Uhm...no...
First non-LJ/DW thing I saw while catching up on reading lists:
“In fact, some marriage therapists caution that women can become as dangerously unbalanced by these books’ entrancing but distorted messages as men can be by the distorted messages of pornography,” said best-selling author Shaunti Feldhahn, who studies the differences between men and ( Read more... )
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Glad to see you back btw :) I am hoping I can go to wiscon next year.
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At the same time however these ideas don't seem to allow for the agency of women to realise that these are false and yet still enjoy them for pure entertainment. There seems to be an idea that women must be rescued from themselves because all women are incapable of separating fiction from reality.
For myself I blame a lot of my skewed romantic notions on reading Mills & Boon at a formative age (I started at about 12), but equally responsible are Disney's portrayals of romance which in many ways parallel those of romance novels. Now that I am older and more self-aware I am able to pick through the "distorted messages" in some of these novels.
Perhaps we should be looking towards educating women about competing ideologies of romance rather than trying to rescue them from themselves!
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I tend to think that women who find themselves disillusioned with RL romantic options are influenced less by fictionalized romantic ideals and more by awareness of patriarchy and social expectations/double standards growing faster than the world is actually changing.
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I think your point about awareness of patriarchy and social expectations is valid. And perhaps it also remains to be questioned why these romantic stories are so popular? If this is just one media perpetuating these ideals then the political economy model would suggest that they would shift towards the mainstream.
To be honest I haven't really read any Mills & Boon offerings in the last 5 years or so and so my opinion is fairly out of date and of course my understanding of the genre was formed when I was a teenager and the "rape her until she loves you" trope was still quite heavily in play. And the virgin heroine was certainly the centre of the Mills & Boon series which was in part involved in my immediate determination that I had to be in love with the first guy I slept with because that was how the world worked. Of course there was nothing really in the world which argued with this ideal, at least not in my tiny part of the world.
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Oh, wait, they don't have sex and men have much stronger minds. Because, as we know, a 17th century pirate is SUCH a more plausible danger than a guy on the street with a gun.
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What gets to me is the undertone these articles usually have of "You don't want women getting ideas about romance because then they might expect too much!"
(I mean, yes, anyone who expects real life to be like a romance novel is going to have a problem, but still... the whining of "Now your man won't be good enough for you!" annoys me.)
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Also, the first romance novels I read were my mother's dog eared Kathleen Woodiwiss books. She's been married for 35 years to one guy who she has an active sex life with and has plenty going on in her life.
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I would agree with you. The weird thing is that most modern romantic comedies are basically "chick lit"/romance novels put to the screen. Which, as you said, tend to amplify some of the issues more that, say, a romance novel about pirates or something.
And, you know, a lot of classic literature novels, could be defined as a type of romance novel: Jane Austen novels for example. Or the classic comedy of manners type novels from around the 1800s.
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