Fair point! But if you ask women what qualities they ideally look for in a man, they tend to be 'good' ones: reliability, fidelity, commitment... No wonder us poor guys are always so confused.
I'm a poor guy, too, Jason. But I have ideas and predilections that make me the outlier among my contemporaries. Reliability, fidelity, commitment. Those are heroic. But perhaps the most heroic is to step outside conventional wisdom, as I have seen you do in your writings. The new era of female agency, which informed the cultural environment of the 1970s, required that both men and women reevaluate the mores they were raised with. Because they had been somewhat relieved of the burden of uncontrolled pregnancy by the pill, they were free to express themselves sexually more like men have always done. Men of the silent and then the postwar generations were bound to be confused by that change. I know I had to learn all kinds of new responses to women who were just emerging. They were still butterflies. But they were tougher in their new embodiment than men of midcentury were used to. Lots of relationships fell apart because both men and women didn't have clear conceptions about who did what and with which and to whom. I believe we are still sorting out the matriarchy/patriarchy question. Single women have taken the government as a mate and together, they have put a new shape on politics. Men are trying to figure out both what they want as men and what women want from the men they accept as dates, friends, lovers and, as often is the case, co-parents. Nowadays, culture and society seem to change every hour, much less every day, and we all have new situations we must address. And maybe western culture will fall apart in this new multipolar world. But it won't happen all at once, at least not in the beginning. Transitions are always tough. At 82, one of my biggest joys is in seeing how much has changed since 1943, when I came into this world.
I happen to be married to one of the ground-breaking and archetype-smashing writers in contemporary genre fiction. Her name as a writer is Elizabeth Lowell. In 1972, she and a cadre of other American women revolutionized "romance" by prying it out of the clutches of Mills & Boon and giving it an updated paradigm. Ann, as I call her, and another magnificently successful female writer, Jayne Ann Krentz, collaborated on a book that explained what they were doing to the man-woman relationship in romance fiction. The title of the book was "Dangerous Men, Adventuresome Women." It captured the essence of the new take on the genre: the male lead character (call him "hero" if you wish) was distinctly American. Bad Boy? Yeah, or at least unconventional. He appeared to be rough and tough, maybe even a bit violent. Sex with him (these books are about the most intimate of human relationships) was intense but pleasurable because the two who did the mating trusted one another enough to turn on their primitive impulses, within some fundamental boundaries. And those boundaries had to do with "love," that hard to define state that humans sometimes achieve. The stories are told from the female point of view and the heroine is willing to enter into intense physical and mental encounters to find out iff the hero is up to the task of winning her body and her heart. By the standards of what I understand to be "romance" today, these books were closer to the Laird and the Governess stories than to the hard-core licking and fucking I see in fragments on my FaceBook feed. But they were frank in their recognition that the new relationship between men and women required adventurous humans, men who were willing to grant agency to their female partners and women who understood that men were not just humans who didn't have menstrual periods. The little book that Ann and Jayne wrote had a profound effect on the writers of the era, which is now fifty years ago. Ten or twenty writers of this genre went on to become multi-millionaire authors despite the best efforts of polite "littrary" publishers to milk them while denying their fundamentally revolutionary spirit. It was a glorious era. I suppose the contemporary ultra-explicit "romances" are extensions of the spirit but they seem to go all the way past polite society to near-nihilism, just as our entire culture has. But you can still see the imprint of newly-liberated female authors writing freely about love, sex, relationships, and, eventually, family. It was the Golden Age of Romance, I think. And I always enjoyed being a bad boy in the eyes of my woman.
Neena, I liked your comment. It sounded like the discussions my writer wife and her colleagues used to have. But in my enthusiasm for the bad boy idea, I got a little carried away and spouted some harsh language. I apologize if you or any other girls were offended. I spend a lot of my time patrolling the crime world and my terms of expression have been influenced by cops and crooks. I nod to Jason, too, since my descriptions of today's "romance" genre are out of line on a substack that is as serious and ethical as his.
Thx, Neena. There are days that I think I hung around street cops too much. On the other hand, The very best of them are probably the most realistic people on the face of the Earth. By the way, Jason responded in the same spirit and complimented me for speaking so lovingly of my wife. She is a remarkable person and has made a vast difference in how I view the world. She’s a realist too, and she’s not afraid to use language that is realistic. Whether you regard yourself as a romance reader or not, try one of her books, written as Elizabeth Lowell, to understand how shebecame so popular. They are available on Kindle at Amazon. She and Jayne Krentz liked to think of themselves as telling the kinds of stories, women have told while sitting around the campfire for ages.
Reading Jason Frowley's post on villains is a delight. Heroes can be boring, and villains can be entertaining. But then there are the questions that arise when, over time, we see a flipping of the script. Jason makes Eliot Ness into a loose cannon and Al Capone into a smiling polite and therefore boring hero. When Eliot Ness was first introduced into popular television culture in The Untouchables (1959-1963) the personae were reversed. A stony-faced and well-groomed Ness led a squad of federal agents against the Italian mobsters who rose to prominence as the underworld aristocrats of the Prohibition Era. Maybe I'm going to have to go back and re-watch the series because I thought Ness was protecting society against the outlaws, a distinctly mundane policeman's job.
This reminds me of a discussion we'd have at work: why do girls like bad guys?.A few of the girls said good guys are boring, bad guys are exciting.
