by Maya Rodale
Thus, romances could be easily mistaken for novels, especially by the audience of “poor, ignorant girls” and “silly females.” Presumably women didn’t have enough intellect, reason, or education to distinguish between the two, especially if some elements of the book seemed so very realistic. Or, more like it, these types of novels presented a world that was a tantalizing picture of the one they lived in...but better.
In her book The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody writes, “The proliferation of conduct books in the eighteenth century bears witness to social fears that females, influenced by the pernicious novel, might get above themselves, take themselves too seriously.”[82] Because the novel looked so similar to real life in terms of portraying humans on earth, obeying the laws of physics and society while also painting a picture of a daring woman succeeding and finding real love in that setting, it wasn’t totally implausible that women would believe them to be real or at the very least aspirational. Or inspirational.
Dismissing the books as unrealistic isn’t necessarily a slight on how well or how accurately the author wrote her story, but about the “crazy” ideas these novels explored and celebrated. Crazy ideas like freedom for women, mutual respect between men and women, true love, or a woman’s worth.
Sweet, sweet fantasy
But the fact remains that romance is fantasy by definition. Readers also want it to be fantasy. The vast majority of people read romance for escape and entertainment and to experience lives unlike their own. It’s not that they are avoiding real life, but we deal with enough socks on the floor in real life, thanks (I dare you to show me a romance hero who has left his socks on the floor when the hamper is right there). This is not a new thing: “What has to be read in the workshop and kitchen must be enacted at club and boudoir,” Margaret Oliphant writes in 1858,[83] meaning that we don’t wish to see an exact, totally accurate, really real depiction of our lives when reading escapist fiction. We want the better version. We want the idealized version.
Some readers within the genre will point out major discrepancies between romance novels and reality—thus highlighting how romance is an idealized, fantastical world. For example, the sheer number of billionaires and dukes strolling through the pages of romance novels vastly outnumber those in reality. Jackie Horne of the blog Romance Novels for Feminists has done the math and found that in real life, dukes made up only 0.0001735 percent of the population of England in 1818. Narrowing the numbers to just the gentry only, 0.00868 percent were dukes. For perspective, her survey of romance novel titles showed that 1.7 percent have “duke” in the title. I’d argue that the number of romances with this type of hero is even higher.[84] As of this writing, there are 492 billionaires in America [85] and only 11 of them are under the age of 40.[86] Amazon shows 14,938 results for “kindle billionaire romance.”
The prevalence of disease-free rakes—charming men who have vast amounts of sexual experience with a large number of women—is another common element of romance requiring a reader’s suspension of disbelief. Historical author Courtney Milan has crunched some numbers and writes on her blog that “a rake in Victorian times who had unprotected penetrative sex with 500 women had a 0.0000000000000000000001 percent chance of sleeping with nobody who had diseases.... Even if you imagine that our rake in question had some awesome rake superpower that allowed him to skip the worst cases, so that he only slept with women who were 99 percent likely to be clean, a rake who slept with 500 women who were 99 percent likely to have nothing has a 0.6 percent chance of avoiding someone who was infected.”[87] We prize those sexually experienced heroes and gloss over the likelihood that they will have picked up a disease or two in the course of their amorous education and possibly passed it along to the heroine. Who wants to read about incurable syphilis in one’s escapist literature?
The priority for the romance writer is creating a story that will captivate the reader, whisk her away from her day-to-day life so she can explore important issues. With a rich hero, one doesn’t need to worry about how the couple will pay the bills, but can focus on their emotional needs and relationship dynamics. Of course we know that sexual promiscuity increases the likelihood of STIs, which is why we explore sexuality through romance novels—it’s safer (and you don’t have to shave your legs). A novel that ignores mundane issues like socks on the floor and what’s for dinner is free to contemplate bigger and more significant things.
Romance novels aren’t any less valid because they portray fantasies. The purpose of some fiction is to depict life as we know it, but romance novels have a different purpose: to show life as it could be.
Uh-oh, high standards
Romance novels give women higher expectations for life, sex, relationships, and partners, usually men. No one paints such a grotesque yet elegant picture of this and why than William Giraldi in his blistering piece for The New Republic:
At the height of the moronic craze over Fifty Shades of Grey, I happened upon a newscast showing a “lifestyle” story in which a camera crew had marauded into the home of a painfully white-bread couple from some nook of New England. According to the missus, their sagging sex life had just been buttressed by her embrace of the Fifty Shades trilogy, and the prevailing mood of this piece, I recall, was one of willing but abject exploitation. As the wife read aloud her favorite lines from one of the books—sentences, as you know, of such galactic ineptitude it was hard to believe a primate could have written them—the husband sat beside her on the sofa, blinking at the camera with a look of the most shell-shocked capitulation. It was unclear whether or not the wife had acquired the battery-operated sex utensils employed in the trilogy, but it couldn’t have been clearer that her porcine husband was being put through a nightly, ghastly regimen of sexual aerobics, a regimen for which he was neither physically nor emotionally suited. He was a cardiac catastrophe in waiting, someone who’d been perfectly content to pass his evenings with TV and pizza. But then along came these blasted books and wrecked his American right to glut and sloth.[88]
This poor, poor man. The heart bleeds for this man who must (horrors!) attempt to satisfy his wife sexually. Or talk to her. Or do things for her for which he is neither “physically nor emotionally suited.” Or give up nights of eating crap and watching TV and feeling nothing. Of course Christian Grey and other every other romance hero succeed where this man fails. The romance hero is more than willing to satisfy the heroine in all of the ways. If he is not physically or emotionally suited to a lifetime of true love and hot sex, the romance hero will change.
