This essay was inspired by Carrie’s review of Roomies, a book I enjoyed despite it prompting a rant from Carrie. Her review is a great read, in part because it caused me to examine my own reading, specifically how much my own tastes have been affected or changed by current political and social issues.
I have been doing a lot of self examination, especially after a recent shopping trip to a bookstore.
I wandered the shelves, looking at all the different books, and I realized that romantic suspense has been shut out from my reading interests.
And I realized why: I want no part of the “guy with a gun” pictured on the covers.
Reading trends and personal tastes are in a constant state of flux; as the world changes, so do our opinions on tropes. In Carrie’s case, a modern marriage of convenience story that included an immigration workaround for White people negated her enjoyment of the romance. When people of color are consistently targeted by ICE agents, I can understand why the specifics of that plot would leave a reader with a very bad taste in their mouth.
And that’s exactly how I feel lately when I see a man with a gun, poised and at the ready, on a romance cover.
I don’t envision being safe from danger or feeling protected.
I envision every newscast from every shooting that’s happened recently – one after another.
It makes me angry.
It makes me feel frightened.
It makes me want to cry.
Those feelings have nothing to do with a reading experience I actually want.
I grew up around guns. I’d say my relationship with them is well-informed, coming from a place of experience and education. I received a BB gun as a Christmas present at the age of seven. I can clean them, load them, and store them safely. I competed in marksmanship competitions while in high school. Firearms are a large part of my family identity and were also a source of bonding. My grandfather collected them and made his own ammo. My brother inherited part of my grandfather’s substantial collection.
But while I respect guns and proper gun ownership, I can’t ignore that there is a widespread problem with how guns are sold, modified, and used. In the wake of the Parkland shooting, which occurred in the county where I was born, and with the mass shootings that have already happened and the others that are likely to come, the last thing I want is more guns.
I don’t want more guns in my community.
I don’t want more guns in schools.
And after a recent book shopping trip, I realized: I don’t want them on my romances.
I’ve been trying to figure out why a gun-toting cover model bothers me so much and I think it comes down to how threatening and upsetting I find the image now, and how much guns are tied to White masculinity, and how much that really grosses me out.
I am a White woman and come from a White family. My brother has his concealed weapons permit and is in the military. The notion that he may be pulled over and shot by a police officer for having a gun in his possession or even just the idea of a weapon in his possession has never crossed my mind. I have that privilege. Many, many others do not, because a White man with a gun is seen as either a protector or, in the wake of a shooting, as pitiable, as someone with mental health issues who was failed by the system. For anyone of color, that is not the case. They get a whole different set of labels – racist ones like “terrorist,” “thug,” etc.
For the sake of this argument, I’m going to be referring to romantic suspense, as this is a trend I see most often for the subgenre, though I do realize it’s not mutually exclusive. Other romances and thrillers use this imagery as well.
In a typical genre cover involving a firearm, the hero is typically the one in the protector position on the cover. He’s front and center, with or without a heroine clutching his biceps. He’s tasked with guarding his love interest and is often some sort of security expert, or works as a bodyguard, is in the military, or a member of law enforcement. While the hero may be trained in various protection tactics like negotiation or martial arts, there is almost always a gun involved. The weaponry is a shorthand symbol for power, authority, and, let’s be real, sexual prowess as well. I immediately think of the joke, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Guns are extremely phallic.
Seeing a man on the cover with a gun, to me, used to be code for, “look how strong I am. I can protect you, keep you safe, and will probably pop a boner from all the danger we’re in.” The cover was effective shorthand representation of what I’ll find inside the book: action, suspense, and most likely that dude and his gun.
However, my reaction to that cover imagery has changed drastically, in part because my awareness of reality interferes with my ability to accept the image as standard marketing. If I were a romance heroine in a book or out on a date with an actual person, knowing that a man I just met has a weapon on them would make me extremely nervous. (Sarah asked while editing this essay with me if I’d still feel unsafe if a member of law enforcement had the gun. And yes, I would.)
But I know I’m privileged to have that reaction. People from marginalized communities don’t have the luxury of feeling safe in the presence of law enforcement, or even merely nervous.
