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SBD -- Age again
Oct. 2nd, 2006 08:18 amIt is Smart Bitches Day again! Celebrate! Rejoice! Or not, it's up to you. You could pull the covers over your head and pretend it isn't Monday instead.
I've been thinking about hero and heroine ages in romance again. I've said (repeatedly, so I'm sure that some of you are bored already) before that huge age differences when the heroine is very young (still a teenager, especially) make me uncomfortable. It is a little bit about the older man-younger woman thing that we see in Hollywood so often, with mature women being marginalized as if romance is no longer possible for them. But it is mostly about the power and experience inequity that seems inherent in a relationship between a 30 year old man and an 18, 19, 20 year old woman. It just strikes me as a little paternalistic, as if the man is a teacher rather than a parter.
In Nalini Singh's Desert Warrior, the hero and heroine are both young -- 23 and 18 when they first meet, 27 and 22 during the novel. I still think 22 is young, but whatever inequity may exist in their relationship (and it does, if only because he is a sheikh who "owns" his wife -- another thing that bothers me about that book, ownership vs. belonging and the failure to distinguish between the two), it isn't related to their ages.
But right now on the small screen, I'm watching the relationship develop between Brian and Justin in Queer as Folk, utterly fascinated. Brian is a 29-30 year old; Justin is 18. At the beginning of the series, he's still in high school. His mom is horrified that he's having sex with a 30 year old. And in the first episode, when Brian dropped him off at school, I was totally disgusted. It wasn't child abuse or pedophilia, because Justin was the age of consent, but it still squicked me out, in part because Brian so clearly wore a label that read "Been there, done that, wouldn't bother with the t-shirt because it wasn't designer." The more I watch the show, though (I'm at the beginning of the second season), the less the age difference bothers me, primarily because Justin is so obviously the more mature of the pair. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sarahf says, Brian is emotionally constipated. He's Peter Pan, obsessed with eternal youth and beauty; in the words of a psychiatrist on the show, a high-functioning bundle of neuroses, bound together by a series of addictions -- sex, alcohol, drugs, excitement. Does he care about Justin? Yes, however much he tried to avoid it. Does the age gap still show up sometimes? Absolutely. Does their relationship sometimes still seem a little teacher-student-ish? Well, yeah. But it still works for me.
Now I'm wondering, is this an example of an exception to my personal rule? Or is it merely an example of exceptional screenwriting and acting? Or am I a hypocrit, applying different rules to the hetero-romance that I read than to the gay tv series I'm watching? Do I have a different standard for gay relationships? Is it a knee jerk reaction that I have to the overt and subliminal paternalism that I see in hetero relationships in romance novels that disappears when presented with a male-male relationship because (I imagine) that she/he dynamic has disappeared? I don't know.
I've been thinking about hero and heroine ages in romance again. I've said (repeatedly, so I'm sure that some of you are bored already) before that huge age differences when the heroine is very young (still a teenager, especially) make me uncomfortable. It is a little bit about the older man-younger woman thing that we see in Hollywood so often, with mature women being marginalized as if romance is no longer possible for them. But it is mostly about the power and experience inequity that seems inherent in a relationship between a 30 year old man and an 18, 19, 20 year old woman. It just strikes me as a little paternalistic, as if the man is a teacher rather than a parter.
In Nalini Singh's Desert Warrior, the hero and heroine are both young -- 23 and 18 when they first meet, 27 and 22 during the novel. I still think 22 is young, but whatever inequity may exist in their relationship (and it does, if only because he is a sheikh who "owns" his wife -- another thing that bothers me about that book, ownership vs. belonging and the failure to distinguish between the two), it isn't related to their ages.
But right now on the small screen, I'm watching the relationship develop between Brian and Justin in Queer as Folk, utterly fascinated. Brian is a 29-30 year old; Justin is 18. At the beginning of the series, he's still in high school. His mom is horrified that he's having sex with a 30 year old. And in the first episode, when Brian dropped him off at school, I was totally disgusted. It wasn't child abuse or pedophilia, because Justin was the age of consent, but it still squicked me out, in part because Brian so clearly wore a label that read "Been there, done that, wouldn't bother with the t-shirt because it wasn't designer." The more I watch the show, though (I'm at the beginning of the second season), the less the age difference bothers me, primarily because Justin is so obviously the more mature of the pair. As
sarahf says, Brian is emotionally constipated. He's Peter Pan, obsessed with eternal youth and beauty; in the words of a psychiatrist on the show, a high-functioning bundle of neuroses, bound together by a series of addictions -- sex, alcohol, drugs, excitement. Does he care about Justin? Yes, however much he tried to avoid it. Does the age gap still show up sometimes? Absolutely. Does their relationship sometimes still seem a little teacher-student-ish? Well, yeah. But it still works for me.Now I'm wondering, is this an example of an exception to my personal rule? Or is it merely an example of exceptional screenwriting and acting? Or am I a hypocrit, applying different rules to the hetero-romance that I read than to the gay tv series I'm watching? Do I have a different standard for gay relationships? Is it a knee jerk reaction that I have to the overt and subliminal paternalism that I see in hetero relationships in romance novels that disappears when presented with a male-male relationship because (I imagine) that she/he dynamic has disappeared? I don't know.
