Calendar Girl (October) Chapter 3:
Wes is back and coping with his trauma by aggressively having sex with Mia at every possible opportunity. I understand that there’s no one size fits all for coping with trauma, but I do find this series’ approach to almost exclusively intertwine sex and healing troubling.
During the first scene in the chapter, for example, they’re in the shower, and Mia starts examining the gunshot wound in Wes’ throat.
I got as close as I dared, his thick erection poking me in the stomach when I maneuvered close enough to see the aftermath of his gunshot wound.
See what I mean? Making a point to not only mention the erection but emphasise how thick it is really detracts from the gravity of the situation.
“How did you survive this?” I asked, knowing that most people who got shot in the neck bled out instantly.
“Gina,” he said as if that answered the question.
I frowned, realizing I hadn’t even asked if she was alive. “Did she make it?”
I know Mia dislikes Gina, but how did this not come up sooner? And again, this whole conversation is taking place during their foreplay and leads up to a ton of sex. It’s an erotic series, but it seems unnecessary to force the sex to do all of the emotional work. It reminds me of Crossfire in a bad way. Not that there’s a good way to be reminded of the Crossfire books.
Wes continues to creep me the fuck out:
“I’m going to play with your wet pussy until you pass out. Then I’m going to push inside and fall asleep with my dick nestled inside of you and my head within licking distance of your tits. That okay with you, sweetheart?”
Somehow Mia does not say, “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT, DUDE!” It’s unclear to me how she could possibly be okay with any of the above. He probably (MAYBE?) doesn’t actually mean she’s going to actually pass out and he’s going to start fucking her. Right? He has to just be like making a terrible point.
But then, okay, falling asleep with his dick “nestled” inside of her? And why is he specifying that his head will be within licking distance when he’s asleep? This is all so fucked up and gross. I mean LOLOL COMEDY AND JOKES LOL.
Also out of the Crossfire playbook, nightmares! And the male protagonist waking up to fuck the female protagonist like crazy to forget his problems. He doesn’t even pause to make sure Mia’s into it, he just immediately starts fucking her.
He roughly pushed my panties down, and in less than a minute from the time I woke him, I was pinned to the mattress and his cock was ramming home.
[…]
For the next few days the pattern was the same. Wes would make love to me in the daylight when he was more himself and fuck me raw at night, taking from my body whatever he needed to push away the nightmares so he could find his way back home.
I understand that Mia’s telling me this is consensual, and I have no choice but to believe her, but I’m still finding it disturbing that Wes would act like this. And Mia’s just like, “Oh, he needs this to heal.”
She does eventually try to talk to him and tell him he should speak to a professional about it (indeed!), and also gets him to tell her more about what happened. This is actually the only time I’ve been convinced that Mia and Wes are meant to be because Wes sounds like he’s a robot too. Here are some examples:
“They had us chained to the wall, arms above our heads with ropes. I’d never felt gnawing tension like that…
[…]
“The men were no longer cracking jokes and playing with their toys— the toys being us. They were off kilter and spoke in harsh tones.”
[…]
“The other looked at me with pure disgust in his eyes, swung his gun around, and fired wildly.”
It’s like Carlan wrote the scene out and then just put dialogue tags around it. Wes isn’t exactly a defined character, but this even seems out of character for him.
Wes also tells us that Gina had a lot of fucked up stuff done to her, and I’m actually thinking maybe Gina has the most compelling story out of everyone here. She got dumped by Wes, had to still continue making a movie with him, got kidnapped, went through horrific shit, saved the ex’s life, and is now presumably struggling to adjust after being rescued. I don’t think this series would do that story justice, but damn it does sound intriguing.
The Wes Experience: Sexual Healing gone totally wrong.
I feel dread over the way this series deals with Gina. It’s like she’s being punished in the worst way just for dating Wes. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s like Carlan is getting a kick out of making her suffer in the worst way, and the reader is supposed to feel like she deserved it.
Gina is a typical victim of an author creating a character only to punish them for “transgressions against the protagonist”. Very often comes as package deal with a not-very-sub text of “the protagonist is always morally right”, so naturally everyone who doesn’t work towards the greater happiness of the protagonist even if it goes against their own interest is morally corrupt and evil. And if it’s in a romance novel with a female protagonist you can also expect a nice amount of slutshaming of every other woman who has just the tiniest amount of sex drive … why, hello, Zoey, long time not seen.
And yes, I think Carlan might getting a kick out of it to a certain degree. It doesn’t have to be that way but from my own experience it’s very easy to write such a punching bag character when the author indulges in a little bit of revenge fantasy and projects someone real into that character. Maybe that writing style can work out if the author either makes it so obvious that the reader picks up the fact that that author wants to punish someone (Ayn Rand for example never denied that her self-inserts punish the establishment for her by proxy) or if the author is good enough to completly hide their own motivation (no example, obviously), but in 99 of 100 cases it’s just immature gloating about the misery of someone else.
I groaned out loud reading Wes’ dialogue. Why why why dies he talk like the skeeviest motherfucker in existence?
I’m sorry for Gina and I hope Mia & Wes will go to a therapy, sex will not “cure” their trauma. And Wes is becoming more and more creepy