Then there’s the fact that right now, a gun is relatively easy to acquire. Because so many people who should not have access, such as domestic abusers, manage to get them through proper channels with little interference, I no longer equate gun ownership with being a law-abiding member of society. The idea of a man with a gun doesn’t make me feel safe. It makes me feel afraid.
There’s also the issue of race. Most men on the cover of romantic suspense novels, especially those that are wielding a handgun, are White. We’ve seen what happens to men of color when they are even suspected of having a weapon. White men with weapons are “vigilantes” and “isolated loners.” If they commit a crime, they’re “mentally ill.” But men of color are treated as suspects or terrorists by default, facing incarceration or murder by the same individuals who are supposed to protect communities.
I’m gun exhausted. I’m sick of seeing mass shootings in the news. I’m sick of zero changes being made at the expense of our safety. I’m sick of having these debates every three months or three weeks. And I don’t want romance to be a reminder of the cycle of gun violence in which we are permanently stuck.
I’m not averse to stories about the effects of gun violence, to be clear. I recently enjoyed The Ones Who Got Away by Roni Loren which is a romance between adults who were victims of gun violence as teens. The series follows several of the mass shooting survivors and, so far, the emotions and lingering trauma felt terribly real. I’m reading the second book now, though I had to set it aside after the Parkland shooting. The reality of gun violence overshadowed my ability to read the story. I’ll undoubtedly pick it back up, but I’m also dreading it, because how long until another mass shooting in real life means I’ll have to pause again?
For those who enjoy or write in the genre, keep doing your thing. You should read what you like, but for me, I sense that my aversion to pistol-packing heroes gracing romance covers is only going to worsen as America’s gun problem persists. I react with repulsion and disgust at the image of a White guy with a handgun on a cover of a romance now. It’s not effective marketing. It’s a reminder of the immediate and increasing threat that guns pose, and how little is being done to change that. So when I see that image, I look elsewhere.
What about you? How do these covers make you feel?
“Only connect,” E.M. Forster said—and I think this may be a case for me of never having connected the dots prior to reading your essay. I read quite a bit of romantic suspense, along with military/law-enforcement and “darker” (mafia/crime mob/MC) romances, but when I scrolled through my kindle, I only counted 12 covers featuring heroes with guns—ten heroes were white, two were Hispanic (although not sure that came through on the covers). I’ve always thought of the presence of a gun on a cover as a “signifier” of the book’s content (much as the presence of dog tags on the cover signifies a military or former military hero or a cover with a high-heeled shoe & a glass of champagne signifies a fun, flirty romance). When I see a gun on a cover, I know I’m going to be reading something where there will be some violence and firearms. One thing I do notice about a lot of romantic suspense is that there’s not so much bang-bang-you’re-dead on the hero’s part as there are situations where guns are stolen, get jammed, run out of bullets, and the hero & heroine have to use their brains to figure out how to get out of the situation. Ironically, the books that feature the heroes (and heroines) using the most fire power are Lexi Blake’s Masters & Mercenaries books where there’s nary a gun in sight on the covers.
One last comment: yesterday my husband and I drove through Florida after a relaxing vacation in Miami and Key West. As we drove north on the Florida Turnpike, we were appalled by numerous billboards advertising MACHINE GUN AMERICA. The billboards featured (white) women and young children at shooting ranges. I must say it took some of the joy out of our vacation to know that certain segments of our society think that giving a child a military-grade automatic weapon and allowing him/her to spray bullets all over a target is wholesome family fun. God help us!
I would probably be prone to buy a book with a man holding a gun on the cover. To me it represents action/adventure and that’s what I like in a story. If the choice is between a couple on the cover with the man holding a gun and a couple holding balloons, I will pick the gun. The joy of reading, though, is that in my mind I can “blur” things out in my head. Whatever genre with weapons–sword, laser gun, pistol, explosions etc.–the violence is the same, but in my mind I skip the gory details.
To be honest, I have zero experience with guns, I don’t know any military/police officers (my dad was a WWII vet but never owned a gun), and have never lived in a big city. So reading a book with violence from a hero who is chasing a terrorist is the same as a human chasing an alien–far from my reality and only happens in books. But also, the appeal to me is that fantasy I have to be the person who saves the day, the woman of action with nerves of steel–the kick ass heroine I wish I was.
