How well I remember my days of reading “bodice-ripper” romance novels. Even though that’s a term that’s been deprecated in most circles, that’s how I remember those books and it’s still how I think of them.
Now here’s a riddle: how come so many feminists grew up on a steady diet of rapey romance novels, yet still come out on the other side with progressive views of sexuality? And even though we’d never write a book like Joanna Lindsey’s “Defy Not the Heart” (even if we could), or even recommend it to someone very impressionable, we look back on them with affection.
I guess it’s like the American trope of the racist grandma everyone’s got hidden away. You don’t agree with her politics, but you love her just the same. But I wonder if that comparison even works? We love our racist grandmas despite their racism, but we love “Defy Not the Heart” because of its retrograde sexual politics (at least in part). Maybe it’s because young people are so interested in erotic stories that we’ll take what we can get and ignore the parts that don’t work for us. That’s the way we’re built to develop, right? Take the good and leave the rest–that’s how well-adjusted kids are supposed to approach everything they’re presented with. That requires such a strong sense of what’s “good” and what isn’t, though. Where does that initial sense come from?