Yeah, that’s right. Rape. I can’t believe this blog has existed so long without us taking a long, hard (huh huh, long and hard) look at the presence of rape in romance.
First of all, I’d like to state
three things up front:
1. Rapist heroes are a big part of the reason why I disliked romance novels as long as I did. Heroes were rewarded for being assholes of the first order, and oftentimes their behavior to the heroine was completely indistinguishable from a villain’s, except romance novel villains tend to be jaw-droppingly ugly. From bad teeth to ugly noses to hunched backs, romance novel villains are dead easy to spot, which is in keeping with many fairy tale tropes that equate outer with inner beauty—but that’s an entirely different topic.
2. I still think romances with rapist heroes have a place in the genre. They’re not romantic to me, but legions of women found them romantic, and legions of women still do.
3. Rapist heroes are not nearly as common as they used to be. Between 1972 and about 1988, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a rapist hero in the face. Starting in about the mid-80s, though, the tides started turning, and by the mid-90s, rapist heroes were mostly a thing of the past, although forced seductions still popped their heads up here and there. (There are readers who maintain there’s no difference between forced seduction and rape, of course.) Despite the recent dearth of rapes in romance, some romances with rapist heroes are still considered classics of the genre, and seem to be experiencing healthy sales. For example, Whitney, My Love and The Flame and the Flower have been continuously in print since their first release (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, though) and are generally reviewed positively by genre romance critics.
Why is rape, one of the most profound and traumatic violations anyone can experience, so prevalent for the first several years in romance novels? And why was it presented as something heroes were allowed to do and get away with, oftentimes without so much as an apology?
Assorted explanations have been floated around. One of them deals with sexual mores. The Flame and the Flower, which kick-started the historical romance genre as we know it, was published in 1972, which in terms of sexual mores had more in common with 1952 than 1992. Several people have suggested that the fictional rape scenario allowed the heroines to enjoy sexual pleasure while still maintaining their moral purity. Nice girls don’t seek sexual pleasure. But if the sexual pleasure was forced on them…well, that’s a different matter, isn’t it?
There’s a kernel of truth in that, but I think there’s more to it.
There’s the fact that domination fantasies in general, and rape fantasies in particular, can be very potent, and these books seem to tap into something primal for a lot of women. Check out this post, for example. But keep in mind that not all women are as conflicted about their domination fantasies as this woman appears to be, and not all women with domination fantasies came from repressive or abusive households. The seeds of turn-ons, kinks and fetishes are oftentimes buried deeply, and the roots can be tangled.
So, OK, so this explanation could be classified as an instance of “This turns them on for whatever reason. More power to them. Fantasize away, just make sure to play safe.”
I still think there’s more to it than that. In my opinion, there are at least three other powerful fantasies at work here other than those of domination:
The first is the fantasy of taming the brutal man. On one hand, EWWWWW HE RAPED HER, how can she want him if she’s even close to being sane?
Darlings, this is fiction. In the fiction, the impossible happens. The classic heroic rapist, unlike a real-life rapist, is tamed by the love of a good woman, and is ecstatic at the very idea of spending forever with the heroine in happily-wedded bliss by the end of the book. He’s completely reformed, and even if most of the classic heroes don’t grovel, their asshole behavior is at least held in abeyance for the last five pages of the book as they explain in tiresome detail to the heroines what was really going through their minds at assorted points in the book and the exact moment they fell in love with them.
(By the way, it’s really important, the Exact Moment. If you don’t get to hear about it from the horse’s mouth, then you get to watch the Dawning of the Realization of Lurve. It’s one of those ridiculous romance novel things that you go along with.)
The temporary cessation of cockheaded behavior holds the promise of future behavior that, while not completely bereft of shitmonkey moments, is at least a reasonable approximation of what a decent human being should act like.
The heroic rapist also rapes for reasons entirely different from the usual real-life rapist, which brings me to the second fantasy: The heroine represents the ideal of the irresistible woman. Many of the rapist heroes in romance novels do what they do because they simply can’t help themselves, I mean, look, the heroine is sooooo beautiful and radiant and desirable and WHOOPS, impaled her unwilling body on his chubby pickle once again. Poor hero. His mind was addled by her blazing beauty.
OK, you can see that I’m less than enamored with this particular fantasy. Frankly, it’s far too similar to the “but she was asking for it, she was wearing a short skirt!” defense for my comfort. But regardless, I can see how this fantasy can hold powerful appeal. This woman, her love sauce is something powerful. Men want her, and women want to be her—that is, unless she’s the sexually-liberated former mistress of the hero, in which case it’s a good bet that she’ll give Courtney Love a run for the money in the “insane, homicidal crack whore” department.
In keeping with the irresistible woman fantasy, the rapist hero is often an obsessed hero. He can’t function with his formerly delicious mistress. No whore can do. He can slake his lust on one, and only one model of female pulchritude. And the most embarrassing thing is, she often makes him spooge prematurely, even though all she does is move her body with shy, clumsy inexperience in a dance as old as time. If she runs away, he will hunt her down to the ends of the earth. He becomes insanely and irrationally jealous when other men pay attention to her.
OK, I’ve just described just about every romance novel hero in existence. What makes the rapist hero different is how the very fact that she makes him lose control, he, a man who has bedded women without count, makes him lose control even more. He desires her, and hates her for desiring her, and he punishes her accordingly. By the end of the book, though, he has submitted to the fact that he doesn’t just want her, he needs her, the way Ozzy Osborne needs Vicodin and red wine.
The more unkind critic would note that his dick has made judgment, and his dick apparently knows better than any other organ of his when he’s found his soulmate.
The less unkind critic would point out that many women secretly want to drive a handsome man crazy for love of their irresistible little selves, even though such behavior in real life would probably result in panicked calls to the police and restraining orders.
The heroine being mistreated also taps into our martyr fantasies. You know: “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to the garden to eat wormmmmms.” Self-pity feels good, y’all, and so is the knowledge that HA HA THEY’LL BE SO SORRY WHEN THEY FIND OUT HOW WRONGFULLY MISTREATED I’VE BEEN. The heroine is misunderstood and treated unjustly, sometimes to brutal extremes, but we, the readers, know that she’s pure and angelic and all that is wonderful about womanhood. She martyrs herself and either refuses to defend herself because dammit, her innocence and inherent goodness is evident to all, or she cocks up the explanation so badly that she creates another big old mess, which is good for at least another 150 pages of conflict in the book.
(That sort of heroine, more often than not, makes me want to hit somebody. Preferably the heroine. Or the hero. Or tie the both of them, dump ‘em in a sack and drown them like unwanted kittens—except I’d never drown kittens, but I feel no such restraint with annoying heroines.)
What gets to me is when the heroine is martyred over and over and over again, mistreated and abused by the hero, but there’s no pay-off. No grovel, no apology, no nothing. For many people, though, the hero finally sorting out the assorted misunderstandings is reward enough, even if he doesn’t fall down on his knees, sobbing out apologies incoherently while offering to castrate himself. At least he now realizes how totally awesome the heroine is and how many worms she’s had to eat: long slim slimy ones, short fat fuzzy ones, and yes, even the dreaded ooey gooey ooey ones.
And moving away from fantasy-land, there’s the fact that many women hold on to relatively rigid views of what should constitute ideal male and female behavior. I’ve read lamentations on assorted romance reading boards about how heroines nowadays are far too mannish, and how heroes are impotent weaklings. These readers invariably long for old-fashioned romances, when the men were men. This attitude was summed up by a reader on some board somewhere who pointed out that there’s no point to the rapist hero apologizing or groveling for his behavior—doing so would make him a pussy.
To be honest, this worldview is so different from mine that it irks me, because I think it takes a real pair of balls to look over bad behavior unflinchingly, apologize sincerely and hold fast to the resolution to not repeat the mistake. The assumption that the ability to apologize for mistakes = pussywhipped drives me nuts, as do assorted stereotypical views of what’s gender-appropriate. But I can definitely see how someone who takes the opposite view would eat rapist heroes up with a spoon.
Hey, want to know something scary? Despite how long this article already is (1,589 words and counting!), I’ve only covered rapist heroes. I haven’t even begun to dissect the implications of other types of rape in romance novels. As Robin said in an e-mail to me:
(…) [W]hat does it mean when the heroine is vulnerable to rape by someone other than the hero? What about a book like Brenda Joyce’s The Conqueror, where the hero (if he must be called that) marries the heroine off to another man and then comes and rapes her on her wedding night, after having sent the groom away? Or what about rapes that are really meant to be angry expressions of power, like what Geoffrey did to Anne in To Love and To Cherish (or even what Sebastien did to Rachel in [To Have and to Hold], although I think it was more complicated there). Like I said, I have NEVER seen so much rape as there is in Romance.
Yup. Damn straight. For a genre that’s supposedly escapist fiction by women for women—how often have you heard the refrain “If I wanted realism/blood/death/unhappiness, I’ll turn on the news, not read a romance novel”?—rape is writ large on the genre’s landscape.
What does that say about the books, and about us? Hell if I know. Feel free to hash it out in the comments.
Maili said on 09.14.05 at 05:56 PM • [link]
Big topic. :D But before I’d ramble, I need to ask this first—how many romance novels feature the rape scenario nowadays?
Tonda said on 09.14.05 at 06:05 PM • [link]
I"m with Maili, I haven’t stumbled across a rape-romance in years and years (not counting in erotica, where the dom-fantasy is alive and well). Are these still really common? If so, I’m feeling pretty damn lucky right now.
I always hated them (Lindsey’s FIRES OF WINTER—my first foray into romance—put me off the whole genre for a decade), and I still do.
Candy said on 09.14.05 at 06:15 PM • [link]
Not a whole lot, ‘tis true. Good point, actually, and I’ll edit the article. But for decades, rapist heroes were very popular, and there’s a pretty significant contingent of readers who either:
1. Did not mind rapist heroes, but also aren’t particularly bothered by the shift in the portrayals of heroes and heroines in romance, and
2. Looooved the rapist heroes, and long for more pirate/virile sea captain/viking/rampaging conqueror/haugthy duke rape action. Because it’s “historically accurate” and all.
DOH! Forgot to address that last bit in the article, too.
So yeah. Huge subject. Huuuuge.
Darlene Marshall said on 09.14.05 at 06:22 PM • [link]
I dunno, I’ve always liked this quote from Daphne Clair in the essay collection DANGEROUS MEN AND ADVENTUROUS WOMEN:
“Half a century later, in the very teeth of women’s liberation, Kathleen Woodiwiss’s THE FLAME AND THE FLOWER and Rosemary Rogers’s SWEET SAVAGE LOVE generated a flood of immensely succesful rape-romances that enraged feminists, created guilt in many avid readers, and were cited as perpetuating the notion that women really do enjoy being forced. (We might assume then that men, major consumers of thrillers, westerns, and detective fiction, enjoy being beaten up, tortured, shot, stabbed, dragged by galloping horses, and thrown out of moving vehicles.)”
For me, it’s all in how well you tell the story, and how engaged the reader is with the characters. One of the funnier novels I read last year was DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER, about a serial killer. He was the hero. This doesn’t mean I want to meet someone like him, but the author did a fine job of making me connect to Dexter.
Tonda said on 09.14.05 at 06:24 PM • [link]
I’m still stunned by a comment I got from a couple of 50-something women at a bar in Reno (they were not there for the RWA con). They wanted to know how I could bare to write rape scenes. When I looked at them blankly and said, “What?” They insisted that since I write historicals, my heroines must all lose their virginity that way. I literally didn’t know what to say, I just stood there, stunned with my mouth hanging open like a fish. Eventually I managed to mumble something about women in the past being not any different than women now-a-days, including how most of them lost their virginity, then I bolted.
SB Sarah said on 09.14.05 at 06:25 PM • [link]
I tend to see rapist heroes as a product of the 80’s/early 90’s romance genre, while current offerings rarely feature romance - a sign that, despite the cover depictions that we all love to hate and slowly improve, people are listening to what readers want.
I think that the prevalence of rape was an easy method of establishing alpha dominance in a hero, one that personally I had little respect for. Just like a writer who takes the easy way out and makes her villain extra-crispy by making him a wanton abuser of animals, making the hero a rapist is a quick-route way to establishing dominance, and (if the heroine is irresistable) attraction, and then having a nice conflict to resolve for a few hundred pages as well.
I’d like to think that romance writers have grown beyond the easy express route method of establishing dominance and villainy, and that’s why there’s more complicated methods of establishing each one.
Shannon said on 09.14.05 at 06:34 PM • [link]
A theory I’ve heard, but haven’t devoted a whole lot of thought to, is that the rape romances were so prevalent during that time period because of a subliminal reaction to women’s lib. After the bras were burned and men stopped holding doors for women lest they get bitchslapped, women secretly yearned for strong Alpha heroes to dominate them.
As I said, not my theory, but one I’ve come across.
JEA said on 09.14.05 at 06:35 PM • [link]
I think fiction is a safe place for us to let our dark sides out to play. Clearly, conflicted feelings about dominance and rape hang around in the shadow of many womens’ minds. And we as romance writers/readers aren’t the only ones using this conflict. Stephen R. Donaldson’s GAP sci-fi series features a heroine horribly abused by the criminal who ends up being something of a hero in the end. (Fantastic series. Highly recommended!)
I don’t think anything should be off-limits in fiction. My personal feelings about rape plots are conflicted enough, and I appreciate the self-reflection and soul-searching these stories demand from me.
But the bottom line, for me at least, is no subject matter should ever be off-limits in fiction.
Joyce
Maili said on 09.14.05 at 06:47 PM • [link]
I have mixed feelings about this topic because we are talking about two different periods: then and now, and ‘then’ does need backstory to lay out whys.
To make it clear, I do consider Kathleen Winsor’s FOREVER AMBER [written in the 1940s] the mother of romance novels. It’s a shame that she’s never really been recognised for her role in kickstarting the romance genre. But I digress.
It was 1970s [I think] when the romance genre was finally publicially and commercially recognised as a genre. Along with that is the introduction of sex and author’s freedom to romance, which caused ripples because—well, there are two reasons: a) at the time [between 1930s and 1960s], category romances and such such were pretty much asexual because of b), which is - the romance genre was controlled by publishers [and their wives!] that monitored morals. If an editor felt that the heroine was a bit too saucy, this will be amended, whether the author liked it or not. These new type of romances really rocked the boat. Sex! Adventure! Madness! Epic! The wild success of those American upstarts really knocked everyone flat on their bottoms.
So while this was going on, we have to deal with readers themselves. OK, I’m taking up too much space. I’ll shut up for a break. :D
Candy said on 09.14.05 at 06:49 PM • [link]
Darlene: thanks for the quote.
The big, big difference between rapist heroes and the scenarios described by Clair in other novels is that the rapist heroes are REWARDED at the end of the book, unlike the guys who beat up the hero in thrillers, westerns, and detective fiction, who usually end up dead or in jail.
“I think fiction is a safe place for us to let our dark sides out to play.”
Actually, I was thinking about this topic on the way to work, and I think in some ways, the prevalence of rapist heroes in romance in years past may have been a way to reclaim rape—or the concept of rape—for empowerment, the way gay people have reclaimed the word “fag” and “dyke,” or the way women have consciously chosen to use the word “bitch” in a positive manner.
I’m not sure if this was conscious on any level, or even if it works, but I agree that fiction is excellent for exploring places that are taboo or impossible in real life.
Maili said on 09.14.05 at 06:49 PM • [link]
Publicially? *headwall* Publicly!
Candy said on 09.14.05 at 06:57 PM • [link]
“I have mixed feelings about this topic because we are talking about two different periods: then and now, and ‘then’ does need backstory to lay out whys.”
True. And I’ve made a right royal mess of sorting things out. In fact, I didn’t even particularly bother, heh. But I’d still love to hear your two cents about why rape in romance was so popular, and why to this day there are people who mourn the disappearance of rapist heroes.
Tonda said on 09.14.05 at 07:27 PM • [link]
” . . . and why to this day there are people who mourn the disappearance of rapist heroes.”
There are also women out there writing love letters to Scott Peterson (and every other murder on death row). I can’t explain them either, but we all know they exist. I understand the illicit thrill of the domination plot (which works for me in erotica, and even sometimes in romantica, where I’m not looking for a HEA), but I just can’t like the idea of the rapist hero in mainstream romance.
Selah March said on 09.14.05 at 08:02 PM • [link]
“True. And I’ve made a right royal mess of sorting things out. In fact, I didn’t even particularly bother, heh. But I’d still love to hear your two cents about why rape in romance was so popular, and why to this day there are people who mourn the disappearance of rapist heroes.”
My theory:
Now? Date rape is a fairly big cultural no-no—part of every co-ed University’s orientation curriculum, and the subject of multiple Law & Order episodes for a decade and a half.
Then? Date rape didn’t exist. In a time when sexual liberation and easy access to birth control were brand new, “date rape” was instead called “how could I have been so fucking STOOPID as to have gone up to his apartment/let him in my room/gotten into the car with him/had that third glass of wine?”
Date rape was what happened when that nice guy you half-hoped would turn out to be “the one” turned out to be a bastard interested in one thing and one thing only, and it wasn’t in taking “no” for an answer.
I think it happened a whole lot more than anybody was willing to talk about, and I think it led to women forcing themselves to believe a whole bunch of shit about men in general: real men are naturally predatory, real men can’t control themselves, real men WANT you, baby, and they’ll keep on you till they get what they want.
How many women DID decide rape was romantic on those terms? How many decided they weren’t raped at all—just forcefully seduced, and wasn’t it THRILLING?? How many married men who’ve kept up the behavior throughout the relationship?
Like I said, it’s just a theory, and it can’t account for the entire phenomenon—maybe just a small part.
Candy said on 09.14.05 at 08:14 PM • [link]
“There are also women out there writing love letters to Scott Peterson (and every other murder on death row). I can’t explain them either, but we all know they exist.”
Ouch, not sure that women who enjoy or aren’t bothered by the odd bit of rape in romance novels can be comparable to the women who write love letters to murderers on death row. And for either case, I do think it’s worth figuring out why these fantasies exist. I’m not quite satisfied with the “Eh, it’s a fantasy, whaddaya gonna do” explanation—mostly because I’m a really nosy bitch.
SB Sarah said on 09.14.05 at 08:17 PM • [link]
I hear you on the nosy bitch part, but I don’t think that anyone with what may be considered an avante garde fetish (feet, shoes, wigs, people dressed in giant bunny costumes) can really explain what about it turns them on. So I’m not sure anyone with a dominance/rape fantasy set could articulate it, at least not to the satisfaction of someone who doesn’t have that same interest.
murgatroyd said on 09.14.05 at 08:26 PM • [link]
Actually, the Guy Who Won’t Take No for an Answer is alive and well—he’s the romantic hero who pesters the heroine, follows her around, somehow finds her phone number, etc. etc. and finally convinces her to go out on a date at which point they fall madly in love.
In real life, if someone were doing that to you, it’d be called “stalking.” Somehow, in movies, it’s romantic and sweet when a guy overcomes a woman’s objections because he knows she wants him to do it.
My bf and I were watching the original “Heaven Can Wait” (Don Ameche, Gene Tierney) when this subject surfaced, and lo and behold, here it is again. I Googled this just to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my, um, nether regions (too much), and came up with this article:
Every Girl Wants a Stalker
PS: I think a really good contest prize would be a pair of SB eyeglasses like all the chicks on the home page wear.
SB Sarah said on 09.14.05 at 08:28 PM • [link]
Re: glasses
You know that one of the first things I have to do post-partum is get my eyes examined and get new glasses. And you KNOW I am seriously thinking of looking for a pair of SBTB-esque frames because I am THAT much of a dork!!
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.14.05 at 08:35 PM • [link]
True to form, I’m going to say that it is the asking of this question that’s important, and not so much the answer.
I think the biggest reason why we saw a surge in rapist heroes during the heyday of late-70’s feminism was becuase of the unconscious clinging to extremes in the face of uncertainty. The late 70s and early 80s were a profoundly uncertain time when it came to gender roles, and historically in times of uncertainty people tend to cling to extremes. Case in point? Smallpox vaccinations, which we now mostly all agree are a wonderful thing but in their infancy were viewed with suspicion and terror.
I think that the explosion of rapist heroes in romance novels was fifty percent this uncertainty in the face of change, twenty percent the “good girl” dynamic- ie, “she was overpowered so she’s still pure- and thirty percent titillating because it was “forbidden”. Rapist heroes in romance were briefly titillating for the same reason homemakers were largely vilified and made inconsequential: because you weren’t “supposed to” want to stay home and clean the house. You were “supposed” to want to “have it all” and hire some damn man to do your housework for you. The titillation factor in rapist heroes faded as the pendulum-swing of gender roles normalized, as people got less and less uncomfortable with the social changes brought about by feminism.
So, again, true to form, I think the important thing here is that romance provided a safe space for women to “work out” that animus, and that the question is still being asked and discussed today. Quite frankly, a discussion of rape presupposes that women have the right to dispose of their bodies in whatever way they wish, and further presupposes that sex is negotiable- both presuppositions that are still not considered true in some countries and even in some American social attitudes.
A question just occurred to me as I was typing this rather windy comment: if we “demonize” the rape fantasy and call it bad, is that a demonization of an aspect of feminine sexuality? I can’t wait to discuss this one… but will stop for now, and go chew my English muffin and think about all this.
Dee said on 09.14.05 at 08:44 PM • [link]
—- The less unkind critic would point out that many women secretly want to drive a handsome man crazy for love of their irresistible little selves, even though such behavior in real life would probably result in panicked calls to the police and restraining orders.
Well, women fantasise about this but if it were a reality it would disturbing and quite unpleasant. This is because the fantasy is striped of its unpleasantness and instead taps into our desires. Kids enjoy stories about children who have to go on grand adventures because they have no one who cares about them. In reality children without caring gaurdians live pretty unhappy lives. Yet children’s lit is filled with this fantasy - the fantasy of ridding oneself of adult supervision and control.
The rape fantasy is also about someone else taking charge and giving up the control. The most total way to give up control is to have it taken rather than to freely give it over. The person who is raped is left with only the sensation. Of course in a fantasy context this sensation will be pleasurable (applying a broad and subjective defnition of ‘pleasure’).
There’s really nothing wrong with this in my opinion so long as readers acknowledge this is fantasy.
I don’t really understand the conflicts within the romance reader community. I would assume there was enough room for all kinds of preferences. If you like weaker more traditionally feminine heroines, buy those books. Don’t read about the go getters with senstive love interests.
Why all the fuss? Isn’t the pool big enough to share?
Lynn M said on 09.14.05 at 08:45 PM • [link]
Fascinating discussion. In fact, if this response turns out to be as long as I think it is going to be, I should turn it into a reply blog-entry.
I agree with Sarah about the use of rape to establish the hero as a certain type of character. In order to be a dominant alpha male, people had to quake in his presence, horses had to gentle at his harshly uttered command, and women had to succumb to his will whether they wanted to or not. And since the stereotypical romance heroine of the age was fiesty - as demonstrated by her unwillingness to fall into the hero’s bed immediately - rape was the end result.
Back in the day, when I read those books, I never minded them. I took them for what they were, and since no other options were available, it never occured to me to question the propriety of it all. Today we’ve become so much more aware and there are so many choices out there, I think readers have spoken in their desire for writers to show male dominance in other ways, returning rape back to role of the dispicable thing that it really is.
Too, I do believe - and this is going to earn me some grief - that if you write a historical about pirates or conquerors, to imply that rape was a part of daily life is realistic. Of course, romance novels didn’t portray rape as simply “to the victor go the spoils” but as a stepping stone to love, so it was more a matter of using historical accuracy as a crutch. If someone today was trying to portray a historical situation with as much accuracy as possible, and the hero raped the heroine simply as a matter of that’s what men who won the war did and not because he couldn’t resist the heroine’s appeal (as in, she could have been butt-ugly and he still would have raped her because he’d been at sea for six months), I might be able to buy it when much later, he actually falls in love with her.
I’m of the mind that if a writer wants to use the bodice-ripper scenario in her story, no biggie. I don’t have to read it if it’s not my cup of tea. I don’t, however, ascribe any ulterior motives like the oppression of women or the glorification of rape. It’s just a fictional story. Heck, there are a lot of movies out there with heroes who walk the line but that I cheer for all the same. I don’t want to know them in real life; I want them locked up in jail. But it’s okay if they stay on the screen.
What I’m having trouble with is the rumor/rule/guideline/nonsense that readers refuse to read romance novels with any rape in it at all. I’m talking about real bad guys doing real bad things. Things for which they eventually get punished as they should be. Sometimes that is what makes the villain the villain. He raped the heroine, and now he’s the bad guy. Or because he’s the bad guy, when he had the heroine in his clutches, he raped her.
Can’t this simply be another tool in the writer’s tool box of dispicable behaviour perpetrated by evil bad guys?
Lisa Wong said on 09.14.05 at 08:47 PM • [link]
Wow. I remember that post from Jean McSpadden on RRA from what feels like eons ago. It broke my young, impressionable mind.
I can’t admit to being politically correct and saying that rape romances disgust me. I won’t say they’re a huge favorite of mine either. It depends on my mood. In my fantasies, a little BDSM isn’t a bad thing, and romances fill in some of that. That’s how rape romances fit in for me. They fulfill a fantasy. I won’t even begin to analyze why some women have this fantasy—a lot’s been hashed out in these comments—but some do. Hit any port or kink site, and it’s a prevalent theme. I don’t think it’s unhealthy if you understand the difference between reality and fantasy.
Robin said on 09.14.05 at 08:49 PM • [link]
Although I may be wrong—as I often am—I don’t believe that the rapist Romance hero is as dead as many here seem to. In fact, I think he’s making a comeback, albeit in somewhat more subtle form in certain cases.
Just off the top of my head, I can recall that Catherine Coulter’s Rosehaven, published within the past five years, features a rapist hero, as does Sasha Lord’s 1994 Into a Wild Wood, which I have not read. Here’s a snippet from the review on TRR, though:
“While the cover copy and the quotes from reviews on Lord’s first book are enticing, the first brutal sex scene between Malalia and Brogan was a shocking change of pace, rape thinly disguised as vigorous sex.”
Anne Stuart’s newest book contains a scene that even Stuart has admitted is angry forced sex, and I also think her recent book Into The Fire contains an almost rapist hero. Judith Ivory’s 2001 book, Untie My Heart (which I adored, by the way), contains a sex scene on a chair which many readers (not me, though) insist is forced sex, and both of Christina Dodd’s books, A well Pleasured Lady and a Well-Favored Gentleman, published in the late 90s, contain VERY controversial forced seduction/rape scenes.
I have not done a systematic study of Romance novels containing rape and published within the last ten years, but I do wonder whether in the mid and lower level series pubs there is more overt rape than in those books reviewed by say AAR or even TRR.
I think it would also be interesting to compare overt rapes and so-called forced seduction scenes to see the points of overlap and divergence for some readers. My own personal distinction is as follows: consent runs along a continuum, and the point at which the heroine no longer consents, but WE (the reader) must consent in her place is the point at which seduction (forced or not, since for me, the force only continues until the heroine consents) becomes force/rape.
sherryfair said on 09.14.05 at 08:56 PM • [link]
Here is my weird theory. Bear with me.
I think the rape fantasy’s prevalence had to do with what was going on at the time regarding women’s notions of their own sexuality. Many of them had internalized messages of shame and dirtyness. (Hell, some of us still have.) And yet the culture was urging them to enjoy their sexuality, to be more open about expressing it. So they turned to the rape fantasy as some sort of dramatization of these conflicting feelings. The hero and heroine were, in some way, not separate people, in some reader’s minds. They were not wholly free-standing characters. They were, at times, and in part, manifestations of this subconscious struggle, acting out the warring female feelings and cultural messages: fear of enjoyment, forcing of enjoyment, acceptance of enjoyment.
To bolster my theory, I’ll mention the frequency with which sex scenes today are written from the extremely subjective viewpoint of the hero. I think this is not simply done to get into the hero’s head, but also to get into the hero’s body. This enables a reader to be both giver and recipient of pleasure, to reconcile the two roles, active and passive. It reflects women’s more aggressive role and acceptance of mutuality in sexual moments. And it’s a much more peaceful resolution than the old rape fantasy, where the rapist was definitely the Other and such acceptance was a struggle.
I fear I have just written something unintelligible. And I also think there were other factors feeding into it, but that’s the main one, in my mind.
SB Sarah said on 09.14.05 at 08:59 PM • [link]
On the contrary, Sherry, I think that is an incisive and thought-provoking bit of analysis right there. I’d never thought of it that way, as an outward manifestation of women’s feelings of sexual conflict. But now that you’ve pointed out that, indeed, a good number of these scenes take place from the POV of the hero/rapist, your theory is very intriguing.
