Congratulations on several more squares on the Bingo Card.
Last week, approximately I actually read quite a few romance novels.
Published this year? Last year? Last ten years? Major publishing house? (Ellora's Cave doesn't count, for various reasons)
I've seen these tropes critiqued regularly on websites by and for romance readers, like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
Yes, I'm familiar with Smart Bitches, and all praise to them for cracking the Cassie Edwards story. But I'm smart enough to know their column is written to entertain: if they can't find bad books to "bitch" about, they don't have a column.
so now you're saying "rape'n'ravage" is something you've *seen*. In books. In the last DECADE. This is somehow different than it being the widespread toxic trope you implied at first.
And I've seen it in reviews of historicals on a fairly regular basis, so unless romance fans are going out of their way to find bad books, I dunno.
Depends on the site: laudatory reviews of good books aren't as interesting. And now [bingo!] we see the ingenuous head-scratch and head-shake...
I didn't realize one couldn't critique certain portrayals of women and of romantic relationships that are common but not universal in the romance genre without being anti-woman and anti-romance.
wow, it's tough to be a white man on teh internetz. oh, wait, sorry, wrong argument. the rape'n'ravage relationship *isn't* common. i may descend to repreating myself here soon. it isn't common, it isn't something the majority of readers like to see, it isn't something most writers feel comfortable with writing, and to say [as you have] that Romance is so filled with toxic stereotypes that it is impossible to write m/m Romance without critically-offending a gay male audience makes it kind of hard for me to imagine you as being *pro* Romance.
The whole subject of queering slash, or whether it was already queer to begin with, is a worthy one and also fascinating. i am saddened to see that so many commenters, in so many venues, take it as an opportunity to launch tangential attacks on the Romance genre at large.
Do you really think there are no negative or problematic stereotypes that are unique to the romance genre? If that were the case, it would make it unique among genres.
I call bullshit. Of course, to be charitable, you may actually not know what the word "stereotype" means. But to answer your question:
I do not think there are any negative or problematic stereotypes that are unique to the Romance genre except in the minds of literary bigots.
The word that screws all meaning out of your sentence?
"Stereotypes."
There are, actually, very few contemporarily-written genres that can claim to house negative or problematic STEREOTYPES in their contemporarily-published offerings. In all the wide world of Bookdom, there are books here and there -- Romances, SF novels, Fantasies, Mysteries -- which will contain (1) errors of fact (2) negative portrayals of an entire group, race, ethnic subgroup, religious denomination, gender, or sexual orientation; this is called a "negative stereotype" or sometimes a "cliche" (3) negative portrayals &c written because the writer is bringing the fail (4) culturally-neutral genre tropes that have the potential to annoy [in mysteries, the guilty are punished and justice is served; in Romance, the climax of the book is the HEA; in Westerns there are guns and horses].
no subject
Last week, approximately I actually read quite a few romance novels.
Published this year? Last year? Last ten years? Major publishing house? (Ellora's Cave doesn't count, for various reasons)
I've seen these tropes critiqued regularly on websites by and for romance readers, like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.
Yes, I'm familiar with Smart Bitches, and all praise to them for cracking the Cassie Edwards story. But I'm smart enough to know their column is written to entertain: if they can't find bad books to "bitch" about, they don't have a column.
so now you're saying "rape'n'ravage" is something you've *seen*. In books. In the last DECADE. This is somehow different than it being the widespread toxic trope you implied at first.
And I've seen it in reviews of historicals on a fairly regular basis, so unless romance fans are going out of their way to find bad books, I dunno.
Depends on the site: laudatory reviews of good books aren't as interesting. And now [bingo!] we see the ingenuous head-scratch and head-shake...
I didn't realize one couldn't critique certain portrayals of women and of romantic relationships that are common but not universal in the romance genre without being anti-woman and anti-romance.
wow, it's tough to be a white man on teh internetz. oh, wait, sorry, wrong argument. the rape'n'ravage relationship *isn't* common. i may descend to repreating myself here soon. it isn't common, it isn't something the majority of readers like to see, it isn't something most writers feel comfortable with writing, and to say [as you have] that Romance is so filled with toxic stereotypes that it is impossible to write m/m Romance without critically-offending a gay male audience makes it kind of hard for me to imagine you as being *pro* Romance.
The whole subject of queering slash, or whether it was already queer to begin with, is a worthy one and also fascinating. i am saddened to see that so many commenters, in so many venues, take it as an opportunity to launch tangential attacks on the Romance genre at large.
Do you really think there are no negative or problematic stereotypes that are unique to the romance genre? If that were the case, it would make it unique among genres.
I call bullshit. Of course, to be charitable, you may actually not know what the word "stereotype" means. But to answer your question:
I do not think there are any negative or problematic stereotypes that are unique to the Romance genre except in the minds of literary bigots.
The word that screws all meaning out of your sentence?
"Stereotypes."
There are, actually, very few contemporarily-written genres that can claim to house negative or problematic STEREOTYPES in their contemporarily-published offerings. In all the wide world of Bookdom, there are books here and there -- Romances, SF novels, Fantasies, Mysteries -- which will contain (1) errors of fact (2) negative portrayals of an entire group, race, ethnic subgroup, religious denomination, gender, or sexual orientation; this is called a "negative stereotype" or sometimes a "cliche" (3) negative portrayals &c written because the writer is bringing the fail (4) culturally-neutral genre tropes that have the potential to annoy [in mysteries, the guilty are punished and justice is served; in Romance, the climax of the book is the HEA; in Westerns there are guns and horses].