On to my rant of the day…
Fellow Seton Hill Graduate and author friend, Tonya Burrows, posted a link to this article this morning, and as I read through it, all I could do was laugh.
The author of the article, Palash Ghosh, says, “After all, romance novels fall into the same sordid category as soft porn, violent comic books and anything written by Stephen King in the realm of literary “guilty pleasures.”‘
Oi! Where do I even begin to respond to that one, folks? Sordid, porn, guilty pleasures? YES PLEASE. I mean, sign me up, now. Are these supposed to be negative things, I ask you? In a world where women are finally (FINALLY) starting to own their sexuality, delve into the unknown, come into their own sexual identities, these are all good things. Now this article focuses mostly on historical romances, which I only read occasionally, but when I do, I LOVE them. I’ve noticed I really enjoy romances of all types, though I do tend to feel like something is missing if they’re too saccharine sweet or all the naughty things are BCD.
Ghosh goes on to say, “I know many… smart, attractive, successful, ‘liberated,’ modern females who nonetheless find some kind of deep satisfaction and vicarious thrill from delving into hyper-romantic, contrived and extremely unrealistic tales of handsome, manly heroes falling in love with virginal women, enduring a series of adventures, then inexorably ending in a happy resolution.”
Hmmm… let’s inspect this. Smart, attractive, successful and liberated women can’t enjoy a FANTASY of a handsome, manly hero?? Um, hello? Where is this rule written? And let’s just compare the male fantasy portrayed in romance novels to the perfect blonde bombshells in those um… art films the average American Male fantasizes over. How is a man in romance novel any more “contrived and extremely unrealistic” than Pamela Anderson or Jenna Jameson? Let’s move on to the article’s statistics, courtesy of the Romance Writers of America:
“*More than 9,000 romance titles were released in 2012, yielding sales of about $1.44 billion (more than triple the revenues generated by classic literary fiction), making it the biggest portion of the U.S. consumer market at 16.7 percent.