Romance Recipe

Years ago, I was surprised when an English professor firmly stated that women’s novels all had recipes in them. Because, shockingly, the very novel I was reading at the time, a romantic suspense tale, had a recipe in it. I was even more surprised because this professor was very boring and I had made the mistake of believing that he had no useful insights to share. He was boring chiefly because of his lecture delivery. Every sentence he said ended with him slowing down the pace of his words and dropping his speaking volume. After lunch, a class with him sent me straight to sleep. On the other hand, I discovered from a yearbook that 15 years before he had been the hot young prof that all the kids liked, and was voted most popular. And he still was kind of quirky in an interesting way. He showed up late for class one day saying he had been watching a soap opera. So I should have known better. But I was an arrogant kid, or is that an oxymoron? I took a writing course with him and was deflated when he pointed out that something I included just for effect in a story could not have that effect because it was not true. I frankly had stolen the idea from a comic book I had read. To my surprise, when I sent my story to a friend who also read comic books, he too said my idea did not work because it was not true. But we had both read the very comic in which this idea had been used! What was going on? Two radically different sources were telling me what my own intellect told me when I first read that comic book story: This is not true, and since it is not true, the story does not work. But I let myself be persuaded while reading the comic book story. My English prof and my friend were not willing to be persuaded by mine. The recipe for a good story has to be the truth. Even when what is being created is a work of fiction, we expect most elements to be true and believable in the circumstances of the story. We expect to be convinced. If we aren’t convinced because the story has an obvious flaw, then we tend to drop out of the make believe experience. If the story has more than one obvious flaw, this drop out is almost certain. That happened to me last year while watching the Superman movie. Superman has super powers, among which is super hearing. So he can do things that ordinary people cannot do; that’s the whole point about him being Superman. In theory, he could find Lois Lane anywhere in the world just by listening for the sound of her voice. But not in this movie. She had to use a FAX—already outdated technology—to let Superman know where she was, sort of. And why? Because she couldn’t call or text message him because she wasn’t carrying her cell phone. Don’t get me started on the likelihood that a reporter would not be carrying her cell phone. I once met a writer who insisted on putting modern bathrooms in her historical novels. I remonstrated with her, but she claimed that really rich people could have had bathrooms even back in 18th century France. She did not want to hear the truth, that regardless of wealth, bathrooms as we know them were not in existence then. The problem with her stubborn determination to include an anachronistic situation in her story was that it kept jarring me right out of the make believe. Not only were there bathrooms in her chateaux, but the characters used them. The blatant historical error was front and center. About two more steps of disdain for the truth, and she might have shown Marie Antoinette tooling around Paris in a Chevy. When reading a romance, or viewing any work of fiction, the first question we ask is, do we believe this story could happen? If the writer does not set up the situation and the characters in a reasonably logical manner, the reader might not even get past the first page. Failing to maintain it, making characters act below their abilities or inconsistently, destroys suspension of disbelief, and readers bail halfway through. Lots of people talk derogatorily about romances being formula writing, but they aren’t thinking about what a formula is. It’s a recipe. And a recipe is a carefully concocted, balanced group of ingredients that act upon each other in a predictable manner if the directions are followed fairly exactly. If you forget the baking powder, your cake won’t rise. If a writer forgets to put in a dramatic plot arc, nothing happens. And if the various ingredients are not correctly sized in relationship with each other, or one is stale and can’t perform its usual function, then the result is a congealed mess, not a cake. Or a story. So my professor was correct in saying that women’s novels had recipes, and not just coincidentally. I was the one who had to learn that in writing any kind of story, there is a recipe involved. Deviating from truth, from the necessary recipe of a story, is a recipe for disaster. And here is a food recipe that has been handed down in my family. Disregard the ingredients balance and the directions at your peril: Emma’s Spice Cake 1 cup of butter (yes, real butter) 2 cups of brown sugar 3 eggs or 2 eggs plus 2 yolks (cholesterol? What’s that?) 1 cup of sour milk (milk can be soured by putting a teaspoon of white vinegar in it) or buttermilk 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon cloves and/or nutmeg, or ginger to taste 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon salt 2 2/3 cups of flour At least 8 ounces of raisins Cream the butter and sugar and add the eggs to it. Mix all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Pour the dry into the wet and mix, alternately pouring in the milk. Once mixed, add the raisins. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Makes two 8 inch square layers or 24 cupcakes (much less baking time if cupcakes). This is a heavy cake that deserves a rich frosting such as a cream cheese, but doesn’t need it. Plain, it’s delicious hot or cold in milk. Yes, of course you can make all manner of lower calorie and lower spice substitutions, but as in story writing, reduce the impact too much, and the result has no tang.

