her son would live instead of her. Drea had demonstrated the "purest" form of love, which apparently is mother-love (that would not have been my guess, but whatever). So the heavenly waiting room welcoming committee takes a vote, and Drea gets sent back to Earth, admonished to go and sin no more, lest she end up in The Other Place.

Okay, this is where this book seriously went off the rails for me. Drea has not shown herself to be a particularly admirable character, but Hell? She was really going to go to Hell? For being kind of lost and misguided and skanky?

Drea is a potentially interesting character. That she has had a hard life is implied but never really explained in detail. We know that she got pregnant at 15 and lost the baby at five months, having to get herself to the hospital because there was no one to take her. The implication certainly seems to be that she was at best neglected, and as a result, she has developed a tough exterior and has learned to do what she needs to get what she wants. While this is not admirable, I found it understandable, given what little we know of her background.

Drea thinks of herself thusly (after her accident and return from death):

But they had held her cheaply because she’d held herself cheaply. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d ever held herself to a higher standard. Not once as an adult had she ever made a decision based on what was right, what she should do; instead, she had gone for whatever paid her the most, benefited her the most. That had been her only criterion. Maybe most people also used that as the basis of their decisions most of the time, but they also went out of their way to help friends, they sacrificed their own material needs to provide for their children, or their aged parents, or they gave to charity or something. She’d done none of that. She had looked out for Drea – first, last and always.

I can tell I’m not simpatico with an author when I feel more sympathetic to the character she’s created than the author herself seems to feel. Maybe it’s that Drea doesn’t seem that hard-bitten, and we’re not given enough information to really understand why she does what she does. I came to wonder if that was a deliberate choice on Howard’s part; it was like she didn’t want to make Drea too sympathetic. But my mind filled in the blanks from what little we are given about her upbringing, and I couldn’t help but feel that circumstances had made Drea the person she was. Which doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t have reformed; but it does mean, for me at least, that if she had died unreformed, she wouldn’t deserve an eternity of torment being poked with pitchforks, etc.

Another hole in the portrait that Howard has created of Drea: she doesn’t seem to have been hugely ambitious, pre-embezzlement and death, which made me wonder what she was doing with such a dangerous character as Salinas, a man whom she has to play dumb around (she feels it’s safest that he not know she has a brain; that way he won’t ever feel threatened by her or worry about what she might overhear). Couldn’t she have just married a doctor, or something?

I will say that unlike Simon, Drea didn’t appear to be a complete sociopath, incapable of empathy, which puts her one up, in my books.

So, Simon. He kills people for a living; but it’s okay because as both Simon and Drea think several times, the people he killed deserved it. Glad they cleared that up. Simon is a sociopath, at least by the self-description afforded by his own thoughts. We are given even less motivation for why he lives life as he does, but we are told that he has never really cared about people:

He was what he was because no life, his own or anyone else’s, had ever meant anything special to him.

Alrighty, then. That’s not creepy at all.

I understand that the focus of this book was on Drea and her growth, but the respective characterizations of Drea and Simon, and the fact that Simon kills again at the end of the book (in cold blood, though to protect Drea) after both of them have supposedly repented, left me with the uncomfortable feeling that in Howard’s world, being a cold-blooded assassin wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as being the kept woman of a drug dealer. I was just really uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of these two characters, and how I felt we were supposed to view them.

Again, both Drea and Simon indulge in justification and rationalizations over Simon’s career choice. These justifications boil down to: the people Simon killed deserved killing. By whose criteria, I wonder? Anyway, in my opinion, the assassin who only kills people who deserve to be killed is sort of like the defense lawyer who only represents innocent clients: a myth found in books and movies, never in real life.

