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

[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.