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Wednesday, April 22, 2020

love in the time of covid-19

I have a confession to make and it's not that my only personal online comment about the coronavirus so far is about underwear.

I don't know how judgmental you will get on this; maybe you will judge me for judging you by thinking you are judging me. 

It's not a crime. I'm not about to declare that I shot JFK (or J.R.) or kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.*

It's a thing that a lot of people do that I have only just gotten around to doing after years of turning my nose up in disdain, declaring I would never stoop so low.

My name is noplot and I read romance novels.

It started innocently enough with a recommendation from a blogger named Julia from Here Be Hippogriffs, a writer who I love and admire but who has sadly disappeared from the blogosphere. She brazenly admitted liking kilt-rippers but in particular sang the praises of Georgette Heyer. Having dabbled before and found the genre wanting, I was skeptical but trusted Julia enough to try again.

My library happened to have one e-book by Heyer; Faro's Daughter turned out to be the literary equivalent of a Cary Grant screwball comedy set in Regency England. Delightful and witty and romantic and fun. And no sex, not even of the train-enters-the-tunnel-metaphorically kind.

One free book turned into a collection of 23 volumes and counting, not a dud amongst the lot.** I would own more but all her romances are in trade paperback that cost $25 Canadian or more - pretty pricey for an author who's been dead for 46 years. In some ways this is a good thing since I have been forced to purchase them slowly, taking my time, making it last. 

This did not prevent me from racing my friend who didn't know what a meme was to get to the romance section of a huge used book sale last year. When she managed to get one I didn't have yet, I refrained from snatching the precious volume from her hands...but just barely and only because it might harm the book.

It all gets a bit hazy after my first hit of Heyer. Perhaps there were other hidden gems out there? Perhaps not all romance writers were "witless with wanting." Perhaps I could hide my shame by sampling some other works in the privacy of my own e-library stacks. Libraries make excellent hiding places.

Somewhere along the way, I also stumbled upon an excellent website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books that continued to support my habit by providing recommendations and also linking to free books and great sales. 

If you are my friend on Goodreads, you may have noted an uptick on the number of romance novels I will admit to have read. Technically, that is only a tip of the iceberg but the ones you find there are the ones I have actually read from cover to cover. It's a rule I have - read all the words, you have to own it.***

There are many that I have just read for the good bits which may or may not include: the blurb, enough of the set up to know what the set up is but could you please just get on with it, the meet cute, the meet stupid, the meet wildly improbable, some of the hero's angst but not all because he should just get over himself, some of the heroine's angst ditto, the first kiss, the first time his heartstrings/penis went zing (sometimes on the first page), the first time she realized she should have worn pantyliners, first base, second base, what even is third base, the household chores being done by paid subordinates, the sex, the set up for the sex but then sadly not the sex, the wedding, the epilogue baby. 

My personal preference is usually for historical romance, hence the Heyer. It's easier to make the sexual tension climb slowly when the woman can't just decide to jump the man as soon as she notices how he fills out his cream-coloured breeches.  Modern romances have a hard time coming up with reasons why the story isn't over as soon as somebody's maidenhead is no longer in peril.

One modern series I read consisted of a different-yet-strangely-the-same Alpha Male in each book explaining to His Woman that she is beautiful and awesome and perfect just the way she is even if she thinks she's fat (which she clearly isn't) because he says she is (or isn't) and could she please stop putting herself down because she is really Pissing Him Off. It was this series that made me understand why some people stay with bad boyfriends because the sex is good.

Then there's the shapeshifter series where the guy turns into a wolf or a tiger or bear and the sex is animalistic and hot but nobody ever has sex when in animal form because that would just be weird. But it's okay to just kidnap women and take them off to your lair to have mind-blowing sex because you can just tell by her scent that she's your mate. No need to find out if your Netflix wishlist has any overlaps.

