The Hating Game, by Sally Thorne

Another romance novel, soon to be a movie.

Among other things, this was a fairly explicit manifesto for the "women want a man who is aggressive/dominant as a lover, and/but a gentle caregiving figure in everyday life." This idea seems pretty common in popular culture -- Chance the Rapper has neatly encapsulated it as "she wants a [lover] who pulls her hair and holds the door for her" -- and Thorne has expanded this idea into a full length book. This isn't subtext, she's repeatedly explicit about it: "brute, raw masculinity contrasted with gentleness is the most attractive thing on earth."

Is it... weird that it only just struck me that this has some kind of relation to the Madonna/Whore complex? Except Madonna/Whore says men can't square the caregiver with the sex-partner, want those two roles to be two different people, but the claim here is that women want both in one person? I don't know, someone must have written about this. (I've been using that phrase so much lately that I might have to initialise it -- SMHWAT? Open to better ideas).

In my circles, the controversial part of that is the aggressive/dominant part, not the gentle caregiver part -- presumably there are other social groups where it would be the reverse, where the idea that a guy should sometimes be gentle would go against the grain. And Thorne is fairly explicit about this model, it isn't latent or hidden:

I lean against the tiles, and remember what it was like to lean against a tree with Joshua Templeman shielding me with his body. In the privacy of my mind I can imagine whatever I want, and they aren't progressive 21st Century thoughts; they're depraved, caveman thoughts.

or:

[my ex] could never have picked me up; he'd have ruptured a disc in his fragile boy-sized spine. Josh sinks down onto a beautiful wing-backed armchair I'd only dimly registered when we first came in. My whole life, before Josh, I scoffed at guys that made a show of their strength; but maybe a little part of me still exists who loves to be carried and coddled.

I don't know what to say about this, but it seems like a major theme in modern life -- I know too many women who feel conflicted for wanting the things they want, romantically and sexually. (More conflicted than this character does, to be honest, she doesn't actually seem fussed). And I get where that's coming from, and what it's rebelling against. And yet it seems... sad?, to want something from your partners and feel bad about wanting it. I feel (to be honest) that it comes from a place of holding premises about gender and sexuality that (evidently, in some way) don't match reality quite right, and then being stuck because the things you're feeling "aren't allowed" under the model you're working from? I'm hoping that's just a phase, civilisationally, that eventually we'll find a synthesis that works better than either the thing we had before or the thing we had now. But I also don't know what that synthesis looks like, or how we'd get from here to there.

some scattered notes and points:

• the book is called The Hating Game, and it's fairly explicitly about playing games with someone. One interesting thing is that even when the female protagonist is explicitly aware of the games the male protagonist is playing with her, they still work just as well. This has been my experience in life too, that if a psychological game works it tends to still work even if you explicitly meta-comment about the fact that you're playing it: I don't really understand how that can be, and it could be that it's actually something different happening, e.g. you move from the original game to the "I'm so confident I can just explicitly say that we're playing a game" game, which also happens to be attractive but is no longer the same thing.
• it's getting boring to mention this, but romance novels just... can't deal with this tension between "these two people are perfect for each other" and "these two people can't declare their love for each other till the end of the novel." For example:

I'd have to be blind not to see the affection in his eyes

is followed a few lines later by

I have severe doubts it would survive in the real world.

Why do you have doubts?! Nothing you have said in this novel should give you any doubts you're perfect for each other! Surely there's a better plot structure for these novels that doesn't involve pretending two perfectly perfect-for-each-other people might not be right for each other?

• which relates to the other thing that keeps getting to me about these novels.... the main romantic problem in most people's actual lives is "should I stay with this person, who is great for me in XYZ ways but flawed for me in ABC ways?" And by setting up characters who are practically perfect (for each other) in every way, these romance novels are just skipping right past that problem. Their characters are solving a completely different problem than most of the rest of us! So what are we actually taking away from these books? (Yes I know there are books that treat relationships and their struggles realistically, and I'm choosing to read formulaic romance novels instead, I understand that this is on me).
• the author doesn't ever mention specifically what city they're in, and I like that, because lol all megacities are generically the same (not actually true! But I like it as a claim). I looked it up later and the author is Australian -- maybe she wanted to appeal to Americans but didn't know anything about any specific American city?  Anyway, fun to see you can just skip the entire location-specificying part of writing (that I often find annoying to do), and just have your setting be completely generic.
• there's a theory that, physiologically, we first experience arousal (in the broadest sense) and then give it an attribution -- there's the famous story of a girl on a rollercoaster or rickshaw (depending on the telling) who misattributes the butterflies of a bumpy journey for attraction and so thinks she's in love with the rickshaw-driver/rollercoaster-operator. (I understand this is the premise of [[How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett]], a book which is currently on my nightstand and which I may eventually be able to read and therefore write a book-thought about). The Hating Game is kind of explicitly about that -- the protagonist thinks she's playing The Hating Game.... but is she ACTUALLY playing the LOVING game? (Spoiler: yes). And occasionally this is explicit: "a flashbulb of energy would pop inside me; I'd label it annoyance or dislike; I'd take the little flash and call it something I don't think it is."

I'm not actually sure where the book lands on this: does it argue that the protagonist misattributes her love as hatred? Or that she always loved him, and knew it, and was in denial about it? I'm not entirely sure.

• the big(ish) twist at the end of this book I found staggeringly obvious, predicted its exact details the first time the twist-related situation was mentioned. I'd love to survey readers and find out how many others felt the same. I wonder if, in honesty, people prefer:

1) a twist this utterly obvious, that you assume others will also know, but you're just waiting to get it confirmed.
2) a twist that you figure out but you think (rightly or wrongly) that other people won't
3) a twist you don't figure out, that actually twists you, but feels satisfying once you hear it

But I'm not really sure how to survey that -- seems like one of those things where maybe the thing we would say we want is not actually necessarily the thing we want

• this really needs a longer take than a bullet-point but: one of my big fears is that unstable relationships are fun because they're unstable, not despite. That we enjoy intermittent variable rewards, or that we think that being with someone who almost-doesn't like us is proof that we're with the most attractive person we could be with. I guess that's another lens/angle on this book, though that one would take a lot more time to tease out.