Review: Young Wife Gets a Sensual Massage by Matt Coolomon

I'm going to start this review by noting that the subject novel is not a proudly feminist book. It's not anti-feminist either, but it is smut, and both of the main characters pretty much have one thing on their minds the whole time. If you find the idea of a sex-obsessed woman wanting to get it on with multiple guys to be inherently objectifying, you'll probably want to stay away from this one. On the other hand, if you like unrepentant smut in which the male and female leads have an equal, mutual, collaborative lust for perversion, I think it can be read without too much worrying over sexual politics. So, with no further ado ...

Jake and Anny are a happily married young couple who find themselves increasingly attracted to an unconventional sex life after randomly picking a vacation activity from their hotel's guide book. The sensual massage Anny gets as a result, while relatively tame, sends both their imaginations along a path of arousal at the idea of Anny being touched and pleasured by a man other than Jake.

While this is very much a book about sex, and we gain almost no insight into the two main characters' back-stories or interests, author Matt Coolomon elevates the novel from its somewhat base concept in two major ways. First, he writes impeccably, in a prose style that's fluid and enjoyable, yet never draws attention to itself . And second -- and more importantly from my perspective -- he takes the time to make both Jake and Anny feel like real people by giving them both sweet, kind-hearted dispositions and a healthy dose of uncertainty over the lifestyle they're fantasizing about. Their personalities remain appealing and sympathetic throughout, even if social mores would insist that Anny is being a slut and Jake a passive wimp. I did occasionally have some unease over the degree to which Anny enthused about receiving extramarital ejaculate ... there's a blurred line as to whether she's genuinely delighted by the process or if she's exaggerating for the sake of increasing her husband's enjoyment of their mutual perversity. Similarly, I felt at times that Jake's behavior seemed more aimed at appealing to the fetish of cuckolding fans than like an entirely natural response. But the relationship between these spouses ultimately won out over these doubts on my part. Each of them has such a great affection for the other, and such a profound interest in making the other happy, that their exploration of this particular kink feels almost appropriate ... and I say "almost" because an element of the fun comes from this being an illicit, taboo undertaking, and that requires the characters and the reader alike to feel some measure of disquietude about it.

In many ways, this is a book that can very much be judged by its cover -- which ordinarily might not be a great compliment. But in this case, the cover really does tell you what you're getting into: it's overtly sexual, and clearly about one single-minded thing ... yet it also evokes a certain purity, beauty, and sweetness along with its prurience.

If the cuckolding genre doesn't fundamentally repel you, and if you like reading stories about nice people, where the conflict is all about the characters struggling with their own desires and not with each other, then I highly recommend this book. Coolomon is a talented writer who knows how to create a slow simmer and then bring it to a frothy, messy boil at just the right moment.

As a closing comment, I'll say that the whole "cuckolding" sub-genre strikes me as a bit weird and difficult to assess from a feminist perspective. I'm of the impression that the audience for these tales is overwhelmingly male, which leads to a sense that the willingness of the female characters is exploitive. Yet, at least in Cooloman's version, the subject matter inherently puts the majority of the power in the woman's hands. So I'm on the fence about the genre, though I can endorse the book for readers who don't stand on the "no way!" side of that fence.

My Overdue Review of She Marches Through Fire by A.M. Manay

I've been waiting for the third November Snow book to arrive ever since I finished the second one. A.M. Manay knows how to bring a novel to its close in a crashing apocalyptic finish, and She Lights Up The Night left me hungry to find out what happened next.

This book landed at an inconvenient moment for me, when I was overworked and under-rested and certainly didn't have time to go back and re-read the first two. As a result, it took me a bit to get the very large cast of characters straight, and I found myself grateful for the author's inclusion of a dramatis personae list at the book's start. I would highly recommend reading all three books in close proximity so that you can fully appreciate the rich array of individual and familial personalities and histories that the story is built around. But if, like me, you don't have the time to bolster a less-than-photographic memory by re-reading, the cast list will serve in a pinch.

Moreover, November Snow's character provides the ultimate impetus and focus for the entire series, and while she spends the first part of this book recuperating from the devastating climax of the previous novel, for most of She Marches Through Fire, November is in top-notch form, perilously navigating a world of supernatural creatures centuries or millennia older than herself with a mixture of keen intelligence, heart, and sheer, stubborn perseverance.

