Bittercon: Are We Not Men - Human Women and Beast-Men in Paranormal Romance

[attackfish]

Paranormal romance is a world in which human women and girls are entranced and overcome by the charms of supernatural, inhuman men. Vampires, werewolves, faeries, demons, and others populate the romantic field for the women of these novels, and seldom does it flow the other way with a human man and a supernatural woman.

The story of a supernatural woman romancing mortal men, as told by male writers portraying women as the other is a venerable and often retold one. But the idea that a woman is othered by men, that she is some sort of strange and unknowable creature tells women that men must be so very different from them, and therefore as hard for them to understand. Therefore, since the beginning of women's writings, women have portrayed men as the strange unknowable.

But is this the only reason the female protagonist of a paranormal romance rarely begins as a supernatural creature? Romance writers presumably expect women and girl readers to identify with the female protagonist, so it must be her male love interest (m/m and f/f romance having different dynamics all together) who is inhuman and serves to introduce her into the magical world he inhabits, a world the reader gets to visit until the story is over, so it's very useful to have an othered male.

One of the largest subsets of paranormal romance is Young Adult or Teen paranormal romance, where entering a supernatural world serves as an obvious metaphor for the first steps into the dating world. Dating is so confusing, so overwhelming, that most of us on some level wish we had a guide. Along with introducing her to the supernatural world, the supernatural boyfriend in a paranormal romance serves as that guide, taking away insecurity, potential pain, and the fear of making a mistake. The fact that if he is a vampire, faerie, demon, angel, etc. he is likely to be much much much older than the heroine (though still appealingly young and sexy) makes for a fairly dubious cultural narrative of an older man who guides and protects a young girl.

It has been discussed elsewhere that fathers and father figures in paranormal romances and urban fantasies tend to be very very good fathers, and mothers are in some way either neglectful or monstrous. The only woman a heroine can rely on is herself. How does this play into the idea of the othered male? Is the genre also othering women from it's female readers, proclaiming them each exceptional women, far above other women, and therefore worthy of their own magical boyfriend?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Readercon.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Good questions! Linking.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[avocado-love.livejournal.com]

This is some tasty meta!

I agree with you on most parts, but wanted to add to this:

Romance writers presumably expect women and girl readers to identify with the female protagonist, so it must be her male love interest (m/m and f/f romance having different dynamics all together) who is inhuman and serves to introduce her into the magical world he inhabits, a world the reader gets to visit until the story is over, so it's very useful to have an othered male.

While I feel this is true, and as you said in the next paragraph, serves as a metaphor for entering the dating world, I feel that starting with the female protagonist as human and he male as supernatural is a good way to kill two birds with one stone.

One of the easiest ways to introduce a reader to a new world is through the eyes of a character who is being introduced to it themselves. Either they're young and growing up and learning the different society's rules, or they're being thrown from the normal (mundane) world into the supernatural, where the changes are immediate.

From what I've seen, urban fantasy usually trends to the second scenario. The boyfriend/love interest also shares a role as teacher/mentor figure, as they are the one introducing our main character to the world. This usually sets up the plot for many moral dilemmas, including whether or not it's right for them to be showing the MC the world at all.

Is this all inherently problematic? Eh, I think it could be, expectantly if put into hands that aren't deft in writing moral dilemmas. There's also the unspoken metaphor of a young girl being led down a path into womanhood by her ~~man, which is... not good. But! I think done in the right hands, it the inherent moral dilemmas could be delt with in an interesting, sexy, (and educational?) way.

There's no getting around the fact that it's an overused plot device because it works in introducing a character to the new world, AND the secondary character/love interest/mentor figure at the same time. It's damn economical.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, gleaned from reading waaaaay too much urban fantasy. :P

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The reason it tends to be problematic, like a lot of other problematic narratives is that it's overused. If one person wrote a woman getting in trouble and getting rescued, no big deal, but because it's such a common narrative, and the reverse is rare, it becomes a cultural statement about women. It's the same here. If almost all of them didn't have the same narrative, and if we didn't already have the narratives we do about older men and younger women, and also predatory male sexuality (that's another thing, the genre tends to eroticize predatory masculinity, and also, conversely, male self control) it wouldn't be an issue.

