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Pondering heroes and the tropes thereof
The latest book from my Library Pile is one that I’d thought to be a historical murder mystery from the cover, but once I started to read, I realized it was a mystery-romance. The heroine has a meet-cute with a guy on the ferry that she’s taking to the Greek island where the events of the book take place. On the island, he is giving her a lift in his sporty little car, when he accidentally knocks over an old lady’s fruit stand, knocking oranges all over the road. Immediately, he stops, apologizes, and helps the old lady pick up her fruit.
And this really gave me pause; it made me stop and go, “Wow, I like this guy! This one’s a keeper, lady.”
… then about five pages later, the actual romantic hero shows up, which is clearly signposted because he is a total dick and the heroine hates him. Just to be sure, I turned to the blurb on the back (normally I avoid those, being a spoilerphobe) and discovered that not only is Dick Boy our “hero”, but the guy I’d liked so much is slated to be the murder victim.
Yeah. No. This one goes straight back to the library.
But this made me realize just how thoroughly over the alpha-hero trope I am. Over. Done. I want characters (male and female) who are the sort of person who would stop to help an old lady pick up her oranges. I am hungry for kind characters in literature, the sort of people who are aware that they exist as part of a community; who, when they accidentally hurt someone, notice and apologize for it, even if it’s a stranger, and doubly so if it’s a loved one.
And I think it was very eye-opening for me how startling it was, to encounter a scene in the opening pages of the book in which the character that I had believed to be the hero does something kind and altruistic. That’s rare. And it shouldn’t be. And this isn’t a problem specific to the romance genre. I read so many books in which the characters are misanthropic loners or just general jerks. I can enjoy me some misanthropic loners, but these days, I find that I’m really craving books about characters who aren’t. (Even if they may occasionally mistake themselves for one.)
Crossposted from Wordpress.
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Wound up behind a bunch of women yakking that up in a supermarket once, complaining that their men wouldn't do anything around the house. They turned to me and invited me to join the bitchfest. I picked up my groceries off the belt, said, "Don't look at me, mine cooks East Indian feast food," and walked away. They were too stunned to respond.
The stupid, it burns like hydrogen.
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Of course, learning to cook and clean, and how to manage asking one's partner to share in housework, are also subject to your upbringing teaching you those skills. I'm lucky enough that my husband was raised by a divorced mother who taught him to cook better than my housework-hating mother taught me; and my parents while I was growing up modelled how to have disagreements and resolve them through discussion without Disagreement Meaning You Don't Love Me. Lots of people haven't been taught these things, haven't even been taught enough to know the words for what they don't know. Doesn't make them stupid.
Also, Friendzone? Horrible concept, right out of the conceptual landscape where women don't really like sex but hand it out in exchange for love, and men are entitled to sex from the women they want. Men complaining about "being friendzoned" seem to assume that if they accumulate enough "niceness tokens" they can trade it in for sex. But "stupid bitch friendzoned me for that asshat" is easier to think than "she doesn't fancy me".
This is why we need more romances with people of all sexes who are kind, gentle, do the housework, negotiate disagreement and reach acceptable compromises. Give people alternative models of behaviour than the ones they grew up with and the existing "romantic" stereotypes.
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That's certainly a part of it.
>>Of course, learning to cook and clean, and how to manage asking one's partner to share in housework, are also subject to your upbringing teaching you those skills.<<
Or deciding to fill the gaps yourself. Nobody seems to reach adulthood with a complete set of personal skills; it's a matter of figuring out what you're missing and whether you want to fix that.
>>Also, Friendzone? Horrible concept, right out of the conceptual landscape where women don't really like sex but hand it out in exchange for love, and men are entitled to sex from the women they want.<<
Agreed. I also resent the way it treats friendship as a lesser concept, which is not necessarily so: friendship can be a primary relationship and sex can be emotionally meaningless bodyplay.
>> Men complaining about "being friendzoned" seem to assume that if they accumulate enough "niceness tokens" they can trade it in for sex. <<
Sometimes, perhaps. But that's not the only version I've seen. I have seen a lot of women misuse this horribly. As in, they'll draw a line and tell men not to cross it: men who obey are ruled out, and those who cross the line are considered for sexual activity. It make me want to slap those women.
