Pity poor me. I missed the latest romance novel brouhaha again. Minding my own business–who does that nowadays? I picked up the scent of scandal today as I was going through my blogroll for the week. According to a post at Dear Author, it seems another supposedly savvy, supposedly feminist woman has yet again decried romance novels. This time, according to whoever is represented by the name hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, a political blog, doesn’t even consider romances books in the traditional sense. Then she gets surprised when folks don’t like what she has to say. Doesn’t anyone beside me ever get tired of this dance?
Actually, the contretemps started before then. hilzoy was responding to a post by Charlotte Allen at the Washington Post entitled How Dumb Can We Get? The apparent answer is very. While I was only mildly annoyed by hilzoy, Allen gets a thump on the head from me. Here’s a snippet from her conclusion:
So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
Even if her article was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, as WaPo claims, shouldn’t it be the least bit funny? Even slightly amusing rather than what seems mean spirited and obnoxious? Here’s a hint: ragging on women the same way a man would doesn’t make you a feminist. It does make you a lot of other things, the least of which is dim.
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