Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Romance as a genre does not equal porn. It doesn’t even equal sex because there’s an entire segment of the romance genre that doesn’t even have a kiss. I’ve also read erotica which wasn’t sexually stimulating although it dealt with sex.

romance novels can create… unfortunate scripts for dealing with sex and relationships.

Absolutely agree here but this is pretty much true for ALL FICTION and some non-fiction and that non-fiction bit changes all the time.

General Romance Genre Commentary
The unfortunate part of the conversation is that the public and the media like to dismiss women by calling their reading choices trashy novels or bodice rippers; making it seem as romance novels are nothing more than stroke fiction or some how like emotional porn.

If that’s all one sees then they really aren’t looking. Romance novel very much reflect the cultural whispers our society has about gender, class and primarily white culture. I expect that in some respects the romance genre very much reflects the no-sex paradigm you’ve described, Figleaf. Do romances actually promote the no-sex paradigm? Maybe. Too many variables and unknowns and not enough reading/study on my part to make that type of determination.

Here’s what I can tell you. Trust, hope, and positive judgment of the heroine are key aspects that are often overlooked when the romance genre is discussed. Trust of the male lead is huge; it’s bigger issue than the sex or the love aspects of the genre. The entire premise of a romance novel sits squarely on top of trust. Today’s romance heroine may not initially trust the hero within the story but the reader must trust the hero and if the author makes the hero untrustworthy, the author may find her stories on the Do Not Buy list.

Authors and readers of romance also go to GREAT lengths to remove societal judgment from the heroine’s adventures, especially sexual adventures in those romance novels which contain sex. Even though other females in the novels may not exempt from that judgment, especially those females who are sexually aggressive/assertive/powerful.

If we put aside the cultural judgment (worthless drivel, nothing but sex) of the romance genre—-and by extension those who produce or consume them—-and attempt to objectively pull apart the romance genre tropes, themes, and cultural underpinings, I think we’d be very surprised at how it accurately it reflects our cultural whispers, if not always our actual culture. Not only that but we can see how/if changes manifest themselves throughout the decades.

Just look at the differences between a romance novel written in the 70s and one today. Very, very different “animal.” The protagonist in a 70s romance tended to be the heroine and it generally was a coming of age story in which the heroine got raped by the hero, who in many cases also served in the story’s villain role. Many—-not all—-of the romances I’ve read recently have the male hero as the protagonist and the woman along for the ride. Oh, there’s no out and out rape, although rape does still exists and remains a highly contentious subject among readers/authors.

What I find far more fascinating though is that the heroine isn’t necessarily the protagonist. Why in a genre which supposedly empowers women are we seeing faceless, cardboard heroines paired with exciting, vivacious, daring men who are male sluts in comparison to their female counterparts and not judged at all? What does that tell us about the society in which these characters are created and consumed? (This paragraph isn’t supposed to be taken a negative impression but more of a curious one. Why? What are we seeing here?)

There can also be some horrible messages found within the romance genre. Messages that I would like to see go away like verbal abuse if not physical abuse by the male love interest. The thing is that this behavior exists in real life and can lead to violence, the difference in the fantasy that the male has to admit to the behavior and grovel and the male lead would NEVER EVER EVER hit a heroine in a recently romance novel. Note, this was definitely not the case in prior decades.

Realistic? Perhaps not but rather than dismiss all this as a fictional fairytale, why not question why is resonates? What does an author/reader gets out of this type of story? Isn’t it important to unravel the resonance instead of concentrate on the dismissive arguments about whether or not it’s sexual/emotional porn?

Dismissing the romance genre as unrealistic and fluff or as somehow a replacement for sex education does us all a disservice because we’re missing out on what our culture says about gender in whispered tones. We’re also missing out on that the fears, dreams and hopes of a certain part of our population. And this is especially true with the stories created by newer, less skilled authors because those whispers about culture and gender can’t as easily hidden by a story magically woven together. A story which carries us away and makes us forget the pieces. It might just be the crap that teaches us the most about the world around us. Or not.

Sorry for the long post Figleaf. Not trying to change your mind about anything, rather I’m asking you to look at the issue from a different direction. There’s a lot of crap within the romance genre, just like every other genre out there.

Tropes and cultural whispers that I’d love to see disappear but they can’t or won’t disappear until we hold them and look at them. Debunk them. There’s also some pretty wonderful stuff found in romance. Hope being a key ingredient. Society could also learn something by exploring some of the ethical arguments/tenets that the romance genre lives and breaths by.

And since the romance genre is the biggest genre in the US in terms of sales (multi-billion dollar industry) and releases (somewhere between 4,800 and 9,000 published in a given year depending on how one defines “romance”), I think it’s time that we did some serious analytical investigation and discussions.

