Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  You’ve never had an orgasm, despite being a courtesan.

  You have self-esteem issues manifested in body-image problems.

  You’re a virgin and a courtesan.

  You have self-esteem issues and body-image problems but you’re otherwise a perfect height and weight.

  You’re a virgin, but you dress provocatively and everyone thinks you’re a dirty hooooor.

  You have self-esteem issues and body-image problems and you need to lose some weight.

  You’ve been promoted to a new job, but while the cover copy and descriptions indicate you’re a professional, in every scene you act like a moron. Because competence is boring when compared to wacky hijinks at the

  You have self-esteem issues and body-image problems, and with the help of Photoshop and/or a carnival funhouse mirror you know what you’ll look like fifty pounds lighter.

  expense of your professional image.

  You’re psychic with powers that are untrained and oh-so-dangerous.

  You’re not a vampire, which the hero will eventually fix with a blood-swapping ritual and copious amounts of doggy-style sex.

  You’re a witch with a deep fear of your magic heritage.

  You’re not a selkie, which the hero will eventually fix with a blood-swapping ritual and copious amounts of doggy-style sex.

  You’re an emo-superhero who doesn’t want her superpowers.

  You’re not psychic, which the hero can’t fix, but since he’s psychic, he can assure you that simultaneously experiencing two orgasms during doggy-style sex is every bit as amazing as he thought it’d ever be.

  You’re a werecod. Or a wereslug.

  Your parents were mean to you.

  You’re a demon with a heart of gold. Literally.

  Your parents were Satan. Literally.

  EXPERIENCE: HEROINES DO NOT HAVE IT

  The more progressive romance novels allow the heroines to experience some sweet, sweet lovin’ prior to the hero, but these concessions have been grudging. Sure, she was allowed to have sexual experiences, but they had to be either stunningly mediocre or downright awful. It was the Curse of the Bad Wang, and its blight affected both virgin and nonvirgin women in Romancelandia. Rapist Wang; Abusive Wang; Overly Massive Wang; Teeny-Tiny Wang; Evil Homosexual Wang (and its close relative, Evil Bisexual Wang); Drug-Addicted Wang; Wang That Died Before It Could Do Its Duty; Utter Lack of Wang Due to Overprotective Male Relatives; Incompetent Wang That Couldn’t Find the Clitoris with a Flashlight, a Magnifying Glass, and a Pair of Bomb-Sniffing Dogs: you name it, and some incarnation of Bad Wang has been invoked in a romance novel. For a long time, it was almost like an episode of Scooby-Doo—you knew some crotchety (or crusty) wang was behind the heroine’s virginity or frigidity; you just had to figure out why.

  Top Ten Reasons Behind the Creation of a Virgin Widow

  10. The late husband was old. Really, really, flaccidly old.

  9. He loved his horses more than he loved her. And, yes, this does occasionally mean what you think it does.

  8. A sad preference for opium created a little matchstick that would not light, if you catch our drift.

  7. He was a soldier who shipped overseas right after the wedding, and some time in the chaos forgot to make love to his newlywed bride, because it’s not as if young soldiers about to go to war have sex on their minds, or anything like that.

  6. She can’t speak of it. It is too horrible.

  5. Lord Floppebottom married her by proxy, and never came to claim his bride.

  4. The sweaty temptations of the flesh were nothing but a trifle when compared to spending long evenings reading aloud the works of great philosophers.

  3. She really can’t speak of it. It’s too horrible.

  2. She was too perfect for him to touch. (Oh, for God’s sake.)

  1. Three words: He was gay. Gay as a three-dollar bill. A three-dollar bill that really enjoyed cock sucking and bad house music.

  If the heroines weren’t virgins and had, by the grace of a merciful author, experienced orgasms some time in the past, you can bet your virgin widow’s stipend that it was due to the hero. The hero, you see, possesses the only thing that can break the Curse of the Bad Wang: the Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’. And if the romance novel is in any way a love reunited story, then you can bet that wheresoever goeth the Heroic Wang, there followeth the sex life. The poor heroines are generally left in a holding pattern until the hero returns. Do not pass Go, do not find another orgasm, do not collect two hundred dollars. Yea, though the heroine may walk in the valley of the shadow of the death of her sexuality, she shall find no vibrator or removable showerhead, nor figure out what her fingers can do, nor meet a remotely competent lover.

