Buried Trash or Buried Treasure #2 – Adventures in Vintage Romance
I’m continuing my way through the pile of 1990s romance novels I bought at a thrift store a few weeks ago, and I’m starting to notice a pattern: depictions of sex and sexuality from the 1990s feel really, really dated. Sexually active non-heroines have toxic portrayals. I mentally associate more coerced or pressured sex between the protagonists with older books, but it was much more alive, well, and mainstream in the 1990s than I noticed at the time.
My Steadfast Heart by Jo Goodman
(Available digitally and in used paper/hardback editions)
Picked because: It’s Jo Goodman!
Verdict: A buried DIK!!!! Colin Thorne, workhouse boy made good as a ship owner, wins a wager with the awful Earl of Weybourne, making Colin the new owner of Weybourne Park. However, the Earl intends to every method at his disposal to avoid paying up, including forcing his niece, Mercedes, to try to seduce Colin.I’d be lying if I said this book is completely unproblematic. It definitely has issues with consent between Mercedes and Colin, especially when Colin leans on her to be his mistress. However, I’ll ‘fess up that sometimes, angsty and vaguely problematic angry sex works for me. Once the Earl goes missing (or dies?) Colin and Mercedes are locked in a power struggle to establish authority at Weybourne Park. It would have felt unnatural for them not to bring that dynamic into their sex lives. Also, Colin is hot. Sue me.
There’s kind of a wild whirlwind of events in the last third of the book, as a multitude of crimes, past and present are unravelled, and every now and then I was even confused by who had done what and in what decade. People confess and unconfess to things, accusations are made and retracted, and I wish it had been slightly less convoluted – maybe one fewer subplot? On the other hand, I was enjoying this book so much I stayed up too late to finish it, and at least some of the confusion probably came from it being two hours past my bedtime. (read our review here)
Grade: A-
A Warrior’s Bride by Margaret Moore
Picked because: I’ve enjoyed another medieval by Moore in this series (A Warrior’s Passion).
(Available digitally and in used paperback editions)
Verdict: ARRRRGHHHHH.
This book really started off promisingly. The heroine, Aileas Dugall, is an illiterate warrior raised among soldiers in a castle that makes Sparta look lush. The hero, Sir George de Gramercie, is a talented fighter, but also a knight who enjoys luxuries like, say, a bed that isn’t just ropes, and having rugs on his stone floors. In a genre often marked by heroines “making over” the wild, barren estate of their men, I was hoping for a hero who helped Aileas learn to find a comfortable middle ground for herself. Something like “she would always prefer riding to sewing, but she had to admit, there was something to be said for warm bathwater.”
Instead, we get a foppy hero who is utterly clueless that his estate managers (highly respected by Aileas’s father) are robbing him blind, and who completely ignores Aileas’s suspicions. That’s bad. What’s worse? We learn that Sir George is uncomfortable expressing anger because as a young man he lost his temper, slid into a fugue state, and MURDERED A PUPPY. I’m NOT KIDDING. This book features a puppy murderer and HE IS THE HERO.
I think it’s safe to say that the camel’s back was already broken here, but let’s not just pile on straws, let’s set them on fire. Aileas’s lady’s maid was in league with the embezzling managers, because one of them sexually assaulted her and she decided that at the very least, she deserved some of their ill-gotten gains as compensation. You know what? Fair enough. How does this story end for her? At the climax, the maid is trying to run away near where Sir George is fighting his agent, and Aileas, the infallible archer, ACCIDENTALLY MURDERS HER. She and George turn to each other and find comfort in the fact that now both of them realize how easy it is to unintentionally kill innocents. Then they waltz off for their happy ending.
I hope they both caught the plague.
Grade: F
Dark Fire by Elizabeth Lowell
Picked because: I have never in my life seen a mustache as off-putting as the one on this hero. 
(Clearly, they thought better of re-publishing the old cover in subsequent editions! – Ed.)
(Available digitally and in used paper/hardback editions.)
Verdict: Well, you know what you’re getting into with an Elizabeth Lowell, whose heroes put the “alph” in “alphole.” Trace Rawlings is a guide in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, where Cindy Ryan has come in search of a friend who, unbeknownst to Cindy, has holed up in a love nest with a local coffee baron. Cindy’s father has hired Trace to guide Cindy, by which he actually means “knock Cindy up,” because this man wants grandchildren with a passion on the wrong side of complete and utter derangement. For some reason this makes Trace totally contemptuous of Cindy.
