Though I wouldn’t care to think of myself as an habitue of the gothic romance section of the bookstore maybe an occasional visitor, or even a dallier, but certainly not someone with any sort of compulsion in that direction I couldn’t help but notice that Johanna Lindsey has a new book out. This was purely by chance, mind you. I just happened to pass by on my way from psychology to women’s history, so I paused for a minute to thumb through Surrender My Love not without glancing surreptitiously around to make sure no one else was in the aisle.
Of course, that’s only in the first 100 pages or so. Selig’s sister Kristen, whose romance with Royce of Wyndhurst was chronicled in the earlier Hearts Aflame, promptly rescues Selig and captures Erika. Naturally, Erika’s pride prevents her from explaining that she didn’t actually have all that much to do with Selig’s sufferings.
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When Selig tries to force Erika to walk naked and chained down to the dining hall, she bites him on the leg and he tackles her: “Lying on top of a naked woman might not have stoked his fires, but her own movements to dislodge him had done so. It was there in the intense smoldering of his grey eyes, and in what she could feel hardening near the apex of her thighs. In a panic, she got out, ‘Recall that you hate me!’ just before his mouth closed on hers.”
Ironically, since these books don’t try to be anything more than material for psychological masturbation, the very same elements that most satisfy women are the ones so widely excoriated by men. In their repetition, their shameless wishfulfillment, romances cater to women’s obsessions without making even token obeisance to the standards of literature. And for that they must be, if not stamped out, then mocked out of existence.
Douglas’ mortification is familiar to feminists. From the radical feminist screeds of the 70s to Susan Faludi’s 1992 bestseller Backlash, traditional feminism has offered a fairly homogenous take on both the problem and its solution. Women are the victims of the nefarious media, this feminism explains, brainwashed into “eroticizing our subordination.” The only way to escape from bimboism is to burn Vogue and Love’s Tender Trap, eschewing heels, lipstick and shaving in favor of Birkenstocks and a flannel shirt.
With Where the Girls Are, Douglas throws a gauntlet at the feet of all those 1960s historians who focus on male politics and culture while portraying women as “mindless, hysterical, out-of-control bimbos who shrieked and fainted while watching the Beatles or jiggled our bare breasts at Woodstock.” Sick of blushing over girl groups, I Dream of Jeannie and Charlie’s Angels, she argues that they expressed women’s dreams and fears or some of them, anyway. As she documents her own metamorphosis from a teenager in the 60s whose hormones catapulted her “between desire and paranoia, elation and despair, horniness and terror” to a feminist mother perplexedly wringing her hands when her four-year-old daughter begs for Rollerblade Barbie, Douglas outlines her own set of rules for distinguishing reclaimable images from those which have been justifiably vilified.
It’s an appealing slant, but one could just as easily make the opposite argument. Maybe the shows were just an attempt by media moguls to breathe new glamour into a role that was rapidly becoming stale. After all, it was precisely this deceptive glamour that Friedan herself criticized in her analysis of the American housewife who was “freed by science and laborsaving appliances from…drudgery.” Substitute “magic” for “science”, give Friedan’s housewife a stylish new wardrobe, and you have Samantha the witch.