Fair point! But if you ask women what qualities they ideally look for in a man, they tend to be 'good' ones: reliability, fidelity, commitment... No wonder us poor guys are always so confused.
I'm a poor guy, too, Jason. But I have ideas and predilections that make me the outlier among my contemporaries. Reliability, fidelity, commitment. Those are heroic. But perhaps the most heroic is to step outside conventional wisdom, as I have seen you do in your writings. The new era of female agency, which informed the cultural environment of the 1970s, required that both men and women reevaluate the mores they were raised with. Because they had been somewhat relieved of the burden of uncontrolled pregnancy by the pill, they were free to express themselves sexually more like men have always done. Men of the silent and then the postwar generations were bound to be confused by that change. I know I had to learn all kinds of new responses to women who were just emerging. They were still butterflies. But they were tougher in their new embodiment than men of midcentury were used to. Lots of relationships fell apart because both men and women didn't have clear conceptions about who did what and with which and to whom. I believe we are still sorting out the matriarchy/patriarchy question. Single women have taken the government as a mate and together, they have put a new shape on politics. Men are trying to figure out both what they want as men and what women want from the men they accept as dates, friends, lovers and, as often is the case, co-parents. Nowadays, culture and society seem to change every hour, much less every day, and we all have new situations we must address. And maybe western culture will fall apart in this new multipolar world. But it won't happen all at once, at least not in the beginning. Transitions are always tough. At 82, one of my biggest joys is in seeing how much has changed since 1943, when I came into this world.
I happen to be married to one of the ground-breaking and archetype-smashing writers in contemporary genre fiction. Her name as a writer is Elizabeth Lowell. In 1972, she and a cadre of other American women revolutionized "romance" by prying it out of the clutches of Mills & Boon and giving it an updated paradigm. Ann, as I call her, and another magnificently successful female writer, Jayne Ann Krentz, collaborated on a book that explained what they were doing to the man-woman relationship in romance fiction. The title of the book was "Dangerous Men, Adventuresome Women." It captured the essence of the new take on the genre: the male lead character (call him "hero" if you wish) was distinctly American. Bad Boy? Yeah, or at least unconventional. He appeared to be rough and tough, maybe even a bit violent. Sex with him (these books are about the most intimate of human relationships) was intense but pleasurable because the two who did the mating trusted one another enough to turn on their primitive impulses, within some fundamental boundaries. And those boundaries had to do with "love," that hard to define state that humans sometimes achieve. The stories are told from the female point of view and the heroine is willing to enter into intense physical and mental encounters to find out iff the hero is up to the task of winning her body and her heart. By the standards of what I understand to be "romance" today, these books were closer to the Laird and the Governess stories than to the hard-core licking and fucking I see in fragments on my FaceBook feed. But they were frank in their recognition that the new relationship between men and women required adventurous humans, men who were willing to grant agency to their female partners and women who understood that men were not just humans who didn't have menstrual periods. The little book that Ann and Jayne wrote had a profound effect on the writers of the era, which is now fifty years ago. Ten or twenty writers of this genre went on to become multi-millionaire authors despite the best efforts of polite "littrary" publishers to milk them while denying their fundamentally revolutionary spirit. It was a glorious era. I suppose the contemporary ultra-explicit "romances" are extensions of the spirit but they seem to go all the way past polite society to near-nihilism, just as our entire culture has. But you can still see the imprint of newly-liberated female authors writing freely about love, sex, relationships, and, eventually, family. It was the Golden Age of Romance, I think. And I always enjoyed being a bad boy in the eyes of my woman.
Neena, I liked your comment. It sounded like the discussions my writer wife and her colleagues used to have. But in my enthusiasm for the bad boy idea, I got a little carried away and spouted some harsh language. I apologize if you or any other girls were offended. I spend a lot of my time patrolling the crime world and my terms of expression have been influenced by cops and crooks. I nod to Jason, too, since my descriptions of today's "romance" genre are out of line on a substack that is as serious and ethical as his.
--evan maxwell
Aww, don’t worry about it, Evan. I wasn’t offended.
And if you haven't read Neena's Substack, Evan, I recommend it! You'll like it because it's not like anything else on the site. I never miss it.
Thx, Neena. There are days that I think I hung around street cops too much. On the other hand, The very best of them are probably the most realistic people on the face of the Earth. By the way, Jason responded in the same spirit and complimented me for speaking so lovingly of my wife. She is a remarkable person and has made a vast difference in how I view the world. She’s a realist too, and she’s not afraid to use language that is realistic. Whether you regard yourself as a romance reader or not, try one of her books, written as Elizabeth Lowell, to understand how shebecame so popular. They are available on Kindle at Amazon. She and Jayne Krentz liked to think of themselves as telling the kinds of stories, women have told while sitting around the campfire for ages.
Reading Jason Frowley's post on villains is a delight. Heroes can be boring, and villains can be entertaining. But then there are the questions that arise when, over time, we see a flipping of the script. Jason makes Eliot Ness into a loose cannon and Al Capone into a smiling polite and therefore boring hero. When Eliot Ness was first introduced into popular television culture in The Untouchables (1959-1963) the personae were reversed. A stony-faced and well-groomed Ness led a squad of federal agents against the Italian mobsters who rose to prominence as the underworld aristocrats of the Prohibition Era. Maybe I'm going to have to go back and re-watch the series because I thought Ness was protecting society against the outlaws, a distinctly mundane policeman's job.