Hey all! It’s time for Wednesday Links, where we do a little roundup of some neat things we’ve seen around the internet. You ready and buckled in?
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This link is from Reader Millie, and I’m pretty sure a few of you emailed me this one as well. So, thank you! I always love a good write-up of romance novels as feminist texts:
“They are definitely not anti-feminist,” she argued. “These are novels written primarily by women, for women – why would they set out to insult their target audience? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Instead, they are largely stories of feminist triumph, with the brooding male hero often forced to acknowledge his sexism and change his ways. “They foreground the female and they are stories about women and for women,” Derbyshire said.
Some commentators have criticised the books as having needy heroines, desperate for the love of a brutish man. Derbyshire, who has read hundreds of Mills & Boon novels, said: “I suspect people who have never read them would say that. There are an awful lot of people who think they know what is going on in a Mills & Boon by just looking at the covers.”
Articles like this make me want to go read in an angrily, empowered manner.
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Love bookish gear? I found this website, Ideal Bookshelf, that has cute prints and pins for sale. But the coolest thing, in my opinion, is that you can get a print of your “ideal bookshelf” with whatever custom titles you want. It costs a pretty penny, but I’m going to treat myself one day.
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For those who use bullet journals, NY Mag explains why this sort of organizations “soothes your panicky mind”:
So what’s the draw? In part, Levitin says, a bullet journal is appealing because it makes it easy to accomplish what he calls “externalizing your memory.”
“In other words, don’t just try to keep track of things in your head. Somehow get what’s in your head out there in the world, whether that means writing it down in a journal or on little three-by-five index cards, covering your desk and your fridge and your walls with Post-its, or making voice memos,” he says. “Some ways of doing that are more elaborate than others, but anything that gets it out of the head is a good thing.” There’s no one gold standard when it comes to organization, he explains, “but there are some general principles that an effective system would follow,” and externalizing is high on the list.
Buzzfeed also has a great article to use bullet journals to chart mental health.
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The Atlantic has an interesting argument about why Mary Bennet might be the true star of Pride and Prejudice:
Poor Mary. When she pays attention to her at all, Pride and Prejudice’s narrator describes the middle Bennet sibling—younger sister to Jane and Elizabeth, older sister to Kitty and Lydia—as someone who, possessing neither “genius nor taste,” often “wished to say something very sensible,” but—oof—“knew not how.” Mary navigates the world with “a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” (Ooooof.) A little bit Mr. Collins, a little bit Lady Edith, a little bit Tracy Flick, Mary is at once introverted and attention-hungry, well-read and insipid, vain and insignificant. She is also, her novel’s acerbic storyteller makes a point of informing us, “the only plain one in the family.”
Anyone agree? Disagree? Tell us what you think in the comments!
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We have a new recommendation feature debuting in this post. Sometimes we have things we love that don’t warrant a review but are so useful we want to spread the word. Special note: the link is affiliate coded so if you use it, many thanks! And if you’ve got something to suggest, please email Sarah!
Laptop Cord Winders
I have one of these from Above the Fray, and it's great for keeping my MacBook cord contained and safe from being pulled or frayed. There are earbud winders, too! -SW
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
The problem with that Guardian article, is that there are in fact a great many, a great great great many romance novels that I have read that are indeed about “needy heroines, desperate for the love of a brutish man” and goddammit, there is nothing wrong with that! Not all romances are trashy or derivative or mired in horrific gender politics, obviously. And those deserve to be celebrated, don’t get me wrong. But so do the ones that *are* trashy and regressive and frankly bad, because I love them too and they make me happy and it drives me nuts when people defend some romance at the expense of the rest of it.
Also, all the Mary fanfic just turns Mary into a different person, most often essentially Lizzie, and carries on from there – and that’s fine – but canon Mary can’t be a heroine, not without that transformation, so…not much of a case that she’s really the star of P&P.
I always felt Mary might have been Mr. Collins’ match. Or that if GTshe hadn’t had to live in the shadow of her extraordinary older sisters or the embarrassing younger ones, she might have done just fine. I had a friend much like her in high school. Socially clumsy and underrated by classmates, she did extremely well out in the real world.
I think there’s a tendency to add a ‘Sue’ to Mary 😉 I don’t see her as the star of P&P, and she doesn’t need to be. Austen showed her as an annoying character, rather like her mother or Lydia, just in a different way.
One of the few things I liked about the book version of Death Comes to Pemberley is that James marries Mary off without a lot of fanfare. She marries a clergyman, gets her own bookroom, and sets a good table, as she learned from her mother. If not a happily ever after, she at least gets a contented one.
