Institutionalised Discrimination

Laura Vivanco

In Sarah Mayberry's Cruise Control there's a secondary romance between the heroine's brother, Danny, and his co-worker, Ben, who enter into a committed relationship. As a result Danny finds the courage to come out to his father and his work colleagues about his sexual orientation:

"I'm twenty-eight. I'm sick of pretending to be something I'm not. Ben and I told the people at work yesterday [...]."
Danny's tone was light, but his hands were shaking as he put the lid back on the pot.
"I think it's great," she said gently. [...] "Dad loves you, Danny. He would never reject you," Anna said. (231)

Danny's not so sure, and here's how he breaks the news to his father:

"You know how all these years you keep asking me when I'm going to settle down with one girl and stop playing the field?"
Their father frowned. "Yeah?" Then his face cleared. "Danny - you're not going to tell me you've got some girl pregnant?" he asked.
Anna bit her lip. Danny looked anguished.
"No. I haven't got a girl pregnant. The thing is, Dad. All these years ... I'm not really into girls, if you know what I mean." (237-38)

Danny's father didn't mean to cause his child pain, but he nonetheless causes him "anguish" due to his heterosexist assumptions. Gregory M. Herek writes of heterosexism that,

Like institutional racism and sexism, heterosexism pervades societal customs and institutions. It operates through a dual process of invisibility and attack. Homosexuality usually remains culturally invisible

One could perhaps think of the romance genre as being similar to Danny's father (and sometimes it's been even less caring). Jessica (a romance reader) commented that

I have GLB or T friends who would claim that since 90% or more of the genre upholds the idea that monogamous romantic relations between women and men are the moral norm, it is quite problematic

It's quite obviously the case that the vast majority of romances are about heterosexual couples and, regardless of whether or not individual authors wish to do so or not (and I'm certain that many would be horrified to think this might be the message that others might take from reading their works), they may cumulatively give the impression that "romantic relations between women and men are the moral norm."

So, if authors are inadvertently sending a particular message (and the genre's been accused of perpetuating racism and ageism as well as heterosexism, and no doubt a few other forms of discrimination) with which they don't actually agree, why is this happening?

Maybe it would be helpful to follow Herek by looking more closely at the concept of "institutional racism." Sir William Macpherson's report on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry was focussed on a discussion of racism within a police force, and it might therefore seem to have little or nothing to do with romance novels. Nonetheless, here is Macpherson's definition:

For the purposes of our Inquiry the concept of institutional racism which we apply consists of:

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

It persists because of the failure of the organisation openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership. Without recognition and action to eliminate such racism it can prevail as part of the ethos or culture of the organisation. It is a corrosive disease.

As Dr Oakely points out, the disease cannot be attacked by the organisation involved in isolation.

It seems to me that romance may, at times, have failed to provide the same "service" to all its potential readers. It may often have done so unwittingly but it is clear that some groups have felt excluded by the mainstream of the genre and its portrayal of romantic relationships between predominantly young, white, heterosexual protagonists. Of course, the genre does not exist "in isolation" from society. Its readers and authors form part of society, and few editors would choose to publish a romance which they believe would not attract readers, and would thus fail to make a profit.

I may be overly optimistic, and I'm certainly basing my opinion on a very small sample of the huge total of romances published, but I think over the decades there has been some progress towards ending discrimination in the genre. As Hsu-Ming Teo has observed, "Between 1890 and 1945, an astonishing number of novels were published in Britain dealing with the theme of romance in India or exploring the possibilities and perils of interracial love" and

these novels legitimized British imperialism. Romances naturalized the colonial order by normalizing the Raj as an exotic background to British love, telling the love story in such a way that the local Indian population, which vastly outnumbered the British, was marginalized and written out of its own landscape and history.

In this context I was very interested to read recently that Harlequin Mills & Boon, as part of its expansion into India,

wants to expand its roster of romantic heroes.

"We are also looking at the Indian prince idea. He is a clear extension of the alpha male and we are looking at launching this next year," says Ms Somerville.

It is also running a competition to find new local authors in India.

Penny Jordan has written about "pushing the boundaries" in this direction because her "first ever book set in India, with an Indian hero, is due out in North America." The first chapter of Virgin for the Billionaire's Taking is available here (there are arrows at the top of the page so that you can scroll forwards in the text). Maybe this is the start of a new trend and we'll eventually find Indian heroes written by Indian authors making their presence felt in the Harlequin Presents line. I do wonder whether or not they'd (a) be non-stereotyped depictions and/or (b) whether such heroes would almost always end up paired with white women, much as HP sheiks usually are.

Ebooks seem to be the place where the dominance of heterosexuality seems most likely to be challenged at the moment, but I also wonder if there's been a trend towards including more secondary couples who are not heterosexual (and not merely the "gay best friend") in paper-published romances. The most well-known recent romance of this kind is probably Suzanne Brockmann's Force of Nature (spoilers about the relationship here), but I know there are others, including Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me (2004), Louise Allen's The Dangerous Mr Ryder (2008), Anita Bunkley's Suite Temptation (2008), Ellen Hartman's His Secret Past (2008) and, of course, Sarah Mayberry's Cruise Control (2006) with which I started this post.¹

Can you think of other examples? Do you think the depiction of non-heterosexual secondary couples in mainstream romances is a signal that in time they'll one day take centre stage, or do you think they're likely to stay in second place for a long time to come? Does the emergence of an Indian Harlequin Presents hero strike you as an exciting new development, or do you think he's a type that won't differ much from the existing sheiks, Greek tycoons, Spanish aristocrats and Italian billionaires?

• Allen, Louise. The Dangerous Mr Ryder. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008.
  
• Mayberry, Sarah. Cruise Control. 2006. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2007.
• Teo, Hsu-Ming. "Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels." History of Intellectual Culture 4.1 (2004).

The photo of many different colours of pencils is from Wikimedia Commons.

1 Crusie includes a lesbian friend of the hero's who finds her own happy ending; Allen (writing a Regency includes a scene in which the hero's sister tells the heroine about their (the hero and his sister's) half-brother, a duke who

does not find women attractive. Not sexually attractive. Do you understand me?
'Oh. Yes.' One came across it, of course, although Louis had had to explain it to her. 'But is that not illegal?'
'Yes. You see how I trust you. [...] Charles has lived, secluded on his Northumberland estate, for eight years, very happily with his lover who, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, is his steward.' (254-55)

Dear Author recently reviewed Anita Bunkley's Suite Temptation and Jane reports that the hero has an employee who is gay and "his live in partner was Todd"; Hartman's heroine has a brother who's already found his "Mr Right." I've not yet read the novels by either Bunkley or Hartman, so it may be that the gay couples don't end the novel as happily as they begin it, but I've not yet read anything in the reviews that indicates this is the case, so I've included them in my list.

Reviewing, Literary Criticism, and "Bad Taste"

Laura Vivanco

This post was one I was going to put up directly after the Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions, but the rather more serious Internet Event of Even More Stupendous Proportions Concerning Allegations of Plagiarism intervened.

However, the original Event did spark some thoughts which still seem relevant. They're mostly Sarah's thoughts, so I'll quote from her at length, but I'll also throw in something that Sandra wrote recently, as well as mixing in a good stiffening of Northrop Frye and a sprinkling of quotes from a variety of other sources. I hope the end result won't be too indigestible.

Sarah wrote that:

The one thing this exercise has done for me is show me again how different are the tasks of reviewing and literary criticism. [...] I can analyze a book I despise (did it for my dissertation!), because it’s not about personal taste, but about what I can say about the book’s _______ (construction, organization, historical context, images of gender/class/race, etc.). When I was a baby graduate student, one of my advisers said “It’s not about whether I like the book, but whether I can say anything interesting about it” and I was horrified! Shocked, I tell you! And I promised myself I’d never get to that point. But getting to that point was what learning how to be a literary critic was all about. And I actually ended up arguing in my dissertation that analyzing books we dislike is *important* to understanding the culture we’re trying to analyze. It’s just as important, in fact, as analyzing books we love. [...]

As my husband just pointed out to me as I read this to him, you’ll notice that Laura and Eric and I never said in our posts whether we liked the book. That came up later in comments [...]. Because in reading the book in order to analyze it, liking it or not was not part of my thought process. [...]

All this is to say that I really love reading the reviews [...] but it’s a completely different skill from literary criticism (which is not to say you guys don’t analyze–you do, but in totally different ways from what we do at TMT), and that fact boggles my mind every time I read a really good review, even (especially?) if the book is awful (or, more likely, just not brilliant).

Northrop Frye also described this difference between the task of the reviewer (whom he called "the public critic") and that of the literary critic. He stated that

It is the task of the public critic to exemplify how a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how literature is to be absorbed into society. But here we no longer have the sense of an impersonal body of consolidating knowledge. The public critic tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the familiar essay, and his work is not a science, but another kind of literary art. (8)

If reviews are "another kind of literary art" that may explain why some of them, the better ones, can entertain, infuriate, amuse and/or move us, even though we may never read the novel the reviewer is writing about.

