Real Quick – Why Reading Romance is Brave and Powerful
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Monday, August 1, 2016
In the most current episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour during a discussion of Suicide Squad, Glen Weldon starts talking about heroism (something he’s devoted a considerable amount of time writing about) and says the following, which pretty much set my hair and my brain on fire:
We’re embracing the antihero. We have been for decades – especially in tv but also in books and movies. We tell ourselves we embrace the antihero because we think it’s more sophisticated. We recognize that the world isn’t black and white, and that moral ambiguity and ambivalence is more real. We tell ourselves that, and we’re awfully smug about it, but the real reason we’re doing that, we embrace the antihero, is because we just don’t have the guts to embrace the hero. We’re too cowardly. We’re too cynical to believe in heroes. We distrust ideals because they’re too hopeful and sincere. If we believed in the heroes that embody them, that means we’d actually have to risk something, put ourselves out there, be hopeful and sincere, and look hokey and uncool….
At RT, and RWA, and in the weeks since, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to different people, sometimes via email, sometimes on the podcast, but as always talking about the romance genre, what it does, what we love about it, and how it can do better. How it can better represent the miraculous individuality of the women who read it, so that the people we see in the worlds of the romances we read more accurately reflect who we are as individuals, as women, as human beings. How it has changed the way it represents sexuality, and how it could change further, for the better. How romance gets some things so amazingly, brilliantly right, and also gets things teeth-grindingly wrong. How evolution is necessary and painful. There is a lot to be said, and it all hasn’t been explicated in full.
But I remain optimistic about the genre. I am determinedly hopeful when there’s yet another hand-wavy pearl-clutching warning about unrealistic expectations or when yet again there are numbers and lists that don’t fit the reality and experience of everyone in this business. I’m determined that romance can be better and do better, even when yet another paper cut is inflicted on someone in the margins of our text. I get discouraged, and I know that it can seem very hopeless, futile and useless when the work of so many is ignored or disregarded, when the effort to move the arbitrary markers of progress is monumental, but prior advancements were made so long ago, a year or five or ten or thirty, that it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone right now.
After a number of conversations this week about how there are so many wrongs that can’t possibly be righted in one lifetime, both within the smaller context of our genre and in the larger, farthest-reaching boundaries of our world, I wondered when or if we within the genre community would hit the, “Oh, well, nothing I can do” point. After 10+ years writing about the genre, and more than twice that reading it, I’ve only experienced a tiny amount of the romance community. And even in that minuscule amount of time, there have been so many small and many more enormous changes, and just as many small and enormous things that remain frustratingly the same. But I don’t think we can or do give up.
And I think it’s because, as Weldon mentioned, that we embrace the heroic ideals. We seek out stories which base their foundations in optimism, and build their structure with possibility and confidence and assurance that it will all be ok in the end. In romance, we traffic in empathy, and we are all about heroic ideals.
What’s more, heroic ideas themselves vary within culture and origin. Is heroism courage? Piety? Confidence and outward bravery? Quiet determination and self-actualization? Humor? Cleverness? Strategy? Trickery? Intelligence and analytic prowess? Emotional fluency and tireless care taking? Or is it all of the above and more? Because the base, the elemental origin of heroism is that there is an ideal, that there is hope, that there is good. There is happiness. And the heroic, they go find it.
So I’m pretty used to being greeted with the assumption that romance is in some way uncool or unworthy because we so eagerly embrace and explore ideals and the possibility of “better” every time we read, every time we write, every time we pick up another book right after we finish the last one.
We embrace heroism, and we take risks by embracing that heroism. That’s scary and weird to some, I think, because we engage with literature which unabashedly targets and elicits our emotions – lots of them, shamelessly, and all the really difficult ones, too! Reading romance is a pretty fearless act because it is risky. It’s pushing against the expected roles for women, rejecting and upending damaging messages about sexuality, and subverting suppressive and toxic lessons about femininity and masculinity. Even at its most familiar, romance centers the characters, their emotions and experiences, wraps them in idealism and hope, and sends them out to readers with the repeated message that in the end, there will be, and there is happiness.
So we’re pretty freaking brave. As Tracey Livesay said during our podcast recording (twice), “This genre is ours. It belongs to us.” There is happiness and there will be happiness because the essential belief of heroism is that better is possible, hope might be reality, and we can do the things that need to be done. We can do better and we can find better, because that’s what we do in romance. We are the heroic ideal who eagerly seeks stories about the heroic ideal, and the emotional victory of finding ourselves.
I hope you’re reading something that rocks your world. Thank you for being brave and fearless readers with me. edit
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