Bestselling author Tessa Dare says “women are constantly told its fantasy to expect fidelity, respect and orgasms in this life and to seek the same in our reading. It’s not.” Similarly, when nonromance readers claim that the genre is unrealistic, romance readers demand to know what is so unrealistic about love. No one is debating the realism of that cartoon hero with the eight-pack abs, or the violet-eyed heroine. What’s at stake are realistic expectations for relationships. Love. Sex. These are high stakes indeed, because they can realistically affect our personal happiness and change the dynamics between people in a relationship. Especially if the couple is married or cohabitating, there can be financial implications or serious effects for the kids.
But did romance novels give readers these high expectations or just confirm that yes, it is reasonable to expect more from your partner? My hunch is that romances tap into an instinctive need for, you know, partnering from one’s partner and reinforce that it’s perfectly normal to crave sex, conversation, intimacy, and socks in the hamper. It is perfectly normal to want someone you love to take care of themselves so they can be around for more loving. Because romance novels make readers feel that their desires are normal and reasonable and give them an image in their mind to aspire to, perhaps they will hold out for a reality that delivers what they want. They can change or make changes.
Dismissing the books as unrealistic is a way to lower expectations for relationships. It is a way for that porcine
husband—or the emotional and physical sloth in a relationship, regardless of gender—to avoid the ghastly nightly aerobics, and it is a way to make those who wish for a more fulfilling relationship feel weird, wrong, or unreasonable for wanting that. But with every romance a person reads, she learns how damn good it feels to be nurtured, loved, pleasured, and respected. And she learns, hopefully, that her wishes, desires, and fantasies are perfectly valid.
Ugh, girl stuff
Dismissing romance novels is a way of dismissing women. For all the gains women have made—they now have more of a voice and role in public life and the right to vote, own property, have a credit card in their name, make choices regarding their own body, and get an education—there is still a stigma about girl things, whether it’s pink stuff, princesses, “female” industries, or romance novels.
Women live in a world built for men, from the social structures that position man as the authority to air bags designed to protect a person the size of the average male—and not the average female. In contrast, romance novels are a world created for women to confirm and validate their experiences, points of view, and desires. This may make it unrealistic for some people, but not for all.
And it matters that women should be able to find a fictional world built to serve and reflect their needs, their desires, and their hopes and to validate their experiences.
Contemporary romance author Jennifer Crusie says it best on her blog:
The world that romance fiction has shown me is more real than anything most of the literary canon ever offered me. Most of my academic reading convinced me that fiction reflected male worlds told by male authorities. But once I read romance, I found that even the most abysmal examples of the genre took place in my world, a world of relationships, details, and victories that balanced my defeats. Better than that, the best of the genre often directly contradicted patriarchal common wisdom by re-visioning the male assumptions I’d grown up reading, telling me that my perceptions were valid after all. Romance fiction was reality fiction.[89]
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In a knee-jerk reaction to claims that romances are unrealistic, romance readers can retort “Oh no, they’re not!” but that is forgetting that these books are fantasy. The characters and actions are highly idealized—and that is precisely why these books are so powerful. Women create an idealized, hopeful vision for the future to inspire other women. Fiction and fantasy are the crucial first steps to changing the world.
Declaring these books unrealistic is a way to blunt their power. A snide remark of “Oh, you don’t really believe that, do you?” is a way to make a reader question not just her reading material but also herself and her hopes for the future. To dismiss these books as unrealistic is a way to try to make them so.
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT BODICE RIPPERS
He let her go, ripped open her wrapper, and tore her corset down to her waist.
—Deadly Caresses by Brenda Joyce
Bodice ripper is a phrase that just won’t die. Bodice ripper is also the phrase that is most likely to arouse the ire and inflame the passions of romance readers. “I think it’s a pejorative term,” says Jane Litte of the popular romance blog Dear Author. Many a romance reader would agree. One blogger even goes so far as to describe the term bodice ripper as the “the N-word of literature.”[90] There is something about the phrase that seems insulting and even demeaning to readers. So why are we still using it?
Traditionally speaking, the phrase bodice ripper applies specifically to the long form historical romances of the 1970s, which are actually described quite well by the Urban Dictionary:
An historical romance where the heroine has lots of nonconsensual sex, which becomes consensual. The book needs to have a gaudy cover with a woman with an extraordinarily long neck, heaving bosoms, and flowing hair and a brooding man.