They hike around the cloud forest, Trace is a douche to her, they bone anyway, etc. And oh, the boning. Some of the scenes are annoyingly dated, of the forced-kiss, “Cindy fought against both Trace’s superior strength and her own wild desires, but resisting was futile” variety (yes, that’s the quote). And the vaguely porny, giggle-inducing goofiness of the cover turns out to be accurately representative of this book, which has two of the most laugh-out-loud unsexy sex scene moments I’ve ever read.
First:
“Her palms slicked across his wet shoulders and down his arms to his fingertips, then back up again until her fingers curled into the fine hair beneath his arms. She made a murmuring sound of pleasure and stroked gently, savoring the unexpected softness concealed on such a hard masculine body.”
Yes, that’s right. The heroine is getting turned on by fondling the hero’s armpit hair.
In the second scene, chapters later, Trace sticks an orchid in Cindy’s belly button and fellates it. Maybe it’s his way of perfuming the mustache, I don’t know.
I definitely have some guilty pleasure Elizabeth Lowells on my keeper shelves, but Dark Fire isn’t going to be one of them.
Grade: C-
What have you observed about sex and consent in books from different decades? How are we doing as a genre in moving forward?
~ Caroline Russomanno
Another school of thought argues that as women began to work more outside of the home and as divorce became more common, women took on the responsibility for everything–think of the Enjoli woman–they began to fantasize about sex they didn’t have to do anything to have. As Maya Rodale wrote,
Collectively, women were stepping out in a major way and it was uncharted territory. Bestselling author Eloisa James explains, “all of a sudden you’re going to work, you’re supposed to be handling the sexual revolution, having orgasms, doing all this stuff.” This is when the bodice rippers hit the bookshelves, just in time to help women try to make sense of it all. In these books “the guy would hold her down and she could experience sexual pleasure without having to work for it and without having to say yes,” James notes. While many women would have been happy to “work” for the pleasure, they probably didn’t have much knowledge or experience of how to get the job done. In these books, a woman could explore sexual desire without the guilt and shame of asking for it, whatever “it” might be. The heroine could still have the sex she secretly, privately, wanted to have, but without the stigma of having requesting or initiating it (slut shaming is still a problem now; imagine what it must have been like over 40 years ago). The hero’s job, then, was to make her confront the desire she felt.
Rodale, Maya. Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained: Expanded Edition (pp. 95-96). Maya Rodale. Kindle Edition. Rodale, Maya. Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained: Expanded Edition (p. 95). Maya Rodale. Kindle Edition.
I’m not arguing that rapey books are good although I feel strongly that no one should be be embarrassed about the tropes she likes. My point is that those earlier books resonated with millions of readers and they did so because they worked for their imaginations.
Agree with you. Good thoughts.
I am not ashamed of my younger self, and I enjoy books about domination occasionally, and harlequin presents. And I would not criticize people for liking different books.
I only notice how I did not have choices then, or rather, did not know a woman could and should say “ no”. If the man was good, or if I loved him, all he did was supposed to be ok, no matter whether I liked it or not. He knew best.
And that makes me sad and angry for my younger self, and grateful that things changed, and my perspective too.
I feel as though the culture I grew up in–upper middle class in the 60s and 70s–was female power positive and I am deeply grateful for that. It was always very clear to me I didn’t want the sort of relationships I saw modeled in my parents’ age group.
At the same time, all my first loves were older men, due in no small part for their sexual experience. I had to learn what I liked and I was able to do so by sharing my body with people who knew how to make it sing. It depresses me that still, in 2018, many women don’t have orgasms. Again, this is not to say that men should control women’s sexuality. I am 6000% not for that. But in my teenage years, the idea that a man might know my body’s capabilities better than I did, well, I’m sure that made bodice-rippers make some sort of sense to me.
I think for me there’s a difference between a story that really dives into the relationship in depth and the “stronger, masterful hero” cliche. A heroine whose enjoyment of a questionable-consent scenario is developed as part of the relationship (like in the Goodman I mention here first) or is explicitly addressed by the author as something specific to these characters can often work for me. It’s like any other trope or trend; it depends on the author and the work as a whole. Is a blackout drunk heroine waking up in lingerie in the hero’s bed because “oh, this will establish the hero as a good guy!” or is the author exploring alcohol issues and the reasons behind the heroine’s drinking? Did the heroine keep her secret baby secret because the hero’s family is murderous or because “Whatever, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to know.”
What was wrong for me in the two books I disliked was the unexamined quality, which I had associated in my head with the earlier, less consent-informed days of the genre. I thought by the 1990s someone would at least have said “Hey, maybe we should think sympathetically about this woman who turned to crime because of rape, not, you know, murder her.”
Agreed.