I won't go much into the plot ... if you're reading this review trying to decide whether to pick up the series, the answer is yes, and you need to immediately go get She Dies At The End. You won't regret it. Meanwhile, if you've read the other two and for some reason are on the fence about getting this one, you also won't regret it. It melds some of the best aspects of the earlier books, providing great payoff for the character arcs of the expansive cast that developed in the second book, but also recapturing some of the tight focus on November's perspective that made the first book so riveting. I had some stumbles at the beginning, reading it while exhausted after too many hours at work, but as the book hit its stride, it did what so many great books do, drawing me into its world so capably that my own would disappear for long stretches and leave me awash in an intensity of thought and emotion.

Finishing it up this evening, I had tears in my eyes. The culmination of the series exquisitely blends pain and hope and determination into a manifesto of true beauty. 

She Marches Through Fire by A.M. Manay!

I'm super-excited to have a new November Snow book to read. The first two kept me zipping through them with fast-paced fun and compelling characters, and author A.M. Manay's inventive twists on supernatural fantasy always leave me curious where things will go next. If you're interested, here's all the info you could want!

Title: She Marches Through Fire (November Snow Book 3)
Series: November Snow
Author: A.M. Manay
Cover design: A.M. Manay
Release Date: March 28, 2017
Genre: Supernatural fantasy

Psychic vampire November Snow must battle grief, injury, and her own family as she fights evil on all sides. She seeks a cure for the poison sapping her strength and a fairy weapon as powerful as it is dangerous to wield. When it is time to save the innocent and gain justice for her maker, will she find the strength to march through the fire?

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER at most booksellers: books2read.com/u/4AgGAN
Trailer link: https://youtu.be/m9gxWk0Q1m8

Excerpt 1:

Hector was coming out of his skin, buzzing with rage.  “Do you honestly expect me to just sit here and let Luka sleep when I could be tearing his throat out?” he demanded.

“That is precisely what I expect you to do,” was Gul’s even-toned reply.

"And shouldn't we be calling the in the feds?  He committed a terrorist act against the human government," Jaime insisted.  "At some point, he has to answer for that.  He could still have co-conspirators out there doing God knows what.  We're harboring a fugitive at the top of the most wanted list.  Until a few days ago, I carried a badge.  I know I don't have any authority here, but this whole scenario makes me seriously uncomfortable."

“November's been poisoned, we suspect with something William got from one of Luka’s people.  We need the antidote.  We may also need Luka's blood.  For now, we need him alive and with us.  And there is no human jail that could hold him,” Gul explained patiently.

“He murdered everyone I ever cared about!” Hector growled.

“And a great many others besides,” Gul acknowledged.  “And I hope, one day, to help you get justice.  But today is not that day. November's life is worth more than vengeance.”  Gul paused before adding, "I intend to make Luka pay dearly for any mercy he gets today, I assure you."

Hector took a deep breath and ran both hands through his shaggy hair.  Pine placed a hand on his love's lower back.  “You're right,” Hector finally sighed.  “But I don't like it.  Just keep him the hell away from me.”  The werewolf then stalked out of the basement, taking out his anger on the stairs and rattling the whole house.
“He’s not going to be the last person you have to talk out of killing him tonight, I suspect, dear husband,” Raina pointed out sleepily.  The eldest vampire in the room, she had just woken, a bit ahead of the others.  She quickly disentangled herself from her still-slumbering siblings.

She gave Gul a peck on the cheek and crossed the room to a large suitcase from which she removed an ancient-looking leather case and a pair of black calfskin gloves.  “Maybe seeing him in this will cheer Hector up.”

Gul shook his head, amused.  “Woman, is there anywhere you don’t haul that along?”

“Well, this time it’s actually useful!” she retorted.  “We don’t want Luka slithering off before we’re done with him, do we?”

Gul nodded, and his wife quickly gloved her hands and locked her brother into a set of antique silver stocks.  She closed them first around his ankles, then reached for his hands and pulled his inert form forward, binding his wrists into the diabolical device.  She searched him for weapons and pulled out his fairy-forged dagger in its leather sheath.  "I remember this thing," she sighed.  "Nasty bit of work."  She hung the sheath on her belt, stood straight, removed the gloves, and looked down next at her sister.

“Savita was in a bad way this morning.  I don’t imagine dusk will find her much better,” she reported to the others.

“Greg is sleeping in the van.  Hopefully he will be able to console her in her grief,” Gul answered.