If the reader identifies with both the hero and the heroine, then the rape scene may indeed be a method of reconciling the often-at-odds politics surrounding women’s evolving sexual selves.
Lynn M said on 09.14.05 at 09:02 PM • [link]
Sherryfair, I think your theory is brilliant. It makes perfect sense. You are right about that time being a time of such conflicting messages. Good girls “didn’t”, but now comes the message that doing it doesn’t make you a bad girl. In fact, it’s your right to not only do it but to enjoy it. So who do you listen to? A lifetime of being told not to or the current trends telling you to go for it?
You say no with your mouth, like a good girl should, you fight back with all your might, like a good girl should, and then you enjoy it because the man is a sex god. You have your cake and you eat it too.
But today, we have much more of the good girls “do” that we don’t need any help in sorting it out. Well, some of us do, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue better saved for my therapist. *g*
Lynn M said on 09.14.05 at 09:10 PM • [link]
Candy, Robin’s reference to Anne Stuart’s Black Ice (I think that’s the one she meant) in which the hero borderline rapes/forcefully seduces the heroine made me think of a question for you.
Seems one of the hardest things for you to accept is the hero who rapes and then never shows remorse for his behaviour. He never seems to understand that what he did was wrong.
What are your thoughts on a hero such as Sebastien, who knows he’s no good, that he’s a bad person who is bound to hurt the heroine and even goes so far as to tell her as much? Yes, he “sort of” rapes her, and yes, he regrets it in that he knows it isn’t the right thing to do. But the writer hasn’t set him up to be a really great guy with a heart of gold who just happens to make some bad choices in the beginning of his relationship.
I’m curious to know what you think. Are these types equally as bad?
sherryfair said on 09.14.05 at 09:10 PM • [link]
(Well, it’s a relief that it made sense to someone else, when written out.)
I’m not entirely satisfied with it as the only explanation, however. I think other points people have made here about notions of gender and the alpha male contribute to it as well. I’m nodding my head while reading many of these posts. What we’re finding out here is that rape fantasy’s prevalence and persistence is a really complex subject and there are multiple reasons.
Robin said on 09.14.05 at 09:23 PM • [link]
Sherry, I agree with so much of what you’ve said, and think you were very articulate, as usual. Like you, I have always believed that the reader identifies with both the hero and the heroine in rape/FS scenes. That’s because I think at core, rape fantasy in Romance is about empowerment of women, whether that’s by embodying the feminine power of martyrdom (and if you think being a martyr isn’t about power, think about those Catholic saints), embracing the sexual power of being somehow sexually liberated by the hero, converting the terror of being physically violated into an act which ultimately becomes one of deep love, transforming the threat of being victimized into an experience of “letting go” and losing control under tightly controlled circumstances, or, as, Candy said, taming the beast.
I also think it’s important to note that there may be a big difference between the rape fantasy that women have in their heads and the representation of rape in a Romance—perhaps sometimes they are the same thing, but perhaps not.
And also, even though I believe that the rape fantasy in Romance is all about the co-opting of power, I’m not sure it’s always successful, and am not convinced it actually subverts the patriarchal conventions it sometimes seems to want to (and in some cases clearly doesn’t want to). But even in the examples Candy illustrates and goes through very logically and rigorously, I kept feeling power for the heroine, whether it’s gained through taming the hero, letting go of her responsibilities and feelings of being overburdened, or basking in the glory of being irresistable. In fact, I’ve been struck by what I see as a difference between freedom, which I don’t see as functioning in the Romance rape, and power, which I obviously do.
Great post, Candy—very cogent and thoughtful and provocative.
Okay, I’m going back to my cave, er Con Law homework, now.
Candy said on 09.14.05 at 09:43 PM • [link]
“I don’t really understand the conflicts within the romance reader community. I would assume there was enough room for all kinds of preferences.”
I agree with that. Like I said, no matter how disasteful I find rapist heroes, I would never agree to define romance in such a way that it would exclude them or do anything that would restrict a woman’s access to books with these sorts of heroes and stories.
But I think the urge to make people conform is also very strong. The whole “I find it repugnant, and all right-minded people should find it repugnant too!” mindset is pretty commonplace. Sexual taboos are especially strong, and sometimes that urge to make everyone conform only to accepted standards of sexuality spills over into legislation (sodomy laws or laws that ban sex toys, for example). Assorted squabbles—and some have gotten really heated—in Romancelandia about what is and isn’t acceptable in romance are just a manifestation of that, in my opinion.
Sherryfair: that was an awesome analysis.
Lilith: I totally agree with you about how asking questions and discussing this openly is even more important than arriving at any sort of definitive answer. Mostly because I think in this case, any sort of definitive answer is pretty much impossible. Good points about our underlying assumptions re: a woman’s autonomy over her body, assumptions that aren’t shared by pretty big chunks of the world population.
Lynn: I haven’t read Black Ice yet, though I have it in my TBR pile. I’ll have to read it to let you know what I think about Sebastien in particular. I’ve liked Anne Stuart’s asshole heroes, however, every one, even the really iffy ones in Moonrise and Shadow Lover. And let’s face it, much as I love her books, her heroes tend to run along the same mold.
But in general, a hero who’s self-aware and who feels bad about what he’s done, even if he’s a jerk in general, will usually get more leeway from me. It’s the unaware asshole—or worse, the asshole who does shitty things because he believes he’s doing something good, that he’s just trying to tame the heroine, not change her—drive me apeshit because an awareness of how fucked-up his actions are go a long ways towards ensuring better future behavior.
But then that’s coming from my viewpoint, and from my viewpoint, that shit’s fucked up, even for a fantasy. Other viewpoints say that this behavior is perfectly acceptable, especially for a fantasy.
“Too, I do believe - and this is going to earn me some grief - that if you write a historical about pirates or conquerors, to imply that rape was a part of daily life is realistic.”
Daily life? I’m not so sure about daily life. Rape has always been viewed as a crime, if only a property crime instead of crime against a person. I agree that in times of war, rape would be pretty common once a village or town was overrun, but then there’s the sticky wicket of how realistic it would be for a woman to fall in love with the man who not only is an invader and the killer of her family/clan/people, but her rapist and captor. If we want to be realistic about portraying rape, then why not be realistic about her being unable to fall in love with somebody so brutal? The truth is, most historical romances aren’t remotely accurate, from the way the time periods are portrayed to the word usage to the dynamics between men and women. All these books can do is provide a reasonable facsimile—some facismiles being more reasonable than others, depending on the author and the reader. That’s why the whole “it’s historically accurate to include rape” bugs me. Men who would not rape, whatever the provocation, existed back then as they do today, though I understand that legal and societal consequences of being rapist are more severe nowadays than they used to be.
Beth said on 09.14.05 at 09:48 PM • [link]
Here’s my theory, coming on the heels of barely glancing at what anyone else has had to say:
Rape fantasy is a fantasy because it’s written as such. Write a real rape, and no women (or at least extremely few) would ever like to read and certainly wouldn’t fantasize about it. I grew up reading the romances that featured the rapist-hero, and the rape scene was invariably presented as very loud protesting and wistful longings of “oh, he’s ruining what would otherwise be beautiful experience” and of course, she’s aroused against her will. But the scenes involve no knife held to her throat, no giving herself up to the belief that the episode will end in her own death, no screaming and begging and crying and desperation, no looking down and seeing herrself covered in her own blood. Et cetera.
Take away the reality of it, and it stops being about rape at all and becomes just a morality play of sorts. It’s all in the language. Or at least that’s what I think.
THIS! Christine said on 09.14.05 at 09:50 PM • [link]
I think Sherry hit the nail on the head. As always the social climate of the time played a huge role in the prevelance of rape in the social consciousness.
It wasn’t simply romance novels, it was police dramas, soap operas, movie of the week.. it was everywhere in our fictional society, raising consciousness of what constitutes rape, and it’s effect.
Placing rape in an historical context (where women often didn’t own their bodies) I believe helped separate the difference between then and now… As i recall it was the late sixties early seventies when marital rape became illegal, (bear with me on the dating of this, as it was different in other countries), and there was a bit of a dust up about that… I can even remember my mother all wide eyed dismissive of the notion saying.. ‘how can a husband rape his wife?’ because that marriage certificate was in essence the legal right/agreement to have sex, ergo, no saying no.
We’re seeing the same thing happening now with pedophelia. Sex with children=bad… even in an historical context where marriages occurred much earlier in pubescence than now.
X
Jenica said on 09.14.05 at 09:56 PM • [link]
I have to agree with Beth. (Though I agree with a lot of what’s been written…)
I’m lucky enough not to have personal knowledge, but when I think ‘rape’, I think of the rape scene from the Sopranos, in the stairwell. Vivid, traumatic, and horrible. Which is a far cry from what you read in most romance-novel rape scenes.
It’s fantasy. But it’s fantasy with a lot of social and cultural baggage, which is why I’m going to keep reading these comments, eagerly.
mapletree7 said on 09.14.05 at 11:28 PM • [link]
What’s the difference between forced seduction and rape?
I don’t mean that rhetorically.
Darlene Marshall said on 09.14.05 at 11:44 PM • [link]
I agree with Beth that the reality of sexual assault is very different from the fantasy portrayal in romance novels, and I also believe readers are smart enough to know the difference and to see plot devices for what they are.
Tonda said on 09.15.05 at 12:10 AM • [link]
I guess my glitch is that I don’t like rape-fantasy romance. I don’t want to read them. I don’t want to spend my $ on them. But frequently there is no way to know that that’s what you’re getting until you’re well into the book (and then it goes sailing across the room, and it’s all I can do not to take the book back to the store and demand my $ back).
Romantica and Erotica books are very up front about their kink/content, but Romances aren’t. So I end up feeling duped. Happened with the only Coulter book I ever bought, and I’ll never buy another. All I have to do is see her name on the cover and I get the hebbies (I can hear that one hero in my head saying defensively, “But I used cream.†*SHUDDER*).
As I said earlier, I guess I find the rape/dom fantasy more palatable in Romantica/Erotica where I A) know it’s coming, and B) I’m not looking for a HEA. I read a book from LooseID a few months back that was heavy on the rape/dom and I just remember thinking the whole time, “What an asshole, why is she sticking around?†The sex scenes were hot, but the story line/romance was implausible (for me). I just can’t get my head around the idea that these women like the hero’s behavior, or even that they can forgive it.
I did find it interesting that I don’t read any of the authors that were mentioned as having written rape-fantasy books in the last decade (with the mistake of that one Coulter book), guess I’ve been lucky. I have no problem, per se, with these books being written, published, and purchased, I just don’t want to personally partake (and I don’t want to be cornered by any more readers and asked about how I manage to write my own rape scenes; Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr).
Lynn M said on 09.15.05 at 12:20 AM • [link]
Mapletree, I think that’s the $60,000 question when you ask it in context of romance novels.
I would argue that all “rape” done by heroes in romance novels is simply “forced seduction” on an extreme end of the scale. Because, like Jenica said, rape in romance novels done by the hero is never the Sopranos version: brutal, beaten woman, call the police/rape kit type that I think most people would associate with the word “rape”. Instead it seems to be the heroine saying no to the hero, he persists, and even if she continues to say no and to physically resist, eventually she ends up responding. Usually that is a big part of her angst - she hates him and herself for enjoying any part of the incident. You know, that old “her body betrayed her” line.
It seems “forced seduction” is used to describe the scenario when the heroine denies that she has any attraction to the hero. It’s that “her mouth says no but her body says yes” deal, and once the hero forces the issue, she usually capitulates. Afterwards she may have regrets, but she does participate in some small degree (returning kisses, moaning and groaning at his touch, etc.)
I’ll be interested to see other definitions and distinctions.
Angela H said on 09.15.05 at 12:57 AM • [link]
Tonda, I also immediately thought of that Coulter book where the “hero” uses cream so it wasn’t rape. I think it was a Viking book, can’t remember the name. Gee, who knew that lube = consent? Nasty.
Tonda said on 09.15.05 at 01:01 AM • [link]
The Coulter book I read was either Regency or early Victorian, so not the same one. Maybe the lube = consent is something she used more than once. Ewwwwwwwwwwwww!
sherryfair said on 09.15.05 at 01:10 AM • [link]
Tonda, I am almost certain the Coulter book you read was “The Heir” (which I think is a reworking of an earlier Regency, “Lord Deverill’s Heir,” though I am less sure of that, because I only read the later reworking).
I also remember Ryder Sherbrooke seizing a jar of cream and putting it to a similar use on the heroine Sophia in “The Hellion Bride.” In this case, I think it wasn’t as egregious as the scene in “The Heir.” Still, not among my favorite books.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 01:18 AM • [link]
“I agree with Beth that the reality of sexual assault is very different from the fantasy portrayal in romance novels, and I also believe readers are smart enough to know the difference and to see plot devices for what they are.”
I know there are people who still draw those simplistic one to one connections between criminal rape and sexual assault and romance rape/FS, but I think that the kind of debate going on here, for example, is more about WHY the device of rape rather than something else. I don’t think it’s a random choice, in other words. And I don’t think that all readers who have difficulty with the device think it’s giving men permission to rape women in real life or suggesting that women want to be raped in real life. But boy oh boy, outside of the rape fantasy, I’m still kind of bowled over by how many near rapes, villain initiated rapes, rape memories, and other forms of sexual violence seem to abound in Romance, and I’m literally fascinated by that fact. Even Lisa Cach’s recent book Dream of Me has a young girl raped by the villain, and the hero has to bring her sexual healing (in fact, sexual healing is an overt theme of the novel). Jo Goodman’s new book features a heroine who was a sex slave, a theme picked up from a couple of her Compass Club novels.
While the rape fantasy doesn’t work for me, I think it’s use in Romance speaks to the struggles women have had in trying to appreciate their sexuality without apology, feel empowered in their sexual choices, and create a safe zone in which they can indulge certain fantasies that are edgy precisely becuase they have a real-world counterpart that’s dangerous and terrifying and potentially lethal, if not permanently damaging emotionally (I’m referring to the real-life counterpart here, not the fantasy).
The email I sent Candy contained a link to a site that was posted on AAR a while back during a rape discussion there: http://www.takeninhand.com/node/216 I wa.s afraid of posting it in the other discussion we had recently because that topic wasn’t specifically on rape. To be perfectly honest, this site leaves me unsettled, despite my adamant defense of women’s right to sexual freedom through any fantasy that turns them on and doesn’t involve real-life harm to anyone or anything else. Even though I see the rape fantasy as potentially empowering to Romance heroines and reades alike, this site baffles me a little bit, and it suggests, at least to me (although I may just be not thinking this through carefully or effectively) that the use of rape in a genre by and for women is a really complicated phenomenon. Whenever I personally think about it, I get kind of full-up intellectually and emotionally fairly quickly, simply because the permutations and implications are so diverse and multi-layered.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 01:20 AM • [link]
“Tonda, I am almost certain the Coulter book you read was “The Heir†(which I think is a reworking of an earlier Regency, “Lord Deverill’s Heir,†though I am less sure of that, because I only read the later reworking).”
It must be one of her favorite acoutrements, then, since she employs it in Rosehaven, as well. That book infuriated me on many levels, but probably the worst thing, IMO, was the way the other women of the household made it clear to the heroine that she deserved what she got because she was not humble enough or submissive enough to her husband.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 01:36 AM • [link]
Wait a second: HOW MANY BOOKS did Catherine Coulter write that used cream as lubricant? Because Sarah told me about Midsummer Magic, in which the heroine’s defloration was performed with the assistance of dairy products.
I’ll write some more about forced seduction when I get home from work. I do think there’s a difference between forced seduction and romance novel rape, but right now I don’t know if I categorize forced seductions as such only because they’re rapes I can stomach and forgive the hero for, or if I actually have some more-or-less objective criteria that differentiate it from actual rape.
“I know there are people who still draw those simplistic one to one connections between criminal rape and sexual assault and romance rape/FS, but I think that the kind of debate going on here, for example, is more about WHY the device of rape rather than something else. I don’t think it’s a random choice, in other words. And I don’t think that all readers who have difficulty with the device think it’s giving men permission to rape women in real life or suggesting that women want to be raped in real life.”
Bingo, Robin. Cut to the heart of the matter. Beth and assorted other people are right, romance novel rape is very much stylized, with most of the icky parts either glossed over or completely missing. But it’s still quite clearly sexual assault—or it is to my mind, anyway.
Evie said on 09.15.05 at 01:37 AM • [link]
What a fantastic discussion! I think the commentaries are brilliant, and am especially struck by Sherryfair’s analysis. I’d agree that the mixed messages of those eras were particularly problematic, but I’d be interested to hear whether folks feel that cultural attitudes about female sexuality (and appetites in general) have really become significantly less ambivalent. This may seem a bizarre tangent, but I’m a dietitian specializing in eating disorders, and it seems like society is more ambivalent then ever about female appetites - and at a time when we are being told that we have unprecedented freedom to make our own choices. If that’s as true about sex as it is about food (and I suspect it’s pretty close, though we seem to be going through a particularly insane patch with the food), then issues of conflicted sexuality and feeling guilty about wanting what you really want in bed would seem to be alive and well in 2005.
Katy said on 09.15.05 at 01:41 AM • [link]
Coulter books have driven me crazy. Not just the amount of forced sex/seduction but the constant re-canning of characters. All females are either big bitches or super-feisty heroines, all males are big, buff and confused about women, though of course they are manly studs who ahve ‘pierced’ any number of trollops(or whatever you want to call them). Feistiness is always in the same flavour, regardless of country or time period. I have read most of her books, and now I can’t stand to go back to any of them, or read any more. Argh! I hate when writers do that.
Miki said on 09.15.05 at 01:42 AM • [link]
I think it’s true that there’s not a LOT of this out there in mainstream romance/romantic suspense. Not like in the 70s and the 80s.
But I think that forced seduction/dominance is a huge seller in the romantica/erotica market.
Like Tonda, I don’t get the appeal. Unlike Tonda, I don’t even get the appeal in erotica.
I agree that, at least in the 70s-80s, the rape fantasy did “solve” the good-girl problem - she didn’t agree, so she didn’t have to “own” the choice to have sex. And, even better, it was really love, so she wasn’t even a closet slut - it was TRUE LOVE.
My theory - and I suspect it will be an unpopular one - for why it’s so popular in romantica/erotica is prompted by things I hear from women I work with. Mostly younger women, by the way.
They complain that they wish they could stay home, didn’t have to work for a living, could find a sugar-daddy to take care of them in the style they’d like to be accustomed to. They long for the 50s ... well as long as they still have the right to make personal choices, naturally.
As a child of the 60s, it makes me crazy (I believe, Candy, you used the word “apeshit”) to hear this kind of talk. I really don’t think they understand the dynamic involved when you give another person total control over your life and livelihood. (And who’ll probably trade you in 10 years from now for a younger, firmer model).
So, for these women who wish for “simpler days”, the dominance/capture/forced seduction fantasy with the alpha-asshole hero gives her “permission” to have a lifestyle that isn’t exactly PC to claim to want.
Or maybe it’s simpler and it’s just their age. Over the years, I’ve known too, too many women in abusive relationships (physically or emotionally) to ever see the dominance romance as anything but abuse. Hell, I liked Luke and Laura - when I was 19 years old. Today, I’d want to string him up by his b…. well, you know what I mean.
celeste said on 09.15.05 at 01:48 AM • [link]
One theory I have is that, for a few women, the rape fantasy is about not wanting to take responsibility for their bodies and their sexuality. Instead of admitting to herself that she intends to have sex with a man and fully owning all the implications of that, she puts herself into a situation where things will end up in such a way that she can’t be “blamed” for it. “Oh, I had too much to drink, and things just sort of happened.” “He was so forceful that he just overpowered me and seduced me against my will.”
FWIW, I do NOT think that the vast majority of women who are date raped fall into this category. I know plenty of women who were date raped who would’ve cut off their legs with a dull, rusted knife instead of walking out of their homes that night, if they’d known that they’d be raped by a friend or acquaintance.
With regard to the appeal of “reforming” a rapist hero, I think it may also have something to do with the woman proving to herself how extraordinary she is. If she can turn around a man who obviously has so little regard for her as a person, then she must be the shit, right? A corollary to this is the appeal of being able to win a man away from a woman everyone acknowledges as extremely beautiful, interesting, wealthy, sexy, etc. If you can get HER man, then how hot must YOU be? I’ve read a number of books where it seemed to me that the woman was far more interested in “proving” herself than she was actually in love with the hero.
I personally find the whole forced seduction/rape thing so repulsive that I will, in effect, boycott an author who has a scene like that in any of her books. And I say this as a person who has been known to enjoy some BDSM novels. BDSM isn’t rape—everybody’s there because he or she wants to be.
I would never advocate censoring books that have rapist heroes, but I’m certainly not going to support them with my book-buying dollars.
Stef2 said on 09.15.05 at 01:51 AM • [link]
Robin, thanks for the link. I think.
As one whose life has been personally touched by rape - violent, abusive and hurtful, which I believe categorizes all rapes (no, not me, but someone very close to me) I find this so repugnant, I feel the need to go take a shower.
I’ve seen the fallout of rape, up close and personal, and it’s not pretty. Just reading the title of that woman’s piece - Rape is a Gift - made me nauseous. I’d love to throw up on her shoes.
I’m a middle-aged wife who’s been having sex pretty much the same way for a lotta years. Maybe I’m too uptight to be very adventuresome, or maybe it’s a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. To each his own, and all that - but using the word ‘rape’ in the context of pleasurable sex - seriously, I have to go vomit now. It’s reprehensible at best and damn close to criminal at worst.
She proposes that this is to be done between consenting adults - doesn’t that make it not rape? Merely role-playing? I found some of the responses interesting - one chick insisted that she would love to be raped. But only by someone she loves and trusts. WTF?
When I think of rape, I think of my up close and personal knowledge of the aftermath - pain, blood and shame and a whole laundry list of terrible things, like scars to the psyche and the soul. If this woman got what she says she wants, I suspect she wouldn’t roll over afterward with a happy sigh of contentment. She’d be in therapy.
Man, this really punched my buttons. Forgive me for going off about it. I’m sitting here shaking my head in disbelief. And I have a certain sadness. The same one I always get when I see a side to human nature that repels me.
Gail said on 09.15.05 at 02:11 AM • [link]
“I do wonder whether in the mid and lower level series pubs there is more overt rape than in those books reviewed by say AAR or even TRR.”
Are you talking about series publications like the Harlequin/Silhouette category books? Desire, Superromance, Presents—that sort of thing?
I don’t read the Presents line at all, because of the tendency toward asshole-ness of the average Presents hero. I don’t know whether there is any overt rape in those books, but those guys are the sort who could be rapist heros. They tend to be the “brutes who need the taming touch of a woman’s love” sort more so than the heros of other lines.
I don’t read much in the Blaze line. The ones I have read focus very much on consensual sex and the woman’s desire for sexual adventure.
As far as I know, the other lines are pretty adamant about no rape fantasies.
I do find it very interesting that Ellora’s Cave doesn’t want any “femdom” submissions because they “don’t sell.” If there are going to be any dominance games, the man better be the dominant.
celeste said on 09.15.05 at 02:16 AM • [link]
Gail said:
“I do find it very interesting that Ellora’s Cave doesn’t want any “femdom†submissions because they “don’t sell.†If there are going to be any dominance games, the man better be the dominant.”
They’ve bought a few books with female dominants, though. I was just reading one of Joey Hill’s the other day. Is this policy a new thing at EC?
Gail said on 09.15.05 at 02:24 AM • [link]
“They’ve bought a few books with female dominants, though. I was just reading one of Joey Hill’s the other day. Is this policy a new thing at EC?”
I guess so. Or maybe it’s just a new project/“line” they were starting. I read just last week—and I can’t tell you where because I don’t remember—a forwarded e-mail about a call for submissions from EC with that line about “No Fem Dom” in it. I didn’t read the submission requirements too closely, because I’m doing good to get my current projects written. Don’t need any new ones.
Becca said on 09.15.05 at 03:36 AM • [link]
another angle on rape/FS fantasies - not sure if this has been covered yet or not.
There are two levels of power flow in these fantasies: overt and covert, physical and emotional. In the overt, physical, power-flow, the man overpowers the woman, forces her to confront her own sexuality and her enjoyment of it.
In the covert power flow, however, the woman overpowers the man: she forces him to become emotionally dependent on her (fall in Luurrvvveee), forces him to give up his Wicked Ways and become domesticated.
In the rape/FS fantasy, while he wins in the short term, she wins in the long run.
Becca said on 09.15.05 at 03:38 AM • [link]
ps: I can’t read Catherine Coulter’s romances either. I rather like her early FBI series, but they’re getting boring now. Haven’t read her latest one yet, however: I’m on a Crusie kick.
Selah March said on 09.15.05 at 04:25 AM • [link]
“FWIW, I do NOT think that the vast majority of women who are date raped fall into this category. I know plenty of women who were date raped who would’ve cut off their legs with a dull, rusted knife instead of walking out of their homes that night, if they’d known that they’d be raped by a friend or acquaintance.”
Of course. In hindsight, anyone would want to take back the “date” that led to the rape…IF they knew it was rape.
But in 1972, they weren’t calling it that. Hell, they weren’t calling it that in my hometown in 1982, either—not even when the victim was underage.
Back then, the average woman who pressed charges against a man she’d seen socially—especially if she’d seen him more than once, or had invited him into her home, or gone into HIS home, or sat in a parked car with him—had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it as far as a courtroom.
So you learned to rationalize. “What happened to me wasn’t rape. I WAS NOT RAPED.” If not rape, then what was it? A forceful seduction? Overwhelming passion? His dominant, lusty nature getting the better of both of you?
Today we call it an assault, because that’s what it is. Back then, we weren’t permitted such truths, so we came up with pretty stories. Maybe some of them made it all the way to the pages of a few mass market paperbacks.
It’s a theory, though, as I said, it probably accounts for only a small portion of the phenomenon.
sherryfair said on 09.15.05 at 04:47 AM • [link]
OT, sort of: Candy, the lubricant of choice used in Coulter’s “The Heir” and in “The Hellion Bride” ought to have been spelled “creme,” the moisturizing product, rather than “cream,” the dairy product. The heroes both get out a little jar from a bureau drawer during the scenes in question. I can’t give you the exact passage. The books are stored away, in boxes, since I don’t read them often. (And no wonder.)
cb said on 09.15.05 at 04:48 AM • [link]
A few random works come to mind:
Johanna Lindsay’s “Prisoner of My Desire” (1991) is an interesting twist on the rape issue here. ((God, how I loved this book when it came out. Found it terribly romantic and sexy. And I very possibly still would.))
Margaret Atwood wrote a wonderful short story called “Rape Fantasies” which is a great exploration of women and fantasy, rape and romanticism - with humorous bits as well! I highly reccommend it. It can be found in the story collection “Dancing Girls”.
Sunita said on 09.15.05 at 06:05 AM • [link]
What a great discussion. I just have one comment prompted by Sherryfair’s excellent insight about the effects of social norms and issues on what we look for in our novels. While I agree with the reasons people have given for the enduring popularity of rape and forced-seduction scenes, I think that we need to consider that it’s not always about the sex itself. That is, sex is not only about sex, it often represents something else (security, adventure, etc.). Rape fantasies aren’t just about not taking responsibility for sex, they might be about not taking responsibility for having to make certain choices about your life. Feminism and equal rights for women gave us a lot more freedom of choice, but it took away the ability to NOT make the choice. It’s not possible for most women to say, today, that they are not going to work most of their lives. No man (that I know of) can be forced to support his wife simply because she’s his wife. And I have met quite a few women who miss this, who still hope to find men with lucrative careers that will allow them not to work or to work on their own terms (with or without children in the picture). Maybe the submission fantasy is about the good part of the days when women didn’t have many options but men had to take care of them.
I could be totally off base, since I’ve always worked and never expected anyone to support me (and they haven’t, so my expectations have been met!).
And this is just about rape scenarios in romance novels, not the discussions on takeninhand.com. I have NO understanding of those points of view.
Sunita
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 06:29 AM • [link]
“I’d be interested to hear whether folks feel that cultural attitudes about female sexuality (and appetites in general) have really become significantly less ambivalent.”
In a word, Evie: NO! FWIW, I do think we’re in a transition period, though, in which women are starting to come forward and claim their sexuality for all its complexity, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near a critical mass of comfort with female sexuality.
“She proposes that this is to be done between consenting adults - doesn’t that make it not rape? Merely role-playing? I found some of the responses interesting - one chick insisted that she would love to be raped. But only by someone she loves and trusts. WTF?”
