Since the start of the holiday season we've written a lot of to-do lists at my house so I thought it would be appropriate to write another list, this time for the blog. It's a list of links to thought-provoking, controversial, or perhaps simply irritating, items:- In the Women's Studies Encyclopedia, in the entry on "Supermarket Romances," written by Karen S. Mitchell, Mitchell states that "The juxtaposition of a multidimensional heroine with a somewhat one-dimensional hero is a characteristic of the romantic historical novels written today." She also writes that,
While the heroines of historical novels have become increasingly competent in their domains, they are limited by the social constructs of the historical time. In this way they are forced to be subservient and are often subjected to rape, dominance, and violent abuse. Helen Hazen argues that romances include rape fantasies because "rape fantasy is quite healthy" (17).
It's probably worth noting that Hazen's book was published in 1983. Although Mitchell is clearly aware that the genre has changed since then, her description of historical romances doesn't match the contents of the historical romances I've been reading recently. Does it describe recent historical romances you've read?
- The next item on my list has been discussed in some detail by Jessica. It's Critelli, Joseph W. and Jenny M. Bivona. "Women's erotic rape fantasies: an evaluation of theory and research." Journal of Sex Research (2008). Hazen is again used as an important source:
One review of historical romance novels found that 54% included the rape of the lead female character (Thurston, 1987). In particular, Hazen's (1983) analysis of rape in romance novels also functions as a theory of women's erotic rape fantasies.
And
In essence, both romance novels and rape fantasies are created works of fiction. Sexual fantasies are self-generated erotic stories often intentionally initiated to provide enjoyment and sexual arousal. Romance novels are structured erotic fantasies that individuals intentionally expose themselves to, typically for emotional satisfaction and sexual arousal. In a rape fantasy women create an imaginary scenario and they participate in the fantasy through the rape experience of their self character. In a romance novel that includes rape, women identify with the lead female character and vicariously experience her rape.
Hazen (1983) notes that, although the hero in romance novels must be handsome, he may also be cruel. Gorry (1999), in a content analysis of male romance heroes, found that these men are strong, masculine, muscular, sexually bold, and dangerous.1 According to Salmon and Symons (2003), romance heroes are not gentle and sensitive; they are men with the physical and temperamental qualities of warriors.2Hazen argues that the romance novel presents the heroine with an exciting challenge. [...] In romance novels, there is often a violent confrontation with a dominant, sexually aggressive adversary who appears to be evil. The challenge for the heroine is to conquer his heart, seduce him into falling in love with her, have him voluntarily make a lifetime commitment to her, and transform his apparent evil and cruelty into something more socially acceptable without diminishing his masculinity. In romance novels, rape is used as an effective means of creating excitement and dramatic tension. Hazen argues that, in the female imagination, shattered purity through violent sex is a primordial danger whose tension creates a powerful story.
In romance novels the narrative structure allows the fantasy to continue to completion in marriage.
- Salmon, Catherine and Don Symons, "Slash fiction and human mating psychology," was published in the Journal of Sex Research in 2004 and can be found online:
Before discussing slash and its fans, however, we first consider the general question of why human beings enjoy fiction at all. Our discussion is animated by the premises that mental phenomena, such as enjoyment, are the products of brain states and that the human brain, like every organ in every species, is the product of evolution by natural selection.
andWritten fiction probably contains elements of both engagement of organizing adaptations and of pleasure circuit lock-picking, and different kinds of fiction may contain different proportions. Perhaps "great" works of fiction are those that most fully engage organizing adaptations, which is why they have survived the tests of time and translation, while "lesser" fiction, including genre romance novels, may primarily pick the locks of the brain's pleasure circuits.
While I cannot comment on the evolutionary biology underpinning these statements, I would like to challenge the classification of romance as a "lesser" form of fiction. It would appear to be based on an assumption that romance is read solely, or primarily, for different pleasures than those derived from more intellectual fiction. As I hope we've demonstrated on this blog, some (though certainly not all) romances can be extremely intellectually rewarding to a reader who approaches them with a mind which is respectfully open about their literary and intellectual merits. Salmon and Symons might also benefit from a little more thinking about how much intellectual activity can be involved in the writing and reading of porn. Pam Rosenthal, for example, has said that she
THE NATURE OF THE GENRE ROMANCE NOVEL
Romance novels have been called, with some justification, "women's pornography." [...] If we can persuade the reader that porn consists almost entirely of lock-picking rather than engagement of organizing adaptations, our subsequent argument that the same is true of genre romances may be more persuasive.come[s] out of that highfalutin French intellectual porn tradition. Story of O was absolutely formative for me in the 1960s, and so was Sontag's essay The Pornographic Imagination. I read a lot of the Marquis de Sade in my teens, too.
