Romance, porn and farmers on TV
A collection of tweets reacting to Katherine Feeney’s Fairfax piece, Are romance novels as bad for relationships as porn?
I’ve tried to organise the conversations by topic so they’re not in strict chronological order, though I’ve attempted to keep replies close to the tweets they’re replying to. If you can’t see the embedded link below, click here to view it directly on Storify. And if you feel I missed an important conversation, please let me know in the comments.
Romance novels aren’t bad for my relationship, except when my husband interups a good story, lol. J/k There’s no one answer or solution for everyone, which makes this an endless coversation. With everyone being different, I can say romance novels don’t affect me in a porn way, it’s just what some of the authors I enjoy write under—and so be it—I can handle it. A girlfriend of mine, on the other hand, if it doesn’t have at least 4 sex scenes without being erotica, she doesnt want it. That’s her. It’s funny, I get a lot of unaware and good advice from a story that deals with romance and relationships…so they can also be helpful, secret tools from writers who’ve maybe been there :)
I’m so sorry…I don’t know why that posted 3 times??? Can you guys delete 2 of them?
Katherine Feeney sent this to me via email. She tried to comment on the thread but for some reason her comment didn’t go through:
Thanks for putting this together Kat.
Certainly one of more illuminating twitter battle/discussion threads I’ve engaged with in relation to my work. It’s testament to the passion, as said, of romance writers that it garnered such a response. Something to be proud of I’m sure. I’m all for writers, and women writers at that. And I can appreciate what it’s like to feel dismissed by broader social expectations (that romance fiction is fluff, for example. I mean, hell, I’m a twenty-something blonde who writes a blog about sex and dating and stutters sometimes, how do you think that goes down during my usual urban affairs beat?). So I want to make it clear, again, that I did not set out to denigrate anyone. I think it was unfortunate the subs chose the headline they did, which used the word ‘bad’ and suddenly transformed the piece into a moral judgment which concluded both forms were not good for relationships. That was not my intention.
My point – as written in the opening line – was about why we should not think romance is necessarily ‘better’ than romance (just because it’s usually contextualised with the words ‘fiction’ and ‘for strident women’, as compared to ‘trash’ and ‘for loser wanker-guys’). In regards to the impact on relationships, I wanted to get again get across a theme I regularly deal one; that unreal expectations often get in the way of real love. So I set out to explain my point about why romance (typically understood as something pro-love) may be no better than porn (typically considered anti-love) when it comes to fostering unreal expectations.
I referenced Fifty Shades of Grey as an extreme example of romance to begin the illustration which centered on Farmer Wants a Wife, a romance-reality show which I believe draws heavily on a common theme in romance fiction (girl meets boy, boy is unlikely, girl like boy, girls beats rivals for boy’s affections, boy sweeps girl off into the sunset for a jolly rogering and most likely the big day she’s been dreaming of). And I did this to illustrate that, while it’s all well and good watching the show and consuming such fiction, we must be mindful of any resultant expectations. Expectations about men, women, romance, sex and love for example. And we must be as mindful of these expectations born of romance, and most likely harbored by *some* women readers as we should be for the expectations born of porn, and most likely harbored by *some* male watchers.
That’s all.
I completely take on board everything that was said by the twitter participants you’ve recorded above (I’d actually be curious to know what they think of some of the comments on the blog…), and I agree with many of the points raised. Yes, romance is diverse, yes there’s a lot of room within romance for feelings as well as fucking, and yes – romance does sometimes get the rough end of the literary stick. But I would, and do, say those sorts of arguments may be made in favour of porn. And I do believe both porn and romance can be good for relationships.
It all depends, as you and others have said, on who’s consuming.
KB – Romance novels aren’t bad for my relationship, except when my husband interups a good story, lol. Oh, I know EXACTLY what that’s like. Like you, romance and porn rarely really intersect for me. They have different purposes and what I look for in porn isn’t what I look for in romance fiction and vice versa. One of the weaknesses I find in the porn vs romance argument is that it’s not comparing like with like. Porn, for the most part, is visual and therefore involves participants other than the creator and the consumer. When porn is purely written then the line is more blurred for me, but when you ask people why they think porn is bad they will, I would argue, be almost always talking about visual porn.
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