I Googled “alpha male” and this was one of the first images that came up. I, uh, can see how that might be hard to resist. (Via sodahead.com)

TRIGGER WARNING: This segment of the Hopeless Reimantic series deals with some themes which may be triggering to abuse/harassment survivors, and some of the authors discussed within play it seriously fast and loose with the concept of consent.

Welcome back to Hopeless Reimantic, where I try to convince you all that my taste in books isn’t really that bad!

First of all, some housekeeping: er, it’s been a while since I last put out one of these, so sorry about that. My degree sort of ate me (final year), and it stands to swallow me whole again in a couple of weeks (FINAL YEEEAR), but I promise to get back to some kind of regular posting schedule in the summer.

Alright! Let’s talk about alpha males. Specifically, let’s talk about how spurious science has constructed a cultural narrative in which the expectation of alpha-dom has been projected onto men. Even more specifically, let’s talk about what that means in romance novels, because the Alpha Male (see also “alphahole” and “alphole”) of Romancelandia is a different specimen to the kind uplifted by, say, economy theorists. Or PUAs.

This in itself is kind of interesting to me, to be honest, because I encounter a lot of guys (and I’m sure I’m not the only person to have experienced this) who say that they feel they need to alpha it on up because that, secretly, is what women want.¹

At first glance, you’d see that pretty well backed up by the sheer overwhelming presence of the alpha male in romance novels. You don’t even have to delve into a Mills and Boon backlist to see it; take Fifty Shades of Grey. Christian Grey is arrogant, and controlling, and he gets what he wants. He’s tormented, angsty, abusive and stalkerish (but only in a really hot way), and he’s richer than God, better-looking than the most virile of the Vikings and carries his own name-brand popsicles around in case you happen to get thirsty when you’re going down on him.

A Mills and Boon backlist will show you a lot more of the same, though. This brand of alpha male is raw power in a designer suit; he mixes pure, unbridled Man with all the trappings of high civilisation, because his power is such that he can dominate any world he wants to. Often he’s risen up from humble beginnings or has some kind of connection with a criminal underworld, just so you know he’s a badass.

A different breed of alpha male emphasises the badass aspect over the size of the wallet. One of the most popular alpha males in recent releases is Kane “Tack” Allen, hero of Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man. Now, my experience of Ashley has largely come through reading reviews of her work, but I did check out Motorcycle Man, and I might take a look through her back catalogue with a view to devoting a post on her at some point. Not because I’m a particular fan, but because her books – and their wild success – have caused quite a stir among the romance-reading community, and I think that deserves some scrutiny.

Some people vociferously dislike them, while others compare them to literary crack (there is a Kristen Ashley Addicts Support Group). At any rate, she specialises in this certain type of alpha, and Tack is a perfect example of it. He’s bad, he’s brawny, and he’s terrific in bed (he gives Tyra, our heroine, “so many orgasms I lost count”). Let’s take a look at him:

Dark, longish, somewhat unruly, definitely sexy hair with a hint of gray interspersed in it. Blue eyes with pale lines radiating from the sides that I knew, I just knew, came from laughing. A dark goatee around his mouth, the bit at his chin overlong in a biker way that was too cool for words. Fantastic tattoos slithering up his defined arms, broad shoulders and muscled neck along with one on his ripped chest and a big one on his back. The rest of his body hard and strong…

– Kristen Ashley, Motorcycle Man, Kindle location 87.

He also embodies alphadom, as, in my understanding, Ashley heroes tend to. I gave up highlighting all the stereotypical alpha behaviours he displayed that I found creepy, because the book’s quite long, but I when I looked at all the ones I’d taken, I still had twenty-four. I lost count of all the times he backed her into something or grabbed hold of her and she told him to back off and he wouldn’t. And he always gets what he wants:

“To be fair, I’m givin’ you a warning,” he said quietly.

“Let me go,” I demanded just as quietly, mostly because I was freaking out.

“I want somethin’, I get it.”

“Let me go,” I repeated.