Gothic Novels

Arguably the most influential 20th century Gothic novel was Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, published in 1938. But by mid-century, a host of other writers were penning romantic suspense with a strong Gothic element, and for a while it became the most popular women’s genre fiction. Phyllis A. Whitney’s period Gothic, The Quicksilver Pool, was published in 1955. In 1958, Mary Stewart’s seminal modern Gothic, Nine Coaches Waiting, came out. By 1960, when Victoria Holt’s period Gothic, Mistress of Mellyn, achieved bestseller status, the Gothic romantic suspense novel genre was truly launched. Gothics would dominate library collections and some bestseller lists for the next ten years. And numerous paperback reprints were supplemented by additional paperback originals by the likes of Elsie Lee, Dorothy Eden, and others. Many were reprints from overseas. (Additionally, to make hay while the sun shone, publishers repackaged older novels with suspense elements, including the entire oeuvre of 1930s bestselling suspense writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, as if they too were Gothics. I remember buying one with a cover blurb describing a typical Gothic setup and discovering on reading it that the blurb was a complete lie. I enjoyed the book anyway, but it was not a Gothic.) The Gothic novel had its standard situations, usually the love story of an awkward, plain, Jane Eyre-like heroine who came to a mansion as a governess and ended up marrying the lord of the manor. This happy ending only occurred after she risked her own neck and suffered a number of vicissitudes in order to resolve some longstanding problems and uncover some old secrets. Chiefly these were problems of the hero. The theme of the cursed man was key in the Gothic romance setup. Like Rochester in Jane Eyre, the Gothic hero had a secret, and it was always a nasty one. Again like Rochester, sometimes the hero was injured, even crippled. In fact, as it developed in the next years, frequently the hero was married at the time the heroine entered his household. Often he was some kind of tormented artist. Other times, he was just tormented. Not to mince words, if the hero’s wife was alive, she was always an Evil Bitch from Hell. She tortured the husband who had been stupid enough to marry her for her looks or for her pregnancy years before. She was unfaithful and gloried in it. And she was also a cold or hostile mother to her neglected child. Sometimes she was outright murderous. If she was dead, she was all of the above, or just an ineffectual wimp that somebody murdered. The Gothic heroine was kind to the hero and to his lonely child. In the process of winning them over, the heroine also won over various crusty or embittered household retainers, and assorted extended family relatives. But there was usually a villain out to get her, to keep the secrets hidden. Sometimes it was a romantic rival for the hero. Sometimes it was an outright villain in sheep’s clothing. One of the most common situations in a Gothic romance was a near-death experience, supposedly an accident, happening to the heroine. But the hero simply did not pay attention. Worse, he or others in the household would accuse her of dreaming or imagining or making it up. One does not imagine a ton of carved stone gargoyle dislodged just as one passes under. But in Gothic after Gothic, that’s how the heroine was treated, as if her words and her experiences were of no merit. This surely mirrored how women were feeling in our culture at that time, that their intelligent observations were being ignored or pooh-poohed as female hysteria. It’s not coincidental that the heroine of a Gothic novel comes to a rotten situation, is the only person to see things as they are, and yet is either attacked (by the secret enemy) or laughed at (by those unwilling or too sunk in despair to change). The Gothic heroine was always a catalyst. A bad situation might have held for decades before she showed up. But then once she started poking her nose into the family secrets and the messed up family dynamics, all hell broke loose. Hence the attacks on her. In addition to curiosity about old secrets, she brought love into the equation. She fell in love with the hero. She loved his child. But since someone else did not, the conflict between love and repressed hatreds caused a dramatic conflagration. This fire, often literally a house fire (as in Rebecca), burned out the nasty secrets of the past and freed the hero to start a sane and loving new life with the heroine. Gothic novels were fine in their day, but most of the dramatic family situations a Gothic heroine encountered would not exist in today’s society of no-fault divorce and DNA science. True, in a period story, neither would come into play, but a large number of the Gothic novels were set in contemporary times. Which by now is half a century ago. Another societal change that would make the typical Gothic story hard to believe is the level of sexuality between men and women without a lifelong commitment. Those old Gothics had at most one passionate kiss per book. Compare that to our modern habit of open sexual relationships and imagine a Gothic heroine arriving at the scary mansion, having sex with the wrong man (who is secretly a multiple murderer) and then having sex with the right man, the hero. Maybe it could make a chick lit novel. But it wouldn’t be a romance, because romance values remain pretty much the same as they always were: the serious stuff is reserved strictly for the hero and heroine. That means a formerly randy hero suddenly becomes celibate once he meets the heroine. And that certainly forbids the heroine to make the mistake of going to bed with the Gothic hero’s insane half-brother, that angelic-looking pastor who secretly murders people! As beloved as Gothic novels were to a whole generation of women, it’s easy to see why it is difficult to write them for today’s readers. Good men are no longer stuck married to rampantly unfaithful women (if they ever were). Men even can win custody of their children in a divorce. And DNA testing can assure a doubting hero about the paternity of the child he is raising as his own. As for the heroines, women are no longer used to being ignored and laughed at in our culture. They also tend to have better job prospects than becoming a governess. Gothic novels published in hardcover followed the fashionable non-representational style of the day, and often just featured a moody painting of a gigantic old mansion. Few or no people were visible. But Gothic paperback book covers often had the heroine on the cover. It has become a cliche that such romances always showed a white nightgown-clad heroine fleeing a massive old house that had a light shining from just one window. Truth is, very few did, as can be seen from some samples from the big name authors of the day. Incidentally, as serious as Gothic novels were, one of the most memorable I ever read was a sly sendup of the genre, Sweet Jael, by an author who also wrote serious Gothics, Sarah Farrant. Makes for hilarious reading. Looking at my collection of old Gothics reminds me how much fun they were. If you have time to ferret out some of these titles from libraries and used bookstores, or even find some new editions, you're in for some excellent storytelling.

