Why the romance genre? It's the happy ending guarantee.

I don't just read romance, but do primarily read romance. Until today, I wasn't sure why. Maybe it was just being that typical woman in midlife with unmet desires?  I hoped not. We've all read the derogatory talk that makes women want to shy away from admitting we crave the stuff of romance novels. The talk that makes us out to be such incredibly superficial and wanton women with inattentive partners and lives that lack personal fulfillment. Okay, some of that may be true, in part, for at least some of us romance novel readers.  But I can't believe that it's just that.

In previous blog entries, I've already talked about my views on a female biological imperative that puts us in a catch-22 and how the fantasy romance sub-genre allows a loose reconciliation of those conflicting desires. But why romance at all?  It can't just be the primal biological drive that has me running off for fantasyland, can it?

Just having finished The Pact: A Love Story by Jodi Picoult, I found my answer.  A friend recommended Jodi and the title sounded like, well, a love story, so I went into the book with a particular expectation.  Coming away from the book, which is an incredibly good read by the way, I was disappointed because my expectation wasn't met.  This was a romantic tragedy and I expected a romance novel. The key difference is that in a romance the ending is happy, the heroine finds love, her needs (and his) fulfilled.  I came away from this book feeling hopeless. The love was there, the romance was there, the feelings of desperation and conflict were there.  But the story was a tragedy, without hope.  Closure, yes.  Hope, nope.  I felt alone, with regret, a mere shell of the person I had once been or had the potential to become. That's tragedy for you.

My life has been tough.  I'm not whining.  But it's true. There are regrets for certain.  But more importantly, there is a feeling of having missed something somewhere along the road called Life.  Was it the meaning of life? My purpose here? The connection to a soul-mate?  Some significant contribution to humankind? Or a lasting difference in the life of just one person?  There is a lot of sacrifice made.  A lot of effort expended.  Tears shed. Choices made or made for us. And what has kept me going through all of it was hope that there was a meaning, a reason, a person, a life, or difference to be realized. As I age, I still have hope of filling that elusive empty space within me. The desire to fill it remains strong.  In my fantasyland romance novels, those strong desires are fulfilled, the girl gets what she needs, finds the answers, makes the difference, fulfills some hope or dream or unmet desire or even something she didn't even know was missing.  It is satisifying to read because the good guy (and equally important girl) wins, I'm filled with hope, fulfillment is possible, answers attainable, complete.

Can I get that from other genres?  Yes.  Is it a guarantee with other genres?  No.  So when I write my novels, they will probably have a romantic thread, regardless if the stage is in an enchanted forest, on another planet, in a high school classroom, in the fires of hell, or on a spaceship.  My message will likely always be one of the deeper values of love, hope, and fulfillment.

Paranormal Romance: The Answer to This Feminist’s Dilemma

I’m not a self-hater.  Yet, after reading another deeply fulfilling romance novel, I find myself coming down from the thrill of my latest vein tap with that same old feeling that I’m betraying my own feminist belief system.  I mean, really, romance novels?? I'm a hard-core feminist. How can I possibly be so satisfied reading about these testosterone-oozing alpha-males? They embody the antithesis of a world of equality for the sexes.

But, I have to admit it. I love, love, LOVE to read about a strong female character falling for an uber alpha-male who pursues her at all cost, despite her best defenses against over-bearing he-man types looking for their next big conquest.  In the end, her walls come crumbling down around her in molten passion and when her defenses lie in rubble, before her very eyes, he transforms out of that inferno like a phoenix into her faithful, devoted and respectful lover and family man. That an alpha-male can becomes that all-around good-guy that protects and cares for his family, whilst still retaining his unbridled primal physical desire for HIS one-and-only woman is, granted, totally fantasy land stuff. But, yes, oh, yes, this is the stuff good romance novels are made of!

As a feminist, my favorite romance novels are written by authors that construct female protagonists that are strong, intelligent, assertive, independent and shrewd. These aren't the milquetoast chicks your mom read between Harlequin covers. These women don't need, nor want, a man to rescue, conquer, and/or seduce them. In the romance books I love, these tough chicks are forced to interact with he-man bad-boys that typically don’t stand a chance of making it past “GO” with these women. Yet somehow the author weaves a tale where her best defenses come falling down around her, she breaks, opening herself to him, letting him take her, willingly, even as every bone in her body screams that this is a bad idea.  She can’t help herself. She matches his passion in ways that he doesn’t expect. She surprises him... and herself. If written well, the next few pages come as close to spontaneous combustion as the printed word can get.

