Best of...

Over the years, I've taken a look at criticism leveled at romance. For example, people couldn't wait to pile the nasty notes all over the Twilight series. In response, I created a serious of articles on the phenomena and this was one of them.

***

Today, I'm going swipe ideas from one of my favorite books about romance - Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, edited by Jayne Ann Krentz.

Several themes emerge from the essays in this book. First is the one discussed a couple of days ago: Twilight and other romances are fantasies. To quote Krentz's introduction:

[T]he readers are no more confused about this fact, nor any more likely to use their reading as a substitute for action in the real world , than readers of [Robert] Ludlum, [Robert] Parker, [Dick] Frances, and [Anne] McCaffrey. (p. 5)

'Nuff said.

The second theme of the book is a shameless song of female empowerment. In a romance, the woman lives. How many times do women die in male action movies because she found a man attractive and acted on it? How many great female characters in literature are punished for daring to act on her own ideas?

Not only do the women live, all of them win. Again, Krentz:

With courage, intelligence, and gentleness, she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.

A cursory glance at the statistics of the causes of female death reveal the radical nature of these ideas.


Finally, for me, the most outrageous theme of romance (and Twilight) is the discussion of Male and Female. Long before Twilight came out, Laura Kinsale discussed the real truth of romance.

[For] a woman, a romance may be a working-through of her own interior conflicts and passions, her own 'maleness' if you will, that resists and resists giving in to what is desired about all, and yet feared about all, and then, after the decisive climax. arrives at a resolution, a choice that carries with it the relief and pleasure of internal harmony. (p. 39)

Long before Edward came along, Linda Barlow described the romantic hero. Sound familiar?

Dark and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits of guilt and depression. He is strong, virile, powerful, and lost. Adept at many things that carry with them the respect and admiration of the world (especially the world of other males), he is not fully competent in the arena in which women excel- the arena of his emotions, which are violently out of control.

Is this the sort of woman most women want? Of course not....[A]lmost from the beginning, I identified with the hero. I saw him as Self, not Other. And I dimly recognized him as one of the archetypical figures in my own inner landscape.

The romantic hero is not the feminine ideal of what a man should be. The romantic hero, in fact, is not a man at all. He is a split-off portion of the heroine's own psyche which will be reintegrated at the end of the book. (p. 49)

This is why Twilight is popular. We are endlessly attempting to claim and integrate our power. It's not about falling in love with the endless git that is Edward.

It is about understanding the parts of ourselves that are dark, angry, and dangerous.

Here we go again; the denegration of women's reading

To be clear; I have not read 50 Shades of Grey yet. I have been too busy getting Dracula Unleashed (Book Three of the Blood Wings series) into some kind of order. But naturally, I have an opinion about the nasty, denigrating comments about books that women like to read.

I have touched on these themes before in my Defense of Twilight posts, (here, here, here, here, here), but they bear repeating.

In no particular order, I want to point out the following things.

1. Women are not stupid.  
 Some critics think that the people who read 50 Shades are going to jump right in and start doing unsafe sexual practices, such as untutored BDSM. There are millions and millions of people tying each other up and spanking like crazy without having been to a single workshop at a leather conference and somehow they survive. Guess what. We do know how to do research.

2. Women are able to separate fantasy from reality.  
 Teenagers who watched the Batman series in the late 1960s did not try climbing up buildings crouched over with a single rope.

3. Women are not illiterate.
50 Shades is considered to be horribly written, with cliches and redundant phrasing. Here's a little rebuttal from Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing, pg. 129:

Women always write in the vernacular....

In the vernacular, it is...hard to be "classic", to be smooth, to be perfect. The Sacred Canon of Literature quite often pretends that some works can be not only atemporal and universal (that is, outside of history, a religious claim) but without flaw and without perceptible limitations. It's hard, in the vernacular, to pretend this, to paper over the cracks. It's also hard to read the vernacular as Holy Writ...

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art.

4. Women's sexual fantasies and arousal are important.
Portnoy's Complaint is considered Great Literature. Susie Bright gets told to shut up. Say no more.

5. Ultimately, it is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS what a woman reads.
Adult men can read comic books, war novels, spy novels - anything they want, really. Because it is none of our business what they read. Same for women.

