The cognitive dissonance is real.
A barrage of celebratory posts and posts decrying rampant misogyny and more posts about wokeness erasing women from language and law heralded International Women’s Day (March 8).
It reminded me of two things:
1. Take Back the Night. I remember this rally, a protest march organized after a series of nighttime assaults and rapes on campus when I was in college back in the mid 1980s. I thought it was ludicrous: we young women couldn’t take back what we never had—the night. Night had always dangerous for women. (It still is.) That’s why the university provided a free escort service to ensure female students got from point A to point B safely. I certainly didn’t see how a few hundred young women marching through the university’s campus after sunset would change anything. It didn’t.
2. Romance. The romance genre is primarily written for women by women, so one might think that the genre would break those glass ceilings, open those envelopes, and refuse to put women in tidy boxes. But what genre most rigorously enforces traditional gender roles? Romance. What gender romanticizes abuse and brutality against women? Romance.
Make no mistake, romance is my favorite genre. It offers the most flexibility; it encompasses every other genre. It even appears in every other genre. It adds depth to other genres, focuses on characters and their relationships, and offers a good deal of wish fulfillment. In romance, women can be anything they want to be: captains of space ships, talented surgeons, world-renowned chefs. Most often, though, heroines fall into standard categories: beautiful, poor, unsklled, weak. Most heroes in romance align with a stereotype: handsome, powerful (politically and/or socially), wealthy.
Romance follows the traditional fairy tale and rewards the (virtuous) heroine with the (wealthy, handsome, powerful) prince. It caters to private, personal fantasies in which everything ends with a “happily ever after,” which we all know isn’t true to life. Romance reiterates and reinforces those gender stereotypes women have been fighting for generations.
Romance it’s the largest genre by both book volume and sales revenue. Needless to say, it’s popular. Very popular. It’s mainly written for women by women.
Why do so many authors write this stuff? Because it sells. So, why does romance—especially “dark” romance—sell so well?
You tell me.
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