Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1)

293 thoughts on “Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1)”

1. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

2. Remember, you can reach the ombudsman at ombudsman@washpost.com. Probably more productive than emailing Allen directly.

3. Isn’t amazing how one of the surest ways for a woman to get published on an op-ed page is to insult other women? This is an unusually blatant example of the genre, of course, but there’s also a huge % of Maureen Dowd’s oeuvre, and the whole work-family dialogue, which goes approximately:
   Caitlin Flanigan: women who work are betraying their husbands and children! This is all their fault!
   Linda Hirshman: women who take time off, work part time, have more than one child, or choose careers that “contribute to society” instead of getting as much money and power as possible are betraying feminism! This is all their fault!
   Male editor: ah, balance achieved; my work is done.

4. The bulk of that article doesn’t deserve anymore response than you’ve so eloquently given it. But I’d like to make a point about what the heck’s going on with all those women fainting at Obama rallies.
   I worked a Michelle Obama rally out here in LA and watched a woman collapse. Barack was no where to be seen. (Oprah, however, was so do with that what you will). While I don’t have enough empirical evidence to say for sure, I’d posit that the ladies are toppling over because they’ve been standing for hours with out food or water, not because they’ve gotten took with the Kool Aid.

5. Could Richard Cohen be secretly female?

6. I can’t wait to read (Part 2)!
   I must admit, though, it had never occurred to me that romance novels are “the female equivalent of porn.” Hmmm. And sold right out in the open at Borders and Barnes and Noble.
   What, then, about Cosmo and such sold at supermarkets?

7. Fourth: doesn’t the Post have editors whose job is to prevent this sort of trainwreck? If so, the editor responsible for allowing this column to waste perfectly good space in the Washington Post should be fired.
   Since when is space in the Washington Post perfectly good anymore? IMHO ever since Katherine Graham passed away they have set their sights on becoming a National Enquirer for the inside-the-beltway set, only with bigger words and less entertaining pictures. You have to admire the determination with which they’ve pursued their dream.

8. It’s rare that a single editorial inspires this sort of immediate reaction. I’ve gone to a dozen blogs already today, and almost every one of them has some version of this post, whether short or long. If nothing else, Charlotte Allen has succeeded in uniting the left blogosphere behind one principle–that if we were lobotomized, we might just be smart enough to write for the Washington Post’s Op-Ed page.

9. if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.
   Really you could have stopped after this point. One would hope that “we” could get universal agreement on this. What is in the water coolers over at the Washington Post?

10. TLTIABQ: It’s perfectly good space. It’s just what fills it that’s the problem.
    In other WaPo idiocy news, check this out for more examples of stuff “we” supposedly do. E.g.:

    “We watch these shows in horror, with a judgmental eye on their cast members, but how different are we from them? In real life, we want what we want and we want it now. No delay. No aggravation. No hassle, pain-free, our way, right away. We’re a highly technical society in a land of plenty. We place a premium on efficiency and convenience. Tiny annoyances and inconveniences foul our moods and affect our behaviors. Why?”

    Grr. Speak for yourself, Dan Zak.

11. “What, then, about Cosmo and such sold at supermarkets?”
    Soft(er)-core porn.
    Well said, hil… as usual.

12. Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.
    Oh my gosh, thank you, hilzoy! This is *exactly* what I was thinking in my head, but I couldn’t translate it into words; it was feeling too amorphous. But what you said here is exactly what I was trying to say.

13. Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.
    Oh my gosh, thank you, hilzoy! This is *exactly* what I was thinking in my head, but I couldn’t translate it into words; it was feeling too amorphous. But what you said here is exactly what I was trying to say.

14. We want what we want and we want it now
    Said best by Woody Guthrie (as with so much else).

15. Another day, another professional hater and self-hater gets front-of-the-opinion-section real estate at the Post.
    Molly Ivins wrote about the career-enhancing potential of dissing your own in a classic column on Camille Paglia; I’ll post an excerpt and link if I find it.
    Meanwhile, Charlotte Allen’s provided that desirable balance for years for editors at “even-the-liberal” L.A. Times, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Monthly, and New York Observer. Head to Writers Reps when you want some of that right-wing flava.
    Gems like “Jena: The Amazing Disappearing Hate Crime” are reserved for her regular gigs at the Weekly Standard. No, I’m not linking to it.

16. “Second, romance novels are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.”
    Um.
    I recognize this is understandably written in the heat of fury, and rightfully so.
    So I hate to stand up in the middle of a good rant.
    But, well, although I’ve never worked on romance novels myself — although I’ve worked on stuff with cross-over appeal for a variety of companies — I spent years working as an editor for a company, Avon Books, whose bread and butter was romance novels, as well as freelancing for many years with my houses with romance lines.
    I worked every day for years side-by-side with romance editors. We had offices and desks next to each other, just a couple of handfuls of editors. I learned a fair amount about the field, and its similarities and differences to other genre fiction over the years.
    What Hilzoy said is, I regret to say, a load of class-based, ignorant, anti-genre, elitist, crap.
    It’s the identical kind of crap dumped ono genre writers of every sort, be they mystery writers, sf or fantasy writers, children’s books writers, romance book writers, or what have you.
    In every genre, there’s a lot of crap, there’s a lot of mediocre stuff, there’s some good stuff, there’s some great stuff, and there’s some occasionally brilliant stuff. That’s as true of the genre of “literature,” or “mainstream” fiction as it is of any flavor of fiction or nonfiction.
    There are no firm boundaries or borders between genres, and there’s no homogenity of quality whatever.
    There are no divisions into “this genre is all worthy” and “this genre is such garbage that we can’t even call what we put it in “books,” let alone call the producers “writers.”

    […] “Second, romance novels are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.”

    And what does that make the writers, and the editors?
    This is seriously offensive stuff, Hilzoy. How would you feel about someone writing a rant like this about philosophy professors, and their work?
    Should I give you some phone numbers of romance novel writers and editors, so you can tell them you’ve carefully considered their careers, their decades of work, and their individual novels, and that you’ve evaluated them, distinguishing the quality of one writer and none novel from the next thoughtfully, and that this is your valuation and verdict on their work?
    Or should they just come by the blog, maybe after some links, to read your opinion of what they do?
    I hope you’ll consider rewriting this. I realize that I’m really seriously offended by it; wait until some of the actual romance folks see it, if you want a real unhappy reaction.
    But it turns out that us folks who produce such horrible and worthless nonliterature are actually really people, who have weird delusions that their work isn’t pseudo-porn trash to be pissed on by people who feel superior to it, and to its readers.
    The upper end of the romance genre is Jane Austen. What’s appealing is the stories, and the characters, and the writing. Want to pick on an individual work, or writer, as lousy? Fine. Go do it.
    Want to trash an entire genre, and all its writers and readers?
    This arouses unwelcome responses, including impulsive and rude imperative suggestions involving recommended actions, that I shall decline to make.
    But they weren’t terribly original suggestions, and thus I leave them to dwell in the reader’s imagination.
    Ironically — but not — War And Piece is stuffed with romance genre elements, by the way.
    (If anyone tells me “[X] isn’t a [Genre Y] story/novel! It’s good, and it transcends its genre!,” I shall fly to where you live, come to your home, shoot you in the head, and leave. Don’t do it, please, for both our sakes.)

17. “Or should they just come by the blog, maybe after some links, to read your opinion of what they do?”
    Rereading this, I realize it may read as if I was making a threat to do this. That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all. What I meant was that inevitably, if that stands at all, it’s apt to get seen by someone in the romance writer’s community, and then they’ll descend with fury, which won’t be fun. I didn’t mean I would be doing anything about it.
    Secondly, where did this vile attack on romance novels even come from? The only relevant bit I see in what Hilzoy quoted is “and read chick lit to our hearts’ content.” Is there more?
    I mean, Jane Austen is literally the epitome of what people mean when they refer to “chick lit.”

18. I had a few similar thoughts to Gary Farber, but I understood the thought hilzoy was making. I think she was speaking more about literary eroticism than romance novels as a genre. Because Laurell Hamilton definitely falls into the former and she’s billed as a science fiction/fantasy author.
    Perhaps the better analogy would between high quality erotica in both its literary and visual contexts. Men and women like to be titillated. Nothing wrong with that.

19. “In other WaPo idiocy news, check this out for more examples of stuff ‘we’ supposedly do.”
    A lot of people are prone to that kind of arrogance.
    Including about what “we” read, or write.
    I thought this from Zak’s piece was pretty sound, myself:

    […] “Whether you are tempted to interrupt someone or are trying to get around a slow car — when you’re under stress you tend to react rather than respond,” says Nathan, who specializes in stress. “Look at what you’re telling yourself about your world and how you are interpreting it. We sometimes interpret the world as a set of ‘shoulds,’ ‘oughts,’ ‘have to’s,’ ‘musts,’ ‘deserves.’ Those are exaggerations. It’s a very competitive world we live in, so we easily get frustrated.”

    I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to try to remind myself that lots of stuff is petty nonsense there’s no good reason to get upset about, so I find this to be good advice, myself.
    Although one of my worst faults is interrupting people; I have a long way to go on that; it’s one of the blessings of writings that that can’t be a problem (outside IMing).

20. I don’t have any personal feelings about it, but Gary has a point regarding romance novels and he does a great job ramming it home by mentioning Jane Austen.
    C.S. Lewis wrote something sympathetic about “bad” literature once–iirc, his point was that people who love badly written books often love them for the same themes and ideas that are found in classics. The difference is in the level of execution. So there’s no point in dissing an entire genre–if someone likes romance novels, maybe they need to be introduced to Jane Austen to see what a superbly written romance novel looks like.
    I’m just repeating Gary’s themes and ideas without as much passion. I leave it to the reader to decide which of us is the “quality” commenter in this genre of genre defense. (I’d vote for Gary, but I think citing C.S. Lewis as a defender of genre literature contributed something. Of course Lewis wrote and loved SF and fantasy, two other widely despised genres, so he had his own personal stake in this.)

21. 90% of all romance novels are crap.

22. All I have to say is thank goodness this was not penned by a man.
    Gary: Rereading this, I realize it may read as if I was making a threat to do this.
    Er, no – coming to your home and shooting you in the head sounded a wee bit more like a threat to me…
    Being in the industry, (you not me) I understand where you are coming from. But this comes across as particularly harsh. People outside your industry see things differently. And “romance novels” have been known as female porn for much of my life. This is not something new hilzoy came up with.

23. Thanks, Donald. I wrote and deleted an even more passionate rant, responding to Xanax’s brief remark, where I digressed into writing about working for magazines, but I decided to work on feeling a little less insulted. (I don’t promise I fully succeeded, as I haven’t.)
    This is just indefensible, in my view, though: “Second, romance novels are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn.”
    I don’t expect Hilzoy to start issuing ukases on which pieces of bound text are and aren’t worthy of being called “books,” but this claim basically enrages me. I don’t care what the adjective used in the place of “romance” is — it’s indefensible offensive garbage, whatever content is plugged in there to make a claim that no one has the standing to make.
    It’s purely “what I read and write is worthy; what you read and write, I care too little about to bother to know anything about, but I claim the right to sh*t on you and yours, and declare all your work unspeakable filthy effluvia, because I’m worthy, and you inherently are not, you are garbage, because I and my respectable friends say so.”
    It’s disgusting. And it’s pure ignorance. Contempt based on ignorance is always disgusting.
    These are strong words, but no stronger than those I see as have been applied to my friends and colleages, and by extension, to myself. Whether this is about romance novels, or mysteries, or fantasy, or science fiction, or what-have-you, it’s the same exact damn thing, over and over and over, decade after decade after decade. The insults and contempt for genre literature, and the people who produce it — some of whom are some of the best writers of their time, I’d contend — just never stops.

24. My favorite passage in Molly Ivins’ 1991 piece on Paglia might violate the posting guidelines, so here’s the link: .pdf, text.
    It’s the last paragraph. How I miss Molly Ivins.

25. For what it’s worth, I am in total agreement with Gary.

26. You’re welcome, Gary. Actually, I used to have strong feelings about this as a fan–it would drive me nuts to see people dissing LOTR or fantasy in general. I used to read critical arguments for and against LOTR and looked up Edmund Wilson’s famously negative review and would get upset thinking about how wrong he was. (That cartoon about people getting upset because someone else is wrong has wide applicability–the internet was created, I think, expressly to allow people to finally vent over issues that they could never discuss with most of the people they knew in real life, because none of them cared.)
    Eventually I just said to myself, oh screw it, I know LOTR has flaws, but I also know it’s great, and there’s just no point in caring what people say who think otherwise. No doubt if I had actually worked in the field I wouldn’t be able to brush it off.

27. Gary: To put this in terms I can get my head around – should I feel offended every time someone bashes some software? People hate Windows. People hate Macs. People hate Linux. Many of those people have more passion about their hate than in your field I think.
    I write and edit (code review) software for a living. It’s my career. Should I get upset every time anyone bashes some aspect of the field? I’d be in a permanent state of rage if I did. You’ve made disparaging remarks about software recently. Should I get pi**ed at you for that?

28. I’m trying to imagine Fabio playing Mr. Darcy. He might have made a credible Madame Bovary.
    Heathcliff coming down off the moors to learn that his beloved, consumptive Marge Simpson has breathed her last doesn’t give me the vapors like my beloved K(C)athy.
    Didn’t Jane Austen have the men do all the fainting?
    Ayn Rand was the ultimate romance novelist, in my opinion, if your idea of a romantic evening is trying to get the Chrysler Building into bed by reciting Milton Friedman’s rhyming couplets to it over raw meat.
    The Beatles once remarked that the odd thing about playing early concerts in France was that the audience was almost exclusively swooning, screaming, 20-something young men.
    Brian Epstein was a genius.
    I once fainted at a Who concert but my brain was occluded via pharmaceutical miscalculation.
    Speaking of fainting, I went to a coed military academy (well segregated back then) in the muggy Midwest as a 11 to 13 year old and on Parade Sunday, the guys dropped like flies, their rifles and sabres rattling as they fainted in the hot sun. The girls didn’t seem to have much of a problem with fainting, because they listened better when they were told not to lock their knees and to breath normally.
    I never liked hunting because calculating spear trajectories was beyond me, so I chose to stay home with the kid, but I always ate the berries on the way home from gathering. The lady of the house would get home after a hard day at work, look into the refrigerator while scratching herself, and ask …. “where the hell are my berries?”
    The kid and I would look up innocently from our game of Uno.
    I don’t know about female Supreme Court Justices, but male Supreme Court Justices believe they know porn when they see it, which is why they excuse themselves to see “Debbie Does Dallas” again, for legal reasons. Clarence Thomas asks no questions.
    Sappho AND Margaret Thatcher. With that kind of diversity, who needs men?
    It has been said that a person would do well to read only Shakespeare, because his plays include all things in the world. Very true. I have the same opinion of “The Simpsons”.
    Didn’t Lady Macbeth spend most of her time dropping everything to put smelling salts beneath her Thane’s nose, him having tossed his cookies and fainted away in a cold sweat at the mere thought of it?

29. Donald Johnson wrote: “C.S. Lewis wrote something sympathetic about “bad” literature once–iirc, his point was that people who love badly written books often love them for the same themes and ideas that are found in classics.”
    He would, he was an avid SF fan (and a pretty good one himself, too). And apropos philosophy departments, I think his theological/philosophical work is far better than 90% of what comes out of them … not so much on originality, but in sheer eloquence and clearness of presentation.
    [Curious fact: I found Obsidian Wings googling for discussions on C.S Lewis, found Hilzoy’s articles]

30. 90% of all romance novels are everything is crap.
    Fixed.

31. Hey, WaPo has gotta sell papers and attract eyeballs. Mission accomplished.
    Its not really worth it trying to response to these ” arguments”. Take a chill pill, hilzoy, and move on.

32. “Gary: To put this in terms I can get my head around – should I feel offended every time someone bashes some software?”
    Up to you.
    But the analogy doesn’t hold, OCSteve. Declaring that a genre of fiction is irredeemably valueless and offensive to many people (“porn”) is singling out a category or set of categories of fiction, and declaring one set Good Literature and the other set Irredeemable Sh*t.
    So the analogy you could make would be if someone declared that one particular type of software, or category of software, or software in a particular language, perhaps, was all disgusting stuff that only an icky person no respectable person would associate with would work on.
    And if you do or don’t want to believe that, I have no opinion. It’s not an area I’d know much about, so why would I have an opinion?
    So whatever you want to believe in that regard, it’s fine with me, to answer your question.
    But if you want to come tell me that my work, or the work of my friends, or the work of my colleages, makes them producers of the equvialent of porn, no, I will not take that well.
    (An argument that would seem to be based on the claim that software has literary value isn’t one I’m experienced with, but I imagine it could be made; however, it’s not clear to me that you intended to make such an argument.)
    To make this more concrete, Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of Miles Vorkosigan books, for instance, were marketed as science fiction, but also have elements of romance in them, and also sold well to many romance fans; a clear semi-crossover.
    The same can be said of a number of books I’ve worked on, and of the books of plenty of writers who are good friends of mine. (In a couple of cases, past lovers.)
    But I’m told this makes their work, no matter how award-winning, no matter how well-written, no matter how thoughtful, no matter how smart, no matter how insightful, no matter the depth of the character and themes, no matter how enjoyable, no matter how powerful, nothing more than “novels [which] are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.”
    Works that people invest years of their life in creating are not to be allowed to be compared to Real Novels, but to “Hustler centerfolds.”
    Tell me, if someone said that of whatever your wife, or sister, or friend, or co-worker spent years of their life creating, which won awards, which hundreds of thousands of people have read and appreciated for years, or decades, would you not give momentary thought to punching the person who said that in the mouth?
    “Novels [which] are not ‘books,’ as that word is normally used.”
    “They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn.”
    “They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.”
    This is not weak-tea, inoffensive, language, and these are not defensible claims.

33. There’s something fishy about that Sturgeon guy.

34. Gary is quite wrong on “romance novels” being the same as sf, mysteries or any other genre. “Romance novels”, as I understand the term, refers to the books released by Harlequin, et al. and have a rigid structure with firm guidelines as to what is and what isn’t “allowed”. There are novels which are not subject to these restrictions that may have some of the same elements as “romance novels”, but these are not printed by the same imprints.
    Austin was the prototype for the modern “romance novel” and her work would almost certainly be accepted by any of the major houses. Most of the current work isn’t up to her standards, but the basic rules apply.