“It isn’t just that, unfortunately,” Raina sighed.  “Apparently William did not just murder his own maker.  He also slew mine.  Savita knew and kept his secret, to her now-eternal regret.”

Pine whispered, “Holy shit.  William killed Queen Marisha?”

Gul's eyebrow met his hairline, and he shook his head.  “What a tangled mess.”

“We excel at that in my family,” Raina replied.  “I can’t even manage to hate Savita properly for keeping her mouth shut.  William, on the other hand . . . William is in for a reckoning.”  Her normally cheerful eyes were hard and determined.

“As I told Hector, justice is unfortunately a job for another day,” Gul said gently.  He pulled his wife toward him, and she consented to rest her head briefly against his shoulder.

“Speaking of Hector, I’d better check on him,” Pine said worriedly.

"Could you carry Savita out to the van while you're at it?" Raina asked.  "And shake Greg awake.  She's going to need him when she rises."
Pine placed Savita over his shoulder and bounded up the stairs two at a time.  After the handoff to Greg, he found his boyfriend in the backyard, taking an ax to a tree stump.  Chips flew into the air.  The western sky was all pinks and oranges behind him.

"Hey," Pine called.  He was careful to stay out of ax range.

Hector left the blade embedded in the wood and turned around to face Pine.  "Hey."

Pine crossed the grass and embraced the larger man.  Hector buried his face in Pine's neck before  whispering, "I can't do this.  I can't look at his smirking face and not bash it in."

"Yeah.  I know.  I think we should split up.  You and I can go with Greg and Savita, take her to Eden to recover.  Let Gul and Raina deal with Luka and finding a cure for November.  We'll be more nimble and attract less attention in smaller groups."

"I don't want November to think I abandoned her," Hector replied, his voice stronger as he regained control of his emotions.  "She saved my life."

"She won't think that.  I'm pretty sure she'll understand better than anyone.  She was there, after all.  She saw what Luka did to your people."
Hector took a shuddering deep breath.  "Fair enough."

"Raina has Luka clapped in silver.  Looks like some kind of a medieval torture device.  It's kind of nice to see the tables turned on the smug bastard," Pine offered tentatively.  "You could go throw rocks at him or something.  Knives from the kitchen.  Furniture.  Whatever comes to mind."

"You fairies, always looking on the bright side," Hector said, managing a weak smile.

Excerpt 2:

Luka woke, and his body jerked as he registered the presence of the silver bindings holding him helpless on the floor.  He looked up at his companions: Pine, Hector, Raina, and Gul.

"Oh, dear," he commented bleakly.

"Tide has turned a bit, you worthless bastard," Hector said, unable to resist the urge to needle the man he despised.

"Indeed, it has," Luka admitted.  "The wheel of fortune does turn.  One day at the top, and the next . . .  Well, here we are.  Are you going to torture me, Hector?  Make me beg for death?" he mocked, widening his eyes in fake fear.

"He wouldn't stoop to your level," Pine replied tensely.

Luka looked from Pine to Hector and back again before a grin spread over his face without reaching his eyes.  "My, my.  How deliciously perverse.  Whatever will your Grandma Hazel say?  Did you know she used to keep a werewolf head mounted on the wall of her bedroom?  You have to do some kind of special magic on it so it doesn't turn back into a human one when the creature dies.  I'm not really familiar with the details.  At any rate, it was quite the conversation piece.  Do you suppose she still has it stashed somewhere?  In some ratty storage facility in suburban Nevada or something?  Can you imagine?  That would make a very special episode of Storage Wars, don't you think?"

"Shut up, murderer," Hector said, his hands balling involuntarily into fists.  His knuckles glowed white against his brown skin.

"And speaking of murderers, dear Pine, has Hector told you how old his father was when I so cruelly had him slain?"  A cloud crossed Pine's face.  "He hasn't?  Well, that should make for an interesting tale, indeed, but I don't think you'll much enjoy it.  Might give you bad dreams.  You know, if fairies slept."

"I know how old Carlos was when you murdered his family and stole his childhood," Pine managed to reply, in a voice that shook more than he'd intended.  "You're vile."

"Tell me, Hector, do you mutts still leave your defective children to the elements?  Poor little cripples who'll never turn—  freezing to death in the snow, or burning up with thirst?  Mauled by vermin?  Pecked at by razor-beaked birds before they even expire?"  Luka had dropped his pretense of jocularity, his fangs now peeking out of his snarl.

