Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  Ingénue: I’m just beginning to show my utter awesomeness. Stay tuned. She’s young, innocent, and a tender flower, but what she lacks in experience, she more than makes up for in good humor and a surprising resiliency. She can be clueless at times, but she differentiates herself from the Too Stupid to Live heroine by displaying flashes of good sense. Books featuring the Ingénue are often coming-of-age tales as well as love stories; heroines who start out as ingénues are often strong, capable women by the end of the story. Last seen: books that straddle the Old Skool and the more current paradigm, as well as many traditional Regencies. Prototype: any heroine in any Laura London novel, but especially Merry from The Windflower; innumerable Georgette Heyer heroines.

  Alpha Heroine: Kicking ass, can’t be bothered to take names. The magnificent bitch of Romancelandia; you can try to cross her, but before you do, try to determine which part of your body you can best live without. Alpha heroines are probably one of the newest species of heroine, and they’re becoming more popular with time. They break certain cardinal rules of romance novel heroine behavior. First of all, they’re usually one of the few heroines who are allowed to outrank the hero in significant ways, such as in social standing, political power, or firepower. Second of all, they will not put up with any shit from anybody, much less the hero. Third of all, they’re often unabashed about the measures they must take in order to save their loved ones and themselves. Snuff a villain? Scheme and skullduggery? Hurt the hero where it counts, when it counts? They’ll do it, and do it well. They fight to the finish, they probably eat their spinach, and they can rescue themselves, thanks very much. But a hero for that soul-deep completion and unbearably supernatural orgasms? That’d be great. They sometimes rub readers the wrong way because they come across as hard, manipulative, and selfish. The best ones, however, are magnificent, if just a little bit terrifying. Last seen: queening it over the masses in the occasional paranormal, romantic suspense, and historical. Prototype: Eve (again) from J. D. Robb’s In Death series; Melanthe of For My Lady’s Heart by Laura Kinsale; Lady Lyssa from Joey W. Hill’s The Vampire Queen’s Servant; Kaderin the Coldhearted, from Kresley Cole’s A Hunger Like No Other; Jaz Parks, from the Jaz Parks series, by Jennifer Rardin.

  Wounded (and Occasionally Soiled) Dove: These heroines are Hamletesque in their angst and tormented psyches—and, occasionally, their tiresomeness. The Wounded Dove usually comes from some sort of horrific past and, in a rather neat role inversion, puts the hero in the position of being the nurturer and healer. Her actions are often driven by fear and distrust; any conflicts in the story are often exacerbated because she refuses to completely trust the hero to help her. Former prostitutes and rape victims in historicals are especially ripe candidates for Wounded Doves—because who better than a hero to provide her with some sexual healin’? Last seen: in every other Mary Balogh novel. Prototype: Zenia from The Dream Hunter by Laura Kinsale; Viola from Mary Balogh’s No Man’s Mistress; Leigh from Laura Kinsale’s The Prince of Midnight.

  Smart-Mouthed Cynic: Jaded, cautious, and funny as hell. Life isn’t a bed of roses. Wait, maybe it is a bed of roses: intensely prickly, nourished by piles of crap, and potentially crawling with aphids. Whatever. In any case, life isn’t easy, and nobody knows this better than the Smart-Mouthed Cynic. She approaches life and love with caution, though without the same level of reluctance to commit as the Antiheroine, and she copes with her disillusionment and pain by being funny. Really, really funny. Last seen: many modern romantic comedies. Prototype: Just about any Jennifer Crusie heroine you’d care to name, but especially Min from Bet Me.

  Airhead: It’s like, totally cosmic, man, like, how annoying this heroine can, like, be, you know? The good-natured airhead is much less common than she used to be, but for a while, authors seemed to think it was a great idea to use ditzy heroines as foils for tough-talking, hard-living, uptight heroes. The idea was, we think, that the heroes would ground the heroines, and the heroines would, like, teach the totally uptight hero how to loosen up a little. This sometimes worked, when the characters found just the right balance with each other. More often than not, however, the chemistry was painful and the comedy ham-handed. To add insult to injury, these heroines, if present in contemporary novels, were almost always New Age dipshits who believed in a dizzying array of woo-woo crap. Just kill us now. By destroying our heart chakra. Which you can achieve if you can focus your energy on that crystal. Last seen: in the mid-to-late 1990s. Prototype: Gabrielle from Rachel Gibson’s It Must Be Love; Leda from Charms by Kathleen Kane.

  TEN COMMANDMENTS OF HEROINE CONDUCT

  1. Thou shalt not lust in thy panties for any male’s mighty wang due to normal sexual horny pants. Thou shalt lust in thy panties only for the mighty wang of the hero. There is no “ho” in heroine.

  2. Thou shalt not offer an accurate representation of the financial insecurity of women at the time period by actively looking for a hero of wealth and reputation, and admitting that thou art doing so without remorse. Just because every unmarried woman at that time actually was doing so is no excuse for similar behavior in a romance heroine.

  3. If thou art in a historical, thou shalt not be without a loyal, trusty servant, even though trusting the servant put the servant in a complicated position of power over her mistress, and really, a heroine who is blackmailed by her servants is scarcely a noble prototype of admirable behavior.