Wedding Traditions: Love ’em or Hate ’em?

One day recently I was driving through the historic part of a small city, and saw a horse and open carriage going along with a bride and groom in it. Chance-met brides always make me smile. I love looking at their finery, and I absolutely adore seeing the bridesmaid choices, and the little flower girls and ring bearers in their tiny versions of adult clothing. I will never forget one wedding party I saw outside a church once that featured twelve bridesmaids and twelve ushers, in four pastel groups of three men and women each wearing the same colors. The women’s gowns and hats were color matched with the men’s cummerbunds, ties, and boutonnieres, contrasting with formal light gray suits. They looked spectacular. If you want to see some finery in the flesh, you don’t have to attend a wedding or hang out in a hotel on a Saturday evening. You need look no farther than any large public park, botanical garden, or arboretum on a weekend afternoon. In many cities there are certain garden spots where the locals traditionally go for their formal wedding photo shoots. And not just weddings, but prom and quincerera and engagement photos. I came upon a couple once having photos taken of them with their new car! It’s only recently that Bridezilla weddings have become so talked about, but trust me, bridesmaid’s dresses have always been a trial. Put people in uniform and all you notice is their body type differences. So the bridesmaids end up being a parade of body types in pastel gowns, and all anomalies look bad, whether weight or height or hair style. As brides have themselves gotten more crazy over their wedding details, they seem to have become more vicious towards their attendants. The People Magazine Amazing Real Life Weddings special even has a section to which former bridesmaids can submit photos of themselves in their frumpy gowns, called “Top Ten Ugliest Bridesmaids Dresses.”People digitally disguises their faces, but the gowns are shown in all their hideous detail. Check it out on line. It’s a hoot. The absolutely worst bridesmaids’ gowns I’ve seen at a wedding I actually attended were wretched two-tone gowns that had huge ruffles and bows—and tight skirts. Not one of those unfortunate girls looked good. In fact they looked so bad I wondered if the wedding might have ended some friendships. For those of you who don’t know what a Bridezilla is, imagine the natural nervousness of a young woman who is in charge of a large public event at which she is the center of attention. But who has never been in charge of a large public event in her life. That’s why weddings are so scary. This pressure can lead to the bride turning into a monster of selfishness. When brides become Bridezillas, they take out their desire for perfection on all around them, acting like humorless tyrants and throwing tantrums to control others. Not only do they frequently demand that their bridesmaids wear unflattering gowns, often they insist that the bridesmaids make all the accessories for the dinner tables (you know, the centerpieces and the little items wrapped in tulle and a ribbon at each place). This can be fun for some bridesmaids, but drudgery for others, and as the wedding approaches, the bride often becomes more and more high strung and unpleasant to be around and the list of demands grows. Some brides even try to make their attendants write their thank you notes! And if that isn’t enough, these micromanaging brides have been known to order friends to diet, and to refuse to include people who do not live up to their standard of beauty. And worse. Much, much worse. Advice columns are filled with the indignant questions of people who have been bushwhacked by crazed Bridezillas. Supposedly, the average wedding in America today costs $30,000. This