"Enough," Raina declared.  "I need to see to November, and I may need Luka's help.  Savita may need him as well, if Greg will allow it.  Nobody is torturing or killing anybody today."

"What's wrong with November?" Luka asked, the hostility suddenly gone from his voice, replaced by concern bordering on fear.

"I told you, William shot her," Raina said impatiently.

"So, you pull the bullet out, and she heals.  What's the problem?" Luka asked, increasingly agitated.  "Even a baby can take a bullet or three."

Gul and Raina exchanged a look.  "William poisoned the bullet, which shattered in her leg," Gul finally explained.  "Some exceptionally strong werewolf toxin.  I believe you're familiar with it, since he got it from one of yours," he added pointedly.  "It would be quite helpful if you could give us the antidote."

Luka looked stricken.  "I had plenty of it.  In the house.  Before it burned to the ground."

"That is highly unfortunate," came Gul's understated reply.  "For both of you."

Book Review - Lost & Bound by Pandora Spocks

Shasta Pyke (not her real name) has put her Hollywood starlet career in jeopardy with a high-profile scandal. Packed off to a remote wilderness lodge by her agent, she meets Blake Walker, a bush pilot with tragedy in his past and a hunger for a very specific kind of relationship he's never been able to find. What will happen between these two very different people, when events conspire to leave them alone together in the northern Ontario wilderness?

For one thing, Blake will test Shasta's boundaries, looking to see if she really might be the woman he's dreamed of. For another, Shasta will have to decide whether Blake can be trusted -- with her safety, and with her true self, long buried by a lifetime in the spotlight.

Lost & Bound is an erotic romance, so it gets very explicit at times, though the love story holds the spotlight much more than the sex scenes. I thought both were well done; the romance suckered me in more than the naughty bits only because I'm more into romance than dominance and submission. Both the leads shine, with fun, likeable personalities and emotionally meaningful backstories. We're sure they'll end up with each other somehow, but the different lives they come from make it a challenge and a mystery as to how. Pandora Spocks knows how to tease two characters together, building romantic heat and suspense while drawing us deeper and deeper into their lives and their inner worlds. She also knows how to paint a breathtaking picture of the characters' surroundings: gorgeous Canadian lakes and forests and rough-hewn cabins sometimes battered by storms.

I feel obligated to note that one scene crossed my boundaries. [Vague spoilers here:] Although Blake never forces Shasta to do anything, there's an early moment when he takes advantage of a situation in a way I found unfair and manipulative. She turns out to be entirely willing, but readers with strong notions of consent may find Blake out of their good graces until he proves himself as the novel moves along. [End spoilers]

Ultimately, this book brings together a very interesting set of dualities. Blake has a driving need to protect and dominate, yet he is also kind, sensitive, and determined to see Shasta flourish. Shasta is ambitious and strong-willed, yet she also yearns to find a place of safety where she can relinquish control. The play and weave of their personalities makes for great entertainment as they circle and feel one another out, then for sparks and heat as they connect with ever-greater passion.

I had a lot of fun reading this one, and look forward to seeing what else Pandora Spocks has up her sleeves ...

Disclaimers! First, I should acknowledge that I received this book as an Advance Reader's Copy from the author, who's a fellow member of the Alliance of Self-Published Authors. Second, BDSM is not my kink of choice, so I can't say I'm entirely qualified to judge the more erotic aspects of this book. They were certainly well-written enough; I just don't have an informed view on how they play through the eyes of someone who's really into the lifestyle and genre.

Lost & Bound

One of my compatriots at the Alliance of Self-Published Authors has a book coming out at the end of the month!

Pandora Spocks writes erotic romance, and writes it very well! I had the good fortune to receive an Advance Reader's Copy of the book from her, and I zipped through the whole thing (a full-length novel, not a short novel or novella) in a couple of days. Even though BDSM is not really my thing, I found it highly entertaining: brisk plotting, fun characters, and a terrific setting!

I'll do a full review on release day, January 31. Until then, it's available for pre-order ... check it out if BDSM romance floats your boat!

Movie Review! (with some feminist ruminations) Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in "Passengers"

There will be some spoilers in this post, but I'll set off the really big ones with warnings.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Passengers, the new sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. We'd both been interested in watching it based on the initial trailers, and despite the spate of negative reviews, we decided to give it a shot. I found it an odd and yet oddly effective movie, and wondered why on Earth it had only a 30% score on RottenTomatoes.com. So I went and scoured some of the capsule reviews and had to ask myself some hard questions.

