Or have they? Or is it just another vast, uncharted landscape of our culture they haven't marched in and trampled on yet?
Back in May, Hillary Rettig gets on Huffington Post to report on the April Conference on Romance Fiction at Princeton -- but she's really just using it as an excuse to pat herself and liberalism on the back and evilize conservatives. What a surprise, huh.
Take this, for example, from her piece, The Eroticization of Equality and Social Justice. She notes that the "arch-conservative" website Human Events lists Dr. Alfred Kinsey's book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a.k.a. The Kinsey Report, as the fourth most harmful book of the 19th and 20th centuries. Then she dramatically asks, "What do conservatives -- and repressive regimes and ideologies the world over -- have against romance, love and sex? Why do they need to control them so much?"
First of all, how is saying that something -- anything -- should be used right, as it was intended -- how is that a need to control? Is telling an obese person they should eat less and healthier food a need to control?
If Rettig cared enough to look, Human Events explained why they consider the book dangerous, with a quote from the Washington Times: “The report included reports of sexual activity by boys—even babies—and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience.... The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age four, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial,” the Washington Times reported.
Presumably Rettig thinks child-sex is just another manifestation of equality and social justice?
So much of the type of romance Rettig is praising as "progressive" is not about equality and social justice. It's not even about love and romance. It's just more leftist mutation and mutilation of goodness and decency.
Vampire heroes and radical feminism
So my novel is completed and available on Amazon.com -- and I'm starting the marketing and promotions bit. I'm also getting back to my neglected blog.
I had a wee bit of trouble trying to classify Southern Man. It's not really a romance, which, as I understand it, involves two people falling in love and dealing with internal and external conflict along the way. Southern Man contains a romance; the story of Troy and Patty's meeting, courtship and early married life is told in backstory and flashbacks. But that doesn't make the novel a romance.
Nevertheless, romance readers are part of my target readership. I was a member of Romance Writers of America and several online romance groups, and one thing I've learned -- romance novels have changed since the 1980s, when I occasionally enjoyed offerings from Lavyrle Spencer and Dixie Browning.
It seems that hunky heroes of times past are finding themselves squeezed out of the picture by host of quasi-human heroes -- vampires, shape-shifters (which, I think, includes werewolves and were-other-things), aliens and even demons. Lord help us, when did the servants of Satan, the enemy of humankind, become the objects of romantic love?
When it comes to reading fantasy or speculative fiction, I can suspend disbelief as well as the next gal... Well, no, maybe I can't. I used to be better at it than I am now. I'm still a fan of space-opera sci-fi (still a Trekker after all these years), but that's only a part of the weirdness I've been finding in romance sub-genres today.
And as a human woman, a daughter of Eve, child of the Earth, I love romance heroes who are real men. Flesh and blood humans, the sons of Adam with all their flaws, creatures made by God in His image, with their spark of the divine. What cyanotic walking dead guy can touch that? What fellow who's apt to sprout fur and fangs can come close to a real man with a human heart full of love?
I admit the intriguing nature of this phenomena, and I've developed a theory based in part upon my antagonism for radical feminism and not-so-radical feminism. Don't get me wrong; I applaud equal pay for equal work and all that, and I admire strong women (my family has been full of 'em for generations). But I believe that helping and uplifting women is but a small slice of the political and cultural agenda of feminism. Far more of its attention and resources are focused on something else.
Basically, the core of feminism is the female hatred of men. That hatred extends to anything that involves men--particularly marriage (hence the current societal drive to define marriage as between other than male and female); and family (hence the stripping from men their rights as fathers by the courts of the land; and hence the feminist-influenced societal war against life in the [female] womb, life that results only when a male contribution is part of the process).
For several decades, western culture has been fed the line that men are the sole cause of all humanity's evil and sorrows; that for millenia, men were oppressors, women the oppressed. That women lived lives of drudgery, men lives of ease. All men are brutes, we were told, all sex is rape.
A post-modern woman, strong, decisive, making her own decisions, in charge of her own life, dare not succumb to the attraction of a strong male because he can, and likely will, revert at any moment, from the slightest provocation, into the brutish oppressor of females men have been from time-immemorial. In the feminist mindset, not even in our fantasies are we allowed to love a strong man.
So, what can we do?
Well, we can disguise them -- as quasi-humans, something still of the earth and still male, but not totally flesh and blood, not the sons of Adam, and possessing no membership in the patriarchy. Or, we can make them not of the earth at all. And we can make quasi-human women to love them, or strive with, or against, them.
