it was all about true love, and they ended up together, and it was all about what the women author and (I assume) the women readers wanted -- I have issues around romance novels, but I know that part of it was my honorary dude socialization to disdain anything liked by women.
Yeah and no. There are some fantastic essays on it, but the thing is, the traditional approach to the romance and most especially the ones involving hero/heroine rape has been badly chokered by assuming that women identify exclusively with the female heroine and are celebrating or at least not fighting traditional patriarchy and rape culture. Even from the bodice-ripper-rape perspective, today the part of the male protagonist, every day the part of the male protagonist, is being played by a woman.
It's one of the reasons I kind of suspect men hate romance novels so much and disdain them as female fantasy; it's deeply uncomfortable to read a female gaze dressed in male skin, and it's even more disturbing when there's a male villain, who is almost always the definition of a evil rapist.
Or to put it another way; in non-Romance literature, or chick lit, which is a useful term right now that encompasses female friendship, one of teh characters is raped and she goes to her best friend for comfort and support, and the friend is angry and horrified and would do anything to help. In a lot of romance novels where the heroine is raped by the villian, you could quite literally do a pronoun fix and it's almost identical when she goes to the hero. Even the healing cock theory of rape recovery that's so popular in romance doesn't involve much actual cock or penetration; the "healing" is in the foreplay, focused exclusively on the female body, often with a metric ton of soliloquy on how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, gorgeous, not your fault, you're not dirty, I want to help, not just things to reassure the victim, but things women say to each other.
...I have a huge thing on how the rape in Romance novels is rarely examined except from the point of view of patriarchal attitudes instead of exploring what, exactly, is going on in those scenes and why. There's a ton of undiscovered country in there, the most interesting of which is that in a Romance novel, if the hero does rape the victim, he might actually admit it, torture himself about it, and apologize for it.
That's not to say I'd drag them out as feminist literature because they live and breathe the structure of rape culture, but the entire set up forces the what's absolutely antithetical to rape culture as well--teh victim is believed, acknowledged, and the rapist admits guilt and regret.
(Note: this ins't a defense of novels that romanticize rape, so much as wondering why no one is exploring the fact that part of the fantasy is being acknowledged by the rapist as his victim, that it wasn't her fault, that she did nothing wrong.)
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Yeah and no. There are some fantastic essays on it, but the thing is, the traditional approach to the romance and most especially the ones involving hero/heroine rape has been badly chokered by assuming that women identify exclusively with the female heroine and are celebrating or at least not fighting traditional patriarchy and rape culture. Even from the bodice-ripper-rape perspective, today the part of the male protagonist, every day the part of the male protagonist, is being played by a woman.
It's one of the reasons I kind of suspect men hate romance novels so much and disdain them as female fantasy; it's deeply uncomfortable to read a female gaze dressed in male skin, and it's even more disturbing when there's a male villain, who is almost always the definition of a evil rapist.
Or to put it another way; in non-Romance literature, or chick lit, which is a useful term right now that encompasses female friendship, one of teh characters is raped and she goes to her best friend for comfort and support, and the friend is angry and horrified and would do anything to help. In a lot of romance novels where the heroine is raped by the villian, you could quite literally do a pronoun fix and it's almost identical when she goes to the hero. Even the healing cock theory of rape recovery that's so popular in romance doesn't involve much actual cock or penetration; the "healing" is in the foreplay, focused exclusively on the female body, often with a metric ton of soliloquy on how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, gorgeous, not your fault, you're not dirty, I want to help, not just things to reassure the victim, but things women say to each other.
...I have a huge thing on how the rape in Romance novels is rarely examined except from the point of view of patriarchal attitudes instead of exploring what, exactly, is going on in those scenes and why. There's a ton of undiscovered country in there, the most interesting of which is that in a Romance novel, if the hero does rape the victim, he might actually admit it, torture himself about it, and apologize for it.
That's not to say I'd drag them out as feminist literature because they live and breathe the structure of rape culture, but the entire set up forces the what's absolutely antithetical to rape culture as well--teh victim is believed, acknowledged, and the rapist admits guilt and regret.
(Note: this ins't a defense of novels that romanticize rape, so much as wondering why no one is exploring the fact that part of the fantasy is being acknowledged by the rapist as his victim, that it wasn't her fault, that she did nothing wrong.)