the ask@ARR: It makes me crazy when fertility is used to punish women–is it just me?
–there are spoilers ahead for the Grant County series–
I’ve recently just slogged–and, sadly, it was a slog–my way through Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series. I love the Will Trent series although I skimmed much of the torture porn. However, the Grant County series not only has one of the least likable female characters of all time–I LOATHE Lena Adams–it also subjects its women to horror after horror. Sara, the lead, is brutally raped, which makes her infertile, and her husband cheats on her. Her sister Tessa is randomly and horrifically attacked while pregnant and loses the baby and her fiancé. Lena is horribly raped and subjected to all sorts of violence and her beloved sister Sybil is sickeningly raped and murdered for no good reason. This is just the violence that happens to the main characters. The indignities, cruelties, and violent acts inflicted on all the other women in the show are endless–really, the only two female characters who aren’t tortured are Cathy, Sara and Tessa’s mom, and Nan, dead Sibyl’s lesbian lover.
Not to mention that, at the end of the series, Sara’s one true love, Jeffrey, with whom she’s worked so hard to build a life with and with whom she is just been approved to adopt a child, is blown to bits before her eyes and dies professing his–ugh–undying love for her.
When I finally finished the books and sat seething at Jeffrey’s death, I realized that, again and again, Slaughter uses fertility to both judge and punish her female characters.
Sara’s infertility haunts her–it’s not until almost a decade after her rape she considers adoption and she never thinks about harvesting her eggs or doing any treatments even though her infertility has nothing to do with the viability of her eggs. Her inability to have children is a weapon Slaughter uses to make Sara’s very stressful life even harder.
Lena is violently raped and then spends years in an abusive relationship with a white supremacist who rapes her and impregnates her. Lena has an abortion and then spends endless hours hating herself for having murdered her baby. At the clinic, Lena meets another woman who is, unbeknownst to her abusive husband, terminating her pregnancy as well. That women is later violently murdered.
Tessa gets pregnant and that baby is murdered in her belly. Several victims in the books are so mutilated by the psychopaths who attack them that many of them end up unable to have kids.
It’s just…. unjustifiably cruel.
In romance, there are often babies at the end. Having a child, in the context of marriage, has historically been the goal. And too often, that scenario feels forced. Not everyone needs to have a kid just as not everyone needs to marry.
However, using women’s desire to have children as a weapon against them is far worse to me. The Grant County series treats women with as much cruelty as any author I’ve read. Is it unfair of me to hope that a woman writing women would do so with more compassion than I think Slaughter does in these books? And maybe I’m over the top about babies–it’s possible I’ve overreacted to the way Slaughter uses fertility as a cudgel.
What do you think? Have you read these books? Do you think it’s OK to use fertility or the lack thereof as a punishment in fiction?
Regarding romance books with protagonists who do not want children: I recently read the fabulous “The devil comes courting” by Courtney Milan and I was so happy to find that the wish to stay childless was followed through to the end; neither protagonist changed their mind suddenly at the end.
I agree with Lieselotte’s point that so many female victims are those seen as “not pure” or silly, and I can’t help but fee that’s so we can do a type of victim blaming and ease our reaction to their deaths. But I really hate the wider issue of violence against women as the underlying premise of suspense books, whether romantic suspense, thrillers, military action books, or straight criminal suspense books. It feels misogynistic and voyeuristic in many cases. It has echos of the “bury your gay” tropes which still plague the portrayals of gays in books and media. It was fine to have them around as long as they died horrible deaths (or were the villain). Interestingly, the “bury your gays” trope used to be called “dead lesbian syndrome” for the disproportionate number of lesbian characters who die, which sort of moves us back around to my original point. Violence against women is still a major driver in entertainment.
I no longer read books with what I consider excessive violence. When I do decide to try a book that might have graphic descriptions of violence, I tend to read them in print rather than listen on audio so I can skim, or completely skip, those parts.
For Christmas last year one of my friends gave me a thriller called “The Surgeon”. I read the blurb, which said something like “He targets lone women, slipping into their apartments and ritually torturing them to death” and the book went straight into the Little Free Library. At this point, I’ve had enough of violence specifically directed at women.
Yuck! I agree!
