Do Romance Novels Offer an Outdated Model of Feminism? from buzai232's blog

Do Romance Novels Offer an Outdated Model of Feminism?



am one among a relatively small number of men who for some time have been fascinated by romance novels. As is well known, romance novels are among the most popular genres in contemporary literature. The field represents a vast market, likely to have substantially grown over the past several months as a result of COVID-19. Amazon has certainly provided a major boost to romance writers, offering them a popular platform to market themselves and their creations.To get more news about Romance Novel, you can visit freewebnovel official website.

Unlike in the past, the large majority of contemporary romance novels promote a very progressive view of women and their role in society. Jessica Peterson, the author of the successful Charleston Heat series, has gone as far as to claim that the romance genre is feminist: “Romance is one of the few genres that explicitly puts a woman’s dreams and desires, sexual and otherwise, front and center. It’s one of the many reasons I love reading it.”

The notion that romance novels propagate an image of women largely in tune with current-day feminism is still somewhat controversial. Yet it has found growing support. As early as 2013, an article in The Atlantic endeavored to show “how romance novels came to embrace feminism.” A few years later, the author of an article on the genre in the online women’s magazine Bustle characterized romance novels as some of the perhaps “most rebellious books you can read right now.” Romance novels, she affirmed, are “practically the only books in which women get exactly what they want, all of the time, and aren’t asked to feel bad about it.”

In some cases, romance novels can be outright subversive. Take, for instance, Aya de León, the Puerto Rican American author of the Justice Hustlers series — “erotic thrillers” with covers “featuring buxom women in tight, revealing clothes.” Yet once lured, the reader is confronted with a story that, as Side Chick Nation’s review on Goodreads explains, “explores how climate change, colonization and a lack of appropriate response on the part of the US government played a major role in the delayed recovery in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.”

To be sure, de León’s books are particularly aimed at raising readers’ consciousness. After all, the author is a lecturer in the African American program at UC Berkeley. Yet even more mainstream, commercially successful romance writers routinely weave uncomfortable topics into their narratives, such as violence against women, rape, sexual and occupational harassment, cheating, miscarriage — the list goes on. I

n fact, on Goodreads, reviewers routinely provide “trigger warnings” to unsuspecting readers who might be offended by cheating, unprotected sex, explicit sex in general (good Christian appropriate novels without sex scenes are referred to as “clean” as if sex was something “dirty”) — again, the list goes on. In any case, it is a fact that contemporary romance novels are a far cry from what the genre used to be in the past, one that promoted traditional gender roles, the stereotypical world of hospitals with shy, beautiful nurses waiting to be scooped up by a dishy chief surgeon.

Today’s female protagonists of romance novels tend to be strong, determined and, most important of all, refuse to take shit from men. They are strong enough to overcome hardship, excel in their chosen professions and fight hard to get what they want — including a partner for life. Arguably most important of all, today’s rom-com heroines are in charge of their own sexuality and, equally important, deserving to get full sexual satisfaction.