In fact, Salmon and Symons would appear not to be aware of erotica and porn written by women, because on their list of "erotic genres [which] could exist, but to our knowledge, none of them does" they include
And I've gotten a fair amount of mail from highly intellected porn readers as wellNarratives with little development of character, plot, or setting in which heroines have brief, impersonal sexual encounters with attractive male strangers, with no obstacles, no falling in love, no strings attached, and no happily-ever-after endings (i.e., narratives that directly mimic male-oriented porn).
Salmon and Symons seem aware only of women authors of romance novels: "What, then, actually does characterize women's erotic fiction? The genre romance novel has the following features. The goal of the heroine is never sex for its own sake, much less sex with strangers."
- A more recent, item which has already deeply irritated many romance readers is a study which, as reported by the BBC, found that "Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life." The study's already been discussed at AAR and at the Smart Bitches'. It's probably worth acknowledging that research can sometimes be reported in the press in ways which lack the nuances present in the original. I'm not sure exactly which study is being referred to, but there are a variety of papers and other items on this and related issues which have been produced by members of Heriot-Watt's Family and Personal Relationship Laboratory. They are:
- Holmes, B.M., & Johnson, K.R. (In Press). Adult attachment and romantic partner preference: A review. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
- Johnson, K.R., & Holmes, B.M. (In Press). Contradictory messages: A content analysis of Hollywood-produced romantic comedy feature films. Communication Quarterly.
- Holmes, B.M. (2007).In search of my "one and only": Romance-oriented media and beliefs in romantic relationships destiny. Electronic Journal of Communication, 17 (3).
- Holmes, B.M. (2004). Romantic partner ideals and dysfunctional relationship beliefs cultivated through popular media messages: Implications for relationships satisfaction. Ann Arbor, MI: Proquest Information and Learning.
I haven't had time to read these over (due to a need to get on with some of the items on my other lists). Does anyone else feel like taking on the task over the holidays?
- And finally some good news, via AAR's new blog,. The original source of the news has subsequently been deleted because, as Paula Guran explains,
the numbers I was mentioning yesterday were compiled from the only the lists of the top fifty bestselling books for the week (in whatever the category and whatever week) on Bookscan — not ALL the books sold. Evidently, that was not clear — especially when taken out of context elsewhere.
However, they're still available at Galleycat: "compared to the first 49 weeks of 2007 [...] mass market paperback sales are up 14 percent—and overall romance sales are up 83 percent, with mass market paperbacks alone experiencing a 50 percent boost." I suspect those might be US figures, but romance seems to be doing well in the UK too: "The real winner in our economic meltdown, you see, is the book publisher Mills & Boon" (Black).
Second, I evidently was not supposed to put those figures “out into the media” at all. I didn’t put them “out into the media”. The media picked up a public posting. To me, there’s a difference, but evidently there is none to Bookscan and I see their point.
And that's the end of my list, and probably my last blog post of 2008. Happy Holidays!
1 April Gorry's Ph.D. thesis, "Leaving Home for Romance: Tourist Women's Adventures Abroad" (from the University of California Santa Barbara), is unpublished and therefore not readily available, but descriptions of her analysis of the heroes of romance novels can be found here and here. It should be noted that the thesis is not primarily about romance novels. The abstract of a conference paper presented by Gorry in 1995 gives an indication of the focus of her research:
the mating behavior of Caucasian tourist women vacationing in tropical locations such as the Caribbean, East Africa, Indonesia and Greece. The widespread occurrence of a phenomenon that cannot easily be explained by evolutionary theory makes female romance tourism worthy of ethnographic attention. An initial three month period of field research conducted in the Caribbean has revealed the following behavioral anomalies: tourist women tend to engage in more promiscuous behavior than they would at home, taking one or more different lovers in the span of a few days, choosing men of lower status than themselves, providing payment for "romantic services," and prioritizing male appearance and reputed love making ability over other mate selection criteria.
2 Salmon and Symons's book, Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality, while it includes statements about romance novels, seems to be only partially about them. The description of the book is as follows:
The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography underscore how different female and male erotic fantasies are. [...] The authors focus particular attention on slash fiction, an erotic subgenre written by and for women and found on-line and in fan magazines. Slash—so-called for the punctuation mark indicating a romantic pair—depicts sexual relationships between heterosexual male television and film characters such as Starsky and Hutch (S/H) and Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (K/S). Salmon and Symons argue that—despite some differences—slash fiction has much in common with romance novels. The authors examine the essential ingredients of female sexual fantasy and how slash fiction provides them.
