Alpha Male or Good Guy? Masculinity Across the Romances of Tessa Bailey, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Erich Segal
By Chloe Brenner (2025)
In this work, I explore how three contemporary romance authors – Erich Segal (1960s-1970s), Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1980s-1990s), and Tessa Bailey (2000s) – prolific across distinct time periods over the last 60 years, represent masculinity in their fiction. I argue that while Tessa Bailey and Susan Elizabeth Phillips depict toxic and alpha characters and Erich Segal wrote loveable heroes, yet all three authors utilize sports as a tenet of their characters’ masculinity. First, I will dive into the evidence supporting that both Bailey and Phillip write alpha male characters, then I will contrast this with Segal’s “virtuous” heroes. Finally, I will compare how the authors relate sports and masculinity, concluding that Bailey and Phillips use it as a vehicle to illustrate troublesome dominance while Segal uses sports to contribute to his characters’ charm. This argument arises chiefly from author interviews, book reviews, and articles from relevant magazines and newspapers in each period.
Tessa Bailey explicitly discusses how she writes male characters with dominating and aggressive character traits. Tessa Bailey is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and has been nominated multiple times for Goodreads Choice Awards (Goodreads 2021). In a 2024 press interview with WBUR (Boston’s public radio station) for her book, The Au Pair Affair, the interviewer asks author Tessa Bailey about her male protagonist’s “ideas about being a man” and his “problem with talking to other men on the team” (WBUR 2024). Bailey begins her response by reflecting back on another book she wrote, Hook Line and Sinker, mentioning that when she released the novel, “everybody” asked her why she wrote a novel about toxic masculinity (WBUR 2024). She emphasizes that she has thought about toxic masculinity “forever” and that it is a part of “everyday life” (WBUR 2024). She concludes her statement by sharing that she cannot imagine writing male characters, particularly athletes, without addressing their “locker room talk” while trying not to make it “icky” (WBUR 2024). In this excerpt, Bailey makes clear that writing about male protagonists with domineering qualities arises from her lived experience as she cannot imagine writing them any other way. Other supporting evidence for this claim lies in another interview, this time with the blog, Ramblings from this Chick (Ramblings from this Chick 2013). When asked to describe her protagonists in 140 characters or less, Bailey reflects that her men are “alpha, dirty-talking cops [who] meet their matches” (Ramblings from this Chick 2013). This description from 11 years prior to the WBUR interview conveys a similar sentiment to the more recent conversation: Bailey writes alpha men who have a tendency towards explicit language. Finally, a New York Times article offers a similar take on Bailey’s heroes. Romance columnist, Olivia Waite, interprets that Bailey’s book, Hook, Line, and Sinker, offers a narrow outlook of men as “big, strong, dumb, and horny” (Waite, 2022). This description adds additional color to Bailey’s perspectives on masculinities: not only are the men alpha in personality, but also in their large stature, and not only do the men like to talk dirty, but they have strong desires to go along with it. We see that Tessa Bailey has represented alpha male characters in the physical, emotional, and sexual sense.
Commanding male characters are also a feature of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ work. Susan Elizabeth Phillips, known to fans as “SEP,” released her first novels in the 1980s. Since then, she has won five RITA awards from Romance Writers of America (RWA) as well as the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award (Selinger 2015, 2). She is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers. Although a short quote, one woman’s comment in an All About Romance column on Phillips’ romances presents a revealing perspective. An anonymous submitter, Donna, wrote that most of Phillips’ “male characters come across to me as real jerks who use women” (All About Romance 1997). This sentiment is corroborated by Phillips herself. In a 2015 interview, she says “I am always going to write an alpha hero because that’s the only thing I know how to do” (Selinger 2015, 9). In fact, she also relates that alpha heroes are essential for creating a central conflict in the plot (Selinger 2015, 9). Although Phillips made these comments later than the time period she represents in this paper, this tendency is also represented on the back cover blurbs of her books from the 1990s. About Dan Calebow in It Had to be You (1994), Phillips writes that he is a “sexist jock taskmaster” (Phillips 1994). Similarly, Phillips advertises her male hero, Bobby Tom Denton, in Heaven, Texas, as a “hell-raising playboy” (Phillips, 1995). Both of these descriptions further emphasize Phillip’s comment in 2015 about her tendency to write alpha men. Playboys and taskmasters evoke the control and dominance that comes with a plot-driving male character. Both Bailey and Phillips create male protagonists with alpha characteristics, not only in their personalities, but also in their sexual relationships. In addition to discussing the mens’ power, the sources also emphasize their “dirty talking” and “play boy” attitudes. By contrast, Erich Segal does not write “toxic” and alpha male protagonists. Instead, he creates more classic and loveable heroes.