>>This is why we need more romances with people of all sexes who are kind, gentle, do the housework, negotiate disagreement and reach acceptable compromises. Give people alternative models of behaviour than the ones they grew up with and the existing "romantic" stereotypes.<<
So much YES to this. It's why I write a lot of what I write. And increasingly, I'm working in primary relationships that are not based on sex/romance as well.
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I think people have gone too far with the idea of imperfect characters. Nowadays, I see people complaining that kind, non-bratty characters with better interpersonal skills than your average betta fish are boring. There's certainly a place for severely emotionally stunted characters, but that place is not everywhere.
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If a woman picks a macho guy, and he hits her or cheats on her, that's his fault, not her fault. If she picks a macho guy, who habitually watches football instead of doing the dishes, and then she complains because he isn't doing the dishes ... well, she knew what he was when she picked him. It's not fair for her to complain about that, and it's not his fault for being himself. She's not responsible for his behavior. She is responsible for her selection in the first place. (This does not cover the kind of abusive behavior where a guy seems great at first then turns into an overcontrolling violent beast gradually. Label not matching the contents is a whole different kettle of very pickled fish.)
>>I think people have gone too far with the idea of imperfect characters.<<
I agree. Character construction requires variety or reading becomes downright tedious. Not to mention that it's embarrassing to be reading along and say, "No, Merry, don't open that door! Oh wait, I meant MERCY. Sorry, sorry, wrong book."
There are all kinds of flaws that could go with a fundamentally good-hearted and well-behaved character. He might be broke, shy, uneducated, more wise than smart, not very handsome, clumsy, any number of things. A character might be brilliant at some emotional/social skill clusters but wretched at others.
That kind of mistake is like complaining about "overpowered" characters. They're not overpowered, they're underchallenged. Try breaking the universe over your knee, that'll light a fire under them for a change. It's a lack of authorial imagination, I think.
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Aargh. It's complicated.
I agree about the "friendzone" thing ... I mean, yes, I know sweet, decent guys (and girls!) who are single, but I don't think it's because the opposite sex is passing them over for jerks. It's just bad luck, not to have run into someone yet who triggered that chemical cascade. Any guy who blames the women in his life for not putting out for "nice guys" is not the nice guy he thinks he is ....
And this:
This is why we need more romances with people of all sexes who are kind, gentle, do the housework, negotiate disagreement and reach acceptable compromises. Give people alternative models of behaviour than the ones they grew up with and the existing "romantic" stereotypes.
*nods a bunch* Yes, I completely agree! At the very least, it would be wonderful to have a much wider variety of stories and role models to choose from. As a society, our bookshelves are groaning with books (actual books and the digital kind) -- surely we can do better than just repeating the same tropes over and over again.
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(Anonymous) 2013-03-24 04:06 pm (UTC)(link)My younger sibling plays a game where zie counts the number of times an adult says the actual words "I'm sorry," or an outright apology in any media whatsoever.
It is shocking how rare it is. The only times you say anyone in media actually says they're sorry tends to be if they're children, and/or in media made for children. Everyone else... well, they might do something to try and make amends, but very rarely do they actually say they're sorry, and the two things aren't the same.
I never noticed it until my sibling started playing the game.
--baaing-tree from LJ
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(Anonymous) 2013-03-26 02:02 am (UTC)(link)1. Say you're sorry.
2. Show an understanding of what you did wrong.
3. Change behavior so it doesn't happen again.
Getting even the first is unusual in media; getting all three is REALLY uncommon.
I kinda want to do a sorta Bechdel test for that, only call it the Apology Test. A movie/book/whatever passes if two characters fulfill all three criteria.
--baaing-tree
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Or... maybe the nice men they've decided not to date are men who for whatever reason which they haven't chosen to share, are simply men they don't want to date? Just "nice" (or not) isn't anything of a criteria for who you want to have a relationship with - it literally tells you nothing about their personality or interests or anything else. I mean, I'd say I have a lot of friends who are really nice but whom I couldn't see myself dating (and all my friends are nice). Judging women for not dating the people you think they should be is really just as pointless as trying to live your life by romance novel tropes.
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On a purely case-by-case basis, that's valid, and I'm sure it applies sometimes. But as a prevailing trend, what it says is there's a correlation between nice men and low chance of sexual success. This does not make me happy, because I observe that men try different things in hopes of attracting a mate. I don't want them to cross off "treat women like people" from their list.