I am so with you on this one. I don’t want to see guns on the cover or read about them In the blurb. I’ve even lost my taste for military/police MCs.
I started feeling this was a few years ago. I was reading an Elizabeth Hoyt novel that was really highly recommended. There was a gun battle within the first 5 pages; the only pages I read in that book which ended up being a DNF.
For many years I read romantic suspense. I was a big fan of Brockmann’s back in the day, but sooooooo many people jumped on that bandwagon that it flooded the marketplace. I really lost interest. And I too am so…..burned out from reality (guns, politics, social injustices, etc) that anything in that particular subgenre has been struck from my interest. I did pick up Loren’s book too and really enjoyed it, but that was a huge departure from my constantly shifting comfort zone.
I have enough drama and depressing crap going on that I really want to escape into the fantasy stories.
I’m from the UK where we have very few guns and very strict restrictions on them. I’ve read my fair share of romance novels with manly men holding guns on the cover and thought it was hot in the past.Looking at the horrifying amount of mass shootings in the USA I’ve got a very different view.
I’ll read novels where there are vampires etc who kill people, but that’s fantasy.Guns are real, and they are often used to kill someone’s partner, so I’m nopeing out of it.
Unhappily relevant. There are bollards downtown in Melbourne so more murderers can’t run us down (we hope). And there was a guy watching Death Wish (Bruce Willis version) on his laptop next to me on the bus just the other day. ‘Guys with guns’ galore. Sigh.
Fiction-wise… I stopped short partway through the last Obernewtyn book because I heard reports about terrorist attacks in Paris exactly when I got to the point in the book with villains like the real-life attackers.
But I bought it, and I will finish it when I have the energy, because, well, it’s kind of The Handmaid’s Tale for gifted kids. Including the being around for decades part. (But incomplete.) And less horrific, mostly.
I read non-fiction about abuse and listen to true crime because it’s relevant to my prehistory, etc. I don’t think there are negative side effects in terms of stereotype threat. In-depth profiling, risk assessment, behavioural analysis…they all tend to focus on patterns that abusers/offenders decide on and refine, and tend to perpetrate on a series of victims, or sometimes as a series of offences against the same victim.
There’s nothing random or sudden about it. It’s not an Everyman thing, or an Any-racially-profiled minority-member thing.
And there’s no sense of doom. Which is the impression the crime shows my parents were into would give, when they quoted the ‘90%+ of criminals were child abuse victims’ figure without quoting the ‘70%+ of child abuse victims break the cycle’ figure.
I was overjoyed to get the happy stats from a foreign news feature. I give Criminal Minds props for featuring that same only 1 in 8 failure figure. They will be giving somebody else – many of them – the same blessed relief.
…And actually, romance novels demonstrate the rule, rather than the exception in this area, but I think I’ve never seen it stated in a form that credible – not just ‘lots of people break the cycle’, but ‘the vast majority break the cycle’.
You’re all so smart and pretty—thank you! I had a lengthy discussion of gun ownership with an acquaintance wearing a pro gun t-shirt the other day and it just left me so miserable, even though we were very civil with each other and found some points of agreement. It was like talking to a propaganda machine. I have family members who are the same. I don’t know what these very privileged people fear so much that they feel like they need to own arsenals. I told this guy that I can’t understand going through life feeling so insecure that I’d want to carry a gun and he about blew a gasket assuring me that he’s DEFINITELY NOT INSECURE. Right-o, friend.
I’m so glad I’ve found this community. I’m somewhat new to romance as a genre (as opposed to this and that with romantic elements) and I’m struggling to find my way through some of the tropes, and figure out what authors work for me.
@Candace – re: White Male Supremacy, OMG, so much that.
@Bec – your Alpha Hero, yeah, that too.
In my real life… well. I’m almost six feet tall, and I’m a martial artist / martial arts instructor and fairly muscular. Before I moved away from good hiking, I hiked a lot, and have a lot of friends in SAR, and quite a few friends who friends who are LEOs (heh – including my favorite aunt, a retired CSI, she’s awesome) and vets. Professionally, I’m a former software engineer, currently within a couple of months of finishing a doctorate in neurobiology, at which point I’m starting a post-doc in mechanical engineering designing robots. (I’m not unaware that my life is ridiculous. No apologies.)