Literary critics, on the other hand, are much less likely to move their reader emotionally, although we may frequently be irritating and can occasionally attempt to amuse our readers. Literary criticism at its best creates a sense of intellectual awe at the way in which the critic has succeeded in marshalling the evidence from the text and other relevant sources into an orderly, logical form. Frye asks:

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course [...]. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. (7)

It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology. (8)

Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. (10-11)

Yes, and those like Sandra, who are forced to read the work of fledgling literary critics are more than aware of quite how much training is required in order to master the rules of the subject:

1. Document your frigging sources! ALL of them!!! No matter whether you use direct or indirect quotations. (If you don't document your sources, your teacher will be p.o. and you will fail the class.)
2. Prove your statements by referring either to the primary text(s) or to secondary sources.
3. It helps if you stick to the facts that are mentioned in the primary text: if the hero's childhood is never mentioned anywhere in the text, analysing the hero's childhood is ... not such a good idea.
4. Fictional characters are not real people.
5. Making sweeping statements about the historical background of a literary text is usually not a very good idea either: because if you do, you have not only failed to stick to Rule #2, but in most cases you are also spectacularly wrong.
6. Logic is a fine thing. Apply it freely and apply it often.
7. All primary and secondary sources you use in your paper should be listed in the bibliography.
8. The bibliography is supposed to consist of more than one secondary source.

The implication of Frye's assessment that literary criticism is a science is that:

at no point is there any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to "learn literature": one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in "teaching literature" arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught. Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study [...]. Criticism [...] is to art what history is to action [...]: a verbal imitation of a human productive power (11-12).

The reviewer, however, is giving a description of his or her experience of reading a text (for example whether it was a disappointment or a gripping read, how the reviewer related to the characters, whether the plot carried the reviewer along or whether her suspended disbelief crashed to the ground through a plot hole). SB Candy recently wrote a post about "bad taste" in which she stated that

unlike the absolute relativists (how d’you like THAT particular turn of phrase, eh?), I do think there’s such a thing as objective measures for how good or bad a book is, and that sometimes, you love something absolutely terrible, and other times, you dislike something that’s actually good.

The literary critic, as Sarah noted, does not primarily concern him or herself with his or her experience as a reader of the text, or with making declarations about "good" or "bad" taste, but instead relates to the texts in a very different, much less emotional way: placing the text in a literary context, providing textual evidence for his or her assertions, and not deliberately distorting the evidence by omitting to mention counter-evidence also present in the text.

Although there were some dissenting voices, the majority of reviewers seemed to feel, with Candy, that "Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome," and Meriam observed that there is something "deeply ironic [in the fact] that a novel which disproves many of Bindel's charges against romance failed to satisfy so many romance readers. What can you do?" Some time ago Jayne Ann Krentz wrote about some young editors who tried to change the genre in response to criticism like Bindel's:

The first target of these reforming editors was what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male. These males are the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels. These are the heroes who made Harlequin famous. These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise.
[...] Why did we dig in our heels and resist the effort to turn our hard-edged, dangerous heroes into sensitive, right-thinking modern males?
[...] We did it because, in the romance genre, the alpha male is the one that works best in the fantasy. (107-108, emphasis added)

I'm a literary critic, not a psychologist, so I'm not going to venture into in-depth discussions of people's fantasies, particularly when they're ones I don't share, but I think this internet event has been more than a condensed version of that long-ago experiment described by Krentz. As Sarah said, it's illustrated the difference between reviews and literary criticism, and from the point of view of literary criticism, as Eric said on the Romance Scholar list:

This really is a big deal [...] because for the first time that I know of romance readers and reviewers and scholars are all focusing, however briefly, on the same book at the same time, as part of a concerted effort. (It's also the first time that I know of when a single category romance has been written about at length by multiple scholars. Few romance novels get any critical attention at all; I'd love to see this as a model for future group efforts.)

• Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.
• Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-14.

The image is of Christine de Pisan giving a lecture. It's taken from Wikipedia. She wrote poetry, prose and engaged in literary criticism:

As a feminist, Christine de Pizan directly challenged the destructive and demeaning attitudes towards women of a popular book of her day, Le Roman de la Rose, by writing Epistres du debat sur le Roman de la Rose (c. 1402), and arguing rather for the equality of women. (A Celebration of Women Writers).

As we've been discussing ferrets, I can't help but note that this latter work included the line "And do you not know that a small weasel is able to attack and destroy a great lion?"

Multiple opinions of Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King

Here at Teach Me Tonight we spent a lot of time analysing Bindel's argument in considerable detail and also critiqued her methodology, in particular her use of back-cover copy to assess the contents of M&B romances.

We therefore decided to analyse one of the novels mentioned by Bindel, Louise Allen’s Virgin Slave, Barbarian King, and because we were joined by many other bloggers, this was an Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions.

Appropriately for the time of year and the historical setting of the novel, these posts, Janus-like, look back to a debate from last year, and look forward to a new era of romance scholarship which is based on detailed analysis of the primary texts in question. Allen’s novel also looks both back and forwards. The first chapter begins on the 24th of August 410 AD, the date of the fall of Rome, it looks both back to the Roman past and forwards into a Visigothic future.

Here are the posts from those of us at Teach Me Tonight. They're not reviews, so they do include plentiful spoilers.

• Laura Vivanco, with a focus on myths.
• Sarah S. G. Frantz, with a focus on Allen's construction of masculinity.
• Rev Melinda's a frequent visitor to Teach Me Tonight, and on her blog she's analysed Allen's "exploration of what it means to be a family."
• Eric Selinger, with a focus on Allen's revision of "bodice-ripper" conventions
  

There have also been quite a large number of reviews of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King:

• CataRomance's Julie Bonello states that "Louise Allen’s historical romances are in a class of their own. Meticulously researched, wonderfully evocative and absolutely mesmerizing, her novels are a surefire guarantee of excellence [...]. Romantic, enthralling and atmospheric, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King is a powerful love story featuring two vividly drawn characters you will find absolutely impossible to resist." Star Rating: 4.5
  
• Romantic Times's Kathe Robin gives the following summary: "Accurate political details, a noble savage hero, a heroine who comes to appreciate another culture and a jealous woman who schemes to win the hero's love all harken back to the classic '80s Indian romances. Allen proves that timeless themes always entertain." RT Rating: 3 stars
• Mrs Giggles gives the following summary: "This perplexing politically-correct, sanitized, and rather bloodless story makes being a captive slave of a Visigoth barbarian come off like a walk in the park. File this one under It does not compute." Her review specifies that she finds the book unbelievable mainly because of issues of historical inaccuracy: "While this book is pretty readable, I find that there is too little in this story that feels remotely real for the setting and storyline." She gives it a rating of 65/100.
• Terri Pray writes that "Ms. Allen has written a delicious novel that I found hard to put down. Wulfric is strong, compelling, honorable, and sensual. He makes some hard choices that put others first ahead of his own desires in life and love, and by doing so he won my heart in a way that few romantic heroes have done before."
• Alicia Thomas at The Good, the Bad, the Unread gives the novel a B: "Virgin Slave, Barbarian King is fiction but the presentation of the principal parties involved (under light, quick inspection) rings true. So, with historical accuracy out of the way, what about the characters? Wulfric is a great hero. He’s exactly what you’d want a hero to be. He’s a little too perfect but it’s ok. Julia has a lot to learn and she changes and grows through the book. [...] a few things niggled at me. Over all, though, this book is a great read for any historical buff."
• Sarah at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books "finished the book deflated and disappointed that a premise that could have yielded so much was flat, predictable, and ultimately a big yawn." SB Sarah touches on something TMT Sarah felt was the most unusual aspect of the book: "Beyond the cultural differences, which are easily mended with the Superglue of effortless assimilation and blithe acceptance, there is no villain, no issue to be overcome except that of choice and geography." Trashy Books Grade: D
• Jayne and Jane at Dear Author give their opinions. For Jayne "There are parts I like which then got balanced with things that seemed to be taken straight from Romance Central and that I’d read 100 times before. The whole ends up being a C+". Jane managed to find "one positive thing I can say about this book [...] I didn’t find it to be advancing the agenda of the male patriarchy and the suppression of females." Other than that, Jane thought that "There was no serious introspection at the differences between Roman and Visigoth cultures. Instead, the cultural conflict comes down to Goth=Good and Romans=Rotten." She gave it a C- .
• Candy at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books gives the novel a D and says that "Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome. [...] he’s not a human so much as he is a Ken Doll, except instead of plastic, he’s molded from untempered wish fulfillment". Laura finds this highly diverting, since she'd been comparing Wulfric to Aeneas. Admittedly "The extent to which the Aeneid promotes or subverts the political program of Augustus is debated," but if you read it as "a national epic, a glorification and exaltation of Rome and its people", then Virgil really couldn't have got any more "politically correct" than that, and Aeneas has been described as being "handsome and strong, pious and brave, serious and wise, indeed just a bit too perfect in some people's eyes" (Janson 53).
• Meriam at Rape and Adverbs thinks that "Allen has taken a situation ripe with conflict and then effectively removed the heart of the conflict. [...] some of my favourite romances deal with this imbalance beautifully - To Have and to Hold, My Reckless Heart, Voices of the Night, The Smoke Thief. These stories work so well because the imbalance is compellingly portrayed, before it is negotiated and then redressed to achieve a satisfying HEA (to put it very simply). Having failed to present a compelling power imbalance with suitably high stakes (incredible as it seems, in a master/ slave dynamic) the romance fails to take off in VS,BK. I was left thinking that the only other master/slave romance I have read - Johanna Lindsey’s Hearts Aflame, complete with spanking, chains and a giant Viking heroine - worked better as a romance." She gives Allen's novel a C+
• Shannon C at Flight into Fantasy is of the opinion that "The characters are standard romance novel fare. Julia is a feisty, well-bred woman with a touch of the Mary Sue [...] Wulfric is equally derivitive. He’s a leader of men who is nonetheless kind to children, women and puppies, and he has the world’s most intelligent wolf as a companion and pet. [...] But the real disappointment for me was the setting. I really wanted to learn more about Rome and the Visigoths, and I felt that this rather colorful time period was rather underutilized. It’s obvious that Ms. Allen did some research, and while I didn’t really want pages and pages of it crammed down my throat, I’d have liked a bit more." She gives the novel a C+
  

Our internet extravaganza even spawned a couple of non-review responses:

• Hotflashes51 does "the Bindel thing. I blogged about the book without buying it." Her comments, which have something of an "a plague on both your houses" feel ("Of this debacle the only one that holds my sympathy and admiration is Louise Allen. She has behaved elegantly. Very professionally. She is a writer, so she wrote a book to entertain the masses. She didn’t write it to change the world or perpetuate any kind of myth or behavior. Nor did she write it to be meticulously analyzed by all a thunder"), can be found at her blog, Hot Flashes Cranky Life.
• A haiku, by Charlene Teglia.
  