Will I read 50 Shades of Grey? After I meet my deadline, for sure. I'm sure parts of it will annoy me and others will get my motor runnin'.

Just like any other novel.
 

Repost: In Defense of Twilight even though I don't like it much - Last one!

(How funny is it that Lady Gaga's Bad Romance came on my Pandora channel just as I got started!)

Today, I'm going swipe ideas from one of my favorite books about romance - Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, edited by Jayne Ann Krentz.

Several themes emerge from the essays in this book. First is the one discussed a couple of days ago: Twilight and other romances are fantasies. To quote Krentz's introduction:

[T]he readers are no more confused about this fact, nor any more likely to use their reading as a substitute for action in the real world , than readers of [Robert] Ludlum, [Robert] Parker, [Dick] Frances, and [Anne] McCaffrey. (p. 5)

'Nuff said.

The second theme of the book is a shameless song of female empowerment. In a romance, the woman lives. How many times do women die in male action movies because she found a man attractive and acted on it? How many great female characters in literature are punished for daring to act on her own ideas?

Not only do the women live, all of them win. Again, Krentz:

With courage, intelligence, and gentleness, she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.

A cursory glance at the statistics of the causes of female death reveal the radical nature of these ideas.

Finally, for me, the most outrageous theme of romance (and Twilight) is the discussion of Male and Female. Long before Twilight came out, Laura Kinsale discussed the real truth of romance.

[For] a woman, a romance may be a working-through of her own interior conflicts and passions, her own 'maleness' if you will, that resists and resists giving in to what is desired about all, and yet feared about all, and then, after the decisive climax. arrives at a resolution, a choice that carries with it the relief and pleasure of internal harmony. (p. 39)

Long before Edward came along, Linda Barlow described the romantic hero. Sound familiar?

Dark and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits of guilt and depression. He is strong, virile, powerful, and lost. Adept at many things that carry with them the respect and admiration of the world (especially the world of other males), he is not fully competent in the arena in which women excel- the arena of his emotions, which are violently out of control.

Is this the sort of woman most women want? Of course not....[A]lmost from the beginning, I identified with the hero. I saw him as Self, not Other. And I dimly recognized him as one of the archetypal figures in my own inner landscape.

The romantic hero is not the feminine ideal of what a man should be. The romantic hero, in fact, is not a man at all. He is a split-off portion of the heroine's own psyche which will be reintegrated at the end of the book. (p. 49)

This is why Twilight is popular. We are endlessly attempting to claim and integrate our power. It's not about falling in love with the endless git that is Edward.

It is about understanding the parts of ourselves that are dark, angry, and dangerous.

Repost: In Defense of Twilight even though I don't like it much.

I think one of the things Twilight does do well is explore the beauty, intensity, and untamed nature of a girl's sexual awakening. I might roll my eyes at the overblown language when I read about Edward sparkling in the sun, but that's exactly how it feels. I'm about to be heterosexist for a while - forgive me.

When a girl looks at a guy's chest (ass, crotch, arms, hands, back - you get the idea) and gets her first nose full of hot testosterone, your entire being flips around. Trust me when I tell you that Bella's rhapsodizing about Edward's crystalline skin is pretty damn tame compared to the things girls think about when they discover just what that turns them on.

Fiction allows us to revisit the cathartic, life-changing moments of our existences. A woman's first flush of arousal is so amazing, so overwhelming, and so important that we read to reinforce all the lessons we learn from it. We get to find that wonderful, ripe, glorious feeling of sexuality, of power, of delight in our bodies, without the negative side effects of judgment, dissatisfaction, or shame.

I think reclaiming that moment of pure ownership of our senses is something all humans must do. The chills, the excitement, the way the hormones made you feel like champagne flowed through your veins instead of mere blood - the world needs more of that joyous feeling.

If you're a writer, go write some thing that makes you remember an awakening. If you express yourself in other ways, do that instead. If you are in love, tell that someone that you desire how maddening their scent is or the brush of their skin on yours makes you moan.

Reclaim that tension that Bella has discovered again for us.

Back in the saddle. Again.

So while I'm engaging in my massive revisions, it's time to revisit my previously posted Twilight series.

****
Ok, back to In Defense of Twilight, even though I hate it: Part Three.

As you may or may not know, I have a degree in Library and Information Science. Save the Dewey Decimal jokes - I've heard them all. We're going into the jungle of literary criticism today.