I could write for hours on this subject—which I won’t, to your relief, but I do think, Stef, that there’s a tremendous amount of conflating that goes on when we talk about rape v. rape fantasy, representations of rape in media v. rape fantasies, and forced seduction (which, IMO, is no longer force once the woman consents to the sex, which is critical for me to go along with this fantasy myself)v. rape v. rape fantasies. The thing that really struck me about that website was that some of the women really want the edgiest experience they can get—but within the realm of some certainty and safety. I don’t have a judgment about that either way, since I haven’t fully grasped what it’s all about yet. Actually, I’m more disturbed by the site’s overall “male led relationship” paradigm, which I have a hard time seeing as successfully empowering for the women involved. But who knows; like I said, I’m still groping for understanding.
celeste said on 09.15.05 at 06:52 AM • [link]
We’ve talked a lot about what might be going on in the woman’s head that would make a rape/FS scene exciting. I have a question about what’s up with the man. In real life, can a man who has forced sex on a woman be rehabilitated into good relationship material? Or is this something that only happens as a fantasy in a romance novel?
I ask because I honestly don’t believe that most pedophiles and serial rapists CAN be rehabilitated. They just keep doing what they do until they’re incarcerated or dead. Is the rapist hero in a romance novel cut from this same cloth? Is the same thing that’s fucked up in these other guys also fucked up in him?
In a BDSM novella I read recently, the heroine was conviced that her captor, the hero, was a serial rapist/murderer and would only keep her alive if she kept him satisfied sexually. The way he talked to her…man, it totally creeped me out. Sounded just like the things a rapist (or child molester) would say to his or her victims. It turned out that the hero wasn’t guilty of the crimes he’d been accused of committing, but after the things he said and did to the heroine, I just could not see him as hero material.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 07:21 AM • [link]
Okay, Candy, I have a question for you. What separates Anne Stuart’s heroes from the rapist heroes you don’t like? There’s a scene from Into the Fire, for example, where Jamie is trying to go to bed and Dillon is stalking her around a table, telling her to “get over it” when she says she doesn’t want to be touched, pinning her down so she can’t move, telling her she can go “safely to bed” as soon as she kisses him, telling her “You’re a sore trial to my self-control” and insisting that it’s “[her] fault” for going braless in front of him, a man she refers to as “immoral, dangerous, heartless, and cruel” (pp. 147-153). I’m not challenging you, just curious, because frankly, that scene creeped me out more than some rape scenes I’ve read, especially all the physical control and shifting of blame to the woman.
Maybe for you it’s ultimately the same as it is for me—it’s all in the context, how the author handles a given situation, what I can discern about her intent. In Dodd’s Well-Pleasured Lady, for example, she starts out characterizing her heroine as totally traumatized at her forced-seduction, but then all that trauma magically disappears (along with her virginity), and by the next day or something, she’s playing dominatrix to her new hubby. That use of FS was so vapid to me, so crudely in the service of mere titillation, that I hated hated hated it. But those scenes in To Have and To Hold? They are almost impossible for me to read, but Sebastian redeems himself for me, and that book is one of my most most most favorite. I trust Gaffney to THINK about what she’s writing and to examine the implications before she writes it. When authors MINDLESSLY use these devices, however, I seem to find them to be more problematic.
“Are you talking about series publications like the Harlequin/Silhouette category books? Desire, Superromance, Presents—that sort of thing?”
To be honest, Gail, I don’t know. The few and far between Harlequin/Silhouette’s I’ve read don’t fit the bill, but I’m wondering about some of the even more discount lines. The reason I ask is that I’ve by and large found rape in some of the most conservative Romances—or should I say the most traditional. I find that to be interesting, to say the least, and I wonder if, since the average Romance reader is considered much more conservative than I am, for example, that some of the lines pitched to that “average” reader contain heroes who tend to act in more manly ways (read aggressive, macho, and domineering, both physically and emotionally). It’s a question, really, not a provable connection that I can or have made.
Karen Scott said on 09.15.05 at 12:08 PM • [link]
I’ve recently come through a Cartherine Coulter read-fest, and it strikes me that she was overly fond of the forced seduction (rape) plot device.
I skimmed those particular scenes because I felt rather dirty reading them. Sigh.
Karen Scott said on 09.15.05 at 04:05 PM • [link]
Erm… that was meant to read Catherine, and not an Irish version of the name.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 04:43 PM • [link]
“Okay, Candy, I have a question for you. What separates Anne Stuart’s heroes from the rapist heroes you don’t like?”
Ha, I haven’t read Into the Fire, either. For what it’s worth, what you’ve described does sound incredibly creepy to me, but because I haven’t read it yet, I can’t say for sure what my reaction will be. I can’t think of a single Anne Stuart book I’ve read that features rape, and the forced seduction scenes have generally been pretty mild. Mostly of the “You know you want me, don’t try to resist” thing, and before you know it the (almost always shy, neurotic and slightly frigid) heroine is coming her pants off. There’s almost always some degree of reluctance in the first love scene between the hero and heroine in an Anne Stuart book, but most of the time it’s pretty obvious that the reluctance is gone before penetration ensues.
I think that’s what separates forced seduction from outright rape in romances—for me, anyway. Is the reluctance mostly gone before the nookifying begins for real? How does the heroine feel afterward?
But hey, evidence that forced seduction is just a euphemism for “rape I can stomach”: what Sebastian does to Rachel in To Have and To Hold. I’m not sure what separates it from rape, but I think a lot of it’s tied up with Rachel’s reaction to it, and Sebastian’s reaction, too. Rachel doesn’t feel raped, although she certainly feels violated on some level.
“We’ve talked a lot about what might be going on in the woman’s head that would make a rape/FS scene exciting. I have a question about what’s up with the man. In real life, can a man who has forced sex on a woman be rehabilitated into good relationship material?”
Good question. I think it would depend on the context. I can imagine a man who’s in many ways a good guy do something incredibly ill-advised while young and drunk, or under extreme circumstances (a war situation, for example). But a man who rapes in cold blood, or who’s completely unable to control his impulses even when sober—that, I’m not sure about. It smacks of pathology to me, and sexual pathologies are notoriously difficult to treat.
Raina_Dayz said on 09.15.05 at 04:47 PM • [link]
As far as that linked post on what I assume is a dominance website (I didn’t stick around), I do see it’s place in this discussion, but I think it’s really a very appalling misuse of the term rape. Any way you slice that, to my mind, it is consensual sex, and it is Not Cool to equate that with rape. In fact, that is my only problem with that article, is that she continues on and on with the whole ‘rape is a gift’ bs. It’s not rape if you make plans, jackass! Call it rape fantasy at least, to differentiate.
I can speak as a woman who loves the whole being dominated for pleasure thing, and that definitely must include a discussion beforehand. Any time there are plans made, the inclusion of safe-words, you’re in a safe place with your lover. You don’t have to be there. It’s not rape, it’s freaking playtime.
When I was 17 someone tried to rape me, and to this day I’m not sure he’s able to father children. I’m really not sure how it is that it that all that fits in with my current appetites, it’s probably deep and psychological, and for me, not worth digging for. But do I enjoy these things because it’s my way of taking back the power over the situation again and again? Very probably, and I’m ok with that.
I think there is alot of merit in the ideas presented here, particular the internal justification of the date-rape, and the mass female confusion with our changing sexual mores. (Wonderful post, Sherryfair). I’ve never had anything but aversion to the rape-romances, and Catherine Coulter, whenever we walk by her stacks in the bookstore, almost always gets a whispered ‘eww it’s the rape lady’ from me to my husband. The woman single-handedly put me off romances for 5 years!
I’m not sure if this post really furthers the discussion in any way, but this has all been fascinating to read. Y’all are making me want to go back to school.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 04:57 PM • [link]
>>“But I used cream.†<<
Oh, GAWD, Tonda. GAAAAWD! Yes, this is my fantasy of a perfect lover. One who needs cream to lube me up. Or creme. I dream about him every night.
Anybody ever heard the PJ Harvey song “Dry”? One of my favorite lines in a chorus. “You leave me. . . DRY.” The perfect insult, or apparently an irresistible lure to a real alpha man.
Vicki
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 05:02 PM • [link]
Speaking of unusual rape scenarios. . . Does everyone here remember the first time you read Outlander? *choke*, *GASP* Um, that was unexpected. Methinks this is no regular romance. If only that had happened to one of those rapist heroes, it would have been PERFECT! But not Jamie! Noooo! Not my sweet Jamie!
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 05:14 PM • [link]
There are two questions raised by this that I find fascinating: what’s the male aspect of this, and what exactly is rape about?
We’ve talked a lot about what might be going on in the woman’s head that would make a rape/FS scene exciting. I have a question about what’s up with the man. In real life, can a man who has forced sex on a woman be rehabilitated into good relationship material? Or is this something that only happens as a fantasy in a romance novel?
Would there be any man we know willing to answer that question? Probably not bloody likely, but I’d love to hear from any male lurkers about that question.
And #2, we’re assuming by and large that rape, rape fantasies, and fictional rape is about sex. I think a few people above have made the point that sometimes sex isn’t about sex, but I think it might be worthwhile to examine what else rape, rape fantasies, and fictional rape might be about. Like power, control, rule-breaking, anger… any thoughts?
BTW, I haven’t read any of the famous “cream” books, and now I’m wondering if I should. *retches*
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 05:20 PM • [link]
I don’t know if I am enough of an expert to speak to the difference between “forced seduction” and rape, but let me dare a guess: the need for the aformentioned lubricant?
I have never, never enjoyed the rapist hero books, but I’ll admit to the occassional forced seduction fantasy. I can even handle it in a romance novel if it’s done well. (And especially if it is the heroine seducing the hero, but that’s just a personal double standard.) Even better if it is just straight erotica. It’s easier not to have to believe in a happy ending when you’re reading a forced seduction.
But the rapist hero, aside from it being hard to believe a heroine could ever have respect for this man, or that he could ever have respect for the heroine. . . Someone mentioned that it’s hard to believe a rapist or child molester can ever be reformed. Exactly! What if this hero gets the hots for your new friend? “Sorry I raped your friend, sweetie, but she was completely irresistible. I know you understand.”
The rape scenario gets some people off, and that’s fine. But I like to think that most grown women understand that love—genuine happily-ever-after, let’s-get-married love—is about respect. RESPECT. It’s not just a hero who gets hard and wouldn’t want his arch-enemy to rape and kill you. Mmm. My hero.
Bleh.
Lynn M said on 09.15.05 at 05:43 PM • [link]
“And #2, we’re assuming by and large that rape, rape fantasies, and fictional rape is about sex.”
See, this is how I view the huge difference between real rape and romance-novel hero-as-rapist rape. From what I understand, real rape is not about sex in any way. It is about anger and violence and control. The rapist uses sex as a weapon just as he could use a gun or a knife. He’s not in it because he’s attracted to the woman or loves her and is frustrated because she’s refused him sexually or any of that. It’s a manifestation of rage and a sick need to control.
Whereas, it seems in most romance novel rape situations it is about sex. Perhaps there is some anger in it or a need by the hero to control a fiesty heroine, but sex is the motivating factor and the ultimate goal.
In a romance novel rape, the hero wants to have sex with the heroine, and if he needs to dominate her to make it happen, he will. Whearas with real rape, the villain needs to control the victim, and if he has to rape her, he will.
And I think this difference is key. Because real rape is horrible, brutal and unacceptable on any level you could argue it. Rapists should be locked up, no excuses accepted.
But romance-novel rape almost seems as if it is simply one form of sex-play, albeit one that isn’t very appetizing to most people. I see a spectrum ranging from agreed-upon dominance fantasies through forced seduction down to the end with actual rape. Seems like romance novel rapes fall somewhere between forced seduction and actual rape.
And I say this only about the romance novel rape carried out by supposed heroes that eventually end up in loving relationships. Anyone who believes real rape will eventually end up in a loving relationship (a la Luke and Laura in General Hospital) is buying the fantasy a little to seriously.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 05:50 PM • [link]
The rapist uses sex as a weapon just as he could use a gun or a knife. He’s not in it because he’s attracted to the woman or loves her and is frustrated because she’s refused him sexually or any of that. It’s a manifestation of rage and a sick need to control.
Whereas, it seems in most romance novel rape situations it is about sex. Perhaps there is some anger in it or a need by the hero to control a fiesty heroine, but sex is the motivating factor and the ultimate goal.
I would agree that rape is a crime of power, without reservation. I think domestic violence is the same species of crime, with its root cause being power instead of anger.
I would further agree that rape fantasies are about intimacy, rule-breaking, and sex itself.
But I’m hung up on fictional rape. The whole point of a fictional rape sequence is to point how what a bastard the hero is or how alluring the heroine is (maybe?) Is it about intimacy, is it abou woman as Siren, is it about men losing control and showing vulnerability, what is it about? I don’t think fictional rape is purely about sex; if it was, it would only show up in erotica (IMHO).
Mmmh. Must go drink coffee and think about this.
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 06:08 PM • [link]
Hi, all. I’ve never posted here before, though I’ve been lurking a while, and know some of the posters here (and of course, Candy!) from AAR. This topic has enticed me out of lurkdom, though.
I’ve been reading romances since my early teens in the early eighties, when hero/heroine rapes and forced seductions were par for the course. In those days, I was able to enjoy many of those books without thinking too much about the implications of my reading pleasure. Nowadays, I’m more picky, but I can still enjoy a well-written fantasy rape or forced seduction quite a bit. Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold is just about my favorite book in the romance genre, ever.
I love Sherryfair’s comment about the hero and heroine in romances also being manifestations of a subconscious struggle. In fact it always surprises me, in reading discussions on romance boards, how many people assume that it is the heroine, and only the heroine, with whom the reader identifies. I personally think there is also much reader identification with the hero.
And IMO in a forced seduction / rape fantasy the reader can identify with both the heroine upon whom sexual pleasure and ultimately, a happily ever after ending is being forced, and the hero, who has tremendous power and freedom in that scenario. One gets to be at once the “good girl” and the “bad boy,” and that can be a satisfying thing.
Let me go on a little tangent here about “bad boys” in general. Not just rapists, but others who break the law or misbehave, including outlaws, con artists, assassins and rakes. They abound in romances, and elsewhere in popular culture, and I think one of the reasons they fascinate us is because of the freedom they represent.
I think part of the appeal of the forced seduction / rape fantasy lies in the fact that it gives readers the ability to identify with another such character who doesn’t care about the rules, who just takes what he wants. Because as women we are raised to always care about the rules, and almost never to just take what we want.
At the same time that one can indulge in that fantasy, one can also identify with the heroine, who is so completely chaste and “good” that she refuses even the hero (who, in the world of the book, is often supposed to represent all things desirable in a man). The hero goes after all he wants regardless of the consequences, and the heroine refuses what she (in the fantasy world of the book, NOT in reality) secretly wants. In this way the two characters allow the reader to have both freedom and moral high ground, simultaneously.
All this is somewhat disturbing to me, but I think it’s true.
Lynn M said on 09.15.05 at 06:20 PM • [link]
Anyone who believes real rape will eventually end up in a loving relationship (a la Luke and Laura in General Hospital) is buying the fantasy a little to seriously.
BTW, I have to say that I was a huge fan of General Hospital at that time. I thought Luke and Laura were just the romantic couple ever and the implausibility of their situation never occured to me.
Which makes sense since I accepted the same thing in the romance novels I was reading at the time.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 06:20 PM • [link]
“But hey, evidence that forced seduction is just a euphemism for “rape I can stomachâ€: what Sebastian does to Rachel in To Have and To Hold.”
I think To Have and To Hold is somewhere in the netherland between rape and forced seduction, in part because Sebastian definitely wants to humiliate Rachel, but she refuses to feel raped, in part because her goal is to feel nothing at all. It feels too violating to me to be straight rape fantasy (which as I understand it is escapist in nature), but since Rachel is turned on and Sebastian desperately wants to break through Rachel’s indifference, it doesn’t feel like straight rape, either.
But how about this for a difference between the rape fantasy and FS: In FS, the heroine ultimately consents. In rape fantasy, I (as reader) consent for the heroine because I know it’s in the service of the HEA.
Wendy said on 09.15.05 at 06:36 PM • [link]
Hey all :)
I was sent over here by Lynn, who recommended this discussion in her blog. Ironic, then, that I’m going to disagree with a comment by Lynn. ;)
>>>In a romance novel rape, the hero wants to have sex with the heroine, and if he needs to dominate her to make it happen, he will. Whearas with real rape, the villain needs to control the victim, and if he has to rape her, he will.<<<
I would argue that in both situations it’s still about power. The so-called hero wants power over the heroine. Now, whether he wants that to get his kicks or because he really does find her attractive and refuses to be held at bay really doesn’t make a lot of difference to me. It’s about power, control and a complete lack of respect for the woman - and this is why I simply cannot under any circumstances buy the argument that the ‘hero’ rapes the woman because he ‘loves’ her so much. He doesn’t love her. He has a complete lack of respect for her, no consideration for her feelings; he sees her as simply a body provided for his pleasure. There’s no love in that.
I’ve read some Catherine Coulter books too, and will never read her again. But the very worst rape ‘romance’ I’ve ever read is one of those Candy mentioned in her post: Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love. I cannot understand why that book continues to see well. I don’t understand all the rave reviews on Amazon. I don’t understand why even some friends of mine, who are otherwise very sensible individuals and who do have lines they don’t like heroes to cross, actually love that book. The ‘hero’ not only rapes his child-wife, he beats and humiliates her. It was truly sickening and McNaught is now on my ‘never read again’ list.
If there’s anyone reading this who does like ‘Whitney’, can you please tell me why? I don’t know if I’ll even behin to understand the appeal, but I’d be interested to hear.
EvilAuntiePeril said on 09.15.05 at 06:45 PM • [link]
Really interesting discussion here, It’s going to take me some time to process all the comments. Just goes to show that the use of this device is far more nuanced than many would have it.
Anyhow, very quickly wanted to say regarding reader identification: yes, absolutely. It always puzzles me how people can assume that the reader will only identify with the main character and so on. Most people are far more complex and ambiguous then any novelist could ever hope to portray, and reading is far more than just processing words on a page.
Now I’m off to have some quality thinking time about how the historical settings of many of these novels allow us to separate rape from its reality and turn it into something else. And also about how it tends to happen to “feisty” females who transgress the gender boundaries of that time.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 06:46 PM • [link]
Oh, I just had a realization. I’ve always hated those romances (usually a marraige-of-convenience story) where the h/h hate eachother, but have really hot sex. I’m referring to the scenario where the hero treats the heroine like complete dog shit during the day. You know, humiliation, degradation, insults. Maybe he’s keeping her locked in the tower as punishment for her evil ways. But he can’t resist her smokin’ bod, so he goes there every night to do her. And she hates him with every fiber of her being, thinks that he killed her little brother, but she can’t help but get wet for him.
I just realized that THIS is forced seduction too. And not the kind I like. He thinks she is no better than an animal, and he will use her own body as a weapon to defeat her.
Ick.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 06:47 PM • [link]
“See, this is how I view the huge difference between real rape and romance-novel hero-as-rapist rape. From what I understand, real rape is not about sex in any way. It is about anger and violence and control. The rapist uses sex as a weapon just as he could use a gun or a knife. He’s not in it because he’s attracted to the woman or loves her and is frustrated because she’s refused him sexually or any of that. It’s a manifestation of rage and a sick need to control.”
Interesting comments, Lynn. They remind me of the evolution of rape laws in the U.S. Before the 1980s, the presumption in rape cases was that if the woman didn’t physically fight with ferocity against her attacker he couldn’t be convicted of rape. This presumption against rape comes from the historical tendency to see women as the Eve figure tempting men with their sexuality. In the 1980s, though, rape laws began to evolve, with lesser degrees of resistance on the part of the woman being acceptable, with some jurisdictions starting to adopt the non-consent rule. So at the time many of these bodice rippers were being published, rape laws were going through a tremendous evolution, as was the perception of rape as a crime of violence rather than a crime of passion, because those two things go hand in hand. As long as rape was considered a crime of passion, the woman was somehow the instigator, but once it became a crime of violence, the responsibility shifted to the man, and the woman had to prove less in the way of resistance to the rapist or forced used against her—in other words, she was not punished as much if she just submitted because she either froze or felt it was to her advantage not to fight back. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as rape in the law was becoming less about sex, that rape in Romance was growing in popularity as a sexual fantasy (at least as it occurs between the hero and heroine). It’s also at this time (during the 80s) that law enforcement was JUST STARTING to treat domestic violence cases as more than just private disputes that warranted no serious attention or intervention.
So perhaps in part women were beginning to feel more protected legally and so they could express the sexual rape fantasy without feeling they would be punished for it. That still doesn’t explain all the incidents of rape fantasy in Romance that fall outside the rape fantasy, but maybe it’s a place to start.
By the way, I know someone mentioned marital rape in an earlier post, and I wanted to point out that only 15 states have eliminated the marital rape exemption (that is the still somewhat popular assumption that rape cannot occur between spouses). The landmark criminal case against the marital rape exemption, People v. Liberta, dates only back to 1984.
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 07:01 PM • [link]
“I would argue that in both situations it’s still about power. The so-called hero wants power over the heroine. Now, whether he wants that to get his kicks or because he really does find her attractive and refuses to be held at bay really doesn’t make a lot of difference to me. It’s about power, control and a complete lack of respect for the woman - and this is why I simply cannot under any circumstances buy the argument that the ‘hero’ rapes the woman because he ‘loves’ her so much. He doesn’t love her. He has a complete lack of respect for her, no consideration for her feelings; he sees her as simply a body provided for his pleasure. There’s no love in that.”
Hi Wendy—great comments. This is exactly how I felt at first about rape in Romance, which is still something I don’t personally enjoy or get into.
BUT, I kept hitting this wall of how it was WOMEN writing these stories and WOMEN getting the hero’s love and eternal devotion at the end of the book, and that totally puzzled me. Yeah, I think there are some authors and books that fall into the “victim of patriarchy” category, where the heroine starts out and ends up as a doormat. But that’s not the case for all rape fantasy Romances.
So I finally started thinking, hey, maybe it’s WOMEN who are co-opting the power of rape, as authors, as character, and as readers, and are trying to re-frame something that in real life makes them victims but in Romance can (not in all cases, though) ultimately make them the dominant partner in the relationship. This doesn’t work for all incidents of rape in Romance, of course, but for the “rape fantasy,” I really wonder if it’s not partly an attempt (not necessarily succesful) to take the power society gives to the man in real rape situations and transfer that to women, either as authors who can craft these books and their happy endings, or as readers who can experience the thrill of being sexually irresistible and the fantasy of domesticating the handsome but morally bankrupt rake. Not to mention taking sex, which for women is traditionally seen as an expression of love, and changing the most anti-love sex act of rape into something that will ultimately become love. What do you think? I’m really interested in seeing the other side of this, since it’s still something I’m struggling with.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 07:05 PM • [link]
I really wonder if it’s not partly an attempt (not necessarily succesful) to take the power society gives to the man in real rape situations and transfer that to women, either as authors who can craft these books and their happy endings, or as readers who can experience the thrill of being sexually irresistible and the fantasy of domesticating the handsome but morally bankrupt rake. Not to mention taking sex, which for women is traditionally seen as an expression of love, and changing the most anti-love sex act of rape into something that will ultimately become love.
OMG, beautiful. I totally hadn’t considered that. Co-opting that power through fiction? It’s a beautiful theory, one I think works.
*bows down to Robin*
Maili said on 09.15.05 at 07:17 PM • [link]
I took the break quite long, but I am glad I did because many offered so much more interesting insights. I agree with Lynn M, THIS! Christine and Sherryfair’s takes most.
What I find interesting is seeing all these degrees of trust [reader’s trust?]. When the hero does something to the heroine, this is the point where it generates a wide of reactions, ranging from continue to have trust [that it’ll work out in the end] to feeling that sense of trust betrayed.
This is probably why there are so many definitions of rape, forced seduction and well as variety of personal boundaries that could be applied to romance novels, such as which context justifies such a scene, which context fails to work, what is acceptable and what isn’t.
There is a non-romance novel by Ayn Rand—oh, what’s it called? ... The Fountainhead? IIRC, there is a scene where Roark raped Dominique, but according to Rand, it’s “rape by engraved invitation” because in her view, it is “clear” that Dominique wanted this all along. Also, IIRC, according to Rand, Roark is a special man, a breed above average men, so he has a freedom to do what he wants, including answering Dominique’s secret desire. [I may be off the track, but please do feel free to correct me.]
In a way this mentality applies to romance novels. Hm, I am not sure that is even a point, but pleae do take it as an off-the-cuff comment.
Maili said on 09.15.05 at 07:24 PM • [link]
Just a quick confirmation that it’s indeed The Fountainhead. Funny that I still could remember their names, but not the book title. :D
sherryfair said on 09.15.05 at 07:51 PM • [link]
Robin, that last post explaining your theory expresses it beautifully. That theory would work for me. With the understanding, of course, that we would still have to look at each instance of rape in a book and the particular context and figure out why the author resorted to the rape device. I, too, think “To Have and to Hold” is a brilliant book, and actually, it’s in my Top 10 of all time. But I was troubled by Coulter’s “The Heir” (I’ve not read “Rosehaven,” and now pribably won’t) and McNaught’s original version of “Whitney, My Love.” (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s fiction.)
SB Sarah said on 09.15.05 at 07:55 PM • [link]
Here’s a curious question: doth my memory deceive me, or don’t some of the forcible seduction scenes/rape scenes end in the heroine having an almost overpowering against-her-will orgasm? I seem to remember a Coulter story (or two or more since they follow a pattern, especially with the cream) wherein the unwilling heroine was overpowered by the mad lovin’ skillz of the hero, and orgasmed to bring the roof down despite herself. But I could be wrong about that recollection.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 08:01 PM • [link]
In fact it always surprises me, in reading discussions on romance boards, how many people assume that it is the heroine, and only the heroine, with whom the reader identifies. I personally think there is also much reader identification with the hero.
And IMO in a forced seduction / rape fantasy the reader can identify with both the heroine upon whom sexual pleasure and ultimately, a happily ever after ending is being forced, and the hero, who has tremendous power and freedom in that scenario. One gets to be at once the “good girl†and the “bad boy,†and that can be a satisfying thing.
Good point, LFL—and glad to see you here! Here’s my thought on reader identification: it’s definitely possible to identify with more than one character. Generally speaking, though, a large part of our identification tends to lie with the person whose POV in which we’re immersed. And books with the hero’s POV didn’t become common until fairly late in the game—based on what I’ve read, it was the mid 80s, but people who know more, please feel free to chime in and correct me. When the heroine is raped in these older books, we’re pretty much seeing and feeling what she’s seeing and feeling.
So when the hero is pretty much a cipher interpreted for the reader through the heroine’s lens, as was the case of many older romances that featured rape, what are your thoughts on character identification?
I think To Have and To Hold is somewhere in the netherland between rape and forced seduction, in part because Sebastian definitely wants to humiliate Rachel, but she refuses to feel raped, in part because her goal is to feel nothing at all.
There’s definitely a continuum of violation, with “being kinda pushy” at one end of the spectrum and “outright rape” on the other. Besides intention and effect, I think what pushes things along further to the “rape” end of the spectrum is the woman’s reaction to what happened. If she didn’t feel raped, I don’t think a rape happened. I was re-reading the scenes this morning and I was struck by a few things:
1. Rachel, because of her past with her husband, was scared of sexual intimacy in general.
2. At the same time, she wasn’t necessarily scared of Sebastian.
3. At one point during the first (second?) sex scene, she says something like “Do it, then.” I didn’t take it as consent, but those words, her attitude (she wasn’t afraid of being violated, she was afraid of being turned on), and her bone-deep certainty that Sebastian would never do anything to truly hurt her, pushed her situation away from being rape.
4. Sebastian was ambivalent about the whole thing, too. He knew he was acting like a shit, but his interest was piqued and he wanted to see how far he could push Rachel. I think it was Rosario who pointed out on Romancing the Blog that it’s easier for her to accept and forgive actions that are unpalatable to her rather than attitudes and worldviews, and I think she even used this very example: Sebastian KNOWS he’s being a fuckass, which makes his reformation more believable, as opposed to somebody who feels no remorse. I don’t know how much the aggressor’s intentions count vs. the effect of the aggressor’s actions on the victim, especially for something as touchy as sexual assault. But for fiction, I know it counts for a lot, at least on my part.
I would agree that rape is a crime of power, without reservation. (...) But I’m hung up on fictional rape. The whole point of a fictional rape sequence is to point how what a bastard the hero is or how alluring the heroine is (maybe?) Is it about intimacy, is it abou woman as Siren, is it about men losing control and showing vulnerability, what is it about?
I agree, Lilith. Fictional rape is not real-life rape, but its use as a fictional device has a definite purpose, even if it’s subconscious on the part of the author, or even if it’s there only to titillate. I think it’s so hard to generalize because we’re covering a lot of different books written by a lot of different authors during different time periods, and once you throw reader interpretation in there… Somebody could make this a subject for a PhD dissertation.
Now I’m off to have some quality thinking time (...) about how it tends to happen to “feisty†females who transgress the gender boundaries of that time.