And here are some concluding remarks from those of us at Teach Me Tonight, with a little bit of help from Northrop Frye:

• Reviewing, Literary Criticism, and "Bad Taste".

The illustration is of Janus, "the Roman god of gates and doors (ianua), beginnings and endings, and hence represented with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions" and this month takes its name from him. I've borrowed the picture from the University of Memphis's Cognitive Computing Research Group.

Wulfric, Wulfgar--What's the Difference?

"Every poem," says Harold Bloom, "is a misinterpretation of a parent poem." Is every romance novel likewise a misreading, a creative revision, of some parent romance? Probably not, but Bloom’s approach to literary history was all the rage when I headed off to graduate school in the 1980s, and I’ve never entirely grown out of it. And Virgin Slave, Barbarian King can certainly be read as a text that rewrites—for better or for worse—one famous predecessor, Kathleen Woodiwiss's early bestseller The Wolf and the Dove (1974), and more confidently as a text that echoes and revises crucial topoi from the sweeping historical romances that revolutionized the genre in the 1970s. Allen borrows scenes and character descriptions familiar from, and made popular by, the “bodice-ripper” romance, but she tames them, drains their violence, and imbues them with more consoling, egalitarian values. Just as her Visigoths want to build a new society in the shell of the old, adding a dash of “Visigoth honour” to “the good things of the Empire” (147), Allen’s novel aspires to offer the best of both worlds. Whether you think it succeeds, comes across as nostalgic, or simply fails, a lamb in wolf’s clothing, may be a matter of taste. For now, description, rather than evaluation, is the task at hand.

[Note: with her attention to historical detail, Allen probably has more in common with Roberta Gellis than with Woodiwiss as an author, and Woodiwiss, an American, may not have had nearly the impact in the UK that she had in the US. That said, as a text, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King strikes me as more profitably to be compared with The Wolf and the Dove--not least for the whole "wolf" thing--than with Gellis's Roselynde novels, and I am comfortable working by comparison and contrast even if no direct influence can be proved.]

As you may recall, The Wolf and the Dove begins with a deliciously campy "myth," impossible to read now without hearing the dulcet strains of Spinal Tap in the background.


"In times of yore," Woodiwiss writes, "when druids roamed the northern forests of England and held their sabbaths in the dark of the moon, a young man grew enamored with battle and violence and studied the arts of war until none could best him." This young man, nicknamed "The Wolf," angers the Great God Woden with his “impudence”; Woden therefore turns him into an iron statue of his namesake and leaves him waiting in the woods near Scotland for "times of war" to come. Then, only, then, will he be set free to prove that he can turn his strength into actual “valor.” The eponymous hero of this novel, Wulfgar, likewise must be changed, this time by love, from a bitter, violent man into a warrior for what is right and good. The comparison to “Beauty and the Beast” is obvious; less obvious, but just as crucial, would be the way that Woodiwiss here repeats the plot of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik, in which the hero must change from a cruel, self-centered man into a “preux chevalier.” To coin a term, each man needs to be chivalrized, and in the process, each must learn to love and respect the woman he has heretofore simply taken.)

As the prologue closes, it’s business time, or at least time for a clash of cultures, medieval-style. "William's hordes crossed the channel and Harold rode from the north and war drew near,” Woodiwiss writes; a page later, as the novel proper begins, the author posts a talismanic date: October 28, 1066, a day when "hewn bodies" litter the earth outside newly Norman Darkenwald Hall and an assortment of Saxon women--notably our heroine, Aislinn, her mother Lady Maidia, and the unlucky 15-year old serving girl, Hlynn--wait within to be brutalized by evil Sir Ragnor de Marte. In the first twenty-six pages, all of the women have been bound and kicked, snoods and bodices (well, gunnas) have been ripped, and Hlynn has been gang-raped. “You are mine, I am your master,” Ragnor slurs, drunken, into Aislinn’s neck as his naked body pins her down—and with that, the first chapter ends.

The sexual violence in these opening scenes serves a number of functions in this novel, and in others like it from the period.

• Structurally, it serves as a baseline of awfulness, against which the reader can measure subsequent events and encounters, especially sexual encounters. When we meet Wulfgar, we know that we’re supposed to prefer him to Ragnor; the latter is repulsive and a vile rapist while the former is attractive and, we’re told, his kisses and later sex with the heroine spark pleasure in her, first unwilling, and finally exultant. (The trajectory of the novel runs from sexual victimhood to sexual agency, from “unwilling” pleasure to actual enjoyment, with recurrent threats of rape from Ragnor and others to keep the book’s distinctions clear.)

• Politically, we might say that it gives us a justification for patriarchy and for particular negotiations with it. The alternative to Wulfgar is not freedom, not equality, but anarchy, to which women are particularly vulnerable. We might say that this subgenre of romance includes both a critique of patriarchal violence, or at least of male violence, as well as a vision of how to triumph, not over, but within those parameters, largely through connection with and transformation of the strongest male around. (Given the context of the early 1970s, we might say that such novels place themselves somewhere to the left of The Total Woman, but well to the right of Fear of Flying; they have My Secret Garden somewhere in their view as well.)

• Psychologically—well, here things get dicey, for me. Had I but world enough and time, I’d use Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination to discuss this deployment of sexual violence. Briefly, if to be a woman in this context is to choose between bad choices, hawk and wolf (as Aislinn puts it on p. 43, forced to pick either Ragnor and Wulfgar) then it’s both logical and tempting for the heroine to affiliate, or even identify, with a man who claims to respect one’s fighting spirit, who insists on “taming a shrew” (56) through pleasure as well as force, and so on. Yet this does little to explain the appeal of such scenes to the reader, or the use of them to affect the reader. Is there some clue to be found in Laura Kinsale’s essay on “The Androgynous Reader,” or in Deborah Lutz’s notion that the “dangerous lover” serves as a distant mirror of the heroine, who “finds her most authentic self at the heart of what seems at first most foreign and outside her way of being—an arrogant, hateful other” (xi)? Perhaps a fantasy of resilience is at work: the heroine endures, resists, and triumphs over horrors, and we identify with that? One last, less fraught explanation might come from the well-documented psychological phenomenon of “misattributed arousal.” Through fear the text triggers an adrenaline rush—pounding heart, physiological excitement, emotional frangibility—and for some readers that excitement then gets associated with the hero / heroine relationship, perhaps. (Clearly I need help with this—but I don’t think I’m the only one who does!)

There is more to say, of course, about the Woodiwiss, but in the interests of time, let me turn now to Virgin Slave, Barbarian King.

You don’t have to read very far into Allen's novel for it to feel a bit familiar—not a bad thing, in romance aesthetics—or for its softening, revisionist moves to begin. Let me start with the familiarities, the signals this novel sends that it has an older, “bodice-ripper” version of historical romance somewhere in its ancestry.

Like Woodiwiss, Allen begins with a date--"24th day of August, AD 410"--, which marks a moment of crisis. In both novels an invasion has occurred, and in both war has stripped away the veneer of civilization, revealing the sorry truth that Hobbes warns about in Leviathan, quoting the Roman author Plautus: in the absence of authority, homo homini lupus est, man is wolf to man. A nameless slave, about Hlynn’s age, has already been the first victim, here killed before she could be forced. Before the second page is through we see the requisite, genre-defining tug at our heroine’s neckline: “His fingers grasped the neck of her tunic and yanked downwards, his sweaty hand sliding over the bared flesh” (8). When our hero appears, he is again a leader of the pack: a figure who is not simply powerful, but also (the narrator assures us) “alien, utterly male” (10). Within a few chapters we hit such familiar topoi as the erotic bathing scene (62-5), a hero who is “angry enough to turn [the heroine] over his knee” (60) and who wonders whether he will need to “break her spirit” in order to “bend her to his will” (61), a pervasive rhetoric of ownership (“mine,” “my woman,” “”you are mine” declared “with the arrogance that never failed to take her breath away” [99]), and any number of scenes in which sexual passion is described as “savage” (193), laced with “violence” (164), and so on.
I do not, I should emphasize, list these as a criticism of the book; rather, I see each as a generic marker, a set piece, even, that places this novel in the sub-genre of erotic historical romance. They offer Allen an opportunity to repeat and vary generic conventions, just as the set scheme of a pentameter line allows us to spot and savor metrical substitutions. Allen seizes this opportunity, revising her material through a series of substitutions and gestures of containment.

