Nights in pink satin, days in pink collars

This past week was a sugar-coated fiction week, watching the Pixar/Disney film Ratatouille and reading Stephanie Rowe’s Date Me Baby, One More Time, which could be classified as paranormal chick lit.

The experience set me to thinking about the large quantities of gloss that gets slathered over stories in our era. Disneyfication of fairy tales is a case in point. As a cynical adult, my interest flagged a little in Ratatouille, and I think it was in part because the story was convoluted without being rooted in a reality I could access. You could see the cooking genius rat as an eternal outsider, aiming for an impossible dream. Yet, it was a strain to keep suspending that disbelief.

As my Web Diva, Sue Trowbridge put it in reviewing the film, “Rats, in a kitchen?” I’ve had pet rats, and they are charming little critters, but not shall we say housebroken or extraordinarily clean. A colony of rats living in and around your kitchen and flooding around the neighborhood, pouring into (or out of) a house in great masses evokes a visceral reaction that is hard to sentimentalize. We don't have this problem with Mickey Mouse because he looks and acts very little like the rat you do not want to find in your cupboard and much more like a human despite the ears.

Watching Ratatouille set me to contemplating how much harm has been done by “happily ever after” and yet how ingrained it is. If I were reading a story to a child would I prefer the “happily ever after” fairy tales than those of the Brothers Grimm, which end with "happily until their deaths." But that doesn’t mean the child would prefer the more sanitized version. I know those who fondly recall the bloodthirsty Grimm tales, envisioning the punishments inflicted on some characters as happening to siblings or mean kids on whom they wish vengeance. I think that’s similar to children’s love of dinosaurs—Tyrannosaurus Rex makes great imaginary backup.

“These fairy tales are not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our forefathers,” . . . -- W. S. W. Anson, Asgard and the Gods, p. 21

I’m not sure how much that the above quote relates to anything I read or watched this week, I just liked it when I found it while I was searching for
happily ever after,

The title of Date Me Baby, One More Time is a satire on Britney Spears’ 1999 mega hit song, "Hit Me Baby One More Time." Yikes. I don’t know how serious the sadomasochistic undertones are to the target audience (20-30 somethings). Date Me is filled with violent threats that are thrown out with the same casual tone that is used to contemplate buying pretzels. It's kind of a convention of the genre. The heroine and her love interest are each hoping to cut the other’s head off for complicated magical survival reasons. The characters take it seriously, that is their job after all. But it is not to be taken seriously by the reader who knows that this is a romance. The fragility of the threats dilutes the suspense somewhat, as does the fact that most of the characters are immortal or extremely hard to kill. But the kill-or-be-killed romance would be an extremely dark tale if the reader did imagine that actual murder would ever happen.

The heroine of Date Me, has a convoluted supernatural pedigree, a fire-breathing dragon for a roommate, and a dead mother who keeps returning from purgatory to complain that she is being courted by Satan, who is portrayed as a hopelessly ineffective lounge lizard who only lives to make the heroine’s mother Queen of Hell. The Satan character was at first irksome, but I eventually accepted him as a sort of Wile E. Coyote figure (with the part of the Roadrunner played by the heroine's dead mother--see? I said it was convoluted!)

The story and all of its conventions float on a veritable sea of horniness—I won’t say “hormones” because the characters' lusts seemed as formalized as a minuet, but I have to give it an "A" for inventiveness and I did keep turning the pages. Kind of like Laurell K. Hamilton on laughing gas.


December 3 to 10, 1977 I read:

The Pink Collar Workers, Inside the World of Women’s Work, Louise Kapp Howe

A Time Magazine review:

To assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in "pink collar" occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on "A and P" (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll.

Louise Kapp Howe died in 1984, just a year after Stallard, Ehrenreich and Sklar took her work a step further and coined the term "pink collar ghetto."

In 1998 Salon Magazine reported that Public Relations was becoming a new pink collar ghetto
article

In the 21st century this situation has changed in some ways, and in other ways has not
2004 pink collar update

December 3 to 10, 2007 I read:

Date Me Baby, One More Time, Stephanie Howe
Stephanie Rowe web page/