53 pages • 1 hour read
A Merry Little Meet Cute
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Themes
The Pursuit of Pleasure
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of R-rated sexual content, substance use, sexual harassment, bullying, and antigay bias.
The novel presents several means for the pursuit of pleasure, including sexual and sensual pleasure, entertainment and fun, ambition and personal dreams, and love. The narrative argues that this pursuit should not be seen as a vice or flaw and that pleasure can and should be enjoyed purely for its own sake. It signals that no one should be barred from such pursuits by other people’s judgments or preferences.
Pleasure is promoted in the novel by the character of Nolan, both as a cause of pleasure for Bee and as a model for enjoying life. His personality—and the relative freedoms he enjoys as a man—provide an example for Bee in relinquishing shame or guilt. For example, Nolan’s pursuit of wild entertainment in his “bad boy” days is both a running joke throughout the novel and further celebration of pleasure for its own sake, as he constructs various experiences to provide amusement; as he tells Bee, his entertainment used to involve ideas like “hir[ing] a petting zoo to come to [his] suite on the thirtieth floor, do[ing] a little ecstasy, and hav[ing] a minirave” (269). Nolan’s character often personifies the simple enjoyment of pleasures and a lack of guilt in this hedonistic approach to life.
Nolan’s role in the music industry was to provide enjoyment and pleasure through entertainment. For Bee, the pleasure in his music is combined with an attraction to his celebrity persona, which makes explicit that this enjoyment goes beyond the art form itself to the projected images of those who produce it. This creative pleasure is linked to sex and glamor and provides a background for the adult connection between Bee and Nolan. The novel demonstrates this through the posters in Bee’s childhood bedroom and her discussion of her teenage fantasies of Nolan, including her creation of “fics” around him—fanfiction. These parasocial relationships can generate great pleasure as a fan imagines the celebrity as their colleague, friend, or romantic or sexual partner, but they are also expressive of the longing inherent in fantasy-based pleasure. In bringing Bee and Nolan together, the book resolves this with the pleasure of a real-life connection that is both creative and sexual.
As an explicit romance novel, the narrative centers on sexual pleasure. This includes sex purely for pleasure, rather than inside relationships, and, as such, is part of the novel’s message of sex positivity and non-judgment. One example of this is the characters’ enjoyment of the dancers at the strip club the North Pole. Prancer confirms that she likes her job because “[she] love[s] making people happy and nothing brings more joy than Christmas and titties” (174). This mirrors the fact that Bee makes her living by creating adult content online; viewers pay for access to the content on her ClosedDoors account or to view the films she makes for Uncle Ray Ray’s.
The novel revels in this kind of stimulation, showing these sexual transactions as mutually beneficial, as Nolan personifies through his patronage of Bee’s Bianca von Honey channel. As part of his character’s role in defying negative moralistic judgments, Nolan assures Bee that her performances provide pleasure: “I can tell you from experience that Bianca von Honey truly brings joy to the world. You are no villain” (269). The novel suggests that sexual pleasure between consenting adults is a matter of “joy,” not shame, even within the more taboo area of sex work.
The novel also promotes the enjoyment of sexual pleasure through direct personal contact. Bee and Nolan enjoy this from the beginning, and it is an essential part of their growing connection. Although the novel is positive in its approach to sex-based work, it explores the different pleasures available through non-transactional sex, particularly mutuality. In their first encounter in the costuming room, Nolan observes how Bee is having fun with him, and that increases his enjoyment. Where sexual pleasure is combined with business for those who are sex workers, Bee and Nolan together celebrate sexual satisfaction as a private, reciprocal joy. The authors present consensual, safe sex as a pleasure that ought to be enjoyed without judgment or restraint.
The pursuit of pleasure is, in the viewpoint of the authors, to be supported, accepted, celebrated, and encouraged.
The Dissonance Between Public Persona and Private Self
In taking up the theme of celebrity and performance, the novel interrogates the presumed boundaries between a projected public image and the private self or identity. As the novel makes explicit with its frequent use of professional pseudonyms, entertainers frequently assume a new name to separate and curate the identity they’ve assembled for public consumption. As a performer, Nolan uses the bland and easy-to-pronounce last name of Shaw instead of his real family name, Kowalczk. The dancers at the North Pole adopt the names of Santa’s reindeer to suit the theme of the venue and create a separate identity as performers. For the same reason, Bee uses her given name—Bianca—with the surname von Honey as her performance identity. For many of these characters, the creation of a separate identity is also to preserve privacy, protecting against celebrity obsession and pejorative attitudes toward certain types of activity, especially work of a sexual nature.
The novel examines the ambiguous nature of these identity boundaries. While the character may think of their manufactured identity as separate, the narrative shows that this division can be fragile. While Bee hires onto the Duke the Halls movie thinking that she can keep her work as Bianca von Honey a secret—even while she’s still posting content to her ClosedDoors account—Jack, a seasoned performer, points out that it was hardly reasonable to expect her to keep her sex work a secret. Audiences may easily conflate the public persona with the private person even when the subject attempts to keep spheres of their life or identity separate.