Then there's all the wish fulfilment from landing a rich boyfriend: 
  • The closet full of clothes (including jeans!) that all fits perfectly, all purchased by a personal shopper who has never met the heroine or by the billionaire's chief henchman, who is charmingly gruff and whose psychic power is guessing women's measurements just by looking at her.  Jesus, I can't even figure out what fits me by looking at sizes in the store and I live in this body. 
  • The housekeeper  who cooks all the meals, washes all the dishes, does all the shopping, and never walks in to dust when everybody's got their knickers off, thereby turning hot and sexy into a scene more cringey than a full season of The Office.
  • The trips on private planes that are really bad for the environment. Plus I would never take off my seatbelt during the flight because of unexpected turbulence, thereby limiting things in terms of sexual positions or contact and really I was just going to read my book.****
I've tried a little bit of BDSM (which is something I'd never imagined saying out loud on the internet so thank God my mother doesn't remember to read these posts) but after a couple dozen books or so, I found it mostly left me cold. 

First of all, it sounds really exhausting for the guy especially when he spends all night thinking up inventive ways to cause multiple orgasms for her, while only getting the one for himself, and then has to get up before dawn to be an extremely successful capitalist in some vague manner which is totally not environmentally unfriendly or oppressive to third world countries or obscene in any way shape or form because, let's face it, great wealth in the hands of the few is the greatest plague upon humanity, unless, of course, you are using it to cause earth-shattering orgasms.

Plus afterwards you have to wipe down all the equipment.

And also, I am a middle child so, as Her Father will attest, the first order that comes out the guy's mouth, I'd be like, "Fuck off, Christian, you're not the boss of me!"

The thing is that I have loved romance all my life. I love romantic comedy movies, I love romantic scenes is other movies. I shipped Mulder and Scully, I shipped Remington Steele and Laura, I shipped Maddie and David from Moonlighting, Sam and Diane, Ross and Rachel.

But I also learned early that I shouldn't like "girly" things like romance novels. Girly things are not cool. They are silly and frivolous and not important topics of conversations such as sports and cars and penis size and whatever else it is that men talk about? Boats? Hunting and gathering? Phlegm?

Everyone agrees that Love is the most important thing but writing about the search for love is seriously uncool.

I grew up in the '60s and '70s when the war between the sexes was raging. It's not like sexism has vanished since then, but it's hard for anyone born in this century to know how sickening it was. You didn't even realize half of it because you were so used to it, it didn't even occur to you to be annoyed.

Star Trek was one of my favourite shows and there were plenty of women in it, but Captain Kirk called his female crew "girls". One show centred on a woman who went mad because she could never be a starship captain so she took over Kirk's body. The crew noticed something was up because Girl-Krik was so histrionic - considering Shatner's acting choices, I wonder how they noticed the difference.

But, why the fuck was it so unbelievable that in 300 years a woman could be a starship captain?

When I read books, I was always drawn to the tomboy character, a girl who could be just as boy as the next boy, like Jo in Little Women, like Nancy's friend George in Nancy Drew. I actually preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew because I thought Nancy was too girly. Nancy kept getting saved by her boyfriend. The Hardy Boys got themselves out of scrapes.

I was not really a tomboy; I sucked at sports; I didn't want to learn karate; I didn't particularly want to climb trees, unless maybe it was a nice treehouse with a ladder and place to sit and read my book about girls who were tomboys.

I didn't want to be a boy; I love being a girl.  But in my mind, girly girls were less than; the girls I admired could do "boy" things and do them well. The thought that "girly" things were not inferior but were just rated that way is a concept that has taken decades to sink in.

As for books, there was a pecking order that had come down through the ages and modern romance novels were definitely on the bottom, probably lower than instruction manuals since the romance writing style was reputed to be so abysmal.

The fact is that many great works of literature are out and out romances. All of Shakespeare's comedies and a good deal of his tragedies. All of Jane Austen's work. Jane Eyre. Lots of Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Many great works include romance even when the main plot is something else. But the minute you call them a "romance" it's like you insulted them.