  4. Thou shalt not be aware of your beauty. Every villain, sleazy uncle, and otherwise able-bodied male who has ever clapped eyes on thee may make sexual overtures on thee, but thou shalt remain in blissful oblivion.

  5. Thou shalt have a nurturing streak larger and warmer than the South China Sea. Thy desire for children shall be unquestioned and unperturbed by real-life concerns such as the cost of child rearing, reproductive choice, and child-support payments (in contemporaries), or the dangers of childbearing (in historicals). And shouldst thou choose to remain child-free, thou freak of nature, verily thou shouldst display your nurturing streak with animals. Preferably cute, neurotic ones.

  6. If thou shalt have a baby with the hero prior to getting together with him, thou shalt keep this baby a secret. See also commandment 5.

  7. Thy amnesia shalt be sexy and not be complicated by distinctly unsexy side effects such as loss of motor control, speech impediments, loss of cognitive skills, and inability to control bodily functions.

  8. Thou shalt not win against the hero in any significant way. A few moral victories shall be thine; all other substantive victories shalt lie with the hero, for yea, his wang is mighty.

  9. If in a historical, thou shalt desire escape from the domestic sphere. If a contemporary, thou shalt desire escape from a soul-sucking career. If in a paranormal, thou shalt desire escape from the superpowers and eternal life that have been foisted unwillingly upon thee.

  10. Thou shalt not kill, unless it be accidental or under extremely limited circumstances. Thou especially shalt not be an efficient killer, unless thou art in a paranormal and thou killest mostly nonhuman bad guys who verily had it coming to their asses.

  VIRGINITY AND THE HEROINE: LESS FILLING, TASTES GREAT

  One of the more peculiar constants of most romance novels, from historicals to contemporaries to paranormals to even erotica, is the sexually unawakened state of the heroine. She’s relatively innocent, as proven by her inexperience or her outright virginity. No matter what type she is, she is definitely not the ho-type.

  Therein lies the deep, humid, dark, and somewhat curious den that is home to the two sacred mythical beasts beloved to Romancelandia. They’re interconnected, if you know what we mean (and we think you do): the Unawakened Woman and the Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’. They are the plague and the backbone of romance. No other genre is as obsessed with the heroine (a) having excellent sex, and (b) not having sex at all unless it’s with the One True Love, who’s also usually the sole person who can make her come. Got orgasm? Got true love! The heroine’s sexual inexperience remains i
ntact only until the hero’s wang of mighty lovin’ introduces her to the wonderment of the fizznuckin’. It’s part and parcel of the fantasy: the awakening to love is that much more powerful when it’s accompanied by a sexual awakening as well.

  Everything about the love has to be superlative, and on the heroine’s part, it’s easiest to use an association we’re already comfortable with: sexual purity. The sexually experienced woman in fiction still raises hackles and creates uncomfortable associations with uncleanness, the threat of infidelity, and moral degeneration. Interestingly enough, the sexual experience is also superlative for the hero, but authors choose to portray it using, not inexperience (which would ruin the fantasy, because we’re not necessarily interested in reading about lovers who come a little bit too fast and use a little bit too much tongue when kissing), but what we and many others online refer to as the Magic Hoo Hoo. The Magic Hoo Hoo does it all: it heals all ills, psychic and sexual. It provides unparalleled pleasure to the hero, despite the heroine’s reluctance, inexperience, and awkwardness. It’s capable of experiencing (and inducing) earth-shattering multiple orgasms on its first outing. It also creates an instant emotional bond that’s even more irrational and persistent than a newly hatched chick imprinting on the first living thing it sees. All that, and it makes you coffee in the morning. One taste of the Magic Hoo Hoo is all it takes; the hero won’t be satisfied with anything else, physically or emotionally.

  Single virgin women in historical romances are somewhat more coherent constructs than their counterparts in other subgenres, especially if they’re from respectable families. A sheltered eighteen-year-old virgin debutante in Regency England—or even a twenty-six-year-old virgin bluestocking—doesn’t overtax the gentle reader’s credulity, though it makes a body wonder how so many of these creatures went through all their lives feeling nary a tingle in their nethers, not even when faced with a handsome footman, or the flirtatious squire’s son. Horny teenagerhood didn’t exist back in Merry Olde Englande, apparently. If the virginity stopped there, that’d be fine, but the fact is, virgins predominate to this day, no matter what the period setting or subgenre. This state of overwhelming heroine virginity was especially true of most books published prior to the mid-1990s. Didn’t matter who the heroine was, or what time period she lived in. A glamorous international spy? A brilliant scientist? A nurse? A boardroom mistress? An amnesiac heiress? A widow of many years? A time-traveling scientist who used to be a glamorous international spy in twentieth-century America but is now an amnesiac heiress in fifteenth-century France? Somehow, some way, her Hymen of Steel will be preserved in all its stalwart glory.

  A Hymn to the Hymen

  Without including a picture that would make this book NC-17 and more controversial than Harry Potter, we’d like to share a word or two about hymens. Specifically, where they are and what they’re made of.