The basic plot of Passengers is evident in the marketing: two passengers on a very long space journey accidentally wake up from suspended animation early, and have only each other (and a robot bartender) for company, with the prospect of decades remaining in the trip. Then more malfunctions turn the story into an action-oriented rollercoaster with the whole ship in terrible danger that our protagonists must navigate alone.

What's not shown in the marketing is the story element that drives most of the critical negativity about the film. (Spoiler ahead, but you'll probably see it coming early on anyway.) The two characters, Jim and Aurora, don't wake up at the same time. Jim wakes up first, and after spending a year in complete isolation from other human beings, he deliberately wakes Aurora up out of desperate loneliness, dooming her to share his fate of aging and dying before they have any chance of reaching the ship's destination. A really large proportion of critics took this as a creepy and gross expression of typical male patriarchal dominance. As one of them put it, "Man gets bored, so man ruins woman's life."

I'll get back to that bit later, in the heavy-spoiler part of the post.

The reason I called Passengers "odd" is that it mixes challenging ethical and emotional issues with science-fictional world-building far more ambitious than the typical s.f. film -- and then tops these elements off with enormously contrived plot devices. The movie was in development hell for almost a decade, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all of the "ship in danger" action elements grew out of studio meddling intended to make the final product more commercially viable.

As a result of this strange hybridization, Passengers offers tons of stuff to provoke thought and contemplation in its audience, while flaking its way through plot conveniences that require you to shut off your brain. For example, the interstellar spaceship is in part based off a Bussard ramjet -- a well-established piece of theoretical technology that allows the ship to fuel itself by scooping up interstellar hydrogen. But nothing in the movie says it's a Bussard ramjet or that it's scooping up hydrogen. I had to do a search and find an interview with the screenwriter to confirm my after-the-movie realization of, "Hey, wait ... was that a Bussard ramjet?" None of the Bussard ramjet details are needed to understand the film or the situation, so the filmmakers chose to include it without drawing attention to it, a mark of respect for the audience's intelligence. And yet in the third act, when things start going haywire on the ship, audience intelligence clearly ranks low in the film's expectations, because plausibility flies out the window in scene after scene.

In other words, Passengers is a mixture of the extremely smart and the Hollywood-dumb. My brain enjoyed the extremely smart parts enough to put up with the Hollywood dumbness, and of course, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt have enough charisma to carry off a dozen dumb popcorn flicks. On top of which, the robot bartender played by Michael Sheen holds his own with the human characters in every scene he's in, while also being obviously a non-sentient piece of AI programming.

So if you're willing to let an exceedingly likeable cast guide you through a richly imagined science-fictional setting and then shrug off some very unimaginative Hollywood action-flick tropes, Passengers may do the trick for you, as it did for me.

Unless ...

(Spoiler-laced feminist analysis ahead)

... you watch the movie the way many of the critics seemed to -- as a reflection of our male-dominated, female subjugating society.

Once I started reading the reviews, I had to bring myself up short and ask, "Was my enjoyment of the film made possible by the fact that, as a man, I have the luxury of tuning out sexism and misogyny the way so much of our society does?" Obviously, no feminist wants to fall into that trap, and I experienced some real self-doubt about my reading of the film. I hadn't seen the male-female power disparity as an issue at all, whereas critic after critic marked it as the largest of the film's numerous flaws.

Did I totally drop the ball as a feminist while watching the movie?

Mulling it over, I leaned toward saying no, I had not.

For one thing, there's no question whatsoever that the film expects us to view Jim's crime as exactly that. He does something horrible and unforgivable, ripping his fellow passenger out of her life and stranding her in the same dire circumstances he's been occupying, except that she at least has one person to interact with whereas he has had no one. And the thing is, Jim knows he's doing the wrong thing. He agonizes over it. He argues with himself, and even begs himself not to go through with it. After he activates Aurora's sleeping tube to revive her, he hides what he's done and lets the automated systems manage her awakening, just as they'd done for him. Then he retreats to his room where he's visibly sick over his own actions. He knows it's inexcusable.

Eventually, of course, Aurora finds out. It takes her a year, and in that time, she and Jim fall in love and create a reasonable facsimile of happiness together, but events conspire against Jim, and she learns the truth.