  The apotheosis of the Bad Wang can be seen in the fabled virgin widow, a creature unique, as far as we know, to the romance genre. When you see a virgin widow, you can be assured that acrobatic feats of storytelling will ensue in an effort to explain why her cinnabar cavern has remained unspelunked.

  THE MAGIC HOO HOO

  We understand the appeal of the Unawakened Woman. We do. There’s a lot of cultural significance attached to first times, whether it’s your first love, first sexual experience, or first orgasm. It’s appealing for the first love also to be the forever love. However, part of the fantasy of romance novels is that the hero is equally floored when he encounters the heroine, and sexually unaware men are in extremely short supply in Romancelandia. How do authors achieve this emotional intensity on the hero’s part?

  By capitalizing on the Magic Hoo Hoo, of course. The chemistry is hotter than the fire of a thousand blazing suns, and the hero is often left at a loss for what to do. It’s not just the physical experience that’s different; it’s a different emotional experience as well. The sex is so good, it’s completely overwhelming. That relatively few romance novels use this method of making the sexual experience special for the heroine is probably a testament to the tenacity of the idea that a woman who enjoys sex for sex itself is morally suspect.

  The explanations for virgin widows and Bad Wang can be so ridiculous that we have, in the past, suggested a rating system to judge these poor orgasmless creatures. We call it the Bitch, Please scale; individual units of measurement are BPs. The rating is obtained by how often the setup makes you think or say out loud “Bitch, please!” For example, Amanda from The Real Deal by Lucy Monroe is a sexually unawakened woman because not only is her husband an emotionally abusive pig, he’s a bisexual emotionally abusive pig who is willing to fuck anything that moves other than the heroine. That heavy-handed, clichéd approach (the Insta-Gay method of creating a villain merits multiple BPs alone) earned at least 50 BPs. On the other hand, Daphne from Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible earned only 2 or so BPs. Even though ultimate angelic-choirs-bursting-forth-in-song orgasms were reserved for the hero, Daphne actually enjoyed sex in the past, but was left unfulfilled by her inept older husband, who was mildly appalled that a gently bred woman would enjoy sex so much. The more nuanced take on sexual pleasure and the convincing historical attitude lessened the BP rating drastically. We’ll let you know if the International Bureau of Weights and Measures accepts the BP as part of the International System of Units anytime soon.

  The Hymen: Definitive Proof in the Court of Love

  Misunderstandings can be rife in any romance novel, and chief among these is the assumption by the hero that the heroine is a slut, a dirty, dirty slut. Reasoning previously used by actual heroes in actual romance novels to definitively prove that the heroine is a Slutty McSlutterson includes:

  She flirts with other men.

  She was out walking alone, at night.

  She’s too beautiful.

  She’s too unconventional.

  Look, other people said so, all right? Christ, if you can’t believe in gossip and hearsay, what can you believe in?

  She’s a widow.

  She’s an heiress.

  She’s his housekeeper.

  She’s his
maid.

  She’s his secretary.

  She’s a romance author.

  She works in a whorehouse.

  She was born to a beautiful mother.

  Who was an actress.

  And also, you know, a whore.

  Who owned her own whorehouse.

  And auctioned off the heroine to the hero.

  The hymen, however, provides proof of the heroine’s purity and allows her to hold her head high despite the slings and arrows of outrageous misunderstandings, and should the hero choose to divest the heroine of her virginity via rape, not only does her hymen prove him wrong, it can actually inspire regret—possibly even contrition.

  BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

  The postrape regret hangover brings up a rather sticky question: How does a hero adequately express the regret and sorrow raging in his breast? It is, at the very least, a tremendously awkward situation.

  Well, wonder no longer! Behold our new Smart Bitch line of “Holy Crap, I Raped a Virgin!” greeting cards. With sentiments like:

  “Sorry I Raped You…Again. And Again. And Again.”

  “I Thought You Were a Whore, Not a Real Person…Please Forgive Me?”

  “Mom Was an Evil Slut and I Assumed You Were, Too…But Your Hymen Proved Me Wrong.”

  “Sorry I Raped You. I Thought You Were Your Mom.”