  Time and again we Smart Bitches read romance novels, particularly historical novels, wherein the hero readies his sword of plenty to invade the delicate virgin passage of the heroine. And it goes a little something like this: Hit it!

  Gulfvar’s man root trembled with barely leashed passion. Eleanora’s moist love grotto beckoned to him, glistening with her ardor, and he could tell from the mewling sounds coming from the pursed bow of her mouth that she was ready, ready to receive him at last.

  He positioned the head of his engorged staff while he kissed away her protests that it certainly would never fit, and slowly slid his aching rod into her tender valley. Gods, but she was tight!

  Suddenly he felt the tip of his eager manhood brush against her maidenhead. He pushed her hair back from her face, and whispered to her gently.

  “It will only hurt but a moment, and then it will be gone,” he said. Then he reared back as if he and his man-staff were jumping hedges at full gallop, and thrust himself deep within her.

  Eleanora screamed as if she’d been impaled upon a pikestaff, beating his shoulders with her fists and crying out from the pain. Gulfvar struggled to hold himself still within her, as the tightness of her tender virginal womanhood cradled him, increasing his aching need to thrust within her again and claim her as his own. But first she needed to feel pleasure, not the pain of her first experience with love.

  He reached down, found her tender love nubbin, and stroked her until she quieted, until her gasps of pain became moans of pleasure. As she reached her peak of pleasure, and cried out his name, he allowed himself to crest within her, and spilled his seed within her aching, tender passage.

  Can you root through the purple prose to find the fallacy? Not the phallus. The fallacy.

  Her maidenhead? Up the vaginal canal by an inch or two? NOT POSSIBLE.

  This biological inaccuracy is passed on from novel to novel like e-mail hoaxes that tell you Microsoft will give you a dollar every time you forward a message. The mystery of the hymen remains intact, impervious to the throbbing staff of truth.

  Here’s the truth about the hymen. Are you sitting down? Good, grab a mirror and play along.

  The hymen is external. That’s right. It’s outside the vagina. Let us say it again: it is external. It is not located up the vaginal canal. It’s a fold of membrane that partially covers the external vaginal opening. And most of the time it’s receded or stretched by the time a woman experiences sexual intercourse, so it’s usually not a bloodbath or a profoundly painful experience. There are exceptions to that rule, but even still, those exceptions of the hymen still rest on the scientific goddamn fact that the hymen. Is. External. For. The. Love. Of. All. That. Is. Holey.

  Some historical novelists research down to the types of feathers on the costumes, the decor, even the language of their protagonists, and still have the hero battering his manly ram against the heroine’s poor hymen. Nothing says, “I couldn’t be arsed to even look at Wikipedia,” better than having a hero encounter a brick wall of a maidenhead up the heroine’s vaginal canal.

  Sometimes, a mucous membrane covering the vaginal opening isn’t just a mucous membrane covering the vaginal opening. Some other inexperience supplements or substitutes for that virginity. For example, she may be unfamiliar with his world, his profession, or the town to which she’s just moved. Either way, virginity and inexperience are extremely common methods to establish an imbalance of power between the hero and the heroine, without the need for whips, chains, and ball gags—unless one or both parties are into that kind of thing.

  The power imbalance becomes one of the crucial conflicts of a romance, as the characters seek to rebalance that power, either with the heroine gaining the required experience, or by making peace with the fact that her power will stem from other sources. Either way, the happy resolution of the relationship needs to restore balance in the world after its deliberate disruption in the beginning. But the fact that it’s overwhelmingly the chick who is in a position of virginity, inexperience, or limitation says something about how comfortable romances are with depicting women at an advantage over the hero, and how readers perceive a power deficit on the hero’s side as an emasculation. The heroine is pinned down by her own hymen, the poor dear, because otherwise the alternative—that the hero has a (metaphorically) tiny wang—disrupts the fantasy world unacceptably.

  This run of either no sex or incredibly bad sex has to leave its mark somehow, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single romance novel heroine seeking a hero must be in want of a good neurosis. So we’ll take you through in a game we like to call “Oh, Honey, What’s Your Problem?” You choose your neurosis and your form of virginal inexperience to craft the perfect heroine—though never fear, even with all that imperfection, you’re still perfect. Mix and match, Chinese Family Dinner style, or just close your eyes and point with one erect finger (or something else that’s erect—we won’t stop you).

  Virginity

  Neurosis

  You’re a virgin.

  You’re not a werewolf, which the hero will eventually fix with a blood-swapping ritual and
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br />   Virginity

  Neurosis

  copious amounts of doggy-style sex.

  You’re a widow and a virgin.

  You need to sell your virginity to the highest bidder.

  You’re a widow and never had an orgasm.

  You don’t feel like people can see orgasm. see the “real you,” so you move to a tiny town in the middle of nowhere with a name like Tiddlywinks-on-the-Santorum, because if there’s anyone who can see the real you, it’d be the citizens of a claustrophobically tiny hamlet in the verdant English or Adirondack countryside.

  You’ve been married more than twice, still no orgasm.

  You have self-esteem issues.