– Motorcycle Man, Kindle location 498

I’m going to try to not quote this book too heavily, but I could, because there are a lot of informatively creepy passages in it. One last one, though, because it’s important. He manhandles her and tells her what to do and in the end she is happy with it because deep down, it’s what she wants. So far, so adherent to PUA theory. What Ashley enthusiasts – and alpha fans in general – would argue makes that sexy and not creepy is that he knows it’s what she wants. That is the nature of their connection: that he knows what she wants, even when she doesn’t.

My arms were crushed between our bodies and I uncurled my fingers from his tee and pressed them flat against his chest as I whispered, “Please, get off me.”

“You want this,” he informed me.

– MM, Kindle location 1258.

And, more explicitly, here:

“…the minute you gave me more of you, I took it, wanted even more and I didn’t keep that a secret, babe, and you fuckin’ know it. And you kept givin’ it. You coulda walked away and you didn’t. And along the way as we’ve been playin’ our game, you got your hooks in me and I got mine in you and you know that too.”

I definitely did if the heartache I’d experienced the last two days was anything to go by.

But I wasn’t going to tell him that.

– MM, Kindle location 3248.

The way I’ve heard this described is that creating a good alpha hero demands a certain skill on the part of the author. If he’s going to dominate the heroine, then the reader needs to be assured that said heroine is in safe hands, and that reassurance is the author’s job. We must be sure that nothing the heroine isn’t okay with is going to happen to her, and readers that are content that the author (and thus the hero) is acting on behalf of the heroine’s best interests tend to be more willing to forgive things like non-consent. Her protests are part of the journey the story takes you on, because – well, you know she’s going to be okay.

This is key, and it’s something I find both reassuring and deeply troubling. On the one hand, I do find the assumption on the part of non-romance readers that the scenarios portrayed in these books are what their readers actually want or believe that they want kind of condescending. These people have brains in their heads like anybody else, and I don’t see many defenders of these books arguing that this is what they feel real life ought to be like. Some do, but not many that I’ve encountered.

The fantasy-escapism aspect of the work is lost on pretty much nobody, and I find it very strange that people don’t assume for other genres that it is. Do you put down a crime novel hoping you’re going to find a dead body in your garage? Fantasy fans might daydream about riding to war on the back of a dragon (I know I have) but I don’t think many people are seriously all that blind to the reality of what that might entail in a real-world context. Very few people would want to be placed in a fantasy scenario with the security of the story stripped away.

On the other hand…

I do understand the reservations non-romance-novel readers have about this kind of scenario being so widely marketed. There’s a crucial difference between, say, a crime thriller and a story about two people falling in love. Being a detective figuring out the culprit of a murder: well, that only happens to a very specific set of people. Falling in love happens all the time, everywhere, to people of all kinds and from all walks of life. A huge part of the appeal of romance and romantic plotlines is the near-universality of the experience. A lot of people are going to find the feelings described as part of that process relatable, even if the way it’s happening isn’t.

Which means that the boundary between fantasy-escapism and “this is the kind of thing I should look for in the world around me” is a lot easier to blur. The idea of a partner knowing what you want before you do, for example, has seeped into culture to an alarming degree, as anybody who’s picked up a women’s magazine will be able to tell you. Fifty Shades has pushed BDSM into the mainstream in a big way by marketing it as romantic. And there is no getting away from the fact that the normalisation of unhealthy relationship power dynamics in mainstream culture and mainstream romance feed off one another, and that is a process which is going to continue until the romance industry and the rest of mainstream culture recognise that it is happening.

I don’t have an easy answer for this one, honestly; it’s something I am still struggling with, and I’m running out of column space. It’s not for me or anybody else to tell people what they should be fantasising about, and I’m not sure that demanding clear delineations between “realistically romantic” and “don’t try this at home, kids!” in romance novels is either practically viable or particularly useful.

But the fact remains that some of this stuff is harmful, and its harmfulness, I find, gets dismissed by romance novel readers as “it’s just fantasy, it hurts no one!” and by non-romance novel readers as “it’s just romance novels, they’re too stupid to know any better!”. This is something that deserves deeper consideration and more frank discussion, whether you’re a fan of the romance novel or not.

Eesh, and I didn’t even get to any actual wolf packs! I’m sorry, paranormal genre. I’ll cover you someday, I promise.