isn’t just inflation. As the norm for weddings has become more and more lavish, endless additional details have become routine, jacking up the total price. And more and more brides, bewildered by the complexity of all the arrangements and also determined to show off to the world, spend additional money on hiring a wedding planner to run this three-ring circus. Yet even as a child I attended a wedding at which no expense had been spared. Obviously: they let a friend’s children come! Usually, the children are the first to go as the bride runs through the list of invitees and starts multiplying the per person catering charge. Still, even back in the day, couples had a choice between elaborate plans and simple ones. I’m not talking about eloping versus a church wedding. I’m talking about having the ceremony and the reception in the back yard (to which obviously anybody could be invited without an additional charge), versus paying to take the vows in a cathedral and then hiring a hotel’s ballroom for a sit-down meal (for which a specified number of meals must be bought), a twenty-piece orchestra, and more. I heard a bride complain recently about how impossible it is to throw an inexpensive wedding, but this just is not true. The bride simply has to make choices about what must be part of the wedding festivities and what can be skipped. It may be difficult to not order every conceivable extra, but just think of the poor, exhausted guests! Who can eat or drink that much in one day? And who should? I’ve been to a wide variety of weddings, from modest to lavish. Some in churches. Some in synagogues. Some in country clubs, hotel ballrooms, catering halls, or antique mansions and inns turned into event venues. Plus one in a cathedral. One held under an oak tree. One in a judge’s chambers. One in a back yard. One in the UN Chapel. One in a living room. And as for the receptions, where I came from it was customary to hold them in one’s own home or in a church basement or, if it was a fancy wedding, in a country club. City dwellers often hire freestanding catering halls. The venue or the lavishness of the wedding seems to have no bearing on the success of the marriage itself, though it does make a difference in how happy relatives are with the new couple. That’s why the arrangements can be so tricky. Pleasing Bridezilla just is a new trend. Pleasing everyone else related to the bride and the groom is the traditional issue. There are conflicting cultural traditions about who pays for a wedding, but they’re all about power. Growing up, all I heard about was the bride’s family paying for everything. Then as an adult I learned about a different paradigm, in which the bride’s and the groom’s family share, thus giving the groom’s parents a chance to have a say in the arrangements—and a chance to get into a major battle with the bride’s parents. More recently, as it has become common for people to marry after they are already launched in careers, many brides and grooms foot the bill themselves. Thus giving the women the opportunity to be Bridezillas. The trouble is, Bridezillas often tell relatives what they must pay for. The groom’s family, for instance, is now often tasked with throwing an out-of-towners brunch the day after the wedding. And that can run into thousands of dollars, yet the family has little say in the event. Another sore subject discussed in advice columns. You’ll notice that I have hardly mentioned grooms in all this. That’s because their main job at a wedding, aside from providing some of the funding and wearing whatever outfit the bride insists on, is to show up. Yet where would weddings be without them? So, what do you think? Who should be running weddings? How can the awful bridesmaid dress problem be solved? How can we rein in crazed Bridezillas?