Excellent observation, Evil Auntie Peril. That part of fictional rape bugs me a lot: the punitive aspect. Penile penetration isn’t just the only way for the hero to sexually subdue a heroine; I know I’ve read many books in which the hero kisses or fondles the heroine punishingly.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 08:02 PM • [link]
I think you’re right, and I think that’s the clue that points us to fictional rape being about the co-opting of power. I have only read one fictional forced-seduction/romance rape scene (where the rape is committed by the hero instead of the villain) that didn’t end up with the heroine Gettin’ Her Rocks Off, and that was in a Sharon Green novel.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 08:04 PM • [link]
Also, IIRC, according to Rand, Roark is a special man, a breed above average men, so he has a freedom to do what he wants, including answering Dominique’s secret desire.
Holy crap, Maili. You’ve just described a large class of romance novel heroes. Heh. Ayn Rand, bodice ripper pioneer—who knew?
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 08:08 PM • [link]
“That theory would work for me. With the understanding, of course, that we would still have to look at each instance of rape in a book and the particular context and figure out why the author resorted to the rape device.”
Oh, hell, yeah. Like you said in your earlier post, there are multiple things going on, and many of them are not mutually exclusive. Your point about sexual ambivalence is so important, IMO, as are Candy’s examples of some of the pay-offs for the heroine in these scenarios, as are the comments of readers like Wendy who see Romance rape as a forcible violation, and as is EAP’s observation that it’s often heroines who step out of the gender norms of their time who are recipients of the hero’s, uh, attention. Not only are there SO MANY variations on the device in the genre, but also there are SO MANY variations from author to author witin the same use of the device.
To be honest, it frustrates me a little that there still seems to be a taboo in the Romance community against talking about Romance rape/FS outside of the “it’s harmless/good” or “it’s horrible and violent” polemic. FWIW, I believe that if we start to ferret out the host of issues related to the use of rape in Romance, we will be right at the heart of some of the most important insights into why and how Romance is such an influential form of communication and connection between and among women (and why it’s not “just porn” or “trash”).
BSC said on 09.15.05 at 08:12 PM • [link]
I don’t know what I find more fascinating: the actual points that Candy brought up, or those introduced/expounded on by the rest of the group. The topic of rape has always been a hot button for me because I’ve had several friends that have been assulted (NOW lists the satistic that 1 in 4 women will be assulted in their lifetime), but at the same time I enjoy Anne Stuart’s scenes that walk the line of what many people find objectionable. I once heard someone call them “edge of consent” scenes, which (in the context of the law) takes what could have been an act of rape and turns it into a hard seduction. In the end, the female protag consents, absolving the guilt of rape from the male.
In real life rape does not have to leave a woman bleeding and beaten to be about power. Many women who are date-raped have a hard time proving their case because they weren’t beaten at all (due to freezing or the decision to not fight back because of fear). I still remember a case where a woman—realizing that she couldn’t win in a fight—asked her attacker to use a condom (which, I believe, he did). When he was brought to trial, his defense attorney argued that by asking him to use a condom, she consented. The prosecution rebutted with the statement that the condom was the only protection she could provide herself in the situation. I do not remember the verdict, but I do remember thinking that had this taken place in the 80s, the case would have never made it to trial.
Due to the ever changing nature of what we define as rape in the court system and socially, I think that we will continue to see rape (in some aspect) used in all literature as a way to deal with our issues. Where we personally draw the line affects what we read and write.
A friend of mine (male) just finished reading the Fountainhead. In the beginning he couldn’t stop talking about how he identified with Rourke, on and on he would go, and then he got to the rape scene with Dominique. He put the book down for a month, couldn’t touch it, because the character he had so identified with had done something that he couldn’t fathom (his exact quote was, “I’m not okay with that.”). Suddenly he’s online looking stuff up on Rand, and asking me if it was true that she hated women (“She must to say something like Dominique wanted it, right?”). I’m tempted to send him the link to this conversation.
L
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 08:21 PM • [link]
Here’s a curious question: doth my memory deceive me, or don’t some of the forcible seduction scenes/rape scenes end in the heroine having an almost overpowering against-her-will orgasm?
You’re right, Sarah: a lot of the rape scenes end with the heroine coming her brains out. As with everything else about this issue, I feel torn about it.
On one hand, I it as blatantly manipulative. “Oh, it’s not rape—she CAME! She was obviously enjoying it! A REAL rape wouldn’t have the heroine coming so hard she saw stars and floated in the eternal rhythms of the universe, etc.”
On the other hand, I feel like it’s part of what Robin says is the reclaiming of rape for empowerment in fiction. Take something scary and awful, and in the end, make it pleasurable.
On the other, other hand, I feel like the pleasure is often used punitively, and the smugness of the hero afterwards, like “Ha! I knew better than you what you wanted, little girl” bugs me too. Because in those old romances, I feel as if the hero and heroine were in competition, and the one who was right more often was the winner, and the heroine LOST EVERY TIME. Bugged the hell out of me because I’m so goddamn competitive, and I mostly identified with the heroine. But this probably reveals more about me than about the rape device.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 08:24 PM • [link]
I’m tempted to send him the link to this conversation.
Do it! DO IIIIIT!
We need a good male POV on all this, too. Where the hell are Stephen and Doug, dammit?
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 08:26 PM • [link]
“Sebastian was ambivalent about the whole thing, too. He knew he was acting like a shit, but his interest was piqued and he wanted to see how far he could push Rachel. I think it was Rosario who pointed out on Romancing the Blog that it’s easier for her to accept and forgive actions that are unpalatable to her rather than attitudes and worldviews, and I think she even used this very example: Sebastian KNOWS he’s being a fuckass, which makes his reformation more believable, as opposed to somebody who feels no remorse. I don’t know how much the aggressor’s intentions count vs. the effect of the aggressor’s actions on the victim, especially for something as touchy as sexual assault. But for fiction, I know it counts for a lot, at least on my part.”
ABSOLUTELY. I also love the fact that Sebastian and Rachel talk about all the ways in which he’s victimized her; in fact, I think his initial sacrifice of her to Sully was even worse than what he did to her sexually. The way they discuss all that earned many many points for Sebastian from me. Plus, I think it’s important that the incidents happen fairly early on in the book, because IMO Gaffney is tracing Rachel’s evolution from victim to independent and healed woman, a process which in turn frees Sebastian to pursue his own healing. The fact that neither of them saves the other, but that they both help facilitate healing in each other really works for me, since both of them avoid the martyr/savior paradigm.
“That part of fictional rape bugs me a lot: the punitive aspect. Penile penetration isn’t just the only way for the hero to sexually subdue a heroine; I know I’ve read many books in which the hero kisses or fondles the heroine punishingly.”
Personally, I think it’s often at these points that the reader is meant to identify with the hero rather than the heroine. Let’s face it—women are often as judgmental of other women, especially as they step out of their assigned gender roles, as men are (maybe more so). It’s like in Japan where women trained the geishas, keeping the system alive and ensuring the subjugation of other women from generation to generation. Yes the system was patriarchal, but it was women who helped continue the patriarchy, at least in this way (same with foot binding in China). I wonder how many readers might think that a heroine deserves to be brought down a peg or two by the hero.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 08:26 PM • [link]
I’m thinking Stephen and Doug know a potentially-deadly conversation when they hear it, and being male may have wisely decided to stay silent. *G* Mostly because I raised this question with the DH, and he got that ol’ “deer-in-the-headlights” look. Poor guy.
sherryfair said on 09.15.05 at 08:34 PM • [link]
BTW, somewhat off-topic: I hope this discussion gets saved somewhere. (I keep debating printing it out, myself, but my coworkers are gonna be surprised to find it spitting out of the printer, between the PowerPoint presentations and the research notes.) Because I would say this is one of the most interesting threads I’ve ever seen on this topic.
Thank you, Candy and Sarah for being our hostesses on this blog, and for initiating the discussion, for moderating it and taking it further.
SB Sarah said on 09.15.05 at 08:36 PM • [link]
You’re very welcome! I am personally honored and inspired by a discussion wherein women can discuss themselves as readers, and example themselves as women sexually while asking, “How does this turn another woman on when it makes me want to cross my legs and hide under the table?” No one is casting judgments about people who may or may not identify or enjoy these scenes, and we’re all asking insightful questions as to why this is a common theme in romance novels.
So MWAH! to all of y’all.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.15.05 at 08:58 PM • [link]
Indeed, I’m impressed by both the lack of condemnation and the quality of replies.
Man, Smart Bitches totally rock.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 09:09 PM • [link]
“That part of fictional rape bugs me a lot: the punitive aspect.(...)”
Personally, I think it’s often at these points that the reader is meant to identify with the hero rather than the heroine. Let’s face it—women are often as judgmental of other women, especially as they step out of their assigned gender roles, as men are (maybe more so).
You have a point there, Robin. If that was the author’s intention, it never works for me—when two characters are equally awful (and the heroines in those romances tend to be highly irritating to me), I root for the heroine.
And you’re totally right about how women do a great job of keeping other women in line, and how we can oftentimes actively perpetuate our own oppression. I believe Simone de Beauvoir talked about that at length in The Second Sex, but it’s been years and years since I’ve read it. Time for a re-read, I guess.
Going somewhat OT: Feminism talks about the destructive male gaze, but has any work been done on the destructive female gaze? The way women assess each other and mete out punishment when they sense some of their own as not belonging can be really destructive. I know most of my problems with body issues and self-esteem stem not from the objectifying gaze of other men, but what my schoolmates said and thought about me and my body in secondary school (equivalent to junior high and high school in the US).
Also, seconding what’s been said by sherryfair and Sarah: this is one of the most interesting discussions on our site so far, and it wouldn’t have been possible without all the incisive, erudite comments from you guys.
Awww, can you feel the love? The Winne-the-Pooh puppy can:
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 09:21 PM • [link]
Re. Whitney, My Love, since I loved that book to pieces when I first read it at age fifteen, and have kept it all these years, I will try to explain its appeal.
For me, a lot of it has to do with the character of Whitney, and the way she is introduced in the book. She is fifteen years old, she wearing boys’ clothes and riding a horse while standing on its back, hoping to impress her friends and neighbors, especially Paul. Whitney is sent off to France with her aunt and uncle, but she goes determined to win Paul on her return. While in France, Whitney charms her friend’s brother, Nicholas, a confirmed bachelor and heartbreaker, and the two become good friends.
It’s not until after these events that Clayton enters the story, as a stranger Whitney meets in a masquerade. It turns out that Clayton has decided to marry Whitney, but he doesn’t want her to know it yet. Thus begins the central conflict of the book – Clayton is determined to marry Whitney, but Whitney is determined to marry Paul.
At this point, I was totally hooked. Whitney was my own age at the time (fifteen) when the story began, and she was not a perfect, sophisticated, mature teenager. She was a believable teenager, and she also reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. She was also not afraid to speak her mind, she suffered some humiliations, she knew what she wanted and she had male friends other than the hero. Although in many ways she was idealized (always clever, kind and outgoing), she also felt REAL. I identified with her in a way that I have with few romance heroines before or since. And that right there is a huge part of why I loved this book.
As to other reasons I loved it, McNaught’s other characters came alive on the page for me too. There’s no question that this author can create a sort of magical, fairy tale world with her side characters. And Clayton, for all his jealousy and high-handedness, was urbane, human and interesting.
I also loved the book because it was a kind of Cinderella fantasy. Whitney, a commoner disapproved of by her father and his neighbors, is singled out by a duke who ultimately marries her and elevates her to the rank of duchess. Many of McNaught’s historicals have this element—the heroine is usually a commoner and often in some kind of unhappy circumstances early on, and often there’s some enemy who schemes to bring her down, but her innate kindness, cleverness and charm bring her to the attentions of a duke, marquess or earl, and she becomes the toast of London before finding a happily ever after. I actually can’t think of an author who does this Cinderella thing better than McNaught.
Now as to the “rape†itself. I put the word in quotes because as horrifying as that scene is, Whitney actually consents before penetration occurs, and even initiates a kiss immediately beforehand. However, she is still terrified, and prepared to go through with the sex because she loves him and perhaps because she thinks it will placate his anger, rather than out of a feeling of desire for him at that moment.
I can’t say that this scene was ever erotic to me. Clayton was too angry and Whitney too terrified. It was not a forced seduction IMO – Clayton starts to seduce her and then stops, actually saying that he doesn’t want her to enjoy it too much. Really, a horrifying scene to read.
But that was actually part of what I liked about it. At that time – 1985 – rapes and forced seductions in romances were a dime a dozen, but most of them were portrayed as enjoyable to the heroine. This one was not. Whitney was clearly traumatized, and even Clayton was haunted by his own actions. Rather than being portrayed as okay, this scene communicated that this was not okay. It created a huge stumbling block for Whitney and Clayton’s relationship, and it did not glamorize what Clayton did. Compared to many of the rapes out there at that time, it felt like a step forward to me.
Lastly, I think part of the appeal of many of McNaught’s books, including this one, and indeed the appeal of many other books in the romance genre too, is a dynamic in which the hero wrongs the heroine in some fashion (whether it’s to rape her, misjudge her, and treat her badly in some other way) and later has to suffer for it or atone for it.
What’s most emotionally satisfying in those books isn’t the hero’s mistreatment of the heroine, but rather his realization of just how wrong he was, his suffering from that realization, and ultimately, his atonement for it. The reason this can be so very emotionally satisfying is that it shows that he can’t harm the heroine without consequences. Love for her makes him vulnerable, so that when he hurts her, he hurts himself. It’s a fantasy that puts power over the hero in the heroine’s hands, because it proves that his love for her is not something he can escape.
SB Sarah said on 09.15.05 at 09:35 PM • [link]
I do not know about research re: the destructive female gaze, but it’s definitely a curious topic, especially since I catch myself being an evil catty bitch in my head about other women, yet never notice what dudes are wearing/doing.
Yet at the same time, I suffer from the fear that everyone else is doing that to me, and thus I turn that gaze on myself and bring myself down. Evil cycle, that damn gaze.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 09:45 PM • [link]
LFL, thanks for weighing in. It’s been several years since I’ve read Whitney, My Love, and part of the reason why the rape scene made me chuck the book on the floor and tear my hair out (OK, I just tugged vigorously, no actual damage was done to the roots) was:
1. I liked Whitney. I liked Whitney quite a bit. Like you said, McNaught has a knack for creating adorable, likeable heroines.
2. Clayton didn’t apologize nearly enough for what he did. In fact, I don’t remember him apologizing for it at all, or feeling too much remorse one way or another about it.
3. WHITNEY ended up grovelling to him at the end, for something not necessarily related to the rape. In fact, didn’t she apologize for the rape, too? I seem to remember her trying to placate him or something right after the dirty deed was done.
So all in all, the resolution of the sexual assault just wasn’t as satisfying for me. I mean, I needed a couple hundred pages of Clay feeling like a complete shit because I get downright vindictive when a hero does something awful to the heroine, but this rape took place near the end of the book, and Clay’s remorse just wasn’t apparent enough for me to forgive him.
I do agree that at least McNaught didn’t romanticize the act to the point of Whitney mysteriously orgasming during the trauma.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 09:55 PM • [link]
Oh, hey, you know how I said up above: “If she didn’t feel raped, I don’t think a rape happened.”
Whitney, My Love is a pretty clear indication that I was full of shit when I wrote that. Because I think it’s pretty clear that Whitney, while terrified, didn’t necessarily think she was raped. But I feel like she was raped, dammit!
Daria said on 09.15.05 at 10:11 PM • [link]
“Somehow, in movies, it’s romantic and sweet when a guy overcomes a woman’s objections because he knows she wants him to do it. “
This is the essence of rape romance.
It is about infantilizing the female.
Because, what we have there: the man psychoanalyzing the woman and deciding he knows what she wants better than she does herself. Or that he knows what she needs better than she does. And delivering it, with her questionable benefit as a result.
And that, my friends, is parental behaviour. “I know what’s better for you, and I’ll give it to you no matter what.”
Which is, in turn, is one of the role models for the dominant person in BDSM groups. It’s not for nothing that “cruel teacher and innocent student” is a big time BDSM game. There is a parallel.
So, no, a rape fantasy is not an asset of a “feminine’ sexuality—quite the opposite. It is a manifestation of a maturity-related issue in sexual development. A woman who has rape fantasies is physically mature but psychologically, her sexuality is immature, and she seeks a sexual position which will allow her not to mature—i.e. not to take responsibility for her sexual choices, mistakes, and wrongdoings.
Thus, enter the superdominant romance hero who says, I’ll give you what you want, I’ll pleasure you, and you have no choice, no guilt, no decisions, no responsibility. In short, he is a manifestation of a sexual preference based on a psychological issue. His obsession with the woman represents her own desire for exploring her sexuality, her obsession with her own sexuality. And his behaviour represents her rejection of adult behaviour. She wants to enjoy her sexuality, but refuses to be held responsible for the choices and results.
So when we get to the basis of it, a rape romance fantasy is an expression of a mix of Fear & Attraction a female reader feels towards her own sexuality. In fact, teen boys often have fantasies about a knock out gorgeous adult woman raping them because she just can’t stop herself. Same mechanism.
Wendy said on 09.15.05 at 10:13 PM • [link]
LFL, thanks for explaining why you liked ‘Whitney’ - it’s certainly interesting to read a different perspective on the book, even though my own pretty much accords 100% with Candy’s.
(Incidentally, your comments on McNaught’s other books reminds me of the only other novel of hers I read - I can’t now remember the title, but it also involves a duke, in this case inadvertently compromising a young woman from a barely-respectable family. He hadn’t even realised that she was a woman when he’d spent the hour or so with her - he thought she was a boy. I almost threw the book away in disgust when he married her as a consequence - it was just too far-fetched to be true. The story got worse when the duke is believed dead: instead of the legal process of inheritance being put on hold to discover whether his widow is pregnant, his brother immediately becomes duke. There were a number of other elements to the story which were too ludicrous to believe, not to mention the TSTL heroine *and* a swathe of minor characters. Ahem).
Back to the discussion - Robin, the idea that women authors may write rape scenes as a way of turning the tables on the reality of male power over women is interesting, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced. Why would they still want to write women being overpowered and controlled by men? Why not women controlling men?
On the other hand, it may be more of a writing-out-your-fantasies thing, which might explain why most of the rape scenes involving the ‘hero’ end with the heroine having the orgasm of her life. Is it the need to experience violence and control in the knowledge that we are safe and, ultimately, will not be hurt and will enjoy it?
I don’t know. And I admit that I have on occasion enjoyed romances where the hero has been a little forceful - but there’s a line, and when he steps over that line, as in ‘Whitney’ and in a couple of others I’ve read, where it is very clearly against the heroine’s will, *even* if she orgasms, then the author has gone too far for me.
I would love to hear from anyone who has actually written a hero/heroine rape scene, though: why did you write it, how do you interpret it, why does the hero deserve to be forgiven, how does it ultimately further the relationship? Now, that would be fascinating.
SB Sarah said on 09.15.05 at 10:17 PM • [link]
“Somehow, in movies, it’s romantic and sweet when a guy overcomes a
woman’s objections because he knows she wants him to do it. “
This touches on a tangentially-related idea of romantic fantasy: the guy who knows the heroine so well, he knows intrinsically what it is that she wants/needs before she realizes it herself. It’s an inversion of the woman-as-caregiver, and allows the fantasy of a man who has that same degree of sensitive empathy.
Of course, sexual force takes it too far for me, but it’s certainly a related element.
Daria said on 09.15.05 at 10:24 PM • [link]
ah, and to the earlier comment of the process of being forced to accept enjoyment being empowering for a woman. I have to respectfully disagree. I think it roots the issue, not solves it, because the heroine of the book never rebels against this, or changes this—but quite the opposite, learns to love and accept this (manifested through the hero). In short, the reader gets the message that it is okay. That she doesn’t need to mature, she’ll get her happy end without that painful and uncomfortable process.
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 10:28 PM • [link]
Here’s my thought on reader identification: it’s definitely possible to identify with more than one character. Generally speaking, though, a large part of our identification tends to lie with the person whose POV in which we’re immersed. And books with the hero’s POV didn’t become common until fairly late in the game—based on what I’ve read, it was the mid 80s, but people who know more, please feel free to chime in and correct me. When the heroine is raped in these older books, we’re pretty much seeing and feeling what she’s seeing and feeling.
So when the hero is pretty much a cipher interpreted for the reader through the heroine’s lens, as was the case of many older romances that featured rape, what are your thoughts on character identification?
It probably depends on the individual reader, but I would still argue that many readers identify with both the hero and the heroine, even if the whole book is written in the heroine’s POV. It does make it harder to identify with the hero, but not impossible, IMO. To support my argument, I will quote (under Fair Use) from Laura Kinsale’s essay, “The Androgynous Reader” which appeared in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women. Kinsale uses Kathleen Woodiwiss’s Shanna, written in the heroine’s third person POV and published in 1977, as an example of a book in which the reader identifies with the hero. She also writes:
“In a romance written from the heroine’s third person viewpoint, who is most often being effectively shown in… intense… character evocation?
The hero.
The heroine’s third person point of view is as likely to create distance between heroine and reader as it is to close it…”
“I should emphasize that the intensity of hero-identification is not necessarily predicted by the actual point of view in which a novel is written. A skillful writer can achieve a high degree of character revelation without ever entering the hero’s point of view.”
“...I would like to point out one salient fact. During the height of the reading experience—the romantic climax—when the reader feels that wrench of emotion, the tingle in the spine, the full and authentic inner twist of reader identification with a character in an emotional cataclysm—when Rhett says to Scarlett, ‘Frankly, my dear…’; when Ruark Beuachamp of Shanna raises an inhuman ‘raging howl… from the wagon accompanied by repeated thuds against the heavy wooden door’; when Clayton Westmoreland shatters the brandy glass in his hand in Judith McNaught’s Whitney, My Love; when Slade in Nora Roberts’s A Matter of Choice growls ‘I love you, damn it. I’d like to choke you for it’—who, may I ask, is the reader at that moment?
Not the heroine, basking in female revenge or bonding triumph.
Oh, no. She’s the hero.”
Fair said on 09.15.05 at 10:28 PM • [link]
A few things: (1) In some of the early rape-saga romances, the heroine was attacked by men other than the hero. She could be raped by the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, and she wasn’t expected to enjoy it with anyone except the hero (and sometimes the hero traumatized her, too; it wasn’t all “wheee rape is fun”).
I think this reflected more than just fear of letting go sexually etc. I think it also reflected REAL fears of women who (at that time, early ‘70s) were suddenly being expected to operate on an equal basis with men, while knowing men still had the upper hand in every way.
It seems to me to these books presented a very traditional message: It’s a man’s world, women aren’t safe, so you’d best find a strong man to protect you.
2) You can look at earlier books, like say Mary Stewart’s romantic suspense novels, and find zillions of rough, abrupt, “demanding” heroes. I mention Mary Stewart because I remember one of her heroes grabbing the heroine so hard he bruised her—I think because he was trying to tell her something urgent and she wasn’t listening—and that was not an unusual scene in women’s fiction. The ‘70s bodice rippers were more explicit about the threat, changing heroes who shook and bruised the heroines to heroes who raped, but they were part of a long tradition of physically domineering heroes.
3) In The Fountainhead, Dominique goes to great lengths to get Roarke to rape her, and I think it’s clear that scene DOES reflect Ayn Rand’s fantasies. A.R. was a brilliant, talented, powerful woman, but still she was very invested in the old idea of men as leaders and women as worshipful followers. (And yes, she was a nut, like many male writers who get much more respect, but she had great talent and huge influence, and her fiction would be studied seriously today if she’d been a man.)
I agree that these scenes are about reader attitudes toward sexuality, but I don’t think it’s only that. I also think they’re all about the real disadvantage women still face in the world (including physical disadvantage and real threat of rape), and maybe about female writers and readers trying to put a positive spin on this inequality. Maybe we’ll know women have achieved real equality when these fantasies cease to have any power over us at all.
(??? Does this make any sense.)
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 10:46 PM • [link]
The issue was raised earlier that some of the hero-rapists never do repent, never admit they were wrong, and I think this is the absolute worst-case scenario for me, as a reader.
When my hero does something terrible in a book (not rape, I assure you) I am only setting him up so that I can break him wide open later, ya know? I torture him with love! I want to break him down so that he emerges a better hero. If there is no growth, if the guy can’t even get past being a rapist, for God’s sake, what’s the point?! Where’s the HEA?
As an author, you’re not even converting the bad boy, you’re just punishing your heroine for being a desirable woman.
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 11:13 PM • [link]
Re. Whitney, My Love.
2. Clayton didn’t apologize nearly enough for what he did. In fact, I don’t remember him apologizing for it at all, or feeling too much remorse one way or another about it.
I pulled the book off my shelf to see if I could find the sections I remembered as showing Clayton’s remorse. Here (quoted under Fair Use) is the description from immediately after the rape:
“Clayton’s head was thrown back, his eyes clenched shut, his features a mask of tortured anguish. As she stared at his ravaged face, her body jerked with suppressed sobs…
With aching gentleness, Clayton gathered her into his arms, and shifted to lie beside her. Without a word she turned her face into his bare chest and wept, cried her heart out in harsh, racking sobs that shook her slender body with such violence that Clayton thought they would surely tear her apart. He lay there, holding her defiled, naked body cradled against him, stroking the rumpled silk of her hair, while he punished himself with the sound of her muffled weeping.”
And after Whitney falls asleep, we get more of Clayton’s POV:
“His grace, Clayton Robert Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore, descendant of five hundred years of nobility, possessor of estates and wealth so vast as to defy comprehension, lay beside the only woman he had ever loved, helpless to either comfort her or regain her.
He stared at the ceiling, seeing her as she had been only hours before, conducting a group of merry, would-be musicians.
How could he have done this to her, when all he had ever wanted to do was pamper and cherish and protect her? Instead he had coldly and deliberately taken her innocence. And in so doing, he had lost more than she had, for he had managed to lose the only thing he had ever really wanted to possess – this one headstrong, beautiful girl lying beside him. Loathing him.
He remembered all the coarse, vulgar things he’d said to her in the coach and in this room. Each degrading word he had spoken, each touch that had hurt her, paraded across his mind bringing a sharp agonizing pain, so he punished himself by going over and over every vicious thing he had said and done to her.”
Shortly afterward, there’s a scene in which Whitney gives Clayton the cut direct, and the brandy glass he’s holding breaks in his hands. Whitney’s friend says to him that he’ll probably get blood poisoning now, and Clayton’s reply is “Unfortunately, I doubt it.”
Later, Clayton has a drunken conversation with his brother Stephen about what happened:
“The tense silence that followed was shattered by a terrible sound that ripped from Clayton’s chest. ‘Oh, God, I hurther,’ he groaned agonizingly. ‘I hurt her so damned much!’ He covered his face with his hands, his voice a hoarse, ravaged whisper. ‘I hurt her and she… she put her hands around me because… because she wanted me to hold her. Stephen,’ he choked brokenly, ‘she wanted me to hold her while she cried!’
He crossed his arms on the table and buried his face in them, finally sinking into the oblivion he’d been seeking all night. His raw voice was so low Stephen could hardly hear it. ‘I can still hear her crying,’ he whispered.
So all in all, the resolution of the sexual assault just wasn’t as satisfying for me. I mean, I needed a couple hundred pages of Clay feeling like a complete shit because I get downright vindictive when a hero does something awful to the heroine, but this rape took place near the end of the book, and Clay’s remorse just wasn’t apparent enough for me to forgive him.
When did you first read the book, Candy? Because I think it does make a difference for me that I first read it in 1985. At that time, most rapist heroes were completely unrepentant, and compared with them, Clayton seemed unusually remorseful. Maybe that’s why his remorse sticks with me even when I reread the book.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 11:16 PM • [link]
I would love to hear from anyone who has actually written a hero/heroine rape scene, though: why did you write it, how do you interpret it, why does the hero deserve to be forgiven, how does it ultimately further the relationship?
Holy crap, that WOULD be interesting.
Any authors brave enough to wade into the fray and give us your perspective on this?
LFL: Thanks for quoting that excerpt from Kinsale’s article. I have to say that in my case, during those climactic moments, I’m totally identifying with the heroine. Unless it’s from the hero’s POV, in which case, I’m identifying with the hero.
I’m a POV whore, I guess. Whoever’s head I’m in is pretty much who I’m identifying with.
The ‘70s bodice rippers were more explicit about the threat, changing heroes who shook and bruised the heroines to heroes who raped, but they were part of a long tradition of physically domineering heroes.
