Peeking into the rock

whenever I visit romance sites I bump into the non-question: "Is there anything sexier than a former Marine with a gorgeous body?" (Really. every time)

Yes, yes, there is.  A former marine isn't sexy to me at all.  Show me a real man -- a railroad engineer, a nurse, a chef, an archaeologist, a mechanic, a hairdresser, a guitar repairperson, a tailor, a phlebotomist, a glassblower, an irrigator, a dentist, a gandy dancer, a crab fisherman -- not a marine.

And those bodies that can only be achieved by carefully symmetric, exactly counted, perfectly time repetitions of precise movements and measured weights, and evenly tanned all over to some peculiar ideal?  They're boring and unattractive.  I want the ones that develop from real-life activities and experiences, a sinew there, a muscle there, a lump of fat there, a tan line, a freckle, a mole, a scar, something real and imbued with story.  I don't care what a man can bench-press.  I want to read his story.

I knew an ex-marine that I liked very much.  He joined to defend democracy.  When I knew him: he was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Well, I've taken a side trip into the modern regular mass-market romance. I'm not sure why, because they irritate me. I think they irritate me even more now that they have redeeming features as a rule than they did twenty years ago when they didn't generally. I know what irritates me about them, anyway. It's the way they handle gender and sex. Big surprise there, huh? But it's different from the problems of the past. At least I think it is.

In the past romances were all about "The Goose Girl" and "King Thrushbeard." The young women started out independent,virginal, and utterly mistaken about men. They became isolated from friends and family and went through humiliating adventures, became trapped by the men they were trying to avoid, had their eyes opened about the superiority of these dangerous men, and lived happily ever after, having renounced their independence and quite often every idea they'd ever had about anything, including class, esthetics, and personal loyalty. The men were simply awful -- brooding, rude, prejudiced, spoiled, egotistical -- and we were supposed to love them for it.The entrapment and humiliation were often engineered with the help of people the young women had reason to trust. It was beyond sexual masochism. It was disgusting.

So the new romances have left the worst of this behind. The women are rarely entirely virginal: they like sex. Even the virgins like sex: they're just not willing to share something so nice with someone who's passing through, which is fair enough. Okay, that's good. They're often professionals and they often manage to hold on to their professions during the course of the story, even after they get together with the men. That's good. The men respect their abilities and don't usually rob them of their independent lives. That's good. Frequently the men are not even assholes. And that's good too. And the women manage to hold on to (or gain) friends and family besides those provided by the men. Sometimes the friends and family of the women are part of their attraction to the men. Another good thing.

But. I find myself skipping the sex scenes. That's odd, isn't it? Because I don't generally skip sex scenes. I like the idea of sex scenes in a book. Sex is nice. And romances are all about eros, aren't they? Isn't there some definition of eros that includes romance and not just fucking? -- the thing where there's three kinds of love, eros, agape, and something else? (here it is: the other word I was thinking of was philia) So isn't it a problem, with me or with the genre, if I can't stand the sex scenes? I'm not a prude. I adore the sex scenes in the online serial gay coming of age romance genre, and also the ones in the print gay romantic comedy genre. And no, I don't think that all sex scenes have to have plural penises to seem right to me. (I can enjoy a straight romantic scene or a lesbian one too: it's all in the writing, and the rightness)

And I also find myself getting resentful every time the books describe the main characters (not so much with the minor characters). And I think this is the same thing.

If I never have to read "the swell of her breasts" or "the swell of her hips" or "the swell of his thighs" again, it will be too soon. And if I never have to read one more time how fucking masculine the guy is or how fucking feminine the woman is, I'll still resent the number of times I've had to read those things in the last couple of weeks reading no more than four or five books. Why are all the men built exactly the same way? They are all big and muscular and defined and have eentsy waists. The women are either tiny or tall, and they are also either delicate or voluptuous. Either way they're startlingly feminine and the guy gets a boner over it. These men get boners all the fucking time, too. And the women are always having the most shocking orgasms every in the history of sex.

No, it's not the hyperbole that gets me. It's really quite permissable for an erotic story to have the sex be over the top. It's the smarminess of the language. I think. And the smugness. Yes, these stories are smug. They smirk. And so do the men, and I don't like it when men smirk. Neither do the women in these stories, except for the fact that really they do like it when the men smirk.

The men aren't real, but that's not the problem, is it? It's the way that the men aren't real that's the problem. It's that the fantasy is so bankrupt. The James Bond type of hero, hypermasculine (except that it's not what I recognize as masculinity -- it's alien and alienating so how can I recognize it as masculine?), stilted, smelling of brand-name aftershave and wearing brand-name clothes. Men all do "manly" things in these books: they play pickup ball games with their masculine pals, they watch The Game, they have trucks or sports cars, they wear jeans or suits -- no, it's not the things they do that's the problem, it's the ritual masculinity of it all, the un-nuanced and thin and flimsy character non-building, the refusal to build a new world for the books.

The worst thing, though, is the Rural Retreat Romance. In these, either he or she or both are in flight from the big, shallow, bad, heartbreaking, unreal city, and they find they true love, community, family, real values, and everything good in an impossible vision of small town America that never existed. It's so fucking "red state" and false and nasty I can't forgive it. If the story is urban and stays urban, the woman starts out with class consciousness and gives it up for her reactionary, silk-shirted beau because real values are about hot men and their vulnerable side and not whatever it was she was mistakenly into before.

Oh. my. dog. I just realized I came full circle and the thing I hate about the modern romance is that it is the old romance, after all.