35. Of course, it’s worth remembering that it’s only relatively recently that the guardians of literary respectability would have judged any novels as more than trash entertainment. Just read Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews, essentially an extended defense of the genre, or read what Austen’s characters say about their own reading.

36. Ayn Rand was the ultimate romance novelist, in my opinion, if your idea of a romantic evening is trying to get the Chrysler Building into bed by reciting Milton Friedman’s rhyming couplets to it over raw meat.
    …
    I don’t know about female Supreme Court Justices, but male Supreme Court Justices believe they know porn when they see it, which is why they excuse themselves to see “Debbie Does Dallas” again, for legal reasons. Clarence Thomas asks no questions.
    Someone needs to collect Thullen’s gems such as these and bronze them (someone, that is, besides me).

37. I’m so furious about that article I’m shaking. I don’t give a rat’s behind for any romance novel, from Jane Austin to Belinda Bosomy. None of those are going to harm my daughter’s self image. When we have a chance at getting the Post, she grabs whatever section I’m not reading and she would probably have beaten me to that. How in the hell am I supposed to raise a daughter who’s proud of who she is if the Post, supposedly a good paper, is run by people so abysmally ignorant that they can’t see that strangling the article at birth would have been the right thing to do.
    And I’m pretty sure they put this out to drum up more of the sympathy votes for Hillary because “the papers are being so mean to her again”. And it’s going to work.

38. “Gary is quite wrong on ‘romance novels’ being the same as sf, mysteries or any other genre.”
    Sure, Jeff. I don’t know what I’m talking about as regards romance novels, because I only spent decades working in publishing, which doesn’t compare to your professional publishing experience and surety of knowledge.
    Is this like how I didn’t know what EBT cards looked like, because I didn’t google them, and I only explained repeatedly that I’d used them for years in both NYC and Colorado?
    “‘Romance novels’, as I understand the term, refers to the books released by Harlequin, et al. and have a rigid structure with firm guidelines as to what is and what isn’t ‘allowed’.”
    Jeff, I’ve worked for, in no particular order, Avon, Ace, Penguin, Signet, Baen, Bluejay, Carroll & Graff, Random House, Ballantine, Putnam, Berkley, Doubleday, Pyramid, Dell, Delacorte, Tor, Pocket, Simon & Schuster, and a whole lot more, since 1975. I just go through explaining how I worked for years at Avon, whose bread and butter was romance novels. I’ve known plenty of Harlequin editors, I’ve been to romance book conferences, I’ve met countless romance writers, I’ve spent hundreds of hours over years sitting at editorial meetings of one of the leading publishers of romance novels in the world, spending all that time talking about strategy of publishing romance novels, details of working with romance authors, what does and doesn’t work in the romance market at a given moment, what the strengths and weakness of a given author are, what elements of story affect what aspect of the story’s strengths, what the varying approaches of our competitors in the romance field are/were, how the romance field has been evolving, and on and on and on.
    I’ve forgotten more about the guidelines and ins and outs of romance publishing than you’re apt to ever know.
    But, sure, I’m “quite wrong” and you know more about romance publishing than I do. Whatever.

39. About romance novels: see update above. I was really, really unclear. Gary might not agree with my newly explained point, but at least I will have made it clear what that point was meant to be. Sorry.

40. (An argument that would seem to be based on the claim that software has literary value isn’t one I’m experienced with, but I imagine it could be made; however, it’s not clear to me that you intended to make such an argument.)
    Dude – when I encounter a chunk of beautifully written code, elegant, simple, powerful – it is the exact same feeling for me as when I read a powerful passage in a great novel. And yet some people who hate the architecture, or the OS, or the vendor, will totally dismiss it.

41. By Sturgeon’s law, 90% of everything is dreck.
    Genre fiction, non-genre fiction, non-fiction, magazines, poetry, Usenet postings, weblogs; everything.
    Some porn is not dreck.
    Some romance novels are not dreck.
    The interesting parallel between romance novels and porn has nothing to do with quality, or the lack thereof: it has to do with unrealistic wish-fulfillment.
    In much porn, unrealisticaly sexually desireable people are unrealistically eager to have unrealistically exciting sex. The reader or watcher can fantasize that such persons would wish to couple with them.
    In much romance fiction, unrealistically romantic people are unrealistically centered on their emotional lives in unrealistically dramatic settings. The readers can fantasize that such romantic and dramatic events might swirl about themselves.
    Both run-of-the-mill porn and run-of-the-mill romance fiction are often consumed out of unmet needs for intimacy and real attachment.
    That’s why the market for each is large.
    Ah, look at all the lonely people …

42. hen I encounter a chunk of beautifully written code, elegant, simple, powerful – it is the exact same feeling for me as when I read a powerful passage in a great novel.
    (me too.) (Or well, maybe not “exactly the same feeling” — but a feeling which has important characteristics in common with.)

43. hilzoy: Again, though, I was deeply unclear, for which I am sorry.
    FWIW, I thought you were quite clear and that Gary’s reading skills seemed to have deserted him.

44. First off, the romance novel thingy that deranged this particular thread needed neither update nor clarification. My personal experience with this particular form of literature has been limited: as a teen, speed reading to the “good” scenes and dog-earing them for later, umm, review. So my experience is an unenlightened male one, thankyouverymuch. But I still somehow managed to get Hilzoy’s point.
    Please keep in mind that one-off funny/rant comments in blog posts are never going to include sufficient qualifications to withstand serious scrutiny. And paragraph after paragraph of apologia after the fact is kinda dull too.
    Second, so far as I can understand the logic of this article, it is as follows:
    1. I am a stupid woman; therefore,
    2. All women are stupid.
    Which makes, like, total sense.

45. Seems like this was connected to the photo on the front page (#5 in this slideshow).

46. Well, hopefully this thread puts to rest the burning controversy re: whether or not Gary polices thread drift.
    😉
    Anyway, getting back to Charlotte Adams and her misogynistic (and, it should be noted ad infinitum, unrelentingly stupid–oh, teh [lack of] irony!) op-ed that the opinion editor of the Daily Mail Washington Post (!) felt was worthy of publication, Jessica Valenti @ Feministing lists some of Allen’s greatest hits (eg, Katrina victims: whiny ass titty babies!). Valenti also encourages readers who don’t think the Post should be providing a forum to the half-baked hate speech (yes, hate speech–replace “women” with “black” or “gay” and imagine the justifiably outraged response) of a self-loathing misogynist to write the editor and/or obmbudsman.

47. How in the hell am I supposed to raise a daughter who’s proud of who she is if the Post, supposedly a good paper, is run by people so abysmally ignorant that they can’t see that strangling the article at birth would have been the right thing to do.
    Perhaps you should consider canceling your subscription? I don’t subscribe but I can’t imagine continuing a subscription to a paper that would publish this filth.
    Also, I don’t believe that the Post is supposedly a good paper. The Post has some decent reporters on staff and many idiots; the decent ones sometimes manage to get a good piece out despite being hamstrung by idiotic editors. That components of that assessment don’t add up to “good” no matter how you arrange them. But YMMV. If you think that the Post has, in general, excellent editors, I’d welcome some evidence on that front.

48. Well, hopefully this thread puts to rest the burning controversy re: whether or not Gary polices thread drift.
    😉
    Anyway, getting back to Charlotte Adams and her misogynistic (and, it should be noted ad infinitum, unrelentingly stupid–oh, teh [lack of] irony!) op-ed that the opinion editor of the Daily Mail Washington Post (!) felt was worthy of publication, Jessica Valenti @ Feministing lists some of Allen’s greatest hits (eg, Katrina victims: whiny ass titty babies!). Valenti also encourages readers who don’t think the Post should be providing a forum to the half-baked hate speech (yes, hate speech–replace “women” with “black” or “gay” and imagine the justifiably outraged response) of a self-loathing misogynist to write the editor (letters-at-washpost-dot-com) and/or ombudsman (ombudsman-at-washpost-dot-com).

49. Jeff, why is romance different from SF? Yes, there probably are romance novels with pretty strict rules for what they are going to look like… but are you suggesting books by Timothy Zahn or R.A. Salvatore don’t?
    (Disclosure: I’ve read both Star Wars and Forgotten Realms franchise fiction, and I did enjoy it at the time. Sure, it’s a little cheesy sometimes, but one has to look at the qualities it has, rather than the ones it’s not really meant to have anyway)

50. Hilzoy’s update:

    […] First, a clarification: I meant, and should have said, genre romance novels. I did not mean Jane Austen.

    *smacks head*
    I’m now heading to your house to shoot you. (I’m kidding!)
    This is exactly the classic “I don’t mean X is in the genre! X is good!”
    Unbeeffingleivable. It comes up every damn time.
    But it’s inevitable. It’s a tautology.

    Moreover, I meant genre romance novels, not genre fiction generally. In general, I do not think that points made about one type of genre fiction apply to all types of genre fiction; in this specific case, I think that both science fiction and fantasy, for instance, are quite different from romance novels in some of the respects I was thinking of.
    […] Genre romance novels are, in my experience, written according to very serious constraints. There are plot constraints, characterization constraints, all kinds of constraints. I don’t really know enough about science fiction to make a comparison, but it would not surprise me at all to learn that the strictures on romance novels are much more stringent than those that govern SF.

    I’m sorry, but this all remains wildly unjustifiable generalization.
    I think, with respect, that you are clueless about the different publishing programs, what the constraints of any of them are or are not, how they evolve, and what they are, and that you have absolutely no idea which publishers, and which writers, and which books — nice that you’ll agree now that they’re actually “books,” which is hardly a point any person not trying, however momentarily, to be deeply offensive would try to make — have what level of quality and “worth,” even in your own view, they possess.
    That’s just effing ignorant bigotry: smearing everything with a name as unworthy of sorting out, because, after all, it’s mostly constrained garbage, the literary equivalent of porn.
    This is just another variant of the same old same old “you’re not one of the bad ones, you’re one of the good ones.”
    Want to be fair? Fine. Talk about individual books. Talk about individual writers. Talk about individual publishers.
    You want to claim that the genre as a whole sucks? You want to claim that “genre romance novels” as a whole shold be sneered at, so long as we distinguish that it’s not all constrained crap?
    No. You’re still insulting everyone who writes and reads the genre. You’re just saying that there are some exceptions.
    “Note: this does not imply, and I did not mean it to imply, anything about the quality of genre romances.”
    I can’t see that this claim is compatible with the rest of what you’re saying.
    You’re arguing that writing within any constraints is inherently inferior to writing without constraints, and is inherently of less quality.
    Whereas the commonplace within genres is to note that a) there are always constraints; and b) constraints just give you a structure to go around, beyond, turn inside out, and see how they can be successfully violated.
    All fiction is constrained within limits, starting with comprehensibility and points of common reference. There are merely faint differences of degree for every work.
    Quality comes from what you do within and beyond those always-existing constraints.
    Beyond that, that’s where it’s necessary to talk specifics.
    But to stop and generalize that “Assessing genre romances is different, precisely because there are so many rules” is condescending, ignorant, bullcrap. It’s not different at all, it’s exactly the same — you judge success and quality, however subjectively or objectively — and it’s only prejudice that is leading you to draw a line around “genre romance” to claim that somehow “[a]ssessing genre romances is different.”

    […] I do not think badly of a particular genre romance because the author should not have made the hero so strong, noble, and self-contained, or because its heroine should not be so completely ignorant of her own charms, or because some complication prevents the hero and heroine from recognizing their attraction to one another until they are forced into close proximity by some unexpected turn of events. Those are the rules.

    No, they’re your ignorant stereotypes. If a story is poorly done in some fashion, it’s poorly done. Being a cliche that’s poorly done doesn’t make it okay “just” because it’s in a genre.
    That thinking is exactly why most people not aficionados of a genre can’t write it.
    All a romance requires is that two characters have an attraction, and that their relationship evolves in some fashion from beginning to end of story.
    That’s it. The rest of it is your own ignorant prejudice, based on the lower common denominators of the genre.
    Characterizing a genre as made up only of its bad and mediocre stuff, and defining anything good as not-genre, is the classic boot-stomp of dismissal. The good and great books and stories of a genre are every bit of that genre as the crap.
    It’s the defining a genre as only consisting of the crap that is the ultimate error, and the ultimate insult.
    So “[f]irst, a clarification: I meant, and should have said, genre romance novels. I did not mean Jane Austen” is simply emphasizing that you really are trashing the genre, and defining it as inherently excluding anything of quality.
    That’s my point.
    No, this doesn’t help.
    Finally, although you’ve added an asterisk, you still claim that “Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used.”
    I repeat, in the face of your standing by leaving this claim, that it is indefensible.
    But oh-it’s-just-genre-romance-that’s-the-same-as-Hustler doesn’t change your argument from what I said it was in the first place. I mean, that was my complaint, so specifying that, yes, it’s not Jane Austen, just genre-romance that should be considered as having no more literary worth than porn, doesn’t improve the defensibility of this claim.

    […] For better or for worse, I think that genre romance (again, I’m agnostic on, because largely ignorant of, other genres) is a different thing than non-genre fiction, and different in large part because it is best seen as a highly constrained performance — as more like the compulsory program in figure skating, while non-genre fiction is like the freestyle part, where you really can do whatever you want.

    So you believe yourself capable of identifying which novels are properly in the romance genre, and which should be cast out? Or is it that you can identify all novels with worth, and which should be cast out as only genre romance?
    This is the ancient error of insisting that genres have discrete boundaries and identifiable characteristics.
    They don’t.
    Genres are permeable and inclusive, not discrete and exclusive.
    Trying to come up with “definitions” that completely include and exclude within discrete genre boundaries is an impossibility and a fool’s game.
    So is trying to draw a clear line around genres and “non-genre” fiction.
    Genres are a convenience of the publishing business. Making declarations about the content, or quality, or worth, of any given work, based on its genre label, or publisher, is inevitably going to rapidly go wrong.
    It’s not defensible.
    “I do think genre romance novels are a different sort of thing from non-genre novels.”
    What meaningful distinction are you trying to draw, then?
    “But that doesn’t imply anything at all about whether the kind of thing they are is a better or worse thing to be.”
    I’ll be interested in your response, of course, but if you weren’t trying to “imply anything at all about whether the kind of thing they are is a better or worse thing to be,” than what exact point were you going for when you wrote that “they are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold”?
    So far as I can tell, you were trying to distinguish between reading for an empathetic experience with imaginary characters, combined with thought-provoking intellectual stimulation — or something along those lines — and solving a puzzle or masturbating.
    And you directly assert that if you read a genre romance fiction novel, it’s not for the same or similar purposes as other fiction reading other than pornography, but simply, you imply, to obtain a desired emotional response.
    Which is in no way, you claim, like what anyone gets out of any other kind of fiction.
    That’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant claim about what other people read for, and it’s, yes, indefensible, and wrong.

51. She could have saved a lot of time by just telling the old classic.
    Why was Helen Keller a lousy driver?
    Because she was a woman.
    I know…. but still, wasn’t that about the gist of it?
    And as been mentioned already, we shouldn’t be suprised that someone would write that column.
    But the Washington Post puts it in their paper?
    Good thing they have a female Ombudsman I guess but still…

52. I must fervently object to a gross technical error in your essay. You wrote “What do you mean ‘we’, white man?” As I recall, the original joke used the line “What do you mean ‘we’, Kemosabe?” Tonto would NEVER have used the phrase “white man”; he ALWAYS referred to the Lone Ranger as “Kemosabe”.
    Wishing to insure that this objection was technically sound, I researched the sentence on Google and discovered 1700 references to your version versus a mere 400 references to my version. Which means that your version is in fact the linguistically correct version, regardless of the realities of the Lone Ranger universe. This is rather like the phrase ‘parting shot’, which gives me palpitations, because the source is ‘Parthian shot’, but those ignorant of ancient history have degraded the phrase to its current sad state.
    Nevertheless, I must ask, “Where were you during the 1950s?”
    And now it is time for me to ride off into the sunset. Hi-ho, Silver, away!

53. Erasmussimo, I think you posted in the wrong thread. Also, you miss the point: Tonto is using a form of address he would never have used hitherto, precisely because the situation has developed in a way which is not to the Lone Ranger’s advantage (as Emperor Hirohito might have put it).

54. Gary: point out the place where I said anything about quality, in the original, as opposed to in the update, where I was trying to say that I was not talking about quality.
    I mean, I said: they aren’t books. This implies “they are not as good” only if you assume that anything that is not a book is worse for that fact. That would be absurd. A sunset is not a book. My cats are not books. I am not a book. Whoopee.
    I am sorry if I was wrong to assert that there is such a thing as “genre fiction”. Also, to take it as obvious that when someone writes the original from which a genre is derived, there are reasons other than snobbery for not including their work in the original genre.

55. Erasmussimo, it looks like the most popular version is “What you mean ‘we’, white man?” (no “do”). I’d’ve expected “paleface” myself, which does do better in the “do”-less version than “Kemosabe” but still not as well as “white man”.
    It’s not surprising that Tonto would abandon the “Kemosabe” honorific if he’s abandoning the Lone Ranger.

56. On reflection, I did say, in the original, that measured against porn or sudoku, romance novels come out fine. So I did talk about quality. But I did not impugn romance novels’ quality.

57. About Tonto: I had always understood the “what do you mean, “we”” to be apocryphal; I think I once tried to track down the original and failed. I prefer the “white man” version to the “Kemosabe” one, when I am using the quote, because it makes it clear why Tonto is saying it.

58. Um, Hilzoy, if I pointed to a journal article written by a philosophy professor and said “this is not a paper! it is more akin to a hustler centerfold”, well, that sounds extremely insulting to me. There are certainly alternative readings of that sentence that are not offensive, but you’ll forgive me for not latching onto them right away.
    Professionals are to some extent defined by their work product — to just declare that the work product of one class of professionals isn’t even in the same category as that produced by other, similar professionals seems to imply that the first class aren’t really professionals. I mean, if romance novel authors produce things that are not books, then why are we calling them published authors? Arguments that somethings which are not books are also good seem to miss this point.

59. The version I first heard, decades ago was: “What you mean we, Paleface?” Of course there should be no “do” in there; Tonto’s grammar goes native along with his allegiance.