What do you guys think? Do you like a bit of alphole in your hero? When does a book cross the line between fantastical goodness and creepy-ass weirdness?

Join me next time on Hopeless Reimantic, where I’ll be talking about…marriage! See you then.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: And indeed you can read two early BR ‘WTF is this alpha male business all about?’ posts from Sarah C here and Stephen B here!

“You were a virgin, Jess.”

“Yes.” This time she didn’t deny it. “And the reason I was still a virgin was because you’re the only man I’ve ever wanted. I was never interested in anyone else. Even when I thought I hated you, I still didn’t want anyone else.”

– Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant, Sarah Morgan (Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, 2010)

I pretty much picked that first reference at random. Bought was the first Mills & Boon I ever actually purchased (I say purchased; at the time of writing it was still a free download on Amazon) and it was absolutely everything I thought a contemporary romance would be, so it holds a special, slightly nauseated place in my heart. It was a lucky choice, though, because a great deal of what I want to say about this trope is contained in this book.

My first romance novel. I promise it’s cheesy in a whole different way than it looks.

There’s a lot of – entirely justifiable – outrage over how prevalent the virgin heroine is, even today. I am not going to go into the whole problematic mess that is the idea that a woman’s ability to love truly and purely is somehow connected to her physical “purity”, or the idea that a woman can only give herself fully to a lover – as if that’s a healthy focal point for a relationship anyway – if she’s unclaimed territory when the book begins, so to speak. (You would not believe how many romances I’ve beat myself over the head with in which the hero cries “I can’t take this anymore! I don’t care if you were a dirty slutty hobag before we fell in love! I love you anyway! …wait, you were a virgin? OH THANK GOD YOU BELONG ONLY TO ME NOW”.)

This’d be pretty much the standard response to non-virgins in many romance novels. Source: Smart Bitches Trashy Books, link at end of post

Nor am I going to touch on the huge double standard that is the the common pairing of the virginal heroine with the Virile Manly Man, who has explored delightful bedroom adventures with many a lady fair – but still takes the heroine’s virginity as proof that she’s someone special. (But of course has nevertheless been totally respectful of all of his previous partners. Of course.) I may write about them sometime, but this is an overview with a word limit, so I’ll put some further reading links at the bottom of the post and we can call it even for now.

She spans all genres, does the virginal heroine (insert your own pun here. Yes, I said insert. No, I didn’t mean – look, just go and sit in the corner, okay?), and some are easier to deal with than others. The historical probably has the most easily explicable virgin heroine of all; it’s history! We know what women were like in history! Virgins were the most highly prized of all the ladies, weren’t they? Non-virgins were cast out and shunned and other antisocial-type punishments as well, and they would never marry, so any heroine worth her salt is going to have to be a virgin, or she’s not going to be good enough for the hero. Duh. It’s historical accuracy! Everybody’s actions always correspond perfectly with prevalent attitudes of the time, didn’t you know that? The paranormal and fantasy genres get away with it pretty easily as well, often with some kind of mystical bond that predestines the two central characters for one another – although that doesn’t necessarily preclude one of the characters having had sexual relations beforehand. Sound like a contradiction? I don’t think it is – more on that in a moment.

Which brings me neatly to the virgin heroine who gives me the most trouble; the contemporary one. This lady can be anyone, you guys. She’s a businesswoman or a hairdresser or a secretary or a recluse. She’s shy, or she’s loud and brash. But she always has this part of her that is…untouched, as it were, and I’ve seen authors who will write themselves around some pretty amazing corners to keep that so. She’s never found the right guy. She’s never experienced sexual desire before, or if she has it’s been fleeting or fumbling enough to ignore – this is overwhelmingly common. Which brings me back to Bought, with its heroine who waited through an entire book for a hero she was never even really sure she wanted, because the true and deep love she felt for him superceded all other possible emotional connections.