You know, here’s a question I want to ask our readers in general: were there a whole lot of rapist heroes, or heroes who were brutal and weren’t afraid to hurt and subjugate women, in books written by men for a largely male audience? I’m thinking of hard-boiled detective fiction, westerns, etc. It seems to me that a lot of these stories had men who were either indifferent to women, or men who had a code of honor that didn’t allow them to physically hurt the dames, unless they were evil and conniving and proved to be a clear and present threat. Is this a false impression on my part?
In The Fountainhead, Dominique goes to great lengths to get Roarke to rape her (...)
Whoa. I’ve never read The Fountainhead, but that sounds fucked up.
And if Dominique wants Roarke to rape her, is it really rape, then? This is sort of puzzling to me.
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 11:22 PM • [link]
LFL: Thanks for quoting that excerpt from Kinsale’s article. I have to say that in my case, during those climactic moments, I’m totally identifying with the heroine. Unless it’s from the hero’s POV, in which case, I’m identifying with the hero.
I’m a POV whore, I guess. Whoever’s head I’m in is pretty much who I’m identifying with.
LOL. I identify with both the hero and the heroine myself. And definitely POV does make some difference to me as well, but I don’t think it’s the only factor in my case.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.15.05 at 11:22 PM • [link]
>>‘I hurt her so damned much!’ He covered his face with his hands, his voice a hoarse, ravaged whisper. ‘I hurt her and she… she put her hands around me because… because she wanted me to hold her. Stephen,’ he choked brokenly, ‘she wanted me to hold her while she cried!’ <<
I have never even read this book and this was extremely moving and painful for me to read. If you are going to make the choice to write a rapist hero, THIS should be his ultimate reaction. He should feel as if he’s violated himself as well as her. Not to be too judgemental or know-it-all, of course. *smirk*
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 11:24 PM • [link]
When did you first read the book, Candy? Because I think it does make a difference for me that I first read it in 1985.
I read it when I was about 16 or 17 years old, so that was 1994 or 1995. Thing is, Judith McNaught was the first romance author whose books I learned to love, precisely because they lacked any real rape. Almost every other romance I’d read up until that point had forced seduction, outright rape or those infamous punishing embraces because I was reading from my sister’s huge stash of Zebras and Mills and Boons. I didn’t like them, but I read them when I ran out of other things to read; it was a weird love-hate relationship. Whitney, My Love was probably the last of the McNaughts I read because I’d heard so many good things about it that I saved it for last.
So like you, I’d been reading a lot of old-skool 80s romances. But I did read the McNaught books out of order, because my two favorites (Kingdom of Dreams and Almost Heaven) came sort of in the middle of her career, yes?
Thanks for quoting the pertinent sections, by the way. I should try re-reading it soon, see if I hate it as much today as I did 10, 11 years ago.
Candy said on 09.15.05 at 11:30 PM • [link]
I identify with both the hero and the heroine myself.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and to an extent, I also think it depends on the skill of the author and how much I like the story in general. Laura Kinsale’s Uncertain Magic has a hero—a somewhat menacing one, at that—whom I identified with, even though the story is only from the heroine’s POV.
And apropos of nothing: I laughed out loud when I read the excerpt from Whitney, My Love because Clayton, he gathers her into his arms! With aching gentleness! What was with McNaught and her achy characters?
Robin said on 09.15.05 at 11:31 PM • [link]
“Maybe we’ll know women have achieved real equality when these fantasies cease to have any power over us at all.”
This makes total sense to me, Fair, and I’m going to use this point to answer Wendy’s questions about why Romance authors don’t use more direct images and devices of women controlling men as a better way to empower women.
Well, I can’t fully answer this question outside of like 300 pages, so I’ll just give the summary outline. For me, it goes back to the fact that Romance grew in part out of the sentimental novel and the Indian captivity narrative, both of which were concerned with establishing certain domains of feminine and masculine power. Romance started out creating a world where women are women and men are men, where men pursue and women are pursued, where men propose/proposition and women submit, where women want children and a white picket fence and wear dresses and want nothing more than the ever lasting and eternal love of a man. IMO it basically perpetuated the patriarchy and continually drew and re-drew the patriarchal world so that the woman was happy and satisfied within its confines.
Rape is the paradigmatic crime of patriarchy—total physical possession and overpoweing of the female in the most intimate way. So what happens when women start writing about rape in a way where the woman ultimately ends up happy? As Fair pointed out, we need to keep in mind that many rapes in Romance seemed to remind a woman of her vulnerability in a man’s world. But the H&H rape fantasy, for example, seems to me to be more about taking something that represents the height of patriarchy in the real world, and re-writing it so that the woman is not only untraumatized but ends up taming her rapist and getting her happily ever after. She still has to live in the patriarchy, which is why I think that the device is a co-optation of patriarchal power rather than an assertion of female power, but in terms of giving women permission to enact the rape fantasy, regardless of whether it’s sexually immature or all the other things it’s been identified with here (so many of which I totally agree with, by the way), it’s still a female revision of a show of masculine power. Is it successful? That’s where the real discusssion starts, IMO. For me, it’s rarely successful, which brings me back to Fair’s outstanding point about sexual fantasies.
Without a doubt women are ambivalent about our bodies, our appeal, our sexual freedom, our role relative to men and motherhood and the commercial world (i.e. the public or male-entitled sphere of society), etc. Is it any wonder we’re (I’m using this is a general we here) going to both have and struggle with the rape fantasy—a fantasy that in its real world counterpart is something terrible and threatening to us, something meant to show us how unworthy we are, sexually and otherwise? The rates of sexual dysfunction in women who have been raped or otherwise sexually abused demonstrate the impact that rape has on the sexual health of women. So we have this fantasy, that we both feel somewhat guilty or at least ambivalent about, and that we write about almost compulsively in the one genre dedicated to love and happiness for women. I know that the question many people ask is why women can’t just enjoy the rape fantasy without guilt, but my question is more like, if women truly embrace our sexuality and our right to be sexual and enjoy sex and indulge ourselves in pleasure when we want to, would we continue to fantasize about being raped? Would we still fantasize about dominating men? Or would our fantasies be differentm, less dependent on all sorts of conflicts and anxieties we have about gender and sexuality?
As to the comments about what a great thread this is, I am so excited that we can talk about this the way we are I can barely stand it! Thanks so much Sarah and Candy for keeping this going, and especially for letting me ramble on incessantly (yeah, like that’s new). Of course I’m also excited that I haven’t been called an apologist for rape or a spoilsport hater of rape fantasies yet (at least to my electronic face!).
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 11:32 PM • [link]
Thinking about Whitney, My Love some more, I think the line I quoted where it says “His grace, Clayton Robert Westmoreland, Duke of Claymore, descendant of five hundred years of nobility, possessor of estates and wealth so vast as to defy comprehension, lay beside the only woman he had ever loved, helpless to either comfort her or regain her,” is key to my enjoyment of this scene. It almost comes out and says that despite all of Clayton’s power and possessions, his feelings for Whitney make him helpless. He can only mistreat her at great cost to himself. There’s a sort of “How the mighty are fallen” satisfaction that I get from reading that scene.
By the way there’s an interesting interview with Judith McNaught at AAR where she discusses this scene. You can find it at this link:
http://www.likesbooks.com/mcnaught.html#4
Daria said on 09.15.05 at 11:42 PM • [link]
I know that the question many
people ask is why women can’t just enjoy the rape fantasy without guilt,
but my question is more like, if women truly embrace our sexuality and our
right to be sexual and enjoy sex and indulge ourselves in pleasure when we
want to, would we continue to fantasize about being raped?
—I’m sure the answer is mostly not. Mostly, because it’s not possible to put all reasons under a single umbrella. But embracing one’s “anything” completely usually leads to quitting the forced fantasy. Not just with sex, but with many things.
In reply to other subthread—I do feel there is a kind of excitement a reader, and perhaps a writer, is taking from seeing the once-powerful hero brought down and suffering—for what he is suffering, ultimately—for wronging the heroine by expressing his power. Think about it—he is punished for being more powerful than the heroine. Doesn’t it also seem to be related to the deeply seated female fear of a man’s sheer strength? Isn’t, in a way, the domestication of a rogue is a kind of a power play, more subtle than the forced sexual situation? Sort of a revenge a woman is taking on a man who is inherently stronger…
Which more and more convinces me that I’m not female…LOL… since both issues leave me indifferent.
Lisa said on 09.15.05 at 11:50 PM • [link]
he gathers her into his arms! With aching gentleness! What was with McNaught and her achy characters?
Arthritis. Makes the joints ache, ya’ know? Some authors have macros programmed into their keyboards that they just hit to put in their favorite phrases. Robert Jordan, for instance.
Lynn M said on 09.15.05 at 11:57 PM • [link]
Going back to Sebastian and Rachel from To Have and To Hold, I was reminded of the fact that to some degree, Rachel not only expected that Sebastian would eventually have sex with her, she seemed to think he had a right to it. He’d saved her from debtor’s prison, she was his servant, and she seemed resigned to the idea that it was part of her hired status to do as the master willed, be that cleaning the ashes from the fireplace, mending the draperies or having sex with him.
So if she submits, or at the very least doesn’t put up a fight, is that considered rape or consent? Certainly she never would have *chosen* to have sex with him if she’d felt she had complete freedom in the situation. Yet she never overtly objected and even enjoyed it to a very small degree.
Are there any other books out there that depict a hero who “rapes” a woman who is in a subserviant position? The only thing that comes to mind is Mary Balogh’s The Secret Pearl where the hero pays the heroine to have sex with him and then ends up rather roughly taking her virginity. And while Fleur consents to the sex because she has no choice, she certainly gets no enjoyment from it and is indeed even deeply traumatized aftward.
Funny enough, the hero in TSP, Adam Kent, ends up being an extremely honorable man who would never rape a woman. But his first encounter with Fleur is certainly borderline, a fact that gives him much personal angst after their encounter.
LFL said on 09.15.05 at 11:58 PM • [link]
And apropos of nothing: I laughed out loud when I read the excerpt from Whitney, My Love because Clayton, he gathers her into his arms! With aching gentleness! What was with McNaught and her achy characters?
ROTFL Candy! Yes, McNaught does love words like “aching” and “poignant,” and there are times when I can really almost see her bringing out the violin music. But you know what? It still works on me! I find some of her books very emotionally affecting. I just about cried my heart out when I read Paradise.
And even though I too have problems with her heroes, I like that she is not afraid to have bad things happen to her characters. To be honest, I get bored with books in which the characters and their relationship are safe. If their happiness is genuinely in jeopardy, I get much more involved in the story. Maybe that’s another reason for the ubiquitousness of rape in romances.
So like you, I’d been reading a lot of old-skool 80s romances. But I did read the McNaught books out of order, because my two favorites (Kingdom of Dreams and Almost Heaven) came sort of in the middle of her career, yes?
Yes. I pretty much read her books in order of publication. WML was the first McNaught book I ever read. I didn’t know a thing about her when I picked it up at the bookstore (because of effusive cover blurbs, I think), so my expectations probably weren’t as high as yours.
Thanks for quoting the pertinent sections, by the way. I should try re-reading it soon, see if I hate it as much today as I did 10, 11 years ago.
Well, it’s definitely not a perfect book. My favorite of hers is actually Something Wonderful which is the one Wendy didn’t care for. Nothing resembling a rape in that one.
if women truly embrace our sexuality and our right to be sexual and enjoy sex and indulge ourselves in pleasure when we want to, would we continue to fantasize about being raped? Would we still fantasize about dominating men? Or would our fantasies be differentm, less dependent on all sorts of conflicts and anxieties we have about gender and sexuality?
I don’t know, Robin, but I suspect that these fantasies may be transmuted, but the anxieties will never completely go away. Asking for a world without rape, well, that’s like asking for world peace. Women will always be, on the average, physically smaller then men and therefore vulnerable to them. So I think that vulnerablility will continue to get explored in various ways.
Lynn M said on 09.16.05 at 12:05 AM • [link]
Oh, and I’m back!
The thing I like best about Whitney, My Love was Clayton’s deep regrets after he’d hurt Whitney. And really, that’s pretty much the only thing I like about any hero/heroine rape scenarios. For me it’s not about the heroine finding a way to be allowed to enjoy sex and remain a good girl or any of that. It’s about watching the hero realize what he’s done and how by hurting her, he’s so much hurt himself. I like the eventual groveling and self-flagellating of the hero.
So along those lines, I think I agree with Candy in that I want reams of pages devoted to the hero’s remorse.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 12:07 AM • [link]
“. . .how we can oftentimes actively perpetuate our own oppression.”
Yes, and I think this can happen in several ways. One, for example is through our internalization of patriarchy to the point where we just don’t question its authority and keep the system going through our cooperative submission. But I think that there’s also a phenomenon whereby women actively take the power position of patriarchy—the position that is oppressive of other women—either because feeling empowered is better than feeling disempowered or as part of the journey toward learning to assert our own power as separate from patriarchy. I think ALL of these instances operate in Romance, depending on the circumstances between the hero and heroine or the heroine and other men, etc.
I’ve been skimming back through Stuart’s Into The Fire and ran across this really interesting thought by the heroine during the first forced seduction scene between her and the hero. Now she’s only had sex once, of course, and it was a rape (NOT by the hero), and then the hero has to force her again in typical Stuart fashion (of course we know it’s different because he’s the hero and it’s only partly forced). As he climaxes (she hasn’t had an orgasm, since he’s too excited himself, of course), here’s the narration:
“She watched him almost from a distance, and dfor a moment she felt almost serene. It was a strange kind of power, to feel him climax inside her, to feel his total loss of control, when she was the one who always felt powerless” (p. 185)
At that point, she’s doing this weird double projection, where she’s identifying his mascline power, but she’s also identifying him with feminine powerlessness. It is, IMO, a perfect example of the co-opting thing, because her sense of power comes directly out of her perception of him as powerless. Of course there are a lot of layers to the scene, starting with the fact that the hero has to force the heroine in order to free her from the memories of the last time she was forced and raped, which is sort of an interesting premise to begin with.
Gail said on 09.16.05 at 12:15 AM • [link]
“Because as women we are raised to always care about the rules, and almost
never to just take what we want.”
This is so-o-o-ooo true. And I would love to read a book about a woman who breaks all the rules and takes what she wants. Think I could write one and get it published? Maybe as a fantasy…
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 12:38 AM • [link]
Some authors have macros programmed into their keyboards that they just hit to put in their favorite phrases. Robert Jordan, for instance.
Ha, with Robert Jordan, he has keyboard macros that generate entire SCENES for him. “Hmmm, it’s been two whole chapters since the last time Rand brooded about the tainted source. Ctrl-Shift-D, and there you go—13,500 words worth of brooding!”
In reply to other subthread—I do feel there is a kind of excitement a reader, and perhaps a writer, is taking from seeing the once-powerful hero brought down and suffering—for what he is suffering, ultimately—for wronging the heroine by expressing his power. Think about it—he is punished for being more powerful than the heroine. Doesn’t it also seem to be related to the deeply seated female fear of a man’s sheer strength? Isn’t, in a way, the domestication of a rogue is a kind of a power play, more subtle than the forced sexual situation? Sort of a revenge a woman is taking on a man who is inherently stronger…
Oooh, what an excellent take on this! And yes, I’ll admit up front I like rading about the asshole hero who has to grovel for his misbehavior partly because of this power subversion, and also partly because I love the martyr fantasy. As a little kid, I used to imagine myself dying in grisly yet painless ways and the sobbing eulogies that would follow during my funeral, about how people would feel sorry they didn’t treat me better, etc. My enjoyment of a particular sort of romance novel is basically an adult iteration of this childhood fantasy, wherein they find out how TOTALLY FREAKIN’ AWESOME I AM, BUT IT’S TOO LATE, SUCKAS.
These two explanations also account for why I love the “heroine almost dies and hero sobs by the bedside as he realizes how very, very, very much he luuuuurves her and how sorry he is that he’s mistreated her” scenario in romance novels, too.
The thing I like best about Whitney, My Love was Clayton’s deep regrets after he’d hurt Whitney.
You know, after reading the excerpt posted by LFL and reading your comment, Lynn, I wonder why I disliked WML as strongly as I did. Because I clearly remember feeling that he didn’t grovel nearly enough to suit me. I really do need to pick this up again and re-read it.
“if women truly embrace our sexuality and our right to be sexual and enjoy sex and indulge ourselves in pleasure when we want to, would we continue to fantasize about being raped? Would we still fantasize about dominating men?”
I don’t know, Robin, but I suspect that these fantasies may be transmuted, but the anxieties will never completely go away.
Excellent point. I don’t think dom/sub fantasies will ever leave us, if only because inequalities in power will always exist. Men with power and freedom still engage in dom/sub fantasies, for example.
Gail said on 09.16.05 at 12:47 AM • [link]
“Oh, it’s not rape—she CAME!
She was obviously enjoying it! A REAL rape wouldn’t have the heroine coming
so hard she saw stars…
When I was working for a prosecutor and going to victim assistance workshops, there was one on rape that said women sometimes do climax during rape. Which really complicates their recovery from it.
“Because in those old romances, I
feel as if the hero and heroine were in competition, and the one who was
right more often was the winner, and the heroine LOST EVERY TIME. Bugged the
hell out of me”
Oh, this bugs me too. Extremely. There are fairly contemporary romances that have this kind of competition, and this kind of result, and I HATE those. They are the Throw Them Against the Wall books for me. Why can’t the hero lose just ONCE???
This bothers me much more than Anne Stuart’s forced seduction scenes (which sometimes have me on the edge of squidging out) (And I think I’m going to be writing one in a few days, which kind of squidges me out too.) You know, Anne does let the heroine win sometimes.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 12:51 AM • [link]
I also wanted to comment a bit about Anne Stuart’s Black Ice, which was brought up earlier. It’s my favorite of all the romances I’ve read this year. I have read roughly ten books by Stuart (Into the Fire, which Robin referred to, was not one of them, so I can’t comment on that book), and Black Ice is by far my favorite of all the Stuart books I’ve read. I enjoyed it so much that as soon as I finished it, I started reading it over again. And I enjoyed it even more the second time. So I read it two more times, for a total of four readings, back-to-back. I just loved it.
Make no mistake, Black Ice is a dark, violent book and not for the faint of heart. I don’t think it would appeal to everyone, but it certainly appealed to me.
As for the near-rape interrogation scene, I didn’t find it erotic, so it didn’t work for me in that sense. But I thought it was a crucial scene to the book, one that was there to (A) show that Bastien was capable of doing almost anything in order to execute his job and protect his cover, and (B) create a huge conflict for Chloe when she is forced to go on the run with him in order to save her life.
As someone commented above, Bastien saw himself as a bastard, and that was part of his appeal. I also loved his world-weariness and his bone-tiredness. Bastien actually was tired of life itself, and willing to die in the attempt to save Chloe’s life, partly for Chloe, and partly because he was so sick of the life he led.
A big part of the success of this book for me had to do with the world that Stuart creates in the novel, one where not just the villains but also the supposed “good guys†were capable of killing innocent bystanders like Chloe to protect their work. This world was so dark that it made it possible to view someone like Bastien as a hero.
One of my favorite lines in the book comes when Chloe discovers that Bastien works for a shadowy organization. “Can you tell me one thing?” she says, “Are you part of the good guys or the bad guys?” To which Bastien wearily replies, “Trust me, there’s not much difference.”
Another line I loved comes in a shocking scene in which Bastien kills someone to protect Chloe. It says in Chloe’s POV, “He was a monster, not even human. But he was her monster, keeping her safe, and she was past the point of caring.”
Stuart creates a world in which it takes someone as ruthless as Bastien to survive, and to keep the heroine alive. Given all the dead bodies that pile up in the course of the story, the fact that Bastien and Chloe’s first sexual encounter was less than fully consensual pales in significance more and more as the story goes on. Without that dark world, Bastien would be far less appealing as a hero. All of which makes me wonder how much of our reaction to these dark heroes depends on the fictional world in which they exist.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 01:00 AM • [link]
“Oooh, what an excellent take on this! And yes, I’ll admit up front I like
rading about the asshole hero who has to grovel for his misbehavior partly
because of this power subversion, and also partly because I love the martyr
fantasy. As a little kid, I used to imagine myself dying in grisly yet
painless ways and the sobbing eulogies that would follow during my funeral,
about how people would feel sorry they didn’t treat me better, etc. My
enjoyment of a particular sort of romance novel is basically an adult
iteration of this childhood fantasy, wherein they find out how TOTALLY
FREAKIN’ AWESOME I AM, BUT IT’S TOO LATE, SUCKAS.”
Oh, LOL. My childhood fantasies usually involved bloody revenge. I’ve read too many Brothers Grimm’s tales—where the evil stepmother ended up wearing white-hot iron shoes and that kind of thing. So if those fantasies involved funerals, they were the nasty people’s funerals. Sort, of, hahaha, you treated me so bad, now look who’s dancing on your grave! Yes, I was a vindictive kid. Maybe that’s why the martyr kind of romance never appealed to me. I’m just left wondering why doesn’t she suggest all those bothersome people visit the place where the sun never shines…:)
i>“Because as women we are raised to always care about the rules, and
almost never to just take what we want.”
“This is so-o-o-ooo true. And I would love to read a book about a woman who
breaks all the rules and takes what she wants. Think I could write one and
get it published? Maybe as a fantasy… “
Sure you can!
I did :) Granted, some reviewers hated the heroine. But you can’t please them all… and as for the rules—what rules? :)
“Men with power and freedom still engage in dom/sub fantasies, for example.”
Not the ones who are fully satisfied with their position, and don’t have deep seated fears or urges for a change.
What people rarely realize is that nearly every kind of “unusual” sexual fantasy, especially something you’d never engage in in real life, means some kind of issue. Not always a bad thing. Not always a problem. But it means something unresolved in your psyche, some inner change or process that expresses itself through sexuality. I don’t mean game-like mild fantasies, erotic entertainment, but full blown extreme “I’m almost ashamed to want it” fantasies. Especially if it is a fantasy you are getting obsessed with, the only thing that gets you off. Controversial fantasies, like the forced seduction one. If you have a repetitive sexual fantasy which makes you a little (or maybe a lot) uneasy… a fantasy you are reluctant to admit—look for an issue behind it. Sometimes, the issue has little to do with actual sex.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 01:13 AM • [link]
“As someone commented above, Bastien saw himself as a bastard, and that was
part of his appeal. I also loved his world-weariness and his
bone-tiredness. Bastien actually was tired of life itself, and willing to
die in the attempt to save Chloe’s life, partly for Chloe, and partly
because he was so sick of the life he led.”
This poses another interesting questions… there are a lot of ‘anti-heroes’ in romance. Why there isn’t a single cheerful one, with healthy self-esteem? They are all brooding… see themselves as bastards, and not in a jolly way. If they are demonic, they are grimly demonic—not one of them is playful, or has some kind of joie de vie.
I think I know why.
A man who is a bastard, but at the same time, possesses healthy self-esteem—-a man who does not hate what he is, neither consciously, nor subconciously, a man satisfied with himself, accepting himself… it is almost impossible for the author to change him believably. But our brooding hero who secretly yearns for the light—oh, will he suffer much and long… because he already has a deep-seated neurosis just waiting for a right reason to surface.
Re: our attitude depending on the fictional world.
A lot, I think. Also on the reader’s personality. I can say that as a reader, I can forgive the hero pretty much any sin… as long as it is committed towards someone other than the heroine. When it comes to how he wronged her, I’m merciless. I’ve read Black Ice, too, and since I tend to associate with the heroine (at least POV-wise, not character-wise), all I could think by the middle of the book was “I wish he died a painful death and left her to find herself another man—after she finishes therapy, of course.” :) Don’t take offense, it’s more my sarcasm than any malice towards the book itself. It did not shock me one bit when he killed someone to protect her. It wouldn’t have shocked me even if he went all Kill Bill and slashed two dozen people to protect her. But the non-consensual sex, oh, that was unforgivable, because it was personal. I didn’t relate to the secondary character, I related to the heroine.
It sort of goes against the essence of romance, but well, that’s the way it is.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 01:13 AM • [link]
I would love to read a book about a woman who breaks all the rules and takes what she wants. Think I could write one and get it published? Maybe as a fantasy…
Go for it, Gail! I know I would love to read one too.
I don’t think dom/sub fantasies will ever leave us, if only because inequalities in power will always exist. Men with power and freedom still engage in dom/sub fantasies, for example.
Great point, Candy. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s true that men still have these fantasies.
(And I think I’m going to be writing one in a few days, which kind of squidges me out too.)
What kind of book are you writing it for, Gail?
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 01:22 AM • [link]
>And I would love to read a book about a woman who
breaks all the rules and takes what she wants. Think I could write one and
get it published? <
Well, people might be coming around, because my GH winner is about a girl who’s ruined and decides she may as well make the friggin most of it and take a lovah. A big ol’ Scottish lovah. She’s quite unrepentful. Is that a word? Hmm.
Of course it’s not published yet and, as Daria said about her heroine, some people HATE her. “A noblewoman in 1845 England would NEVER act this way!”
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 01:24 AM • [link]
No offense taken, Daria. But actually, that scene was written from the hero’s POV. So… clearly some people identify with the POV character, and some with the hero when he’s not the POV character or with the heroine when she’s not the POV character. When I think about the scene in question, and who I identified with, I’m not sure who it was. The scene was not erotic to me (and forced seductions sometimes are). But as I said before, I did feel it was crucial to the story.
So, do all books in which the hero wrongs the heroine not work for you? I would think that would rule out a big segment of the books that are out there (and especially those that were out there in previous decades).
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 01:26 AM • [link]
Ah. Unrepentant. Sorry. This is why I can write, but not speak. Not enough time to think over each word.
Gail said on 09.16.05 at 01:53 AM • [link]
(And I think I’m going to be writing one in a few days, which kind of
squidges me out too.)
What kind of book are you writing it for, Gail?
It’s a fantasy—with romantic elements. For Luna. They let me do lots of unusual things.
Fair said on 09.16.05 at 01:55 AM • [link]
This has been an amazing thread, and Robin, I’m so glad you commented on my post - I was hoping you would. You should write a book (if you haven’t already). You have so much to say.
Maili said on 09.16.05 at 02:09 AM • [link]
Off topic:
Of course it’s not published yet and, as Daria said about her heroine, some people HATE her. “A noblewoman in 1845 England would NEVER act this way!â€
*violent head banging on desk*
Victoria, next time someone say that to you, please do
rip her face to piecestell her that this country is old enough to witness the best and worst sides of the human nature, hundred times over. If she’s from a family that is wealthy and powerful enough for its members to get away with anything, she can do WHATEVER she wants, especially if she knew how to twist and bend the society’s rules without losing her family’s face. This happened many times in real life for *centuries*, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t happen in your story as well. Keep trying, Victoria.
A-hem. Sorry about that, everyone. Don’t mind me. I feel better now, even though my forehead is throbbing from headbanging.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 02:18 AM • [link]
I read that “A noblewoman in 1845 England would NEVER act this way!” comment, and I gave Maili a half hour to come back and kick some ass. She did it in forty-seven minutes.
Slowing down in your old age, darling?
*ducks Maili’s fists*
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 02:29 AM • [link]
“As for the near-rape interrogation scene, I didn’t find it erotic, so it didn’t work for me in that sense.”
HI LFL! So glad you’re here and commenting.
FWIW, Stuart made it clear in her AAR interview that it wasn’t supposed to be erotic—it was supposed to be angry. That comment, her willingness to have that kind of scene in a Romance, indicated enough self-awareness on her part that it made me read Ritual Sins, which someone recommended to me, and which I enjoyed. I also want to say that I thought that Into the Fire had some interesting things going on, although it’s apparently considered one of the books in which she “goes too far,” whatever that means to Stuart readers. My feelings about Stuart from my limited reading experience are mixed; on the one hand I think she tackles some sticky issues without the soft-focus resolution, and I appreciate that a lot. On the other hand, there is some serious sexual f**ked upness in her books, IMO, and I’m not necessarily talking about the forced seduction scenes.
Your discussion of Black Ice, which I will read based on your recommendation, reminds me of Debra Webb’s Striking Distance, featuring a hero who seemed—at the end of the book, even—one step ahead of Norman Bates, and a heroine who cracked me up with her continued comments that she was had a degree in psychology and couldn’t believe all the whacked stuff she was doing! That book was one bleak “romance,” and when I think about it, I totally agree with your comments about the importance of the fictional world surrounding the hero as part and parcel of whether or not we can buy into his evolution.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 02:48 AM • [link]
Still Off Topic: >If she’s from a family that is wealthy and powerful enough for its members to get away with anything, she can do WHATEVER she wants<
Thanks, Maili! Glad to know my storyline is in keeping with reality. The heroine is, in fact, an heiress and the sister of a duke. Untouchable in some ways. She’s already managed to lose her respectability, but she’s still got her money and her looks, so bring on the hot monkey sex! Ee-ee.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 02:58 AM • [link]
“Robin, I’m so glad you commented on my post - I was hoping you would. You should write a book (if you haven’t already). You have so much to say.”
