Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Smart Bitches?
Well, I do, and not just because they aren't afraid to skewer man-titte. Today I love them for blogging on women's sexuality in romance novels. There are two points in here I'd like to throw out, the first beginning with this comment by Sarah:
Anything that treats women’s sexuality as anything positive and allows for sexual exploration from a female-centered viewpoint is inherently subversive. Locating romance within the history of fiction about women, and you find an inherent contrast from books that eagerly posited that any female who engaged in sexual acts and enjoyed it was destined for a painful, pox-ridden, hell-bound death.”
I know that many roll their eyes and call romance "chick porn" and while we can go into the debate that there's nothing wrong with that, I'm not going there. To me, whether a story is a straight romance or erotica, so long as it treats its characters in a respectful manner, I will enjoy reading it.
The other point concerns Candy's comments about Happily Ever After. "There’s a prejudice against the happy ending, and I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the snobbery isn’t entirely unjustified. I’ve read far too many books in which the endings were far too pat and far too easy. On the other hand, I’ve also read a great deal of books in which I could just tell the authors were gleefully rubbing their hands over the Portentious and Tragic Ending for Our Struggling Protagonists and *wrist on forehead* it’ll be so literary and ironic and heart-rendingly tragic."
I like happy endings, dammit. I also find snark and angst overrated. That's not to say I want to be stupidly happy and oblivious, but misery for its sake is just...pointless. Spare me the martyrdom, and don't tell me that romance is a lesser genre because it shows women having happy, fulfilled lives. Candy is absolutely right, pat endings are lame, no matter whether it's pat HEA or pat melodrama.
3 comments:
Make me a happy rebel then.
Sooo agree with you. There are too many "bad" endings in life. Nothings wrong with a little escapism into fantasy, keeps hope alive and us from drowning in depression.
Heh, I hear ya, Jill. I take great satisfaction in knowing that William Shakespeare's plays were regarded as pulp fiction back then, and that critics of his day regarded Marlowe as infinitely superior.
And who do we read now? Who do we study? ;-)
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