From Eloisa James’s description I would add that men were not just making a woman “confront the desire” she was more openly exploring but were attempting to control women’s desire since a woman who demands equal rights to pleasure, including when it happens, with whom it happens, or even if it happens at all is a threatening thing to male power. Women are but just one half of the dynamic in this description from James. What are the men experiencing when they encounter a women interested in exploring their own sexual pleasure? What would romance writers today say of beta heroes, for instance? Why weren’t the men from romances in the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s keen to be mutual players rather than seeking to “confront”? The language in James’s description is very aggressive wording, but that is in keeping with romance novels from decades ago and even with some still today.
God, I read most of those Moore Warrior series books as a youth and I don’t remember that plot. I’m glad I missed it!
Lowell’s HQN output is so wildly uneven. She put out a Temptation a little later that just enraged me but I can’t remember the title.
I need to find the Goodman now!
I read all the old Jo Goodmans I’d missed when I discovered them this summer on Scribd. It was wonderful crazysauce times.
I blame two things for the ugly sexuality of so many of the early romance novels. First, the first two BIG sellers that opened the door to steamy romances (Rosemary’s Rogers’ “Sweet Savage Love” and Katherine Woodiweiss’s “The Flame and the Flower” ) had rape and domination dynamic throughout the whole book. The publishers, including the categories who had lists of what HAD to be in romances which included a banning of the male POV completely, used these two books as templates for hundreds of others. Second, I think the rapey, hostile heroes express the real ambivalence to the changing sexuality of women. Yes, yes, women COULD have premarital sex, even for good girls, but. . . to show that they WERE good girls, they couldn’t decide themselves to have premarital sex. It had to be thrust, so to say, upon them.
Thanks so much for making me laugh out loud so early in the morning Caroline! Love the reviews of the Moore and Lowell books.
I loved Catherine Coulter as a very young person for many years and many books and loved rereading her.
And then I reread Night Shadow some 10 years later and just had to get rid of my whole shelf of Coulters. The whole book showed us a hero who was forcing the heroine sexually for her own good.
That was the first time I realized how destructive and downright violently demeaning the sexual image of women was in those times, just 20-30 years ago. And how I did not even notice it when I first started reading those books as a teenager / young woman. So basically, I was so brainwashed that I believed that this was romantic and exciting. How horrible, looking back!
I do not know if those books were 80-ies or 90-ies.
I am in my 50-ies.
A lot of good evolution there.
Like you, I do not mind some power games and some pushy heroes in certain settings, and I do not mind at all when I read a book labelled as Dom/sub or such. But it frightens me to think that this was normal in romance, and I thought it was romantic and right to have a man decide about a woman’s body and sex, when I was a young woman.
Same for me, Lieselotte. I was really shaped by the ugly gender dynamics I read as a teen and remember trying to talk to my mother and and some female friends and not getting reassuring answers..
It’s challenging to go back now and try to read books from previous decades as abusive behavior abounds, and you’re absolutely right too in that it was typically depicted as romantic. The good news, I think, is that the messages from these earlier books are shaping a whole slew of new authors today in very positive ways and of course, readers today are demanding healthier representations.
Thanks, Blackjack! Yes!
This was my experience EXACTLY. Exactly. The only one I kept was Night Fire because it wasn’t rapey.
He fellates an orchid… how? Though that explains the Georgia O’Keeffe homage cover.
Agree that most 90s books do not date well in terms of portrayals of sex and gender relations. But most contemporary biker books are arguably worse in how they portray consent, sexuality and power dynamics/gender equality.
I love Jo Goodman’s older historical romances, but I don’t recall consent issues in them. It’s been a long time since I’ve read them though. In Goodman’s current writing today, I find her to be among the more evolved and socially respectful writers on gender equality. Overall, romances from the 90s do feel dated for me, especially on issues of women’s sexuality.
The Margaret Moore book and review are hilarious. It’s almost so bad you want to read it for exercising your eyes by rolling them.
Don’t do it, Keira! Think of the puppies!
This is such a great post! :D
Still laughing at “I’ll ‘fess up that sometimes, angsty and vaguely problematic angry sex works for me” (*), followed by the plague comment (**), and finished with the hair galore (***).
(*) Good for you, Caroline! (Heck, I may check the novel one of these days.)
(**) At least he didn’t kill a kitten.
(***) Mustache? Armpits? — Yuck! (I even pictured a worse mixture of Burt Reynolds and Manuel from Fawlty Towers.)
Thanks, Kass! There was a bit of a My Lord and Spymaster vibe going on with two people madly attracted to each other while on opposite but defensible sides of a conflict.
I love the Jo Goodman. Her older historicals are just so good.
I loved the first three Compass Club books!