60. Ah the memories — this brings back Johnny Carson’s job interview of Tonto…
    Q: “Last employer?”
    A: “Kemosabe.”
    Q: “Reason for leaving last job?”
    A: “Him find out what Kemosabe mean.”

61. Kevin, Tonto’s grammar wasn’t going native, as an indication of shifting allegiance. It was always like that. Hence the SNL skits with Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein’s monster.

62. I tend to think that the ‘romance genre’ (by which I mean romances of the kind that Harlequin publishes, but rather than identify the genre with a particular publisher, I use the quotations to try and get the same meaning across) as the basic equivalent of Japanese yaoi manga. Same market, different product realizations.
    Kevin’s point about the apocryphal Tonto quote makes me realize that part of the fun of the quote is that that his grammar suddenly chooses this opportunity to improve. It reminds me of a joke that makes the point more explicitly
    A person from the West is at a banquet in Africa and finds himself sitting next to someone dressed in a dashiki and kufi, and the guest, looking to make conversation, smiles, and very slowly says ‘you likee soup?’. The man smiles and nods. Reassured by the success of the communication, he follows with a ‘You likee party?’ The man smiles again and nods. Then the emcee stands up and gives a brief introduction of the kind for someone very accomplished who has a list of honors to long to note, and the man in the dashiki stands up and proceeds to deliver a perfectly crafted, impeccably delivered speech in an obviously Oxbridge inflected accent about the theme of the banquet that has everyone impressed. And as the man returns to find his seatmate trying to crawl under the table in embarrassment, he smiles and says to him ‘You likee speech?’

63. Um, Hilzoy, if I pointed to a journal article written by a philosophy professor and said “this is not a paper! it is more akin to a hustler centerfold”, well, that sounds extremely insulting to me.
    I think a better story to illustrate the point at issue here is this one: suppose I observe hilzoy reading Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in her spare time, and I say “How very female! I’m sure a male philosopher would never read such tripe, even in his spare time!” Would I not reveal myself to be a right twerp by saying this? And suppose hilzoy responds by saying: “The relevant comparison here is not with the serious books my male colleagues read when they are working, but with their leisure interests, like sudoku.” Are the fans of Samuel Richardson justified in taking umbrage at this?
    KCinDC: fair enough, as long as we’re agreed that there’s no “do” in that sentence.

64. Well, we may not have solved the problem of misogyny, but I sure learned a lot about the Lone Ranger and Tonto!

65. “Gary: point out the place where I said anything about quality, in the original, as opposed to in the update, where I was trying to say that I was not talking about quality.”

    Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not “books”, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.

    Hilzoy, you’re saying that you picked War and Peace as a random example of fiction, rather than, say, Valley of the Dolls, or A Girl of the Limberlost, or, let’s see, Danielle Steel’s Sisters, not because it’s famously supposed to be one of the “best” novels ever, but simply randomly?
    Any of these current non-genre fiction best-sellers would make the same point for you?
    And that you picked “the Hustler centerfold,” with no judgments in mind, and that you’d be as comfortable with walking into a colleague’s office to finding them perusing a Hustler centerfold as you would be if it were a copy of Newsweek?
    “I am sorry if I was wrong to assert that there is such a thing as ‘genre fiction’.”
    I don’t know why you should be sorry; I don’t recall ever disagreeing anywhere with such a thought or claim.
    “A sunset is not a book. My cats are not books. I am not a book. Whoopee.”
    Books, however, are books, and novels are novels.
    If I said “you are not a philosophy professor, you aren’t even comparable to the category of philosophy professors, you’re comparable to a Hustler centerfold,” I’m doubtful you’d find “A sunset is not a philosophy professor. My cats are not philosophy professors. Whoopee,” to be a refutation of the notion that that you are, in fact, a philosophy professor. If you were fine with being told that you were, instead, comparable only with a Hustler centerfold, I’ll take your word for that.
    “But I did not impugn romance novels’ quality.”
    You’re saying that asserting that they’re not even novels, that they serve an entirely different, and incomparable function from that of all other fiction, doesn’t “impugn [their] quality”?
    I have to disagree. If you can explain to me how saying that romance genre novels are incapable of having the same qualities as other fiction, but that asserting this doesn’t impugn the degree of their holding the same qualities, well, here’s where I need a philosophy professor to untangle that for me, I’m afraid.
    Seriously, I’m sorry to be so strong about this, and I certainly don’t mean to offend in return, and I don’t hold putting some perhaps not best-considered thoughts down in perhaps not the most clearly thought out way, against anyone, least of all you, since I do that all the time, and you’re a brilliant wonderful person I rarely disagree with.
    But I think you got the wrong end of a stick here, and perhaps might not want to use it to dig any deeper.
    There’s nothing magically different, for all the mediocre romance publishers with strict publishing guidelines which frequently results in mediocre and limited romance fiction being published, about romance genre writing that makes it incapable of being as rich or deep or ambitious or successful or insightul or “literary” as any other kind of fiction.
    And the people who read a book labeled as “romance genre fiction” read it for all sorts of reasons, from all sorts of different writers, doing all sorts of different things.
    Locking all these writers and readers (and publishers and editors) into a box, and declaring that none of the novels they produce, publish, and read, serves the function other fiction does is just wrong.
    It’s a mind-reading claim to know what someone is reading for, just because you stereotype them.
    And it’s just wrong to claim that romance genre fiction is inherently totally different in function, or form, from other types of fiction. Do I really need to defend that point?

66. “and says to him ‘You likee speech?'”
    I take it you’ve never seen The Wind and the Lion.

67. I wasn’t clear about grammar “improving”, so I’ll tell another joke.
    When I was studying horn, one of the grad students was this very sweet woman who had a soft spot for kids, and when a friend of a friend brought his kid, we got the kid to go up to this grad student and ask the following questions
    -What kind of instrument is that?
    The grad student launches in a long explanation of how it’s a ‘horn’, but some people call it a ‘French horn’, with lots of clearly enunciated words and head nods
    -How long have you played it?
    She explains when she started and adds some bits of information that a child who was perhaps making his first contact with a horn might want to know.
    -Why does your horn look different from the others
    The grad student, seeing that the kid is clearly a sharp cookie, starts explaining that she is playing a Holton.
    -Why don’t you play an Alexander, I think that the pitch is a lot more accurate.
    The look on her face was worth all the coaching (and promised bribes) to get the kid to memorize his lines.

68. Well, I had a comment to LJ, but Typepad won’t let me post it, even after the link is removed entirely. This is fun.

69. I’m going to step up and defend hilzoy (which is a treat in itself since she so rarely needs defending). hilzoy isn’t saying that romance novels and porn are related classes of works that are roughly comparable in terms of originality or literary merit.
    Instead, she is making the following, very different, claim: Before sneering at women (and discounting their intelligence and literary taste) because women read romance novels (as Charlotte Allen does) it is worthwhile to see how men fulfill their similar needs. And it turns out men fulfill those similar needs with porn. hilzoy’s *point* is that if you make the fair comparison between men and women along this dimension it is hard to see how that comparison would make you discount *women’s* intelligence and literary taste.
    And as a man who enjoys both romance novels and porn (and whose wife also enjoys both romance novels and porn), both claims seem obviously correct to me.

70. “and says to him ‘You likee speech?'”
    I take it you’ve never seen The Wind and the Lion.

71. “Instead, she is making the following, very different, claim: Before sneering at women (and discounting their intelligence and literary taste) because women read romance novels (as Charlotte Allen does) it is worthwhile to see how men fulfill their similar needs. And it turns out men fulfill those similar needs with porn.”
    Yes. She’s saying that fiction published as under the romance genre label has no value in common with other forms of fiction, but only with porn.
    You’re correct about what I’m disagreeing entirely with.
    Romance writers don’t, in fact, all write with goals and means that have nothing in common with other fiction, but only with porn (or puzzle-solving, if you prefer). That’s wrong.

72. Ah Limberlost! Make a fortune catching moths! and being perfect in every way, but very modest about it. Back in the day, young women had standards to meet.

73. Wow. I can’t believe you had to write a long clarification of what you meant with your comments about romance novels, which was crystal clear to me. (And in no way offensive; indeed, it was very much along the lines of Janice Radway’s book, Reading the Romance.)

74. Gary, the joke is also in Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, but both of them are with Japanese coming out on top, and I think that it works better with an African context, especially in regards to language, in that there are more Africans who are native speakers of English than Japanese.
    There is also my personal context to consider, in that making the Japanese come out on top might not be as funny, especially if someone was thinking that I was trying to make a comment about Japanese-Western relations.

75. Gary: She’s saying that fiction published as under the romance genre label has no value in common with other forms of fiction, but only with porn.
    No, she isn’t.

76. Do women not use porn?

77. Gary: I was not saying what you thought I was saying. I admit to having been unclear, since the “it’s more like porn” made it natural to think I was saying “it has no value”. That’s why I tried to clarify. I was trying to make the point sexyhusband says I was trying to make, which is not, as I understand it, anything like: “fiction published as under the romance genre label has no value in common with other forms of fiction, but only with porn.”
    However, since I’ve already tried and failed to make myself clear, I’m not sure what trying again would accomplish.

78. OK – my big insight from this weekend – I’m spending way too much time on the intertubes and somewhere out there life is passing me by.

79. “No, she isn’t.”
    Good, then.
    I meant to write “seems to be,” to be sure, and apologies that I slipped on that.
    LJ: “and I think that it works better with an African context, especially in regards to language, in that there are more Africans who are native speakers of English than Japanese.”
    But the “you likee, you washee,” “you [fill-in]ee” construction is the old American anti-Japanese stereotype, specifically, isn’t it? Anti-Asian, at least. It’s in zillions of old movies and fiction.
    But I don’t recall anyone ever engage in this bigoted stereotypical usage by portraying that construction and language as ostensibly coming from Africans, or faux Africans. The racist anti-African stereotypes are different. (Bones in noses, grunting and waving spears, etc.) Have I missed all that?
    I mean, not that I was prevously addressing anything other than “hey, that old joke was in this old movie,” but since you bring it up, isn’t that a bit of a problem? Asians don’t talk like that, but the bigoted stereotype was that they did. If there was no such stereotype about Africans, how does the joke make any sense at all? Are jokes based on stereotypes interchangeable because all stereotypes are interchangable? Or what?

80. Wow.
    Sexyhusband, bitchphd, Kevin — thanks from someone who was finding a lot of this thread hard to stomach, but having a hard time knowing where to start in terms of saying so.

81. I have to say this thread exerts far more bytes arguing the merits of romance novels than I would ever have predicted.
    I’m having a hard time imagining a universe where it actually matters, that hilzoy said “Hustler centerfold” when discussing the relative merits of teh romance.

82. I’m sorry this thread got hijacked from the topic at hand, which is Charlotte Allen’s claim that women are trivial creatures and apparently can’t be trusted to vote rationally. Never mind that men are voting for Obama in greater numbers — they must be doing it for rational reasons while women are swooning over his looks and charisma.
    and never mind that the reasons given for voting for Bush was he seemed a good guy to have a beer with. That, according to Allen, must be a coldly logical reason for voting for him.

83. No, it’s actually Chinese, which is why it is more out of place when used to speak to an African and using it there avoids the problem of linguistic stereotypes, which I think provides a bit of useful distance.
    If the joke didn’t make sense to you, my apologies, but it seemed that it did, unless you believe that the joke can only be used if the protagonist is Asian. I don’t think that is the case but mmv, of course.
    Furthermore, I believe the joke is a reversal of prejudice and stereotypes, but if you don’t agree, you are welcome to explain why.
    If you would like to read up on why stereotypes in jokes are not necessarily interchangeable, there’s an excellent discussion in one of Douglas Hofstadter’s books, though I’m not sure which one without pulling them down from my office, which I won’t be in until tomorrow at the earliest, but I will post it then.

84. “That’s why I tried to clarify.”
    As a rule, you put strikeovers over statements you don’t stand by. I appreciate that you’ve added more explanation of your POV and what you wish to say.
    But I do take you to stand by the words you’ve posted. You’re still “saying” them, so far as I know, and standing by them, unless you withdraw them.
    So so far as I know, you’ve added explanation, but are still declaring and asserting precisely that “Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either Ultimate Sudoku or the Hustler centerfold.”
    If you’re not standing by this, fine. But it’s what your post currently asserts, along with some added words.
    You further declared that “First, a clarification: I meant, and should have said, genre romance novels. I did not mean Jane Austen.”
    So you’re specifically distinguishing “genre romance novels” and — I’ll leave it to you to fill in what words best describe what you were giving Jane Austen as an example of.
    You write “When I assess a non-genre novel, I assess it as a work of imagination, in which the author is free to do as he or she wants.”
    Am I wrong in understanding you to be distinguishing this from assessing a genre novel, which you do not “assess it as a work of imagination, in which the author is free to do as he or she wants”?
    If you weren’t distinguishing between the need for two distinct approaches here, any further explanation of what you were saying would be appreciated by me.
    If you were so distinguishing, as I take you to be, then, again, I disagree that all novels published in the romance genre must be so assessed not “as a work of imagination, in which the author is free to do as he or she wants.”
    This is something we may simply disagree over, and about which I believe you are wrong, insofar as I believe strongly, from my observations and experience that this is a great insult to a lot of writers and readers in the romance genre because it is based on false premises as to what many writers in the field attempt to accomplish, what some succeed at, and what many readers derive from those writers’ works.
    I think you’re reducing everything published under the genre label to its least common denominator by making such an assertion that there is no commonality between genre romance fiction, and “non-genre” fiction. I think this analysis isn’t supported by actual thorough knowledge of the writers in the field, or their readers, or the publishers, and that its premises and conclusions are wrong.
    But if I’m misunderstanding you at all, please do explain where. What point were you trying to make by saying that books published as genre romance “are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn,” if not that genre romance novels are not “novels” and not “normal novels,” and that a genre romance “isn’t a book in the normal sense” as you’ve since expanded?
    “I do think genre romance novels are a different sort of thing from non-genre novels.”
    “Different” to the point that they’re not “normal.”
    And you explained:

    […]With this as backdrop, when I said that “romance novels are not “books”, as that word is normally used”, I should, first of all, have said not books but novels, and specifically non-genre fiction.

    So genre romance novels are not novels. They’re “different,” and not “normal.”
    All of them. Inherently.
    Why?

85. I’m so glad to find out that I shouldn’t be worrying about finishing my master’s in mathematics education, since apparently I don’t have the mental capacity to do so….after all, I’m just a girl.
    Women like the Washington Post author scare me, and more frighteningly give Ann Coulter room to make pronouncements that women shouldn’t have the right to vote at all.
    More to the point, the reasons I support Obama have nothing to do with his gender and everything to do with his voting record, his platforms, and the fact that Hilary sold out years ago.

86. I believe the most important observation underlying what Gary is saying is pretty simple: if you haven’t read very much _____ and you’re going mostly by secondhand knowledge, then you might not know as much as you think you do, and there may be more diversity than you think. I’ve observed that this is true for a number of different values of _____ (I’ve seen some people make startlingly dismissive and ignorant comments about 19th century Russian literature, for example), and, among other things, it’s true of romance novels.
    Ten or so years ago, I made some dismissive comment on Usenet about romance fiction. Someone else pointed out that I was making just the same sort of dismissive comment that I would have resented if it had been made about something that I knew and cared about, and that I was probably making it out of ignorance. After thinking about it, I realized that that response was right: I really didn’t know much about 20th century genre romance fiction, and it was silly for me to judge it just by looking at covers while I was walking past the romance section in the bookstore. I asked for some advice about good authors to start with. I still won’t say I’m well read in the field, but I know a little more than I did and I know that at least some novels that are sold as genre romance are worth reading.
    Look at the bright side! Ignorance is equivalent to opportunity. If there’s a whole field of fiction out there that you’ve been ignoring up until now, then it means there are a lot of books out there that you might enjoy and that you might get to discover for the first time.

87. Let me put this another, short, way: if all you want to say, Hilzoy, is that for some people, some genre romance novels often function in a way different from that which much other fiction functions for them or others, fine, I completely agree. And there are plenty of other variants of lesser statements along those lines I’d agree with, and see no problem with.
    It’s making flat declarations about the entire genre of romance fiction and every work published in it and how it functions for all readers of all genre romances that’s crazy and wrong and offensive.
    And it’s what you wrote. You wrote nothing but flat declarations and assertions about “romance novels.”
    Period.
    And then reemphasized “genre romance novels.”
    Period.
    If you actually mean something far more limited, great, go ahead and clarify that you mean something much more limited.
    Otherwise, since some folks think this is a “hijacking,” I’ll try to leave that as my final comment on the topic.

88. Let me start by saying that I don’t read very many novels that could be described as “romance genre”. The thing that is confusing me about Hilzoy’s original post together with the subsequent discussion, is that (just like SF and westerns and mysteries and “general fiction”) some romance novels might be characterized as “pornographic” or “soft porn”. Also, though individual romance novels differ subsets may have similarities that might result in calling them formulaic. But some (I’m thinking of several by Georgette Heyer) are wonderful novels, and I believe have more in common with, say, Converse plays or other “comedies of manners”. I think these plays, which are always studied in literature survey classes and thus presumably considered worthwhile by some literary authorities, are themselves quite formulaic. Yet they are often bitingly funny and contain veiled commentary on political and social issues of the time. Being formulaic is not of itself a derogatory description. As Gary points out, it’s how the formula is used.
    Since I really respect Hilzoy for her well written and usually excruciatingly well researched posts and think everyone, no matter how talented, can have a bad day, I choose to think that perhaps she herself has only happened onto the formulaic soft porn section of the broader category of “romance novels.” Perhaps that subset might be compared with the Hustler centerfold more accurately. So I think she was careless in this post for lumping unlike things together in a quite derogatory way that Gary rightly took umbrage about. But everyone is entitled to a strike out now and then, especially when their batting average is so very high.

89. I believe that if you do a literature search, you will find that normal variations in brain size (measured in cubic centimeters with MRI, taking size into account) are correlated with tested IQ around 0.30.

90. Gary, perhaps the disconnect here, as bemused suggests, lies in what one thinks of as belonging to the set “genre romance novels.” Those without your experience in publishing, such as myself (and apparently others on this thread), think of books with covers that could reasonably feature Fabio and a woman in imminent danger of having her clothes fall off.
    Since we are apparently not familiar with what constitutes “genre romance novels” in your experience, how would you suggest that this subset of books be referred to?
    (I might add that I have read multitudes of what I call “trashy romance novels” and some authors are hacks, and others are quite talented. To my recollection, I have only picked up two TRNs that I could not bear to finish due to the poor quality of the writing — I would suggest that the formula is a very great part of the appeal.)

