Some scattered thoughts on gender, class, and the fantasy of powerlessness

In an effort to decompress after reading Serious Literature, I borrowed a copy of Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris that had somehow made its way into my house. (Basically, zingerella tossed it at me and said: "Trashy vampire novel! Read it! You won't be able to put it down and you'll want to stake Bill.") True on all counts, because she knows my taste pretty well. After having now read something from the big three popular paranormal romances (Twilight and the Anita Blake books being the other two), I think I have now read enough that I can form a few half-assed conclusions about paranormal romance as a genre.

The first is that I don't like it. Oh, I like to read it, because it's excellent subway material and makes me outraged in a particular way that I find entertaining, but I don't lose myself in the fantasy like a good little girl is supposed to. I remember, as a teenager, being quite into vampire novels (I drew the line at Anne Rice, given how piss-poor her prose was, but I quite enjoyed Nancy Baker and other embarrassingly Goff writers). But I've yet to read one that didn't offend me.

The second is why it offends me. There's the obvious feminist angle, of course. While within a patriarchal society heterosexual relationships typically involve some imbalance of power, in paranormal romance, the relationships are by necessity severely imbalanced. The male half of the couple is dominant, not by virtue of privilege, but because he is a predator and the female half of the couple is his natural prey. This is never portrayed as deeply fucked up, but actually quite special and romantic. Anita Blake is the least offensive of the lot on this issue, because at least she's a fairly powerful woman in her own right. But she's still less powerful than her love interests.

(Compare to say, Buffy and Angel. The relationship is more balanced than the ones in paranormal romances because while Buffy is human, she has supernatural powers, and even when she's weaker than the vampires, she outmatches them by being unpredictable and a brilliant strategist. And even so, everyone in her life comments that her relationship with Angel is dysfunctional and unbalanced, because even when he's good, he's still a vampire and several hundred years older than her, and thus not really the type of guy you want to bring home to Mom, no matter how awesome Joyce happens to be.)

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a really big fan of dysfunctional relationships in fiction. I don't think I've ever portrayed a happy couple in my own writing. But I want some acknowledgment that the dynamic is creepy rather than romantic.

When I'm reading these stories, I wonder about the women who do get off reading them. Far be it from me to judge anyone's fantasies, but it is a bit of an odd one to be so very popular, particularly among women who don't consider themselves to be particularly kinky.

Detractors of genre fiction frequently argue that sci-fi/fantasy is "escapist"; I disagree, of course. Good skiffy is quite the opposite, using the language of the bizarre to describe the contemporary human condition. But I don't just limit my reading to good speculative fiction, because there isn't enough of it—I'm quite fond of the trashy stuff too. Particularly young adult skiffy, where the predominant fantasy is of the bookish daydreamer who is somewhat of an outsider but, as it turns out, is the powerful Chosen One meant to save the magical world from doom.*

Paranormal romance seems to follow a different narrative, however. It's a fantasy of powerlessness. In it, the female (always female!) protagonist is frequently ordinary; if she possesses any special abilities at all, they won't help her when she actually needs them. She falls in love with a man who is stronger than her in every way. Whatever advantages she had over the average human are useless to her now. In addition, she frequently suffers from "character flaws" that make her weaker and less well-equipped than average to navigate the dangerous world of the supernatural. Bella is so clumsy that she hits an artery every time she looks at something sharp; Sookie is, well, a moron. She becomes completely dependent on a man, who, because of his "old-fashioned" values, begins to take over every aspect of her life. And her ordinariness does not save the day at the end in some cool twist; she must be rescued. By her man.

This is not new insight, of course; every Twi-hater has the same visceral reaction. (One of my friends, who really liked the Twilight movie, couldn't understand why I found Edward creepy. To which I replied, "Imagine you have a daughter. Imagine she brings home her new boyfriend, who is rich—and 50 years old. Are you cool with this? Now imagine he breaks into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep and slashes her tires so she can't see other guys.") What I do see missing is a class angle.

Back in the day, Marxists used to refer to capitalists as "vampires," a metaphor that seems to have fallen out of use. But there's something to be said for it. You never see a working class vampire; they are always aristocratic, urbane, well-read (they've had hundreds of years to accumulate wealth, of course). The female protagonists of paranormal romances, not so much. They're working class or lower-middle class girls, with human friends and family in the same economic strata. It's the friends and family who hold them back, who disapprove of the new bloodsucking beau, who represent the old life that must be discarded and looked down upon. It's—unnerving, to say the least.

So paranormal romance scares me. Just, you know. Not in a good way.

* Of course, this fantasy is also problematic, and deconstructed spectacularly in China Miéville's Un Lun Dun.