Consider, for example, the wolf we meet in the opening scene. It is not wild, nor does it attack, although it may guide and warn. “The animal had [Julia’s] arm between its jaws,” Allen writes in the opening chapter. “It was not biting, just holding on with a pressure that would not crack an egg, yet which had all the potential to rip her flesh from her bones” (17). Obviously this serves as a figure for Wulfric, powerful enough to rape or kill Julia yet bound by honor and simple kindness, never threatening either. (Wulfric starts, as a character, with the traits that Wulfgar must struggle to achieve.) Less obviously, I take it that the wolf’s hold is a figure for the “hold” that the rhetoric of male strangeness, heroic arrogance, sexual power struggle (see 66), and erotic possession has over the reader, or at least over the genre. In their wild state, uncontrolled, these would be terrible; to be useful, they must retain just enough strength to lend a shiver of the illicit, the lawless, the extreme. The novel invokes them repeatedly, along with familiar claims about impulses that are “fundamentally” male and female—but the reader who goes to Virgin Slave, Barbarian King for the strum und drang of a Woodiwiss novel will be disappointed. The novel may gesture towards the high drama of sexual difference, but it treats this material awfully sweetly, lightly, even naively. It’s costume jewelry, like the chains--“light, and of a precious metal, naturally”--that Julia imagines in a brief, soft-focus fantasy of herself as a “sex slave” (107-8). Or, to draw another metaphor from the book, it’s like the dormant volcano on whose slopes the couple first make love. When Julia comes, she wonders, “Did the volcano explode?” ( 130). It hasn’t, it doesn’t, and the erotic “force beyond her understanding” it represents doesn’t really seem that far beyond her understanding, after all (130).

At its heart, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King is a domestic, even domesticated romance. I mean by this not only that its treatment of eros and sexual difference tends to moderation, not extremity, but also that the novel consistently longs for and valorizes a particular version of “home.” Julia has no real home as the novel begins—we are repeatedly told that she is lonely in her life in Rome, that she has no network of relationships to make her happy there, and still worse, no work to do that anyone values, that matters to anyone. (Allen frames Julia’s captivity as an opportunity for her to prove her strength and learn to fight (20), to show her strength, as she would never have done in the safe confines of Roman society.) Among the Visigoths she finds all of these—it’s as though she had been carried off to a bourgeois Forest of Arden, and as though the reader were carried off, while she reads, to a similarly supportive community, not all that different, finally, from “real life.” Wulfric has a place among the Goths, friends and family and work to do, but the community itself is homeless, nomadic, and he’s essentially a public figure there, with no separate private, domestic life. (No life without wife, as Mr. Kohli says in Bride and Prejudice.)



The foundation of the home this couple creates lies partly in their demonstrated care for one another, and partly in a sexuality for which we have, I think, a less famous, less elaborated, less dramatic, and potentially less sexy rhetoric to draw on: a mix, as the novel puts it, of “innocence and trust and desire” (124). What shall we make of this combination, their “esteem enlivened by desire,” to quote the poet James Thomson, from The Seasons (Spring)?

In her essay on the novel’s account of masculine honor, Sarah refers to what she sees as its jarringly anachronistic version of marital love. Whether or not it is in fact an anachronism, their notably egalitarian, affectionate love match fits quite nicely into the book as a “new foundation myth,” as Laura puts it in her own impressive piece. Just as Milton writes a (for his time) modern notion of companionate love into the story of Adam and Eve, the origins of mankind, Allen inscribes companionate love into a deep, foundational moment in European culture, “the basis of the Europe we live in today” (294).

As history, this may be bunk. I’ll need to spend a day or two with Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage: a History and Jean Hagstrum’s Esteem Enlivened by Desire: the Couple from Homer to Shakespeare to judge, and even then I’d probably be bluffing. (More on this anon.) As literature, though, such transpositions serve a worthwhile purpose, and even have a fancy theoretical name, courtesy of Harold Bloom, the critic I came in with. In Bloom, a move like this is called a “metaleptic reversal”: a rhetorical turn whereby something later (a text, an idea, whatever) claims to be in fact earlier than its temporal precursor, or even manages to seem the original, with the previous text simply a falling off or secondary instance. Surely it’s no accident that Allen’s hero and heroine end up living together in Provence, home of the troubadours, or that their imagined villa lies “in the shadow of Mont Ventoux” (294), a mountain internationally famous thanks in large part to the poet Petrarch.

In Allen’s foundation myth, as in Milton’s, companionate love is older than troubadour fin amors or unrequited Petrarchan longing--just as, to be too clever by half for a moment, her novel's merger of cultures antedates the one enacted in the Woodiwiss novel. In fantasy, it is not a new turn in marriage, circa 1750; rather, it is at the very least contemporary with the colder-hearted thought that marriage is a move in the struggle for power, with every wife, in Julia’s words, “a gaming piece on the board where family and civic status was decided” (103). It is, therefore, an original version of love, perhaps the original, and thus the one to which subsequent "revolutions "actually, and quite properly, return.

The Spectacle of Masculine Honor: Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King

Sarah S. G. Frantz

The main theme of this novel, as I read it, was that of honor and the knotty questions of how to define it, how to live it, who was allowed to possess it, and how to deal with it in a love relationship. The honor projected in this novel was a particularly masculine honor, but then how female authors construct masculinity, how that affects the love story, and what it means for the reader are my particular obsessions. This novel, however, seemed almost tailor-made for my brand of analysis, especially as it comments on Bindel's analysis of the romance genre.

A few words about historical accuracy: I chafed against our choice of this book from the three Bindel commented on. I don't like reading novels set before about 1750, because our understanding of our own subjectivity, of love relationships, of individuality, of our socio-economic place in life, of what it meant to be human changed in the eighteenth century and historically accurate depictions of life before the eighteenth century would, in my opinion, be almost incomprehensible to modern readers because what it means to be human has changed so much. Take that back 1600 years to 410 AD, and my concerns are multiplied ten-fold. Modern subjectivity is a Romantic-era construct, to a large degree, and what has changed the most is the power and importance and expression of love between two individuals and its relation to marriage. So reading about a Visigoth and a Roman "falling in love" and finding their happy ending in marriage in ways that our modern sensibilities can understand is a complete historical anachronism and that bugs me. So I usually avoid novels set before 1750, and certainly this is the first romance I've read set before 1300 AD (and it's only Laura Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart that sets that date back before the eighteenth century). I will state now that it is my belief that Allen's construction of masculinity has nothing to do with "real," historical Visigoths except in that she plays now and then with modern popular understanding of "barbarians." Rather, her depiction of Wulfric and of the Romans represent a completely modern representation of ideal masculinity.

That aside, Bindel could hardly have made a more ironic choice than Allen's novel when condemning popular romances as "misogynistic hate speech" that perpetuates violence against women. The first act performed by the hero Wulfric when he enters the action of the novel is to kill the two Romans who have killed Julia's female slave and are trying to rape Julia (10). He punishes violence against women swiftly and finally. Almost the first thing Wulfric says to Julia is in response to her fear of rape: "I do not approve of ravishing women, as you saw just now. You need not fear that" (16). When the reader enters Wulfric's point of view in Chapter Three, the first thing he reveals is his inability to explain his attraction to Julia: "Something about this dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned creature called to him" (33), but the second thing is a reiteration of his feelings about rape:

There was fear at the back of those brown eyes, fear that he would force her to do more than carry water, despite his pledge, and that angered him.

These Romans had no concept of honour, no respect for a man's word. (33-34)

Wulfric's horror and complete disavowal of violence against women, then, is tied to his concept of honor. Indeed, later this link is made even more explicit: "And he would not take what he so easily could, because his faith told him it was wrong and his honour despised the thought that he would force a woman" (69).

This is the same honor that is posited as the cause for the sacking of Rome in the first place. Berig, Wulfric's squire, explains to Julia:

"We keep our word, all of us. Your emperor is an oath-breaker." He put loathing into the words. "There is nothing worse. If you cannot trust a man's word, what can you trust? He is less than a man, he is not fit to lead."

"It is politics. Honorius must do what is right for the state," Julia protested. What am I doing, debating politics with a barbarian youth while the city burns around us?

The boy stared at her as though she had sprouted two heads. "Do Roman women understand nothing of honour? Your emperor gave his word. He broke it, now he must pay." (21)

Honor, therefore, is a particularly masculine trait, and is explicitly tied to what it means to be a good man. The barbarian men are consistently shown as possessing honor (even the men who challenge Wulfric do so with honor--there is no villain in this book), whereas the Roman men are shown as lacking in honor because they lack the desire to act like men (they run, hide, facillate, don't fight to defend their own, keep themselves fit for show not action, and lie in political situations).

Julia (and the reader) is indoctrinated into the definition of masculine honor through the first half of the novel by observing it in Wulfric's actions. He kills the Romans who are trying to rape her; he doesn't rape her; he acts as councillor to his king; he wins a challenge fight against a fellow barbarian. Everything he does, he does with honor, and this point is hammered home to Julia and the reader again and again.

In the scene in which Julia understands the importance of the long hair of Visigoth men (and the Samson and Delilah imagery is glaringly obvious here!), masculinity is presented as THE defining characteristic of subjectivity for Wulfric: "she could see it went to the heart of what he was as a man" (76). Realizing what she almost did by cutting his hair, she thinks, "she could not imagine killing someone's soul, their sense of themselves. It seemed Wulfric knew that about her, just as she knew, deep down, he would never force her, never harm her" (76). The barbarian symbol of masculinity--their long hair--is a symbol of "their sense of themselves," defining who they are as people. And again, that iconic masculinity is joined with Wulfric's inability to rape Julia.

