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

[elanor_x]

a literary convention that I blame for messing up a lot of people's ideas of how Wuv works
If somebody really believes a promiscuous man will leave his old ways because of her being special, I think the woman isn't very intelligent to say the least. Btw, in real life the number is much greater than 12 many times, the man isn't very likely to reform and I believe tends to stray after marriage. [This isn't from personal experience, I just don't tend to trust people too much. Specially, not "miraculous transformations"]. Hugo wrote once a very good post about "sowing wild oats" and that, contrary to the popular belief, the more you sow, the harder is to stop. The amount isn't finite.

[zingerella]

I don't think people are especially stupid for allowing popular culture and literary tropes to shape their expectations of the world. Stories in all their forms (movies, TV shows, songs, poetry, books) are the expression of what is considered desirable and normal in a culture. Sure, we recognize the place for the fantastic in our stories: nobody really believes in schools of magic like Hogwarts, for example. The structures, stock characters, memes, and tropes, though do serve to shape our expectations

[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

[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

[raincitygirl]

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

[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