91. “Those without your experience in publishing, such as myself (and apparently others on this thread), think of books with covers that could reasonably feature Fabio and a woman in imminent danger of having her clothes fall off.”
    No, that’s fair enough.
    There’s a whole cliche about that, as it happens.
    Otherwise, I refer you to the last sentence of my prior comment.

92. “Genre romance novels are, in my experience, written according to very serious constraints. There are plot constraints, characterization constraints, all kinds of constraints. I don’t really know enough about science fiction to make a comparison, but it would not surprise me at all to learn that the strictures on romance novels are much more stringent than those that govern SF. They are certainly more stringent than those that govern fiction generally.”
    Speaking as a writer who is getting married to a woman who’s worked as an editor and literary agent handling mostly women’s fiction and a big chunk of genre romances, I can tell you this is exactly right, hilzoy. If you wanna write for Harlequin, there are rules you gotta follow — they’re not interested in your deviations, no matter how creative.

93. @moff: That was a terrible first sentence, but to clarify: I’ve been party to a lot of talks recently about the writing of Harlequin romances (and have even done some copy and line editing of such), thanks to my relationship with a professional in the field.

94. Hilzoy, I love your posts. And this was one of my favorites.
    A thought on the presence of rules making genre fiction different: could you not make the same argument for haiku, or a sonnet, or an iambic pentameter poem, or indeed any art form? It’s always been my sense (and experience) that the rules, properly understood, don’t restrict the artist, but instead provide the foundation for artistry.
    You could take the argument further: any medium will itself involve inherent restrictions, whether the range of the musical scale, the dimensions of a canvas, the rules of grammar. Maybe the better argument would focus on the effect, including limitations on the range of possible expression, of particular rules, rather than the presence of rules themselves?
    Okay, back to my latest genre manuscript…
    🙂
    Barry

95. I don’t understand how there is anything gender-specific about Clinton’s campaign mistakes. Giuliani and Fred Thompson ran campaigns which were at least as stupid at their most stupid and had none of the successes that Clinton did have (a phenomenal operation in California).
    And it’s laughable to say that she’s not a good debater, because she’s had a few missteps against someone whose blood seems to run at an almost reptilian cool. She’s a fantastic debater. She’s probably a little better than Obama, but he’s been able to play a prevent defense of sorts these last few debates, and she has had to strain to gain some ground against him, and it hasn’t worked out. She’s got just a little more detail than he has. And it’s almost creepy how she simply never misspeaks. Even Obama can meander with an answer at times.
    There are going to be indulgences particular to different temperaments. It would be very easy for someone to write an article describing just how stupid professional football is and just how stupid it is that grown men spend so much of their leisure time following it, hinging their emotional ups and downs to it. If there is this stereotype that women in the workplace talk about Botox (something I have never seen to be the case), what about fantasy football (something that is actually becoming a major problem at many companies)?
    And one study about how women and men compare at driving as evidence of intelligence inequality? Look, I could write a pretty stupid article titled: “We Rape, We Diddle the Kids, Lock us all up!” Frankly, the XYs are overrepresented amongst the populations of rapists and pedophiles. It seems a lot more relevant to me than a slight difference in average accidents per mile.
    As far as men not making catastrophic mistakes, I can only laugh. Simply name any one of the history’s famous catastrophic mistakes. Napoleon marching on Russia? Hitler marching on Russia? The Iraq War? All of WWI? Just take your pick. None of these were perpetrated by men?

96. Barry, that whole riff is Hofstadter to a tee. I can’t give book titles (my office floor is being waxed), but if you are at all interested in the question of how strictures interact with creativity, you should read his stuff.

97. Barry: There is a great quote from Robert Frost — “I would sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.” — that gets at the heart of the issue of the relationship between rules and creativity. Frankly, often it’s a *constraint* that’s responsible for creativity, because without a constraint there would be no search for alternatives to the obvious idea. Rules, in the hands of the talented, actually provoke artists and thinkers to greater creativity.
    But I think there is a deeper idea here that in some ways, without rules, there is simply no such thing as creativity in writing, as we traditionally think of it, because there are no constraints within which we are seeking alternative solutions. One of the reasons we value creativity, at least in art, is that there is something engrossing about the surprise of encountering a truly creative and unexpected solution to a problem. You can imagine rules as defining a problem space. Creative ideas are solutions to that problem space that satisfy it in unexpected and surprising ways.
    Shorter me: It’s actually harder, not easier, to be creative when there are no wrong answers.

98. Given that bloggers on this site seem to define democracy as, “a system of government designed to protect me from the desires of the common people” hilzoy’s attempted redefinitions of the words “book” and “novel” do not surprise me.
    It comes of as an incredibly snobbish group of comments…but that does not surprise me.
    Perhaps we should all continue the discussion of the poor taste of the vast majority of the electorate that you very serious people are counting on to save your government. While we are at it, we can decide that what the hoi-polloi listens to is not “music”, the structures in which they live are not “architecture”, their beliefs about the after-life are too simple to constitute “religion”, etc. It will be fun for the whole gang and we can all bask in the glow of presumed superiority.

99. I have resisted talking about whether I have or have not read and enjoyed romance novels until now, since I thought it was beside the point. But for what it’s worth: I have. (Not all the time — not jut now, for instance; it goes in waves.) If anyone thinks I meant to condemn the readers of romance novels, they should be aware that I would be condemning myself.

100. now_what,
     Given the doubts raised about your understanding of democracy in this thread, it seems that your comments are more rooted in anger at getting taken to task than an honest defense of romance novels.

101. Regarding the absolute value of genre romance novels, an anecdote.
     My local resale book shops refuse to take romance novels, as they are glutted with them and cannot sell the supply they already have. Even Goodwill does not want them.

102. If anyone thinks I meant to condemn the readers of romance novels, they should be aware that I would be condemning myself.
     No offense intended, Hilzoy, but this is an inapt thread in which to play the “It’s OK if I insult this group because I’m part of it” card.

103. An honest defense of “romance novels”? I thought we had already decided they were not novels. Perhaps “romance unbooks”. And I see that you now redefine “having one’s assumptions confirmed” as “getting taken to task”.
     Democracy is not “government by the people”, a book is not “a written or printed work of fiction or nonfiction, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers”, why one learns fascinating new concepts daily here on the internet.
     The more important point being that the people who read things that aren’t considered to be “books”, the people who, it is feared, may influence politician’s actions…these are the people being counted on to change a country’s direction.
     And they get spat on.

104. does anyone beside me find it ironic that a serious polemic analzying a piece about in which a woman writes about the shallowness of women gets sidetracked into a debate about romance novels?
     to hilzoy’s defense, it’s not her fault that romance novels have the reputation of being shallow, and her dismissal of same is only reflective of a greater opinion of the population in general.
     (replace the words “romance novels” with “pop music” or “blogs” and see how the overall characterization would be legitimate in the eyes of the majority of people.)
     otoh, i agree 100% w/gary that within any genre there are great examples and poor examples, and the vast majority are simply mediocre examples.
     there are plenty of fans for any genre, and every creative endeavor (especially the ones that actually get published or professionally produced) took hard work which should be respected, even if the final product is not something one would perosnally enjoy consuming.

105. Actually, I think this thread got thrown horribly off-course in part due to a bit of a misreading by hilzoy. My guess is that “chick lit” here refers less to romance novels of the imminent-wardrobe-malfunction-cover kind, and to the vast family of often rather pink books whose type specimen is Bridget Jones’ Diary (&tc.)
     Anyway, re: Charlotte Allen – accepting her pop-evolutionary psych premise for the sake of argument, why would “an excellent memory and superior verbal skills” mean that “the number of women [Supreme Court Justices] will always lag behind the number of men“? Whatever (on-average) inherent cognitive abilities might have been selected for by generations of guys down on the savannah needing to ‘calculate’ spear trajectories (and I actually don’t dismiss this basic kind of idea out of hand, although it’s wildly simplistic and not even extremely tentative), it’s hard to imagine how such things would translate, in some gender-neutral future, into ‘natural’ male over-representation on the Supreme Court.
     Of course, I’m making the same kind of mistake here as hilzoy’s making when she asks “doesn’t the Post have editors whose job is to prevent this sort of trainwreck?” In that case, it’s imagining that the trainwreck is unintentional. In mine, it’s imagining that Allen’s piece is meant to inform, entertain, or even provoke, when in reality it’s to prepare for a future where Charlotte Allen’s name is Ofdonald.*
     More or less, anyway.
     “Someone needs to collect Thullen’s gems such as these and bronze them (someone, that is, besides me).”
     Agreed. I’ve tried, but three computers later, I’m frankly starting to run out of money. Baby shoes are much easier – although let me say, it turns out to work a lot better if one takes the baby out of them first.
     * That is, Washington Post Company CEO/chairman Donald E. Graham, not Donald Johnson. Presumably.

106. Now-what—I gotta take my hat off, because that’s a really creative way to score a political point, casting yourself as the defender of the common man (or woman) against the elitist liberals based on what hilzoy said about romance novels.
     Where do I fit in? I’m a Christian, a C.S. Lewis fan and probably to hilzoy’s left on some issues, while being a defender of genre fiction, so when the very serious liberal elite gather in conspiratorial fashion to carry out those nefarious schemes you outline, I’m going to have a tough time knowing whose side I’m on.
     I read LJ’s link–Gary was one of your opponents then and in this thread he and hilzoy have been on opposite sides of the fence, so you can rest easy. The liberal elitist Bolshevik revolutionaries are devouring their own.

107. I thought that your original post was clear but your explanation was a thing of beauty. You are stunningly gifted writer. Just sayin’.

108. I did not mention any schemes or conspiracies. I described an attitude present all too often in posts here, an attitude that seems less than functional if any sort of democratic political change is desired, and an attitude generally insulting in any event.
     Not that any sort of rousing defense of genre fiction is needed, perhaps all that it would take is for one to be able to look at the bound collection of pages someone holds in their greasy proletarian paw and be able to realize, “that is a book“.
     And I’d be fine if you all got back to talking about how pathetic the WP story was, no issues with that at all. Better use of your time than trying to reeducate me on what democracy means.

109. “The liberal elitist Bolshevik revolutionaries are devouring their own.
     They go particularly well with red wine?

110. “…. democracy as a ‘system of government designed to protect me from the desires of the common people’.”
     I can’t speak for anyone else here, but if the common people would take their time and maybe buy me dinner after getting a few drinks in me, they could have their way with me.
     Thing is, the common people more often than not suffer from premature pantisocracy (take that, William F. Buckley!) and then roll over and go to sleep without asking me about my day.
     I find too that the alleged spokespeople for the common people complain about nudity on the screen and then have the audacity to walk around all day “buck naked with bubbles” (James Dickey) underneath their clothing, the hypocrites.
     The nerve!

111. “I read LJ’s link–Gary was one of your opponents then”
     I just went to see what you were referring to, and that’s not quite right.
     I only made two comments. The first is this, in which I somewhat disagreed with a point of Anarch’s and allowed that now_what might have a point.
     Then, in the second comment, I sharply questioned something now_what said. Now_what didn’t respond, the thread ended, and that was that.
     I wouldn’t really describe that as my being in “opposition” to anyone. For the record. If I had been arguing a point, and doing so in multiple comments, I’d agree. But I didn’t.
     I’d suggest to now_what that — and I know many will laugh that it’s me making this suggestion, and I can’t imagine why — less sarcasm is more apt to be persuasive.

112. http://www.heybeus.com/2008/03/03/wait-wait-jk-right-washington-post-is-all-like-why-are-women-so-dumb-we-pop-our-gum-and-stare-blankly/
     You tingle our lady brains. We link to thee!

113. When I found out what “Tonto” means in colloquial Mexican, I was filled with horror and shame and rage.

114. “My guess is that ‘chick lit’ here refers less to romance novels of the imminent-wardrobe-malfunction-cover kind, and to the vast family of often rather pink books whose type specimen is Bridget Jones’ Diary (&tc.)”
     Incidentally, I’d say this is exactly right. “Chick lit” has been a well-known category for more than a decade now, and has little to do with genre romance novels. “Chick lit” novels certainly don’t work under the kind of constraints Harlequin (which pretty much denotes the lowest common denominator of genre romance publishing, rather than the average, let alone any kind of ceiling) writers do.
     I entirely meant to mention that in the first place, but got distracted and forgot. Thanks.

115. “When I found out what ‘Tonto’ means in colloquial Mexican, I was filled with horror and shame and rage.”
     Wikipedia, for what it’s worth — and I don’t have independent knowledge to speak to the veracity of any of this — says that “Tonto’s name, according to an NPR story on the Lone Ranger, was inspired by the name of Tonto Basin, Arizona,” and that:

     Further, in Portuguese, italian and Spanish, the word “Tonto” means “fool” or “idiot” (although this appears to have been a coincidence, as the character is depicted as intelligent), so the name was changed in the dubbed versions. In some Spanish speaking countries, he was named “Toro”, which means “bull”.

     Do you have reason to believe this is wrong, and that an intentionally insulting name was chosen?
     See also this NPR story.

116. The sentence about the driving is taken directly from a ScienceDaily article from 1998: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/06/980618032130.htm
     Either I don’t understand what this statistic means, or someone at ScienceDaily is making no sense to me. I tracked down the actual Epidemiology article by G.Li et al. and figured that the ScienceDaily article must have been trying to interpret this paragraph:
     “Overall, the crash incidence density for men is slightly lower than for women (5.1 us 5.7 crashes per million person-miles). Male drivers are three times as likely as female drivers to be involved in fatal crashes because they have greater exposure prevalence and higher crash fatality rates. That is, on average men drive more miles than women, and crashes involving male drivers are more severe.”
     In other words, despite the fact that women have more crashes per mile driven, men are involved in more fatal crashes overall because they drive more and their crashes are more likely to be fatal.

117. By the way, i only tracked down the driving paper because I couldn’t believe some people commenting on WaPo were saying that Allen’s article wasn’t prejudiced because she uses “statistics and specific examples”. When I realised that the statistics used were almost word-for-word from an online article and that the article made no sense either, I had to track down the paper.

118. FWIW – very little, I imagine – I first heard the “likee speechee” anecdote about 45 years ago, attributed at the time to Wellington Koo (China [Republic of] Minister to the USA, 1915ff, and after a long and distinguished diplomatic career, again Ambassador to the US, 1945ff).
     So The Wind and the Lion is very definitely a latecomer to this wheeze.
     As I am to this thread, having missed the opportunity (without regret) to mix it up on the virtues or otherwise of genre fiction. (On which I find Hilzoy, as always, eloquent and plausible, but that’s neither here nor there.)

119. I saw it attributed to Wellington Koo too, in Asimov’s Guide to Humor (1971).

120. “So The Wind and the Lion is very definitely a latecomer to this wheeze.”
     Oh, sure. Screenwriters are rarely that inventive, and I wasn’t in the least trying to claim that John Milius had originated the joke.
     It’s a nice usage of it, though, with John Huston as John Hay as the butt of the joke. 🙂
     And since the movie is set in 1904, obviously it was before Wellington Koo. 😉 😉 😉

121. Dan, it depends whether it’s a boho or a hobo buffet. Red is for Bohos. Hobos seek refinement.
     Wow, what a trip. I think I’m glad to have gotten here late.
     Just loved Barry’s post. As juicy lucid and nicely honed a chunk of worthwhile prose as I’ve encountered lately. Loved the delicacy of the spices.
     Is it me that’s new?— speaking of spicy and by extension sexy..Handles chosen for the occasion? Or an Old Guard regathering to see an unusual scrap?
     So much I don’t understand. Reminds me kind of what things were like back when I was a kid..
     Donald, found your last post thoroughly delightful in all ways, but not least for your fond mention of Lewis.
     Likewise delighted by HaraldK’s earlier note about finding Hilzoy’s place by chance in a Lewis Google.
     —All due naturally to finding that other guests are vessels of enthusiasm for the man, his ideas and manner.
     Back from when I could modestly indulge bibliophilia I have a fair wodge of the whole bookshelf, as well as with a finer reverence, some number of treasures by Charles Williams.
     Per the nature of democracy dispute; now_what, I’m far from unfamiliar with those strongly felt thoughts in myself; but I am far less practiced with those thoughts hanging out hereabouts. Would you be insulted if I voiced the possiblity that your fervor was provoked by the unusual length and height of the wave of feeling in this particular thread?
     Because it seems to me- I mentioned in another thread ‘a variety of vistas’— that the main things that especially surface here are a pleasure in language, a concern for substance, and an often graceful mutual courtesy (the exceptions to that rule usually serve as foils for wit, so that’s ok with me).
     You might have been dismayed to see two of our heroes (skipping the m/f thing) waving their arms like that.
     I do think Gary had excellent arguments but had trouble marshaling them while his blood was boiling, and I do think that Hilzoy seems to have been vulnerable and more distressing was unable to grasp it.
     Maybe like watching your parents fight. was always a sore point for me.
     I can see it as a Good Thing, admittedly in diffuse ways. I don’t feel like trying to lead the jury on that.
     Lastly, John; where in Dickey? Catchy.

122. You scholar types; nice informational maneuvering. [applause]
     Surely by now the accepted model has shifted from the hated woman driver, to reckless young men drivers and circumspect young woman drivers? I, discouraged, wonder if ethnic slurs still play a part in stereotyping style-of-driving expectations.
     I’d be a bit surprised if the ee joke wasn’t used in the Charlie Chan movies. I have vague memories of such. Sorry, no searchee.
     I would likewise be surprised if the same move hadn’t been made on a painfully naive tourist/ cowboy/any kind of dumb gringo archetype attempting Spanglish. Surely no need to elaborate there.
     While I remember, a minor enduring question; what determines when name appears in red? My surmise is it doesn’t signify a presence on-site; I doubt it represents a gold star; so what’s the variable?

123. “You could take the argument further: any medium will itself involve inherent restrictions, whether the range of the musical scale, the dimensions of a canvas, the rules of grammar.”