Besides NOT raping her, Wulfric allies his brand of honor and his relationship with Julia in important ways. After a particularly explosive sexual encounter, Wulfric realizes that Julia trusts him: "Somewhere there was a trust in him and in his honour. He should not care, but it seemed that he did and that the thought warmed him, deep inside where he kep the emotions that a leader could not show" (69). Wulfric's emotions for Julia are paired with his belief in her trust in his honor. if he didn't know that she knew that he was a Good Man, he wouldn't be as attracted to her as he is. He spends a lot of time unsure of his own feelings, unable to name them when he feels them ("What in Hades was wrong with him now?" he asks himself when he's worried for Julia's safety (122), and admits to himself that "I have no idea what it means" that he is angry about his concern for her safety when she disappears (123)), but when he finally admits to himself that he loves her, he connects it again with his honor: "To liken a man's honour in battle to his feelings for a woman just showed how far he had fallen into love with this brown-eyed Roman" (196). The very thing that defines him as a man--his willingness to fight for "his kin, his tribe, his king, his family, his God" (183)--is conflated with his love for Julia.

Which is not to say that Bindel's concerns aren't still valid. Bindel wrote, "But rather than becoming a "new man", it seems he has become even more masculine and domineering in order to keep the heroine in line. This is how the rape fantasies so integral to the plot have been able to persist." Wulfric certainly fits this mold as well. The first few sexual encounters between Wulfric and Julia are almost violent, and Wulfric is invariably described as dominant and dominating, but also unable to control himself around Julia.

One of their first kisses is told from Julia's perspective:

They were both angry. She had no idea whether she was more angry at him than herself, but there was no mistaking that Wulfric was furious with her, and utterly determined to bring her panting and pleading to his feet.

His grip on her was punishingly hard, his mouth plundered without any mercy, lips and teeth and tongue possessing and taking with a power that seemed to only increase as she refused to be cowed by it. He plunged his tongue into her open mouth, hard and hot. Innocent of a man's body she might be, but Julia knew what this invasion mimicked. (66)

After their encounter, she "saw on Wulfric's face nothing but male arrogance and the desire to dominate" (66). The power in these sexual encounters, however, is balanced with the absolute belief in Wulfric's inability to rape (when they finally do have sex, Julia's consent is explicitly sought and given: "'Certain?' he asked quietly. 'Certain.' She nodded" [125]), and with domesticity.

While the Visigoth's attacked Rome because the Roman emperor had no honor, what they had been promised and never given was land of their own that they could settle on. Wulfric and his barbarian horde are depicted as wanting domesticity more than anything else. Wulfric thinks, "They had taken the greatest city on earth, they held the sister of the emperor, they could strip Rome of gold and slaves and treasures. But were they any closer to what they needed, their safe homeland?" (34). Julia observes:

Through the open doorway, Julia could see the bustle of camp life as the sun began to set. Men were beginning to come back to their home fires, children running out to met [sic] them, womenfold standing up from tending their cooking pots to wave, or to exchange a kiss with the big, long-haired warriors. So fierce, so savage looking, and yet, apparently, so domestic. There seemed real affection there." (38)

This domesticity allows Julia to feel at home in the Visigoth camp on her first night there: "Hazily there was the realisation that she was not feeling lonely, she was feeling warm and safe and at home" (45).

Once again, this innate quality in Wulfric is soon turned to the service of the love story. Wulfric comes to view "home" and the stability it offers as residing in Julia, rather than in a particular place:

He had given up calling anywhere home years ago, clinging instead to the vision of a villa somewhere in Gaul, shady courtyards, lush fields, a vision that Alaric's orders to go south had dashed to fragments. It had become an impossible dream and yet now one slender girl with brown eyes and the courage of a warrior had given him a home wherever she was." (150)

The suspense at the end of the novel is located in the uncertainty over who will succeed the dead king, with Wulfric depicted as one of the best men for the job because he's the only one who doesn't want it. But the reader is not privy to the resolution of that tension because Julia is taken home by the Roman army after they attack the Visigoth band. She is in Rome when the new Visigoth king is named and all she knows is that it's not Wulfric, making her fear that he's dead. He comes to rescue her, however, just as she's ready to rescue herself. But he cuts off his hair, the symbol of his masculinity, of his leadership, and his "sense of himself," in order to be able to blend into the Roman crowd. Once they are together again, he tells Julia, "I want to go north into Gaul, not wait for Honorius and Athaulf to talk endlessly for years. I want to buy land, no wait for it to be given. I want to settle, learn to live with my Roman neighbours. I told my kin that, and said that if that is not what they wanted, then I released them from their fealty" (286). So the main tension of the novel is resolved off-stage, as almost a side issue, because after Wulfric's decision to find his domestic space by himself, the issue of who is king and what that means to the Gothic tribes is unimportant. Wulfric is creating his own reality, and while "a king must keep his hair . . . in this new world, a leader need not" (286). When they escape Julia's parents' house and find their ox carts hidden in the streets, Julia settles on is and tells Wulfric, "now I am home" (291). Wulfric agrees: "So am I. Do you know, I thought I would never have one until we found a place to settle. I did not realise all that I needed was to be where my love was. So simple, so hard to find. You are my home, Julia, my love" (291).

Ideal masculinity, then, is embodied in a man who is a natural leader, but unambitious, a fighter and warrior who just wants a home where he can farm, a barbarian and "savage" who finds violence against women abhorrent, a man whose personal sense of honor is paramount but who will sacrifice its symbol to recover his lover, and the construction of this image is the heart of this novel.


Image of the Visigoth warrior borrowed from here.

Laura on Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King

Laura Vivanco

My analysis of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King got so long that it wouldn't have fitted easily onto the blog so I've posted it on my website. However, as there isn't a comment facility on my website, if you'd like to comment on my analysis, please do so here.

I've focused on some key myths which I think provide a cultural context for the novel and give extra resonance to the events related in it.

One of those myths is that of Romulus and Remus, pictured here in a painting by Rubens. I thought it would make a change from the more well-known Capitoline Wolf.

An Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions!

Sarah S. G. Frantz

In the recent uproar over the Guardian article by Julie Bindel and Daisy Cummins about the centenary of Mills & Boon, Bindel mentions Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King as indicative of "misogynistic hate speech." Louise Allen responded to the comments in another article in the Guardian. We at TMT thought this was interesting enough that we spent a lot of time exhaustively analyzing Bindel's argument.

Here at TMT, we though it might be fun to do a "Dueling Literary Analysis" of Allen's novel, a la Dear Author's Dueling Reviews. And then we saw Jane at Dear Author saying that she was going to do Dueling Reviews of Allen. So we all invited Smart Bitch Sarah, and we're going to have a review event!

So, at the beginning of January, TMT will post four (count them!) literary analyses of Allen's novel (myself, Eric, Laura, and Robin). Jane and Jayne will review the novel at Dear Author, and Smart Bitch Sarah will review it at Smart Bitches Who Read Trashy Books. If you'd like to join us all, run, don't walk, to your local bookstore to buy Virgin Slave, Barbarian King and read it by the beginning of January. You can also buy it as an ebook from eHarlequin.

Louise Allen can thank us later! You can't buy publicity like this! :)

A warning: while Jane, Jayne, and SB Sarah will probably not give away spoilers, because they write reviews, we here at TMT will write analyses and will provide spoilers galore.

Bindel, Piece by Piece

There has been so much discussion of this piece lately that I almost hesitate to do this, but since several of us seem to disagree on the "meat" of Julie Bindel's argument--the substantive points she's making, or trying to make, rather than the dashes of rhetorical chipotle that spice things up or make us sputter and cough--it seems the way to proceed is simply to look over the article, piece by piece, and see if we can agree on what it says.

Here it is, then, paragraph by paragraph (numbers added for easy reference). Laura, Sarah, and the rest of us contributors can weigh in by editing this post and adding commentary after each paragraph, as well as in the comments boxes.

Let the games...begin!

1. Fifteen years ago, I read 20 Mills & Boon novels as research for a dissertation on "romantic fiction and the rape myth". It was the easiest piece of research I have ever done. In every book, there was a scene where the heroine is "broken in", both emotionally and physically, by the hero. Having fallen for this tall, brooding figure of masculinity, the heroine becomes consumed with capturing him. The hero is behaving in a way that, in real life, causes many women to develop low self-esteem, depression and self-harming behaviour - blowing hot and cold, and treating her like dirt. But all comes right in the end. After the heroine displays extraordinary vulnerability during a crisis, Mr Macho saves the day and shows her he cares.

EMS: Laura has already written about Bindel's research methods here, so I won't cover that. Instead, let me just observe that I don't know what "rape myth" she means, and it matters. Imagine this same paragraph--this one and the next one--as having grown out of a different dissertation, one on "romantic fiction and dominant / submissive sexual fantasy" and see how differently it reads. (One can also imagine it as deriving from research into "romantic fiction and the power of random reinforcement.")

SSGF: Doesn't exploring a "myth" or a narrative give us power over it in real life? Don't various narratives exist precisely so that people can explore the extremes (as Lazaraspaste says in the comments) in order to give us psychic control over the situations if/when they happen to us?

EMS: I agree, Sarah, and I’d like to link this idea to your discussion, below, of the ending of the romance novel. Bindel snidely dismisses the victory of the heroine: “But all comes right in the end.” Why is the ending to be mocked? Because it doesn’t happen that way often enough in “real life”? On those grounds, couldn’t we just as easily dismiss the genres of mystery and detective fiction? Bindel seems never to consider any function of literature other than to inculcate values / ideology or to reflect reality. The notion of literature as dream-work, a way to work through and triumph over threats, does not enter in to her discussion.