Which I suppose is what some will argue about this book: it’s not realistic, nor is it meant to be. Which, fine, but when you place these two characters on somewhat parallel journeys, it tends to highlight their similarities and differences. To summarize, for me as a reader:

• Simon was by far the worse person before they each reformed, and even though Simon “reforms” he still kills when he decides it’s necessary (making me wonder what his future body-count might look like).
• Simon is given less of a background that might mitigate his behavior.
• Simon manifests serious signs of sociopathy. Drea manifested simple garden-variety selfishness, which I found a lot more palatable (and believably reformable);
• Yet it’s Drea who gets told she’s ending up in Hell if she doesn’t change her ways. Simon’s reformation seems to be far less of an issue, and his decision to stop being an assassin (after he kills just one more person!) feels like it has less of a sense of moral urgency than Drea’s reformation.
• Both characters excuse Simon’s behavior but not Drea’s.
• Drea feels compelled to give the money she steals from Salinas to charity. There is no mention of what Simon plans to do with his blood money, but I have the feeling the United Way shouldn’t be expecting a big check any time soon. Simon earned that money! Killing people. It was totally hard work. What?

I think it’s a sign that the book wasn’t working for me that the one character who I felt had some depth of characterization, and who I could even kind of feel for a little, was Salinas. He is shown to be callous and cruel, but when Drea deceives him for a brief time into believing that she loves him (as part of her plot to run away) and is devastated by his turning her over to Simon, he actually reacts in a recognizable human way – he seems to feel remorse for how he’s treated Drea, and has a desire to examine their relationship. Of course, when he realizes she’s duped him, he wants to kill her, but – nobody’s perfect. A couple of times in the book Simon thinks about how much contempt he has for Salinas, and I just couldn’t help but wonder – why? Why were we supposed to root for Simon and disdain Salinas? I just didn’t get it, and it made me kind of resentful, actually.

Lessons learned: prostituting yourself, stealing, driving over the speed limit, not returning library books in a timely manner and killing people for a living are all bad things, but only one if them is worthy of getting sent to hell. Wanna guess which one? If you said not returning library books, you’re totally wrong. Silly, it’s being a whore, of course!

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Death Angel by Linda Howard
2. When a Snark Is Ruined by a Bad Rant
3. Holly Lisle Hates Chains (and after reading her rant, Chains may hate her)

I really enjoyed Rules of Seduction and was greatly anticipating Lessons of Desire and the story of the independent and unconventional Phaedra Blair. When I began the book, I was even more interested because I could see that the story that was going to unfold was an exploration of a fundamental feminist issue of alone and unhappy v. together and happy. Because I knew how it woud end, I was intensely curious to see how the issue of female independence would be handled.

Phaedra Blair is the daughter of a famous independent female thinker Artemis who taught Phaedra to love freely. Her father, Richard Drury, was a respected member of Parliament and another intellectual. Richard and Artemis shared a “great love” but never married as Artemis maintained that marriage would rob her of her independence. On Richard’s deathbed he gives his memoirs to his illegitimate daughter, Phaedra, and extracts her promise to see the memoirs published. Upon reading them, though, she discovers that her mother had strayed from her father’s bed and that the lover that her mother took may have led to her death.

Richard Drury’s memoirs contained information that could be besmirch the reputations of current members of Society. Elliot Rothwell is dispatched by his family to negotiate with Phaedra for the exclusion of a story about Rothwell’s father. Elliot’s mother and father were famously estranged. Elliot’s mother had taken a lover and some believe that she was banished to the countryside for that. The story included in the memoirs suggest something even more nefarious. Elliot’s experience with love was very destructive, yet strangely, he is not afraid of Phaedra changing his life.

Phaedra, on the other hand, her experience with love was positive but she is afraid. I felt like Phaedra’s platform of interaction with Elliot was always from a position of fear. She feared not being in control. She feared the erosion of her independence.

The perfect love that Phaedra pronounces is one that is unfettered by obligation or responsibility. Her mantra was like that of another literary Phedre (Kushiel series)–”Love as thou wilt.” But Phaedra in her own way is as rigid as those that she despises; those who live by those silly society rules. Elliot points out “I do not speak of the law or of customs or finances, but of living. I am not alone or unfettered by others. There are my brothers ever-present in my life, and other relatives with claims on me. I am theirs and they are mine. Even if my brothers and I grow to hate each other, the burdens of life are shared.”