     So very true. But since we’re on a roll insulting genres here, I often think that if modern abstract paintings or modernistic “classical” music had equivalents in literature, it would be books written in the author’s own (possibly unpublished) artificial language… or maybe three volumes filled with long sequences of the unicode characters ೋ, ⡳ and ῲ.

124. Women: Stupid, Fickle, or Just Golddiggers?

     It looks like the Washington Post seems to have waded in to the Big Muddy over the weekend with columns denigrating women as stupid or fickle. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has some excerpts.
     So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate

125. “ it would be books written in the author’s own (possibly unpublished) artificial language”
     Which, to tie back into Donald’s LOTR comment, is why Tolkien is in some ways a modernist author (as Tom Shippey points out)
     “There is a great quote from Robert Frost — “I would sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.” — ”
     Something there is that doesn’t love a net . . .
     Incidentally, the first time I ever heard of Justice Scalia was when he quotemined Mending Wall in Plaut v. Spendthrift Farms, Inc., referring to “the advice authored by a distinctively American poet: Good fences make good neighbors.“. (At least it wasn’t to support some ruling about property rights.) Nothing I’ve seen since has contradicted my initial impression ’bout him. My dream is that one day he becomes the first justice to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors against the state of literature, although I fear that’s even less likely than Andrew Jackson’s face getting kicked off the $20 and replaced by either Sequoyah or John Ross.

126. There’s a stereotype that feminists are easily offended and have no sense of humor.
     If you didn’t prove it by lambasting a WaPo article that was supposed to be tongue in cheek (at least, that’s the way I saw it), then you definitely proved it in your clarifications here.
     The very fact that you have to go on and on, explaining and defending yourself in detail about ROMANCE NOVELS in order to stave off any offense shows how difficult it is to have a rational conversation about anything having to do with gender.
     So what if you compared romance novels to porn? It’s perfectly normal for males to enjoy porn, and it’s perfectly normal for females to enjoy romance fantasises. What of it? There’s no way any rational person is going to convince me that Harlequin romance book #585, or Sweet Valley High #1186 is high literature. But once again, so what? We don’t always need high-brow literature in our lives all the time.

127. First of all, a note of appreciate to Dan S. That’s some finely crafted comment.
     Second, to the question of whether the Allen piece is tongue-in-cheek, it’s on the front of the B section, which I don’t think is usual real estate for the such material, and from this bio, Allen doesn’t seem to be from the Poconos circuit.

128. (Resisting the initial impulse to write improvisationally) contemporary musical experimentalism and free jazz (an aside; I was on friendly terms with a free-jazz trumpeter with a wide and deep mastery of all manner of music— he was married to Peter Serkin’s sister,— and he told me once that he put everything he knew into every solo) still are using instruments and notes, timbres and tones, pitches and rhythms, and the fundamentals of music lie very deep in our brains (see This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin).
     Sound poetry, which some of my poet friends have performed to stunning effect may serve as a near-analog to the unstructured speech you imagine. It is still possible to speak of it, analytically, in structural terms.
     Color-field painting, at least back when I was in art school, was subject to a pretentiously rigorous formalist analysis.
     Constraints are unavoidable. We are bounded and bound by limitations everywhere we turn. Received rules refined by the finest minds over lengthy periods offer the creator proven paths to follow. They enable rather than constrain. In the Modernist period familiar ‘constraints’ are often construed as departure points and determine that what will be done must be unlike that which preceded it. No rules is in popular parlance the last rule left standing, but it is a rule. Anarchists as they exist in the world at large are programmatic anarchists. They have rules, largely hyper-democratic.
     An obsessive preoccupation with the unknown is not a terminal constraint upon creative imagination, and can be thrilling in its maintenance of exquisite balance in the face of daunting odds. But it calls itself experimental, and the results are often at best interesting. But I have seen distinguished actors doing orthodox Shakespeare and leave me not wholly satisfied. I have merely appreciated Branagh’s Lear and been delighted and moved to terror and pity by a transgendered Lear in which the cast moved around the stage on golf carts.
     There is an unaccountable thrill to watching such a sucessful high-wire act.

129. John Rohan: There’s a stereotype that feminists are easily offended and have no sense of humor.
     Yes: it’s so much easier to claim that someone is easily offended than it is to consider how some people are easily giving offense: and I know many men who prefer to think “feminists have no sense of humour” because they don’t like to consider the bare possibility that many women just don’t find misogynistic “jokes” funny.
     Come to that, I know many men who obviously want to be John Thullen and fail horribly, who don’t like to consider the possibility that their “jokes” just aren’t funny.
     “Laugh, damn you, laugh at my joke or I’ll…”
     *snickers*
     *marathons*

130. I must have been the only one who thought this article was hysterical. I am a woman and wasn’t at all offended by the article. I thought a lot of it was true and mildly entertaining.

131. John Rohan, the sidetrack about romance novels and genre fiction had nothing at all to do with hilzoy’s main point. She mentioned romance novels in passing in derogatory fashion, Gary took offense having worked in the field, I could see his point (linking it to the offense I sometimes take when fantasy or SF gets dissed) and thus a successful threadjack was born.
     I agree with hilzoy’s main point about the Allen post.

132. Compliments! *blushes, runs away*
     Re: the whole thing being a sarcastic gag mocking ‘scientific’ sexism – Allen’s involved with the IWF, which suggests to me that under the humor, she’s quite sincere.

133. If the idea was to be funny while insulting the WaPo’s female readers, I’m sure Harry Hutton could have done a better job.

134. Wow, that IWF link is worth a gander. The group started from the ad hoc ‘Women for Judge Thomas’, and one of the mainstays published The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism from Regnery. Check out the inserted editorial comment right above that. The list of arguments makes it seem that Charlotte Allen is a female version of Ben Domenech.

135. Linda:
     I must have been the only one who thought this article was hysterical. I am a woman and wasn’t at all offended by the article. I thought a lot of it was true and mildly entertaining.
     I’m asking you to break the Zen of Jokes, here (“the joke that must be explained is not the true joke”), but — why weren’t you offended? Although my personal reaction was closer to “repulsed”. I did not perceive any funny in it — she seemed to be just saying the same sort of things that were used as actual, serious arguments to refuse women the vote. Where’s the humor in that?

136. On the genre romance-novels issue: it is extremely important to note that the audience for novels in general is overwhelmingly female — I’ve seen estimates up to 80%. If women are dumber than men, then reading literature in general is a pastime of the stupid, and it is fiction as a whole that we should be condemning as an idiotic form of art. Single-person shooter video games, conversely, are the highest form of art known to man.

137. what determines when name appears in red?

     It’s in red if there’s a link, and there’s a link if you’ve supplied a URL to link to, either by typing one in on the comment form or by signing in with a TypeKey ID.

138. Doctor Science:
     I wasn’t offended because it was meant to be funny–tongue in cheek. Women are silly. Thank God because men are boring. Women have it all, seriously, and I think the article was meant, since it was side-by-side with the other one there, to put humor to the whole who-women-vote-for issue. There are bigger issues in the world than this one.

139. Sturgeon’s Law applies- 90% of everything is crap but I thought that the WaPo was supposed to have editors to solve that problem.
     Romances are definitely related to porn. I had a mild addiction to them in university. After eight hours going through heavy texts and reading lists, I would use the romances for bus and bath reading. Bought them used, wouldn’t cry if they got lost or damaged and you can read most of them in under two hours, but I gave them up when most began with sex scenes.

140. I’m with Gary on most of his points, but I’ll add a couple.
     •Westerns are predominantly seen as a “male” genre. Romance is seen as female. So no matter how formulaic and cliched Westerns get (and as a bookstore salesclerk, some of them get Very), they don’t get the crap and the sneers romance does.
     •As was pointed out a couple of times, “Harlequin” does not equal the sum total of romance novels.
     •What’s acceptable in romance has actually broadened a lot over the years, as witness the growth in paranormal romance (the number with a female as the vamp/werewolf is astonishing).
     Someone pointed out some years back that Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” broke pretty much every standard for a romance: Time-travel (not done at the time), a heroine married to another man, older than the hero, hero who’s a virgin. It still got published.
     •Speaking as someone who writes fantasy short stories, I can say that most magazines have a lot of stringent requirements: No graphic sex, or no cussing, no “evil person gets a comeuppance” plots, etc (my favorite was an erotic horror magazine that include “no vampire hookers biting it off during oral sex” on their Don’t list). Listing how much sexual content is appropriate is a particularly common one–and according to a lot of older authors, the whole genre used to be really, really conservative about sexual topics.
     So I don’t think the idea that romance is as rigid as a sonnet and other genre fiction is a beat poem holds water.
     •While some romances do have a lot of sex (content varies wildly), a lot of mainstream thrillers/adventure novels have a lot of sex. And it wasn’t that long ago you wouldn’t have seen any sex in a Harlequin or most others. So I don’t think “porn” is really the right comparison to make.
     •Gary, thanks for saving me from making this post a lot longer, I’ve got stuff I need to go do.
     •Hilzoy, as to your general discussion of the WaPo article, right on!

141. Fraser, are sales of westerns anywhere near sales of romance novels? I’d think the difference in popularity might have something to do with the frequency of ridicule too.

142. Fraser,
     I don’t know if the word ‘porn’ necessarily represents sex. A google search on “food porn” yields over 500,000 hits.

143. felix culpa:
     “buck naked with bubbles” is from the poem “Root-light, or the Lawyer’s Daughter”, available in his collected poems.
     Until you asked, I didn’t know where in Dickey I picked that up, but it’s the only four words that stuck with me from a poetry reading of his I attended some time in the last century. Google it.
     I pass through rooms in my life, half awake, and pick up lint which then dislodges itself much later, in a different room.

144. I don’t know if the word ‘porn’ necessarily represents sex. A google search on “food porn” yields over 500,000 hits.
     Forbes magazine is money porn.

145. Westerns, it’s true are a minor genre compared to romance, but pretty much any sort of “action adventure” genre gets more respect than romance does. Allen, I notice, doesn’t compare chick-lit to fiction targeting a male demographic, because that would kill her point that women’s bad taste proves they’re stupider than men.

146. Oh, dear.
     Hilzoy, I bow to you as unquestionably one of the best political prose writers currently active, whether on these here intertubes, in newspapers, or in mile-high flaming letters etched against the sky.
     But I regret to say that your carelessly ignorant jibe at romance novels, and even more your ham-fisted “explanation”, not only ruined but completely undercut your entire argument here.
     Let me give you an example: Suppose you had chosen to counter Allen’s moronic statistic about “women drivers with the quip, “well, women aren’t “driver’s” as the word is normally used: they are either decorative accessories to automobiles or the female equivalent of wrecking balls.” And in your update you explained, “Well, golly, everybody knows that there are excellent drivers who happen to be women, but they aren’t what you call “women drivers.” No, “women drivers” are the people who get behind the wheel of a car not to transport themselves and others from here to there, nor to exercise their mastery over a complex piece of machinery, but for the express purpose and sheer fun of driving over mailboxes!” And in the comments you noted, “Hey, there’s no insult here! I’m a woman, I drive, and hey, I’ve run over a mailbox or two in my time!”
     Can you not truly see that this is not only JUST AS insulting as Allen’s original piece, but almost EXACTLY THE SAME insult?

147. Book genres are often perceived as negative by people who don’t really like the genre. I like SF (well…. I actually read almost anything) and though I agree with Sturgeons Law I don’t mind some entertaining crap. But there are also SF books that are good, that make you think. If you assume all SF is crap than good books automatically can’t be SF. Example from Margaret Atwood:

     Q: It’s hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it science fiction?
     A: No, it certainly isn’t science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all. The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid’s Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.

     The piece by Charlotte Allen is stupid in many ways which at least proves that some women are indeed dim.
     I’m like Hawise: I read a lot of the cheap novels when I was 16-18 because they didn’t require much brainusage. But I started to dislike them when they had to go on with pages of veiled references after the kiss. These days I read a lot of speculative fiction for that same reason; braincandy. But I read lots, so there are some good books in there too 😉
     Women read more fiction than men in any case:

     When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain.
     By this measure, “chick-lit” would have to include Hemingway and nearly every other novel, observes Lakshmi Chaudhry in the magazine In These Times. “Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominately male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly female.”

148. hapax, good to see you here.

149. Heavy lengthy thread…
     OK I suggest; porn is essentially seductive delusion activating desires called ‘base’. Architectural Digest, I have been told, is House Porn; you can make up your own, make it your own, cast it around the room at parties: The phrase is then properly delivered as smirking condescension, variable according to the condescension to be conveyed.
     Linda, connect the dots. Ms. Allen’s favorite charity has affectionate ties to Clarence Thomas, and its new prez “served in the executive office of the 2000 Bush-Cheney Presidential Inaugural Committee” (same link as above). Her allegiances seem pretty clear on the face of it, and while she may have been entertainingly cheeky you must I can only imagine be able to conclude that gleam in her eye is icy?
     I make the humble offering of an anecdote, which is handy to a number of the thread’s strands.
     A few years ago I had a role in a friend’s film, her second feature. She had been holding down two steady jobs a bit earlier. Her day job was film editing, her night job was as a call girl.
     She’d written a script about a former female porn star turned porn director set upon by her former lover now rival, and the cosmic battle that ensues. I say cosmic. God was played by Annie Sprinkle and there were a lot of angels is various degrees of attire.
     The title of the film was Bubbles Galore. Bubbles, the hero[ine] was played by Nina Hartley. Her destitute heartthrob was named Buck,
     Cosmic. At least for tying strands of thread.
     It was billed as a feminist spoof on porn, and the director, my friend, dedicated it to sex-workers everywhere, as having been one she had every right to do.
     Perhaps the most fun was when the Reform Party (now merged with the Conservative Party, now in the news for fresh scandal) put up a major stink in Parliament, in pale imitation of the NEA affair, over such work receiving arts funding. The party was in conference in Ottawa at the time, and a lot of fresh-faced kids attending ended up being interviewed, as these things go, and were quoted as saying they had nothing against sex, and it was probably on the front page of every newspaper in Canada.
     As they say, you can’t buy publicity like that.
     Still had only a brief run. But recently it was far and away the all-time record holder on the Showtime Channel®.
     Nina said she’d made over 400 films, and this was her first non-porn experience. Very cool lady. Bright, alert, fearless. She was at the time enacting the transition from star to feminist porn director.

150. hilzoy, I believe you’ve touched a nerve.

151. I’m in the office and the Hofstader book is Le Ton Beau De Marot and the interesting part is how to translate various genres of jokes into other jokes. Good stuff.

152. Farber @6:37 March 2: “If I said “you are not a philosophy professor, you aren’t even comparable to the category of philosophy professors, you’re comparable to a Hustler centerfold,” ”
     Cite/photo?
     (xanax’s head explodes…)

153. Barry, that whole riff is Hofstadter to a tee
     It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Stravinsky covers this ground really thoughtfully in “The Poetics Of Music”.
     I was on friendly terms with a free-jazz trumpeter with a wide and deep mastery of all manner of music … and he told me once that he put everything he knew into every solo
     The hard thing about playing free is that you have to invent the rules on the spot. You not only have to create the thing you’re playing, you have to also create the context that will make it make sense. And you have to do that on the gig, in real time.
     And, because you’re making it up right now, and folks in the audience have no particular context to bring, you have to find a way to include them. You have to give them some kind of path into what you’re doing.
     Playing free is very hard. A lot of it, in the end, is kind of self-indulgent, but when it works it really is a thing of beauty. It’s a real adventure, and everyone gets to come along.
     I often think that if modern abstract paintings or modernistic “classical” music had equivalents in literature, it would be books written in the author’s own (possibly unpublished) artificial language
     Wasn’t that “Finnegan’s Wake”?
     “The liberal elitist Bolshevik revolutionaries are devouring their own.
     They go particularly well with red wine?
     And some fava beans. Slurp!!
     Thanks –

154. Thanks russell, your fava slurp brightened a gray day.
     Playing free is very hard…when it works it really is a thing of beauty. It’s a real adventure, and everyone gets to come along
     Raphé Malik was the trumpeter; and certainly he, and another old friend, a legend among jazz musicians hereabouts— reeds, guitar, keyboard— really sweat(ed).
     Matthew Shipp doesn’t sweat, but, intense, oh my; he had my in tears of wonder through two entire sets.

155. dutchmarbel posted:
     f you assume all SF is crap than good books automatically can’t be SF. Example from Margaret Atwood:
     Q: It’s hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it science fiction?
     A: No, it certainly isn’t science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all. The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid’s Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.
     I agree with dutch. This quote by Margaret Atwood is typical. “A slight twist on the society we have now” — what the fuck does she think science fiction is? Well, she displays her appalling ignorance: “Martians.” What an ignoramus. Lois McMaster Bujold can write rings around her. And I hate to see Hilzoy mouthing the same snobbish crapola about another genre.

156. The problem I have with Hilzoy’s equation of romance=porn for women is that she’s essentially making the same argument that she’s criticizing Allen for.
     Allen said women are dumber than men. Hilzoy said, women read romance which equals porn.
     Being associated with porn is a BAD thing in current Western society, so comparing women’s enjoyment of romance novels to enjoyment of porn implies women are doing a BAD thing, which brings us right back to Allen’s misplaced arguments on the inferiority of women.
     I can believe that Hilzoy didn’t mean to make the same kind of offensive statement as Allen did, but she succeeded nevertheless.
     Bad argument, made worse by the ‘explanation’.

157. romance novels* (update below the fold) are not “books”, as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn.
     I can’t add much to what Gary Farber’s already said in response to this but I’d like to make three quick points. The first is that different readers may read the same text for all sorts of different reasons, and each may respond to it very differently. Just because some readers may receive sexual stimulation from the romances they read doesn’t mean that the works themselves are actually pornographic.
     That brings me to my second point, which is that “pornography” is a term which is difficult to define and has lots of negative connotations. If anyone’s interested, I wrote a long post about the various meanings of the term “porn” as applied to the romance genre.
     My third point is that it is quite possible to read and analyse romance novels, including Harlequin romances, as literature. If anyone’s interested in reading an analysis of this sort, I’ve posted one here and there’s always plenty of discussion of the romance genre, from an academic, literary critical perspective, at the blog I contribute to, Teach Me Tonight.