2. By this time (you know how uppity women can be), our heroine is so fed up that she does not comply when he grabs her inevitably small frame in his huge arms, and attempts to take her to bed. And so begins the "gender dance" - man chases woman, woman resists, and, finally, woman submits in a blaze of passion.

EMS: I'm puzzled by the euphemism here: "gender dance." Clearly Bindel wants us to see the scenario she describes as a rape, with the final clause an unthinkable, ridiculous finale. On the other hand, again, if this were in a piece about power disparity and sexual fantasy or consensual sex-play, there's nothing particularly unthinkable about the scene she describes; anyone who follows Dan Savage or other sex-advice columns, or reads the LustBites erotic authors blog knows how common such scenes and fantasies are.

EMS: It’s clear from what Laura has posted below that Bindel dislikes this particular “dance,” whether as sexual fantasy or as consensual play. She speaks, for example, of “pornography and sadomasochistic sexual practices” as having “invade[d] the lesbian community.” Her assumption would seem to be that women as such, were they not “invaded” by patriarchal ideology, would not find power differentials erotically exciting. I don’t know what evidence she has for this; certainly as far back as Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite” (Frag. 1) we find differences in power between women being eroticized:

[Anne Carson’s translation]

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus,who twist lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart

but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father's
golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you,
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair---

they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love? Who, O
Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.

That penultimate stanza makes it pretty clear that Sappho doesn’t fantasize about equal, reciprocal affection, even between two women. Rather, what she wants the Goddess of Love to promise is a reversal of the existing power dynamic: the chased one will be the pursuer, the beloved the lover, “even unwilling.”

A lot of work was done on this issue in Emily Dickinson's love poetry back in the 1990s. There were two distinct waves of criticism: the first tried to argue that when ED wrote about love between women, it was egalitarian and reciprocal and kind, but when she wrote about heterosexual love, the poems were about hierarchy and domination / submission and so on. A few years later, the problems with this grew unmistakable: the theory simply didn't fit the facts, the actual poems. Bindel strikes me as very much a "first wave" critic in this scheme: on whatever grounds (taste or ideology) she wants to assert that love should be a certain way and that certain behaviors and dynamics should not be attractive. If they are, there's something wrong with you: you've been infected, invaded, etc., by the patriarchy.

EMS: It's also worth pointing out how false to many romance novels this description of the "dance" turns out to be. In novels from The Sheik to The Flame and the Flower the rape scenes are not played out this way: they're scenes of violation with no "blaze of passion" or pleasure on the woman's part. The shocking thing about these novels is the fact that the rapist turns out to be the romantic hero, that the novel forgives or redeems him, which is a different issue, although one that Bindel might well address.

3. My loathing of M&B novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic or pulp fiction - Martina Cole novels, which I love, are also formulaic. But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by M&B. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech.

EMS: Has she shown, so far, that the novels perpetuate propaganda? Has she shown that they are misogynistic, evidence of what we might call "female self-hatred" (as one hears of "Jewish self-hatred," for example)? I don't think that she has.

EMS: Let me say that again, more loudly. I don’t think that Bindel has shown, so far, that these novels perpetuate propaganda. She has read selectively, distorted some facts, and implied that a common, even commonplace locus of sexual excitement (hierarchy, differences of power) is at best contemptible, and at worst (as in the later passage, quoted by LV below) radically foreign to women, so that if women like it, even between themselves, they merely testify to their own corruption. I am unconvinced.

EMS: So far, then, the core argument seems to be that these novels feature heroes who "behave in a way that, in real life, causes many women to develop low self-esteem, depression and self-harming behaviour." Am I wrong to see this as meaning, essentially, that Bindel objects to the fact that many women enjoy reading about men who behave in ways that they wouldn't put up with in real life, which is to say that she objects to women fantasizing about things that they wouldn't want to do (or suffer) in real life.

EMS: The logic would seem to be that by enjoying this fantasy, they give aid and comfort to men who act (in real life) like these heroes, and they undermine support for women who have been abused by such men. Let me offer a comparable case from another cultural realm: supposing there was a body of popular work (fiction, songs, movies) in which people have a wonderful time binge drinking, or drinking and driving. Someone who came from the world of public health might well look at all those films and stories and songs--ah! the songs: "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer," "Hey, Bartender," "One for My Baby (and One for the Road)," "Seven Drunken Nights"--and write a similar case against them. Yes?

LV - One might also want to make a comparison with smoking in the movies. There's been quite a lot of research done on that. For example, Mekemson and Glantz found that "Both the entertainment and tobacco industries recognised the high value of promotion of tobacco through entertainment media. The 1980s saw undertakings by four tobacco companies, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds (RJR), American Tobacco Company, and Brown and Williamson to place their products in movies." and, Dalton et al observed that "Exposure to smoking in movies has been linked with adolescent smoking initiation in cross-sectional studies. [...] Our results provide strong evidence that viewing smoking in movies promotes smoking initiation among adolescents."

EMS: I'd thought of that analogy also. But smoking is, in all circumstances, a threat to one's health. Drinking leads to alcoholism and alcohol abuse less pervasively or inevitably, except in perhaps in particularly at-risk populations. Are all women to be considered an "at-risk population" here? Heterosexual romance and marriage don't strike me as being quite as dangerous, case for case, as smoking, although I don't know the statistics. Perhaps if I did I'd feel differently?

SSGF: I think the analogy is much closer to the crime fiction Bindel likes so much. Nothing gets resolved in films with drinking and smoking. No one stops the vice, nothing gets fixed. But at the end of crime fiction, the world is a more just place. The killer is apprehended or dead, and the protagonists have saved the day. And it's the END that is valorized in considerations of the genre. The end isn't denigrated as they are in romance fiction, because of course the criminal has to be punished, the crime solved, and order restored. No one questions that ending, and because of the ending, crime fiction has slightly more respectability that romance fiction. And yet, as romance defenders say again and again, no one expects crime fiction readers to go out and commit the crimes they read about. Ah, but you're not identifying with the criminal, right? You're identifying with the solver of the crimes. Then again, what about Dexter, which I've heard is a fabulous show in which one does identify with the serial killer, because he is the protagonist. Still, readers/viewers don't go out and commit their own crimes. It comes down, again, to which part of the story has the most "influence"? The beginning/middle where the hero might be acting like a jerk, or the end where he has reformed, changed his ways, and treats the heroine as she deserves, admitting her power over him. If that's the influential part of the story, then again, as I said in my post, romances are "good for you" rather than "misogynistic hate speech" (I really can't believe she said that).

LV: Sarah commented that "Nothing gets resolved in films with drinking and smoking" which is sort of true, in one way, but in another, if characters drink and smoke and this makes them appear glamorous and more successful sexually, then it's suggesting that drinking and smoking have positive effects, and so that perhaps makes their portrayal in film closer to the ways that some heroes behave. In real life these behaviours might be indicative of an abusive relationship, but in the romances kidnapping a heroine or blackmailing her, or deciding to take her virginity as revenge for something her father did to your father, is part and parcel of the hero's glamorous, sexy alpha-ness. And it could be argued that even the way he changes could be read as encouraging the idea that an abuser could also change, whereas in fact abuse tends to escalate.

LV - and why am I ending up playing the role of Devil's Advocate here?

EMS: Because you're a fair-minded, reasonable person, doing what an academic is supposed to do: take ideas seriously, test them, and see what you think!

LV - anyway, to get back to smoking and alcohol, here's some of the research: “one in every five deaths in the United States is smoking related” and smoking is, as we have seen, encouraged by certain representations of smoking in films.

LV - Re alcohol, "Estimates for 2002 show that at least 2.3 million people died worldwide of alcohol-related causes accounting for 3.7% of global mortality. Alcohol consumption was responsible for 4.4% of the global burden of disease" (Global Alcohol Policy Alliance). Alcohol consumption is affected by portrayals in film and the media:

The central conclusion reached by Hanewinkel et al. is that exposure to incidental portrayals of alcohol use in US movies has contributed to the early onset of alcohol use by a group of German adolescents.

and a

study, funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is the first-ever national longitudinal survey of the influence of alcohol advertising on youth. Snyder and her colleagues conclude that greater exposure to alcohol advertising contributes to an increase in drinking among underage youth. Specifically, the analysis shows that for underage drinkers, exposure to one more ad than the average for youth was correlated with a 1 percent increase in drinking, and that an additional dollar spent per capita on alcohol advertising in a local market was correlated with a 3 percent increase in underage alcohol consumption as well. (from here, and more research into the link between advertising and alcohol consumption can be found here)

LV - So those are two activities which can be very harmful and consumption of both substances has been shown to be linked to their portrayal in film/the media. Given the horrific figures relating to violence against women, one might argue that relationships with men, while potentially pleasurable and even beneficial (like alcohol), can often have extremely negative consequences. According to the US Department of Justice’s 2000 Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: "Women experience more intimate partner violence than do men: 22.1 percent of surveyed women, compared with 7.4 percent of surveyed men, reported they were physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, boyfriend or girlfriend, or date in their lifetime."

EMS: Just to jump in for a second, Laura: you say "relationships with men," but the report speaks of assalut by "boyfriend or girlfriend." According to the this website website (which I have not evaluated), "Domestic abuse occurs in approximately 30 to 40% of GLBT relationships, which is the same percentage of violence that occurs in straight relationships. It is a myth that same-sex couples don't batter each other, or if they do; they are just "fighting" or it is "mutual abuse"." Here too, on the AARDVARK site, I read that "The rates of domestic violence in same-gender relationships is roughly the same as domestic violence against heterosexual women" and "The GLBT community itself is often not supportive of victims of battering because many want to maintain the myth that there are no problems (such as child abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc.) in these relationships." One might argue that Bindel's brief against heterosexual romance fiction perpetuates this myth, because it suggests that violence against women is a problem only when women are in relationships with men.