Some scattered thoughts on gender, class, and the fantasy of powerlessness

In an effort to decompress after reading Serious Literature, I borrowed a copy of Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris that had somehow made its way into my house. (Basically, zingerella tossed it at me and said: "Trashy vampire novel! Read it! You won't be able to put it down and you'll want to stake Bill.") True on all counts, because she knows my taste pretty well. After having now read something from the big three popular paranormal romances (Twilight and the Anita Blake books being the other two), I think I have now read enough that I can form a few half-assed conclusions about paranormal romance as a genre.

The first is that I don't like it. Oh, I like to read it, because it's excellent subway material and makes me outraged in a particular way that I find entertaining, but I don't lose myself in the fantasy like a good little girl is supposed to. I remember, as a teenager, being quite into vampire novels (I drew the line at Anne Rice, given how piss-poor her prose was, but I quite enjoyed Nancy Baker and other embarrassingly Goff writers). But I've yet to read one that didn't offend me.

The second is why it offends me. There's the obvious feminist angle, of course. While within a patriarchal society heterosexual relationships typically involve some imbalance of power, in paranormal romance, the relationships are by necessity severely imbalanced. The male half of the couple is dominant, not by virtue of privilege, but because he is a predator and the female half of the couple is his natural prey. This is never portrayed as deeply fucked up, but actually quite special and romantic. Anita Blake is the least offensive of the lot on this issue, because at least she's a fairly powerful woman in her own right. But she's still less powerful than her love interests.

(Compare to say, Buffy and Angel. The relationship is more balanced than the ones in paranormal romances because while Buffy is human, she has supernatural powers, and even when she's weaker than the vampires, she outmatches them by being unpredictable and a brilliant strategist. And even so, everyone in her life comments that her relationship with Angel is dysfunctional and unbalanced, because even when he's good, he's still a vampire and several hundred years older than her, and thus not really the type of guy you want to bring home to Mom, no matter how awesome Joyce happens to be.)

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a really big fan of dysfunctional relationships in fiction. I don't think I've ever portrayed a happy couple in my own writing. But I want some acknowledgment that the dynamic is creepy rather than romantic.

When I'm reading these stories, I wonder about the women who do get off reading them. Far be it from me to judge anyone's fantasies, but it is a bit of an odd one to be so very popular, particularly among women who don't consider themselves to be particularly kinky.

Detractors of genre fiction frequently argue that sci-fi/fantasy is "escapist"; I disagree, of course. Good skiffy is quite the opposite, using the language of the bizarre to describe the contemporary human condition. But I don't just limit my reading to good speculative fiction, because there isn't enough of it—I'm quite fond of the trashy stuff too. Particularly young adult skiffy, where the predominant fantasy is of the bookish daydreamer who is somewhat of an outsider but, as it turns out, is the powerful Chosen One meant to save the magical world from doom.*

Paranormal romance seems to follow a different narrative, however. It's a fantasy of powerlessness. In it, the female (always female!) protagonist is frequently ordinary; if she possesses any special abilities at all, they won't help her when she actually needs them. She falls in love with a man who is stronger than her in every way. Whatever advantages she had over the average human are useless to her now. In addition, she frequently suffers from "character flaws" that make her weaker and less well-equipped than average to navigate the dangerous world of the supernatural. Bella is so clumsy that she hits an artery every time she looks at something sharp; Sookie is, well, a moron. She becomes completely dependent on a man, who, because of his "old-fashioned" values, begins to take over every aspect of her life. And her ordinariness does not save the day at the end in some cool twist; she must be rescued. By her man.

This is not new insight, of course; every Twi-hater has the same visceral reaction. (One of my friends, who really liked the Twilight movie, couldn't understand why I found Edward creepy. To which I replied, "Imagine you have a daughter. Imagine she brings home her new boyfriend, who is rich—and 50 years old. Are you cool with this? Now imagine he breaks into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep and slashes her tires so she can't see other guys.") What I do see missing is a class angle.

Back in the day, Marxists used to refer to capitalists as "vampires," a metaphor that seems to have fallen out of use. But there's something to be said for it. You never see a working class vampire; they are always aristocratic, urbane, well-read (they've had hundreds of years to accumulate wealth, of course). The female protagonists of paranormal romances, not so much. They're working class or lower-middle class girls, with human friends and family in the same economic strata. It's the friends and family who hold them back, who disapprove of the new bloodsucking beau, who represent the old life that must be discarded and looked down upon. It's—unnerving, to say the least.

So paranormal romance scares me. Just, you know. Not in a good way.

* Of course, this fantasy is also problematic, and deconstructed spectacularly in China Miéville's Un Lun Dun.