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.