And her reaction, to me, defies any suggestion that the film is saying it's okay for men to treat women however they like. Aurora instantly hates Jim. She screams at him and flees his presence whenever he tries to explain himself or beg for forgiveness. At one point, she enters his room at night and beats the crap out of him -- not just punching him in the face, but jumping onto the bed with him and repeatedly kicking him before finally grabbing up a heavy object and preparing to bash his brains out with it.

Jennifer Lawrence gives a fantastic performance in these scenes. No person with a heart could watch her in such absolute agony and say, "Well, but really, what Jim did wasn't that bad." Jim himself knows it's that bad. He doesn't fight back or try to stop her when she comes in to whale on him. He doesn't even defend himself when she's about to crack his skull open. Instead, he surrenders and just waits for her to kill him.

Of course, she can't do it (although I wonder if there was an early, dark version of the screenplay that ended right there, with her beating his head open) -- but her inability to murder him the way he has murdered her does not lead to reconciliation. She remains utterly estranged from him, so much so that it's clear she will never get over what he's done.

But Hollywood being Hollywood, they couldn't do the artistic thing and end the movie with Aurora killing Jim or with the two of them growing old and dying on the ship without ever speaking to each other again. Instead, it turns out that the accident that woke Jim up also led to an accelerating cascade of malfunctions, and if the two of them don't find a way to fix things, the ship will blow up and all 5,000 people will die.

So, conveniently, Jim didn't actually murder Aurora by waking her up, but saved her life by doing so, because the events of the third act show that he could never have gotten the ship fixed without her help. Even more conveniently, the process of fixing the ship opens up some emergency facilities Jim didn't know about, including a way for one of them (but only one) to return to suspended animation.

These contrivances are worthy of eye-rolling, but because Lawrence and Pratt have such terrific chemistry, and because we get to see Jim really, really suffer for his crime, I didn't begrudge the movie its fakey happy ending. No amount of suffering could excuse what he'd done, but I could buy Aurora forgiving him, because their romance was genuine, and he not only deliberately sacrifices himself to save the ship, but offers to put her in suspended animation again as soon as he realizes he can, even though her forgiveness means he could keep the option secret from her so that he wouldn't have to be alone.

Still.

After mulling all this over, might I nonetheless be going too easy on the film? Should I instead have been incensed that Aurora forgives Jim? Is this really just a horribly sexist, patriarchal movie that deserves the critical and moral lambasting it's received?

Here's why I think the answer is "no."

I had viewed the film as a story about two people. I had viewed Jim's crime as a crime born out of human loneliness, not male entitlement. And as a story about two people, it worked fine.

Which made me ask myself, what if the gender roles had been reversed? Would the movie still have been blasted as sexist, if it featured a female mechanic with great physical aptitude waking up a male writer and proceeding through the same events? Well, yes, it would have been criticized, because people would have said, "It's just a statement that women are incomplete without men." But I think the criticism would have been much more muted -- somewhere between annoyance and anger, but not at the level of outrage provoked by the Lawrence/Pratt version of the film.

And then I asked myself, what if both the characters had been female?

And I think the answer to that question is that the same people attacking the male-female version of the film would have hailed the female-female version as bold and forward-looking, and would have swallowed the implausible third act to a far greater degree and forgiven the female Jim (let's say "Jem") much more easily.

The exact same screenplay, with the exact same character motivations, the exact same dialogue, and the exact same interpersonal dynamic, would have been touted as a social triumph instead of reviled as a piece of neanderthalic misogyny.

Which means that it's not Jim that people are judging as unforgivable. It's not the story that's an offense against women and against human decency. It's the society in which we live.

So unhealthy is our patriarchal culture that many progressives and feminists are unable to view a story about a man and a woman as simply being a story about two people. The projection of our world's gender roles onto the story overwhelms the substance of the story itself -- even though there's nothing in the movie to suggest that Aurora and Jim live in a society with the patriarchal flaws of ours.

I really wish they'd made that version of the film with two women. Not because the love scenes would then have been hot lesbian action (well, maybe a little because of that, since I'm not entirely free of male piggishness), but because the story is a good story, and I wish it could have been viewed as a story instead of as a statement on gender inequity.

Even better would have been a version of the story where Aurora doesn't fully forgive Jem, but agrees to let the mechanic wake her up for a week or two a year so that Jem doesn't go crazy from loneliness.

Damn, why am I not the one in charge of Hollywood?

Happy Holidays - and a New Story!

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