Ah, yes, I get that it would be easier on everyone if I used up my own (cyber)space but unfortunately, I don’t have the gumption to be that selfless right now.
I did, actually, start to put together a conference proposal on rape in Romance for a cultures of violence conference, which is how I started thinking about all this more systematically. Unfortunately, the conference didn’t want the proposal (actually, I don’t think they ever got it, but they probably still wouldn’t have wanted it), and now I’m stuck with this topic I’m fascinated by and no real outlet—a dangerous combo as you’ve witnessed here.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.16.05 at 03:10 AM • [link]
This seems like an excellent topic for an RBA article…
Fair said on 09.16.05 at 04:05 AM • [link]
Ah, yes, I get that it would be easier on everyone if I used up my own (cyber)space
Well, I didn’t mean it that way, I just meant I wish you would write 100,000 words sometime because I’d be happy to read it. I’m always looking to see what you have to say about these things.
Stef2 said on 09.16.05 at 04:54 AM • [link]
Yeah, I STILL wanna be Robin when I grow up - even if she is 20 years younger than me.
One element of romance that bothers me goes along, I think, with this discussion about rape and forced seduction, at least as much as I’ve read thoughts about the hero groveling in misery after he’s acted like an ass. My problem: So many romances focus on the change of the hero because of his love for the heroine. In my infancy of reading romances, back when Steve and Ginny were gettin’ it on all over the planet, I read rape scenes and barely blinked. As time passed, I devoured romances and totally bought into the fantasy that a man can change with a woman’s love.
Now, this whole concept stops me cold. It stretches believability, for me at least, to the breaking point. Can a man (or woman) be happier with love in their life? Sure. Will this love perhaps spur them to do things they might not otherwise? Could be. But I can’t buy that love will completely alter a personality. Once an asshole, most likely always an asshole.
Maybe I don’t like this premise because it’s the classic situation of domestic abuse. How many women have you known who got involved with someone, thinking they could change him? As people grow older, their quirks and character flaws tend to become more pronounced - not the other way around. Consider how difficult it is to change our own character flaws. And that’s something we can control. How is it believable that a woman can change a man because she loves him?
When I was in my 20’s, I bought it. In my 40’s, no way. I’ve noticed my reading habits have changed, and I look for romances that have a more realistic premise of what love means between a man and a woman. If a man will force himself on a woman, regardless of provocation, even if she ‘enjoys it’ (which I also can’t buy) that’s it for me. She can love him til the cows come home, and he’ll still be a bully.
Mar said on 09.16.05 at 06:09 AM • [link]
This is such a fascinating discussion! I agree with a lot of what’s been said, and I guess I’ll try to throw my two cents in, although it may seem repetitive or less articulate after the all of you!
In regards to the changing social mores, I think that maybe the increase in sexualized violence on TV and in mysteries or thrillers might have something to do with why we’re seeing less rape in romances. I recently read an article about sexualized violence toward women on crime shows, and while the violence against is being portrayed more often and more graphically, more women are watching these shows. Similarly, a lot of women I know (my mother, for example) who used to read romance novels, now read grisly crime novels.
I think that we live in a society where violence (in entertainment, certainly) is seen as less offensive than overt sexuality. As a result, the mass market entertainment, which always wants to combine sex and violence for the most punch, has moved from violent sex into sexualized violence. Does that make any sense?
Judith McNaught said on 09.16.05 at 07:07 AM • [link]
Several years ago, I made it a practice to avoid “Romance Review Sites,” but I came across a discussion about this particular topic elsewhere, and I decided to follow the link and have a look for myself. Now that I’ve read all your posts in this topic, I’m very glad I did.
Despite a site name which initially turned me off and the use of what I assumed was “shock-value profanity” all over the main topic pages, I’ve just discovered some of the most intelligent, insightful, and thought-provoking commentaries on this subject that that I’ve ever read anywhere.
It didn’t matter to me whether the messages were critical or supportive of my books, it mattered only that they were sincere, sensible, and accurate. Your messages were all those things, although in one case I don’t think I wrote the book being described. LOL
In any case, it’s been a genuine pleasure and an honor to visit here. Your diversity, passion, tolerance, and perspective reaffirm my faith in our sex—which by the way never wanes anyway.
Before I vanish, I’d like to comment on an interesting thought one of you expressed, which was, “Maybe we’ll all know women have achieved equality when these fantasies cease to have any power over us at all.”
I can remember a time when sexual equality, including equal job opportunities, and equal pay for equal work, were mere fantasies that women secretly (and often guiltily) cherished, and that men openly derided and opposed.
My generation converted those fantasies into battle slogans that we campaigned for and marched for in the early 70’s. We endured the scorn, the epithets, and the retaliation of a nation of men who feared, mocked, subverted, and openly opposed everything we wanted to accomplish. We knew all along that we were waging a battle that would take decades to win, and so we fought it for our daughters’ sake, more than our own.
Because of the above, I have a broader perspective on the issue of women’s equality in the past and present than many of you do. From my perspective, we’ve won the battle for equality against our male opposition. Now there’s only one battle left to fight, but it’s the toughest one yet and unless we win it, we will never have true equality. Unfortunately, our opponents in this remaining battle are far more resilient, more clever, and therefore more lethal. They are all women. They are ourselves.
When we first inhabited this planet, we were l/2 the size of males. Our very survival, and the survival of our young, depended upon our ability to attract and secure a male protector. In that desperate quest, we necessarily regarded every other female as deadly competition. Since we had no physical prowess to display in order to outshine our competition, we had to settle for using every petty method available to us. We searched for faults in each other, we found them and pointed them out; we criticized and condemned.
Because we had no power over males, we felt powerless, and so we strived to exert what puny power we did have, over each other instead.
Maybe that behavior became part of our genetic memory, because today—driven by survival instincts that we no longer need—many of us continue to view every other member of our own sex as potential competition. For that reason, we feel compelled to nitpick, criticize, and condemn each other. We still feel powerless, and so we try to inflict our judgments and tastes on each other.
In the struggle for equality with men, we are our own worst enemy. No, I think we are our ONLY real remaining enemy.
In answer to this statement, “Maybe we’ll all know women have achieved equality when these fantasies cease to have any power over us at all,” I would like to suggest that there will never be equality for women until we learn to support each other’s choices and, more importantly, our absolute right to make choices for ourselves. (If in doubt about how to do this, we have only to watch how males react and interact.)
We are an amazing sex, a fascinatingly diverse sex. In fact, we have only a few characteristics in common: Courage, loyalty, passion, and compassion. When we learn to celebrate our strengths and warmly tolerate our differences, we will achieve equality with men.
And then we will change the world.
It’s going to happen. It IS happening. Just not as quickly as I once hoped.
Thanks again for a very informative and enjoyable experience here, and for letting me participate as an uninvited guest. And in case anyone is thinking of suggesting it—please do not ask me to define, discuss, or defend my position on this topic or the scene I wrote in WML which some of you feel is objectionable. I’ll leave all that in your very capable hands. LOL
Judith McNaught
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 07:33 AM • [link]
“My problem: So many romances focus on the change of the hero because of his love for the heroine. In my infancy of reading romances, back when Steve and Ginny were gettin’ it on all over the planet, I read rape scenes and barely blinked. As time passed, I devoured romances and totally bought into the fantasy that a man can change with a woman’s love.”
FWIW, Stef, this idea of love changing everything, of turning the a-hole hero into the perfect man and filling the heroine with a sense of purpose and perfect contentment is the main reason I resisted reading Romance for so long. What you’re describing is a specific example of the total idealization of romantic love as the most superior form of love, a notion that our society is STILL selling to women, especially young girls, IMO. I don’t any longer believe that Romance sells this idea any more than the rest of our media or society in general, but it still bothers me because in a truly love-starved society such as ours, I wonder if our myopic focus on romantic love as total fulfillment has kept us both 1) looking outside ourselves for happiness, and 2) feeling that anything other than that “great romantic love of a lifetime” is an inferior form of love, or not “real love.” So I’m with you in enjoying Romances in which the hero and heroine are strong individuals who find their own happiness to share with one another. And I am particularly drawn to those Romances which explore different relationships and the various forms of love that exist in the world and are just as (and perhaps even more) powerful and potentially transformative as amorous love, especially since so much of what people these days call “love” is later revealed to be lust (Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger, anyone??).
The Greeks saw love as existing in three forms: eros, agape, and philia. Eros is obvious; agape is both spiritual love and love of humanity/peoplehood; and philia is admiration and love of another that is neither spiritual nor erotic (friendship love, for example). It’s interesting, isn’t it, that as our society has become so focused on finding that ideal Romantic love, that we seem to be so unfulfilled and discontent. IMO the many many many individuals who reached out to help in the aftermath of Katrina have demonstrated that both love of humanity and admiration/friendship love are still alive and well, but we only seem to focus on them in times of crisis.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 07:47 AM • [link]
My feelings about Stuart from my limited reading experience are mixed; on the one hand I think she tackles some sticky issues without the soft-focus resolution, and I appreciate that a lot. On the other hand, there is some serious sexual f**ked upness in her books, IMO, and I’m not necessarily talking about the forced seduction scenes.
I would agree that that’s a fair description of some of her books, though not all. She has a also written some lighter category romances. Some of her books have worked for me better than others, but often times they are a guilty pleasure because of the sexual f**ked upness you talk about. But in Black Ice the world which the characters inhabited was even more f**ked up than their relationship (though yes, that was f**ked up too), and this made the relationship more satisfying to me on a deep, emotional level than say, the relationship of the hero and heroine in Ritual Sins.
Your discussion of Black Ice, which I will read based on your recommendation, reminds me of Debra Webb’s Striking Distance, featuring a hero who seemed—at the end of the book, even—one step ahead of Norman Bates, and a heroine who cracked me up with her continued comments that she was had a degree in psychology and couldn’t believe all the whacked stuff she was doing! That book was one bleak “romance,†and when I think about it, I totally agree with your comments about the importance of the fictional world surrounding the hero as part and parcel of whether or not we can buy into his evolution.
Striking Distance sounds like an interesting book; I just put it on my list of books to buy. Truth to tell, I think sometimes dysfunctional worlds, characters and relationships can make for very compelling reading. If they are well written, that is. If their dysfunctionality (is that a word?) is explored. And if, in the case of romances, the characters move to a healthier place in a believable way. For me, Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold is just about the epitome of how well it’s possible to do that in a book that contains a forced seduction / fantasy rape / whatever we want to call it.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 08:13 AM • [link]
Judith, so nice to see your comments. I’m glad you enjoyed the discussion. I agree that we women are often each other’s worst enemies, which is why it’s so nice to have discussions like this one.
Can a man (or woman) be happier with love in their life? Sure. Will this love perhaps spur them to do things they might not otherwise? Could be. But I can’t buy that love will completely alter a personality. Once an asshole, most likely always an asshole.
I agree with that, Stef2. And the similarity to the thought processes of women in abusive relationships, thinking they can change these men, really worries me.
But for me personally, the premise still works if the author shows early on that the hero wants to change, or has a strong internal conflict because part of him wants to change. I don’t believe a woman can change a man, but I believe a man can change himself, if he is sufficiently motivated.
And I think that there is a bright side there, to redemption stories (I’m speaking off all redemption stories now, not just ones that involve forced sex). They can serve as a reminder to us that we are capable of change, however difficult, and that we should not give up on ourselves or rest on our laurels. And that’s an important message for literature to convey, IMO.
Perhaps romance is not the best genre to carry that message, because of the danger of readers taking it to mean that they can change an abusive man. But I think people need to hear that they can change, and for that reason, there will always be redemption stories somewhere.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 12:03 PM • [link]
“So, do all books in which the hero wrongs the heroine not work for you? I
would think that would rule out a big segment of the books that are out
there (and especially those that were out there in previous decades).”
No—the books where he wrongs her but keeps being nice to the world don’t. If he is an asshole in general, then it is at least logical he wrongs everyone.
And the books where she is a sweet innocent people-loving martyr who never gets back at him, and finally he realizes he’s been so not nice to her and comes back with an apology… they don’t work. Because if you are an arsehole enough to hurt someone so helpless, you are doomed to stay an arsehole for the rest of your hopefully short life. It’s like kicking kittens. You kicked one, you can kick another one any time. Once a liar…
If she is a total shrew who can ground any man under her high heel, and finally she meets this one… then, as a reader, I’m fine with wronging. Because I know she’ll come back with the kind of vengeance that will make the ground shudder :). It’s fighting with a worthy opponent, not kicking kittens.
Though my earlier statement still holds. If he treats the heroine worse than he treats all other people, especially without a real big reason (like, he is totally sure she is responsible for his family’s gruesome death)—then I just don’t buy that she is going to be oh so special for him.
Still, there are some kind of wrongs you just do not forgive, in my book. Like rape. Or barging into your house and killing off everyone there. Maybe that’s why I go all ballistic—to me, rape and murder are equal crimes. Maybe rape is even worse, because it is ultimate humiliation. You can at least kill someone honorably. Someone earlier said that there were so many dead bodies piling up by the end of Black Ice, the fact that their sex was not consensual paled in comparison. Not for this reader :)
And I just don’t read what they call classic romance. Marriage of convenience and stuff. I tried. My wall got so many books hurled at it, I had to change the wallpaper :)
The issue that raises my shackles is the way violence towards women is described in romance—sometimes. “It’s okay if he says he’s sorry.” We are told that any man, no matter how mean, can be repentant, can be fixed, can apologize and love the woman. Fiction or not, it is the kind of idealistic statement that brings optimists into trouble. It’s okay if he did it out of love? It’s okay if he is sorry? We should forgive and accept?
Authors aren’t afraid to tackle those controversial themes, but the way they solve the issue seems to be most controversial. Nowhere else in fiction you’ll have the victim so forviging, so accepting. No where else you can have a victim of rape and abuse founding a stable marriage with the rapist and abuser (I don’t mean all kinds of forced sediction here, but the extreme cases. What is done to women in romance… by their “heroes”... for the sake of love… in any other genre, it would have been a basis for a thriller plot). Nowhere else the violent behehaviour is being so justified—by being ultimately not an obstacle in the character’s way to happiness. You meet heroes so vile, a rare protagonist in another genre can measure up—and still they get ‘fixed’ and get their happy ever after. Romance is the only genre where you can see a man kidnapping and raping a woman, then living with her happily. Perhaps it’s in the female nature, to hope for redemption beyond all reason.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 12:06 PM • [link]
“I recently read an article about sexualized violence toward women on crime shows, and while the
violence against is being portrayed more often and more graphically, more
women are watching these shows. “
That is the difference I was babbling about. In a thriller, someone who is violent towards women is caught and jailed. Or killed.
In romance, he says he is sorry and marries the victim.
It’s not about the degree of violence—but the message. The attitude.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 12:16 PM • [link]
” But actually, that scene was written from the hero’s POV. So… clearly some people identify with the POV character, and some with the hero when he’s not the POV character or with the heroine when she’s not the POV character.”
This might be a topic for a whole new discussion. I have a friend who says she loves reading romance written from the make POV, in order to get into the heads of the men. She is just not really interested in the female protagonist. She’d love to have category romance all written in the male POV.
I noticed that in romance, I always identify with the heroine, no matter what the POV is. Although if it is a book in another genre with the male protagonist, I easily identify with him. I suppose, it’s not a question of gender relation, but that for me romance is the heroine’s story. The hero is just a plot function…
LOL, it was originally said about female in pulp fiction. That a woman in pulp fiction is just a plot function, not a character. Sexist little me.
(Although it needs to be said, I rarely read ‘straight’ romance. I read women’s fiction where there is a big external plot which has nothing to do with romance. So perhaps, I’m so used to the idea of romance as a secondary plot, that the romantic interest of the heroine becomes a plot function just because of that. Because it’s not the main focus.)
SB Sarah said on 09.16.05 at 03:13 PM • [link]
It is such a good thing I am sitting down when I read the comments that arrived over night. Welcome and thanks for your very insightful comments, Ms. McNaught! Especially this one:
In the struggle for equality with men, we are our own worst enemy. No, I
think we are our ONLY real remaining enemy.
AMEN!
runswithscissors said on 09.16.05 at 03:39 PM • [link]
Hi – I’m new here (and praising the fairy godmother who directed me to this site on the very day I had foresworn romance-novel-related-websites forever. Coincidence – a great plot device that also happens in real life™) but I hope it’s okay if I humbly add my thoughts to the discussion.
A book that sticks out in my mind because of the rape scene (or scenes depending on your point of view) is Gypsy Lady by Shirley Busbee. A bodice ripper with a capital bod that I read at a very young and impressionable age, which is why, despite my mother confiscating it, I still remember all the details. The hero rapes the heroine, believing her to be a gypsy wench = fair game. When he realises she’s a virgin, he decides to run off with her to Paris to make amends. Discovering that she’s actually as aristocratic as he is (though she was raised by gypsies) he has to marry her. There are many, many misunderstandings, but they are well on their way to the happy ending when the hero’s mortal enemy kidnaps the heroine and rapes her. The author makes it very clear that this is a Very Bad Thing, and though the hero kills the villain, the heroine remains traumatised = won’t have sex with her husband. Eventually her husband forcibly seduces her and they have their big happy ending.
The underlying message seems to be that though the hero forced himself on the heroine it was okay because he thought she was a gypsy and hey, isn’t that what a testosteroney alpha male in breeches would do? Whereas the villain raping the heroine is wrong because he knows that she’s a lay-dee. I don’t know if this was Busbee’s way of addressing the issue of rape in romances, or if she was just trying to give the men in the book ‘authentic’ attitudes towards sex.
I think the ‘raping the wench’ angle has been a way for some writers to fit sex into the plot, given a general assumption that sex was a no-no for nice unmarried girls in the past. So sometimes the hero mistakes the heroine for a gypsy, a maid, or a prostitute and ravishes her – but he’s not a bad person because a) easy mistake to make and b) everyone was doing it, so why not me? In other words the writer’s telling us not to judge the hero by our 21st century standards because the rape is ‘historically accurate’.
Just a (long) thought. And having got it off my chest, I can go back to work ...
Lynn M said on 09.16.05 at 03:49 PM • [link]
As I’ve grown older and questionably wiser, I’ve also come to be highly cynical about the premise of love’s ability to change a person completely. It’s why I have such a hard time with stories featuring a rake hero. No matter how sexy and fantabulous the heroine, if he was a skirt chaser his whole life, how can I believe that switch just gets turned off.
My other grown up issue is the speed in which romance novel heroes and heroines manage to fall in love. They meet cute on Sunday, have sex by Monday night, and are engaged or married by Friday. In my experiences, relationships that follow that course usually wind up with anullment papers being filed by the end of the month.
But in order to enjoy romance novels, I have to shut down that part of my brain that knows reality doesn’t work that way. I have to suspend disbelief, just as I have to accept for the duration of 300 some pages that time travel is possible, vampires are dang hot, and all men are impossibly buff, virile lovers. It’s all part of losing yourself in the entertainment.
As that pertains to this discussion, when it comes to accepting any form of rape in a fictional work, I think it’s a matter of knowing where your own personal line of suspension lies. For some, it hits way too close to reality to be acceptable. For others, we are able to take it as simply another twisting of what is real into what is fantasy.
SB Sarah said on 09.16.05 at 03:55 PM • [link]
Further ruminating the topic, it’s a curious intersection, the idea of women’s competitiveness for one another, and the idea of romance and women’s fiction allowing women to identify in a positive manner with one another.
Not to run the “Romance Shall Heal the World’s Ills!” flag up the pole (har) but women, in my very humble opinion, are never taught to compete appropriately with one another. It’s not a skill that socially we learn without some direct effort on our part. Perhaps with the advent of youth sports leagues, girls now will learn to play fair and leave the battle on the field, so to speak, but as many people have pointed out, women are our own worst enemies as we cut each other back and constantly seek to one-up each other.
Yet being given the opportunity to identify with another woman in the romance genre circumvents a lot of that competition, and rarely do I feel that urge to “squish the other woman” when I’m reading, though I do encounter the feeling when I’m reading a magazine profile of another woman sometimes.
And that’s a good look into my messed up psyche. I need more coffee, clearly!
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 04:57 PM • [link]
Well, slap me silly and call me Susan—Judith McNaught actually posted on our forum.
*faints dead away*
I never thought I’d ever get to “meet” the author who wrote the first romance novel I ever loved.
(I don’t cuss because of shock value—OK, maybe a little bit because of it—but because my inner child is a 13-year-old boy who thinks cusswords are funny.)
I agree with that, Stef2. And the similarity to the thought processes of women in abusive relationships, thinking they can change these men, really worries me.
But for me personally, the premise still works if the author shows early on that the hero wants to change, or has a strong internal conflict because part of him wants to change. I don’t believe a woman can change a man, but I believe a man can change himself, if he is sufficiently motivated.
Beautifully said, LFL. That’s the crux of believable character change for me, too, and it’s why Sebastian’s redemption in To Have and To Hold is so convincing to me; Sebastian desperately wants to change for the better, and Rachel is a catalyst, not the sole cause and purpose.
People DO successfully change and redeem themselves. Drug addicts quit, homophobes open their eyes and stop hating, self-destructive sluts (there are many varieties and reasons to slut) stop slutting, etc. They’re a lot rarer than fiction leads us to think—the vast majority of fiction deals with character arcs, which implies character change and transformation over time—but it happens.
It’s okay if he did it out of love? It’s okay if he is sorry? We should forgive and accept?
Authors aren’t afraid to tackle those controversial themes, but the way they solve the issue seems to be most controversial. Nowhere else in fiction you’ll have the victim so forviging, so accepting. No where else you can have a victim of rape and abuse founding a stable marriage with the rapist and abuser (I don’t mean all kinds of forced sediction here, but the extreme cases. What is done to women in romance… by their “heroesâ€... for the sake of love… in any other genre, it would have been a basis for a thriller plot). Nowhere else the violent behehaviour is being so justified—by being ultimately not an obstacle in the character’s way to happiness. You meet heroes so vile, a rare protagonist in another genre can measure up—and still they get ‘fixed’ and get their happy ever after. Romance is the only genre where you can see a man kidnapping and raping a woman, then living with her happily.
Daria, you have hit precisely why rapist heroes in romance make me so deeply uncomfortable.
And yes, the fantasy of redemption is a very strong one. Think about it: “Nobody else could change the reprobate, but he changed for me.” Again, that’s some powerful love sauce, and we women, we love thinking we have powerful love sauce.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 05:07 PM • [link]
Oooh, also:
“Thanks again for a very informative and enjoyable experience here, and for letting me participate as an uninvited guest.”
There’s no such thing as an uninvited guest here. It’s an open forum, and the people who post here are generally courteous (which sometimes shocks me, given the behavior I’ve seen on other Internet forums, and given my predilection to poke at sleeping tigers) and so smart, they scare me.
So feel free to drop by with your two cents any time, Judith. I’m very glad you enjoyed the experience here.
SB Sarah said on 09.16.05 at 05:11 PM • [link]
Good point Candy - everyone’s welcome. Unless you like throbby hearts.
And, dude, your Native American name would totally be She-Who-Pokes-at-Sleeping-Tigers.
I think at this point I am She-Who-Is-Round-Like-the-Moon.
anu439 said on 09.16.05 at 05:14 PM • [link]
Why there isn’t a single cheerful one, with healthy self-esteem? They are all brooding… see themselves as bastards, and not in a jolly way. If they are demonic, they are grimly demonic—not one of them is playful, or has some kind of joie de vie.
Certainly, there are nice, well-adjusted heroes—as much as I can’t stand most of Coulter’s stuff, she does have nice guys like Burke Drummond (Night Fire), his best friend (Night Storm), and a couple of others I’m still fond of. Jo Goodman has some of the best nice-in-a-totally-sexy-way heroes I’ve read.
But the nice guys are probably a minority (though I bet a sizable one) because as has been stated before in this thread, one of the fundamental storylines in romance is that of the heroine taming the rogue. It’s one of the most powerful. If the guy’s already a loves-his-mother, high-fives-the-butler, gives-to-charity type, then a major way to demonstrate/express the heroine’s power is gone. Or she has to find her power in other ways, like the heroines who find her sexuality/identity after years of abuse from her elderly, dominateing dead husband thanks to the nice-guy hero.
The nice guys are usually the ones who rehabilitate traumatized heroines.Otherwise, they have to die to make room for the grim, dominating hero. Hey, even Jack Dawson had to bite it in Titanic.
The comments about identification with both the h/h are really interesting. For me, my reading habits have changed since I began reading romance maybe 15 years ago. The wild-and-free hero POV has been a given in the genre for decades, so I rarely give it more than a passing thought (unless it’s someone like Shannon McKenna whose sex scenes are worth reading not just because they are HOT HOT HOT, but cuz they actually speak to the characters’, uh, character.)
These days, I am a whore for heroines. I expect a great deal more in their characterization than I used to in terms of complexity and intelligence. I want more than a story about finding her sexuality in the arms of a bastard-type story. I LOVE stories in which two strong people go at each other, give in to each other. Which explains why I am reading much less romance.
Also I agree with everything LFL says about loving the asshole who wants to change for himself, with the heroine as a motivation/inspiration, not the reason.
OT: LFL, have you read anything good lately? I need recs, and we generally have the same taste. Last things I read were Jo Goodman’s Season to be Sinful (LOVED IT) and Lisa Valdez’s Passion (very satisfying).
Maili said on 09.16.05 at 05:22 PM • [link]
The hero rapes the heroine, believing her to be a gypsy wench = fair game. When he realises she’s a virgin, he decides to run off with her to Paris to make amends. Discovering that she’s actually as aristocratic as he is (though she was raised by gypsies) he has to marry her.
*This* topic deserves a column of its own. I never really liked and understood this popular form of snobbery that appears in almost all sub-genres of the romance genre, including futuristic romances. Whenever I come across this in a romance, my heart breaks. Melodramatic, granted, but it’s how I truly feel. I just don’t understand why this is accepted with little fuss.
EvilAuntiePeril said on 09.16.05 at 05:34 PM • [link]
This discussion just gets better. Loads of insightful comments and a lot of food for thought. And serious respect to Judith McNaught stepping up to the plate - she is one classy lady.
Something that’s been touched on, but which seems worth noting is that it’s always alpha heroes who perpetuate sexual violence. I’ve used a blanket term for a range of behaviour to make the point that everything on this continuum from rape to “punishing kisses” is a manifestion of the alpha male personality. It connects to his physical strength, but also with his inability to express any powerful emotion apart from anger, often to the extent that he isn’t aware of feeling anything else. And this anger often expresses itself as violence towards the heroine.
Candy mentioned that the rape device or sexual violence is sometimes used as a crude shorthand to characterise the hero as alpha. I wanted to expand on this because I think it also connects with the way romantic fiction (especially the more traditional kind) deals with gender archetypes. The archetypes are firmly rooted in sexuality, and the consequence of this is that sexual violence is used in some books to reinforce these roles. What disturbs me about such cases beyond the deed itself is that the sexual violence is often cast as punishment, particularly when the heroine transgresses the boundaries by taking on some of the “male” values like arrogance, aggression or sexual choice.
There is a lot of security to be had in retaining these roles (at the cost of freedom), but their boundaries tend to crumble in the real world, no matter what era you happen to live in. Hence the need for the distance created by exotic or historical settings. This may in part account for the “fairytale” or fantasy aspect of many romances. But I wonder whether the darker settings of many modern romances are just another side of this coin. Yes, the distance created can allow devices like rape to represent other struggles and conflicts, but like Robin I don’t think it’s always successful, and I suspect this may be part of the reason why.
EvilAuntiePeril said on 09.16.05 at 05:56 PM • [link]
Oh, and hope I didn’t come across as snobbish about alpha heroes and such. I absolutely love a lot of these books, but find it interesting how I’ve fallen out of love with certain types of novel over time, and why some books have a visceral appeal that seems completely at odds with a lot of my more rational viewpoints.
Stef2 said on 09.16.05 at 05:59 PM • [link]
So what does this say? That the use of rape or forced seduction is the lazy writer’s way of establishing an alpha male? Could be, but I’m not so sure that’s accurate. The novels that have been discussed were written by women I consider incredibly talented, who weave complex plots and draw unique, identifiable characters. I don’t think they’d resort to using rape as a plot device, merely to point out an alpha male. I’ve seen a lot of alpha males portrayed who didn’t resort to violent sex with the heroine. They may be gruff, rude, even crude - but not violent.
No, I believe the rape/forced seduction thing is more about buying into the fantasy of the heroine having the ability to alter the hero’s character, to redeem him from the beast he is in the beginning. It’s real sweet - but to me, it’s total bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong - I love a bad boy as much as the next girl. But there’s a distinct line between a bad boy and a sexual abuser. Of late, I am becoming even more nitpicky, and find a distinct line between a bad boy and an asshole. Talking down to the heroine, dismissing her opinions, treating her as inconsequential, all of which is rewarded by her ‘love’? Yeah, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I’m a feminist mother of college-aged daughters first and a romance reader second.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 06:18 PM • [link]
The underlying message seems to be that though the hero forced himself on the heroine it was okay because he thought she was a gypsy and hey, isn’t that what a testosteroney alpha male in breeches would do?