The photo of the list is from Wikimedia Commons.
*This comment may be disrupted, as there is a cat that seems to want to throw up on me.*
ReplyDeleteI suppose romantic comedies could destroy one's love life if one looks at a half-naked Hugh Jackman and then at one's own partner and insists on making comparisons.
Critics seem to think that romance readers are somehow unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. I used to think romance novels were dangerous to the psyche, but that was back when the case was (or at least I thought it was) that they were read by teens and very young and inexperienced and/or uneducated women who were more likely to allow their experiences to be formed by their reading. Nowadays the readers tend to be educated and much more experienced in life.
They also don't seem to realize that there is often a massive difference between the fantasies one devises for oneself about rape, seduction, whatever and those created by someone else--one reason I'm not a big consumer of porn or erotica.
WV: warting--describing a hero's bad qualities (cf. Oliver Cromwell)
I find the argument that romance is "women's porn" to be bizarre for several reasons, one of which is that women consume about 1/3 of porn, and at about $13 billion, the revenues of the sex and porn industry in the U.S. are larger than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball combined. women's porn is not romance novels. It's porn.
ReplyDeleteHappy holidays, Laura!
there is a cat that seems to want to throw up on me
ReplyDeleteI hope it didn't!
I suppose romantic comedies could destroy one's love life if one looks at a half-naked Hugh Jackman and then at one's own partner and insists on making comparisons.
{soppy confession} Well, while I can see that Jackman's good-looking, I've yet to come across any hero in either a romantic comedy or a romance whom I'd prefer to my husband.{/soppy confession}
They also don't seem to realize that there is often a massive difference between the fantasies one devises for oneself about rape, seduction, whatever and those created by someone else
I'm sort of hesitant to ask, since perhaps this is heading into Too Much Information territory, but would you like to elaborate on that? Feel free not to, of course, if you wouldn't like to.
I find the argument that romance is "women's porn" to be bizarre for several reasons, one of which is that women consume about 1/3 of porn
I came across a post at Feministe which made me think the following might be the underlying cause of this sort of thinking/argument:
the “pop” wing of evolutionary psychology seems to distinguish itself by filling in the gaps with “just-so stories” that explain fragments of data with modern “common sense” ideas about, for instance, what the normal roles of men and women are. [...] Some pop-evo-psych studies seem almost intentionally designed to confirm conventional beliefs about gender roles, to continue that example.
When I read that, it occurred to me that this perhaps describes Salmon and Symons. After all, the description of Warrior Lovers says that
The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography underscore how different female and male erotic fantasies are. These differences reflect human evolutionary history and the disparate selection pressures women and men experienced, say the authors of this thought-provoking book
Perhaps it wouldn't suit them to discover that in fact some women like porn (and some men like romances), because then they might have to rethink some of their ideas about those "disparate selection pressures"?
And, now that I've looked at the article the Feministe item linked to, things become even clearer. David J. Buller writes in Scientific American that
The most notable representatives of Pop EP are psychologists David M. Buss (a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion) and Steven Pinker (a professor at Harvard University whose books include How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate). Their popular accounts are built on the pioneering theoretical work of what is sometimes referred to as the Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology, led by anthropologists Donald Symons and John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides, all at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (emphasis added)
Donald Symons is, of course, the co-author of Warrior Lovers and I've been assuming he's also the "Don Symons" who co-authored the article "Slash fiction and human mating psychology." April Gorry was also at the University of Santa Barbara and it turns out she had Symons as her supervisor.
The cat did not throw up on me; she's good at false alarms. Her new addiction is stealing the ham from my breakfast. I look down at my sandwich and she's halfway into it!
ReplyDeleteAs for the difference between one's personal fantasies and those created by authors, it's not all that subtle--one is custom-designed, the other is one-size-fits-all, off the peg (or perhaps "ON the peg" might be a better metaphor!). I have read a few examples of porn, mostly Victorian or at least pre-Lady Chatterley, and they mostly seem to be about spanking, which I find boring. I shan't go into more detail about my own fantasies (no moles are harmed in them); but often things presented in books as turn-ons are no such thing for me. For example, a number of Linda Howard's books feature "forced seductions," where the heroine really MEANS "No!"--but the hero persists and eventually she gives in, but not until after a good deal of seriously intended protest. This might be someone's rape fantasy, but to me it would be a deal-breaker in the context of an established relationship.
WV: mater--participant in erotic scene, or one's mother (not both at the same time)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"'the “pop” wing of evolutionary psychology seems to distinguish itself by filling in the gaps with “just-so stories” that explain fragments of data with modern “common sense” ideas [...] Some pop-evo-psych studies seem almost intentionally designed to confirm conventional beliefs about gender roles, to continue that example.'"