Meanwhile, romance novelists are working in their billion dollar girly ghetto because they know what sells - there are plenty of women who want to hear what they have to say. There are good writers and bad writers. There are writers who get a lot of stuff right even when they get a lot of stuff wrong. 

We all need a bit of romance in our lives. Some men will claim they add women to their testosterone-fuelled action flicks because a) it makes the women in the audience happy and b) boobs, but I suspect they also ship Hulk and Black Widow just like the rest of us.

Romance isn't just hearts and flowers and wish fulfillment; it's about finding real love, a love that will last through your life, a love that will sustain and support you.

It's possible to have a good life without ever finding that one person who loves you, someone who picked you out of the crowd and said this is the person I need to stay in my life, the one I'd most like to be quarantined with. Someone under no obligation to care about how you like your bacon or your eggs or to tolerate you or the rest of your family at Thanksgiving dinner. Someone who will go to two different supermarkets to buy the bread you like. Someone who will nag you to get your snow tires on because otherwise they'll worry until you get home during the first snowstorm.

It's possible to live without romance, but I doubt anyone starts out rejecting the idea out of hand.

Writing about romance is hard. It's the stuff of everyday life. No explosions, no bullets flying, and no car crashes, although my mother told me she nearly killed my father by getting out of the car when he was in the middle of changing the tire on their first date. If falling off a jack counts as a car crash...

The typical romance is more like Girl has birthday and gets Boy's name from a friend in lieu of present.***** Boy meets Girl for coffee even though Girl doesn't drink coffee (Boy probably should have taken that as a sign that he will have to go to multiple supermarkets looking for bread some day). Boy takes Girl to a Johnny Depp movie that is supposed to be a romance but is just awkward and strange. Boy kisses Girl anyway. Girl likes Boy but realizes she's in the middle of a major depression and puts Boy on hold until the drugs kick in. Girl remembers how to feel again and stalks Boy at the Regatta. Boy takes Girl to the Folk Festival. Girl kisses Boy. Boy goes on three week vacation without Girl and sends her only one freaking email. Girl tries to surprise Boy by picking him up at the airport but Boy has unromantically left his car in longterm parking. Girl awkwardly trails Boy home. Boy ignores Girl at the door because Rat has been using his house as an Air BNB while he was gone. Girl stands there awkwardly watching shovel-wielding Boy chase Rat, wondering why this reunion is so awkward and strange and not like a romance novel at all. Boy drives Rat out from behind the couch causing Girl to leap posthaste aside as Rat leaves posthaste through the back door. Boy is mortified. Girl can't wait to start a blog so she can tell the world about it in three part harmony, with photographs with circles and arrows and paragraphs on the back of each one and asterisks on the bottom explaining her references.****** Boy asks Girl to marry him even though Girl uses way too many words and asterisks to tell a story. Girl marries Boy despite his lack of appreciation for a good run-on sentence.

Finding the right romance novel(s) for me have been a lot like the process of finding the right man. There's a wide range of them, lots of duds, lots of maybes with weird bits that just don't work, lots with good bits that don't make up for the bad bits. Other people will try to set me up with someone, saying "this one is great" but I figure out pretty quick that they're just not my type. Some are nice but just not right. 

Some will blow my socks off and not just euphemistically. I will read them again and again and never get tired of them because they capture those moments of connection, the times when two people look at each other and just know they are meant to be together through pandemics and every other disaster and every good thing too.






*For those who were born in this century, the answer key (allegedly): Lee Harvey Oswald, (Kristin), Bruno Richard Hauptmann, i.e. not me 
**Apparently the same can't be said for her contemporary mystery novels so I've avoided them and can therefore neither confirm nor deny
***Fortunately for me, it is literally impossible to read all the words in Fifty Shades of Grey so no one will ever know that embarrassing fact about me
****I read this one book where the guy bought them first class tickets instead because it left less of a carbon footprint and I practically swooned
*****Total fabrication, I got the name and a present!