I always found myself wishing that Mr. Collins had offered for Mary after Elizabeth rejected his suit. He seemed to genuinely admire her, and she didn’t seem put off by him (which is more than could be said for any other woman in the story). I think they would have managed quite well together. Instead, I felt heartily sorry for Charlotte Lucas even as I understood why she married him. I would imagine it would be difficult for Mary to find someone that suited her well, especially given the small community in which they lived.
..and then the anti-side in another Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/mills-boon-feminism-val-derbyshire-snobbery-romance-women
Ok, so that other Guardian article also kinda good, also misses the boat. Gah! Romance novels are written by women, for women, and give women pleasure. That makes them feminist! That’s the whole story, right there. Quit policing other people’s sexuality. Grrrrrrr.
The Science of Us article is killing me. I bullet journal. I use it for work every day. No drawings, not charts. I use it for work and it’s so helpful. This article is basing their argument on the “fact” that it’s “a complicated system.”
The basic idea is an indexed journal with a ‘homemade’ daily calendar (write numbers down a page and put the days of the week by them), and monthly calendar (I write the months on a page). That’s it.
But this article goes on and on about how you have to do this and that. “The bullet journal forces you to do more than just write.” No it doesn’t. “It requires chart-drawing.” No it doesn’t. And “symbol-making” (if you call putting a dot in front of items on a to-do list “symbol-making” then ok). “As a quick Instagram search for #bulletjournal or #bujo will demonstrate…” Don’t do this. Don’t look on instagram or pinterest for bullet journaling. If I had I never would have started.
What those people are doing is putting an index on their scrapbooking. Not that there’s anything wrong with scrapbooking. The example photos in that article… I have no idea what those people are doing. And I use a bullet journal every day, at work. Without drawing. Or chart making. Oh, I cross out the dots when I finish an item. So, there’s your symbol making for you.
I agree with Julia, don’t read that Science of Us article. They are using examples from people that love to sketch and decorate. My bullet journal is very simple – to do lists for my business, my home, my dogs, my kids, and groceries. Meeting notes from clients, volunteer work, phone calls, projects. Everything is in one book (I use a Moleskine because the cover is sturdy enough to hold up in my purse) so I can refer back to meeting notes or projects no matter where I am.
I am a kinesthetic learner, which means I work best when my brain and motor skills are engaged. While I write meeting notes in my book and like to have them there to refer to, the act of writing things down makes them stick better in my brain. I have tried a lot of electronic to do lists, but typing things out doesn’t work as well as writing them down for me.
The whole thing about the symbols — I don’t do that. I have a box next to my to do items and put an X in there when it is done. If I decide I am not going to do an action item (for a project or the house or whatever) I cross it out instead just so I have a different record. The bullet journal is an ongoing to do list, but you can include as many other things as you want.
My eyes started to cross as I reached the middle of the video on the Bullet Journal site.
if Mary had married Mr. Collins, Lizzy probably wouldn’t have gone to Kent, there would have been no proposal from Darcy, and therefore no reason for Darcy to right the wrongs whilst Lizzy falls in love with him. No reason for the story to continue.
While Mary may have seemed the perfect compatibility “match” for Collins, imagine how insulting it was for Collins (though a dolt) to be refused by Lizzy (and he wasn’t allowed to ask for Jane). In his offer of marriage to Lizzy, he was also ensuring the future of Longbourn and protection for her sisters. In asking Charlotte to marry him, he was also snubbing the family which snubbed him. (we don’t know exactly why his father and Mr. Bennet had a falling out). Charlotte was basically a spinster, for her to marry Collins was advantageous on many levels. After all “Miss Lucas perceived him from an upper window as he walked towards the house, and instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.” Was Charlotte a little bit calculating? And in the end, it benefited her family,”The whole family, in short, were properly overjoyed on the occasion. The younger girls formed hopes of coming out a year or two sooner than they might otherwise have done; and the boys were relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte’s dying an old maid.”
Have to admire Lizzy that she would be rather steadfast in her decision to marry for love or not at all. Most women in her position would not have turned down offers of marriage.
Whenever articles like the ones in the Guardian crop up, I feel like the battle lines between the original article and the rebuttal are drawn in extremes. It’s either black or white; texts are either strongly feminist or completely antifeminist. The reality, I think, lies somewhere in the middle. Romance is a vast genre, and as with ALL genres, the quality of individual titles varies wildly.
Not all romances are feminist, but many are. Not all romances are unfeminist (because there’s a difference between something being antifeminist and unfeminist), but many are. Some are even antifeminist. I have one particular author whom I’ve blacklisted for the antifeminist rants in her books. I will never buy another book from her, and I wish I could get my money back from the one I did.
If I were to accept that author as representative of the genre at large, I would wrongly believe that the entire genre was of a similar ilk. But that would discount strong and influential feminist voices in the genre like Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, and many others whose names not be as familiar but who are nevertheless fighting the good fight.