The novel shows how the public persona can also offer avenues of expression for the private personality. Nolan and Bee both ponder the opportunities that their work offers to express a deeper part of themselves. Nolan reflects, “[O]nstage, I could be anyone. And when I sang—even silly musical songs that had nothing to do with my actual life—it sometimes felt like the words and the melodies were coming together to express a part of me I would have never been able to explain otherwise” (103). Bee finds her sex work to be a way to express her sexuality in ways that she hasn’t been given through other acting opportunities or in real-world relationships with boyfriends. Bee considers her Bianca persona, like her content, as something she can control, and she draws strict boundaries when a viewer tries to exercise ownership over or intrude upon her private self. For Bee, as a woman and a sex worker, the risk of losing this control is particularly great and provides much of the narrative’s sense of jeopardy.
Nolan maintains more fluid identity boundaries because his work is less taboo and his image as a celebrity is more easily available for public consumption and criticism. This causes him different challenges than Bee. When information about his family becomes public, Nolan reflects that he’s not viewed as a person to commenters on the internet; rather, he and his family “[a]re bags of blood for the gossip vampires, and [they] [a]re content fodder for everyone else” (283). This comment combines Nolan’s experience of the dehumanizing aspects of celebrity with his sense of family responsibilities.
This distance between the public persona and the private person creates narrative tension for the novel, partly through complicating their interactions as the romance-lead couple. Both Nolan and Bee, in their own way, are concerned that the other is interacting with a fantasy rather than them. To each, the public image belongs to the fantasy, but they want to be seen and loved as their private self.
In contrast, other characters, even those involved in the entertainment industry, don’t seem to encounter this dissonance in the same way. Kallum, Steph, Teddy, Sunny, and Luca are purely themselves, leaving the conflict between the public and private as something the leads must sort out. This involves both Nolan and Bee creating, and learning, the distinction between fantasy and reality, just as they mutually decide what aspects of their relationship to celebrate publicly and what aspects to keep to themselves. While the public persona is created for the enjoyment and entertainment of others, the novel suggests, the private self and those relationships belong to the individual alone.
The Painful Effects of Discrimination
The novel condemns discriminatory behavior by showing how even seemingly casual instances of discrimination can have a lasting and painful effect on individuals. These attitudes are mostly focused on the novel’s core subjects of sex, sexual orientation, and body image. The novel shows that the lack of respect for privacy, bodily integrity, or consideration for the different experiences or choices of others causes damage to characters’ happiness or dignity.
Bee has the most extensive experience of discrimination, directed at both her body size and her career path. She reflects several times that she has encountered problems in getting good roles from casting directors who don’t consider her figure desirable. She has also been treated callously in romantic relationships: First, there was the high school boy who wanted to make out but didn’t want anyone to know he was involved with Bee, and second came her ex-boyfriend, Spencer, who didn’t want to introduce Bee to his family members. Both treated Bee like she was a secret, suggesting that they were ashamed of her or embarrassed to be public about their attraction to her. Again, Nolan expresses the novel’s view: “Fat wasn’t the problem. But the way the world, and especially the entertainment industry, treated people like Bee…that was the problem” (99). He takes Bee’s side in the matter of the director’s chair, noting that if it doesn’t fit her, the problem is with the chair and not her shape.
Bee has also encountered callous treatment in the adult film industry; she reflects, “[Y]ou sometimes still get a director who treats you like a posable Barbie or someone who won’t work with a plus-size performer” (272). The first attitude stems from the objectification of women’s bodies and a cultural assumption that women’s sexuality or pleasure is an accessory to male sexuality. Bee points this out in her remark to Nolan that the general (heterosexual) porn scenario ends with the man’s orgasm, while the woman’s pleasure, if any, is considered adjunct. This male-centric tendency, the novel suggests, creates the perception that pornography is exploitative or predatory toward women, and it argues that this is not inherently the case. Bee’s work shows her with considerable agency and choice: Her ClosedDoors account puts her in sole control of her content, delivery, and subscriber base. While this doesn’t entirely shield her from individual viewers who objectify or occasionally threaten her, it presents a view of sex work as an individual and dignified choice of career.
The novel shows that both Nolan and Bee understand that discrimination may ultimately cause the loss of their present employment and barriers to future career opportunities. Nolan, however, as an attractive white man, has otherwise been shielded from much public condemnation, as Gretchen notes. Instead, when her work as Bianca von Honey is exposed by Dominic Diamond, Bee is the one subject to rampant discriminatory attacks centered on her body size, her sex work, and her identity as a bisexual woman. This, the novel suggests, is part of society’s urge to control and objectify women’s bodies: The online hate is “punishment” for Bee having behaved freely in these areas. In all cases, the novel treats these instances of discrimination as invalid and unkind, promoting attitudes that celebrate tolerance for and acceptance of diverse body types, sexual orientations, and sexual activities.
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