My question is why we never have a human couple both being thrown into the magical world together, where you could have introductory characters, or a woman being drawn into the magical world through a different way from a man, and then meeting a man later, or a magical man needing to be rescued, or...

There are Paranormal Romances that I just love love love, but I have to hunt for them.

[marycatelli]

Then you get the other problem -- namely, that since one would be no problem how can you criticize any given instance? Many critics manage to come across as "Thou shalt not ever use this."

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This is how the woman in refrigerators trope functions. Especially when complainers are told "You just don't want to see anything bad happen to women characters ever!" Um, no.

[marycatelli]

Except that I've never heard anyone complaining of that trope that didn't come across exactly as that.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I have. I've also complained about it. A refrigerated woman is a woman killed to further the development or plot of a man. A woman killed as part of her own plot arc isn't refrigerated. Male characters are almost never killed to further the plots of female ones, only the other way around (unless it's a child. A boy can be killed off to motivate either parent). It means that her death isn't important in and of itself, only as a catalyst for the more important male character. How many male characters can you think of who have a dead wife (often plus children) in his backstory? Killed by the villain? How about the reverse? How many stories are about a man taking revenge for a dead or injured (or raped) wife/sister/daughter? Usually a woman getting revenge is for something that happened to her, not to people close to her.

[marycatelli]

Everything in a man's story is put there to further his story. That's basic writing.

And the reason why women are killed rather than men is that people don't care about men. You can see it any day in discussions about violence against women in movies: a movie where 95% of the dead are men will not produce a peep about violence against men, or even in general, just about violence against women.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Women in ensemble casts, or women who have previously had plots of their own in comic books, like the infamous Babs, are killed, raped, or maimed to facilitate the story of a man. We're not just talking about the main character man vs. side character woman. It also seems like writers are more reluctant to kill off a long running male character than a long running female one.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Yes, the closest thing I can think of to a human couple being thrown into the world of otherness together is the last two or three seasons of "Dr. Who." And even there Amy Pond spent the entire first Matt Smith season leaving her regular old human boyfriend behind, like the (in this respect) somewhat analogous Rose before her, and traveling with the newly-regenerated Eleventh Doctor on her own--after first meeting him as an eight- or nine-year-old child and remaining fixated on him until he belatedly returned at least twelve or thirteen years later. In fact, the producers seemed to be deliberately creating considerable doubt about whether Amy would ever voluntarily return to her own time to marry Rory the next morning. But ultimately she did, and, after a few more hiccups (like Rory's getting killed, then resurrected as some sort of cyborg centurion and faithfully standing guard for several millennia in order to be reunited with her), the two of them have both wound up traveling with the Doctor fulltime pretty much ever since.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

*pets Doctor Who* it's always one of those shows when after mentioning any element of it, you have to say "It's that kind of show"... If that makes any sense.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think the pairing of a girl with a strong man *is* inherently problematic. It wouldn't be if girls regularly were paired with strong women, boys with strong women, and boys with strong men (that at least is a common narrative, but not in this particular genre). We also don't see girls and boys figuring out life together, which happens a lot in real life and is a healthy alternative.

There's an unhealthy meme that hasn't left real life, which is that no woman has ever succeeded without a male mentor - however far she gets, she only gets there by the grace of a man (and with the unspoken threat that if she gets too uppity, he can take her powers away again.)

The mentors in these stories always seem to want to bind the young women to them - teaching her to find her wings and her own path in life doesn't appear to be an option.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. If we didn't live in a society where a May/December romance with a young woman and an older man weren't seen as perfectly normal, and the reverse as freakish, and a significant number adult men didn't use this to prey on young girls, this wouldn't be a problem. But it is, and it reinforces some pretty twisted ideologies.

This I think is also the reason that fathers and father figures in these stories are portrayed so favorably compared to mothers. A mother who guides a child partway and refuses to allow them independence is manipulative and repulsive. A father who does the same thing is in the right. We also have this cultural emphasis more generally on a woman character's father. Ziva's father in NCIS trained her from birth to be an assassan, and when she escapes his grasp, she does it by leaping into the arms of the show's daddy, Gibbs, Tiana from Disney's The Princess and the Frog is following her dead father's dream of owning a restaurant, my beloved Babs is Commissioner Gordan's daughter... It's ridiculously common across multiple mediums. And it's toxic.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I've tended to avoid writing these sort of pairings. Sure, the naive protagonist gives plenty of chances to explain what's going on, but they're too much of a tabula rasa.