158. I am not a trivial person because I’m a woman, as Ms. Allen suggests. I do not suffer from ‘female mental deficiencies.’
     I write Romance novels. I write real books. I do not, as hilzoy claims, write the equivilent of porn. And yes, when you state genre Romance novels aren’t real books, but more akin to porn, it’s an enormous insult to those of us who make a living writing in the field, to those of us who enjoy reading the genre.
     It’s ironic that a commentary against such sweeping and demeaning generalizations of women should include such sweeping and demeaning generalizations against a genre of fiction which explores relationships, love, commitment, and the emotional journey of two people. A genre which is largely driven by women.
     And to this:
     ‘Assessing genre romances is different, precisely because there are so many rules. I do not think badly of a particular genre romance because the author should not have made the hero so strong, noble, and self-contained, or because its heroine should not be so completely ignorant of her own charms, or because some complication prevents the hero and heroine from recognizing their attraction to one another until they are forced into close proximity by some unexpected turn of events. Those are the rules’
     No, those are not the rules. I’ve written many, many Romance novels that contain none of the above. So have others.
     I’ve been writing in this field for 25 years. You’ve just tossed my body of work in with Hustler, and deemed it as not real books while boiling an entire genre down to a handful of cliches.

159. While hilzoy made the equation, I don’t think she necessarily said that porn was bad. She can clarify that if she wants, but for me, I don’t think ‘porn’ is necessarily a bad thing, though the way it manifests itself in Western society is not good at all. Again, speaking for myself, I think everyone should enjoy porn, and enjoying porn shouldn’t carry such a stigma, but it does and because it does, the business has (as I understand it) a lot of ties to organized crime, something which pornography shares with the drug trade.

160. Whether or not porn is bad isn’t the issue, for me. I don’t write it, and the genre I write in is not its equivilent.
     I’ve got no problem with porn. I have a problem having my ‘not real books’ equated with it.

161. As an academic studying romances, I have a few things to say:
     Radway’s ethnographic study of romance readers is not only 25 years old in a field that has changed completely in those 25 years, but it’s also terrible scholarship in the first place. So anything she has to say about romances is probably wrong, and I could tell you why in great detail if you wanted.
     I read the disjunction between Gary and Hilzoy as coming from Hilzoy’s claim that readers read romances to fulfill the same needs that men fill when they watch porn. This is wrong. While I certainly have my stroke books, they’re mostly not romance novels, because I read romances for the emotional relationship between the characters, not for sexual gratification. It’s like comparing apples and donkeys. If one doesn’t assume that’s the only “need” romances fulfill, then the books become more than “just” romances.
     Harlequins =/= mainstream romances.
     Clinch covers =/= what’s inside the book.
     Condemn romances AFTER you read Jane Austen, Laura Kinsale, Joanna Bourne, Georgette Heyer, Suzanne Brockmann, Nora Roberts, if you can.
     Come visit us academic romance readers at Teach Me Tonight. We’d love to see y’all there.

162. Oh, hi Nora!! 😉

163. My comment was composed before I saw yours, so apologies if it seemed like it was directed at your comment.
     I think this is an interesting issue, and I don’t mean for this to be snarky in any way, and I don’t want to out anyone, but if a writer’s output was of works that were rejected a (one might say ‘the’) major romance company and were published by a company that built itself on publishing manuscripts that the mainstay publisher had rejected, doesn’t that speak to the nature of the ‘genre’? Also, when talking about the genre, if it is more susceptible to plagiarism, doesn’t that suggest that the genre (but not individual works that may distinguish themselves) has some of the characteristics that Hilzoy described? That you have taken the genre and made it into something worthwhile is great, but it shouldn’t be thought of as pulling all the rest of the genre up to the same level that you have attained.
     I see a parallel between describing things as ‘kitschy’, where kitschy might be a compliment, but some people would automatically assume that it had a derogatory meaning.

164. I don’t think ‘porn’ is necessarily a bad thing
     Liberal Japonicus, I think there are two main problems that authors of romance would have with the description of their work as “porn”. The first is that that “porn” has negative connotations, but even if one isn’t using the term in that way, it’s still often used to mean “material designed to create arousal in the viewer/reader” (I’ve discussed this, and other meanings of the term here).
     A great many authors of romance novels would deny that their work was written in order to create arousal. They would say, as Nora Roberts has, that their fiction is primarily about “relationships, love, commitment, and the emotional journey of two people.”

165. ~I think this is an interesting issue, and I don’t mean for this to be snarky in any way, and I don’t want to out anyone, but if a writer’s output was of works that were rejected a (one might say ‘the’) major romance company and were published by a company that built itself on publishing manuscripts that the mainstay publisher had rejected, doesn’t that speak to the nature of the ‘genre’?~
     No. It may speak to the nature of that publisher, or more likely the opinion of the editor(s) who received the submission. MANY mss are rejected by MANY editors across the spectrum of fiction, and are subsequently bought by another.
     That’s publishing, not Romance.
     And why would you say Romance is more susceptible to plagiarism? It happens in every field of writing.
     Porn, whether fair or not, is a term most often used–and it certainly came across to me in this case–to describe something that has its value only as a sexual stimulant or outlet. Again, no problem with porn.
     However, I don’t write porn. The genre is not porn.
     While it’s flattering for you to say I’ve taken the genre and made it into something worthwhile, it’s simply not the case. It’s always been worthwhile, and would continue to be without me.

166. I cross posted with Sarah now, but I used preview this time, so I will try and respond to what Laura wrote.
     If one defines porn as ‘things men watch/read/listen to to get off’, well, what precisely are “things women watch/read/listen to to get off”? And then, what do you call stuff that men use to experience emotional relationships? That there is a neat box for one thing, but not the other two says something about power, sexuality and gender relations in society. Which I think is an important discussion to have, but it gets muddied quite a bit when one attaches value judgments and then uses those value judgments to criticize.
     I’m thinking that we have defined Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sexus, as well as the work of Mapplethorpe and others, as pornography. And since hilzoy says she reads romances, it is logical to assume that she wasn’t using porn with a negative connotation.
     I don’t disagree that porn does have a negative connotation, but I’m not sure if the answer to dealing with it is to maintain the notion of it as dirty, and create a category of fiction (that is arguably primarily enjoyed by women) that is good because it deals with emotions rather than physicality. This has the effect of maintaining the Puritanistic dichotomy of desires of the flesh being evil and desires of the mind being good, which is a source of problems. One can either continue to regard physical desires as base impulses that should be eliminated at best and strictly controlled at worst, or one could try to understand that those desires are part of what it means to be human and the ability to understand them and shape them is as much an art as anything else.
     I can see that the counter argument is that a life of the mind is much more worthwhile than gratification of the flesh, and being raised in the Deep South, yeah, that certainly rings some bells with me, but I think that when one argues that porn is, by definition, bad, it makes too much of a separation between our head and areas south of it.

167. But I still crossposted with Nora. I was going by your wikipedia entry, but being obscure to avoid making you the subject of this discussion rather than the dichotomy of emotional versus physical needs and what the romance genre appeals to. And I’m really worried about creating a situation where you might feel that you have to give more information than you are comfortable with, so I hope you won’t mind if I bow out here and let you have the last word.

168. ~but it gets muddied quite a bit when one attaches value judgments and then uses those value judgments to criticize.~
     Maybe so. And that’s exactly how the comments regarding Romance novels–not real books, equivilent to porn struck me. A value judgment used to criticize an entire genre of fiction.
     Once again, no problem with porn. Go porn!
     But I don’t write it, and don’t appreciate having someone label my work, and my genre as such.

169. I haven’t actually read my Wikipedia entry, but the situation you described isn’t really how things went for me back in the day. And you are talking 1979–looong ago.
     I submitted to Harlequin–the only game in town then for category style Romance. Was rejected. Not only because the ms needed work, but because at that time they published almost entirely British authors. Not American. Silhouette Books opened its doors at this time, looking very specifically for new, American writers in the area of category Romance. I polished up my mss, submitted and sold.
     That’s pretty much public fodder for anyone who’s interested, so I’ve no problem relaying it.
     I can’t quite see how this brief history of my start reflects the genre itself, or as it is a quarter century later.

170. A heartfelt welcome to you, Nora and Laura.

171. I’m not sure if the answer to dealing with it is to maintain the notion of it as dirty, and create a category of fiction (that is arguably primarily enjoyed by women) that is good because it deals with emotions rather than physicality.
     I don’t think romance authors would, in general, reject the physical or argue that it’s “dirty”. But there’s a big difference between works which are primarily created in order to arouse the reader (pornography), and works which may arouse the reader, and may discuss and celebrate sexuality, but which also explore a great many other areas of human experience, primarily love (romance).
     “I’m thinking that we have defined Lady Chatterley’s Lover […], as well as the work of Mapplethorpe and others, as pornography.”
     We have? Who’s “we” (to refer to something else discussed at length further up the thread)? I’d always thought of Lawrence as an author of literary fiction.
     Hello and thanks for all the welcome, Slartibartfast. I’ll leave any fish for the dolphins.

172. “If one defines porn as ‘things men watch/read/listen to to get off’, well, what precisely are “things women watch/read/listen to to get off”?”
     Well, porn. Women use porn. Men use porn. And for the same reasons.
     They also both read romance (admittedly, more women than men do this, in my experience), but not necessarily or always for the same reasons they read porn.
     I don’t ever use romance to get off. There may well be people who do, but their use of it doesn’t make it porn.
     Also, I write what I like to think of as an eclectic mix of romance, fantasy and science fiction. The stories that are specifically romances get no less effort put into them than the stories that are not romances.
     And while I’d like to think one day someone will say my work transcends genre (in the sense of ‘this is a great romance and it’s also just a great book’), I wouldn’t ever want them to define my work as other than romance/fantasy/sf just because it’s particularly good.

173. On the subject of constraint in literary forms:
     Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
     And hermits are contented with their cells;
     And students with their pensive citadels;
     Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
     Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
     High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
     Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
     In truth the prison, unto which we doom
     Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
     In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
     Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
     Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
     Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
     Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
     -Wm. Wordsworth

174. Nora, thank you for saying so elegantly what so many of the rest of us would like to say here. Thanks to Gary, too, for picking up the gauntlet. I was going to step in, but since I don’t think I could say things any better than the two of you already have, I’ll simply shake my head at all the ignorance displayed and pour another cup of coffee and get back to work on what I’ve just been told is ‘not a novel’.

175. I would like to go to the RWA (Romance Writers of America) conference and tell its 9000 members that they are writing porn and that its published members–Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, James Patterson, Bob Mayer, Jennifer Crusie, Debbie Macomber, Suzanne Brockmann, Catherine Coulter, Lisa Jackson, Sherrilyn Kenyon, all of whom are in the 2007 Bestsellers Honor Roll–are, in fact, publishing un-books similar to Soduku and Hustler magazines. That all the editors at the conference have been editing un-books all these years and not know it.
     It is difficult for me, a romance un-writer, to go rah-rah over Hilzoy’s excellent points when the underlying message says, “We aren’t like THOSE women, you know, the ones that write and read romance, which aren’t books anyhow.” I realize many people don’t see what the big deal is. Making a sweeping generalization like that speaks of ignorance. Like I said, I challenge you to attend the RWA conference and tell those authors on the Honor List, face-to-face, that they have been writing porn.

176. There have been a couple of posts since I started to write this one, so I might have to beg off as it’s 1 am here.
     I don’t think romance authors would, in general, reject the physical or argue that it’s “dirty”.
     Well, it’s not that they are defining the physical as ‘dirty’, they are defining pornography as ‘dirty’. Someone was defining porn as ‘stuff men use to get off’, which is a bit of a rejection. Of course, we men can be overly sensitive :^)
     Nora argues that the field has changed in 20 years, which I am sure is true. So, would Hilzoy’s comment have been correct 20 years ago? Do we judge a genre on its best examples or on its average? Or its history? Has the quality of romances improved so much in the past 20 years that the mean average of such works makes the equivalence to porn ridiculous? Or did romances never operate on the same plane as pornography, a classification that has included Lady Chatterley, Lolita, Tropic of Capricorn? I don’t mean for those questions to be as rhetorical as they sound, I really don’t know, cause I live outside the US and don’t have the time or resources to regularly read any fiction at all. But by asking these questions, I do want to suggest that it is not as cut and dried as it seems. And by arguing that the genre has changed and to also argue that romance never could equal pornography (a category which has included Tropic of Capricorn, Story of O, Fanny Hill, and a whole raft of other titles) is being a bit ahistoric, which doesn’t dismiss it, but does make the point arguable.
     I’m also thinking that the implicit definitions of pornography floating around in this discussion are visual, but I’m not sure if that is necessarily the case. Fanny Hill or the Story of O are certainly pornography, but they aren’t visual.
     I also don’t want to sound pedantic, but my point about bringing up Lady Chatterley was that it was felt to be pornography and the publishers, Penguin, were tried for obscenity in 1960. The ‘we’ refers to society, not to any particular configuration of commenters.
     A parallel example might be the notion of ‘comic book’, though that might not be the best example, because in order to escape the stereotype of comics, they have to be classified as ‘graphic novels’ or bande dessiné or manga. And one can detect the same thing with the defining of pornography as ‘erotica’.
     I am interested in this because I see these dichotomies shaping our thinking a lot, in ways that can be quite pernicious. This split between the mind and the body is something we see in the distinction between art and craft, which leads to us valorizing certain types of work over other types, we see it in valuing of logic and rationality over emotional connection and empathy, which tends to be used against women in a variety of ways, we see it in valuing visual learning over kinesthetic learning. This is at a bit of a remove from the discussion of the article and Hilzoy’s comment, but that’s what is behind my thoughts, at any rate.

177. Am I understanding correctly that Hilzoy has a Ph.D of philosophy or is, in some form, an academic? Because the whole premise of the argument of romance books being “not normal” or not real books (as opposed to being a cat, a sunset, or a person) is based on faulty assumptions.
     There are constraints within the genre of romance. That is the nature of genre fiction. Mysteries involve a person or persons who find a crime and ultimately solve the crime. (I have yet to read a mystery where the crime remains unsolveable at the end). Joseph Campbell wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces which argues that all myths have the same archetypical hero.
     There are tropes within general fiction such as the bildungsroman. A work set in a particular historical time period is constrained by the, well, time period. All literature has constraints, some constraints are simply more obvious.
     As for your assumptions about those constraints, as others have told you, those are simply inaccurate. Like Gary Farber said, you have to start pulling out examples in order to prove your point.
     Let me start with a Harlequin Blaze written by Kathleen O’Reilly. It’s got a silly title: Shaken and Stirred. It’s got the requisite lack of clothing on the cover.
     The story is about a young woman who refuses to give in to love because she seeks to claim her own independence. This independence is idealized in her mind by owning her own apartment in New York City. Despite being offering the love, desire and protection of an attractive male, Tessa is determined to succeed on her own. In the meantime, though, she chooses to have a lover without the emotional attachments. In the early sex scenes, Tessa requires that they pretend her lover is a stranger to her. Does this fit into your assumptions of that the heroine is “completely ignorant of her own charms?”
     Or let’s take Meljean Brook’s Demon Angel where the heroine is a lying spawn of Lucifer and the hero is a virgin knight. The heroine is the seducer and the virgin knight is the resister. How then does this book play against your stereotypes?
     Sherry Thomas’ Private Arrangements features a wealthy young woman in the late 19th C who schemes to get a Duke into her bedroom so that she can become a duchess. Is this a pale wilting flower?
     Hardly. For every genre romance that you can point out that fits your assumptions, I can point out one that doesn’t which means only that the romance genre is a broad in scope and depth as even the real books.

178. ~So, would Hilzoy’s comment have been correct 20 years ago? ~
     No, they still would have been inaccurate and broad-based generalizations on an area of fiction that is not, was not, pornographic.
     Lolita is certainly not a Romance novel, for example–whether you consider the story pornographic or not. The examples you list aren’t Romance novels, so it’s very difficult to see the point you’re trying to make.
     I understand you’re addressing the issue of porn itself, questioning the whys of its accepted definition. But the issue here is Hilzoy equated Romance to porn–in its basic and accepted definition. It’s simply not the case. She stated they weren’t real books. It was a derrogatory comment on the genre, and for me, my own work as I write within in.
     The topic of the blog sprang from an article written by a woman who considers females less–not as smart, not as capable. It’s demeaning. In the body of the essay rebutting it, Hilzoy does exactly the same thing to an entire genre of fiction, to the people who write it, read it, edit and publish it. Porn. Not real books. Less than ‘real’ novels.
     I’m a smart, capable woman who writes Romance novels. I know a lot of other smart, capable women who write Romance novels, edit them, publish them, read them.
     We dislike when we’re dismissed as unimaginative pornographers who don’t write real books.

179. Why would we define the romance genre today by the books that were published within the genre 20 years ago?
     As for the romance=porn argument, that would not have been true 20 years ago. There has been an increasing number of sexually charged books released in the past five years, but there has almost always been explicit sex in some romance books within the past 20 years.
     The goal of sex in a romance book, from this reader’s standpoint, is to further the plot or theme of the story. For example, in the Shaken and Stirred book, the type of sex the couple engages in is emblematic of the stage/health of their relationship. Initially the sex is devoid of emotional involvement. It is purely sexual. At one point, the feelings of one of the characters starts to change and evolve to the point where the meaningless sexual encounters are more painful than pleasureful. Later in the book, when the couple has reconciled, the sex is loving and serves as symbolic of the reunion.
     There are hundreds of romance books where the sex seems there for more titillation purposes than anything and while it can titillate, I think that if the sex merely titillates then I think it is more of a failure of the author to underscore an emotional point in the book than for the sex scenes to be viewed as porn.

180. I’m now going to have to retract this. I didn’t say it because I disagreed with Gary, I said it because I agreed with Gary, but a) didn’t see that it was all that important, and b) didn’t see that he was making any headway with hilzoy.
     Clearly it is important, to some, and I find myself re-interested. Not that me being interested should be…um, interesting.

181. Nora said: “The topic of the blog sprang from an article written by a woman who considers females less–not as smart, not as capable. It’s demeaning. In the body of the essay rebutting it, Hilzoy does exactly the same thing to an entire genre of fiction, to the people who write it, read it, edit and publish it. Porn. Not real books. Less than ‘real’ novels.”
     Yep, that’s it in a nutshell.
     Allen said (summarizing): “Women are dumb. Why don’t they just accept it and be happy?”
     Hilzoy said (summarizing): “Hey, I object! Not all women are dumb. Just the ones who have anything to do with romance novels. But I like books that are actual books, not beaches, cats or sunsets.”
     I stand awed by such powers of elucidation. Perhaps we could get a follow-up explanation wherein we learn that books contain words.

