When Megan tweeted about a piece on the website for a Utah television station equating romance with porn, I thought to myself, “Here we go again.” So much of what was written in the article harkened back to the Puzzled and Puzzled and Confused broohaha that attracted Salon.com to AAR more than a decade ago. That particular blowup came as a result of a Write Byte by Robin Schone, who scandalized the romance community by having her heroine...masturbate. Seems quaint in 2011, no? Well, it wasn’t in 1999.
Something I failed to address back in the day that comes immediately to mind where this new controversy is concerned is this: The analogy of “porn is to men what romance is to women” fails, and fails utterly. Why? Because porn sexually objectifies women and their bodies purely on the physical level —who, after all, watches or reads porn for the story? Romance novels, on the other hand, provide women with fantasies based on men in their entirety. Yes, both work on a fantasy level, which is why a man visiting a strip joint can be deluded into thinking the stripper giving him a lap dance is totally into him. He doesn’t get to know her as a person while she’s grinding on him any more than male porn performers do much else beside giving the women the bada-bing in every which way. Contrast that with a woman reading a romance novel...and, btw, most of the romance readers I know have long-term, committed, and ahem, sexually satisfying marriages/relationships...sure there’s sex, but readers get to know a romance novel’s hero, warts and all, throughout the book. Getting to know the hero provides an emotional component to the sex, which is generally associated with falling in love or staying in love.
This, of course, is part of the argument made against the reading of romance novels in some corners, which goes something like this: Real men cannot possibly live up to the fantasy of a romance novel hero, which engages a woman’s emotions, so women begin to get a warped idea of what real men are like. Additionally, we supposedly get the same high from this emotional connection as men do from the visual fantasy of naked women doing it. Again, I fail to see how the compulsion to watch women with fake boobs having sex can possibly be the same as reading about a couple growing into a committed relationship. Will Robinson, something does not compute.
That this particular piece comes from a television station in Utah raises red flags all over the place. A good friend of mine, raised in the Mormon church, left it because she felt it demeaned women in general, and because she had to hide the fact that she read romance. And when the original controversy arose at AAR, the religious leanings of those most vocal in their dismissal of romance played a tremendous part. Interestingly enough, it used to be that women were told not to read romance because it was sexist. Over the last dozen years or so, though, we’ve been told not to read romance because we’ll end up hiding books under the mattress while setting our husbands aside in favor of pocket rabbits while fantasizing about the ideal romance novel hero. Many of my favorite romance novels empower women, and that may be the real reason we’re warned against them.
(For more about this incendiary article, check out The New Yorker, SmartBitches, DearAuthor, and VacuousMinx, among others.)
Laurie Gold cannot stop reading and writing about romance—she’s been blabbing online for years. She remains a work in progress. Be one of the few who visits her at Toe in the Water or follow her may-be-too-political-for-you tweets at @laurie_gold.