LV: According to the Findings from the Australian Component of the International Violence Against Women Survey (2004) "Over one third of women who had a current or former intimate partner reported experiencing at least one form of partner violence over the lifetime, and four per cent in the past 12 months" (and there are more Australian figures here). In the UK, “One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime” and globally “At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a study based on 50 surveys from around the world” (Amnesty).

LV - Unlike alcohol and smoking, it's much more difficult to establish quite how romance-reading relates to domestic violence. But what evidence there is, is discussed below, in relation to paragraph 4.

4. Why do I care so much about books that few take seriously? Are there not more important battles to fight? Challenging the low conviction rate for rape certainly seems more urgent than trashing novels that perpetuate gender stereotypes, but there is no doubt that such novels feed directly into some women's sense of themselves as lesser beings, as creatures desperate to be dominated.

EMS: "There is no doubt." Does that mean "there is evidence"? If so, where is it?

LV - There is some evidence in Julia Wood's "two-year study, which she described in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, [in which] Wood identified 'women's use of gender and romance narratives to make sense of violent relationships'" and "People commonly use stories to make sense of their lives, placing themselves within those stories, said Wood: 'Some of the images of men and women in these romance novels are entirely consistent with the dynamics of violent relationships'" (from here). As noted previously, Bindel is only saying that romances have a particular effect on "some" women, just as Wood's study was of a small group of women who had been/were in abusive relationships.

EMS: But "make sense of" doesn't necessarily mean "excuse" or "stay with," does it? Is there any evidence that women who repeatedly "make sense of" their situation by reading romance novels tend to change that situation in higher or lower numbers than women who do not?

We'll need to get this study or the full account of it to evaluate it properly--from the description here I'm not sure it qualifies as a "no doubt" proof, or even as very persuasive.

SSGF: I'm with Eric: we need to read this study in full, because it's very unclear (to me) as to whether Wood is looking at women already in an abusive relationship? Again, romance narratives might compound their problems, but I can't believe that they're the sole reason women are in those relationships. But this doesn't cover the blanket statement that Bindel seems to be making that all (or most) readers are adversely affected by the patriarchal ideology of the romance narrative. And if romances contribute to just one women staying in an abusive relationship, that is of course too many, but I think there's too many variables to be certain about anything.

EMS: And, as I've observed before, romance fiction is hardly the only genre or text that can be used to make sense (bad sense, destructive sense) of an abusive relationship. Thus, for example, this:
LV - Pointing out potentially unsavoury aspects of other genres/belief systems doesn't get romance off the hook, though, does it? I mean, if I commit a crime, it's still a crime, regardless of whether other people commit more crimes or worse crimes. And in fact, if other genres and belief systems could be used in the same ways as romance, might that not suggest that romances form part of a wider set of cultural ideas which validate abusive relationships? So if we're defending romance, I don't think we should distract attention onto the beams in other genres's eyes in order to dismiss claims that there's a mote in our own. But is there a mote in our eye? That is the question. And having now misquoted both the Bible and Shakespeare, I think I'd better stop.

EMS: Motes, shmotes! OK, you caught me, Laura. But my point--if I had one besides wanting to give Sarah something nifty to think about at church--was twofold:

• First, if romance does contain this set of cultural ideas, it may not do so any more than any other genre or branch of culture, in which case it's unfair to single it out for derision or critique; and
• Second, if romance and the Bible both contain such negative material, they also both contain material that contravenes or complicates or flatly contradicts it. The Bible contains the book of Lamentations, which is one of the more unsettling accounts of an abusive relationship I know, but it also contains the book of Job, which radically ironizes anyone's attempt to justify unfortunate events as divine punishment, and it also contains the Song of Songs, which is one of the loveliest accounts of equal and reciprocal companionate love that I know--in which, I might add, there is occasional play with hierarchy and power and so on.
  

SSGF: Eric, OMG, where did you GET that? I love Jesus the dom, spanking his little submissive! (I could go into a very long discussion of how Christianity is actually all about submission, but I'll do that another time!)

LV: Wendy Larcombe's Compelling Engagements : Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Annandale, N.S.W.: Federation Press, 2005 is described by her publisher as being

a ground-breaking work which investigates the narratives of rape law and of romance fiction, and explores the outmoded and strikingly similar depictions of their normative female subjects. These are women who are not only vulnerable but also evidently worthy of the protections or rewards promised: punishment of the rapist or the hero’s love. [...] Larcombe shows how the legal construction of gender and subjectivity in rape law is still working to disempower victims. She suggests feminism’s failure to accommodate women’s investment in heroines of romance fiction has limited their effectiveness in transforming rape law.

I haven't been able to get hold of either of these works to read them in full, so I don't know how much evidence, or what sort of evidence, Larcombe provides.

EMS: Does every woman (or man) who wants to be dominated think of him or herself as a "lesser being"? Again, on what evidence does she make that claim? This paragraph seems quite weak to me, but perhaps I'm missing something.

SSGF: Eric, from the BDSM perspective, absolutely not. In fact, most sexual submissives I know are incredibly self-confident, self-assured people who are usually Type A personalities IRL. In fact, in the community, if a submissive is needy and DOES imagine him/herself as a "lesser being," red flags are thrown up around them and clever doms learn to stay away. BDSM is not counseling, it's a sexual orientation. It shouldn't be used to work out self-esteem issues unless all the partners know exactly what they're doing. But that's not what Bindel is talking about. She's talking about a more pervasive unconscious drive that women apparently have to debase themselves because society tells them to. Part of the disconnect here, I think, is that most non-readers still buy into the stereotype of romance readers being undereducated housewives who shore up their "false consciousness" by addictively reading romances, whereas statistics show that, in general, romance readers have a higher education level than the general population, and are probably therefore slightly more conscious about how and why they read, and therefore less likely to "succumb" to the supposed patriarchal influence of romances.

SSGF: And furthermore, while Bindel is looking at how far we HAVEN'T come in feminist aims of an equal society and blaming it on romances, one could turn that on its head and look at how far we have come toward meeting goals of equality in the last forty years, which is precisely when romances have had their resurgence. As in, for hundreds (thousands) of years, equality for women was unavailable, even unimaginable, but since romances became popular, we've been creeping closer and closer to equality. Correlation or cause--you be the judge! (tongue planted firmly in cheek).

5. One argument from M&B apologists is that the heroine has moved with the times. True, she is now more physically active and sexually imaginative. The modern-day character often dares to have sex before marriage, knows what she wants in terms of her career and personal life, and even has a sense of humour.

EMS: So far, she's ceding points to us apologists. I'm getting suspicious. (Did she not have a sense of humour before? I haven't read enough category romances to comment--but then, has Bindel?)

6. As a result of the changing heroine, the hero has been required to catch up. But rather than becoming a "new man", it seems he has become even more masculine and domineering in order to keep the heroine in line. This is how the rape fantasies so integral to the plot have been able to persist.

SSGF: Oh, Lord, where to start. Hey, in the 90s, we tried the "beta" hero in a lot of category romances, and he wasn't so popular. I'm sure Bindel would say that this proves her point, but I'm not so sure. Yes, true, the hero has become more masculine and more domineering, but we've also gained much more access to his thoughts, to his point of view, and this gives us more access to understanding why he does what he does. Again, Bindel would probably say this is patriarchy at its worst, but I still wonder what part of the novels we're valorizing. If it's the end, where the hero is brought to heel--tamed, in fact (sorry, Laura, I know you don't like this word)--then the fact that he's super-domineering means the heroine's victory is that much more powerful (and empowering?).

LV - I also much prefer beta heroes (though because of the very different ways that people use the terms "alpha" and "beta" to describe romance heroes, they often aren't very helpful and you have to provide your own definition of each term before they can really be meaningful).

EMS: There's no logic to this paragraph, folks. Why would we expect the heroes to become more "beta" (mo' betta'?) if the heroines have become stronger? Wouldn't we expect precisely what has happened: stronger heroines need bigger challenges?

7. Take this description of a recent M&B novel, The Desert Sheikh's Captive Wife: "Tilda was regretting her short-lived romance with Rashad, the Crown Prince of Bakhar. Now, with her impoverished family indebted to him, Rashad was blackmailing her by insisting she pay up ... as his concubine! Soon Tilda was the arrogant Sheikh's captive, ready to be ravished in his far-away desert kingdom."

EMS: The "rape fantasy," if there is one, is staged as anticipation here. Does Tilda actually get ravished? Does the Sheikh remain arrogant? Bindel doesn't care enough to find out, but surely it makes a difference. This is one more retelling of E. M. Hull's classic The Sheik, evidently, but I suspect that its actual plot, turn for turn, and its characterization of both hero and heroine are radically different.

8. Or Bought: One Island, One Bride: "Self-made billionaire Alexander Kosta has come to the island of Lefkis for revenge ... He doesn't count on feisty pint-sized beauty Ellie Mendoras to be the thorn in his side! ... There's a dangerous smile on Alexander's lips ... As far as he's concerned Ellie's a little firecracker who needs to be tamed. He'll seduce her into compliance, then buy her body and soul!!"

EMS: "Seduce her into compliance" may mean "rape" in somebody's book, but I don't think it will mean rape in this one. And again, does anyone who reads much romance believe that Ellie will be the only one "tamed"?