182. Well, given that this thread is being invaded by the romance readers and writers whom Gary predicted, I’m glad some of us are managing to interest you!

183. Your update is just as insulting and inaccurate. The “if it’s good it can’t be genre” canard has been used for years to put down writers, and it’s still prime balls. What’s next: “happy endings are unrealistic”? Because that’s just as false.
     You need to stop being such a nose-in-the-air elitist and realize that you are the one in the wrong here.

184. “Hilzoy said (summarizing): “Hey, I object! Not all women are dumb. Just the ones who have anything to do with romance novels. But I like books that are actual books, not beaches, cats or sunsets.”
     I stand awed by such powers of elucidation. Perhaps we could get a follow-up explanation wherein we learn that books contain words.”
     I did not say that. I didn’t say anything about what I, personally, like, since I thought it was beside the point. I didn’t say anything about dumb, for the perfectly good reason that I don’t think that either genre romance novels or people who read them are dumb. I very much regret the way I expressed my basic point, but I think that this particular interpretation of what I said says a lot more about the author’s assumptions than about what I actually said.

185. I also never said “if it’s good, it can’t be genre.” Saying “the way you assess genre romances is different from the way you assess works of straight fiction” does not mean, or imply, that good work can’t be genre fiction.

186. Also, welcome to the romance writers. I know some of you and very much enjoy your work, whatever other impression I might have managed to give.

187. Well, thank you for letting us climb all over your blog.
     It’s probably obvious that, when it comes to the whole romance/porn thing, I’m more in tune with Gary’s comments than yours, but I loved your blog post in general.
     And this whole discussion is fascinating.

188. But, Hilzoy, you said that romance novels are not novels and specifically not novels because they have constraints and the constraints you cite aren’t supported by examples, particularly when you are talking about genre wide constraints.
     And you make specific exception to other genre fiction such as SFF although you admit to not being well read in the SFF genre. I guess I would ask how well read you are in the romance genre.
     And in defending your claim that romances are “not books” you stated “A sunset is not a book. My cats are not books. I am not a book. Whoopee.”
     A sunset, cat, or a person not being a book, as I am sure a student of philosophy would know, is a non sequitur. It’s a logical fallacy which fails on its face because by saying that romance does not equal “book”, but cats aren’t books and cats are good therefore I don’t believe romances are bad has absolutely no connection. It’s the height of ridiculousness.

189. Not in so many words, but you sure did imply it with your “genre romance” comment.
     I still don’t see why you went so far out of your way to insult an entire literary genre you apparently know very little about, especially considering the genre’s irrelevancy to your actual argument.

190. Talk about digression from the topic.
     Can we just move on and agree romance, SF, and Tom Clancy novels are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining?

191. First off, there seems to be some confusion here between catagory and non-catagory romance. Category romance, typically published by Harlequin, has several distinct lines with specific requirements; non-categories are much looser. Both are types of novels. Both require characters, plots, conflicts, observations, etc…
     Secondly, there seems to be some confusion between pictures and novels. A Hustler centerfold is a picture. A bodice ripper cover is a picture. The relationship between a centerfold picture and a three hundred pages of character and plot building is just as tenuous as the comparison between the cover (designed by an art department who often hasn’t read the book) and the novel it covers.
     Hilzoy seems to be making the mistake of saying, “This is what I read romance novels for, so this is what they are for.” But surely, even if she is reading only to turn her mind off/receive titilation, she can acknowledge that genre romance is processed differently than pictures (or Sudoku). Sunsets are not novels, and they aren’t processed as such. Novels should be processed as novels, no matter the genre.
     Fanny Hill, which has been brought up in this thread, is most definately a pornographic novel (stroke book, left handed novel, insert your favorite euphimism here). It can be read for the “good bits” only. But it’s also a book that I had to read for two of my Lit courses in college, in the same syllubi as Milton and Richardson and Defoe and Laclos and Goethe (but not Austen). The fact that it is a novel means it can be read for how it portrays the society it writes about, hidden themes between the sexual acts, etc… You get out of reading what you put in, just like anything else. As for reading genre differently than non-genre, this seems like a weird blanket to lay down. The words on the page should convey what the novel is attempting to achieve, regardless of label, and they’re what need to be grappled with. Non-genre is just a label, like romance. Austen and Joyce are both marketed as literature, but you can’t read them the same way, as they are accomplishing very different things.
     The really puzzling thing for me here is Hilzoy’s use of the word “book” rather than “novel.” Book is a physical descriptor–pages between covers. Like a coffee table book, or non-fiction, or a book of verse. None of these should be compared to War & Peace, but they are certainly books.

192. The constraints you cited re Romance novels, as an example of why you don’t consider them real books, works of imagination, are not accurate.
     Every genre has basic reader expectations. In Romance those are: A central love story, emotional commitment, sexual tension, conflict, a happy or uplifting ending. That’s it. On that framework anything can be added–any element from any other area of fiction, any imagined storyline, character type, conflict–internal, external or both, any setting, and time period.
     Every genre would have a form of reader expectations–it’s why readers choose the read within that genre.
     Do you consider all genre fiction less than ‘straight’ fiction due to the reader expectations which help define the particular genre, and therefore assess all genre fiction differently? Would all genre fiction be considered not real books?
     If not, and it’s only Romance, why is that?

193. they [authors of romance] are defining pornography as ‘dirty’
     Nora specifically said “I’ve got no problem with porn. I have a problem having my ‘not real books’ equated with it.”
     Authors of romance novels tend to reject labels such as “porn” or “bodice ripper” because those terms don’t accurately describe what they’re writing.
     Someone was defining porn as ‘stuff men use to get off’, which is a bit of a rejection.
     It was Hilzoy who said that “romance novels […] are […] the female equivalent of porn,” which might be taken to imply that women don’t use porn. However, as Imogen said, “Women use porn. Men use porn. And for the same reasons.”
     I also don’t want to sound pedantic, but my point about bringing up Lady Chatterley was that it was felt to be pornography and the publishers, Penguin, were tried for obscenity in 1960.
     Yes, and there’s no denying that some people found Lawrence’s work obscene, just as there’s no denying that some people find (some) romances sexually arousing. But Lawrence and his publishers rejected the term “obscene” just as modern romance authors would reject the term “porn” because those words are not accurate descriptions of the works in question.

194. Can we just move on and agree romance, SF, and Tom Clancy novels are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining?
     Well, no, Mis En Place, I don’t agree to your comparison. Within romance genre there are fast food joints and fine dining. There is the amuse buche and the gustatory feast. But the entire genre is not cheap, bad for you, and might kill you in the end if you partake too much of it.

195. FWIW, this, as a result of this and this.
     I swear I never heard of the site, or anyone connected to it, until I got an e-mail out of the blue this morning.
     But it’s utterly unsurprising.
     And, whoops, I am also unsurprised to see we have new visitors (welcome! feel free to come back and chat in other threads!), and more thoughts on this thread.
     I’ll skip commenting on most, but: “Can we just move on and agree romance, SF, and Tom Clancy novels are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining?”
     Setting aside discussion of Clancy as an individual author, but as to the genres: no. Absolutely not. I’ll leave further specific discussion of romances to those more knowledgeable than I, but I see no reason to assume that, and I will absolutely defend hundreds of specific sf books as “fine dining,” and dozens of sf/fantasy writers as gourmet chefs of the highest quality.

196. “…Can we just move on and agree romance, SF, and Tom Clancy novels are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining?…”
     Well, no! Because clearly the romance readers and writers here, plus various other commenters, *don’t* agree.
     You’re more than welcome to compare an author, or a book, to McDonalds if you think that’s a valid comparison. But to do it with two whole genres just makes it sound as if you’ve never read any book in those genres.

197. Mis En Place: I don’t know whether or not we will move on — that has more to do with where commenters want to go — but I actually don’t agree that genre romance (and I specifically did not include and other genre fiction) are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining.
     Also, as a general note: I do not strike portions of what I’ve written unless I seem to myself to have made a factual error. I elucidate instead.
     That said, here’s what happened: I read the stupid Outlook piece that prompted the original post. I got to the part about women’s alleged literary preferences, and thought: look, this is the wrong comparison. I think that romance novels generally are where many women go for what I guess you might call romantic, and sometimes erotic, daydreaming. (I mean no aspersion on daydreaming here: I do mean that it has something to do with wish fulfillment, but I do not mean something like: imagining a whole world in which your romantic wishes are fulfilled cannot be a very serious imaginative enterprise that gives rise to some very good writing.)
     The point was not to say: romance novels are not good, or anything. — I’m trying to think of an analogy here. One, of course, would be to imagine that Charlotte Allen had dissed men on the grounds that many men’s taste in photography runs to porn, whereas women allegedly prefer, oh, Ansel Adams. That would precisely get across what made me think: wrong comparison! whatever the right comparison is, and whatever it reveals, this is not it! — but it retains the loaded associations of porn that are what I most regret about the way I originally wrote this.
     What’s hard about finding the right comparison is that I need not just some set of purposes that different groups of people tend to meet differently, but also that their different ways of meeting it should involve different media; and in which that fact affects what products (or whatever) in certain media they enjoy. Then I could say: comparing group A’s use of this medium to everyone else’s, and then using what group A tends to do for a given set of purposes to what everyone else does for other reasons entirely, is the wrong way to look at it. You should compare what members of group A does for these purposes to what other people do for analogous purposes.
     One possible analogy, though this doesn’t entirely get around the apparent aspersions on quality, would be: comparing the public performances attended by mid-level managers to those attended by the public as a whole, and concluding that they had some odd preference for PowerPoint presentations that wasn’t shared by, say, auto mechanics, who (let’s suppose) prefer things like sermons or public lectures. If someone tried to use that comparison to say that auto mechanics are, I don’t know, more spiritual than mid-level managers, I’d want to say: no, you have to sort out things people go to for the sake of professional advancement, or because they are meetings you have to go to for your job, from the rest.
     I don’t know if that’s any better — I suspect it just makes things worse — but it was the sort of thing I thought when I read what Allen said.
     I completely admit to not knowing nearly enough about romance novels, though not to either looking down on people who read them or not knowing anything about them. My knowledge is that of a casual consumer. It is almost certainly out of date, since I haven’t read much romance for a couple of years. (I blame blogging, which has made me a lot more likely to think of reading nonfiction when I want to procrastinate.)

198. This discussion seems to lose sight of the fact that hilzoy is responding to the claims made by Charlotte Allen:

     What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.” Here’s the book’s autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back. Then, when that doesn’t pan out, she goes to Italy and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India to meditate (that’s the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian beach, finds fulfillment by – get this – picking up a Latin lover!
     This is the kind of literature that countless women soak up like biscotti in a latte cup: food, clothes, sex, “relationships” and gummy, feel-good “spirituality.” This female taste for first-person romantic nuttiness, spiced with a soupçon of soft-core porn, has made for centuries of bestsellers – including Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel “Pamela,” in which a handsome young lord tries to seduce a virtuous serving maid for hundreds of pages and then proposes, as well as Erica Jong’s 1973 “Fear of Flying.”

     The assumption that this kind of literature (however you want to label it) is inferior to the literature favoured by men is Charlotte Allen’s assumption, not hilzoy’s. hilzoy’s point, if I understand her correctly, is that even if we grant Allen’s contention that “first-person romantic nuttiness, spiced with a soupçon of soft-core porn” is not particularly worthwhile, that still doesn’t establish what Allen is seeking to establish: female inferiority to males. To establish that you would presumably have to argue that male taste is somehow better. Allen fails to make that case.

199. Kevin: I actually didn’t mean to grant that assumption, just to say: compare it to the right things. Though, just to say it again: I completely understand how it came off that way, and regret the way I wrote it.
     Had I wanted to go on with the comparison, I would have said: to judge by what I know of patterns of consumption, more women than men seem to prefer media that involve things like plot, character, dramatic tension, and the like, over things like centerfolds, that do not. Personally, I’m not particularly into judging people on the basis of what they require for romantic/erotic fantasy, but if I were forced at gunpoint to make such a judgment, I’d say: sheesh, one reason I’m not into these judgments is that I tend to think that what does this particular thing for us is not wholly up to us, but surely genre romance involves a lot more complexity, and lends itself more to real quality, than the relevant genre of pictures does.
     Not that a genre’s “lending itself” to quality means that things in it will achieve that quality, or that things in genres that don’t cannot achieve it. Genre is not destiny. Some are just more promising than others.

200. ~The point was not to say: romance novels are not good, or anything.~
     I guess if that wasn’t the point, I wish you hadn’t said they weren’t real books, and better compared to porn. It’s hard to get by that to whatever point you were making.

201. I know. I just wish I hadn’t said it. I did, though. *kicks self.*

202. Hi, I came over from SBTB for the romance discussion, but it’s been debated so well that I have nothing to add on that.
     However, reading the article bits (I don’t want to give the WaPo site a hit for it), I thought “I can do better than this woman”. I can make an even broader and more sweeping generalization that demeans men; can I get prominent space in the WaPo to flesh this article out?
     “Men are dumber than women because they play videogames for entertainment where women read.
     Men are the primary consumers of videogames, and everyone knows that videogames are stupid/worthless/mind-numbing/violence-inducing. Likewise, everyone knows that books are better than videogames. Women are more likely to read a book than play a videogame, therefore they are smarter and more worthwhile. Men should be kept away from jobs requiring thought and judgement, since obviously all they are good for is hand-eye coordination.”
     ***
     Just in case anyone misses my sarcasm, I know that all of the statements made are either wrong or unproveable. But I sure could write an interesting article using this premise; do you think it would get published?

203. hilzoy: I actually didn’t mean to grant that assumption
     Of course I know you didn’t grant Allen that assumption in the sense of accepting it as true. What I took you to be saying was that even if, for the sake of argument, we accept Allen’s disparaging assessment of Samuel Richardson et al., she still hasn’t made her case.
     Enough already. I’m off to the pub. That’s how us superior males use our leisure time, not reading mushy romantic fiction. 😉

204. Hilzoy, what’s your definition of a “book”?
     You seem to be saying that what separates romance from other things that are books is that people read romance to daydream and fantasize and escape from the world.
     What’s unspoken is the opposition: what is it that people do with actual books that they do not do not do with romance novels?
     Because that’s where I’m getting stuck in your analysis. I think people are actually disagreeing with you about what women use romance novels for.
     What I hear you saying is this:
     Charlotte Allen is wrong because she compares woman’s love of “romance novels” with man’s love of “great literature.” But “romance novels” do not fill the niche for women that “great literature” fills for men. It instead occupies the female equivalent of the male niches of “porn” and “Sudoku” and so her comparison is inapt.
     And I think that what people are trying to say is: No, you have also gotten the wrong niche. “Romance novels” fit in the “book” niche. They do not fit in the “porn” niche. Nor do they fit in the “Sudoku” niche. They firmly occupy the “book” niche–and I suspect that whatever it is you think “books” do that “romance novels” do not, there are a plethora of examples of “romance novels” that will do for the reader precisely whatever it is you think that “books” do.
     And when you say that people read romance to escape and fantasize, the unspoken subtext is that romances do not challenge readers to think, and that readers do not pick up romances to be challenged. I understand you’re not placing a value judgment on that–but value judgment or no, it’s no more true of romances than it is true of any other section of the bookstore.

205. “….but if a writer’s output was of works that were rejected a (one might say ‘the’) major romance company and were published by a company that built itself on publishing manuscripts that the mainstay publisher had rejected, doesn’t that speak to the nature of the ‘genre’?”
     Since that describes about 99.9% of all writers of all genres, I’m at a loss as to what it might “speak.”
     It’s pretty rare for an unpublished fiction writer to find their first manuscript bought on the first submission, LJ.
     What’s common is for an unpublished writer to write a bunch of novels, and submit them all around, have them rejected, and finally get one accepted somewhere. And then go through the difficult “second novel blues,” and either start building a career with another couple of books whose sales build on the previous, or failing, and either more or less quitting, or trying to start over, possibly under a new name.
     Nor is it in the least unusual for a writer to move to another publisher, or have several publishers.
     Since this is true of all the genre fiction publishing I’m familiar with, and this is the way it’s always been done since the dawn of modern mass market publishing, I have to wonder what the heck you’re talking about.
     (Not to mention that suggesting that selling to leading romance publishers other than Harlequin is some kind of insult is… not well founded in reality as we know it. Harlequin isn’t exactly the first, best, choice of how to get your book best published, maximize your advances and career, or get good reviews. As anyone with the faintest clue about romance publishing knows. [Cripes, you’re talking to a former Avon Books (junior) editor.])
     “Also, when talking about the genre, if it is more susceptible to plagiarism, doesn’t that suggest that the genre (but not individual works that may distinguish themselves) has some of the characteristics that Hilzoy described?”
     You have a cite to indicate that romance novels are “more susceptible to plagiarism” than… what? Cite?
     “That you have taken the genre and made it into something worthwhile is great, but it shouldn’t be thought of as pulling all the rest of the genre up to the same level that you have attained.”
     “Your stuff is good, not like the rest of the genre!”
     Thanks, LJ, for yet another version of the Eternal Slur.
     You probably don’t know, but this is such a cliche since the 1930s, and so infamous to people in the sf field, and other genres, that people have been making fun of it since before I was born. My old pal Dave Langford has been running a series of “As Others See Us” quotes from mainstream interviews and articles, in Ansible as “As Others See Us” since he took over the newszine from Peter Roberts when it was Checkpoint, back in the late Seventies.
     Samples. Just please click this link ten times or so.
     And, if you don’t get it, the point is how stupid and ignorant these claims are.
     And they’re stupid when said about any genre.
     So, in no genre or medium of fiction or creativity is the majority of work above average: quite an indictment, that.

206. Slarti: “Clearly it is important, to some, and I find myself re-interested.”
     For the record, I actually wrote a brief response to you yesterday, pointing out that you were apparently incapable of imagining millions of people who clearly think it’s important, and specifically saying something like “apparently you are unable to imagine the existence of these folks.”
     But since you’ve several times in the past made the same comment to me about an issue that other sets of zillions of people people find highly important, but you do not, I figured I have zero credibility with you, and it was pointless, and best left to the inevitable showing up of romance folks after Hilzoy’s comments are inevitably run-across if left standing.
     You have a consistent habit of announcing that because something is unimportant to you, obviously I’m a [derogatory implication] for going on about it, no matter that, in fact, whole industries and worldwide communities do find that thing quite important, which is why I go on about it, no matter that you’re clueless about the topic, and the people it matters to.
     For the record, and the next time this happens.
     And I like and respect you anyway. Not that you likely care.