Erich Segal writes a different type of male protagonist than Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Tessa Bailey: he portrays men as upstanding and principled. Erich Segal was a Professor of Classics at Yale and later at Dartmouth and Harvard (Peretz 2010). His novel Love Story (1970) was a near-instant New York Times bestseller and the story of protagonists Jenny and Oliver captivated audiences. He followed Love Story with the sequel Oliver’s Story and several other romance novels (Peretz 2010). The primary piece of evidence that suggests Segal creates “good” protagonists is a quote from an interview with the radio program Bookbeat.
“He is a hero. He is an all-American boy. He is a star athlete for Harvard. He is a good guy that basically – except the distance with his father – there is nothing wrong with this kid, and in this age of anti-hero it is awfully tough to find a guy that will make the old square virtues look good” (Bookbeat 1970).
He wants to write a “good” and “virtuous” character with no flaws. Much to the contrary of Phillips’ and Bailey’s alpha characters, Segal simply wants Oliver to be the ideal guy. This quote also indicates that Segal is attempting to counteract the temporal trends towards anti-heroes and instead to put forth a character with classic or “old” virtues. In a 1970 New York Times review of the movie adaptation of Love Story, the author, Vincent Canby writes that the actor portrays Oliver as a “rich, waspy, movie hero who rebels – but not too drastically,” a type of hero that Canby thought “had vanished” from movies (Canby 1970). To Segal, Oliver is an exemplary guy: he pushes the boundaries just far enough to grow. A third piece of evidence adds to this understanding of Oliver as the ideal man. In a Redbook magazine article, Segal is quoted saying that love necessitates “an ever-lessening differentiation between the masculine and the feminine” because only then could we abandon the “illusion” of romance (Spock 1971). From the quote, it seems that Segal takes umbrage with the illusion of romance and suggests that in order to counteract this illusion, qualities that define men and women must become more similar. This interpretation relates to Segal’s desire to portray Oliver as a “good” character. Morality and virtuousness are universal characteristics that can be applied to men and women alike. The central distinction between Phillips and Bailey’s representations and Segal’s is that both female authors have stated that they intentionally write dominant male characters while Segal attempts to write American heroes. One example where this discrepancy plays out in particular is through how the authors utilize sports as a means of demonstrating masculinity.
When Tessa Bailey discusses her athletes, she describes that she has to write the “locker-room talk” that can be “icky” (WBUR 2024). Bailey’s comments here serve as evidence for her claim that she writes “toxic masculinity” into her novels. Similarly, in the back cover summaries of both Heaven, Texas and It Had to Be You, Phillips associates negative portrayals of masculinity with sports. Recalling the description of the “sexist, jock, taskmaster,” she connects being a jock with being misogynistic and demanding. Similarly, the “hell-raising playboy” from the earlier quote, is also identified as an “ex-jock” earlier in the blurb’s paragraph. Again, the womanizer is also an athlete. Yet, the evidence suggests that Segal is building a different narrative. In the Bookbeat interview excerpt, Segal connects Oliver’s status as a “star athlete” to his role as the “all American” good guy aspiration. The contrast between Segal’s goal in creating a masculine character and Bailey’s is on display in a scene where, after a hockey game, Oliver’s roommates attempt to get him to engage in exactly the kind “locker room talk” about his love interest that Bailey describes. Instead he tells them to “get lost” and he calls her up and tells her he loves her (Segal 1970, 10). Segal is clear here that in order to embody the aspirational male character, Oliver does not want to talk about Jenny negatively or suggestively behind her back. Instead, he wants to continue building a relationship with her and treat her with respect. His performance in the hockey game serves as a catalyst for him to make this call to Jenny. Sports stardom is virtuous in Segal’s work.
There is also an interesting connection between how the sources indicate a connection between sports and unseemly or crass ways of talking about women. Each piece of evidence I have employed related to male protagonists and sports, pairs sports conversations with inappropriate discussions. From Bailey’s “locker room talk” to the Phillips’ “play-boy jock” to Oliver’s refusing to participate in his friends’ inappropriate discussion of Jenny, sports and lewd conversations about women seem to go hand in hand.
In this work, I have demonstrated, through primary sources, how three authors represent masculinity. The men that Tessa Bailey and Susan Elizabeth Phillips write are domineering and engage in sexist dirty talking. Both authors admit that they write male characters like this on purpose as it is, in both cases, all they know how to do. At the same time, Segal represents men as virtuous and heroic, also intentionally. In a time when anti-heros were popular, Segal wanted to write male characters readers would like. Although attempting to create protagonists with different profiles, all three authors use sports to further their characterizations as either toxic and alpha or good and traditional.
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