ReplyDeleteDeborah Cameron's The Myth of Mars and Venus makes similar observations about "research" on gender psychology. From a review:
"The Essential Difference... concludes that 'people with the female brain', supposedly more empathetic, are better at jobs such as nursing... and the male-brained, supposedly more analytical, make better lawyers. Cameron comments aptly that nurses also need to be analytical and lawyers need people skills: 'These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.'"
There's also a relevant section in Olivia Judson's Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. As I recall, she discusses the idea that the male of most species is driven by the imperative to spread his seed widely, while the female exists to nurture the young and to hold the male close for protection if possible. I believe Judson describes that "knowledge" as being derived straight from 19th-century ideas of gender roles and "confirmed" by sloppy observations that tended to ignore evidence to the contrary. I haven't read the Salmon & Symons, but I wonder if they end up crosswise with some of these recent analyses of sexuality and evolution.
Judson says the biological imperative for the female is to have her young sired by the most superior male to be found, so that her strategies are designed to mate with as many males as possible. The male's strategy is to impregnate her and then to prevent her from mating with any other males. This is why in some insects, the male remains attached to the female for several weeks.
ReplyDeleteWhether it explains why certain females bite their mates' heads off during the process, or eat them afterwards, I dare not speculate.
Tal, I'm glad the cat wasn't sick on you.
ReplyDeleteAs for the difference between one's personal fantasies and those created by authors, it's not all that subtle--one is custom-designed, the other is one-size-fits-all, off the peg
OK, I understand what you mean now. Thanks for explaining.
I haven't read the Salmon & Symons, but I wonder if they end up crosswise with some of these recent analyses of sexuality and evolution.
I haven't read Judson or Cameron but what you said about
"knowledge" [...] being derived straight from 19th-century ideas of gender roles and "confirmed" by sloppy observations that tended to ignore evidence to the contrary.
and Tal's mention of certain species in which the female bites off the male's head, reminded me of a recent post by Hilzoy in which she discusses the Pope's pre-Christmas comments about gender and notes that
he's presenting his claims as something he learns by "listening to the language of creation". And that's just wrong.
It is not true that the natural world teaches us that marriage is between a man and a woman -- it doesn't have teachings on the subject of either human or divine institutions, and it surely does not teach us that homosexuality is unknown in nature. (The Pope is reputedly very smart and intellectually curious; did he somehow miss the stories about gay penguins, fruit flies, bonobos, and even, topically enough, black swans?) Lots of fish change sex, as did this ex-hen. There are male animals who act like females, and vice versa.
and Tal, re
Judson says the biological imperative for the female is to have her young sired by the most superior male to be found, so that her strategies are designed to mate with as many males as possible.
This is not something one sees in romance novels, is it, but if it's a strategy which evolved as a mating strategy among primates and still affects humans, doesn't this suggest that perhaps, just possibly, romance novels don't have such "great potential to illuminate female mating psychology"? A theory I've seen is that women are more likely to be unfaithful (and prefer rakish men) when they're ovulating, but are less likely to prefer dominant/rakish-looking men the rest of the month. Unless one assumes that the heroines of romances are permanently ovulating, that certainly isn't an aspect of "female mating psychology" that's reflected in romance.
Judson's book (which is delightfully funny as well as scientifically sound) deals mostly with the lower forms of life--insects and such.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Desmond Morris, as I think I've mentioned before, human sexuality evolved pair-bonding as a method of (1) making sure the male will stick around and help provide for the mother and young during homo sap.'s very long dependency period; and (2) making it possible for humans to live in groups without constantly fighting over the choicer females.
So keeping the man around is biologically advantageous for the female; but the male's imperative is still to spread the love around.
Or, as a great philosopher once put it:
Hoggamus higgamus
Men are polygamous:
Higgamus hoggamous
Women monogamous.
WV: imaerre--well, anything's possible, but I seldom make misteaks.
Catherine Salmon was involved in slash fandom back in the 1990s, but her views on slash fanfic and its underlying psychology are somewhat at odds with those of most of the slash readers and writers I know. Henry Jenkins had a much better grasp, although his major study of fanfic, "Textual Paochers", is severely out of date nowadays.
ReplyDeleteHiggamus hoggamous
ReplyDeleteWomen monogamous.
Except that we're probably not, as a whole:
One study suggested that one in 10 children are being raised by men who are unaware that they are not the father.