Technically, the phrase should really just apply to the romances of the 1970s—Sweet Savage Love, The Flame and the Flower, and so on—however, unfortunately, it persists. But romances aren’t like that anymore, as Eloisa James points out in her New York Times op-ed: “These days, however, a romance heroine is likely to toss her own bra, and if buttons are skittering on the floor, they're quite possibly shirt studs.” [91] (Though I did recently read a scene from a book published in 2003 where the hero literally ripped the heroine’s corset and drawers and then—well, you know what then. I should note that it was very, very consensual.)[92]
But still: Why, why, why in the era of no means no, yes means yes, and society actively fighting rape culture, are we still laughingly using a phrase that implies women need to be forced into sex or enjoy rapey sex—and love to read about it for entertainment?
The reason is that as a culture, women’s desire and sexuality still freaks us out. We’re fine with a girl on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine, shoving her bikini bottom down so low it seems like her vagina has been airbrushed out.[93] But the minute a major motion picture shows a woman receiving oral sex, the Motion Picture Association of America freaks out and forces changes.
Elyse Discher, a reviewer at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, tells me, “If I have come to one conclusion as an adult, it’s that a healthy depiction of a woman enjoying her sexuality is the most scandalous thing on earth ever.” And many romance novels have come to provide healthy depictions of female sexuality. Not that we would know it, the way the conversation is always about bodice rippers with the implication that women don’t want sex unless a man makes them want it.
But a real conversation about bodice rippers and romance novels cannot be had without talking about women’s sexuality and pleasure. It’s the sex talk everyone, even grown-ups, are afraid to have.
* * *
After spending hundreds of millions of dollars in search of a female Viagra, most drug manufacturers have given up. Which is a pity for their bottom line and perhaps a pity for the estimated 40 to 45 percent[94] of women who suffer from female sexual dysfunction. For women, sexual arousal isn’t just a simple matter of blood flow. Women can become physically aroused in terms of blood flow to their lady parts, but that doesn’t mean they’re psychologically aroused. In the immortal words of Madonna, “he needs to start with your head.”
It’s even more complicated than that, according to Dr. Louann Brizendine, M.D., a neuropsychiatrist: “female sexual turn-on begins, ironically, with a brain turnoff.” A woman has to feel safe and worry free, so the amygdala—the fear and anxiety portion of the brain—shuts down. Her feet have to be warm.[95] That’s a lot for one little pill to accomplish. Or a human.
Women’s sexuality and desire is complicated. There are extra steps. But not in a bodice ripper. Most romance scholars and readers agree that to understand the sexuality in these books, one must understand the context in which they were written and read. While the Middle Ages fretted over women’s insatiable sexual appetites, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, we saw the opposite view take over. It became generally accepted that “women weren’t troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.”[96] Thanks to the sexual revolution that kicked off in the 1960s, the advent of the pill, and dramatically changing roles for females, women were finally about to explore this aspect of themselves. But where to begin?
Collectively, women were stepping out in a major way and it was uncharted territory. Bestselling author Eloisa James explains, “all of a sudden you’re going to work, you’re supposed to be handling the sexual revolution, having orgasms, doing all this stuff.” This is when the bodice rippers hit the bookshelves, just in time to help women try to make sense of it all. In these books “the guy would hold her down and she could experience sexual pleasure without having to work for it and without having to say yes,” James notes. While many women would have been happy to “work” for the pleasure, they probably didn’t have much knowledge or experience of how to get the job done. In these books, a woman could explore sexual desire without the guilt and shame of asking for it, whatever “it” might be. The heroine could still
have the sex she secretly, privately, wanted to have, but without the stigma of having requesting or initiating it (slut shaming is still a problem now; imagine what it must have been like over 40 years ago). The hero’s job, then, was to make her confront the desire she felt.
As our culture has become more accepting of women’s sexuality and desire—and yes, we have—we’ve seen a change in the sexual dynamics between the couple in a romance novel. Sweet Savage Love, perhaps the bodice rippiest of the bodice rippers, includes many moments like this:
She had forced herself to be prepared for a quick, brutal rape, but instead, against her will and the silent, screaming protest of her mind, her body, vital and young, was beginning to respond to his caresses.[97]
In comparison, consider 50 Shades of Grey, which to some is an open and shut case of Man Dominates Woman. But they spend the entire book negotiating what they’ll do in bed. She sets hard limits. He respects them and says “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” Anastasia is open and not conflicted about her desire for him. The reader does have to listen to a bit of rationalization and justification from her Inner Goddess for sleeping with the hot, kinky billionaire, but her exploration isn’t forced.
And that’s just one example of how the genre has changed. Long before #YesMeansYes, a trending hashtag on Twitter and the informal term for new laws that make affirmative consent central to school sexual assault policies,[98] romance novelists began adding a little something to their sex scenes: explicit consent. The hero and heroine are getting it on and we’re in her point of view, so we know she’s really wants it and the hero is hard, at her entrance, and dying for this pleasure, and still they take a moment to confirm that, yes, this totally hot and everyone agrees it should go further. For example, there is this exchange in Tessa Dare’s novel Say Yes to the Marquess, which I selected because it was literally the last romance novel I read, as of this writing, thus demonstrating how easy it is to find these examples:
