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Continuing with Kamble, and questioning my life choices
In the chapter in which Kamble attributes the Moreness of heroes in Mills & Boon over time to gay rights, and the need to depict / demonstrate / prove heterosexuality, we find sentences like this.
“The marriage into which he coerces her permits the inclusion of sexual intercourse midway through the narrative and he physically forces the heroine into bed, though the label of rape is avoided by documenting the heroine’s feelings of sexual arousal.”
I get that this was published in 2014, and likely this sentence written well before that. And yet still.
Kamble asserts that we moved from the rape-y heroes of the 70s to a slightly less rape-y/physical assaulty 80s. “The emergence of this character can be explained through a look at the state of the gay rights movement in this decade.” That remains astonishing — but is the thesis of the entire chapter — and her summary of events in the efforts to recognize civil rights for lesbians and gays in the UK leaves a lot to be desired. I mean, yay, I learned about abseiling into the House of Lords (you too can read about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/27/section-28-protesters-30-years-on-we-were-arrested-and-put-in-a-cell-up-by-big-ben). But the summary includes things like this: “laws in Canada … had continually awarded more rights to the gay and lesbian populace”. _Awarded_?
Anyway. Back to the thesis, such as it is: “This change in the texts coincides with the waning of the panic over homosexuality; in other words, the hero does not have to be on guard any more against an emotional display that might be viewed as unmanly, a trait popularly associated with homosexuality.”
Kamble has a really high degree of commitment to this thesis. “It is crucial to remember this evolution of the mytholy of the Alphaman so that the form is not read mistakenly or one-sidedly as a regressive symbol against feminism alone.”
OK, but wouldn’t it be _so_ _much_ _more_ _straightforward_ to read Alphaman as a solution to an increasingly difficult conundrum? As readers who were raised with a very Defer to the Man Marriage Ideology gained confidence in the workplace, the Man they were going to defer to needed to be a lot More in order to make deferring to him seem at all reasonable. That does not make it a regressive symbol against feminism. What it makes it is a stressed ideology struggling to adapt to a universe that it is poorly adapted to. It was eventually replaced (mostly) with consent culture, which is great, and a much more collaborative approach to heterosexual romantic relationships, which is also great.
Kamble discusses in the next bit the 70s and 80s in US popular romantic fiction, and spends a chunk of time on some very rape-y books, notably, _Whitney, My love_. There’s a bunch of bullshit about what purpose outside the text my be served by all the rape-y-ness, which I’m not even going to get into. Kamble then remarks on “the popularity of novels that contain such an episode. The timing of the motif’s appearance in the eighties, unprecedented in the genre’s nearly 70-year history, suggests that the focus on forceful male desire for a woman is a reaffirmation of heterosexuality.”
Well, what else could it be? But then look at the publishing history. This was a Simon & Schuster publication via Pocket Books in the wake of the recent (1979) ending of their relationship with Mills & Boon / Harlequin as the US distributor. Simon & Schuster needed books to sell, so they started their own lines, and if there is one thing you can say about popular romantic fiction, it is _highly_ sensitive to sales. And we _also_ know that rape scenes were really prevalent in movies and TV because they increased engagement — people talked about them, people went to see what all the talk was about, etc. etc. We didn’t get rid of rape scenes in movies and TV because they didn’t move product; we got rid of them with political pressure. That shit was _toxic_. (I know they are not _all_ gone).
I don’t know what Mills & Boon’s editorial policy on rape was, but I gotta believe it was Hard Pass. Basically, _as soon as_ someone was publishing popular romantic fiction that did NOT have a Hard Pass policy on rape, we got rape. And it’s been tough to completely stamp it back out of existence since, because it, unfortunately, generates buzz.
“The marriage into which he coerces her permits the inclusion of sexual intercourse midway through the narrative and he physically forces the heroine into bed, though the label of rape is avoided by documenting the heroine’s feelings of sexual arousal.”
I get that this was published in 2014, and likely this sentence written well before that. And yet still.
Kamble asserts that we moved from the rape-y heroes of the 70s to a slightly less rape-y/physical assaulty 80s. “The emergence of this character can be explained through a look at the state of the gay rights movement in this decade.” That remains astonishing — but is the thesis of the entire chapter — and her summary of events in the efforts to recognize civil rights for lesbians and gays in the UK leaves a lot to be desired. I mean, yay, I learned about abseiling into the House of Lords (you too can read about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/27/section-28-protesters-30-years-on-we-were-arrested-and-put-in-a-cell-up-by-big-ben). But the summary includes things like this: “laws in Canada … had continually awarded more rights to the gay and lesbian populace”. _Awarded_?
Anyway. Back to the thesis, such as it is: “This change in the texts coincides with the waning of the panic over homosexuality; in other words, the hero does not have to be on guard any more against an emotional display that might be viewed as unmanly, a trait popularly associated with homosexuality.”
Kamble has a really high degree of commitment to this thesis. “It is crucial to remember this evolution of the mytholy of the Alphaman so that the form is not read mistakenly or one-sidedly as a regressive symbol against feminism alone.”
OK, but wouldn’t it be _so_ _much_ _more_ _straightforward_ to read Alphaman as a solution to an increasingly difficult conundrum? As readers who were raised with a very Defer to the Man Marriage Ideology gained confidence in the workplace, the Man they were going to defer to needed to be a lot More in order to make deferring to him seem at all reasonable. That does not make it a regressive symbol against feminism. What it makes it is a stressed ideology struggling to adapt to a universe that it is poorly adapted to. It was eventually replaced (mostly) with consent culture, which is great, and a much more collaborative approach to heterosexual romantic relationships, which is also great.
Kamble discusses in the next bit the 70s and 80s in US popular romantic fiction, and spends a chunk of time on some very rape-y books, notably, _Whitney, My love_. There’s a bunch of bullshit about what purpose outside the text my be served by all the rape-y-ness, which I’m not even going to get into. Kamble then remarks on “the popularity of novels that contain such an episode. The timing of the motif’s appearance in the eighties, unprecedented in the genre’s nearly 70-year history, suggests that the focus on forceful male desire for a woman is a reaffirmation of heterosexuality.”
Well, what else could it be? But then look at the publishing history. This was a Simon & Schuster publication via Pocket Books in the wake of the recent (1979) ending of their relationship with Mills & Boon / Harlequin as the US distributor. Simon & Schuster needed books to sell, so they started their own lines, and if there is one thing you can say about popular romantic fiction, it is _highly_ sensitive to sales. And we _also_ know that rape scenes were really prevalent in movies and TV because they increased engagement — people talked about them, people went to see what all the talk was about, etc. etc. We didn’t get rid of rape scenes in movies and TV because they didn’t move product; we got rid of them with political pressure. That shit was _toxic_. (I know they are not _all_ gone).
I don’t know what Mills & Boon’s editorial policy on rape was, but I gotta believe it was Hard Pass. Basically, _as soon as_ someone was publishing popular romantic fiction that did NOT have a Hard Pass policy on rape, we got rape. And it’s been tough to completely stamp it back out of existence since, because it, unfortunately, generates buzz.
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