TSTM (too stupid to masturbate)

Bwa-ha! Can I please use this in my next critique group meeting? Love it.

Thanks for the brilliant addition to our critical vocabulary.

So glad to contribute to the romance lexicon.

I never came across anything to indicate that the women were viewed as unattractive or undesirable… [they were] intelligent, sometimes scheming, sometimes playful, sometimes clumsy, but always self-possessing and attractive women

To reference the screwball comedies, or even the great romances from Hollywood’s Golden Age, those characters were real

I agree that these are well-written, smart, sassy women, and all those characters were created by men. Why do we get so many infantilized heroines from women writers?

Iz wimmin geting stupider?

What I love about questions like this is that you can actually answer them using the scientific method.

My thesis was on women’s images in American popular music and was done using a cultural materialist approach. I did a content analysis of the lyrics of the top ten songs over a 30-year period and tracked evaluative dimensions against periods of economic expansion and recession in America. Very, very long story short: women were portrayed as good and passive, or bad and strong, but never good and strong until 1967, and that’s only if you assume the song Windy is about a woman (it’s not – it’s about a dog). During recessionary periods women were always bad and strong. (The study was an attempt to look at stereotypes and scapegoating, etc.)

However! That didn’t stop the government from pushing a strong = good image for women when they desperately needed workers for the war effort.

Anyway, it’s interesting that cinematography would give us a different picture, since a lot of the screwball comedies were made during the Great Depression.

Plus these tropes are tired, old and BORING!

To me it shows a lack of respect by the author for my (the reader’s) intelligence. I realize that I am probably in the minority in this, but, tough…there are lots of other and better books out there! I’m sticking with them.

BUT…I had to forgive her because she wasn’t ever trained in covert ops and had no idea that honesty wasn’t necessarily the best policy in all cases. Too, Ken never took a few minutes when they were alone to explain to her that she needed to just keep quiet, that in talking to their enemies, she risked both their lives. While I as the reader knew what Ken was planning to do, Savannah the character had no idea. So I the reader thought she was acting stupid, but from her limited perspective, she was only doing what she thought was the right thing.

So in the end, she wasn’t TSTL even though she was ignorant. I think this difference is key in whether or not I can stand a heroine. If she does something that common sense would tell the average Josephine on the street is a truly boneheaded move, I’m likely to toss the book at the wall. But if she’s just ignorant about some facet or another, I can at least excuse her. I may not like her, but I have to give her some slack.

However I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for Mother Theresa heroines who give and give and give so much until everyone around them suddenly realizes what good people these heroines are. I hate myself for loving these kinds of stories, but I blame it on my own character flaws–I *want* to believe that if someone is “good” enough, they’ll eventually be recognized for it. Even though I know it’s twee and unrealistic and probably makes me a TSTL reader. I can’t help it.

Ahem.

I’m generally left baffled by the aims of the romance genre when I read romances with such skewed gender biases. Is the genre “for women by women,” and if so, what precisely does that mean? I’m generally attracted to the heroine’s journey, and my romances reflect that. However, I ultimately desire to achieve a balance between my h/h–which is what I like to read.

However, I do believe the TSTL heroine is just as “perfect” and idealized as the majority of heroes in romance. The TSTL heroine never truly makes a gaff because the she’s just so darn lovable, and there’s never a moment where she doubts the hero’s affection and (some form of [warped or not]) respect for her. In real life, that guy with whom you’ve been flirting with may look at you weird if you suddenly spilled ice cream on your shirt, or that social gaff may land you in hot water. There just aren’t any real-life consequences or bumps on the road for either the hero or the heroine in a romance novel, which is the genre’s greatest loss, IMO.

To reference the screwball comedies, or even the great romances from Hollywood’s Golden Age, those characters were real. For all the gloss and glitter, their actions and words were consistent and realistic for the situation, and if a character like Nora Charles fell flat on her face (or, in the case of Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, his back and his hat), she carried it off with aplomb–it wasn’t a ploy to make her look endearingly cute and oops-I’m-so-clumsy (twirling hair). And the men were just as tough and sensitive (check out Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire for the perfect “absent-minded professor).

I said explicitly that if the heroine was going to make stupid choices, that would be fine as long as it was part of the character arc and that she owned the stupidity and then tried to move forward. But all too often the heroine is acting stupidly in order to advance the plot - provide suspense, but, I think, more often than not, to provide a foil for the hero’s masculinity and heroicness.

I agree with Jane, both times. I don’t want perfect heroines, but I want her stupid choices to make sense in character. And if she’s too stupid to see that her choices were stupid, then I’m going to lose interest. Dim secondary characters are quite amusing, but I can’t handle dim main characters.

I also have problems with TSTL heroes, though. I get particularly irritated with the ones who don’t learn trust until it is almost too late (like the wife is dying in childbirth in some obscure locale because he sent/drove her away, not believing the child was his. Or the equivalent.)

I do think there’s a good argument to be made about using the stupid behavior of the heroine to allow the hero a way to look good, and there are teeth-gnashing gender paradigms there, for sure. And Hortense, I LOVE “TSTM” and will now use it frequently!! Thanks for the brilliant addition to our critical vocabulary.

It’s interesting that no book read or film viewed, will be the same for everyone. I perceived some shenanigans in the movie but then I analyze films while refering to the scripts.

Which parts did you think were contrived? ::curious::

I just had to quote that LOL what I wouldn’t give to read the above scene.

Me, too!!!

Also, does anyone think they photoshopped the color of that cat’s eyes? I can’t stop staring at that picture, lol.

I like an imperfect heroine, but what I don’t like is a heroine who is made to seem *lesser* than the hero in order to a) advance the plot, b) make her seem vulnerable (SEP’s Nobody’s Baby But Mine being a prime offender of this, IMO), c) give the hero a chance to shine, or d) make her less intimidating to the reader.

There are instances in which a heroine does something that makes me want to slap her, like the heroine of Victoria Dahl’s A Rake’s Guide To Pleasure when she pushes the hero away, because I know how wrongheaded her actions are. But if I believe that she is acting the only way she can within her life circumstances, and if she eventually does the smart thing, then it’s okay. In fact, the dramatic tension that can come from those instances can be very effective and smart in terms of the book’s composition.

When I get into trouble is when I want to slap the *book* because the heroine is nothing more than a prop or a bait and switch. Where the writing itself doesn’t come across as so clever because the heroine cannot carry the weight of her own character, and where the manipulation is so visible to me that the character is upstaged by the machinations of the writing and the plotting.

Heh. I find this column ironic, since I wrote a blog post a year or so ago on this very topic and got pretty much vilified here for my opinion that the current state of romance/chick lit is overrun with infantilized heroines (and yeah, the part that most people got up in arms about: the male writers I read did a better job creating complex and mature female characters).

My recollection is that it was your elevation of male authors above female authors that people objected to, with the generalization about heroines simply being seen as a vehicle to forward that thesis.