At least people have made an active choice to publish my stuff.^[1] Maybe you could put it on par with a good fan-fic. But I look at what I do with my characters, and how I use them, and they're people with a history. They might be in an unanticipated situation, having to do something they're not prepared for, but they're not going to do anything stupid.

At least, not if they can see an alternative.

There are paranormal romances which do some of that. But there's a heck of a risk of turning into a Mary-Sue.


^[1]A character with history can be so interesting. (http://spontoon.rootoon.com/SPwBeL03.html)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's possible to have a not at all naive, and already well developed character being introduced to a magical world, and I'd think they would be more fun, but the tabula rasa effect is probably a feature, not a bug for a lot of readers. They can make her anything they want.

I'm a YA kind of girl, which does mean that there are certain kinds of lack of experience that are expected of heroes and heroines in those works. And sometimes they act stupid, because even smart people sometimes do. What gets me, is why the same pattern persists in a genre doesn't require that pattern.

[marycatelli]

The less naive she is, the more the world will knock her off her feet by showing things are not what they seem.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This is true, but also why I think it's less fun. Why can't we take someone who has very rigid worldviews and then shatter them?

It's a useful writing device, I know.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel a bit lame linking to my own essay, but it's quicker than regurgitating all the points in it: "Why Is Faerie Ruled by Queens?"

If it wouldn't have been terribly off-topic for the conference, I might have tried to go into the flip side, which is human women and supernatural men. It seems to me that pattern happens the most often when the supernatural is seen as predatory/bestial (as opposed to mystical/irrational, the faerie pattern, which is so often feminine). Those qualities can be hyper-masculinized, whereas "manly" and "fey" don't play as well together. And, of course, some of it has to do with the sources of these narratives: Dracula, the archetypal vampire, is male, and on the werewolf side you have the whole "alpha wolf" concept. (Which apparently isn't nearly as true as we think. But I digress.)

I really like all of your points, too, about reader identification and othering and the dating metaphor and even the practical, craft-related concern of exposition. I can think of some ways to flip those on their head and write from a supernatural female perspective -- some authors have done that already -- but it doesn't erase the pattern.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I remember that essay! I think the feminine associations of faerie are why faeries are more common in Urban Fantasy than Paranormal Romance. And why the Paranormal Romances I like tend to be about faeries. I mentioned in the essay how I thought women othering men was the natural consequence of men othering women, and faerie folk tradition is so much older than any of the others in Paranormal Romance, so the one where men's voices predominate.

Paranormal Romance likes to eroticize male predatory behavior, doesn't it?

I never got that Alpha male thing. Anybody with dogs should know differently. *shakes head* People see what they want to see.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Good point; I tend to see the UF side of things more than the PR, and conflate the two together overmuch in my head.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's hard to tell where the line between them goes.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Paranormal Romance likes to eroticize male predatory behavior, doesn't it?

Yep.

A couple of years ago I put it like this: "Because we live in a patriarchal society, it is with individuals from the class of their oppressors that women are encouraged to find romance. The mystification of oppression consequently blurs the distinction between the ideal lover and the lover as he represents a source of oppression for a woman."

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. In old folk tales with othered women, men were given the lesson that they should either try to destroy the other or change it. Danger in a woman was a sign that she must either lose her power, or die (and power, of course meant danger) or in some stories, that she would leave and break her human's heart. Women are encouraged to embrace the other and make themselves more like it instead. Since the other in Paranormal Romance is dangerous (just like men can be in real life, there's a reason Edward is frequently called an abusive stalker) this danger is what we women are told to embrace. Meanwhile, if something happens to us, it's our fault.

[amyraine.livejournal.com]

This is a tangential comment, going off of the bit about mothers/mother figures:

"either neglectful or monstrous"

I offer up another option: if she's neither, then she's dead/missing

Take our mutual fandom, AtLA:

Kya - dead
Ursa - banished, missing, possibly dead
Hama - monstrous
Mai's mom - neglectful
Poppy Bei Fong - arguably both monstrous and neglectful, though it's following her husband's example...and I think that makes it even worse.
All other moms - missing or unnamed and ignored.