Library school gives you amazing perspective on popular culture. The criticisms aimed at Twilight for being misleading, wrong-headed, and a bad example to our youth have been fired at writing as far ranging as Harry Potter to E. B. White to the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew to Tom Swift.

Yes, I'm serious.

Literary critics used to claim that reading these kinds of books as akin to feeding your child poison. After all, children are weak minded, you know. Now remember that women are told the same things about their reading choices.

To all the people who tell me that Twilight is going to tell women to fall for a gross, stalkery freak, I have one thing to say.

Women are not stupid.

Could it be possible that females are perfectly capable of discerning the difference between fantasy and reality??

When a young woman makes a poor choice in a mate, the example she's using comes from up close and personal observation of adults around her.

Not fictional characters.

If we honestly thought that women yearned for maltreatment, why don't we believe that every man reading a James Bond novel yearns to be shot, stabbed, tossed out of airplanes, dunked in arctic ice cold water, and have no emotional life to speak of?

Of course that is ridiculous - because we don't think men are stupid.

Why should we think our girls are stupid, impressionable, and helpless? Reading about Waif Bella does not turn a girl into a passive Waif. Reading about James Bond, the man with no sense of self-preservation, does not make a boy into a moron who thinks that getting shot is just business as usual.

Twilight (and romance) is popular because girls and women know it is fantasy. They get to experience what it is like to be passive Bella, or pretend they are dangerous Edward (more on that next time), or even learn how very wet the Pacific Northwest is.

What would the world look like if we believed that women were smart?

Repost:: Examples of the Waif

The prototype of The Waif is, of course, Cinderella. Some say Sleeping Beauty was a Waif, but I always felt her passivity was born out of her family keeping her ignorant of her danger instead of teaching her how to save herself.

Other famous Waifs are:

Ilsa Laszlo in Casablanca
Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz
Juliet in Romeo and Juliet
Amanda in The Glass Menagerie

Bella fits right in.

Repost: In Defense of Twilight even though I don't like it much, Part Two.

Today is the discussion of the Return of the Waif. *insert drum flourish here*

For anyone who is not as insane for archetypes as I am, here is quick introduction to The Waif from The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines by Cowden, LaFever, and Viders.

The Waif projects a child-like innocence, a soul-stirring susceptibility. She is naive, enigmatic, yet reslient. Everyone she meets wants to save her, but she can surprise people with her incredible inner strength and fortitude. She touches the vulnerable place deep inside all of us with her soft touch and wistful glance.... Her delicate fragility makes her an easy target. She always seems between a rock and hard place. She adapts to any situation she falls into without complaint. The Waif does not fight back; instead, she endures untold hardships untils she is rescued. (pg 76)

Bella is the Waif. Her purity is not merely her virginity, but also a sense of being unspoiled by greed, temper, or the cruelties of the world. She is also trusting and (more or less) kind. I personally find she is far too good of an example of the failings of the waif: impressionable, passive, insecure, and isolated. (pg. 77) As a Waif, Bella lets other people control her destiny, rather than pursuing her own interests. She's not even sure what her interests are.

Fairly obviously, the Waif has fallen out of favor with modern writers. I personally find it dull to write someone who refuses to act. But there is a reason why she is making a resurgence in literature.

The Waif appeals to the exhausted side of our personalities. The Waif rarely fights back or initiates action. Instead, she allows life to surprise her and take her where it goes.

Even the most motivated of self-starters get tired. There is something refreshing about letting go and allowing something or someone else to run your existence. And wouldn't it be restful to expect the best once in a while, rather than always anticipating the worst?

I think readers like Bella because everyone needs someone to take care of them every so often. It feels good to imagine taking your hands off the plow and letting another person till the soil.

I must admit, though, that I like it when a Waif decides to risk the blisters and dirt of her own labor.

I wonder if Bella ever will.

Repost: In Defense of Twilight even though I don't like it much.

I feel the urge to repost some of my favorite articles here from my blog. Here we go with my series on Twilight by Stephanie Meyers.
******



I have a lot of legitimate criticisms of Twilight. I read the first book, and never even tried any of the sequels. I have a strong disdain for passive heroines, and Bella is about as passive as it gets.

