Well, Mr. Cranky from NJ never returned my call, so apparently I annoyed him too. I'm not sorry; there's got to be more to life than putting up with someone's irritability. It's only in Harlequin romances (which I'm reading way, way too many of for a chapter in my book) that the hero's boorish, rude behavior signals that he is a softie underneath who is ripe for falling in love with just the right woman, namely the heroine, stand-in for the reader. It's amusing to read these books in quantities and see how preoccupied they are with the supposed mind of the hero as he is utterly captivated by our heroine...fighting her power over him with all his masculine bravado, but helpless before her incredible beauty, charm and yes, intelligence (we're told the heroine is intelligent, though what's obsessively described is physical beauty). Meanwhile the reader gets to gaze on the satisfying spectacle of the hot, powerful male reduced to jello, not just by her sexual appeal but her ability to permanently engage his emotions. That is clearly most of the pleasure of the text.
Except to me, wondering how I could be reading this stuff for what seems like eons, and still not even halfway through the slog. First, there's a degree of female narcissism in the above, a greedy need for attention and approval from the male, that turns my stomach, and second, nothing in my actual experience has ever matched up to this compelling motif. In real life, rude and dominating men turn out to be...you guessed it, rude and dominating.
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