This post was inspired by a post by Sarah on Smart Bitches.
The stereotypical romance reader is so easy to conjure that toungue-in-cheek blog posts and magazine articles don’t even bother to describe her.
A woman lies, bathrobe-clad, on a couch in an untidy room with As The World Turns blaring in the background or nestled in a tub of Calgon while her children clamor outside the locked door for her attention. She is probably eating chocolate.
The ease with which the stereotype is dismissed in popular culture implies contempt. Everything the reader is doing is the opposite of whatever she is supposed to be doing. She is reclining instead of working, bathing instead of childrearing, eating instead of starving. Worse yet, she is reading instead of doing all these things, and worst of all, she is reading a ROMANCE.
She reads this book, with a ropy-muscled tanorexic on the cover, out of ignorance. She doesn’t know better books exist, or, if she does, can’t understand them. She reads the books as pure escape. She doesn’t even process the words — she moves from feeling to feeling until the happy ending disgorges her back into her unsatisfying life.
I describe this unpleasant stereotype because I want to remember it every time someone giggles when I say I’m writing a romance novel, or pokes fun at me on the train when they get a good look at the cover of the book I’m reading. Because that’s what people, even well-meaning people, are thinking of when they feel comfortable dismissing the genre, its writers, and its readers out of hand. And who would want to be associated with a stereotype like that?
Me.
The reason the romance stereotype is so potent is not just because it doesn’t reflect the real diversity of romance readers. It’s offensive because it sets the romance reader apart from other readers. She’s not really reading, poor, deluded soul, because she’s not reading a real book. She’s reading the wrong thing.
Men were the first public readers and writers. We get our ideas about what it’s okay to read from the first hairy-backed readers, and they were not reading Gena Showalter. (She is a girl, yuck.) So, when, as readers, we bring up the topic of romance novels, we’re forced to explain why romance novels are “literature,” or why they are like books for a “mainstream audience,” ie books men will read. I have had this conversation so many times. Romance novels stand up to literary criticism! Romance novels are empowering! Romance novels are better than Best Selling Serious Novel by Much-Lauded Author!
Romance readers don’t need to prove that they’re just as good as some fictional male reader, or, for that matter, any reader. Romance novels are a uniquely female activity. I know I’m not being fair — there are definitely male readers of romances — but romance novels are written by women for a female audience. Perhaps we need a new dialectics to discuss them, one developed by women for the romance genre. Scholarship that doesn’t try to place romance novels in the pantheon of Dead White Male Literature, but that proudly declares them Something Else.
As soon as I finish this mouthful of bacon chocolate, I’m going to do just that.
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