However, this is not about my baggage. It's about what makes this series resonate with so many people.

Let's talk about one aspect of Bella's passivity - namely, that you don't have to do anything to be considered worthy of love. You just have to be you.

We all seek to earn love - we get good grades (or bad grades), keep a clean house, save money, wear the right clothes and the right perfume, know all the outrageous sex tips, try to read someone's mind....

You get the picture.

But Bella is the object of Edward's obsession merely by sitting around, sleeping, and smelling really really good- all on her own. No special powers, no twisting herself into something she's not for approval, no Cinderella-type makeover to make someone notice her.

How powerful and hopeful of a message is that?!

You. Don't. Have. To. Earn. Love.

It's a radical thought in a society that tells women how they need to act to 'get a man'.

Twilight isn't my cup of tea, but it beats The Rules any day of the week.

Twilight, one last time.

(How funny is it that Lady Gaga's Bad Romance came on my Pandora channel just as I got started!)

Today, I'm going swipe ideas from one of my favorite books about romance - Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, edited by Jayne Ann Krentz.

Several themes emerge from the essays in this book. First is the one discussed a couple of days ago: Twilight and other romances are fantasies. To quote Krentz's introduction:

[T]he readers are no more confused about this fact, nor any more likely to use their reading as a substitute for action in the real world , than readers of [Robert] Ludlum, [Robert] Parker, [Dick] Frances, and [Anne] McCaffrey. (p. 5)

'Nuff said.

The second theme of the book is a shameless song of female empowerment. In a romance, the woman lives. How many times do women die in male action movies because she found a man attractive and acted on it? How many great female characters in literature are punished for daring to act on her own ideas?

Not only do the women live, all of them win. Again, Krentz:

With courage, intelligence, and gentleness, she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.

A cursory glance at the statistics of the causes of female death reveal the radical nature of these ideas.


Finally, for me, the most outrageous theme of romance (and Twilight) is the discussion of Male and Female. Long before Twilight came out, Laura Kinsale discussed the real truth of romance.

[For] a woman, a romance may be a working-through of her own interior conflicts and passions, her own 'maleness' if you will, that resists and resists giving in to what is desired about all, and yet feared about all, and then, after the decisive climax. arrives at a resolution, a choice that carries with it the relief and pleasure of internal harmony. (p. 39)

Long before Edward came along, Linda Barlow described the romantic hero. Sound familiar?

Dark and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits of guilt and depression. He is strong, virile, powerful, and lost. Adept at many things that carry with them the respect and admiration of the world (especially the world of other males), he is not fully competent in the arena in which women excel- the arena of his emotions, which are violently out of control.

Is this the sort of woman most women want? Of course not....[A]lmost from the beginning, I identified with the hero. I saw him as Self, not Other. And I dimly recognized him as one of the archetypical figures in my own inner landscape.

The romantic hero is not the feminine ideal of what a man should be. The romantic hero, in fact, is not a man at all. He is a split-off portion of the heroine's own psyche which will be reintegrated at the end of the book. (p. 49)

This is why Twilight is popular. We are endlessly attempting to claim and integrate our power. It's not about falling in love with the endless git that is Edward.

It is about understanding the parts of ourselves that are dark, angry, and dangerous.

In Defense of Twilight, even though I hate it; Part--Oh,who cares what part it is.

Just letting you know that, yep. Still hate Twilight. But I still much to say!

Related to my entry two days ago, this entire article treats girls like they are stupid. Except for points 13, 18, 19 and 20, which are actually funny.

Second, I think one of the things Twilight does do well is explore the beauty, intensity, and untamed nature of a girl's sexual awakening. I might roll my eyes at the overblown language when I read about Edward sparkling in the sun, but that's exactly how it feels. I'm about to be heterosexist for a while - forgive me.

When a girl looks at a guy's chest (ass, crotch, arms, hands, back - you get the idea) and gets her first nose full of hot testosterone, your entire being flips around. Trust me when I tell you that Bella's rhapsodizing about Edward's crystalline skin is pretty damn tame compared to the things girls think about when they discover just what that turns them on.