Epublishing and the RWA: In Opposite Corners Again

Just last week, at its annual national conference, the Romance Writers of America (RWA) announced new guidelines under which it would recognize publishers. The effect was to de-recognize various epublishers already recognized, and to block the recognition of various newer ones. (Epublishing is electronic publishing.) The RWA has been trying to feel its way about the basis on which to grant recognition to new publishers, having gotten so confused about it that all recognition was suspended for a while. After cogitation and legal advice (from lawyers who apparently are not New York City publishing lawyers but whatever is available in the RWA’s Houston area headquarters—and that’s a mistake), they decided on new rules. The RWA has now lumped epublishers with subsidy and vanity presses and demanded actual printed books as proof of being a publisher. The cries of outrage from the membership were immediate. Maybe RWA will reconsider its position; maybe not. Its governing board is bulky and conservative. You can read the new guidelines for yourself on Lucynda Storey’s blog. For anybody involved with an epublisher, this is frustrating. Epublishers chiefly offer books or single stories via downloads directly on the Internet. Sometimes epublishers venture into print, but often they do not have print expertise and it shows. Regardless, epublishing is not the same as subsidy publishing. Subsidy publishers demand that their writers pay some of or all of the costs of publishing their works from editorial through printing and distributing. Epublishing is not the same as vanity publishing. Vanity publishers will publish anyone who comes up with the money, although their chief stock in trade is to pretend that they are legitimate publishers with the same vast distribution networks as, say, Random House. Epublishers maintain an editorial staff that is selective about what is accepted and then attempts, through the use of other experienced professionals, to produce a professional grade final product and market it. Subsidy publishers sometimes do this. Vanity publishers almost never. Now granted, some epublishers show a marked lack of editorial taste or skill. And some have the nerve to ask their authors to create their own covers, or to do the interior page makeup themselves, instead of actually employing graphic designers to do such work. Frankly, this seems like sheer ignorance. A reputable global firm (in India, Barbados, or Hong Kong, take your pick) would produce beautiful, professional-grade page files dirt cheap. So epublishers do make many beginners’ mistakes. Their print versions are even worse, often with muddy covers, horrible typefaces, bad page design, amateurish errors such as the copyright notice on the wrong page, and more. Additionally, some epublishers veer into an ethical gray area by involving their writers in paying for the print versions of their books. I don’t consider this acceptable. It’s subsidy publishing. And if writers weren’t desperate to be published and to obtain RWA recognition, they might not deal with these folks at all. Another questionable practice is for epublishers to demand that their authors spend their own money to promote their book. And an even worse situation is the one in which the epublisher actually is a network marketing company in disguise. They’ll print the book, but then it’s entirely up to the author to get copies sold. Mary Kay, anyone? (Incidentally, MyRomanceStory.com practices none of these questionable policies.) So to be honest, epublishers have a distance to travel before they will merit unquestioning acceptance as a respectable branch of the publishing industry, whether that acceptance is from the RWA, or from other writers’ organizations, or from other publishers. But what most people will agree on is that epublishing represents a publishing revolution, just as the downloading of music via the Internet represents one. It cannot be stopped, and who wants to stop it anyway? New technology is the parent to new publishing paradigms and this is the early development period. There’s bound to be confusion for a while. What authors could use from their writing associations at this time is some help identifying which epublishers are the most professional and which are the ones whose manner of doing business is skating too close to the shady. Authors mostly can’t do this, because their are blinded by their intense desire to be published. But writers’ associations such as the RWA can. Unfortunately, they currently are washing their hands of making distinctions between epublishers. The very fact that they insist that the epublisher produce printed books is proof. It occurs to me that this is kind of like insisting that a new television network, to prove that it is television, produce a movie and market it in theaters! The secondary item is related, but it’s not the same format or process at all. Since the RWA is a writers’ association that is particularly dedicated to helping unpublished writers become published, it ought to deal with the complete spectrum of publishers, including epublishers. The RWA could be very useful to its members by dissecting the contract terms of these newcomer publishers. Instead, the RWA insults and ignores them.