That book scared the bejabbers out of me. And to be fair as I recall, it wasn’t just women who were targeted -it was a couple as well, which scared me even further.
It’s very well written and the people don’t do “stupid” things that put them in danger which makes it even scarier. However I regularly tell people it’s one of the most terrifyingthings I’ve read and one that’s kept me up nights- so if that’s not what you are looking to read you made the right decision by donating it.
In defense of the author though, it is part of a series with two intelligent, independent heroines (part of the Rizzoli and Isles series) and I did enjoy the several books in the series I read.
The reason why I stopped reading most thrillers was the – to me egregious and discriminating – violence against women.
At some point in my life, I just started noticing that most serial killers went (then) after blondes * and that the brutality of death of women was shocking.
Then, I noticed how often women in book or film got killed for being not pure, in whichever way: the girlfriend of the drug dealer who regularly is roadkill in books, or the silly girl who wanted to party dies. Women who do not adhere to the strictest of standards of conservative cautious female behavior die.
Then, I noticed the number of postapocalyptic stories where women started being slaves or cattle because of fertility issues – long before the film series, the Handmaid’s Tale as a book was unbearable to me because again, just being a woman meant you stopped being full human.
The amount of pain women have to bear because they can (or cannot) get pregnant, the instant shift to being a belly in which a valuable human lives (from being a person, before that), the willingness to either punish or revere the woman for her fertility, it is all of it dehumanizing.
I can still tolerate the whole issue of fertility as core to femininity in historicals, where women are essentially needed to provide bloodlines and continuity, and often, the plot is centered around that, but more and more, in contemporary books, and especially in crime fiction, I just cannot bear it.
I even remember when it happened, it was at some point in the pathologist Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell – there was a serial killer who came back in a second or third book, and wham, I just could not take dead women anymore whose only common feature was being female. It felt like we lived more in the mind of the killer stalking his prey, indirectly glorifying the killer by making his thoughts the center of the mystery – and I stopped reading books that – to my mind – end up glorifying violence against women.
I know that this is an extreme position to take, and I do not blame authors or anything, but I just do not wish to partake anymore.
I end up reading cozy mysteries by now, and that is why I keep asking about violence levels when you write about crime books (for example, Gregory Ashe, or the Seven of Spades books – I do not want to go there anymore).
*(in parking garages – you should never wear high heels in a parking garage if you are an attractive blonde – you die ;-)
Over the last few years, I’ve given up on most psychological suspense too—although it used to be one of my favorite genres after romance. I started to see a pattern in so many of the plots: women were punished for loving the wrong man, befriending the wrong person, helping the wrong stranger, trusting the wrong friend, confiding in the wrong neighbor, etc. An entire genre seemingly devoted to the notion that a woman can’t win no matter what because all of her choices will be wrong! I still read some PS (I really enjoyed Alice Feeney’s recent ROCK PAPER SCISSORS), but I’m very selective about the books I choose.
yes, I had a similar evolution in my reading, and you describe the pattern much more completely – it feels like women get the blame and the horrible punishment no matter what – exactly that !
Both of you have eloquently expressed my feelings and I am glad I am not alone in shifting my reading and watching habits to avoid violence against women. I wish more people would make that shift and reduce demand for works that tell such stories. It seems it can’t be good for our world to have people reading or watching a steady diet of them, and yet they seem to proliferate. I was excited to watch Kate Winslet in MARE OF EASTOWN. She is such a wonderful actress. (Spoilers ahead… ) Yet I could not get past that first episode where the young teenage mom puts on makeup and goes to a party and is murdered. And of course, fertility comes into play as she has had a baby out of wedlock. It was so disturbing, and I just could not watch another episode, no matter how well-written or well-acted. Why kill the young girl, the young mom? To get a primal emotional reaction. To juice us up and engage us. But it backfired for me and my husband. We were done.
I had that same experience with Mare of Eastown.
I think it’s interesting that in suspense and horror films there is a convention where the person being killed or who suffers “does something” to deserve it.
For me, it’s always lessened the scare factor because it showed a way to avoid the horrible fate. There was an “out’. Don’t do what X person did. The scariest things I have read or seen were where there was no “reason” to it, it was totally random and the victim couldn’t avoid it. It was just bad luck.