I’m fairly pro-gun control, but I’m *really* pro guns not being a stand in for machismo and let’s get rid of the machismo while we’re at it. (I wasn’t raised around guns during my early years – quite the opposite – but learned some shooting basics in my teens, and have acquired some more exposure since. Oh, and got to do fun things like take knives away from kids when I was teaching during my undergrad years, which really had me thinking about how much worse it would have been had through brought guns onto campus…)
Ahem. What all this is getting to is my confusion about a lot of the dynamics I see in some of the books I’ve read – even some of the ones I like! I mean, by any measure, I should know some of these guys right? We should have trained together, and hiked together, and gone out for pizza and ended up practicing knife fighting at night in the rain (okay, that’s more of a hacker / martial artist thing.) They don’t act like that, the folks I know – or maybe just not around me, like, we butted heads a few times and they decided I was one of the guys? One of my best friends is dating (and topping) a former Special Forces guy (haven’t met him yet, but their pictures are adorable – pretty sure he’s not the domineering sort, though she’s super egalitarian outside of the bedroom). Maybe it’s my west coast (US) origins?
I still see so much of this pretty narrow portrayal of masculinity – and just as much a narrow portrayal of femininity. I find a lot of the Alpha Heros irritating – and some of them quite unattractive – but too many narrowly feminine heroines, and I start feeling pretty alienated, like some kind of freak of nature. Give me men with some degree of emotional intelligence… and while we’re at it, competent women who are totally out of fucks.
This will sound tangential but …
I recently read two back-to-back mysteries by {author}, who (a) is a white American-born male, (b) has lived in both the US and England, and (c) sets his novels in England. In each book, there came an utterly jarring moment where, in the course of The Reveal, the villain pulls a gun on the main character. I think it simply did not enter the author’s mind that this does not happen. Yes, sure, guns exist everywhere, and some people have them–but you can’t toss it into the story as casually as if you’re mentioning that it has started raining.
That was the scary part: someone taking it for granted that the way things work in one country is the way things work in all countries.
Over the years, I’ve become less and less likely to read the type of romantic suspense where a gun-wielding guy is protecting the heroine. For me, it is not so much the gun itself, but the hero. Often the hero is a black-ops type who (1) seems to have no problem with killing people, as long as they are “bad guys”; and (2) works for some secretive government agency that the reader is supposed to accept knows who the real “bad guys” are. Covert assassinations for which a government will not take responsibility, though — why does this belong in a romance? Let’s save that for a paranoid psychological thriller where we’re not expected to root for cold-blooded killers and have our heroine expect to live happily ever after with them.
This put into words what I tried unsuccessfully to articulate in a debate of the culture of horror movies that glorify violence and gore with a friend the other day. After decades as a paramedic in a “knife and gun club” city, I have seen all of the gore in real life and cannot seperate screaming and death for entertainment from the screaming and death in reality. No suspension of disbelief. I think this is what is now crossing over in other areas. Like others on the post, previous favorites like NCIS have now been replaced with the Great Brithish Baking Show and romance books which have always been a “safe” place no longer have the alpha male and his gun. Too many dead and damaged bodies in reality for this to be entertaining. I’ll stick with Mary Berry, cavorting English bunnies and learn about really complicated pastries on PBS and my romance novels will be as light and fluffy as the pastry.
@Zyfsv Oh, heavens, I have *such* a crush on Sue Perkins. Um… yeah. Excuse me while I go vanish in a fit of Mary Sue.
I don’t mind guns in books at all. Don’t mind a hero with a gun on the cover, either. There are bad cops/good cops…bad people/good people…there’s good and bad when it comes to everything in life. I served in the military, as did my husband. He served no less than four tours in Iraq/Afghanistan, and we are responsible gun owners.
I guess I’m still all about that ‘alpha hero.’ Hello Black Dagger Brotherhood! Hello to all the cowboys and FBI Agents! I know that’s not exactly everyone’s cup of tea anymore, but I don’t see anything wrong with it. Here in South Dakota, during hunting season, I hear gunshots and see guns all the time. Doesn’t bother me.
What bothers me is bullies. Or the ‘mob mentality.’ What bothers me is when people gang up on another person because they have a differing view. Intolerance bothers me. Intolerance about anything. We’re all different, come from all backgrounds, and should embrace our neighbor.
