Glittery HooHa

[zingerella]

Via sabotabby, one of the coarser, more colourful articulations of a literary convention that I blame for messing up a lot of people's ideas of how Wuv works: The heroine's glittery hooha (GHH).

Romance author Jenny Crusie's quandary:

my hero, who is supernaturally irresistible (stick with me, it works) sleeps with at least twelve women before he goes to

Comments

[raincitygirl]

Maybe I'm the wrong target audience, not being much of a romance novel fan, but I can't help but wonder what's so terrible about a protagonist being sexually active. I mean, if he's taking precautions to guard against STDs and pregnancy, he's not coercing or pressuring his sexual partners, and he's not lying to them about what type of relationship he wants, is he still a bad person? I haven't read the book, but from Crusie's description, it sounds like the character is pretty open about what he's looking for from a date, prior, of course, to meeting the heroine and her GHH. Assuming that everybody's presumably a reasonably intelligent, reasonably sober grown-up, if those women have decided they're okay with having a casual fling with him, what exactly does the heroine have to get upset about?

Now, maybe teh character is a misogynistic asshole who doggedly pursues 'stud' status while being contemptuous of the 'loose women' who fall for him, but if he's the hero, I'd hope he wouldn't be like that. I'm just uncomfortable with the idea that anybody, male or female, is considered 'tainted' just because they've had sex in the past, and enjoyed themselves. It's progress away from the stupid double standard which makes men studs and women sluts for the same behaviour, but I'm not sure if it's progress in the right direction. Instead of rejecting the idea that a sexual past equals contemptible promiscuity for a woman, we're extending the condemnation to cover men too. And, absent any evidence of his promiscuity having been coupled with irresponsible and/or hurtful behaviour towards his past lovers, I don't think that's helpful. For one thing because it makes the sex itself the problem with some guy who is a misogynistic asshole, rather than the behaviour surrounding the sex.

Or I could be overanalysing this.

[zingerella]

In real life there's nothing wrong with a sexually active partner. In this LJ, there's really, really nothing wrong with anyone being sexually active (with reasonable precautions, active, enthusiastic consent, and all those Good Things.)

Crusie's talking about genre conventions and reader expectations, which, of course, reflect societal ideals, but don't always mirror society, if that makes sense.

I'm not much of a romance reader, so I'm going to have to take Crusie's word for it and extrapolate from the small number of romance-qua-romance novels I've read. I'm guessing that romance readers (or at least the readers of this particular sub-genre) have been deeply infected by the one-man-for-one-woman notion of true love. They want the hero and the heroine to get it on with each other, and not with anyone else. I suspect it's okay for the hero and heroine to have had previous partners, sometime in the backstory, but not within the covers of that particular book.

This is what I'm guessing.

As far as I'm concerned, Hero and Heroine can get it on with as many people as they like, as long as it's in the service of the story and not gratuitous (there's a place for gratuitous sex, but I prefer my stories to have relevant sex).

[raincitygirl]

Good point about Crusie writing genre fic for which there are certain reader expectations.

I wonder if that's got something to do with why fanfic erotica has become such a huge thing. Slash fic takes reader expectations re: acceptable female behaviour out of the equation entirely (and is usually written by women for women). And in het fanfic, there seems to be more latitude for behaviour by female characters which would be frowned on in traditional published romance/erotica.

Of course, there's also the fact that fanfic isn't supposed to make a profit, so it can take more risks and cater to a niche market, as opposed to playing it safe to try to appeal to a broad audience among romance readrs. The worst that'll happen is that a given story won't get much feedback, as opposed to a publishing company losing their investment in a book and needing ot answer to the shareholders. The amount of money at stake would probably encourage publishers to play it safe and get their writers to give them more of a product which they already know will sell. I wouldn't be surprised if some women who buy and read romance novels are also frustrated by the conventions, but put up with them because there's nothing else on the market. A self-perpetuating conservatism, perhaps.

And there's also the fact that fanfic writers don't have to think up original characters and put lots of time into making sure the readers get attached to them. Provided a ficcer is able to keep their borrowed characters in character and not mess up on showing the background plot (i.e. the worldbuilding provided by the TV show or movie in question), they can skip straight to the specific plot of the story and/or the porny stuff without putting tons of time into set-up. The readers are already attached to these characters or they wouldn't be reading the fic in the first place, and they don't need the details of the background explained to them either. But all the above aside, I wonder how much the popularity of fanfic has to do with women who want to read erotica, and are bored or turned off by the story conventions in the erotica written commercially.

[zingerella]

See again, I don't know much about the conventions of erotica, either, save that they differ from those of romance. Ask me about conventions of speculative fiction, and I'm a lot better informed.

I do know that readers in most genres (including so-called literary fic, although the readers will deny this) are, like most consumers of entertaiment, overwhelmingly conservative. People want clear narrative arcs, with stories that end, goddammit, and tie up all the loose ends. They want their moral ambiguity to be easily resolved-they don't mind suffering with a protagonist who faces tough decisions, but they want to believe that their protagonist has made the best decision possible under the circumstances. They want their gender conventions upheld. Authors who defy the conventions are frequently met with incomprehension or hostility.

It is indeed a self-perpetuating conservatism.

And I can't opine too much on fanfic (placidia? Are you here? If I shine the beaker-shaped-beacon of shininess will you come and opine? You know much more about this than I do. ellarien? Is this something on which you can venture an opinion?) I think there's a lot going on there: the desire for more of one's favourite world and characters (itself a kind of default to the familiar, no?) And, while ficcers are free to ignore publishers' bottom lines, doesn't fic have its own conventions?

[ellarien]

You called? I can't speak to the erotica part of the question: all my fanfic is strictly PG-rated, and I only write it for one particular TV show that's so ancient it pretty much predates the idea of continuity between episodes. There's definitely a self-indulgent element there, though, and I remember being amazed to find that I wasn't the only one with those particular buttons.

I do like spending more time with the characters, certainly, and not having to dream up a whole universe and cast of characters every time lowers the barriers to getting any stories told at all; in theory I'm using it as a pump-priming exercise, but it takes a lot of it to get the engine turning over fast enough to launch into an original novel; I know I'm ready when I start getting impatient at the limitations of the borrowed milieu. Also, my natural length seems to be 20-30K words, which is fine in fanfic but a handicap in the real writing world.

The conventions and constraints for fanfic probably vary a fair bit depending on the community standards of the intended audience. Permanently maiming or killing canon characters is usually frowned on in the circles I'm familiar with, for example, but marrying them off is fine though not done lightly; shifting the whole thing closer to modern times rather than using the original background is quite acceptable. (The original show had a 1960s vision of the 70s and 80s, largely implemented using props and stock footage left over from WWII.) I have seen a lot of stories that seem to have very much the same plot, which gets a little tiresome after a while, and there's a whole slew of not-quite-canon bits that everyone uses, added onto what can reasonably deduced from canon. (The idea that one character is a computer whiz, for example, which has slender if any canon evidence but is widely used.)

Sorry, that got long and rambly. I hope some of it is relevant to what you were wondering about.