“I don’t see how you can say romances are feminist,”” said the gentleman, waving a red flag in front of me on a day my opinions were bullish. His wife, who writes historical fiction, was not so adamant, but also not convinced by my argument that ‘feminist’ is a fair label to apply to any publishing sector in which:

• the participants (readers, writers, authors, editors, agents) are overwhelmingly women
• the plots are driven by the needs and actions of a main character who is a woman.

Further discussion disclosed that the man’s main objection is that romances play into a false belief that a permanent romantic attachment — a happy ever after — is the only goal for a woman, and that a story in which a woman finds happiness in her career or her craft is more feminist.

HEA is on the label!

I think the argument has a couple of flaws.

First, such a book would not be shelved as a romance. In the end, genre is a sorting device. A romance is a book in which the main plot arc deals with a taking a romance to the expectation of a happy ending. A mystery is a book in which the main plot arc deals with solving a mystery. A Western is a book with cowboys. And so on.

Second, and more important, I see a hint of the great divide between male and female sensibilities that has brought us to this #metoo point in our cultural history. As human beings, we are social creatures, needing intimacy for our health and wellbeing. Give a baby all the necessities of food, drink, warmth, and shelter, but never cuddle it or give it undivided attention, and it will fail to thrive. It may die, but if it lives it will be with permanent emotional scars.

Intimacy is a human, not a female, need

As adults, we seek intimacy in our relationships with friends, partners, and family members. And we are miserably unhappy if we can’t have it. A romance deals with one kind of intimacy; that with a sexual partner. For me to believe in the happy-ever-after, the couple also must reach some level of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual intimacy — but without the physical it isn’t a romance.

Romances, and some literary novels, are the only stories in which the search for intimacy is central to the plot. How sad that something so central to the lives of all human beings is relegated to books dismissed with appellations such as ‘chick lit’, ‘bodice rippers’, ‘mommy porn’.

So my fundamental objection to my friend’s position is not to his view of romance books (which, by the way, had not been informed by reading any), but by his definition of feminism.

 A feminist is not a woman trying to be like a man

In essence, he saw a feminist as a woman who did the things men are interested in doing, and a feminist book as one that was about women succeeding at things traditionally done by men.

I like those books, too. I’m all for women doing what interests them; yes, and men, too. If you’re the best crochet artist in Eketahuna, I don’t care about your gender. You go for it!

But I categorically deny that a woman has to be like a man in order to be interesting or worth reading about. And I also deny that a genre that deals in intimacy, and in hopeful endings, is — for that reason — anti-feminist. The desire for a lasting intimacy is basic to our humanity.

It seems to me that Western culture has steadily narrowed the options for men who seek such intimacy, teaching them to be afraid of emotions and to focus on the physical. Having sex with multiple women has, in many cultures, been a symbol of a man’s power, which the poor dears seem to confuse with their virility.

Hence the joke. What do you call a woman who behaves like a man? Answer: a slut.

We are failing our boys

In our culture, such behaviour is sold to our young males as desirable — in fictional and real life representations, both main stream and pornographic. They have no idea they’ve been sold a pig in a poke. No wonder so many of them live in quiet despair — or die young.

As for the impact on young women, and what romances have to do with it, I’ll leave that for another post.