9. Or Virgin Slave, Barbarian King: "Julia Livia Rufa is horrified when barbarians invade Rome and steal everything in sight. But she doesn't expect to be among the taken! As Wulfric's woman, she's ordered to keep house for the uncivilised marauders. Soon, though, Julia realises that she's more free as a slave than she ever was as a sheltered Roman virgin."

EMS: We're going to read this one collectively, here at TMT, in January: stay tuned for details. Dibs on the Wulfric costume!

SSGF: This one is fascinating to me, because the titillation factor is high on that last sentence, but the book is actually discussing definitions of civilization vs. barbarism and their treatment of women.

10. The first two were published this year, the third comes out in January.

SSGF: And we all know how accurate the front cover and back blurb are in depicting the atmosphere and actual ideology of the book (see all SBTB Cover Snark!). Great research there.

LV - And yet, people do pick up books at least partly as a result of looking at the covers. So presumably words such as "blackmail," "concubine," "ravished," "revenge," "dangerous," "seduce," and "compliance" are ones which attract some readers. Bindel might wonder what it is about these concepts that's attractive to readers.

EMS: I think Bindel knows what about these concepts is attractive: she just doesn't like it, and doesn't think they should be attractive. On the other hand, readers who know the genre also know that although the books may give them the frisson that these words promise, they will also end with an HEA, so that the book as a whole will take them from the ordinary world into the world of romance and then (as it were) carry them safely home. Even more, they know that they will get to indulge in a fantasy of power that is doubled: male power and female power, even if neither of these play out in a way that Bindel thinks is safe or sage.

LV - In another of the interviews Bindel's done, she spoke to Sheila Jeffreys, for whom

heterosexual sex is sexual desire that eroticises power differences. Lesbian and gay sexual practices do not escape her scrutiny. Two of her books, The Lesbian Heresy (1993) and Unpacking Queer Politics (2003), focus on how "queer" sexual politics have led to oppressed sexual minorities embracing any kind of sex, such as sadomasochism, in the name of liberation. Jeffreys tends to see things coming before they happen. She was the one who warned, in the early 1980s, that pornography and sadomasochistic sexual practices would invade the lesbian community. They did.

LV - Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from Bindel's overall positive response to Jeffreys, and from the word "warn," but I would guess that Bindel isn't exactly embracing sadomasochism. I've only found one other reference to Bindel's position on the issue: "Julie Bindel of Justice for Women even believes a 'bridge between lesbian feminism and S/M politics' is possible (Taylor and Chandler, 1995: 42). This is an unusual acknowledgment that sadomasochism does not necessarily rule out lesbian feminism" (O'Sullivan 118). [O'Sullivan, Sue. "What a Difference a Decade Makes: Coming to Power and The Second Coming." Feminist Review 61 Snakes and Ladders: Reviewing Feminisms at Century's End (1999): 97-126.]

SSGF: ::sigh:: If one sees BDSM purely as a representation of the repressive patriarchal power dynamics in society, then seeing it "infiltrate" the lesbian community must be devastating. But if one realizes that being kinky is, itself, a sexual orientation above and beyond being lesbian, then kinky lesbians do not herald the end of civilization as we know it. Kinky lesbians are just women who happen to enjoy playing with power dynamics in a relationship and I very much doubt the lesbian community has ever been free of them. Let's see, I know an incredibly feminine lesbian dom who calls herself "Master," and a very butch female dom who calls herself Daddy. The feminine dom is partnered with a very butch submissive. The butch femdom is partnered with an incredibly beautiful femme sub. I also know a butch femdom partnered with a butch submissive. How do we unpack the patriarchal power dynamics in these relationships? Or more to the point, should we unpack them? I would argue that we shouldn't.

EMS: "Heterosexual sex is sexual desire that eroticises power differences"? You mean, if I have hot power-exchange sex with another guy, it will still be heterosexual sex? Damn! No one tells me anything. More seriously, see Sappho's poem above, among any number of other texts.

11. In 1970, one of M&B's regular writers, Violet Winspear, claimed that her heroes had to be "capable of rape". Another, Hilary Wilde, said in 1966, "The odd thing is that if I met one of my heroes, I would probably bash him over the head with an empty whisky bottle. It is a type I loathe and detest. I imagine in all women, deep down inside us, is a primitive desire to be arrogantly bullied." These comments may have been made some time ago, but the tradition seems to continue in the many M&B novels that depict female submission to dominant heroes.

SSGF: Or maybe all women, deep down inside, have the primitive desire to control the arrogant bully, because that's certainly what romances give them, if we valorize the ending, not the middle.

LV - I don't think "all women" have either of these "primitive desires". The term "primitive desire" is interesting, because it suggests that these desires are innate/"natural". But if we accept that, does it mean that true vanilla-ness is deviant/kinky/subversive of the norm?

SSGF: I like the way you think! :-)

EMS: Face it, Laura: you're utterly bent! As for Bindel, has she in fact demonstrated that there are "many M&B novels that depict female submission to dominant heroes"? She's shown me the heroes; no evidence yet of the submission. Not in this article, anyway.

SSGF: Ooh, nice point, Eric. Is Bindel arguing by proxy that dominant male necessarily equals submissive female, without thinking that dominant male might just as easily equal dominant female as well?

12. My horror at the genre is not directed towards either the women who write or, indeed, read them. I do not believe in blaming women for our own oppression. Women are the only oppressed group required not only to submit to our oppressors, but to love and sexually desire them at the same time. This is what heterosexual romantic fiction promotes - the sexual submission of women to men. M&B novels are full of patriarchal propaganda.

SSGF: So what dynamic are the kinky gay men in Joey Hills' Rough Canvas replicating? Is Thomas in the feminine position as the submissive/bottom? Isn't that an equally egregious stereotype of homosexual relations as Bindel's view of power relations in romance novels?

EMS: Having gone through this article paragraph by paragraph, I simply do not find that she has demonstrated any one of these central points. She has not shown that heterosexual romantic fiction promotes female sexual submission, nor that the novels are full of patriarchal propaganda. She argues by assertion, with flimsy evidence or none at all. She has convinced me that she has a "horror" at the genre, but that "horror" seems mostly her own disgust with fantasies she neither shares nor enjoys, and with the women who have them. (But it's not their fault! Really--they can be saved!)

SSGF: For what it's worth, going back to the ritualized submission of BDSM sexual orientation and practices, the submissive has all the power in the relationship. It is the submissive's right and duty to say "Stop!" at any point, and the dom's responsibility not only to respect this negative, but also to make sure the submissive is alright, whether or not s/he says stop at all. While this might be viewed at patronizing from outside the community, it absolutely isn't when practiced in real life. Any dom who earns a reputation for not stopping or makes any kind of remarks about respecting safewords should be and usually is completely ostracized. The submissive has all the power, precisely because the submissive gives up the power.

13. I can say it no better than the late, great Andrea Dworkin. This classic depiction of romance is simply "rape embellished with meaningful looks".

SSGF: Nothing is ever black or white. Nothing is absolutely one thing or the other. Does Bindel's argument hold some water for some women? Probably. Her fault is in not realizing that romances can be and are empowering for other women. Her fault is in throwing around words like "misogynistic hate speech" without recognizing that others might feel differently and that for the women who subjugate themselves to patriarchal practices, romance novels are the least of their concerns.

LV - Given Bindel’s admiration for Dworkin, it may be fruitful to examine possible similarities in their thinking. Dworkin, as noted in the obituary Bindel wrote about her, “came to represent the fierce debate on pornography and sexual violence.” Bindel has done research into “sexual violence and the criminal justice system. A founder member of the feminist law reform campaign Justice for Women, Julie believes that doing paid work, however ethically and responsibly, is not enough, and remains a committed political activist.”

LV - Dworkin “achieved fame when, in 1983 along with legal academic Catharine MacKinnon, she drafted and promoted the civil rights law recognising pornography as sex discrimination in Minneapolis” and later “Dworkin and MacKinnon were commissioned by the Minneapolis city council to draft a local ordinance that would embody the legal principle that pornography violates the civil rights of women, and is ‘hate speech.’”

SSGF: Personally, I don't feel repressed by the porn I watch and read.

LV - In paragraph 3 Bindel used the term “hate speech” to describe romances, and I wonder if she also believes that they are pornography. Certainly romances have been described this way by some feminist critics of the genre. 1979 saw the publication of Ann Snitow’s “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different” and it was followed the next year by Ann Douglas’s “Soft-Porn Culture: Punishing the Liberated Woman.” Douglas’s comments are particularly relevant, as I think her ideas about romance may be similar to Bindel’s:

The Harlequins are porn softened to fit the needs of female emotionality. They are located inside the female consciousness, but so are most current hard-porn (heterosexual) stories and magazines; so, for that matter, are the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. Female, not male, consciousness is the most satisfactory repository and register for the forced acknowledgement of male power. The Harlequin heroines initially resist domination, but so do the hard-core heroines. Breaking down female antagonism is half the fun. (27)

and

How can they [romance readers] tolerate or require so extraordinary a disjuncture between their lives and their fantasies? Probably the Harlequins are not written by men [...] but the women who couldn’t thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves, not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality. It is a frightening measure of the still patriarchal quality of our culture that many women of all ages co-sponsor male fantasies about themselves and enjoy peep-shows into masculine myths about their sexuality as the surest means of self-induced excitation. (28)

[LV - I've put all of the Bindel paragraphs into a dark green (green being one of the colours of the suffragette movement).]