We can wrack our brains, world-build till the cows come home, and create vampire after vampire and eternal wars for them to fight, and furry men who howl at the moon ... or we can admit we are women with human hearts who love men, real men -- men who are not the evil oppressors we've been told, but who also have human hearts capable of courage and love.
Humanity, with its flawed nature and spark of the divine, is the unending source of fascinating stories -- including romances. Face it -- even the wildest paranormal, sci-fi fantasies are concocted by human minds.
So to heck with what the feminists say. Men are wonderful. I love them!
Are you a writer or reader of paranormal, futuristic and fantasy romance? Do you agree or disagree with my premise? Are you a feminist who thinks I just don't get it? Let's hear from you. Comments invited!
I had a wee bit of trouble trying to classify Southern Man. It's not really a romance, which, as I understand it, involves two people falling in love and dealing with internal and external conflict along the way. Southern Man contains a romance; the story of Troy and Patty's meeting, courtship and early married life is told in backstory and flashbacks. But that doesn't make the novel a romance.
Nevertheless, romance readers are part of my target readership. I was a member of Romance Writers of America and several online romance groups, and one thing I've learned -- romance novels have changed since the 1980s, when I occasionally enjoyed offerings from Lavyrle Spencer and Dixie Browning.
It seems that hunky heroes of times past are finding themselves squeezed out of the picture by host of quasi-human heroes -- vampires, shape-shifters (which, I think, includes werewolves and were-other-things), aliens and even demons. Lord help us, when did the servants of Satan, the enemy of humankind, become the objects of romantic love?
When it comes to reading fantasy or speculative fiction, I can suspend disbelief as well as the next gal... Well, no, maybe I can't. I used to be better at it than I am now. I'm still a fan of space-opera sci-fi (still a Trekker after all these years), but that's only a part of the weirdness I've been finding in romance sub-genres today.
And as a human woman, a daughter of Eve, child of the Earth, I love romance heroes who are real men. Flesh and blood humans, the sons of Adam with all their flaws, creatures made by God in His image, with their spark of the divine. What cyanotic walking dead guy can touch that? What fellow who's apt to sprout fur and fangs can come close to a real man with a human heart full of love?
I admit the intriguing nature of this phenomena, and I've developed a theory based in part upon my antagonism for radical feminism and not-so-radical feminism. Don't get me wrong; I applaud equal pay for equal work and all that, and I admire strong women (my family has been full of 'em for generations). But I believe that helping and uplifting women is but a small slice of the political and cultural agenda of feminism. Far more of its attention and resources are focused on something else.
Basically, the core of feminism is the female hatred of men. That hatred extends to anything that involves men--particularly marriage (hence the current societal drive to define marriage as between other than male and female); and family (hence the stripping from men their rights as fathers by the courts of the land; and hence the feminist-influenced societal war against life in the [female] womb, life that results only when a male contribution is part of the process).
For several decades, western culture has been fed the line that men are the sole cause of all humanity's evil and sorrows; that for millenia, men were oppressors, women the oppressed. That women lived lives of drudgery, men lives of ease. All men are brutes, we were told, all sex is rape.
A post-modern woman, strong, decisive, making her own decisions, in charge of her own life, dare not succumb to the attraction of a strong male because he can, and likely will, revert at any moment, from the slightest provocation, into the brutish oppressor of females men have been from time-immemorial. In the feminist mindset, not even in our fantasies are we allowed to love a strong man.
So, what can we do?
Well, we can disguise them -- as quasi-humans, something still of the earth and still male, but not totally flesh and blood, not the sons of Adam, and possessing no membership in the patriarchy. Or, we can make them not of the earth at all. And we can make quasi-human women to love them, or strive with, or against, them.
We can wrack our brains, world-build till the cows come home, and create vampire after vampire and eternal wars for them to fight, and furry men who howl at the moon ... or we can admit we are women with human hearts who love men, real men -- men who are not the evil oppressors we've been told, but who also have human hearts capable of courage and love.
Humanity, with its flawed nature and spark of the divine, is the unending source of fascinating stories -- including romances. Face it -- even the wildest paranormal, sci-fi fantasies are concocted by human minds.
So to heck with what the feminists say. Men are wonderful. I love them!
Are you a writer or reader of paranormal, futuristic and fantasy romance? Do you agree or disagree with my premise? Are you a feminist who thinks I just don't get it? Let's hear from you. Comments invited!
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