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Disrupting the Werewolf Pack In Patricia Briggs's and Carrie Vaughn's Paranormal Romance Novels
Introduction: The Fantasy of Dominance Hierarchy
One of the more disturbing areas of the internet is the so-called manosphere, where "groups tend to superficially engage with evolutionary psychology and genetic determinism" (Tomkinson 154), slotting human beings, especially men, into the categories of alpha and beta (and occasionally zeta), based primarily on their perceived sexual and financial success. Participants appear to believe that they are biologically hardwired for success or failure in life, and some of them use this fatalistic belief to enact violence against culture in general and women in particular. At the same time, from the 1990s onward, the paranormal romance has risen in popularity, filling bookstores with romantic and erotic novels peopled with werewolves, vampires, and fairies. Werewolf romance specifically seems to share the biological determinism of the manosphere, creating hierarchical packs, led by alphas who control the actions of all other members, including the few female werewolves that exist within this structure. As Carys Crossen points out in The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of the Werewolffrom the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century: "Male werewolves are therefore typically expected to be hypermasculine-dominant, aggressive, prone to violence and overtly sexual-while female werewolves, despite being just as beastly as their male counterparts, are expected to be more submissive, docile and obedient within the environs of the lycanthropic pack" (61). In other words, the werewolf pack sounds a lot like the manosphere's fantasy definitions of human society.
Much has been written about the sexual and psychological male dominance in these fantasies, especially given the fact that they seem to be written and read primarily by women. Scholars like Alexandra Leonzini ascribe power dynamics in paranormal romance to the predictability of the genre. She claims that "Even prolonged psychological and physical abuse can be excused as foreplay by the reader, who, aware of the formulaic nature of the category romance and its guaranteed happy ending, knows that the story will conclude with a passionate declaration of love and happily ever after" ("'All the Better to Eat You With': The Eroticization of the Werewolf and the Rise of Monster Pom in the Digital Age" 278). Others have noted that romance in general is often...