Holy Testosterone Traffic

Mark and I made a deal. He would read Stardoc by S.L. Viehl if I would read Without Remorse by Tom Clancy. I've shunned Clancy's novels for several reasons: 1) I'm not big into military suspense thriller stories (probably has something to do with growing up in the military); 2) any series of books in which the MC goes from being your "average CIA/FBI/whatever Joe" to POTUS is just a little too much for me; and 3) I've been told that the scene in the movie version of Clear and Present Danger in which only Jack Ryan emerges alive and relatively uninjured from a blocked alley under attack is not different from the one in the book - how in the world can I be expected to suspend disbelief with that? But if my suffering through a Clancy novel gets Mark to read some top-notch science fiction (other than my own), I'll give it a try. Thus begins my chronicle into < deep male booming voice > Testosterone Traffic < / DMB voice >.

I kept losing track in the beginning of the book whenever there would be a lot of description of the fighter jet or the missile or the boat or the incendiary device of choice. So it took me a while to keep reading to the first sex scene of the book (about twenty or so pages in). I was rewarded for my efforts with this line: "Pam lay back, letting him take charge as he needed to do now that he was again a man in spirit." I'm sorry for not warning my female readers that they shouldn't have been eating or drinking anything while reading that.

As I kept reading, I thought that it was perhaps Clancy's intent that the MC come off as a male chauvinist pig. He tosses lines around like "capacious ego" and "proud image of himself" to describe the MC. But then he throws out this line to describe some government and military bigwigs at Arlington on Memorial Day: "Normal men might have wept, but these were not normal men." Now I'm confused. Is the whole book full of supermen? Will all the testosterone leak out of the pages and start going to work on me? Is that why Mark likes these books? Puts hair on his chest, and all that?

But it's not just the men, it's the women too. All breasts and desire. And stereotypical. We've met two women so far: the tried and true Hooker With a Heart of Gold and the dumpy and plain science professor. As our Superhero makes a bad decision to lead him and his woman into danger, the woman (HWAHOG) thinks, "She was confident in her man, wasn't she?... She had to trust him - no, he had to know that she did. She had to show him that she did." And into danger they go.

Mark tells me that the MC has to foul things up and be egocentric - it's part of how this character comes to be the ace hitman type in later novels. Doesn't mean I'm going to laugh or roll my eyes any less. This is how I'm going to survive my descent into the Supercharged Testosterone Traffic that is Clancy's novel. I'm going to be all feminine and estrogeny and have a good laugh. I'll share that laughter here, so be warned about spoilers if you plan on reading this novel. I don't mean this to offend men or Clancy and his work. Rather, I mean this to be entertaining and further proof that men and women come from totally different worlds.