Fiction allows us to revisit the cathartic, life-changing moments of our existences. A woman's first flush of arousal is so amazing, so overwhelming, and so important that we read to reinforce all the lessons we learn from it. We get to find that wonderful, ripe, glorious feeling of sexuality, of power, of delight in our bodies, without the negative side effects of judgment, dissatisfaction, or shame.

I think reclaiming that moment of pure ownership of our senses is something all humans must do. The chills, the excitement, the way the hormones made you feel like champagne flowed through your veins instead of mere blood - the world needs more of that joyous feeling.

If you're a writer, go write some thing that makes you remember an awakening. If you express yourself in other ways, do that instead. If you are in love, tell that someone that you desire how maddening their scent is or the brush of their skin on yours makes you moan.

Reclaim that tension that Bella has discovered again for us.

Back on Track. And pissed off.

Ok, back to In Defense of Twilight, even though I hate it: Part Three.

As you may or may not know, I have a degree in Library and Information Science. Save the Dewey Decimal jokes - I've heard them all. We're going into the jungle of literary criticism today.

Library school gives you amazing perspective on popular culture. The criticisms aimed at Twilight for being misleading, wrong-headed, and a bad example to our youth have been fired at writing as far ranging as Harry Potter to E. B. White to the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew to Tom Swift.

Yes, I'm serious.

Literary critics used to claim that reading these kinds of books as akin to feeding your child poison. After all, children are weak minded, you know.

To all the people who tell me that Twilight is going to tell women to fall for a gross, stalkery freak, I have one thing to say.

Women are not stupid.

Could it be possible that females are perfectly capable of discerning the difference between fantasy and reality??

When a young woman makes a poor choice in a mate, the example she's using comes from up close and personal observation of adults around her.

Not fictional characters.

If we honestly thought that women yearned for maltreatment, why don't we believe that every man reading a James Bond novel yearns to be shot, stabbed, tossed out of airplanes, dunked in arctic ice cold water, and have no emotional life to speak of?

Of course that is ridiculous - because we don't think men are stupid.

Why should we think our girls are stupid, impressionable, and helpless? Reading about Waif Bella does not turn a girl into a passive Waif. Reading about James Bond, the man with no sense of self-preservation, does not make a boy into a moron who thinks that getting shot is just business as usual.

Twilight (and romance) is popular because girls and women know it is fantasy. They get to experience what it is like to be passive Bella, or pretend they are dangerous Edward (more on that next time), or even learn how very wet the Pacific Northwest is.

What would the world look like if we believed that women were smart?

In Defense of Twilight, even though I hate it; Part Two

Today is the discussion of the Return of the Waif. *insert drum flourish here*

For anyone who is not as insane for archetypes as I am, here is quick introduction to The Waif from The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes and Heroines by Cowden, LaFever, and Viders.

The Waif projects a child-like innocence, a soul-stirring susceptibility. She is naive, enigmatic, yet reslient. Everyone she meets wants to save her, but she can surprise people with her incredible inner strength and fortitude. She touches the vulnerable place deep inside all of us with her soft touch and wistful glance.... Her delicate fragility makes her an easy target. She always seems between a rock and hard place. She adapts to any situation she falls into without complaint. The Waif does not fight back; instead, she endures untold hardships untils she is rescued. (pg 76)

Bella is the Waif. Her purity is not merely her virginity, but also a sense of being unspoiled by greed, temper, or the cruelties of the world. She is also trusting and (more or less) kind. I personally find she is far too good of an example of the failings of the waif: impressionable, passive, insecure, and isolated. (pg. 77) As a Waif, Bella lets other people control her destiny, rather than pursuing her own interests. She's not even sure what her interests are.

Fairly obviously, the Waif has fallen out of favor with modern writers. I personally find it dull to write someone who refuses to act. But there is a reason why she is making a resurgence in literature.

The Waif appeals to the exhausted side of our personalities. The Waif rarely fights back or initiates action. Instead, she allows life to surprise her and take her where it goes.

Even the most motivated of self-starters get tired. There is something refreshing about letting go and allowing something or someone else to run your existence. And wouldn't it be restful to expect the best once in a while, rather than always anticipating the worst?

I think readers like Bella because everyone needs someone to take care of them every so often. It feels good to imagine taking your hands off the plow and letting another person till the soil.

I must admit, though, that I like it when a Waif decides to risk the blisters and dirt of her own labor.

I wonder if Bella ever will.