The biggest problem in the portrayal of Phaedra is that she is constantly getting into situations which require her to be saved by Lord Elliott. Elliot’s arrival was necessary for her release from prison. She could not even mount a donkey by herself. Further, Phaedra is depicted as headstrong and Elliott rational. Phaedra is irrational where Elliott is wise. Elliott is portrayed as the noble man. Elliot is the one to teach Phaedra that true freedom is illusory. I felt that there were few lessons that Elliot was taught in this man/woman struggle.

I know it sounds like I didn’t like the book. I did. What I did appreciate was that in coming to love Elliot, Phaedra realized that she need not sacrifice herself and her beliefs of being independent. I did like the juxtaposition that Elliot, as a man connected to his family, had more constraints on his actions than did Phaedra, a woman. I thought it was a great attempt at addressing the issues of feminism during the time period and making it relevant even for the modern woman. I wish I had seen Phaedra, however, in more positions of power and not so in need of saving. C.

Best regards

Jane

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Rules of Seduction by Madeline Hunter
2. REVIEW: The Rules of Seduction by Madeline Hunter
3. REVIEW: His Lordship’s Desire by Joan Wolf

“One line from “My Brilliant Career” has always haunted me. At one point, Sybylla’s Aunt Gussie tells her, “Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence.” My teenage self thought that was an incredibly pithy observation, and I went right home to record it in my journal. When I hear it now, I think, “Huh?”

Where did this come from, this idea that in order to be complete, we women had to be alone? That by falling in love and making a commitment to another human being, we were somehow diminishing ourselves? That our choices were: A) Fall in love and be unhappy, or B) Remain alone and be happy. Why couldn’t we fall in love and be happy? Nope, sorry. Not one of the choices, according to the world where I grew up.

Thankfully, I think most of us saw through that message and fell in love anyway. I mean, it’s not like falling in love or not falling in love is a choice, right? We meet someone who loves and respects us as we are, someone who shares our hopes and dreams and desires, someone who makes our life better just by being in it, and what? We’re supposed to NOT love them? Especially when loving them and being loved in return is a big part of what makes us complete?”

Elizabeth Bevarly made this comment on the now defunct blog called Squawk Radio. It is a comment that has always disturbed me when I look over the thousands of romance books I’ve read and how few of them have memorable heroines. I have to wonder if it is because there is a prevailing sensibility that Bevarly simply articulated.

Heroines are often portrayed in isolation, no friends, often estranged from family or an orphan, teetering on the brink of financial ruin. They are depicted as sad sack individuals whose sexual identity was created for them out of one miserable experience with a man more interested in the growth of his own toenails than the satisfaction of his partner in bed. The whole driving motivation for the female is to achieve a better sense of completion through the love of a good man.

Bevarly says “Where did this come from, this idea that in order to be complete, we women had to be alone?” She goes on to say that “being loved in return is a big part of what makes us complete.”

This idea of completion is what the whole notion of feminism is against – the fulfillment of being a person of worth by having someone love you. The obverse then is that feminism does not allow you to be in love or be happy. The true teachings of feminism is an internal completion, having your life be fulfilling by you own accomplishments, your independence, your ability to survive emotionally and financially alone, without leaning on or relying upon another individual.

In Pat Gaffney’s Mad Dash (reviewed here), the heroine, Dash, relies too much on external completion in her search for fulfullment, whether it was her role as a daughter, a mother, a friend or a mentor. When some of those roles disintegrated, the role of “lover” was not enough. She had not yet come to grips with her need for independence as it butted against her dependence on others for emotional satisfaction. Perhaps that was the motivating force for her mid life crisis. Dash’s retreat from her husband to “find herself” truly does become a quest for internal fulfillment. Once she recognizes the source of discontent, it is easy to move back toward co-existence with her lover, her husband.

In contrast was the character in Gena Showalter’s Catch a Mate. The mother of the heroine suffers from a clinical psychosis. She caught her husband cheating on her and has allowed this one event to rule her entire life.

