Men Need Love, Too

So I finally got my hands on a copy of the latest Romance Writer’s Report (The monthly industry publication put out by RWA), so I could see what all the huhbub was about Jennifer Crusie’s agent recommendations. ::shrug:: To each her own. I have a friend who was insistent upon getting a New York agent too, and now she regrets that she wasn’t more insistent upon getting an agent she actually likes. To each her own. I don’t agree with everything Jenny Crusie says by a long shot (she has a strange prejudice against prologues, epilogues and flashbacks), but she always presents her arguments in a well-researched, academic manner, and I can’t fault her for the fact that academically, we don’t always see eye-to-eye. So that’s fine. Don’t agree with it (my agent has offices in Georgia and L.A. and is doing quite well, thank you very much), but it’s fine.

Frankly, if I was going to be offended by something, it would probably be the interview with Superromance author K.N. Casper. That was, without a doubt, one of the silliest, most sexist, most pointless articles I’ve ever seen the RWR publish. I honestly believe it set the cause of gender equality back a good ten years. It jumped off from the patently false and ridiculous assumption that “it’s weird” for men to write romances and even went so far as to actually say that women are the keepers of emotions and emotional depth and that it must be so difficult for Mr. Casper to access that for his books.

WHAT THE F—?

A few weeks ago, at Romancing the Blog, a lone male writer (William LAmbert) poked his head out from under the covers to comment on this very topic:

Besides which, romances are widely and heartily promoted as books by women for women, along with the supplemental (and I’ve always thought denigrading) illusion that any woman, between diapers and cooking, if she just puts her mind to it, can write a romance. Any book by a man for women goes against those expensively hard-won and long-running promotional campaigns.

Man’s got a point there (and it’s the reason that, even though I’m against this whole “definition of romance” nonsense that RWA is after — um, hello? Romance is between a man and a woman? I know of plenty of romances that aren’t! — I’m also against hte idea of calling it “Women’s Fiction Writers of America” — we write in a genre, not for a gender-specific audience). In this business, he’s had to defend not only his right but also his ability to tell a love story. A love storyt hat, if you are to believe RWA, he always has a fifty percent role in making!

And this is not the first time I’ve seen this opinion expressed as if it was gospel truth. A scant few days ago, there was a conversation on the HQN thread of eHarlequin (always a popular gathering place for the prejudiced and clueless of the romance industry), where an aspiring male writer introduced himself with “Dear Editor, I know it’s weird to think a man could write romance…”

No! No it’s not! Stop saying shit like that! The more you say it, the more idiots like the interviewer of the RWR will believe it and think she can present it as the natural assumption which weary male romance authors will then have to defend themselves against. I can very easily compare this to the bodice-ripper paradigm. People said it so often and for so long that now people and the media think it’s ACCEPTABLE to say it. It’s acceptable to make fun of romance without the slightest reasoning. It’s acceptable to call books with no sign of a bodice, let alone a ripped one, “bodice rippers.” I wrote an artcile about a romance writer back in the day, and my editor put bodice-ripper in the text, because he argued that there was no other way for the standard reader to access what I was talking about. (Oddly enough, the premise of the article is that the just-launched Blaze series was sexier than any Harlequin series that had come before it, so saying that the books weren’t bodice rippers was a little weird.) My friend Kristen Billerbeck writes Christian chick lit set in Silicon Valley and an article about her used the phrase Bodice-ripper as a comparison. That’s about as valid a comparison as if they’d used supernatural horror novels.

So now the poor male romance writers have to first defend their ability to write said novels, then defend the value of the novel itself! DO you see what a horrible situation we’re setting up?

Why in the world would we think that men have any less of a natural ability to read and enjoy a love story? An excessively short (but it gets the job done) list of men who write and have written romance (whether they call it that or not):

The Tony part of Tori Carrington
James Patterson
Nicholas Sparks
William Frickin’ Shakespeare

Now, I will sit back and let you tell me how hard it was for Bill to access the depth of human emotion, since that’s women’s work. No, go ahead, I’ll wait.

Let’s get one thing straight here, one thing that’s way, way, WAY more important than debating whether or not an agent should live in Brooklyn and take the subway to Manhattan every day.

Men and women have equal capacity for artistic and intellectual achievement. Women and men can be rocket scientists and romance writers. Period.

Shame on you, RWR, for publishing sexist nonsense in your magazine as if it was our organization’s official position on the matter. Write on, K.N. Casper.