[Hi Amousie. You’ll notice that my post didn’t discount any of what you said. It’s a cliché that romance novels are trashy, or that they’re “porn for women,” or any manner of things I carefully didn’t say. I did say, though, that its concentration on, well, romanticized interpersonal relationships (whether physically sexual or not, and with plenty of both with plenty more in between) makes it a generator of really terrible expectations in the absence of more formal education. That porn or other genres may also create similar, if more corporeal expectations is immaterial. —fl]

Figleaf, I’m aware what your post said and yes, I went slightly off tangent because I’ve seen the romance novel = porn conversation here on your site. But this post seemed rather more open than the others so I thought I’d make the attempt to expand beyond the normal way of defining the parameters of the argument.

I did say, though, that its concentration on, well, romanticized interpersonal relationships (whether physically sexual or not, and with plenty of both with plenty more in between) makes it a generator of really terrible expectations in the absence of more formal education.

See that is a judgment statement backed up more from the cultural viewpoint that says romance novels bad and that women who read them are “lesser.” It MAY be true but you have no way of knowing since, by your own admission, your exposure to the romance genre is limited. Do you even know how steeped in the no-sex paradigm that premise is from my perspective?

So… The romance genre is concerned with interpersonal relationships beyond romantic ones. Will those non-romantic interpersonal relationships be judged similarly or are we only concerned with the romantic ones?

Also fiction as a whole has many books that depict sexual or romantic interpersonal relationships. Is there a reason why only the romance genre is being held accountable for generating “really terrible expectations?” Women are the primary consumers of the romance genre but surely men are subject to similar really terrible expectation generators within the genres they prefer. So why do I never hear a similar argument for primarily male fiction?

I’m not asking you to change your mind, Figleaf, I’m challenging you to reconsider the starting point/cornerstone of the typical arguments raised about romance genre and its consumers. Then I’m asking you to go a step beyond and identify which points are based on cultural heresay and which points are based on objective analysis, how we should interpret that information against the cultural backdrop and whether or not the “good” of the romantic interpersonal relationship depiction outweighs the “bad.”

Perhaps you’ll come to same conclusion. I don’t know really. But right now the arguments I’ve seen surrounding the subject are rather subjective without any objective analysis to support the conclusions reached.

The Dogged Pursuit, keep in mind that the romance genre is huge and that matching your reading style / preferences for enjoyment purposes might be difficult given the limited selection at the airport. And there’s truly a lot of crap out there although probably no more percentage wise than any other genre. Of course, percentage wise finding crap is much higher within the romance genre simply by the shear numbers involved.

May I suggest Agnes and the Hitman, or Bet Me/Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. It’s not guaranteed that you’d enjoy them but the author is rather good at exposing the cultural underpining of our society within the romance genre paradigms using humor to do so. And these books speak just as much to the interpersonal community surrounding the couple as they do the romantic interpersonal relationship.

Another option for starting out, Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase. It’s language is slow and leisurely and relies on romance genre perceptions of the historical era but the author has very good control of her creation and seems to be a favorite among romance readers.

From a police procedural point of view, JD Robb’s In Death series. Some consider it police procedural lite but there’s a definite romance thread woven throughout the series if you wanted to dip your toe in. Definitely not for everyone though. Of course that’s true of all fiction.

I got my sex education using fanfic! I don’t know if you know what that is, but it’s fiction (generally heterosexual or gay male romance) written about various media (generally fantasy/science fiction) by geeks (generally straight or bi females).

It actually, weirdly, did a pretty good job.

It completely debunked the no-sex class theory, because once you start complaining about girls flooding all the archives with (badly spelled) stories redeeming the villain/getting together two characters who never actually met/starring a thinly disguised version of themselves, simply because OMGTEHPRETTY, it’s rather hard to argue there’s no such thing as female desire.

It made gay people totally unremarked upon. Of course there are gay people in our stories! There are gay people in real life, aren’t there? (Also, OMGTEHPRETTY.) Same thing for polyamory and BDSM— the first one I encountered for the first time as a solution for a particularly thorny love triangle, the second as a Kink Writing Challenge that presented it as a perfectly normal thing couples (or moresomes) do.

It even taught me about rape. There’s a genre of stories called noncon, which means non-consensual, and another called dubcon, or dubious consent. Noncon is for he-said-no-then-he-wanted-it, love potions and date rape drugs, and the ever-popular Aliens Made Us Do It. Dubcon is mostly too drunk or underage (teenage) to consent. But the point is that these were presented as just fantasies and things that, outside of the context of fiction, would be rape— not “gray rape”, but pure, simple rape. Even more importantly, they were viewed, not as the ordinary way things happened (coughSuperbadcough), but as something readers could be disturbed by, that they should be warned about.

Would it have been better to have a talk that actually encompassed all of this stuff? Yeah. Of course. But I just felt the need to point out its existence. (And sorry for the mammoth post!)