You’re right. I also think too many times the things that make it seem like the victim could have avoided it are just illusions. Everyday behaviors, something we don’ t even give two thoughts to if a man does it, are suddenly reckless behavior and reason to blame the victim for stupidity. My single friend and I had this discussion once when I said something about not walking to her car alone after dark.She just laughed at me. “Well,I’d have to get a different job,because driving is the only way into work and there’s no one to walk me out.” I thought about that conversation years later as I left my job at the mall after closing the store alone and walking through an empty parking lot alone most nights. And employees are required to park in the farthest spots in the lot.
I understand your feelings completely. I gave up the Outlander series because I couldn’t stomach the sexual violence. It’s the reason why of all the Law and Order shows SVU, despite its strong actors and writing, is the one I have watched the least.
The other part of me is all too aware though that women and children are the most in danger and it’s 100% accurate that they are the ones usually preyed on by serial killers but even more disturbingly by their loved ones. I’ve seen figures in the U.S. where 64% of female homicide cases in a year the females were killed by a significant other or family member.
The sad part is as women we are trained to be so afraid of strangers (and of course we should be cautious) but the people we love (statistically) are the ones far more likely to kill us.
I think the latest statistics regarding female homicide victims are even higher than 70% that the killer will be either husband/boyfriend or ex-husband/ex-boyfriend. Also, if the victim has ever filed a domestic abuse charge or obtained a restraining order against a man, the odds that that man committed the murder go above 90%. I’m beyond grateful for my kind & loving husband, but sadly for many women today, a man is often someone to fear not someone to build a life with.
Let’s talk about the punishment that occurs at the end of a woman’s fertility. The end of fertility spells the end to a woman’s position as an attractive romantic lead, as romance publishers and advertisers (although TV & films are beginning to change) continue to cling to the notion that a romance heroine/woman is only valued and attractive when she is young and fertile. This has punished and continues to punish older women, pushes them to the sidelines a secondary characters, or forces them into stereotyped roles, all while and preventing them from being romantic protagonist.
1) I HATE Lena Adams but not because of what was done to her. I hate her because she’s a liar and a bad cop.
2) Slaughter puts all her characters through horrible torture. It’s clearly not enough for them to have to investigate it, she wants them to suffer through it as well. Pretty much everyone in her books who hasn’t suffered some horrible trauma in their life gets killed (eg, Jeffrey). This is true of her non-Sara Linton books as well, BTW.
3) I assume Slaughter used fertility issues because that’s so deeply personal to most women, and these books are set in the south, where women’s roles are strongly traditional and motherhood is widely treasured and expected. How can Sara–wealthy, beautiful, well-educated–be damaged in a way Will (who suffered a brutally abusive childhood from before he was even born) cannot understand? Infertile! And why settle for some ordinary cause of infertility when you can make it traumatic and brutal? (see #2)
Anyway, so glad someone else has binged this series at the same time I did, I could rant about Lena Adams for a long time. PS: Also, I never liked Jeffrey.
I didn’t pick up on these issues but I think it is because I have been reading Karin Slaughter over a number of years.
I picked up on the violence towards women, but I wasn’t really overly shocked by it. Maybe it is because violence towards women is so common in many mysteries, thrillers, crime novels? How many serial killers torture and mutilate women in crime novels. Have depictions and discussions of violence towards women become so common that I am numb? I think her stand alone novels have even worse graphic violence.
I never saw all the issues of fertility and the ties to violence as punishment. That may be because there is too much inaccuracy in her medical descriptions. (She really needs to find a better medical advisor). I never understood how Sara’s ectopic pregnancy led to a hysterectomy.
So why do I keep reading? Because Slaughter is a good storyteller. And I really love the Will Trent books. (I’m not a fan of Sara. I find her really unrealistic). I love Will. And I love the strong and interesting women that Slaughter features in the Trent novels including Will’s partner Faith and his boss Amanda.
So I will continue my love/hate relationship with Slaughter and keep reading her books.
I too will keep reading Slaughter–but I like the Will Grant books the least of all of her work. She is a great storyteller and is superb at creating believable, vivid characters.
I think Sara’s infertility really bothers me because it doesn’t make sense medically. She would have still had eggs at the very least.
I will say I think Slaughter is particularly vicious towards her women–she’s rather like Patterson’s early works or Stuart Woods in that regard and I do find it hard to take.
I like *Will Trent* a lot. I like Amanda and Faith as well, but I’m getting tired of Sara. I’m getting tired of the fact that either or both of them has to be kidnapped/shot/stabbed/whatever in every single book. And I hate with a deadly passion how their relationship has been twisted, dragged out, and prolonged through the most tired tropes: “he made a joke about marriage and I yelled at him for it, then he clammed up and obviously I will never bring it up but I will remain angry at him forever for not asking me to marry him because it would be so IMPROPER for me to ask him.”
I get that they are both supposed to be damaged people but holy smokes, if they jumped to conclusions like that in their professional capacities they’d’ve been dead long ago.
I think Slaughter is like Joss Whedon–she’s never going to allow any of her characters to be truly happy in love.
I originally liked the Sara-Will relationship. But now I think that Sara is poisonous to Will. You give great proof above. Sara needs to keep testing Will’s love. Maybe Slaughter will never give any of her characters a happily ever after.
I’m also getting tired of Sara being so capable at everything. There has been significant press coverage about how the coroner system fails at autopsies. But Sara (a pediatrician) is a perfect coroner, to the point she is recruited to the state medical examiner
I was also horrified at Faith’s treatment of Emma’s dad. There’s this weird men must prove themselves thread in these books that’s somewhat misandristic.
Lena is a horrible cop and a horrible person.
I have decided she is only still around as a tool to bring up and rehash at length Sara’s traumas.
Agree! Lena’s marriage to Jeffrey’s son is only to reinforce Sara’s infertility. Same with Lena’s ability to get pregnant.
Don’t worry, we will see Lena again to torture Sara
I hate you for saying that.
Sigh.
I’m also waiting for Ethan to get out and torture Lena. So there’s that joy to look forward to. #not
The often-contrived baby epilogues in HR irritate me too. It’s not that I’m opposed to romance heroines who want to be mothers, but if she has zero maternal instinct until the last page of the book- or when she first encounters the hero’s magic wang- that’s poor characterization for the sake of following an expected formula.
Recently, I’ve been seeing a little more variation in this regard though. I’ve even found that a lot of Love Inspired Suspense novels don’t end with babies, marriage, or even a wedding ring. And this is an explicitly Christian line! A lot of the stories I’ve read end on a note of, “The danger is over, but we still have a lot to learn about each other. So, we’re dating seriously now with the possibility of marriage on the horizon.” Pretty cool, actually. Yes, some do end with the more traditional, “Here’s an engagement ring even though we’ve only known each other two weeks, and let’s have lots of babies after the wedding,” but there’s actually a surprising amount of diversity in their HEA/HFNs that pleasantly surprised me.
Unfortunately, some of the new childfree heroines of HR feel unrealistic and forced in a different way than the traditional six kids skipping merrily around the hearth. Specifically, I have read a couple of HRs now where the hero’s like, “I might want to have kids” and the heroine is like, “No way!” And… that’s the end of it. Because apparently whatever the heroine wants is rule of law. *Sigh* That’s not how healthy relationships in any era are supposed to work. Couples need to be on the same page about such a huge responsibility, not one bulldozing the other into compliance. Some issues just aren’t possible to compromise.
In short, there seems to be some progress on the HEA/HFN front but some steps backward too.
Sounds like fertility (or lack thereof) is just one of a series of awful things (rape, abuse, death of loved ones) used to punish female characters in these books. I’ve never read anything by Slaughter, but a writer who consistently brings such a level of cruelty to her female characters would quickly get switched out of my reading rotation.
I came here to say this – it seems like she has all of her female characters experience tortorous events based purely on the fact that they’re women, and to a degree that makes me wonder if the author herself holds some sort of weird misogynistic views o.O I’ve definitely read crime/noir that was basically writing as therapy, and it became really obvious as the series went on and the same events kept happening again and again.
I dunno. I believe she’s gay, not that that means she couldn’t be misogynistic. But she loves her characters–so it’s just sort of a disconnect to me.