Maili was right, this issue deserves its own column. On one hand, a guy raping/fucking a girl and not giving it a second thought because he thinks she’s a prostitute/servant/gypsy/other form of Wenchableâ„¢, then doing a 180° turn when he finds out she’s a lady (woh woh woh) is a somewhat authentic attitude for a guy of that period to have.
My question is: how far are we willing to take historically accurate attitudes and cast them as heroic?
Here’s an example:
Would you be willing to read a book with a slave-owning plantation owner hero who rapes his female slaves, and never does anything to discourage his overseers from doing the same? Hey, it’s not as if he was raping a human, right? Because that, arguably, is also an authentic attitude to have.
People who know more about history can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole notion of loving-monogamy-within-the-bounds-of-marriage very much a MODERN notion in the first place? Which would mean that pretty much all historical romance novels are anachronistic in that sense already.
I also don’t see why there’s a need to cast distasteful behavior as historically authentic when it’s just as historically authentic for men NOT to engage in these behaviors.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.16.05 at 06:26 PM • [link]
I turn my back for twelve hours of heaving, and look what happens! LOL
Serious props to Judith McNaught for being classy. *lifts glass*
However… um, I don’t think the battle’s over yet. In a society where it’s still hard for rape victims to get true justice, where the federal government says domestic-violence restraining orders don’t “necessarily” need to be enforced, and where women still make seventy-odd cents on the dollar a man makes for the same work, not to mention a world where motherhood is economically penalized, I don’t think women are the only enemies who remain.
I think the feminist cause has slowed a little, both because of infighting among different feminist ideaologies and because of female conservatives (Condi Rice and Ann Coulter spring to mind). The most dangerous thing right now, I think, is believing we’ve won the battle. In a country where a husband can still batter a wife to death, (and don’t give me that “she must have deserved/wanted it because she stayed” crap, we all know that plenty of women can’t afford to leave abusive relationships on a purely economic level) and motherhood is still unpaid scut work, I don’t think the fight is over at all. It’s much better than it was, because of the sacrifices and battles of the women of McNaught’s generation, but the war isn’t over yet, ladies. Not even close.
I just went on a rampage through my books trying to find out if I’d ever written a rape scene. I don’t think I have (even in the unpublished novels) but I have noticed that my heroes tend to do a bit of bruising, usually when they’re trying to hold a heroine still and explain something. Do you think one is a milder version of the other? Either way it’s a character with physical strength overpowering another character who may not have that same strength. It seems to be, again, about power.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 06:29 PM • [link]
“Striking Distance sounds like an interesting book; I just put it on my list of books to buy. Truth to tell, I think sometimes dysfunctional worlds, characters and relationships can make for very compelling reading. If they are well written, that is. If their dysfunctionality (is that a word?) is explored. And if, in the case of romances, the characters move to a healthier place in a believable way.”
I’ll be anxious to see your response to SD, LFL, because for me it was one fascinating book. NOT romantic, but compelling and challenging in interesting ways. The fact that it’s a single title Silhouette surprised me a little, and I can tell you that the writing is not the most polished, but it’s so worth reading, in part because the heroine is actually much more interesting than the hero, IMO. The way we watch her get sucked in, and the ambiguity of the ending, and the self-consciousness she has in some ways but not in others made that book a fascinating experience for me. If you can’t find it, I’ll lend you my copy.
“No where else you can have a victim of rape and abuse founding a stable marriage with the rapist and abuser (I don’t mean all kinds of forced sediction here, but the extreme cases.”
Have you read Eileen Dreyer’s older RWR article “Rape is not Romance,” Daria? I found it on the internet a couple of years ago, and it’s really, really interesting. As a trauma room nurse and Romance writer (she also writes as Kathleen Korbel), she is also very ambivalent about the way domestic violence and rape are portrayed in Romance, especially in situations where the hero treats the heroine like crap for the whole book and then tells her he loves her on the last page. She especially rails against the argument that it’s historically accurate to portray rape in earlier times.
“The hero rapes the heroine, believing her to be a gypsy wench = fair game. When he realises she’s a virgin, he decides to run off with her to Paris to make amends.”
This plot line reminds me a lot of Lisa Kleypas’ first book, Where Passion Leads, which traumatized me quite a bit the first time I read it.
And speaking of traumatic books, anyone read Sandra Brown’s Hawk O’Toole’s Hostage? Not only did that book employ the rape/violence against women theme, but also the Native American as savage rapist theme, which, I have to say, upped the ante considerably. I would need about 400 pages to detail all the offenses committed by that book, but after making this guy the most brutal and disgusting and racially stereotyped “hero,” Brown completely infantalizes him at the end by having him suckle at the heroine’s breast after she’s just fed their new son. See, my lips are curling even at the memory. Not to mention my disgust at the “woman as healer, nurturer, domesticator, earth mother” thing (how much can’t I stand many of SEP’s Romances for just this reason!). And am I the only one totally icked out by these heroes who want to suck milk from the heroines? Or how about the hero of Coulter’s Rosehaven who DEMANDS that the heroine let him watch her breastfeed their child? Is that common in Romance?
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 06:29 PM • [link]
“If the guy’s already a loves-his-mother, high-fives-the-butler, gives-to-charity type, then a major way to demonstrate/express the heroine’s power is gone. Or she has to find her power in other ways, like the heroines who find her sexuality/identity after years of abuse from her elderly, dominateing dead husband thanks to the nice-guy hero.”
And power is a critical element here, isn’t it? It’s interesting to me how women seem to shy away from certain notions of power, but we still yearn and seek out others, unwilling sometimes to see it as power we’re looking for. Sure it may not be the power to leap tall buidings in a single-bound, but it’s power just the same. And IMO it all goes back to the notion that power is conferred on the woman when a man loves her. And if she has to fight hard for that, it’s even more powerful. If she has to tame him from virtual savagery, it’s even more powerful. And yet, it’s still conferred by the male.
As to your mention of Shannon McKenna’s books, her first, Behind Closed Doors, is still my very favorite, because Seth was an a**hole hero who “talked” in the story, both verbally and through his internal dialogue, which, IMO, McKenna did a fabulous job representing. And it really did make me love him. Generally in these sorts of stories, if I buy the redemption I’m happy for the heroine but not in love with the hero. Seth and Sebastian from THATH, though, I loved by the end. But my most favorite anti-hero turned hero? Sheridan from Kinsale’s Seize the Fire. Now there was one a**hole hero who did the most terrible things to the heroine and still won my everlasting love.
“Well, I didn’t mean it that way, I just meant I wish you would write 100,000 words sometime because I’d be happy to read it. I’m always looking to see what you have to say about these things.”
I know, Fair, and I really do appreciate it. I may be nearing that 100K mark on this thread, though. If not, there’s always my dissertation on captivity narratives, but I don’t know how many words that is, and besides, you’d probably find it boring. It obviously didn’t inspire me to turn it into a book, so that’s probably not a good sign.
Tonda said on 09.16.05 at 06:34 PM • [link]
“I’ve also come to be highly cynical about the premise of love’s ability to change a person completely. It’s why I have such a hard time with stories featuring a rake hero.”
Jo Beverley gave a kickass workshop in Reno called something like “Cliché or Real Love” that was all about the biological things that happen in animals brains that cause bonding (aka love for us). Her take on how this worked into the reformed rake was fascinating and made total sense to me. I’m going to butcher it, but here goes: Some animals (and let us not forget that we are animals!) have fewer, or some specific, receptors for the biological chemicals that result in bonding in their brains. When these creatures DO find a mate that triggers the bond, they are more likely to be jealous, devoted, obsessive, etc. They bond (fall in love) with a vengeance. So, if you view the rake as one of these types of animals, then when he does manage to find the woman who triggers the bonding process, he’s likely to be first confused and amazed, and eventually strongly committed.
“My other grown up issue is the speed in which romance novel heroes and heroines manage to fall in love. “
I’m with you that sometimes it does seem too fast, but I have to remind myself that this happens in real life. My grandparents got married after knowing each other only two weeks (and were happily married and in love for 50+ years, until my grandfather died). My best friend told me she “knew” on her second date that her now husband was “the one”. I’ve been crazy in love twice in my life, and both times, I KNEW it was love, and mutual, almost immediately. As my friends and I say, “He just smelled right.”
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.16.05 at 06:41 PM • [link]
Would you be willing to read a book with a slave-owning plantation owner
hero who rapes his female slaves, and never does anything to discourage his
overseers from doing the same? Hey, it’s not as if he was raping a human,
right? Because that, arguably, is also an authentic attitude to have.
People who know more about history can feel free to correct me if I’m
wrong, but isn’t the whole notion of
loving-monogamy-within-the-bounds-of-marriage very much a MODERN notion in
the first place? Which would mean that pretty much all historical romance
novels are anachronistic in that sense already.
Actually, our modern idea of marrying for “love” inside romance novels is extremely anachronistic. “Marrying for love” wasn’t around until the mid-to-latter half of the 1900s, I believe. Before that, women married for security, for policy (if they were of a certain class) and for economic protection, not for love. Even what we consider to be the birth of romances, the Provencal troubadours singing about knights and their ladies, never held it as a good thing that the love should be consummated. That’s very much a modern thang.
And monogamy within marriage is very much a modern invention for men. As I’ve expressed before, chastity before marriage and nonadultery are held to be female social duties, b/c of property laws (a man wants to make sure the son who inherits his property is his and his alone; women wer eonly seen as incubators, if that.) Men were largely free to whore where they willed, since that was what a man did. (Don’t believe me? Read a few seventeenth-century plays.)
It is also a fairly recent invention to allow women any sexual freedom at all, ie the idea that they have a right to dispose of their bodies how they will and a right to seek sexual gratification. The historical idea of women (I’m talking Middle-Ages Europe, and hell, even Classic Greek, the Lysistrata is a comedy b/c nobody dreamed women could restrain themselves or understand politics) is that women were barely human, weak-willed filthy little maniacs who didn’t have the brains to keep themselves out of whoredom if they were once introduced to the Big Male Pokey, and consequently had to be both repressed for their own sake and chained for society’s sake, but also “protected” since they were developmentally disabled and didn’t have the wits to Make Any Decisions. Seriously, that’s the largely underlying assumption in most historical eras that we’re going to see romances in. There were exceptions- but the exceptions don’t concern us here.
Which makes me wonder if maybe we’re turning the tables by taking that wound in the female psyche from so many centuries of disdain and repression and turning the heroes into slaves to the Luuuuurve(tm) Juice.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 06:50 PM • [link]
“Daria, you have hit precisely why rapist heroes in romance make me so deeply
uncomfortable.
And yes, the fantasy of redemption is a very strong one. Think about it:
“Nobody else could change the reprobate, but he changed for me.”
Again, that’s some powerful love sauce, and we women, we love thinking we
have powerful love sauce.”
I guess I’m a pessimist :) I have spent my tender years reading every Agatha Christie’s mystery I could find, and her serial heroine, a harmless-looking, sweet-mannered old lady, used to say, “people never change. If he killed his first two wives, we can say with absolute certainty he is going to murder his third wife, too.” I tend to agree. Yes, people undergo ‘some’ changes, people see the error of their way… but the basic personality doesn’t change. It’s like a stormy sea—on the surface, it is boiling, but the closer you get to the bottom, the calmer it is. I’ve been down there while waves rushed over out heads, and at the very bottom, the sea plants are barely moved, it’s so calm. Same with human psyche, the changes are mostly on the surface. The most basic, inherent, deeply ingrained personality traces stay the same from cradle to grave. IMHO, of course!
“But there’s a distinct line between a bad boy and a sexual abuser.”
Totally. It’s been said here that forced seduction is one of the ways to establish an alpha male, but there are other ways too. I remember a hero who, well, admittedly he kissed the heroine forcefully a couple of times, and after that (she melted, of course, each time) she said angrily, “well, go on, rape me” (with quite a lot of provocative come-on in her manner), but he always said smugly that he would never go further than a kiss, because he doesn’t need to—soon there will be a day when she comes to him begging him to take her because she can’t wait a day longer for the pleasures of his bed. Extreme smugness, but I liked it :) Of course, he ended up being the one to do the begging.
Tonda said on 09.16.05 at 06:51 PM • [link]
” . . . but isn’t the whole notion of loving-monogamy-within-the-bounds-of-marriage very much a MODERN notion in the first place? Which would mean that pretty much all historical romance novels are anachronistic in that sense already.”
Depends on what you mean by MODERN . . .
The notion of marrying for love (among the upper-class) really begins to make headway in the 18th century (see THE RISE OF THE EGALITARIAN FAMILY for a great view on this). If you didn’t marry for love, then the idea that monogamy (on the man’s part) would be expected or practiced is harder to understand (it was pretty much always expected of the woman). This is not to say that people did not marry for love before the 18th century, just that it wasn’t until then that it was considered as a REASON to marry.
The notion of MALE monogamy within a marriage is still not the norm for many cultures. I had a long discussion with a male friend just last year about how he’s “allowed” to step out on his wife so long as he pays the bills, treats her well, is a good father to their children, etc. He’s Ecuadorian, and claims that this is the norm for all the men he knows. I told him he’s a pig, but he stands by his view of the world (just as I stand by mine). He’d never leave his wife, but he also doesn’t love her (in the big I LOVE YOU way). He married her because his mother picked her out, she was from the “right” sort of family, etc. It freaks me out sometimes when he and I have these talks. I just can’t get my head around his view how his marriage works.
So, I don’t think that a loving, monogamous marriage in an historical romance is anachronistic. But the idea of marring BECAUSE you were in love was not the norm for a large stretch of history.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 06:54 PM • [link]
In a society where it’s still hard for rape victims to get true justice, where the federal government says domestic-violence restraining orders don’t “necessarily†need to be enforced, and where women still make seventy-odd cents on the dollar a man makes for the same work, not to mention a world where motherhood is economically penalized, I don’t think women are the only enemies who remain.
Good points, Lilith. In fact, not only is it difficult to push a rape conviction, but rapists don’t get all that much jailtime compared to other crimes which I think are less of a big deal (e.g. mandatory minimums for drug possession), and rape is probably THE most under-reported crime. All these point to how we have quite a ways to go.
IMO it all goes back to the notion that power is conferred on the woman when a man loves her. And if she has to fight hard for that, it’s even more powerful. If she has to tame him from virtual savagery, it’s even more powerful. And yet, it’s still conferred by the male.
Interesting points, Robin. I’m not sure I have a whole lot of coherent thoughts about this, but I just wanted to highlight a point I found particularly interesting.
Have you read Eileen Dreyer’s older RWR article “Rape is not Romance,†Daria? (...) She especially rails against the argument that it’s historically accurate to portray rape in earlier times.
I haven’t been able to find this article on-line. And now that I find she addresses one of my biggest pet peeves when people try to defend romance novel rapists, I want to read it more than ever, wah! Any chance of an executive summary from you, Robin? Pretty please? With throbbing animated hearts on top?
But my most favorite anti-hero turned hero? Sheridan from Kinsale’s Seize the Fire. Now there was one a**hole hero who did the most terrible things to the heroine and still won my everlasting love.
Oh yes, I love Sheridan too. Love love love. Interestingly enough, when my husband read the book, Sheridan made him cringe and cringe. I do think part of what makes Sheridan so charming and ultimately redeemable is how in many ways he’s self-aware, and he knows he’s a jerk. We watch him go from “I’m a jackass, and I’m just fine with that” to “I’m a jackass, I’ve hurt someone I loved, and I need to change.” Quite rare in a lot of anti-heroes. Watching him do the right thing on occasion, almost despite himself, is funny but powerful at the same time. I also don’t think I’ve ever cried as much at the ending of a book as much as I did for Seize the Fire.
But the nice guys are probably a minority (though I bet a sizable one) because as has been stated before in this thread, one of the fundamental storylines in romance is that of the heroine taming the rogue. (...) The nice guys are usually the ones who rehabilitate traumatized heroines.
God, I love nice guy heroes. I wish there were more of them. Christy of To Love and to Cherish is the quintessential nice guy hero, and one of my all-time favorites.
I think there’s more than the redemption fantasy going on, although that’s certainly a large part of why there are so many angsty alphas in romance. I think a lot of women still believe in their heart of hearts that nice guy behavior is pussy behavior, and they don’t want pussies for romance novel heroes.
Romances are, in many ways, a highly stylized form of fiction. And I think the alpha hero, especially one who’s a rapist, is one of the best demonstrations of this fact.
runswithscissors said on 09.16.05 at 06:55 PM • [link]
“My question is: how far are we willing to take historically accurate attitudes and cast them as heroic?”
After I wrote about ‘historically accurate’ rape plots, I started thinking about the irony of me, person who likes her romances to be historically accurate, hating rape-the-wench scenes because they’re TOO accurate. Then I started to think, well maybe if the book was written in, say, the 18th century, I could go along with the concept of a guy who rapes someone still being the hero, because the writer was reflecting the attitudes of the day. But the only books I can remember written before 1900 which involved rape/forced seduction of maids/wenches/gypsies are Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Pamela – and in both cases the author makes it very clear that the rapists are bad, bad men.
I think the biggest problem is that the hero-as-rapist creates a conflict … you can either have men behaving badly-but-historically-accurately (now there’s a name for a sitcom) or you can have them behaving like heroes-to-modern-standards, but try to combine the two and you create bad hero soup. Bleeuch.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 06:55 PM • [link]
“But I wonder whether the darker settings of many modern romances are just another side of this coin. Yes, the distance created can allow devices like rape to represent other struggles and conflicts. . .”
I’m actually one of those people who feel that contemporary Romances often have MORE sexual politics and identity conflicts than historicals do. For one thing, I think when women are writing about their own society (or at least some fascimile of such) there’s more consciousness about certain attitudes and mores, but also more personal, sometimes unconscious ambivalence toward them.
Your point about the alpha hero is so interesting, because it makes me wonder whether it’s always the alphas who abuse in real life, or whether it’s sometimes those passive aggressive, appear to be beta types who take out their otherwise barely suppressed rage at the world on their partner. Any thoughts?
“However… um, I don’t think the battle’s over yet. In a society where it’s still hard for rape victims to get true justice, where the federal government says domestic-violence restraining orders don’t “necessarily†need to be enforced . . .”
You know, Lilith, I totally agree with you, and your comment reminds me of something we talked about in my criminal law class last semester. In the past ten years or so (at least in CA), there’s been a big shift in the treatment of domestic abuse cases to the point where even if the woman doesn’t want to pursue the case the DA’s office MUST do so on her behalf (it’s called a “no drop” policy). Apparently some women’s groups are actually against this policy because they believe it simply shifts the patriarchal control over the victim from the husband/boyfriend/parnter to the state, which then acts in the “best interest” of the woman. At first you might scoff at this idea, but when you think about it, if you change the content and make it that the state ensures that a woman isn’t allowed to go out after dark alone because she might get attacked, the implications seem a little darker.
Or how about in battered women’s syndrome defense cases—some women’s groups have actually resisted the use of the syndrome in cases where women have killed their attacker, since the defense depends on a notion that the woman is passive and helpless against the violent attacker, but she ends up needing the defense because she’s finally taken active steps to end the situation.
I’m not in any way suggesting that either the no drop policy or the BWS should be banned or are anti-feminist or whatever. I’m just saying that there are so many layers to this notion of gender roles and power and who has power when that it’s not so easy to just make us our own worst enemy outside a much larger social context in which gender still does matter. I do, though, think that women have some pretty mixed expectations for men, and that maybe we need to pay a little more attention to what we expect from and of them (like, we want them to be sensitive but still “manly”—to do the icky stuff around the house but not be chauvanistic, etc.). Because I really do think we have a huge advantage in that society expects us to be open about our emotions and our insecurities, whereas society still, IMO, sends mixed messages about masculinity and simultaneously discourages men from publicly working to resolve those conlficting roles.
Daria said on 09.16.05 at 07:02 PM • [link]
>Why there isn’t a single cheerful one, with healthy self-esteem?”
“Certainly, there are nice, well-adjusted heroes—as much as I can’t stand
most of Coulter’s stuff, she does have nice guys like Burke Drummond (Night
Fire), his best friend (Night Storm), and a couple of others I’m still fond
of. Jo Goodman has some of the best nice-in-a-totally-sexy-way heroes I’ve
read. “
Not nice guys, I meant. The bad boys, the assholes, the alpha heroes—why are all of them brooding and unhappy and self-deprecating and world-weary? A man can be a bad boy and totally pleased with himself and well-adjusted in his own way.
sherryfair said on 09.16.05 at 07:04 PM • [link]
I’ve found that author’s efforts at psychological insight and characterization and the subtlety of the interactions they portray really, really affect how acceptable the scenes are to me. To put it bluntly, better writes handle this subject better. Aromance really lives or dies by its characterization. (Do I care about these people? Am I willing to follow them and understand them?) And characterization in romance is an interplay between archetypes and more individualized, idiosynchratic observations of people. The authors that interest me less and who write more crudely about interactions seem to lean really, really heavily on the archetype, without doing much shading, without much gray, without much exploration.
When I think about these forced seduction/rape/power displays, here is a handful of scenes (and their players) where I really feel the author’s worked out the relationship, the meaning of the transaction, and the motivations of the heroes and heroines involved. Which is key for whether it’s acceptable to me, whether I can read on, still believing in the “truth” of what the author is depicting:
Judith Ivory, Stewart and Emma in “Untie My Heart”
Patricia Gaffney, Sebastian and Rachel, “To Have and to Hold”
Laura Kinsale, Allegreto and Elena, “Shadow Heart”
It’s interesting to me that the more “iffy” and loaded sexual transaction in almost every instance is the first one (Allegreto/Elena being the acception, and wow, what an exception, their second interactioN!), that the book spends a lot of time showing how the relationship develops and changes, in subsequent interactions, as the heroine not only consents, but initiates and even, in some cases, dominates later on, until the balance of power is more equal.
Also, the other thing I noticed, is that the writers whom I’ve listed don’t resort to rape/forced seduction very often. But also, they have smaller bodies of work, so maybe it’s not fair to compare them with, say, Catherine Coulter.
EvilAuntiePeril said on 09.16.05 at 07:07 PM • [link]
“So what does this say? That the use of rape or forced seduction is the lazy writer’s way of establishing an alpha male? Could be, but I’m not so sure that’s accurate.”
I’m with you on this most of the way stef2, and certainly wouldn’t want to denigrate many of my favorite writers as well. So apologies if I offended you or anyone else.
But yes, there are examples in books where sexual violence doesn’t seem to be used in a very sophisticated way, although they tend to be so forgettable that they haven’t come up in this discussion. So again, apologies if that came across as a blanket judgement, it certainly wasn’t intended as such.
In my comment I was trying to use Candy’s statement as a basis for examining the undeniable connection between the alpha male hero and sexual violence. I think that people would be uncomfortable with this sort of behaviour from a beta-type hero.
Romantic fiction is littered with examples of heroines being “kissed punishingly”, “grabbed roughly” and so on. And I think that any discussion of rape in romance, needs to take this into account as well, and look at the causes of this behaviour. After all, if it’s encountered in real life, most women would see it as a danger sign in big red neon letters.
I wanted to link this to one possible reason why the co-opting of power as described by Robin can be unsuccessful. Because this is taking place in the context of an act that reinforces gender archetypes. It’s a deed which is believable when performed by an alpha male, and it strikes at the very core of how many women would define themselves.
Yes, sexual violence is a continuum. Obviously, in fantasy everyone has different places where they draw the line, but why do they exist, even today? And whay so many alpha males? And I’m asking this as someone who really enjoys many of these books.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 07:07 PM • [link]
“As I’ve expressed before, chastity before marriage and nonadultery are held to be female social duties, b/c of property laws (a man wants to make sure the son who inherits his property is his and his alone; women wer eonly seen as incubators, if that.)”
I wonder if this is highly contextualized. In Puritan New England, for example, women could be pregnant before marriage; in fact, it was important to make sure the woman COULD conceive, and couples who didn’t marry after a certain amount of time (usually after the woman started to show) were fined to encourage them to marry. HOWEVER, in many of the more remote areas, where you didn’t have a magistrate, for example, men and women lived together much in the same way they do today and changed partners after a relationship had run its course.
Oh, and for those of you thinking about Roe in the wake of the Roberts hearings? From what I understand, abortion isn’t in the Constitution because it was practiced widely in the colonies and no one even thought about it being in danger. As long as the fetus was aborted (herbally) in the first trimester (before the “quickening” as they called it), it wasn’t frowned upon. What’s significant to me about this little story, though, is that it was midwives who did this sort of doctoring, and once doctors (that is, men doctors) grew as a profession and a professional society, they didn’t want midwives doing so much anymore, and abortion moved into a whole new social category (this movement was combined with the “safety” concerns that physicians touted, as well). Don’t know what that’s apropos of, except that gender still matters, IMO.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 07:12 PM • [link]
Then I started to think, well maybe if the book was written in, say, the 18th century, I could go along with the concept of a guy who rapes someone still being the hero, because the writer was reflecting the attitudes of the day. But the only books I can remember written before 1900 which involved rape/forced seduction of maids/wenches/gypsies are Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Pamela – and in both cases the author makes it very clear that the rapists are bad, bad men.
See—that’s the point I’ve been trying to make forever. Rape was not the norm. Rape has been criminalized for a long time, and if not criminalized, then viewed as not something someone of good character does. These mores are reflected in the literature of the time. Here’s another example for you: Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos. The rakehells come to a sticky end.
In fact, it’s not until you get to historical romances written in the modern times that we see seducers and rapists overwhelmingly being portrayed in a POSITIVE light.
It drives me apeshit.
I think the biggest problem is that the hero-as-rapist creates a conflict … you can either have men behaving badly-but-historically-accurately (now there’s a name for a sitcom) or you can have them behaving like heroes-to-modern-standards, but try to combine the two and you create bad hero soup. Bleeuch.
WHY do heroes behaving badly have to rape? Why can’t they show their bad behavior in other ways that are equally accurate but don’t step over the rape line, like, say, gambling, or being an alcoholic, or just being kind of a jackass in general? It drives me crazy that thanks to a certain type of romance novel, bad boy behavior in Merrye Olde Englande = rape.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s just as historically accurate for a hero to NOT rape, as it is for a hero to rape.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 07:13 PM • [link]
In regards to the changing social mores, I think that maybe the increase in sexualized violence on TV and in mysteries or thrillers might have something to do with why we’re seeing less rape in romances. I recently read an article about sexualized violence toward women on crime shows, and while the violence against is being portrayed more often and more graphically, more women are watching these shows. Similarly, a lot of women I know (my mother, for example) who used to read romance novels, now read grisly crime novels.
I think that we live in a society where violence (in entertainment, certainly) is seen as less offensive than overt sexuality. As a result, the mass market entertainment, which always wants to combine sex and violence for the most punch, has moved from violent sex into sexualized violence. Does that make any sense?
It makes perfect sense, Mar. But it is disturbing, because it shows that our culture has a certain fascination with sexual violence toward women. Still, I can understand it. Sex crimes are like a bogeyman. I know that for me, fear of them was instilled in childhood, when my mom taught me not to talk to strangers. And my fear of rape has never gone away, especially since a couple of people near and dear to me have survived sex crimes and I have seen up close just how devastating those can be. Since we fear sex crimes so much, perhaps it is inevitable that they pervade our entertainment, where heroines can overcome that danger, either by the villain’s imprisonment or by his redemption.
It is interesting how, in romantic suspense, it is often the hero who catches the serial killer / rapist. And the hero is often extra-motivated to do so because he’s falling in love with the heroine, who is next on the villain’s list. So in the end it’s still true love that overcomes the danger to the heroine.
The underlying message seems to be that though the hero forced himself on the heroine it was okay because he thought she was a gypsy and hey, isn’t that what a testosteroney alpha male in breeches would do? Whereas the villain raping the heroine is wrong because he knows that she’s a lay-dee. I don’t know if this was Busbee’s way of addressing the issue of rape in romances, or if she was just trying to give the men in the book ‘authentic’ attitudes towards sex.
I remember that book! What you say is interesting, runwithscissors. I think that premise was in Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower also. The hero mistook the heroine for a prostitute and raped her, then married her when he realized his error. Since that book was a huge bestseller, perhaps that plot device became part of the blueprint for other authors.