As a feminist, it becomes paramount that all of this is constructed by the author in a way that this woman can be completely vulnerable to this alpha-male in a believable manner without her being weak, stupid, dependent, naïve, or even entirely submissive.  Not all romance writers do this, but the ones that I admire do, as does the one I aspire to become.

So both of them come away from the mind-altering connection they share somehow changed.  But then there's a conflict.  Something happens to confirm to her that he’s every bit as bad as she originally thought, maybe worse. She kicks herself for letting him in. She gets out the stone and mortar, hastily rebuilding her rampart. She may be broken-hearted but she's not rolling over. She knew the risks of falling for him, and there's no one to blame but herself.  When she thinks it is over, then our hero is somehow redeemed.  She finds out something about him that redeems him in her eyes.

This is another key point in a romance novel, which was pointed out to me quite eloquently by Tracy Wolff, a favorite author of mine, in a presentation I attended some time ago.  The author of a bad boy romance novel has to push the envelope, trying to make this guy as bad as bad can be yet still managing somehow to remain redeemable in the eyes of the heroine (and the reader). It's the knife-edge romance writers tight-rope walk: bad but not too bad.  If we readers feel the line's been crossed, and the male not worthy of our female, then the story is corrupted, turning into something twisted and perverse. The author can't betray the readers.  It's understood by all romance readers that the heroine is to realize a reward worthy of her, something of value, something good, even if it is all wrapped up in an oh-so-bad-boy package complete with a Chippendale’s bough.

As a feminist, it's really difficult to find plausible scenarios where male characters can be this bad and still redeemable in a way that doesn't offend our feminist sensibilities. It's not like I'm going to forgive the guy simply because he's "a man". That's the excuse that had me abandoning romance novels altogether as a teenager viewing them as "unhealthy."

But with paranormal romance novels, I find that the feminist in me can relax a little bit. Why?  Because most men in paranormal romance novels have one thing in common that's unique compared to other romance alpha-male heroes. These men are vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, or other such preternatural creatures.  They have a ready-made excuse for acting like ... well, animals.  And , paradoxically, they have a perfect built-in excuse for redemption.

We can chose to believe that these paranormal alpha-male dudes want to treat their women as equals, but they have this inner compulsion to act as monsters act. When the heroine triggers the guy's primal side (bringing out his beast), he takes what he wants, driven by animalistic desire.  He simply cannot help himself when he dominates and conquers in the heat of the moment. It’s in his nature, one he often intrinsically struggles with and yet is helpless to change or control. So he’s bad, very bad, but he's also oh so good! Socially she is his equal, but when it comes to his beast she doesn't stand a chance. He delivers both the hot and raw alpha-male and the loving family-man in a perfectly redeemable 1-2 sucker punch as described in my previous blog entry. So he is bad but redeemable without a feminist having to sell out.  What more could a feminist want? It’s brilliant!

Thinking about this at a deeper level, the duality of these paranormal males (the man at odds with his inner beast) is much like the feminist who loves reading romance (the female demanding equality and her conflicting fantasies of being taken by an alpha-male in the bedroom).  Duality seems to be something we feminist romance junkies can relate to.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons paranormal romance is so popular? A feminist can read paranormal romance and not feel like they've completely sold out to the old Harlequin mentality.

Of course, I still wouldn't dare read these in public except on my Kindle or iPad.  No one can see the cover of my trashy romance novel as I sit at Whole Foods and read on my Kindle over my lunch break.  

A Feminist's Penchant for Romance Novels

Trashy romance novels, the naughtier the better, are a hidden pleasure of mine. I first started reading them as a young adult. But even at that tender age I knew that the stories I read were not emotionally healthy.  If I prescribed to set out to find a mate using what I found in those books, I would be setting myself up for a world of hurt and somehow I realized that.  Eventually I abandoned reading romance all together because it simply was not compatible with my feminist perspective. 