How about we do away with the political commentary on book blogs? We come to websites like this to read about books. We can get all the political rhetoric we want on TV. It’s why I cancelled my TV.
I don’t think that’s possible, Christine. Unless this is your first visit here, I’m sure you’ve seen posts at SBTB that talked about racial diversity and representation in romance, the role of women in society, historically and in the present, violence and sexual harassment, LGTBQ issues, the politics of publishing, and the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of books by and about women in mainstream book reviews. All these things are political, and they affect the books we read, and why we like them or don’t like them.
Tangential issue, something I’ve thought about for a while: uncritical representations of the military and its activities in romance (cards on the table: I’m not American but in the US). I was especially struck by a romance I otherwise liked, in which the hero is a US military veteran with some occasional dark thoughts on what he had done (not PTSD). The otherwise sensitive author made this man reflect on how he had “had to” torture terror suspects, because “it worked.” Tough, but necessary, etc. There was no indication that the reader was supposed to reflect critically on this. I’ve seen similar stuff in other books. But — torture does *not* work. It has been proven over and over that it produces unreliable information, and in any case it is deeply immoral and under no circumstances permissible. It shatters the victim’s mind and body, it is cruel and dehumanizes both victim and perpetrator. The torture under Bush is a permanent stain on the US, and the US army field manual still includes torture techniques. Ultimately, I liked the novel I had read, but I am acutely aware that this is one of many pop culture sources that tacitly condones something that is the *very opposite* of love, intimacy, romance, and the hopeful possibilities that romance offers. I wonder if there is room to recon with this in other romances, or on this blog — I mean the pervasive and damaging militarism I perceive in the US and in US romance, having lived there over the last six or so years. Thank you for your work and for everyone’s comments.
@Heidi So, I suppose that’s a fairly realistic thing for this man to be thinking – because even if it doesn’t work, it’s fairly likely that he believed it did, and he has a lot of reason to be emotionally committed to the idea that it works. I mean, imagine in his position coming to realize that it never did?
But step back a bit. There’s a fairly common plot point in action pieces where torture is “shown” to work, establishing in the minds of viewers that it does work. (IIRC, there’s some evidence that a lot of ideas for how torture has been conducted has come out of popular entertainment, so this is really relevant. It’s been a some years since I looked at these sources…) Usually the set up is that there is some group of people in peril. There is the bad guy with the information to save them, and a time limit, and he won’t speak. The noble hero is conflicted, but finally goes and does the hard thing and does… whatever awful torture type thing, to successfully get the information and save all the innocents. Yee-haw, obviously torture is all for the good.
(And, I agree with you, all actual evidence is that it doesn’t work and by the way, it’s completely reprehensible. But especially during the post 9/11 period media depicting torture as a hard necessity was really common in the US.)
@Lepiota yeah, in this instance it was pretty clear that the reader was supposed to just take this as another bit of info about the character, who was supposed to be a person of good to excellent judgement. TBH, I think it was just not reflected on by the author, maybe for the reasons you note. But I could be wrong…
I think some studies were done looking at the impact of the TV series 24 — notorious for representing torture as efficient AND in fact heroic (and the time pressure thing that you mention was of course crucial…). I feel Homeland (the HBO show) was quite bed in this respect too.
Today’s podcast celebrates another cover with a woman posing with a gun:
And again I cringe over the sexism. I don’t think it’s okay to be sexist about the issue of gun control, if for no other reason than it plays directly into the NRA soundbite that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
@Deborah: A woman with a gun on a cover does not bother me for several reasons. Mainly, acts of gun violence are rarely perpetrated by women. More often than not, women are victims of gun violence rather than perpetrators. Additionally, a woman holding a gun does re-enforce the concept of a gun being an extension of toxic masculinity.
A gun on its own produces less discomfort for me than a white man holding a gun. The same goes for a woman holding a gun.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I shoot, I carry, so I don’t have an issue with guns on book covers because of the guns. I just don’t like my romance mixed with suspense in general, so guy with gun on a romance cover indicates a book I probably don’t want to read. In the few I’ve read the male characters often don’t appeal to me, and the technical aspects relating to the guns don’t ring true.