When I read the book in my early teens, I thought that was cheesy, but I also thought that the villain’s rape was so much more traumatic for the heroine because he was the villain. The hero’s rape of her led to a HEA, while the villain’s rape of her got in the way of a HEA. I think that in those days I was able to tune out the darkness of a lot of hero-heroine rapes because they led to a HEA. I had a much harder time when the heroine was raped by someone other than the hero.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 07:15 PM • [link]
My other grown up issue is the speed in which romance novel heroes and heroines manage to fall in love. They meet cute on Sunday, have sex by Monday night, and are engaged or married by Friday. In my experiences, relationships that follow that course usually wind up with anullment papers being filed by the end of the month.
LOL, that happens to me too. It bothers me how quickly the hero and heroine get married, especially in contemporaries. In historicals it’s generally more plausible to me.
OT: LFL, have you read anything good lately? I need recs, and we generally have the same taste. Last things I read were Jo Goodman’s Season to be Sinful (LOVED IT) and Lisa Valdez’s Passion (very satisfying).
Hi Anu! Thanks for the recs. The last good book I read was The Lily Brand by Sandra Schwab. It wasn’t quite a keeper for me but I thought it was a really good debut. Before that I really liked Susan Squires’ The Companion. Come to think of it these are both books in which the hero is sexually violated.
There is a lot of security to be had in retaining these roles (at the cost of freedom), but their boundaries tend to crumble in the real world, no matter what era you happen to live in. Hence the need for the distance created by exotic or historical settings. This may in part account for the “fairytale” or fantasy aspect of many romances. But I wonder whether the darker settings of many modern romances are just another side of this coin. Yes, the distance created can allow devices like rape to represent other struggles and conflicts, but like Robin I don’t think it’s always successful, and I suspect this may be part of the reason why.
Great point, EvilAuntiePearl. Love your moniker, by the way. Speaking of the exotic, what do you think of the current paranormal trend? I wonder if the heroine’s being bitten by a vampire or werewolf isn’t a transmutation of the old rape fantasy. It’s still a kind of violent image, and it still changes her life permanently. And it still leads to a HEA.
Tonda said on 09.16.05 at 07:17 PM • [link]
Where does the notion that rape is an historically accurate thing to portray come from? I’m confused on this.
Rape is not portrayed as an acceptable thing in any of the actual period books I’ve read (as someone else already pointed out, rapists are shown as BAD men), and a man who forced himself on his servants was considered beneath contempt in the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking advantage of the weak and/or dependant did not show you in a good light.
A man might sow his wild oats with the village girls, but he wasn’t supposed to do so with the maids in his family’s house (and this presumed that the local girls were willing, virginity not being a requirement among the lower orders).
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.16.05 at 07:17 PM • [link]
Robin: You do have a point. However, the loosening of the social mores promptly vanished once the New World started to be more urbanized; once there was greater access to magistrates. I would submit that perhaps the pressures of frontier life loosening social mores and gender roles was what started a strain of defiant female non-submissiveness in the New World, but that it didn’t change the underlying assumptions about what a woman’s sexual “rights” were, which in that time were still very much the heir of Elizabethan social mores.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 07:39 PM • [link]
I guess I’m a pessimist I have spent my tender years reading every Agatha Christie’s mystery I could find, and her serial heroine, a harmless-looking, sweet-mannered old lady, used to say, “people never change. If he killed his first two wives, we can say with absolute certainty he is going to murder his third wife, too.†I tend to agree. Yes, people undergo ‘some’ changes, people see the error of their way… but the basic personality doesn’t change.
I don’t think it’s so much a matter of optimism vs. pessimism as it is how willing and in which ways you’re willing to suspend your disbelief.
For example: Many people don’t like paranormal romances. Of those people, some people just can’t get over the fact that the hero or heroine isn’t human, or, in the case of the vampire, is dead.
I know many people who are unable to read fantasy books and SF for similar reasons. Faster-than-light travel? Magical rings that need to be destroyed or the world will end? That’s just SILLY.
For you, having a hero reform drastically is beyond the boundaries of your suspension of disbelief. For me, it really depends on how drastic the change is, how the author portrays the change, and how the character treats it. I can’t stand books in which the hero/heroine fight, fight, fight, fight right up until the last 5 pages of the book, and then all of a sudden they start talking about why they’ve been treating each other like shit for the last 400 pages. That, I can’t buy. I can’t suspend my disbelief that far.
But a story in which an asshole hero feels conflicted about his asshole behavior, and eventually changes it because he’s presented with powerful enough motivation? Depending on how it’s written, I could buy into that sort of story.
And you’re right about how certain cores of us are fairly constant, that a lot of the visible changes are on the surface. This goes back to what I’ve talked about earlier: attitude vs. surface behavior. The attitudes, the worldviews, those are the deep, grounding parts that are really, really difficult to change. If the behavior conflicts with the attitude, for whatever reason, or if something Big happens and shifts that worldview around, then the behavior change isn’t just convincing, it’s in some ways inevitable.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 07:44 PM • [link]
“God, I love nice guy heroes. I wish there were more of them. Christy of To Love and to Cherish is the quintessential nice guy hero, and one of my all-time favorites.”
Have you read Jo Goodman, Candy? LOTS of her heroes are nice guys, but still very complex, and I love the layering and richness of her books.
“Watching him do the right thing on occasion, almost despite himself, is funny but powerful at the same time. I also don’t think I’ve ever cried as much at the ending of a book as much as I did for Seize the Fire.”
Oh, I started at Olympia’s letter and never stopped, which is RARE for me, since I’m not much of a crier at movies or books. But one of my very favorite moments in that book happens early, when Olympia first visits Sheridan. They’re sitting across from each other, her holding that dead plant, and he’s watching her (quote to follow under fair use):
“As he observed her in musing silence, a novel thought occurred to him. It slipped through his mind so subtly that it seemed to mingle like smoke with his physical perceptions, with the way the dim light through the stained-glass window fell across her hair in little iridescent rainbows, and the scent of old tobacco and dust lingered in the room. He wondered, aburdly, if this was what she had come for—simply to sit in the stillness and be alive and share it with him.
“Something inside, some tiny something he hadn’t even known was there, seemed to unfold, to spread tentative petals open like a desert flower sensing rain.
“She turned and looked up at him, her great, unblinking eyes full of cryptic forest wisdom. He thought foolishly: Let me stay here. I need this.” (p. 19)
See, I’m starting to tear up even as I type that out.
“I haven’t been able to find this article on-line.”
Check your email, Candy.
Jennifer said on 09.16.05 at 09:00 PM • [link]
Kind of relating to the Whitney discussion, there’s also this chat with Laurell K. Hamilton here:
(http://www.writerspace.com/chat/chat101101.html) regarding the infamous “Micah rapes Anita in the shower, using soap as lube” scene, in which she claims it wasn’t intended to be rape. I think she lost a LOT of readers with that book (and that bullshit).
As for Dominique in The Fountainhead, keep in mind that she is (IMO) one of THE most fucked-up characters in literature. She’s a masochist. She marries men she can’t stand and then tries to be the perfect submissive housewife in order to punish herself, she destroys anything she finds beautiful, she makes it her mission in life to destroy the career of the man she loves, and will only sleep with him after she’s done something destructive to said career. She’s VERY VERY WARPED. She’d never choose to just sleep with a man for her own pleasure without some kind of punishment aspect being involved. Which, I guess, is how she had to be raped, because she’d never get into a sexual relationship otherwise (and you’ll notice she twists said relationship later by only sleeping with him when, etc.).
Though the odd thing is that (a) how would Howard know that would have to be how he would be able to get involved with this woman by raping her (oh, because they’re soulmates and he can read her mind!), and (b) frankly, Howard as a rapist was always a stretch to me. Except for Dominique, he never gave a shit about women, or sex, or physical power over someone, or even mental power over someone. All of that didn’t even seem to come up on his mental radar. So again… how did he know what to do to get this sick chick off?
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 09:10 PM • [link]
I’ll be anxious to see your response to SD, LFL, because for me it was one fascinating book. NOT romantic, but compelling and challenging in interesting ways. The fact that it’s a single title Silhouette surprised me a little, and I can tell you that the writing is not the most polished, but it’s so worth reading, in part because the heroine is actually much more interesting than the hero, IMO. The way we watch her get sucked in, and the ambiguity of the ending, and the self-consciousness she has in some ways but not in others made that book a fascinating experience for me. If you can’t find it, I’ll lend you my copy.
Thanks, Robin. I just ordered Striking Distance from half.com, and am looking forward to it. I will let you know what I think when I read it.
Not to mention my disgust at the “woman as healer, nurturer, domesticator, earth mother” thing (how much can’t I stand many of SEP’s Romances for just this reason!).
You might want to try Ain’t She Sweet, if you haven’t read it. The heroine was not the most nurturing type IMO, and she was also unusual in that she’d hadn’t always been a nice person, and had had not just one but several other relationships (some good, some bad) before her romance with the hero.
I also don’t care to see a hero suckling milk at the heroine’s breast. I haven’t read that particular Sandra Brown book. Not everything of hers works for me, but she’s written some books that I really enjoyed.
But my most favorite anti-hero turned hero? Sheridan from Kinsale’s Seize the Fire. Now there was one a**hole hero who did the most terrible things to the heroine and still won my everlasting love.
I love Sheridan too; such a wonderful, wonderful character. But I would love to have seen him with a less vulnerable heroine, because watching him do those terrible things to Olympia was so wrenching to me that I can’t bear to reread the book in its entirety. I have kept it, and read parts of it many times, like Olympia’s letter, and the ending, where she calls him “My terrible lonely wolf.†I really love those sections. I think Olympia reminds me of myself at a younger age, in the way she is so trusting. And so, seeing that trust get shattered is really painful.
As I’ve expressed before, chastity before marriage and nonadultery are held to be female social duties, b/c of property laws
I once read a fascinating book called The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray by Helen Fisher, an anthropologist. Fisher posited that hunter-gatherers practiced serial monogamy, with each relationship lasting about four years, the length of time it took to conceive, bear and wean a child. She also said that the expectation that it wasn’t until the invention of agriculture, which led to property inheritance, that chastity and non-adultery came to be expected of women.
In addition, she suggested that our current economic system is reminiscent of hunter-gatherer life, in that rather than being tied down to one piece of land, we move to where we can earn a living, and in that most of us no longer inherit the bulk of our property, or our professions. This, she said, was the reason that women once again have more sexual freedom, and that serial monogamy and divorce are so much more commonplace than they were a century or two ago.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 09:19 PM • [link]
“Kind of relating to the Whitney discussion, there’s also this chat with Laurell K. Hamilton here:
(http://www.writerspace.com/chat/chat101101.html) regarding the infamous “Micah rapes Anita in the shower, using soap as lube†scene, in which she claims it wasn’t intended to be rape. I think she lost a LOT of readers with that book (and that bullshit).”
I have not been able to get into the Hamilton books, and have not read the book in question, but her comments crystallize what is probably the most important factor in how I take a Romance rape/FS scene.
For me, it’s all about an author’s thoughtfulness or mindfulness, whichever you want to call it. I think the genre of Romance is served in the worst way by the MINDLESS REPETITION of plot devices, stereotypes, unexamined assumptions about sexuality and gender, and indiscriminate images of violence. I’m not saying I enjoy all books where the author has been thoughtful and intentional in her use of certain plot or character devices or themes, but I’m a hell of a lot more likely to try to work through what’s going on than I am if I feel the author is throwing stuff in for titillation or shock effect or because it’s popular. In the cases of mindless and unexamined repetition, I see the potential to pass on certain stereotypes almost unconsciously, the perpetuation of assumptions, presumptions, and stereotypes such that they seem to become real in and of themselves, and lots and lots of fodder for those who believe that Romance does not serve women as intelligent, sexually and emotionally healthy, self-aware, confident, and well-rounded, let alone love—able individuals.
And we haven’t even gotten into how all these devices reflect on men. THAT would be a very interesting discussion, too, IMO.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 09:20 PM • [link]
>Of late, I am becoming even more nitpicky, and find a distinct line between a bad boy and an asshole.<
Oh, God, yes! Good one, Stef. If they’re tortured and have issues, I can deal with it. But guys who are just cocky, aggressive asses. . . no thanks.
And despite Jo Beverly’s assertion, I think once a guy is a slut, he’s a slut. Ten years later, when his overwhelmed wife is laid up with a fallen cervix after her sixth child, the good time guy is gonna notice the gorgeous widow on the next estate. Unless he’s a tortured ‘ho who hates himself for trying to bury his pain between a woman’s legs. I HAVE written one of those and it was fun. (Did I mention I like to break my heroes in two? Yes, I’m all fucked up.)
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 09:23 PM • [link]
So, by magical *koff* means, I have managed to get my mitts on a copy of Eileen Dreyer’s “Rape is Not Romance” article from the August 99 issue of RWR. Very interesting reading, not all of which I agreed with. She argues that rapist heroes should not be allowed in romance novels for the following reasons:
1. It sends destructive and confusing messages to romance novel readers in abusive relationships; it often telegraphs the notion that the love of a good woman can change a rapist or abuser.
2. Rape isn’t about romance, sex or sexual attraction, it’s about exercising power and control in a sexual way.
3. It subverts and defeats the “genre message”. In this article, Dreyer agrees with Jayne Ann Krentz that “genre fiction is the retelling of old myths”, and she identifies the key messages of assorted genres, e.g. that of SF being limitless possibility, that of fantasy as being good conquering evil, that of mysteries being justice always triumphs, etc. Romances, according to Dreyer, pass on a message of hope, commitment and community, and rape is inherently destructive to this message.
She then goes to note that she doesn’t object to the presence of rapist heroes in other genres, and she’s not asking for a ban of books that feature rapist heroes. She just doesn’t think it belongs in romance because of the audience. She basically drew a direct comparison between including rapist heroes in romance and inserting scenes from a Tarantino movie in Sesame Street.
The article also discusses the historical accuracy defense of rapist heroes. Dreyer points out that most romance novel heroes don’t completely conform to historical accuracy, which would include missing teeth, lice, etc. If we’re going to cherry pick virtues and vices to showcase in a romance, why showcase rape?
She also addresses the redemption defense of rapist heroes, i.e. that the rapist hero is necessary because it’s meant to demonstrate how the heroine “tames” him by the end. According to her, there are other ways to show the hero is a wild man; rape is an extreme and unnecessary example to use.
She also asks us that if the rapist hero treated an animal the same way he treats the heroine, whether we’d regard the hero as worthy of love and adulation.
——
OK, so that was my personal summary. I don’t think I’ve violated any copyright laws, because people do this sort of summary all the time with book reviews, but if what I’ve done was just Incredibly Naughty, let me know.
Other people who’ve read this article can also feel free to chime in if you think I’ve missed or grossly mis-stated any of Dreyer’s main points.
Comments on what I think of this article to follow, because ExpressionEngine only allows 5000 characters per comment. Grrr.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 09:40 PM • [link]
“You might want to try Ain’t She Sweet, if you haven’t read it.”
Is that the one with the heroine who was a terror in high school? The one recently discussed on AAR (before Match Me If You Can)? I have that on my list. I loved Fancy Pants, and have been looking for another book like that one. It’s weird, too, because I’m sure I read SEP say that she considered FP a more traditional Romance than her later ones, but I think it’s entirely the other way around. There’s a moment in It Had to be You where the heroine “reclaims her femininity” when she has sex with the hero that almost had me throwing the book across the room. And don’t even get me started on Breathing Room.
“Not everything of hers works for me, but she’s written some books that I really enjoyed.”
Which ones, LFL. This is the only one I’ve attempted, and it was recommended to me b/c of the rape stuff.
“I love Sheridan too; such a wonderful, wonderful character. But I would love to have seen him with a less vulnerable heroine, because watching him do those terrible things to Olympia was so wrenching to me that I can’t bear to reread the book in its entirety. I have kept it, and read parts of it many times, like Olympia’s letter, and the ending, where she calls him “My terrible lonely wolf.†I really love those sections. I think Olympia reminds me of myself at a younger age, in the way she is so trusting. And so, seeing that trust get shattered is really painful.”
I also cannot re-read the book in it’s entirety for the exact same reason. BUT I think it’s absolutely necessary that Olympia be so naive for the book to work. I know this is going to sound sick, but I see her as the inverse of Rachel—both characters are blank slates, but in totally different ways. Rachel has completely shut down, so Sebastian’s need to open her up allows him to see himself more clearly in her humiliation. Olympia is a naive blank slate, and Sheridan’s need to hurt her, to teach her something about life and himself, also allows him to see himself more clearly in the wake of what he does to her and helps bring about in her life. But unlike Rachel, Olympia is also very ACTIVE in seeking her revolution which, IMO, goes a decent way toward setting up some of the trauma that occurs to her. So she’s not simply a device against which Sheridan heals or redeems himself. Also, while it was, perhaps, over the top, there’s a way in which I think Olympia needs to have her innocence lost, because although it threatens to ruin her, it also connects her to some extremely deep understandings, a wealth of true and complex emotions inside herself, some really powerful survival skills, and a depth of compassion that I don’t think she would have had otherwise. Given the fact that Kinsale dedicated the book to Vietnam vets, I can see how the parallel stories of Sheridan and Olympia’s lost innocence, the inevitability of that in the context of the book, and the way they each cross through the wilderness into at least some healing light at the end seems fitting. Because as hard as it is for me to read about all the suffering, and to think of its real implications, it’s even harder for me to imagine that one cannot come back from that kind of lost innocence, that it’s definitively and utterly destructive to mind, body, and spirit. And because Olympia’s love for Sheridan was so deep, even after all of his betrayals of her, I don’t think she would ever have gotten over him. She either would have been ruined by her sense of lost love or by the memories of the horror she witnessed, which would plague her because no one else could understand them. Iin order to find any happiness, she had to be able to reach Sheridan and to understand him, and unfortunately, I don’t think there was another way for that to happen than through her traumatic loss of innocence.
Candy said on 09.16.05 at 09:45 PM • [link]
Right, so what I think about “Rape is Not Romance” by Eileen Dreyer:
I agree with the last few bits of the article. Agree wholeheartedly, especially with the whole “rape is historically accurate” malarkey, which, as you know already, makes me bonkers.
But I strongly, strongly disagree with Dreyer about genre messages, and about excluding rapist heroes from romances. We’re adults. SANE adults. We know what’s real, and what’s fantasy. People who can be swayed so strongly by fiction that they don’t leave an abusive spouse solely because they read romance novels—OK, hang on, lots of different things I want to dissect here.
First of all, I doubt that women are willing to stay in abusive relationships because of the message romance novels send them. At best, romances are providing reinforcement (weak reinforcement, in my opinion) to something that is already a deeply-held belief, and this deeply-held belief won’t be swayed if romance novels suddenly stop featuring rapist heroes. Women have stayed with abusive men long before genre romances came on the scene; they will stay with abusive men even if there are no genre romances to read with rapist heroes.
It also oversimplifies why women stay with abusive men. Some women stay because they honestly think they deserve the pain and humilation, some stay because they literally can’t afford to leave, some stay because they have children and are standing fast by the idea that children need a mother and a father, some stay because they’re still in love with their abusers. Etc. And none of these reasons are mutually exclusive; abused women oftentimes have several different reasons for staying with their tormentor.
Second of all, I’m thinking Dreyer is overstating the influence of romance novels (and perhaps fiction in general) on our psyche. Her example of Tarantino movie clips in Sesame Street is telling. Sesame Street is a CHILDREN’S program. There’s a protective attitude that we take towards children’s entertainment that we shouldn’t (in my opinion) exert on entertainment meant for adults.
If I acted in a way consistent with the types of fiction I like to read, I’d be a lone-wolf gun-toting vigilante instead of a person with very strong pacifist and collectivist leanings who does not ever plan to buy a gun.
I get really uncomfortable when we start regulating what’s acceptable and what’s not in fiction meant for adults—and by regulating, I don’t mean government legislative actions per se, I mean something as simple as the RWA changing the definition of romance, or a dedicated group of people lobbying publishers to include or exclude elements considered offensive from books. The standards of what’s offensive and what’s not are so different, not to mention the varied ways authors handle assorted elements, that I’m not comfortable with something that lacks nuance like excluding all books that feature rapist heroes from romance.
And frankly, I’m not sure I buy into the whole “genre message” thing. The message varies from book to book, and are interpreted in different ways by readers. There are large, overarching themes in each genre—the “save the world” theme is prevalent in much of SF/F, and finding lasting romantic love is another overarching theme in romance, but to somehow making these messages normative is, I think, taking things a step too far.
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 09:49 PM • [link]
Your point about the alpha hero is so interesting, because it makes me wonder whether it’s always the alphas who abuse in real life, or whether it’s sometimes those passive aggressive, appear to be beta types who take out their otherwise barely suppressed rage at the world on their partner. Any thoughts?
I’m not very knowledgeable about this, but I do remember reading somewhere that the rates of domestic abuse are much higher among police officers than in the general population. So very possibly alpha types are more likely to be abusive. However, that does not preclude the possibility that beta types might also sometimes take out their rage on their partners.
I don’t think we will be seeing a beta hero of this type in a romance though! Because in such a scenario it would not be possible to write off the hero’s abusiveness as something bad that comes along with the good alpha qualities.
Robin said on 09.16.05 at 09:49 PM • [link]
As someone who has read Dreyer’s article, I think you did a great summary, Candy.
I am also ambivalent about her article, since although the rapist hero rarely works for me in a romantic sense, I think there’s a lot more going on in the use of rape in Romance than what Dreyer focuses on. But she’s a trauma room nurse, and she’s seen a lot of domestic abuse, so I think that informs her view a lot. I also think that discussions of how Romance may or may not influence women in society is a very different discussion than one that examines particular devices Romance utilizes. Sure there are some overlaps, but there are also significant points of divergence.
I thought it was really interesting, though, that an author was making these points, since I’d not really seen that before (of course I live in a cave so that might make me underinformed about these things).
One thing you said in your summary that triggered my memory, though, is the myth thing. I was thinking yesterday about how many myths incorporate rape into them, as well, and while I have nothing coherent to say on that subject, I think it’s worth looking at, especially since Romance does seem to recycle and comment on quite a number of classical myths.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 09:54 PM • [link]
>>She also asks us that if the rapist hero treated an animal the same way he treats the heroine, whether we’d regard the hero as worthy of love and adulation. <<
Good God, that’s an insightful and scary thought! Jay-sus. My mind has just been blown, and not in a good way.
Lilith Saintcrow said on 09.16.05 at 09:54 PM • [link]
Candy, I hate you. You just took everything I wanted to say about that article and put it into better words than I ever could. Dammit. *mutters jealous imprecations*
but seriously: Bravo! Well said!
Darlene Marshall said on 09.16.05 at 10:01 PM • [link]
>>If I acted in a way consistent with the types of fiction I like to read, I’d be a lone-wolf gun-toting vigilante instead of a person with very strong pacifist and collectivist leanings who does not ever plan to buy a gun.<<
Brava, Candy! I think we don’t give the readers enough credit in this genre for being intelligent and able to synthesize information and understand what the author is doing with her story. I am a lot less concerned about authors who write rape scenes than I am about those who insist they know what’s appropriate or inappropriate in a romance. Let the reader judge whether or not the story works, and whether or not she appreciates whatever elements the author brings to the story.
Becca said on 09.16.05 at 10:07 PM • [link]
No, I believe the rape/forced seduction thing is more about buying into the fantasy of the heroine having the ability to alter the hero’s character, to redeem him from the beast he is in the beginning.
this is what I was trying to get at when I was talking about overt and covert power-flows much earlier. “He may be able to force my body with his brute strenght, but the Power of My Love will overcome his mind/emotions in the end!”
This (absent the rape theme) kind of power flow is explored in depth in the early Miles Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold) books, where Miles constantly has to out-think and out-manoever his stronger, taller, bigger adversaries. It’s also a theme in the life of Milton Erickson, who developed non-direct forms of manipulation that evolved into a very subtle form of hypnotherapy, due to his childhood when he was bedridden for ... over a year comes to mind, although it’s been years since I studied Ericksonian hypnosis.
Victoria Dahl said on 09.16.05 at 10:09 PM • [link]
Robin,
Oddly enough, I am reading “This Heart of Mine” by SEP right now, and this is the one that features the children’s book author raping the professional football player. *snort*
There’s a super funny scene later in the book, where the heroine is very consciously telling herself that she has no choice but to have sex with the man. “She knew it was a lousy relfection on her personal maturity that she needed to believe that the decision had been taken out of her hands. . . By the time she was thirty, she was absolutely certain she would have taken charge of her own sexuality.” She then proceeds to weave a hilarious fantasy that she is terrified slave girl and the hero her ruthless owner. Of course, the hero has no idea he’s supposed to be being ruthless. Classic stuff.
Becca said on 09.16.05 at 10:16 PM • [link]
The issue that raises my shackles is the way violence towards women is described in romance—sometimes.
I think the phrase you intended was ‘raises my hackles’ although I rather like the image of ‘raising one’s *shackles.*
LFL said on 09.16.05 at 10:28 PM • [link]
I’ve found that author’s efforts at psychological insight and characterization and the subtlety of the interactions they portray really, really affect how acceptable the scenes are to me.
That is a big factor for me too, Sherry, at least these days. But when I started reading romances in my early teens, I was able to accept the archetypes. When I started finding books with more efforts at psychological insights and characterization, I really appreciated the improvement. I love Gaffney, Ivory and Kinsale (I have a friend who jokingly refers to them as “The Holy Trinity”), but I can also think of a handful of books by other authors that feature rapes, forced seductions, or otherwise abusive heroes, in situations that are psychologically interesting to me.
I would love to hear if any of you guys have read the following, and if so, what you thought of them:
Only With Your Love by Lisa Kleypas:
In this book the heroine and her husband, who are newly wed, are on ship that’s attacked by pirates. The husband is killed before the marriage has been consummated. The heroine is taken captive and brought to an island that is a pirate hangout. There, the hero, who is nother pirate, fights the one who captured her and frees her from him. He takes her through the bayou to her husband’s family in New Orleans, but on the way there, he forcibly seduces her. Now here’s the twist that makes this story so interesting to me: The heroine thinks there’s something familiar to her about the hero, but, because he has a beard, it is not until he brings her to her husband’s family (after the forced seduction) that she recognizes that he is her dead husband’s identical twin.
That twist makes it possible for me to believe that she subliminally did recognize him, and in some part of her, wanted to be with him because she was grief-stricken, and he looked so much like her husband. By the same token, I can also believe that she feels horrible for having sex with someone else so soon after her husband’s death. This sets up a great internal conflict for the heroine vis-à -vis the hero.
The Price of Innocence by Susan Sizemore:
This book is interesting because it’s a kind of homage to the captive-captor stories of the seventies and early eighties, and at the same time an attempt to update it and tell a late nineties type story. The main romance takes place nine years after the hero and heroine first met. Nine years earlier, he was a pirate on the China seas who freed her from other pirates who killed her family, only to turn around and blackmail her into being his mistress for a hundred days (is there a theme emerging here?). That relationship ended and nine years later they meet again, neither having been able to forget the other. The heroine is now a strong, independent woman, the hero is trying to be a better person. But their obsession with one another thwarts both of them at first. The story of how they met is told in flashbacks that are interspersed with the main narrative.
The Price of Innocence is written in heightened, dramatic language and though its subject matter is quite dark, the characters always seem to be having fun. It feels a little bit like the author is winking at the audience or spoofing the captive-captor story a little bit. I don’t think it’s a story that would work for everyone, but I really enjoyed it.
Uncommon Vows by Mary Jo Putney
This is my favorite of these three, partly because it takes a clear stance that the hero mistreating the heroine is not okay. There’s no actual rape or forced seduction in this book, but the heroine does come close to being raped a couple of times, once by the hero (which, though he stops himself in time, still leads to terrible consequences) and once by the villain. Uncommon Vows is more of a captive-captor story, with the obsessed hero taking the heroine captive. But rather than fall in love with him, she is repelled by his actions, and only grows more and more determined not to give in to his demands that she become his mistress.
I really love this book not just for the strong-minded heroine, but also for the fact that Putney does spend reams and reams of pages showing the hero’s remorse and his attempts to make it up to the heroine.
As I said, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on these books.
Darlene Marshall said on 09.16.05 at 10:48 PM • [link]
I was thinking today about the whole “It’s ok if she’s a tavern wench but if she’s a lady I have to marry her” issue, and one of my favorite books that deals with this is THE DUKE’S WAGER by Edith Layton. One character makes it clear from the outset that he considers the heroine his natural prey (I believe he even uses that phrase), an unprotected woman who has no economic or familial resources to resist his efforts to make her his mistress. He arranges for her to be literally thrown out onto the street so that she has to come to him.
But she has an ace up her sleeve, another nobleman who owes her family a favor and she turns to him for help.
By the end of the book I was completely blown away by Layton’s skill at making you see the characters in a whole new light. It’s a Regency era historical that was just re-released as a Signet double, and I highly recommend it to folks who want to see how this plot device is handled with compassion and talent.
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