  Heroes will be sure to find the appropriate card for every occasion.

  FEMME VILLAINY

  Heroes don’t face quite the same constraints as the heroine. For one thing, the Heroic Wang works on all and sundry. His jealous ex-mistresses would (and frequently did attempt to) kill to preserve their access to the Boner o’ Gold. And speaking of jealous ex-mistresses, one of the most bizarre elements to romance novel stereotyping? The villainous sexy woman. If there’s a woman who likes sex, who likes sex a lot, who likes it so much that she knows how to capitalize on it, she’s a villain without a heart. Woe betide you if you’re a woman who enjoys sex for its own sake and knows your way around a manicure, because as far as we can tell, snappy, immaculately applied fingernail polish combined with an ability to experience orgasms while not madly in love are two sure signs of a fatal degeneration in feminine virtue. Being a native of some sort of glamorous foreign country (Greece, Italy, France, the Upper East Side of Manhattan) only makes it worse. Sexual ignorance is the same as moral purity; sexual experience or knowledge, even in some contemporaries, is treated the same as moral turpitude.

  Why the contrast? Generally speaking, the heroine in the vast majority of romance novels is an Unawakened Woman in every way, not merely sexually. If she’s a raving beauty, she has no idea whatsoever about her physical attributes—this sort of heroine was the staple of Old Skool romances, and her lack of awareness was often part and parcel of her youth. She’s usually mousy, or brash, or tomboyish, or just plain oblivious. She’s a modern-day Snow White. She’s the prettiest one of all, but she’ll never know it—she will, in fact, happily cohabitate in platonic bliss with a group of short, non-sexually threatening men until some dude on a horse shows up and French-kisses her corpse into sexual awakening and a realization of the power she holds.

  This is in direct contrast to the villainess. If the heroine is Snow White, the villainess is the pre–old-hag wicked stepmother. She’s sharp, she’s sophisticated, she’s unafraid to wield her sexuality as a weapon, and damn, she looks good in black. She also has a tendency to be psychotically pissed off when she finds out she’s not the most beautiful of all. This species of villainess is usually the woman who is in direct competition with the heroine. She’s the ex-mistress, the former girlfriend, the horrible ex-wife who died some appropriately gruesome death. In short, she’s the rival.

  The other type of villainess is usually old and ugly, and is presented as either grossly obese or grotesquely gaunt. These tend to be the people who can exert immediate power of the heroine: the evil stepmother, the vicious aunt, the harsh housekeeper. She is the heroine’s captor. In this sort of villainess, the threatening sexuality of the heroine’s rival is removed almost entirely because it’s completely irrelevant; the cautionary aspect of what beauty and sex can lead to when untempered by the Powah of Lurve is unnecessary. Instead, the focus switches to using physical appearance instead of sexual experience to denote villainy. Here, as in many fairy tales, you can literally see the person’s soul made flesh. Outward markers of hideousness often correspond to internal character flaws.

  The preoccupation with moral purity through sexual (in) experience doesn’t just play into the fantasy of Sleeping Beauty being woken with love’s first kiss; it expresses societal anxieties about sexually available females who aren’t affiliated with a culturally sanctioned protector or mate. The simple fact is, widespread acceptance of women as fully actualized human beings with rights equal to those of men is only a handful of decades old in many industrialized nations and barely in its nascent stages in most parts of the world. Old attitudes about women as property are bound to crop up in fiction, and author Lilith Saintcrow, in the essay “Half of Humanity Is Worth Less Than a Chair” published in the Nothing But Red anthology, calls it the problem of the wandering vagina. Because of the vagina’s lack of ownership, the woman is quite literally a walking property crime waiting to happen, not simply because she doesn’t have an owner, but because she can potentially bear a bastard son.

  Interpreted through this lens, the root cause for the sexy villainesses beyond the “oh, it’s the sexual double standard” dismissal begins to emerge. A woman using her sexuality for her own ends and deriving sexual pleasure independent of love and reproduction isn’t just party to a property crime—she’s about as natural as a chair suddenly getting up and wanting to sit on a person. People react similarly to slave uprisings, and it’s no coincidence that black male slaves were also often portrayed as sexually voracious predators who had to be restrained whenever possible—and fictionally, the villainesses’ ultimate fates aren’t much better. The villainess also lessens the potency of the male: by reclaiming her body via her sexuality, she rejects the power of the male, and if there’s one thing that’s unacceptable in the romance genre, it’s a hero with an inferior wang.

