romance novels

Side B: Cinderella and Sex Education

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-11-14 18:59

In comments to this post about sex education and porn, Stasha of The Dogged Pursuit of Happiness brought up the issue of porn’s silent step-sibling

I’d add another genre the ill-advised substitute-sex-educator group and include Romance novels, or rather, erotica lite. In hindsight, I think I would’ve been better off with the porn. The twisted princess fairy tales these books promoted (especially in the late 70’s and 80’s as I was coming into adolescence) served as my sole source of sexual information and even these — as comic as they appear to me now — were sources of real shame. Our household and community was devoutly religious, our schools extremely conservative, and I believed I was going to literally burn in eternal hellfire because I didn’t want to put the smut down.”

I’m not as angry about it now but it took almost 40 years to get over what I now veiw as a peverse upbringing. I view the “education” I recieved back then as a crime; I was robbed. Robbed of joy, safety, knowledge and confidence. Moreover, I believe that the people who knew better and offered nothing to counteract that nonsense are as equally culpable as apathetic bystanders who witness more overt crimes and choose to say or do nothing.

She said it here.

It pretty much a cliché to draw comparisons between porn and romance novels. And often controversial since both pornography and romance producers and consumers will swear up and down that the stereotypes about their genre of choice is overblown, etc., etc., etc. And I have to admit I haven’t consumed a wide-enough variety of to be able to either confirm or deny comparisons or objections thereto.

I can say, however, that Stasha’s right that absent comprehensive sex education, which includes not only birds and bees and how not to transmit sex-related disease but also interpersonal skills and emotional development, the cumulative messages of even the mildest romance create seriously unrealistic expectations. In the absence of sex education, and in the domestic silence that often accompanies its absence, that too is a pretty big issue.

And as with porn it’s not particularly the novelist’s responsibility to portray realistic relationship dynamics. And that’s generally fine because, often, adults who encounter them have experience with romance of their own. But with no real-world experience and, often, no grounded modeling, romance novels can create… unfortunate scripts for dealing with sex and relationships.

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Not NiceGuys™

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-06-22 17:42

Via Amanda Marcotte and others, a nice breakdown on romantic perceptions vs. realities of real “danger man” relationships.

P.S. No, the alternative is not to be a NiceGuy™. It’s not an either-or choice.

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Pornified... and Romance-ified!

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-01-08 23:23

Ezra Klein nails a fairly serious problem about a seemingly light-hearted subject (and gets a dig in at spotty researchers in the bargain.)

Of course romantic comedies harm your love life. They create unrealizable expectations for connection and intimacy. They feature the world’s most beautiful people speaking dialogue written by the country’s most talented screenwriters. But we didn’t need a methodologically shoddy study for this finding. We just needed to read more Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim called anomie “the malady of infinite aspiration”. His central idea was that human beings need regulation – a framework of informal and formal rules that set limits to what they are entitled to expect, for instance, in the form of economic rewards. It is an idea that contrasts sharply with the culture of capitalism, not least its US version.

The trick of romantic comedies is realism. The characters have to seem like real people. The situations have to be believable. The dialogue has to be ordinary. You need to be able to relate. But you end up relating to something utterly unachievable.

He said it here.

If you remember the height of the “porn wars” of the Reagan era it was fairly common for visual-porn advocates to point out a double-standard between condemnation of photography and illustration, which was generally labeled “male” and toleration of text (including, especially, romance novels) which was generally labeled “female.**”

Well. In at least one way that really matters, both sides were right. In terms of creating expectations romance novels and visual porn create expectations that, like those created by romantic comedies, are unrealizable.

Bit of a nuisance, that. (Can’t remember who but for instance someone the other day suggested the women of Sex In The City were typical in appearance.)

The difference, I think, between economic rewards and romanticized and/or pornified expectations is that whereas it might work to impose Durkheimian limits on generation of excess wealth, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever manage to limit porn or romance novels… let alone romantic comedies. What does tend to work, however, is realistic, comprehensive sex education… which, being comprehensive tends to educate students not only about sex but romance as well.

[** Never mind that even then there was at least a 30% overlap in both directions — everyone was still recovering from the 1970s where everything had to be painted either black or white. Also never mind that the big objection of anti-“porn” types, at least the non-evangelical feminist side of the evangelical/feminist coalition, was that unlike text which requires only imagination to produce, photography required people. And then, far, far less so than now, too many people in porn got figuratively as well as literally screwed. —fl]

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Romance and Porn: Masculinity and Femininity For (Ventriloquist) Dummies

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2007-12-16 17:58


Photo by Flickr user ellawaiin. Used under a Creative Commons license.

When Robert Jensen writes about porn speaking to men in a whisper, saying “if you come into my world it will all be there, and it will all be easy” in Getting Off: (Pornography and the End of Masculinity), then he is drawing lines in a dimension that includes (as I’ve mentioned here) advertising but also romance novels.

Now the assertion that romance novels are just “porn for women” is old, the sides firmly entrenched, and defenders of the separation are extremely touchy about it. And while I wouldn’t wish to rock that boat along the established lines, I would point out that by Jensen’s definition of porn speaking to the deepest vulnerability as well as the entitlements of masculinity (as socially constructed) then romance novels speak no less deeply to the construction of femininity. (Remember, according to both Jensen, me, and most genuinely radical feminists, male and female human beings exist independently of the artificial and too-often bogus notions of “masculinity” and “femininity.”)

Anyway, drawing lines in the same dimension as Jensen, Calico of Dominatrix Next Door, responding to a comment to her main post, says

I picked up a romance novel at work the other day and read most of it before I realized it wasn’t horror.

The protagonist was convinced she was fat, stupid, hideous, socially inept and unlovable. (Although she was none of these things.) She hated her thin, pretty, vapid housemates. Men swarmed all over her and eventually her true love proposed and she realized she wasn’t that bad after all.

Apparently, the writer thought this plot would strike home with the average American woman. ugh!

It’s absolutely true that what physical preferences vary. It’s also true that you don’t always need to care. Sex is about what you do, not necessarily what you look like while you’re doing it.

Read the quote in context here.

In other words, if porn whispers in men’s ears about a world where even strangers on elevators are attracted to you, and in fact so attracted to you that even dry-fucking their asses is “strangely” a turn on for them… then romance novels that whisper in your ear about everyone falling all over your beauty even though by your incredibly high standards you’re not attractive enough… well…

Both ways those are actually whispering right past us as actual human men and women and into the ears of our constructed gender dummies on our knees, the exaggerated mannequins of “manliness,” of “womanhood,” and whispering so seductively that we’re sure that if we only had one that was a little more full up top or a little longer down below; if we could but move our lips even less when we spoke; if we could just find the right wig, or a bushier mustache for our dummies then people would finally see the real us. And want to spend the rest of their lives with us.

—-

Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying all porn, or all romance novels merely help us shellack our ventriloquist dummies. But I would like to suggest that to the extent they do so then to that extent they are indistinguishable.

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