Submitted by Quirky-Party-1326 t3_11ayuyv in books
I recently read this article on Slate criticising the criticism on Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. While I haven’t read the book, I’m familiar with the plot (wiki for plot summary). Some of the points made by the author of this article really resonated with me and wanted to share.
> A dark romance can involve rape by one of the main characters, physical abuse, childhood trauma, serial killers, or countless other types of bad behavior. A book is tagged as “dark romance” more as a content warning than as a mission statement, but the underlying idea is that this is a romance novel where you cannot expect clear-cut morality.
> In the 2020s, the online defense of dark romance largely revolves around the revelation of the personal. On the #darkromance side of TikTok, users share recommendations and salacious screenshots, but you don’t have to scroll for long before coming across an indignant response to finger-wagging moralists, with dark romance TikTokkers saying: I’m a survivor. I’ve been abused. The safety net of a romance novel is how I process my trauma. In a post-xoJane world, it’s so common to publicly unpack trauma, to rip yourself open for internet critics—who never cared about you or your well-being in the first place— that it’s become the first line of defense for readers of dark romance. Dark romance can be healing. See? I’m healing.
> The idea that the primary goal of a romance novel is to be instructional, to set an example for young girls, is rooted in a patronizing and sexist belief that women, particularly young women, are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality. Second-wave feminists were critical of romance novels just because they focused on love—implying that, if a romance novel heroine desires romantic love above all else, surely the young reader will do the same. We’ve moved beyond that critique, but we seem to be stuck on the idea that a romance novel isn’t just a category of genre fiction, but that it needs to have moral justification to exist, that we can’t extract themes or feelings or ideas, but we need to be taught how to behave by a romance novel.
> But as someone who loves romance novels, particularly the ones that overlap with elements of horror, I draw a hard line at the claims Hoover is romanticizing abuse. If Hoover’s work, which does not end with the protagonists together, isn’t allowed to depict abuse, you can sure as hell believe detractors don’t think romance novels are allowed to do it either.
> This is something I fully believe we, in romance, should care about. We should be taking better care of each other, we should be leaning into empathy, we should not be forcing fans of romantic fiction to disclose personal trauma to justify their tastes. That, to me, is the real harm.
Please read the whole article as the author makes a lot of really excellent points. I can’t help but notice this double standard of people being able to enjoy video games or books where killing people is fine, but reading dark romance is somehow perpetuating abuse against women. Data shows majority of women (as high as 62%) enjoy some level of non consensual sexual act fantasy (and psychologists encourage women to enjoy these fantasies safely). But god forbid authors, often women authors, make money selling that content and other women spend money enjoying it. Consenting audiences should be free to produce and consume whatever content they want. If Amazon is allowed to ban any authors publishing books with non con, then they should remove every Call of Duty game and every Jack Reacher novel and every season of Dexter as well. (A humorous video to show how silly it is to apply the same criticism people make of romance books to other genres).
This whole idea that romance has to be morally sound and demonstrative of idealised behaviour is trash and should be deemed as objectionable as women being not allowed to read novels in the past centuries as their tender brains were deemed as unable to differentiate between fiction and reality. Data has shown that violent video games don’t make us more violent. Data has shown that women suffering from sexual assault or abuse is not due to them romanticising abuse but rather lack of resources to keep them safe. Given that, why are we still trying to police what types of books we can write or read? Why are we essentially saying women should not be allowed to legitimately, legally and proudly compensate/be compensated for content they enjoy? Why are we saying that an arbitrary group of people ‘know what’s best for us’ because women don’t have brain enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality? Why are we saying they ‘women are confused and repressed’ for enjoying the one of the most common fantasies in the safe and consenting world of buying and reading a book - and somehow this is not kink shaming?
For us to say we live in a free and equitable society, we need to stop these double standards and allow everyone to enjoy whatever the hell content they want to. The measure of how free a society is how books are treated. So let people choose, stop the vilifying and stop the infantilising and and stop the morality policing.