Decades later I find myself back secretly reading romance novels once again. As much as I hate the idea of liking these books, I simply cannot seem to get enough of them and that really bothers my feminist side. These books depict alpha-male bad boys that often dominate, abuse, neglect and otherwise disrespect the female until they realize, from a variety of catalysts, the error in their ways and pledge their undying love and devotion. Yippee!!! The feminist in me is about ready to stick her finger down her throat, or a poke fork in her eye....or both. Yet firing up my Kindle to read the latest J.R.Ward book is the equivalent for me to tapping a vein is for a heroin addict. It has really bothered me that I, a self-proclaimed feminist, was willingly reading such drivel and finding it so very fulfilling. A very disturbing situation.

Then, as I was reading Orson Scott Card's Xenocide today, there was a passage, spoken through his character Valentine, that describes the genetic programming of human males and females. In short, the author posits that male genetic programming is that of the proverbial alpha-male; to inseminate as many females as possible, and to use force if necessary. The genetic programming of females is to attract the strongest and most virile male as a means of securing the most viable offspring. Everything to this point sounds typical to me; however, the next part caught my attention. Those same females seeking out the alpha-males for procreation also have a drive to attract the most stable males so as to have the greatest chance of them sticking around to provide protection, assistance and sustenance for the mother and young child. But, you may conclude, as I do, that that alpha-male who wants to fuck everything in sight is probably not the same guy that wants to hang around and provide for a newborn baby and a stressed out mommy. Sounds like he'd be hightailing it outta there, right fast.

I don't know what kind of cruel joke mother nature is playing on us women, but these two directives, branded into the human female basic genetic operating procedures, are completely incompatible.  We are, by our very genetics, set up to be disappointed. If we follow our genetic predisposition to be attracted to the biggest, strongest, fiercest males, we will absolutely be the most unlikely to find men that are family-man types to settle down with. But in reality that is exactly what we want them to become ... after they've mated with us. Sad but true. These alpha-males are not likely to be neutered and become non-roaming docile monogamists and yet we delude ourselves into thinking we can tame the testosterone coursing through their veins. They will of course continue in their genetic programming which compels them to spread their seed far and wide, yes, while we're stuck home raising the kiddos. OR, if we are feminists, we chose our mates not based on our biological drives but instead with our minds, choosing those partners that are long-term relationship material. Of course this is a much wiser and more compatible choice for the long haul.

But there is something to be said about the lack of physical passion of a primal nature when you pick a mate using the cerebral criteria of stable, reliable, family man, instead of those used by our genetic encoding which lean toward that untamed rogue. It's a trade off we make willingly.

So is it any wonder that, when choosing our recreational reading material, feminists (often secretly) are drawn to those trashy romance novels with the big bad alpha-male, that dominates and conquers the enthralled, often independent, willful and defiant female in a heated erotic passion that's hot enough to melt your lipstick in its case, and then that same fella turns into the hopelessly in love, devoted and faithful family-man we want to settle down with? It's that alpha-male lover turned devoted family-man mate combination that completely rocks our female worlds. I could never figure out why it was such a pleasurable experience for me reading such silliness until now. I mean, I knew it was insane to think the alpha-male would behave this way. It made no logical sense at all. Looking at it using Card's genetic programming passage though, it makes total sense. These romance novels are pressing the two most basic and incompatible female genetic hot buttons in a very effective 1-2 sucker punch. My feminist me really doesn't stand much chance in stopping my genetically ingrained reaction to it, outside of simply refusing to allow myself to open such books and start reading. 

It's a fantasy world. And as long as I'm an adult that understands that this isn't something I'm likely to encounter in the real world, it's a safe enough pastime. My concern is in the young impressionable girls that read this stuff and think it's the ideal and something they can actually attain in a mate. It is the setup, then, for heartbreak, dysfunctional relationships, and ultimately divorce. I'm proud that the young girl in me saw these books for what they were at a young age. I'm also proud that I figured out why I'm back at it, reading these same books, all these years later. It's an innate female genetic predisposition that is better fed in the fantasy world of my head via the pages of a sizzling book than between the sheets with some hotty boy from the gym or off the football field. And maybe eventually our future female generations won't have this unnecessary genetic remnant that, if followed now with our monogamistic social pressures, can only break a young woman's heart.