Men Have Written a LOT of Stupid Romance Comics

From time to time, someone in the blogosphere takes it upon himself to mock old romance comics. I mentioned one such episode a few months ago. That first one got me kind of hot under the collar, because frankly, mocking romance comics is shooting fish in a barrel, as well as seeming to me to be offensive to women on the face of it. It’s easy to mock romance comics because there were a lot of stupid romance comics published in this country half a century ago. And it’s offensive to women because the mockery is always directed at the heroine of the badly written story, not at the bad writing itself. At the time, I protested and then responded logically by explaining the historical context of the story, and informing readers about the story’s various virtues as well as acknowledging its genuine flaws. But I have mellowed since then, so I’m just going to point out the elephant in the room in another such foray into patronizing humor, a recent post on another blog entitled “I Was Raised by Wolves.” Cheap laughs abound as the blogger dissects a story of a young girl beset by the unwanted attentions, first sexual and then disciplinary, of her mother’s lovers. To complicate things, the girl and her new stepbrother fall for each other. And of course there’s another boyfriend in the picture, too. It’s a story that raises a serious issue and then slides away from it, that of sexual abuse of teenage girls by the men their own mothers bring into the home. On some level, the writer was trying to be real, but instead he took the story into silliness involving two boyfriends, which the blogger mocked by mocking the female protagonist. After reading this nonsense, I had a rather freeing thought. When they mock romance comics, these smugly postmodern guys—it is usually guys, but sometimes gals, too, all of them proud to distance themselves from serious romance—these smugly postmodern guys are attempting to mock women, yet in reality they are mocking men. Of course that is not their intention. Yet almost every romance comic story published in the United States fifty years ago was written and drawn by men. There may have been a handful of women who ever got to be published in a romance comic, whether they wrote it or they were hired to draw it. It was a man’s business, as were most fields fifty or sixty years ago, and women were seldom allowed to contribute. A few managed to break through. But very, very few. Think of the contrariety involved in not allowing women to share in creating fiction meant to appeal to women! But of course that is the history of our culture, and most specifically the history of romance comics. So when these self-described postmodern people mock the heroines of romance comics, in reality they are mocking men without realizing it. That’s a kind of absurdity that is genuinely postmodern.

Independence Day

I’m so glad to have independence, so I can rant one day and smile the next, and blow a few things up, too! And since fireworks are legal in my state, not to mention free speech being legal in my country, nobody is coming after me for any of these behaviors. Freedom comes first. There will always be love, but romance involves the freedom to make choices. So, here’s wishing the entire world both freedom and romance. Independence.

Are Romance Novels Bad for You?