In what is otherwise a great series full of strong female characters, the lack of mother figures who are powerful women in their own right was painful. Isn't there anyone I can look up to as a mom and a woman?

Guess I'm probably in the wrong genre. Maybe I should look outside of YA.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I actually have a post on mothers in fantasy here: http://attackfish.livejournal.com/63694.html . The missing mother is a common genre convention in children's books in large part to facilitate children being able to go off on (extremely unsafe) adventures but also carries with it some nasty cultural narratives.

Though A:tLA is about as far from Paranormal Romance you can get and still be fantasy... And in Paranormal Romance, at least for now, awful mothers win out over missing ones.

[marycatelli]

There's plenty of supernatural men romancing women in age old tales. Fair Janet is wisely afraid of it from Tam Lin, as the ballad The Elfin Knight shows -- the bear in East of the Sun, West of the Moon -- Hans My Hedgehog.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

But wasn't the bear a human man who the troll queen had fallen in love with originally? Not that I'm critiquing the above point.

[marycatelli]

Well, werewolves and vampires were human originally, too.

(Technically the troll queen was his stepmother who wanted him to marry her daughter, his stepsister.)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it's a departure from most faerie lovers, in that most of them were never human, and the emphasis on werewolves and vampires being born human is that the human girl can become magical too. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing depends on the genre. In East if the Sun, West of the Moon, the emphasis was on the way he could return to being human.

Really? The version I heard was that the troll queen herself fell in love with him.

[marycatelli]

Ah, but those aren't the age-old tales! You kill the vampire or werewolf in the age-old tales -- indeed, the only fairy tale I've read where the vampire-like creature is the love interest, she is also saved from vampirism.

"I have a step-mother who has bewitched me so that I am a white bear by day and a man by night; but now all is at an end between you and me, and I must leave you, and go to her. She lives in a castle which lies east of the sun and west of the moon, and there too is a princess with a nose which is three ells long, and she now is the one whom I must marry."

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

There's something to the fact that the traditional narrative is about making the other more like one's self, or destroying it, and that Paranormal Romance is about embracing the other, and changing yourself to be more like them.

It's been a long time since I read it. I must have misremembered.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Great post!

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Thanks

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

There's also the less frequently-occurring variant in which the female lead is somewhat paranormal/supernatural to begin with, although the male lead or leads at least initially is far more powerful. Series (they're usually series--Ilona Andrews' "On the Edge" is the only apparent one-off example of this I can think of) that fit this pattern include Andrews' "Magic Bites/Burns/Slays," etc., whose heroine is basically a very adept warrior with somewhat less well-developed magical abilities on the side, and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire (a/k/a "True Blood") series, in which the otherwise apparently normal human Sookie is a telepath. (Evidently in the HBO TV version Sookie has now been revealed to be at least part fairy, although this doesn't happen until much farther into the book series, if it ever does--I've only read the first four or five novels so far.) Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series probably also qualifies, since although Mercy as a skinwalker/were-coyote lacks some of the classic vulnerabilities of more conventional werewolves, she is also less physically powerful than the various male werewolves who are romantically interested in her.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, vampire hunter, also starts out as a somewhat more formidable example of the "human except for one preternatural ability" type that Sookie Stackhouse fits into, with the preternatual ability in question in Anita's case being the ability to raise--and, to some extent, control--the dead. Of course, as the series progresses Anita becomes more and more powerful, going from a mere (re)animator to a fullblown necromancer, then beginning to develop her own unique variations of some of the powers of her various vampire and werewolf/wereleopard/shapeshifter lovers. By the time of "The Harlequin," fifteen books into the series, if not before, she seems to have become as powerful--in some ways perhaps even more powerful--than either of the two supernatural males she has spent much of the series bonded with in a magical triumvirate of power (i.e., the master vampire Jean-Claude and Richard Zeeman, the head of the local werewolf pack).

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Most of the ones I can think of that follow this template involve faeries. The essay swan_tower wrote and linked to above talks about it in some depth. Women in faerie stories (by which I mean the modern version) are much more likely to have some kind of connection to the faerie world, known or not, before the story. Kaye in Holly Black's Tithe being a changling and Aislinn from Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely, fated queen of the summer fae are good examples of this. There is strong association of faeries with the feminine, and though the pattern occurs in other PR and UF, it's more common there.