It’s with great aplomb I can announce the start of a new year. Today it has become official. For today, at last, my laptop has been fixed. The accident that was waiting to happen for over a year happened last week. I stepped on the bloody thing and it was all Jane Austen’s fault. If the girls hadn’t of been swooning over Mr. Darcy, if the DVD hadn’t been used as a coaster and had not frozen every eight seconds then I wouldn’t have taken the computer upstairs, I wouldn’t have left it on the floor and I wouldn’t have fucking stepped on it.
Damn you Austen, from now on we are enemies, you and I.
When it comes to women and their view of romance I’m constantly being told that ‘I just don’t understand’. I admit romantic fiction certainly isn’t my forte, I kind of get it, but he smacks of woman porn to me, female emotional-masturbation. Austen is the grand mummy of it all but, for the life of me, all I can see in Pride and Prejudice is a protracted argument that ends with two people fucking.
In my opinion that’s what makes romance such a pointless genre. As a man I can’t see how reading about two people, who aren’t me, getting laid would be the slightest bit interesting. In real life this is a recognized fact. There is nothing more boring than someone banging on about their new boyfriend or girlfriend. None of us care because none of us are fucking them. Also, a self respecting romantic novel has up the ante; inject a bit of conflict and adversity into the situation. So now you’re reading about someone else’s dysfunctional relationship. Joy heaped upon joy.
In most romantic novels the male lead has to be a prick. The dashing Mr. Darcy is Austen’s prick. Now, don’t think for an instant I have any problem with a man’s God given right to be a prick. I myself have profited immensely from being an arsehole. Truth be told my life took a considerable up turn when I gave in to my inner wanker and allowed him to flourish.
My problem with Romantic fiction is the interpretation by its readership, more to the point their interpretation of ‘the prick’. The Girlf, who is now published in the genre herself, goes to great pains to explain it. However what she fails to recognize is I’m ACTULLY a bloke so I view the complex inner subtext of the hero with a great deal of skepticism.
What I don’t get, I’m told, is even though he spends the first seventy percent of the book treating the heroine like shit, even though he’ll pop up, fuck her then disappear for weeks on end, even though he’s arrogant, officious and dismissive of her for the majority of the story the truth is he really, really loves her. This is often explained to me with wide eyed sincerity as if I’m an idiot not to get it.
This is perplexing because this is exactly how I’ve treated the women in my life that I didn’t give two shits about. Women who had difficulty with ‘fucking off’ once I was finished with them. It seems as if I was completely wrong with my appraisal of the situation. I was laboring under the assumption that I was being a grade A twat where as in actual fact, although I didn’t know it, I was emulating the classic male romantic lead and was in fact deeply and head over heels in love with these women. If I had known I wouldn’t have felt so bad about using them (That’s pretty much a lie. I didn’t feel bad about using them).
Romantic fiction goes wrong at the start because it assumes men have a subtext. Essentially we don’t. We don’t keep are thoughts to ourselves, we don’t craftily manipulate situations to get our own way. We rumble through life observing with wide eyed fascination the changing smells and colours around us and cooing. The Girlf disagrees. Apparently I’m always at it, sneakily steering her with complex subterfuge so she’ll subconsciously obey me.
Am I?
Really?
Clearly I’m cooler than I thought I was. From my perspective I’m merely childishly sulking or stamping my feet and pretty much kicking off like a five year old. Little did I know it’s actually a clever Machiavellian ruse that I use to shape the universe around me.
God I’m good.
Reading and writing about love, the Girlf has started asking me to talk about my feelings. This unnerving habit is probably just research yet it unsettles me. Slowly, slowly I’m coming to the realization that I haven’t got any.
This needs clarification, I do actually feel stuff. I’m not a sociopath. However feeling something and needing to talk about it are two separate things. Any feelings I have that require discussing I’m happy to discuss, such as my feelings for her. I’m totally comfortable talking about them. However she mines for those hidden, secret fears and desires that I’m quickly discovering don’t seem to exist. Unfortunately she’s not having it. Clearly I must be hiding something.
I think the main difference between the sexes is women feel stuff and men know stuff.
I know I love her more intensely than anyone I’ve ever met in my life. I don’t feel this, I know this. I know, also, she’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever clapped eyes on. This is a realization, a hard fact, not a fluttery nuance in my stomach. I know what her body does to me when I touch it, the desire I feel every time I do so is an indisputable reality not an airy fairy confusing angst inside me. It doesn’t take me by surprise, I don’t question it, it’s there, it’s real and I’m good with it.
This in a round about way brings me back to my initial point. The men in the books all seem to be taken by surprise by their emotions. They don’t realize they’re in love with the heroine until the last twenty thousand words. They are shocked by the revelation and this, in my experience, never happens.
I knew I wanted her the first second I saw her. There was no confusion, no doubt, no soul searching. I looked at her and thought ‘I’m having that’.
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