That being said, complacency is a dangerous thing. If we simply declare, “All romance novels are feminist, and that’s that,” then we are implying that our work is done, and that the genre and industry don’t have any more gender problems. That is not the case, and we shouldn’t gloss over it in our enthusiasm to legitimize our reading material.
It’s also easy to fall into the “No true Scotsman” trap of thinking that we don’t need to consider those explicitly antifeminist texts in the conversation because they’re not “really” romance novels. They are, and if we want to be taken seriously, we can’t just sweep them under the rug and pretend that they don’t exist or that they’re not really problematic because they’re written by women, for women, about women. Internalized misogyny is real, and women are just as capable of antifeminism and sexism as men. The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility was written by a woman, for women, and about women, but it still says women shouldn’t look around in a city (seriously) or visit a library alone. Yes, it was written at a different time; no, I don’t care. There were feminists in Victorian England, and there are antifeminists today. My point is that we can’t just assign the label of “feminist” to any text that fits the “for, by, about” criteria.
We cannot have a well-rounded discussion of the genre if we are unwilling to acknowledge its flaws as well as its strengths. It is possible to love something and still want and expect it to do better. This is our genre, these are our books, and it’s up to us to make the changes we want to see. Nobody is going to do it for us.
TL;DR: The romance genre is too big to label it entirely as “feminist” or “antifeminist.” It is reductive and simplistic to do so. A book written by, for, and about women can still be unfeminist. The conversation would benefit from nuance on both sides.
The Guardian article makes an important and much needed argument in favour of the feminist value of romance novels. I certainly find many of them to be so, as I’ve written in my piece on this website (couldn’t resist tooting my own horn a little!) but as many others are pointing out in the comments – not all romance is feminist, and it’s certainly been truer for recent novels rather than older ones. Despite that, I certainly agree with the premise of Derbyshire’s piece that we should not be embarrassed by our choice of literature, much of it (if not all) is certainly feminist and empowering.
@Dread Pirate Rachel – I agree a lot of nuance gets lost in these arguments, and absolutely we should all vote with our wallets for what we want. We need to work toward whatever change we long to see in the world and romance publishing, absolutely. I prefer we do it without casting shade on other women’s choices.
One thing is not nuanced: No one gets to tell me what I think is sexy.
That means no one gets to tell me I like it when I say I don’t, and no one gets to tell me not to read about that if I want to. Women embracing their fantasies and sexuality is empowering. Telling women what they *should* want in their romances is not.
There need to be romances I find repugnant in order for other people to get their kink on. Books that are not good, even books that are anti feminist, because yes, internalized misogyny is real – and that’s going to be the very key for plenty of women to be in charge of their own orgasm. Calling shame on those books or the women who like them is not improving anything.
tl;dr:
Women finding employment and financial independence by writing about women and their sexuality, for other women’s pleasure is utterly and absolutely feminist and I will die on this hill.
[…] Linkity from Smart Bitches. […]
@kkw, Nowhere did I attempt to tell anyone what they should think is sexy. Nor did I shame anyone for liking what they like. In fact, I never addressed the readers of romance at all (aside from saying that it’s up to us to make the changes we want to see); I was specifically and exclusively referring to the books themselves as texts.
I would never shame someone for liking what they like; it’s unproductive and pointless, and I resent it when people try to shame me for liking things. For example, as a queer woman, I have been lectured about how I should stop watching Supernatural because of the queerbaiting. I’m not going to stop, and I get annoyed by the people who tell me to. I’m aware of the problems in the show and I wish they would do better, but I still like it, and I have every right to do so. I would be a massive hypocrite if I presumed to order people only to enjoy the things of which I approve. However, I reserve the right to criticize the texts, which is what I did in my previous comment. Criticism of a text IS NOT an attack on the reader–or the writer. You will notice that I did not disclose the author whom I have decided to stop supporting, and that is because I reached the decision on my own after purchasing and reading a book that I found distasteful. This was a deliberate choice; I didn’t want to make any of her readers feel bad for enjoying her books, because that is not what I’m trying to do here.
Incidentally, I also didn’t address the action of writing a romance novel at all; if you reread my comment, I said, “we can’t just assign the label of “feminist” to any text that fits the ‘for, by, about’ criteria.” The text, not the writer who supports herself through the sales of books that I may find unappealing.
I actually agree with all the points in your comment, and I’m not sure what I said that made you think I didn’t. Regardless, I hope that I’ve cleared up any ambiguity in my previous comment. I always enjoy reading your comments here.
@ Dread Pirate Rachel I’m so glad you like my comments but I really have got to stop commenting on this post! I just needed to thank you for your clarification. It made me feel so much better. Sometimes it’s great to be wrong! I’m going to blame sleep deprivation for totally misinterpreting you. I’m sure part of it was my dismay that it was *you* saying what I (mistakenly) thought you were: I always like your comments as well.