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.

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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.