Wow! The series you describe sounds the very antithesis of “relaxing romantic read”. Definitely not something I will be seeking out. As far as using fertility as a weapon, that’s pretty disgusting to me and there is nothing “romantic” about it in the slightest. On the other hand, why is childlessness rarely given a positive spin? Those of us who have chosen a child-free life see it as an affirmative choice. Amongst my friends who have made this choice, I have never heard any regrets expressed. Yet the baby imperative lives on evermore in romantic fiction.
It’s funny–at the end of the series, Karin Slaughter wrote a letter saying she’d been writing love stories–Sara has a great love with Jeffrey in this series and then, after he’s dead, one with Will Trent in that series.
The jury is out on Will and Sara–I don’t trust Slaughter to give them long term happiness–but Jeffrey and Sara are a tragedy, not a love story IMHO.
Personally, I’d love to see childlessness in historical romance handled in ways other than the usual. Maybe the hero is the infertile one (because it’s possible to be a strong, admirable and good-hearted man even without the ability to procreate). Or maybe the heroine has realized from the start that she would be happier without children, and she stays that way. Something, anything, new.
Right. Or maybe even a couple who wanted children but weren’t able to and still find a beautiful HEA in each other. There are so many possibilities and yet romance- especially HR- tends to get in a rut in this regard.
I’m beginning to wonder if this is a big reason why queer HR has become so popular over the years; there just seems to be a greater amount of HEA/HFN options portrayed. Ironic, when you consider how the characters have to keep their love hidden because of society.
Exactly. I’d even be fine with the usual maternal heroine who couldn’t have children with her evil dead husband if she approached this in some way other than considering herself barren and waiting passively to be cured by the hero. She could proactively seek medical advice, or marry a man with very young children who need a mother, or look for a child to raise on her own. Or, as you said, she and the hero could build a happy life that doesn’t include children. There are so many fresh possibilities.
I just read one of those celebrity articles with pictures that was all about celebrities or couples that either had a lot of kids or had no kids and it was very interesting.
There are so many prosaic reasons why people don’t have children I don’t understand why more books don’t incorporate them.
For instance Helen Mirren (whom I adore) said it just didn’t happen for her. All the guys who presumably wanted to marry her and have kids were all “old and boring” according to her. She seems pretty happy with her life and still has an amazing career.
Nick Offerman and Megan Mulally tried for a year, decided it wasn’t in the cards for them and said “Oh well”. They think their life together has been fantastic.
Dolly Pardon said she had an independent husband and no kids and that’s why she’s been able to have the career she did.
I know real life people and couples who simply say or said “kids aren’t for me/us”. I don’t understand why more authors and presumably readers don’t agree with this sentiment.
I’ve been under the impression that this is crime drama / procedural suspense, which doesn’t play by the same rules as romance or romantic suspense, despite the love story the author inserts in the plot.
I don’t like reading about this kind of violence or domestic abuse, so I rarely pick up books from this genre. I do have the first Will Trent book in my TBR, picked up on sale years ago, though I haven’t been motivated to read it (too many other books, wrong mood, not enough time). I think if I did pick up this series to read it would be to see how author depicts the setting (Atlanta and Georgia in general).
I don’t even think it’s okay to use fertility as a magical wonderful gift for the supposedly-barren heroine in the epilogue. And what’s done to women in the Slaughter books sounds horrific, so thanks for the warning.
That said, there’s one book I’ve reviewed where the heroine becomes barren during the course of the story (through a specific act of intimate violence), and while it was difficult to read, it worked in the context of the story. The heroine’s infertility was something that grieved her very much. Plus, she was part of a religious society which emphasized having children, the more the merrier.
But eventually she came to terms with her condition by deciding to dedicate her life to guiding and supporting her community as a whole, something she felt she might not have been able to do if she’d had children of her own. Making the best of a bad situation, basically. I wasn’t on board with the religious aspects, but the story on the whole worked better for me than if it had ended with the heroine happily raising half a dozen babies. Still, that’s a far cry from books or a show where nearly every woman is the victim of a brutal assault. I don’t even want to Google the Slaughter books to see what they’re about.