Trust me, I can handle it

[pbray]

Mini-rant...


I've been watching COVERT AFFAIRS on USA-- brainless eye-candy which is all I'm up for at 10PM. I don't take it seriously, but this week, the b-plot was Annie suspecting her brother-in-law was cheating on his wife. In the end, it turned out he'd been laid off two months ago, so his sneaking off to a hotel was for a job fair rather than a love affair. And his reason for keeping this a secret from his wife? "He wanted to protect her."

Because it's perfectly okay to hide such a crushing financial reality from your partner. Womenfolk need protecting, after all, they can't cope with the facts of modern life. Far better that your wife keep spending--including planning a couples getaway to a luxury resort--than it is for her to know the truth. In the show Annie didn't call him on his bullshit. Didn't point out that it wasn't about protecting his wife, it was about him being ashamed, being afraid that his wife would think less of him. Nope, she just urged him to share the news with his wife, assuring him that her sister was strong enough to handle it.

The next day I started reading an urban fantasy*. At one point the hero realizes that the evil forces have followed him to his home, and his family may be in danger. Does he tell his wife about the threat? No, because he doesn't want her to worry. What makes this worse is that his wife already knows about the supernatural world, and knows that there are creatures out there that want to kill him. He's not hiding what he does from her--he's only concealing the fact that she may be in danger. It's a boneheaded, patronizing move. When the dark forces attack, I'm sure she'll be happy that she had a husband who thought so highly of her that he didn't worry her beforehand.

Maybe his wife would have chosen to stay by his side. Maybe she would have decided now was the time to get the hell out of Dodge, and gone to stay with friends or family until the threat was over. Either way, she deserved the chance to make her own decision. By robbing her of that choice, the hero shows what he thinks of her. And no amount of internal monologue about how much he respects/admires her is going to change the fact that his actions show something else.

It's a flaw that's really bugging me about what is otherwise an excellent read. I'll likely finish the book, just to see if the hero redeems himself. But I'm not holding my breath.

And for the record, the last time someone tried to protect me in this way, I terminated our relationship. He had a brief stint as a stalker, but then transferred three thousand miles away which put an end to that problem.

*Per my usual policy, because it's a first novel I'm not naming names.

Comments

[pbray.livejournal.com]

Female.

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

Ack! Ack, ack, ack, ack! ('scuse me, hairball)

Sigh. Author has no clue, apparently. Thanks for saying. I'll just go clean up the mess I made now.

Oz

[kelly-swails.livejournal.com]

Allow me to interject.

1. I agree with the general tone of the comment thread in that the dude's actions in the novel are at the very least disrespectful. I also agree that the "I'm the manly hero and I will protect you by keeping you in the dark" is a ... retro ... way of looking at the male/female relationship. It has its place in some fiction, but certainly not urban fantasy.

2. Perhaps the author didn't intend to make the hero disrespectful. Perhaps the author doesn't *realize* this is a disrespectful way to think or act. My guess is the author grew up thinking that it's "romantic" to be "rescued," and has her male protagonist act accordingly. We all bring bits of ourselves to our work, and we all learn a lot about ourselves through the act of writing and having folks read that writing. Maybe this is a lesson this particular author still has to learn? So I say, cut her a little bit of slack.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

I think you're correct that the author thinks that this behavior is romantic rather than condescending.

And other readers have different reactions than I did to this book, and likely to this scene.

As far as cutting slack--that's where the naming no names comes in, and there's not enough detail in my post to ID the book, since it is a first novel.

[kelly-swails.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that *you* weren't cutting the author slack. You clearly were, as you noted. It's just that sometimes comment threads can veer from "this was a poor choice" to "this author is stupid, delusional, and dysfunctional" pretty quickly. I wanted to throw my thoughts into the ring. :)