Hi, My Name is Elizabeth & I’m a Romance Novel Victim
Elizabeth
Recently I joined a book club. We've worked hard to be an admirable club, reading award-winning books and not depending solely on Oprah for our fare. We read Sula, Cane River, The Red Tent, Nine Parts of Desire, God of Small Things. We tackled heavy topics of gender, race, class. Which was really quite a feat, considering some of us were strangers when we started the club. As we politely disagreed about heavy, emotional issues I remembered the old adage about leaving politics and religion off the table. But too late. We were in and, boy, were we in deep.

But summer came and we realized just how tired we were. The last serious book we read, Cane River, got almost no discussion. Some people couldn't read it, saying that they saw this kind of hopelessness and sadness in their daily lives and didn't really need any more of it in their leisure time. So our thoughts turned, as they had several times before, to the books that shaped us growing up as women. And those books make an illustrious list: trashy romance novels of various kinds, from Victoria Holt's soft historical romance to Judy Bloom's tamer Forever to her racier Wifey to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying.

We told stories about secretly reading the raciest parts aloud in band, reading these books in public places, embarrassed, or reading them at night under the covers with a flashlight. Though we all read slightly different books, the theme across all of our stories was the same: every woman there, from straight to bisexual, from single to married mother, had read romance novels of one sort or another growing up. And many of us, feminists though we want to believe we are, still read them. I, for one, am as crazy about historical romance at 30 as I was at 15. Though my political views have changed and I am in what I believe to be a very equitable relationship with a very kind man, those novels still hold an appeal for me I just can't put my finger on.

Though I managed to find and grasp on to feminism just as I was sinking toward a life as a passive object or angelic enabler, I can only say this happened out of sheer luck. If the right things hadn't happened at the right time, those romance novels would have been THE shaping force in my life. And frankly, sometimes I still think they were.

I knew from the time I was 11 and got my hands on Victoria Holt's House of a Thousand Lanterns exactly what I wanted in a man: he had to be a rake, but not just any rake-oh no. He had to be a rake ready to settle down, a rake I could reform. He would meet me and all the many women he'd known before would fade into the past as he became swept away by my purity and goodness.

I didn't explicitly understand that romance novels were shaping me, but looking back the pattern is clear. I tried to be pure; I tried really hard. To little avail, but still I tried. And I found the worst men I could possibly find. Gorgeous and horrible, men who treated women like objects or angels of mercy but who never, as I learned only too late, had any intention of reforming.

I finally decided romance novels had ruined me utterly and for life, I could not be attracted to a decent man and so I decided I was done with men entirely. Life alone, the spinster in the stories--that had to be the only way. I could not break free from the stories about gender and romance those novels had embedded in my mind. Even when I knew they were unrealistic and sexist, still they stayed with me, as part of me, shaping who I looked to as attractive and who I looked past as unattractive.

I won't bore you with the story of how everything turned out ok for me in spite of…. I married someone who might be described as a reformed rake, but God knows he was reformed long before I met him. I had learned by then that I couldn't do the reforming; the bad baggage had to be packed up before I came along.

No, the fact that I survived romance novels to have a decent life is not the point. The point is, for me and most of the women I know, those novels shaped and molded us in so many ways-who we thought we were supposed to be, what we were supposed to want, who we were supposed to be attracted to. And all the ways they shaped us were utterly wrong. All the things they made us desire inevitably led us to unhappiness. They are men's stories, written by and for women. They are stories about how men can have it all, be irresponsible and wild, and still be admired and loved, but women, to be worthy of attention, must be beautiful, pure, angelic, and willing to wait.

It's easy to be sarcastic about this, to treat romance novels as a joke, a silly pastime, unimportant. But it's exactly that flippant attitude that gives these misogynistic stories so much power. We laugh about them, but read them voraciously. They are supposedly mindless reading, so we don't form book groups to discuss them. We read them alone, as guilty pleasures. And that is exactly the problem. Because we read them alone, especially during our adolescent years, because we mention them to no one, because we don't discuss the messages those books are sending, they are empowered to shape us. We don't critique them or take them seriously, so they become a part of who we are, what we believe, what we want from life. If men's expectations are damaged by pornography, I think we can only say that ours are damaged by romance novels. If men see women as objects and victims because that is what they see in Playboy and Penthouse, we see ourselves as victims or saviors because that is what we see in our romance novels.

So, at our next book club we are putting down all the award winning books and turning our attention to the books that shaped us, the books we devoured (and still devour) and believed to be only mindless entertainment. Because it's time that we started asking, "Why does this appeal to us? And what are we going to do about it?"

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