The Missed Opportunities in Weakness

Anyone who's been following this blog for awhile probably knows that I'll take a "beta" hero over an "alpha" hero any day, but that mostly I wish the distinction didn't exist. Actually, I don't think sociology upholds the dichotomy at all so outside of romance novels, the distinction really doesn't exist. It's arbitrary, unrealistic and damaging to everyone, regardless of gender. "Alpha" is shorthand for a certain kind of strength in heroes, an unambiguous, worldly, most often physical, but sometimes also economic power. And even when we talk about "beta" heroes, we talk about different kinds of strength: competence and kindness, for example.

But outside of sociological and feminist arguments against subscribing to socially-constructed and ultimately restrictive portrayals of masculinity, I think there are missed opportunities when we focus so intently upon strength. And it's not just in heroes. I noticed the other day while perusing Amazon's romance novel newsletter that whether in the blurb or the extent reviews, everyone is obsessed with "strong" heroines. I'm guessing this is code for all sorts of things: independence, smarts, competence.

But lately I'm also seeing ruthlessness, willingness toward violence, and selfishness. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself. In nearly every other genre, women are most often cast in the caring, nurturing, selfless role so having access to another narrative is bound to be empowering for romance readers and writers. In fact, I myself wrote a couple weeks ago about how in the most recent novella, the women of the Beyond series had seized their violent potential with both hands. It did and still does seem to signal progress in their ongoing struggle for equality, which I'm having trouble seeing as a bad thing in their environment.

I do think an opportunity for telling different kinds of stories is lost though when we approach every tale from the perspective of strength. If every hero and heroine must be intelligent, attractive, charming, likeable, morally upstanding, physically imposing and/or eternally capable, we seem to be missing an entire range of human experience. In fact, most of human experience. The part of human experience where we admit how little control we really have over anything not within a very narrow range of our own personal behaviors.

I just wonder how much of the sameness of some of the romance marketplace can be laid at the doorstep of a readership obsessed with strength. When hero and heroine both must be strong and independent and stubborn, a certain type of plot is bound to proceed from that. It starts to look like every book is a power struggle. Because it is a power struggle when both parties are relentlessly strong and independent. They may struggle against other things too, but they're bound to direct some of that stubbornness at each other, a particularly annoying facet of current romance novel conflict resulting in stubbornness for the sake of stubbornness. This isn't the entire explanation, of course. It's almost like writers have completely forgotten about the potential for the person versus nature option for conflict in favor of the often narcissistic person versus him or herself or the person versus person conflict detailed above. But I'll leave that discussion for another post.

If I look back on my best reads of the year, the books that stand out are ones where one or more characters have a weakness to contend with, sometimes on more than one level, sometimes a weakness that is also a strength depending on the context. The couples in Glitterland and Living in Shadow are both nearly wrecked by mental illness. Social bias profoundly influences what actions the characters in Think of England can take and what they can risk. Have Mercy and One Kiss with a Rock Star both have characters who defy societal expectations and pay a price for doing so. A lack of confidence drives the characters in Private Politics, particularly the hero. And in Prosperity, ruthlessness, selfishness and obsession play both as strengths and as weaknesses, but so do kindness, compassion and devotion.

Not all of these books were entirely perfect, but they were original. And in every one, there's also a kind of surrender: to hopelessness, to another person, to desires, to reality. There's an admittance of powerlessness and a lack of control. And though the characters often eventually reclaim or reinvent whatever strength they brought into the story, they're changed by submission (sometimes subtle), not by battling it out to the very end.

I often talk about a lack of context in terms of family relationships, spirituality, work and other non-romantic elements playing a role in the simplification of the romance story line. But the fear of weakness, of non-manufactured vulnerability, of allowing characters to do anything as long as it involves digging in their heels unyieldingly, well, that's some of what separates the chaff from the wheat as far as my reading is concerned.

The Man and the Hero

There has been a lot of discussion lately in the Romancelandia blogosphere about Alpha Males and Beta Males and Theta Males and Gamma Males. Am I missing any Greek letters there? And while I understand the marketing reasoning behind each of these category distinctions (especially for those of us who read romance for the heroes and have specific preferences), I have a hard time drawing such hard distinctions in real life men. And probably not coincidentally, the books I love best also seem to have trouble making those hard distinctions.

The man I know best, of course, is my husband and I really don't know how to categorize him according to a romance novel character distinction. In general, he's an easy-going guy. Pretty much the most easy-going guy I've ever known. He's affectionate, attentive, caring and responsible. But put him between a bully and a victim and he's pretty fierce. He also reads romance and his take on the heroes is pretty interesting. In fact, he wrote the review portion for next Monday's review of Emma Barry's new book Private Politics so that should be interesting. The only editing I did was for typos and editorial style (though I still wrote the recipe part).

Looking back in my dating past, most of the guys I dated were similarly not easily categorized. Even among those who were military (and there were quite a few of those, living as I do in the DC area), bouncers, cowboys, motorcycle riders or other similarly Alpha-sounding types, there was really only one true Alpha in the bunch. That may say more about me and the guys I chose than the guys themselves, of course. Even people I only know casually have observed that I don't seem like the kind of girl one could trod upon. But my own personal Alpha and I were the longest relationship I had before I met my husband. He was a cowboy-pilot-motorcycler who once literally put his body between me and danger. He also made my lunch every day before I left for work and loved shopping for clothes with me. I'm just not sure how that fits into most romance novel conceptions of the Alpha.

A really good example of a book I love best is Unbound by Cara McKenna. Rob, the hero of that book, at first appears to be the quintessential Alpha backwoods warrior. He's gruff, speaks little, chops wood, shoots arrows, fishes and lives off the land. In his previous life, he was a hard-charging Type-A bar owner capable of endless amounts of seduction. But he has a whole different side that he keeps hidden from the world, the heroine and even himself as much as possible. What interests me most about Unbound is just how much damage the Alpha-Beta false dichotomy has wrought in Rob, who felt forced to turn to alcohol and, subsequently, complete withdrawal from society in order to function. It's something that a lot of modern men seem to have experienced, if not to that extreme degree.

Yes, I know romance novels are all fiction. I just worry sometimes (even independent of my husband's reading, which does put a whole different spin on things) about that whole Alpha-Beta spectrum as an essentially patriarchal tool. Even without knowing the specific views of the researchers on the wolf studies in the 1950s that yielded the language we now use, whether male or female, there were certain assumptions about gender roles underlying work undertaken in that time period. Alpha meant in charge, a leader, an enforcer. Beta meant access to inferior or no mates, secondary access to food and a constant struggle to attain Alpha status. That whole paradigm assigns value to Alpha status. Plus the way the Beta distinction as it is now used by the PUA (pick-up artist) and men's rights communities seems to enforce that idea. The only greater insult than calling a man a Beta is calling him feminized or referring to him as a woman.

I have written about romance novels and the romance fandom being a safe space for me, as free from the pressures of patriarchal conventions as I can make it. It's largely free of male bias. Authors, editors, bloggers and reviewers of romance are nearly all female. I'm incensed when a book I read (ahem, Skye Jordan) or an article like that stupid Vice one about fisting intrudes into that safe space. It's tempting for me to say, well, romance isn't for men; it's for women. And it's one of the very few things that is. Who cares about how men are portrayed in romance when the rest of the world cares so little about how women are portrayed in everything else?

So why can't my brain just leave this idea well enough alone?