A study at the University of Stirling seems to pinpoint the instinct which might tempt some women to stray around the time of the month they are fertile. (BBC)
There are all sorts of other surveys about women's levels of infidelity, but I'm not sure how reliable they are, so I won't quote them here.
Thanks for this, Jules:
Catherine Salmon was involved in slash fandom back in the 1990s, but her views on slash fanfic and its underlying psychology are somewhat at odds with those of most of the slash readers and writers I know
I did wonder if that might be the case ;-) One hypothesis presented in the paper, about women who read m/m fiction was that they "might be, disproportionately, former tomboys. Research on tomboys suggests that most do not reject traditionally female activities but rather embrace traditionally male ones (e.g., they may play with both dolls and trucks)."
As for traditional female roles, read Mary Pipher's REVIVING OPHELIA. Until they are more or less forcibly socialized otherwise, usually when they hit middle-school age, girls don't see such things as playing sports or being good at math as gender-specific.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, what's the big diff between playing with dolls and playing with action figures? I didn't play house with my dolls; I was more likely to play something involving adventures from whatever I was reading or had recently seen at the movies. Of course, it was solitary play; perhaps if I'd played dolls with other girls, it would have been tea parties and such--but I never had friends to play with at that age.
WV: dulator--an adulator without a scarlet letter
Anyway, what's the big diff between playing with dolls and playing with action figures?
ReplyDeleteThe main difference is probably that, as you say, girls are "forcibly socialized" into playing with dolls. It seems to me that "action figures" are really just dolls, but given a different name and usually given military hardware so that they seem more "manly."
Does this mean that I can't have a Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe?
ReplyDeleteNo, it means you can have one, but you'll probably have to buy it for yourself ;-)
ReplyDeleteGood! My Jane Austen action figure will appreciate the company.
ReplyDeleteHere are some more links for you:
http://kathryn.garforthmitchell.net/wp-content/iStock_sausages.jpg
There's a nice line that I can't remember about much contemporary evolutionary psychology, which runs something like, "the world is littered with a million evolutionary accounts that seemed plausible until the truth was learned."
ReplyDeleteIt's not clear to me what most of these evolutionary accounts are intended to add to our understanding. If we want to know why Michael Phelps can swim really fast, we might want to know something about his musculature and their coordinated motions during a race. We might add to this the relationship between those motions and the physics of movement through water.
What does it add to say that swimming is a nice survival adaption in order to hide from predators in lakes or locate food? Or even look at the musculature of his parents? Yes, that might be the historical source of his swimming ability, but it is not what makes him move when in the pool.
Similarly, men and women act in various ways romantically for a whole host of very difficult to discern reasons. To understand why Woman X smiled at Man Y, it is far more important to know what she currently sees in him than it is to know the historical benefits of smiling at men. Men and women act with their current bodies and minds. Evolution does not act. Societies do not act. This is an old distinction about causation from Aristotle.
I would argue that I do not know at all why a woman (or man) does some particular action even if I had a perfect evolutionary account of the action's benefits. To believe the evolutionary account does tell me something, I'd also have to believe that that precise survival goal sits in her brain today, motivating her, and there's no reason to believe that.
It's not clear to me what most of these evolutionary accounts are intended to add to our understanding.
ReplyDeletePaca, as I said, I know next to nothing about evolutionary psychology, but when it comes to using it to understand differences between men and women, could the intention be to work out what is "natural" so that having done so, particular gender identities can be deemed "natural", and any alteration to them can be judged impossible/unnatural/likely to damage the reproductive success and evolutionary survival of that individual's genes?
Hi Laura,
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't think that's what consciously motivates the large majority of evolutionary scientists and I can't speculate on the unconscious motives. I think of it as 1) just an historical impulse being expressed in the fields of psychology and sociology, and 2) following the natural implications of considering all animal behavior in evolutionary terms. Both of these are legitimate research questions.
It's just not clear to me that one can truly explain individual contemporary decisions based upon reasonable evolutionary explanations. I believe you know the history of opinions of love far better than myself, but does that history truly explain why any woman finds a particular man's joke charming, even attractive?
I don't think that's what consciously motivates the large majority of evolutionary scientists and I can't speculate on the unconscious motives
ReplyDeleteI was only thinking about the ones I've read who'd written about gender differences, but clearly I'm prepared to boldly speculate where no sensible Paca would go. ;-)
does that history truly explain why any woman finds a particular man's joke charming, even attractive?
No, I don't think so.
I believe you know the history of opinions of love far better than myself
I'm sure you flatter me, but I won't reject the compliment.
Just to let you know, April Gorry's dissertation is now available online: http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/PDF/romance.pdf
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for letting me know. I'll add the details to the Romance Wiki's bibliography.
Delete