No. And no, this is not a continuation of my previous story of my collection of supposed bad habits. It just so happens that immediately after I humorously called my romance novel reading a bad habit, one of the more irritatingly perennial, stupid putdowns of romances, lamely couched as a balanced discussion in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has been launched again (see “Harm in Reading Romance novels?”--and puke). Over at Smart Bitches the straw man debate got covered a couple days ago as “Romance is Bad for You! So is Pornography! And Sex! A Two-Bitch Rebuttal to the Age Old Question” and we’ve all made plenty of reasoned responses and derogatory comments and so forth. Not to mention the ones sent directly to the publisher of the original stupid phony debate. But then someone e-mailed me the link again today and I thought, “Oh, I am so tired of this. The stupidity just keeps coming.” Did I mention that putting down romance novels is stupid? Well, it is. Books are not good or bad for you. This so reminds me of my youth, when I started to read comic books and learned that a psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham, had written a bestselling, influential book called Seduction of the Innocent. In it, he “proved” that comics were bad for children. He claimed that there are all sorts of nasty hidden sexual messages and nasty openly sexual situations in comic books. And then he lost me when he cited the supposed homosexual situation in Batman Comics: Batman and Robin live together and in some stories even sleep in the same room. Bruce Wayne is Dick Grayson’s “guardian.” Ominous. Also absurd. To a little kid, it makes sense that they are in the same room when the adventure begins. To the writer and artist involved, it’s also more efficient to show just one panel of the heroes being awoken to catch some criminal. Big whoop. I always thought that it was the dirty minds of sex-obsessed adults (that would include Dr. Wertham) that made them think comics were nasty. They probably thought the entire world was nasty. Adult implications flew right over my head, of course. I was just a kid. And that’s my point. You don’t see it unless you are looking for it. And sometimes when you think you see it, you are imagining it. Still, did people believe Wertham’s sex-obsessed, absurd argument? Yes. It was titillating, and sex sells. Sadly, that’s the same reason this current mock debate was encouraged. Sex sells. Oh, sure, the right wing lady is denigrating the dreams and aspirations in romances and lecturing women to be submissive to their selfish husbands. And conflating romances with erotica, which, truly, is a different category of book. And the left wing lady is damning romances with faint praise by saying, well at least women are reading, and conflating romances with erotica, which as we know, is a Different Category of Book. She’s calling romances pornography, and then saying pornography isn’t bad for people. Oh, give me a break! Where do these people get off judging what other people read? What they read, for gosh sakes? Or judging the books themselves when clearly they have not read them? Just stop talking about what you do not know about. Just stop telling people what to learn, or think, or dream. And stop telling them that what they do is wrong, or trivial, and bad for them to boot. It takes a whole lot of arrogance to tell other people what to read or not read, and to judge and condemn various categories of books either explicitly or with faint praise. Romances keep taking the hit because women like them. And women are easy to blame. And women just will not behave. The Stepford Wife movement is alive and well, but somehow, its leaders can’t quite reach those of us who do not want to become slavish robots. Why? We’re busy reading romances. Stories of hope, of joy, of pain, of optimism, of the entire scope of a woman’s life experience. Sometimes just a slice of it, the good part wherein we meet a person whom we admire, and settle in for a life of love and work. This is not bad for us. Maybe it’s even good, because if happiness can be visualized, it can be attained. (At least if you believe the self-help books, another category of book that is alternately flogged as overly miraculous or complete twaddle.) Reading romance novels will not rot your brain, or use up time that you would have spent doing supposedly better or more important things. People do not sit down and ask themselves, “Shall I perform pro bono brain surgery on the indigent, OR shall I read a romance?” “Shall I comfort the dying, OR read a romance?” “Shall I start a nuclear war, OR read a romance?” Romances will not lead women to look at their imperfect husbands and despise them. If we despise them, it is not because we are comparing them unfavorably to an unrealistic ideal, but because of concrete reasons based in reality. And plenty of us admire as well as love them very much, thank you. Nor will romances lead women to subjugate themselves against their will to a societal order that feels wrong to them. I’ve heard that idea bruited about and I’ve thought about it a lot, because like most romance readers I have read many really bad books over the years. Books in which men abused women, and the women accepted it. The answer again is No. No matter how many romances I have read in which the man is a violent tyrant and the heroine is a lame, idiotic, helpless, immature fool-—who nevertheless GETS THE GUY--I have not been inspired by these books to become a whiny, helpless ninny. Or to look for a man who will beat me. I never said to myself, “Oh, that’s the secret to happiness. I’ll just pretend I am stupid, and a big, strong, rich man will love me. Maybe a prince.” Nor has anybody else. It’s just a book. Now I must add a cautionary note. While attending a professional wrestling event years ago (do not ask me why), I listened in on some adults who seemed to believe that the bouts were completely spontaneous instead of scripted in advance. So, yes, it is possible for otherwise intelligent adults to believe in fairy tales. Still, as far as I know, neither wrestling nor romances actively cause their followers to believe. Nobody is handing out LSD with the price of admission. So romance readers, do not listen to anyone who urges you to stop reading romance or anything else, or who disapproves of your choice of reading material. And the rest of you, stop telling people, especially women, what to read and what not to read. You are bad for people.