“He held her weak, trembling body, and when she would have protested against the liberties he was taking, his lips covered her mouth … stifling the words she tried to utter … She struggled then, but only half-heartedly; both his arms imprisoned her again, she closed her eyes and let him have his way …”

He admitted to reading them in faculty meetings and that they made his heart go “oingo boingo.” Then he said this, “See, I had always thought that the idea of coercing the fairer sex into abandonment stemmed more from the male than the female gray matter. … Not unlike the great late-teen realization that girls like sex too, the very thought that men and women were occasionally conjuring the same sugarplums made me feel much closer to my female compeers in general, and less like a creeping lust monster.” Even though he’s fully aware that his fellow female faculty members might be horrified by his reading habits.

I guess it must be because I’m younger that I DO find him to be a creeping lust monster. My mom had a well-hidden box of romance novels I occasionally dipped into as a teen (she never knew I found them). I never judged her for enjoying the rapiness of the stories, nor any of the other women fond of them. So I couldn’t figure out why this guy disturbed me so much. I still don’t quite know.

I also vividly remember reading Margaret Atwood’s essay on rape fantasies and strange men coming through your window at night …
“Listen,” I said, “those aren’t rape fantasies. I mean, you aren’t getting raped, it’s just some guy you haven’t met formally who happens to be more attractive than Derek Cummins and you have a good time.”

I think that’s the deal with the older romances. They don’t bother me as a woman’s rape fantasy, somehow, because it isn’t as troubling from inside the woman’s head in a society that requires women to resist premarital sex. But from the male perspective, ie getting off on (at best) dubious consent and the whole she-secretly-wants-it thing … is really disturbing to me. It’s funny because the rape scene in The Fountainhead made me so angry that I was literally shaking, and I read this at the same time of life.

That said, the romance novels became less titillating to me once I actually learned about sex. The rapiness was never a turn-on. No one watches Birth of a Nation because they love the story; it’s racist and disgusting. People still watch it for the cinematic progress, but I don’t think there’s much literary progress going on in romance novels. So I hope they slowly go out of print to make way for less problematic fluff. It’s one thing to take cultural context into account when reading from a critic standpoint, an entirely different matter when reading for fun. In terms of silent film, give me The General any day.

I do think that one needs to read novels within the context of their time, however, good novels are rather timeless. (This being said, very few romance novels would qualify as good literature and so cannot hope to be timeless). I would also argue that reading romance novels is an excellent way to get at the social constructs and feel of a certain time period. This information is more useful for culture studies than literature studies, but still very valuable. The average woman reads romance novels (or man) and it is these average people who make up a large segment of society.

Do I think that I should still be allowed to snark old romances from before I was born? Oh yea. That is part of the fun.

“My point was that to purport to study or review romance novels without taking into account the time in which it was written is to be intellectually dishonest and/or lazy.”

From your article: “I’m not sure why there’s this unwillingness to go along with the zeitgeist of the time in which the book was written, but instead to apply today’s standards of fashion or technology or pop culture as markers of timelessness.”

I’m not really concerned about “markers of timelessness” as regards romance novels. I just prefer my books without rape as love. I guess I’m intellectually dishonest and lazy, too; how dare I apply my “modern” standards of “repeated rape doesn’t cause women to love their rapists” to my entertainment? Shame on me.

I will remember next time that I am tempted to be snarky about patently offensive things in literature that has already been printed that I have to remember that it is a product of a racist, sexist, vastly broken culture, and that I thus cannot criticize it, because to expect better of the books I read is to be intellectually dishonest and too lazy to place them in historical context.

Romance novels are being studied in a scholarly fashion. When doing literary criticism in a scholarly fashion, one takes into account the time in which the book was written. I don’t think romance novels should be excluded from this.

I wasn’t making a moral judgment as to the rightness or wrongness of it or how its presented, and I did make a point to separate legal rape from what is presented in the 70s and 80s romance novels.

My point was that to purport to study or review romance novels without taking into account the time in which it was written is to be intellectually dishonest and/or lazy.

Sure, the woman who is raped isn’t “spoiled forever.” But the rapist-turned-boyfriend ain’t spoiled, either—he’s never punished for raping a woman. If we look at it that way, the rape victim isn’t spoiled because she is never identified as “being raped”—she’s just playing her set role in the rape-courtship.

So while the rape victim here isn’t spoiled, it’s important to look at WHY she isn’t. Is it because, in these books, being a victim of rape is not seen as a source of shame? Or is it because, in these books, RAPING is not seen as a source of shame? If she’s only un-spoiled because she doesn’t leave (or out) her rapist, is that the kind of “moving on” we should hold up as a romantic ideal?