In some ways, it’s not just the heroine who gets this. A discussion on I (Heart) Presents brought me this, from an interview with romance author Julia James:

I must say, I’ve done this several times, when the hero, realising the heroine is a virgin, goes to great lengths to ensure her first experience is really special, and, of course, in doing so, makes it really special for himself as well. In a way, she gives him her physical virginity, and in exchange he gives her his emotional virginity.
[Source]

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has its own epithet for the hero’s “emotional virginity”; they call it his coming into contact with the Magic Hoo-Hah. (The hero’s counterpart for this is the Mighty Wang, if anyone was interested.) The principle is pretty much the same; somehow, during sex, the hero and heroine exchange a piece of each other that nobody’s ever seen or touched before. And, because of the underpinning idea that men are physical creatures where women are emotional ones, that usually translates to the heroine being physically untouched before she meets the hero, and nobody ever having touched His Heart¹.

In a lot of ways it is this, more than a heroine’s physical virginity, that worries me about the trope as a whole. Because it’s been occurring to me more and more often than the virginal heroine does not necessarily need to be a virgin, per se; the second most commonly occurring version of this trope that I’ve read, usually in contemporaries, is one in which the heroine has had sex. Not, in most cases, often – maybe once or twice, and always with the man she fancied herself in love with before she met the hero. But she didn’t really enjoy it; it was uncomfortable or even painful, and after that relationship ended she never really thought of doing it again, and she figured she’d never really understand what about it was so much fun.

Even LGBT romance has its own version of this, in the form of the straight-person-turned-gay (rarely if ever is there a story of a straight person turning bi), who had sex – even lots of sex! – with the opposite gender, but never really experienced attraction before meeting their same-sex true love. Which is a plausible enough narrative, in fairness, but loses something in that the true love in question tends to be the only person our straight-turned-gay hero/ine experiences any kind of attraction towards at all.

I’ve seen justifications of this, and I can see why it’s popular. If romance is fantasy-fodder, what creates a more perfect fantasy than two people exploring new emotional ground together so that you, the reader, can vicariously experience all of that awe-struck joy and wonder? You only fall in love for the first time once, after all, and this creates a world in which the first time you experience this all-consuming emotion is also the only time. You wander into this amazing place, all innocence, and you are thrilled and delighted – and then you never have to leave again. What could be more perfect than that?

Okay, who here has witnessed somebody they’re close to fall in love for the second (or third or fourth) time? And – and I’m aware that not everybody does this – who’s also seen them perform this amazing feat of selective memory, where suddenly their past relationships no longer really “count”? Oh, sure, they’ll say, we had some good times, it was fun while it lasted, but it was never really all that – I always knew something was missing. And now I’ve found it, because this – this – is the real thing.

Who’s seen that repeated over and over again through a cycle of partners?

Because watching that happen? That’s the kind of feeling this trope gives me. I want to be happy that this kind of “mine is a love that I’ve never yet loved” tabula rasa brings happiness to people, but – I can’t. It kind of depresses me, if I’m honest. I’m more a believer in there being A One (or more than one One!) than there being The One, but I wasn’t always, and even when I wasn’t I’ve always kind of thought – so what if somebody’s not The One? Do they have to be secondhand? Even in Fantasyland, is it so important that every single other relationship a person has before they meet The One be denigrated like this? Even stories about a person loving again after they’ve lost a partner to death suffer from this kind of “it was never like this before, this person is touching a part of me that has never been touched” thing, bar a very rare few.

There are exceptions to this, of course. I’m desperate to get my hands on A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant, which unfortunately is only out in print, but features a courtesan heroine who actually enjoys sex, even before she meets the hero. I recently read a pretty damned excellent book by Molly O’Keefe called Can’t Buy Me Love, whose hero and heroine are many things, but untouched ain’t one. In LGBT-ish fiction, and incidentally also one of the “very rare few” widower-whose-previous-relationship-meant-quite-a-bloody-lot books, Deirdre Knight’s Butterfly Tattoo has two people loving again without discounting their prior experience. And the hero’s bisexual. Right on.

So that’s Virginal (Emotionally and Physically) Heroines (with the occasional Hero). Next up, I…haven’t actually decided what I’m covering yet! Enjoy the mystery.

Further reading:

• Recap: Virgin Heroines in Harlequin Presents
• Virginity as Shorthand: the virgin and the playboy strike again (ClitLit)
  
• Virginity Cliches In Romance (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)

1. Anybody ever saying this sentence out loud is required by law to finish it up with a single emo tear.