Yet it isn’t just the heroines mother who sends the message that completion and happiness are only brought on by the love of a good man.

Jillian, the heroine, does not want to forgive her father for cheating. Her brother addresses her.

Brent pinned her with a hard stare. "Don't you think it's time to bury the hatchet? Or do you want to end up like Mom, bitter and alone?–?

"And crazy,–? Brittany added sadly.

The theme of the book is that if Jilly doesn’t forgive a man and allow one into her life, she will be “bitter and alone”. When Anne, her former boss is confronted as to why she sold the business to Marcus and not Jilly, she replied

"You want the truth? I'll give it to you, but you're not going to like it.–? Anne settled deep into the couch and with a sigh, peered up at the slatted ceiling. "You would have ended up like me and I didn't want that for you.–?

She blinked in surprise. She didn't know what she'd expected to hear, but that wasn't it. "So what?–? she said, incredulous. "That's not for you to decide.–?

"Your bitterness toward men grows daily, Jillian. If you don't do something about it while you're still young, you are going to end up alone and miserable, more so than you are now. You'd always have wondered what could have been. You'd always have wondered where the years had gone.–?

But Anne now radiates a new zest for life because she has a hot young thing in her bed. Anne is achieving happiness through a man and urges subtly for Jilly to do the same.

When Jilly’s mother, who is emotionally ill, finally recognizes that she needs help, she does so because she wants some one to love her. She wants a man.

"There's more.–? Her mom drew in a long breath, as if bracing herself. She'd probably planned the speech all morning. "When you, Brent and Brittany said I had multiple personalities, well, it hurt. But it also helped me see myself through your eyes. I don't want to be the person who makes everyone around her miserable. I want a life and I want a man.–?

"Mom–"–?

"I'm not finished. I'm tired of being alone. Maybe if I get my emotions under control, someone will stick around and love me for who I am.–? By the time she finished, she was crying. "I'm sorry. The medicine hasn't kicked in yet.–?

Of course, reliance on a man was the source of her problems in the first place. The author fails to sell me on the idea that Jilly’s mom is ever going to be emotionally healthy because she simply does not want to be healthy for herself. Her healthiness or lack there of is dependent on validation by someone else.

Bevarly’s statement promotes the idea that being in love is the only cure for loneliness. She also holds as the greatest ideal of the eros love and discounts the love one might have as a friend, a mother, a mentor, a daughter.

A friend of mine said that the real paradox is how to function as part of whatever support system you have and still maintain independence. How the support system conflicts with the independence to create either loneliness or dependence is ultimately the question but not one that romances strongly explore.

The point is that interdependence instead of dependence reflects healthier emotional characters. Caroline Linden and Jo Goodman both do an excellent job presenting independent individuals who might be hurting. Healing, however, doesn’t come through the partner or through the ephemeral concept of love. True healing comes internally with the partner simply providing support. The love is based on mutual respect instead of dependence. It is more believable that the happy ever after endures.

If it is the intention of the author to reflect an unhealthy emotional relationship such as existed in Liz Carlyle’s Never Deceive a Duke, then it should be clear. If not, it leads this reader to believe that the authors are failing to ask the important questions regarding character development such as what would happen to this character if she did not meet and fall in love with the hero? What is the emotional makeup of this character? In relationship focused book, a character driven book, which is what romances purportedly are at their core, the author must exhibit a strong understanding of the emotional health of her characters so that growth or movement is articulated.

Bevarly says that the message of feminism is “our choices were: A) Fall in love and be unhappy, or B) Remain alone and be happy.” Instead the choice that Bevarly presents is “alone and miserable or together and happy.” (the latter being my interpretation of Bevarly’s argument). Bevarly offers the same limited choice, simply the obverse. Both opinions are both limiting. Bevarly presents the exact same fallacy. Falling in love does not automatically equal happiness just as much as being alone does not equal independence. Why can’t Romance be about true love without that love being the only route to happiness?

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