  Conversely, says Saintcrow, demonstrating a heroine’s virginity is a way of reinforcing the order, because the sexually active woman who gets to choose her partner (for rather liberal interpretations of “choose,” since the choice is quite literally forced on the heroine in many Old Skool romances) is turned into a safe figure. The woman reclaims her sexuality, but with the hero as a necessary and sufficient condition. Her vagina, if it ever wandered, finds a steady home in short order.

  SEX IS NATURAL, SEX IS GOOD

  All this analysis aside, however, we do have to give romance novels their due: no other fiction genre focuses sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular in the context of happy romantic relationships. Not that we’re aiming to comprehensively summarize the sexual mores of Western civilization via an examination of its literary canon, but generally speaking, the wages of Unmarried Nookie seem to be death, even if the woman didn’t consent to the nookie (see Tess of the D’Urbervilles), while the wages of Extramarital Nookie is fleeting pleasure followed by lifelong repentance (see: The Scarlet Letter), death (see: Madame Bovary) or grinding misery (good Lord, take your pick). We’re not attempting to dismiss these works as somehow unworthy, and Lord knows we loves us the canon, but let’s be honest: the portrayal of sex skews toward the grim. Sex, and especially female sexuality and sexual pleasure, is by and large treated with distrust and viewed as a destructive force, with relatively little acknowledgment of its redemptive and constructive powers. This isn’t particularly surprising; narratives tend to conform to the cultural space of the times. Looking back, it makes sense that the sagas full of virgins in imminent peril of being constantly raped were prevalent in the 1970s and ’80s, as modern feminism and the sexual revolution struggled and screamed into existence. The historical romances published today are
considerably different beasts from the Old Skool novels in structure and sensibility; if nothing else, the conflicts regarding women’s bodies are no longer being visited in quite so literal fashion on the heroine.

  In contemporary romance, virginity is treated differently. The heroine can be:

  A. A bona fide virgin, for any number of reasons, many of them completely neurotic and serving as backstory for why the heroine doesn’t believe in herself.

  B. Sexually experienced—but it’s never been like it is with the hero, because she has been cursed by Bad Wang. The hero’s sexing is the pinnacle of all sexual experiences, and he has a heroine who was previously convinced she’s frigid yodeling in happiness within fifteen minutes of the application of his Heroic Wang. It’s almost like a box cake recipe: to make happy heroine, remove pants, add cock, and stir until creamy consistency is achieved.

  C. Sexually experienced and perfectly happy with her past orgasms, so much so that it’s a nonissue, but inexperienced in some other, very significant way.

  Most contemporary romance novels published after the early 1990s allow the heroines to have sex. They have sex before marriage with somebody who isn’t the hero. They aren’t presented as pure, pristine vessels of womanhood to make their bows before a monarch (well, most of them are not, anyway) and they may have even had (Gasp!) enjoyable nonhero-bestowed orgasms (though this particular heroine is still a relative rarity—it’s difficult to give up the fantasy of the completely Unawakened Woman being woken by the One True Love).

  So how to create that imbalance of power? What can substitute for virginity?

  Ignorance and inexperience, of course! And maybe life-threatening danger.

  Many a contemporary heroine finds herself a fish out of water in the plot of a romance. The city girl moves to the small town in the country. The country girl moves to the city and impresses everyone with her down-home wisdom and guileless charm. The mailroom clerk finds herself advising the CEO. The daughter of the CEO finds herself in control of a company she knows nothing about. The heroine discovers that many parts of her former life (usually her career and fiancé) have stifled her to the point that she might as well be stumbling around in a zombie state moaning that she wants brains, sweet sweet brains, so she goes on a tear: quits her job, breaks up with her lover, moves to another town, adopts a dog even more neurotic than her, whatever. The list could go on and on—situations ripe for misunderstanding and the education of the ignorant heroine substitute for that pesky virginity, and really, the contemporary heroine’s inexperience is much more satisfying because you can lose your virginity only once. But you can make a fool of yourself and charm or fight your way out time and again—it never gets old!