>>Judging women for not dating the people you think they should be<<
It's far less about my tastes than theirs. My beef on that line is women who pick one thing and complain because it isn't something else. That disjunction bugs me even more than when I think their poor choices are creating practical problems for other people. It's like picking an alarm-breed dog and complaining because it barks. You want a quiet dog, get a Basenji in the first place.
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Also, if someone would seriously consider cross[ing] off "treat women like people" from their list then they were never nice in the first place.
their poor choices are creating practical problems for other people
Why is this all the womens' fault, anyway? Why aren't we going after men for being so fixated on sex (according to your argument) that they didn't stop to consider whether they were actually well-matched with the woman they started dating?
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I disagree that this is an actual trend. If so, then mathematically speaking, the older people get, the higher the concentration of single nice guys there would be in the population. And that's ... not what I see. At all. Nursing homes are not full of sweet, kind, never-married men. Now if you ASK certain men, they'll tell you that they can't get a date because they're just too damn nice, but I am, shall we say, skeptical.
No, it's just that at any and all age levels, there are some people who are dating jerks and some people who are dating nice people, and there are plenty of people who haven't met the right person yet. But the idea that nice men get passed over en masse for jerks is, IMHO, pretty much bullshit concocted by dumped guys to explain their lack of dating success. And you know, looking at the world and making up explanations for how stuff works (especially in ways that explain it as being a) not my fault, and b) not random chance) is a thing people do! It's how our brains work. It doesn't mean it's objectively true however.
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When I was in college, I took Sociology of Marriage and Family Life. It was one of the more rewarding classes I took, along with the Psych Communications course. I very distinctly remember one particular class in which we discussed patterns of women, attraction, and men.
Something the professor, who was a marriage counselor of some thirty years, gave as an example was how women in teen years would make "perfect guy" lists, with all the qualities they wanted. She asked the class (which was 90% women) if we had done that, and if our relationship choices matched what we consciously wanted. Several of the women spoke up and said that, when pointed out like that, the men that they chose were the exact opposite of what they consciously wanted -- one lady even said she had been through four major relationships, marriages, and divorces, and that she knew that she picked men who were bad for her and would abuse her. But that all the guys that met the qualities on her list? The ones that were really nice guys (not Nice Guys) and were there for her? She just wasn't attracted to. And several other women responded in agreement -- that there was just some reason why they were not attracted to these guys, but they were attracted to men that would hurt them. And they knew it.
I don't think we ever got into discussing why it happened (we didn't have enough class time; literally most of the 2 and a half hours of that class was spent with pretty much the entire class breaking down) but it was such a huge thing, among so many of us... (Adding, I think, trying to remember, the determination most of us came to was that it was a cultural thing, in how women are raised in the patriarchy, and... that was just way way too much for that class to cover.)
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I hit the same thing in my Women's Studies classes. It was embarrassing to see baby feminists doing this. There is just not enough palm for the face.
>> Something the professor, who was a marriage counselor of some thirty years, gave as an example was how women in teen years would make "perfect guy" lists, with all the qualities they wanted. She asked the class (which was 90% women) if we had done that, and if our relationship choices matched what we consciously wanted. <<
I did that. The universe delivered someone who fit all of my qualifications, and was nothing like what I expected, and there was a bunch of stuff I abruptly realized that I hadn't considered at all. But it's worked out brilliantly.
>> I don't think we ever got into discussing why it happened <<
There's a description of this phenomenon in the novel Six Moon Dance that involved the phrase "he looks dangerous and smells virile." And I thought, yeah, that probably accounts for a sizable percentage of the cases.
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Except my partner, who is like my mom. My mom is awesome. I was shocked when my partner had been single for over two years when we got together, because they are so very very awesome and sweet and thoughtful and all-around wonderful. But, I noticed the way they treated women. We have an open relationship, and a friend of ours back east held parties that tended to result in hookups. And there was this one chick there that while I frequently ended up playing with, my partner felt that she needed a friend more than a fuckbuddy. And that was how they treated most women... friends first, although they were certainly open to more.
Which, all the people I have been with were friends first, so I don't quite understand the aversion to that that some people have. Granted, I also have aversions to macho male attitudes and with one exception (and I am pretty sure he deliberately misrepresented himself) all the guys or MAAB people I have been with have had very strong feminine qualities.
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