207. Hilzoy: “Saying ‘the way you assess genre romances is different from the way you assess works of straight fiction’ does not mean, or imply, that good work can’t be genre fiction.”
     But romance novels can’t be “good work,” let alone a “good novel,” when it isn’t even a “novel” and isn’t even a “book,” which is the claim you are standing by.
     Your assertion doesn’t seem to make any sense, Hilzoy. How can a novel that isn’t even a “novel” be a good novel? How can something that can’t be compared to novels be a good novel?
     How does your claim make any sense? There are good non-novel, non-book romance novels? How can a non-novel be a good novel?
     Incidentally, if you believe romance non-novels can be good novels, could you name three, please? Thanks.
     I’ve made this point essentially several times now, but I missed any response.
     I refer you again to my my 08:03 PM comment of March 2nd.
     “…but I actually don’t agree that genre romance (and I specifically did not include and other genre fiction) are to literature as McDonalds is to fine dining.”
     Taking “and” to mean “any,” you’re still asserting that romance genre fiction is uniquely distinguishable from other genre fiction. Is that by the publishing imprint? Or by what means, please?
     This is a serious question: could you please define “romance genre fiction” as you use the term, and offer some explanation as to how, absent the cover package/publishing information, explain how you’d issue rulings, were you a professional mass-market editor, on which manuscripts count as “books” and which count as “non-books”?
     Folks with professional mass-market novel editing/publishing experience are used to making quick decisions on that which is “bad” and that which is worth considering publishing, and we can also usually conclude whether something is a story, or just ideas and fragments, but as a rule, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that a novel ceases to become a novel depending upon which imprint we decide to publish it under.
     “Also, as a general note: I do not strike portions of what I’ve written unless I seem to myself to have made a factual error. I elucidate instead.”
     Naturally, you should act as you see fit, and hold to whichever policies work best for you. I don’t expect anyone would want to try to bully you into doing otherwise.
     However, I do contend that the statement “Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used.” is factually in error. If you can find a source that verifies your statement as a fact, I shall withdraw my claim.
     “I got to the part about women’s alleged literary preferences, and thought: look, this is the wrong comparison. I think that romance novels generally are where many women go for what I guess you might call romantic, and sometimes erotic, daydreaming.”
     You’re confusing the reasons some people read romance novels with what romance novels are. The views of some fans of a work don’t define the work, and they certainly don’t define the genre.
     This is just insupportable reasoning, which I think you’ll see if you think it through.
     “What’s hard about finding the right comparison…” is that you’re continuing to insist that the entire genre of “romance novels,” and every single work published as one, or that you define as one, isn’t comparable to that of “real” novels, and that they uniformly serve a different function for all their readers.
     This claim is wrong. That’s your problem: that you’ve yet to understand that. You can struggle for the next decade trying to find a way to explain it, and you’ll never find one that holds up, because the claim isn’t defensible.
     You’re generalizing what could be fairly said of how some romance readers read some romance novels sometimes to a universal and absolute ukase that that’s the only possible way all people read all romance novels.
     That’s where you go wrong, and until you you get this point, I can’t see that you’ll get out of the contradictions you’ve placed yourself between: there’s just not going to be an analogy that justifies that absolute generalization.
     Which was my sole point from the start.

208. Well, as to the Charlotte Allen piece, like her earlier defense of Larry Summers and the “women are innately less capable of science and math” ridiculousness, this one underwhelmed me with its complete lack of anything resembling analysis (i.e. conclusory statements emerging from unsubstantiated premises do not arguments make).
     As to the discussion of Romance novels, which, it seems to me, is very appropriate given Allen’s demonstration of how women do and don’t characterize other women, I add my thanks to Gary Farber for his articulate explanations.
     As an academic myself (Ph.D. literature, J.D.), I am caught between amusement and frustration at the judgments cast at Romance — amused because before I read them I shared the disdain, and frustrated because now that I am a genre reader I understand the ignorance behind such disdain.
     As to Hilzoy’s argument that genre Romance is of a different character than other literatures, I just can’t agree, especially if the measure is why women (who make up only part of the readership, BTW) read Romance. Besides the inevitable inaccuracies in any such singular thesis (i.e. women read for some kind of escape or “wish fulfillment”), there is the fact of Romance’s varied and rich ancestry, from Classical Comedy, High Romance, the comedy of manners, the novels of sentiment and sensibility and gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, Victorian morality tracts, and captivity narratives, just to name a few.
     As a genre, Romance is concerned with the concept of the family as the basic unit of society, and especially with marriage as socially transformative (i.e. based on love rather than class or convenience). It is strongly concerned with romantic love not merely as fantasy but as a cultural ideal within societies that conceive the family as the ideal social microcosm. It is very interested in gender roles and class differences and, depending on the subgenre, with race and cultural conflicts. Genre Romance, like SF and some of its literary ancestors (esp. Comedy) is very much a genre of social critique, even when it appears to reinforce the status quo, because its central problem is the viability of the social contract of marriage (or at least romantic love, which has begun to replace marriage as the end point in many Romance novels). Romance novels run the gamut from socially reactionary to transformatively subversive.
     Yes, there are crappy Romance novels, and for many of us who read them, the covers and titles continue to be an embarrassment. It is not fair to say, however, the category Romance (i.e. Harlequin) is uniformly low brow, as some of the most subversive Romances I’ve read have been category novels, nor is it accurate to say that all Romance is alike.
     If genre Romance as a whole is of a different *type* than other fiction, it is only distinguishable in the same way that SF is of a different *type* of novel than Fantasy or Gothic fiction. As Gary pointed out, ALL writing conforms to certain formalistic boundaries, and in the case of genre fiction, those boundaries are definitive *as they relate to form.* I’m not, for example, one of those people who believes that literary fiction is merely one more genre, but at the same time I would never argue that genre Romance is of a different *essential character* than literary fiction, any more than I would argue that horror is of a different *essential character* than lit fic. That they may have different *characteristics* is different, IMO, and a more reasonable basis of distinction.
     But to marginalize genre Romance by asserting is more comparable to Hustler or sudoku than to other types of fiction just doesn’t hold for me as a logical argument, especially given that genre Romance’s pedigree can be traced more directly through other forms of literature than, I dare say, Hustler. Just try Judy Cuevas’s (aka Judith Ivory) Black Silk or Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart or Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold and then try to forward that argument.

209. Gary – I appreciate all that you are saying, but Harlequins are not the dustbin of romances either. Many huge name authors got their start there: Tami Hoag, Tess Gerritsen, Nora Roberts, Jennifer Crusie, Suzanne Brockmann, Linda Howard, and the list goes on.
     Further, while there are heavy constraints in the Harlequin categories, there are actually wonderful top chef sort of books being written and published through those category lines.

210. What Gary said.
     (Thanks, Gary)

211. For the record, I actually wrote a brief response to you yesterday, pointing out that you were apparently incapable of imagining millions of people who clearly think it’s important, and specifically saying something like “apparently you are unable to imagine the existence of these folks.”

     Sorry, Gary; evidently I missed it. Still not seeing it, actually, but point made, and taken.

     But since you’ve several times in the past made the same comment to me about an issue that other sets of zillions of people people find highly important, but you do not

     Wow, I thought I actually did that very rarely. I’ll try to choke back the impulse, from now on. Mostly, as I said in my last comment, I said anything at all because it appeared to me as if you were making the same arguments repeatedly, without getting agreement from hilzoy. If that’s me misreading you, my apologies.

     I figured I have zero credibility with you

     That’s not true. You do annoy me on a fairly regular basis, but that’s got nothing whatever to do with what credibility I give you. FWIW, anyway. Furthermore, I have absolutely no authority or influence, here, beyond what the average commenter possesses, so my opinions relative to what you’re writing should have the same or less weight as anyone else’s.

     And I like and respect you anyway. Not that you likely care.

     That actually means quite a lot to me, Gary. Thank you. I can’t say that I always like you, but I do have a high regard for the sheer volume of reading you’ve gone through, as well as the care you take to research your opinions.

212. Hilzoy: “I know. I just wish I hadn’t said it. I did, though. *kicks self.*”
     Yeah, but you’re still standing by it. Your post, and thus you, are still making the claim.
     If you actually want to disclaim it, or withdraw it, that would be different.
     If you don’t want to stand by it, actually withdrawing the claim would seem to be more productive than saying “I’m kicking myself” while standing by the claim.
     But I may not understand the logic of preferring to continue to make the asssertion instead. Strike the “may.” But I constantly don’t understand how other people work.
     Jane: “Gary – I appreciate all that you are saying, but Harlequins are not the dustbin of romances either.”
     Point taken; I didn’t mean to sneer at Harlequin, or their readers or writers. I just get a little tired of people using the imprint as a synonym of All Romance Novels, and of confusing category romance with leaders, super-leaders, and other types of mass-market genre paperback publishing. (Not that people outside the biz even know how a monthly line works, or what difference it makes where a book is placed on the schedule, or perhaps even why one publishing house would have a bunch of imprints, and what difference that makes.)
     Thanks for the kind words, Nora and all.
     It’s highly unusual for me to disagree with Hilzoy, although it happens from time to time on matters such as this where our background and perspectives differ strongly.
     As a rule, though, we see most things eye-to-eye. Hilzoy is quite brilliant and articulate, and is usually right, but we’re all human.
     (I’ve heard rumors from time to time that I have been known to make an error or poorly put claim, but surely that couldn’t be true!)
     Anyway, if you look at other posts at this group blog, whether past, or in future, you can find some fine stuff by Hilzoy and others, as well as a terrific bunch of commenters (with a few jerks wandering by, of course, and some of us regulars have our … quirks). Just saying in case you’d like to stick around, or come back, for other discussions and threads.
     One of my regrets, incidentally, about my time at Avon is that I never could get anyone at the weekly editorial meeting of the 14 of us to agree on finding a manuscript with a romance featuring a chiropracter, so as to explain why, in the cover illo, the Manly Chiropracter With Rippling Chest Revealed was apparently examining the back of a woman very closely with his skilled, professional, fingers, as she leaned over backwards.
     Surely a chiropracter romanance setting was perfect?
     I just don’t understand why this notion wasn’t snapped up.
     I guess this explains why I worked on sf, mysteries, action fiction, nonfiction, science books, politics, woo-woo, movie tie-ins, a Vietnam War line, our Latin American line, and pretty much everything but romance, cook books, sports books, and business books.
     😉

213. Gary: “But romance novels can’t be “good work,” let alone a “good novel,” when it isn’t even a “novel” and isn’t even a “book,” which is the claim you are standing by.”
     I do not take you to have missed the part of my update in which I said that I should not have said used “book” when I meant to say “non-genre fiction”. or to believe that if something is not a work of non-genre fiction, it cannot be “good work” of any sort. Given that fact, though, I am at a loss as to how to interpret what you say here.
     “However, I do contend that the statement “Second, romance novels* (update below the fold) are not ‘books’, as that word is normally used.” is factually in error.”
     — I took it to be obvious that I was not claiming that they were not, literally, books. I mean, they are bound and printed works produced by publishing houses and sold in bookstores, etc. Thus, I thought that this more or less had to fall in some category like “stupid thing to say”, “point I should have expressed differently”, etc., as opposed to “misstatement of fact”, and this that whatever problem anyone has with what I said, thinking I was factually in error wasn’t an option. Sorry if this was unclear.
     “you’re still asserting that romance genre fiction is uniquely distinguishable from other genre fiction.”
     No, I’m just responding to people who think I am talking about works that are plainly not genre romance, on the grounds that (apparently) what I say about genre romance must be what I think about genre fiction generally.

214. ~I took it to be obvious that I was not claiming that they were not, literally, books.~
     I get that. But what you’re saying here is that they are less than books outside the Romance genre. These are BOOKS, but these? Not so much.
     I would like to know the answer to what I asked earlier re reader expectations in genre fiction, and why you feel by having them, as do all other genres, Romance is less.
     Which is the only way I can interpret this:
     ~No, I’m just responding to people who think I am talking about works that are plainly not genre romance, on the grounds that (apparently) what I say about genre romance must be what I think about genre fiction generally.~
     So why is my work, to be personal, less than a work by a Mystery writer, or SF, or Horror?

215. When I read Hilzoy’s first attempt to deal with romance novels, I thought “whoooo boy, someone is going to blast her for that one.” And Gary rose to the occasion and was — wrongly I believe — accused of hijacking the thread.
     I spent some time writing the following (long) comment, but in the meantime the thread had wound down, so I didn’t post it. The thread has come alive again with participation by some leading romance authors, academics and people who are active in the “romance fiction community.” So I’m posting this mini-essay because it tries to define some of the terms that the thread has been struggling with and addresses some of the “category” problems Hilzoy is wrestling with in her follow-up comments.
     Given how superb Hilzoy normally is with using categories and comparisons (philosopher that she is), and given how sensitive she is to elitist and sexist assumptions, I was surprised by her remarks. Like “bemused”, I’ll put it down to Hilzoy having an extremely rare bad day. But I find the conversation quite interesting — and not a hijack, since it’s dealing with the sorts of cultural assumptions that Charlotte Allen so lazily exploited — so I’ll add my two cents worth.
     First off, I think I understand the point Hilzoy was trying to make — if Allen is going to take female reading preferences (or any other female-dominated activity) as evidence of women being less intelligent or more frivolous or whatever than men, Allen should examine analogous activities men choose to engage in for similar purposes. And if Allen did that, she’d find her arguments wouldn’t hold up very well.
     But I find Hilzoy’s own choice of analogy and her subsequent clarification bothersome, because I don’t think she’d make the same sort of argument with respect to other art forms — such as movies — or other genres of fiction. I think some confusion in both Hilzoy’s remarks and the comment thread comes from mixing two different notions of “genre” — an artistic category and a marketing classification system. So before I respond to Hilzoy, I’ll start by discussing how we might think about some terms in the broader context of popular culture — including genre more generally.
     ——————
     I. What is “genre” anyway?
     The “romance genre” debates are in some sense merely a subset of the “genre wars” that rage over how we should approach popular fiction of all sorts. But the “romance genre” presents special issues because it is produced and consumed primarily by women.
     Genre is used in one sense as a system to classify and compare artistic products — fiction, film — on the basis of shared elements or characteristics. In fiction and film, every work can be classified according to genre, and some works can be classified as belonging to more than one genre. We create similar classifications for other art forms — poetry, non-fiction, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture, music — though we don’t usually apply the “genre” label to those classification systems. As several commenters have noted, an artist never truly works on a blank slate (or blank page) — all artistic works, even the most innovative, conform to one degree or another to genre conventions or “rules” or the artist is reacting to, playing off of, or subverting genre conventions or rules.
     In the sense of “genre” as an artistic category, therefore, the fact that the “romance genre” has a particular set of “rules” governing form and content doesn’t make “romance” something other than one of many “genres” of fiction or film. It’s the “rules” for each genre that distinguish one genre from another in a classification sense, but there is no hierarchy of genres — that is, the “rules” of each genre don’t make one genre inherently superior qualitatively to other genres. So novels are novels, just as movies are movies, regardless of the genre(s) each belongs to.
     As Gary explained, when we use “genre” in this sense, what constitutes a work in the “romance genre” is pretty simple — a novel or film which focuses on the development of a romantic relationship between two people (him/her, her/her, him/him, or throw in an alien or two). As Gary also pointed out, there are many works that fall in other genres, such as mysteries or thrillers or westerns or science fiction or fantasy or even literary fiction, which should also be classified as “romance.”
     The second use of “genre” (and sub-genre) is as a marketing category. An identifiable audience has emerged for books or movies or TV shows that share certain elements (and don’t have other elements). Artists and those who finance the production and distribution of works — publishing houses, movie or television studios — make and market products with that particular audience in mind. From the standpoint of the audience — potential readers, movie-goers, TV audience, DVD consumers — the fact that the product is marketed as being in a certain genre or sub-genre creates an implicit “contract” between the artist and the audience that certain genre conventions, or audience expectations, will be met. The conventions can be played with or subverted, but only in ways that will nonetheless satisfy the audience, will allow the audience to stay with the artist even as the artist twists or challenges or breaks genre conventions.
     It’s not just publishers like Harlequin that produce and market according to genre conventions. Movie studios go to great lengths — including choosing alternative endings after test screenings — to try to ensure that audience expectations of genre conventions will be satisfied in the sense that the movie doesn’t lose the audience, even if it challenges audience expectations. And TV production has been dominated by the “pilots” system.
     The more purely “commercial” a product, the more closely it will adhere to the “rules” of the genre of the sort that Hilzoy described, where the publisher or the studio has a fairly rigorous checklist of elements they think the audience enjoys and other elements they think the audience (and in movies/TV the censor) is likely to reject. From a potential consumer’s point of view, genre marketing can be a big plus — the distributor is telling me that “if you loved X and Y, you’re probably going to enjoy Z”.
     But as Hilzoy pointed out, the fact that a work is “commercial” — is produced and marketed with a target audience in mind — doesn’t tell us anything about the “quality” of the work. Most will be inferior knock-offs of some sort — “vampires” are popular, so suddenly there are legions of me-too books with paranormal elements, or a superhero movie was a blockbuster, so a queue of superhero movies is set for summer release. However, a few works will stand out, either for originality or for strength of execution, or both. And an even smaller subset will eventually become “classics.”
     There are lots of positives about producing with a particular readership or audience in mind, especially because it gives the author or film-maker/show-producer a sense of communication with the potential consumers of the work. There are also some major downsides, aside from the risk of producing something that is purely formulaic and hopelessly derivative.
     The biggest problem is “genre ghettoes” — works which could appeal to multiple audiences or have cross-over appeal get pigeon-holed in a narrow genre and don’t find the wider audiences they could reach — the sorts of concerns that Gary described in some detail. The entire field of speculative fiction — if we group science fiction, fantasy, alternative history, etc together — suffers from a “genre ghetto”, especially in not receiving the sort of attention from newspaper and magazine reviews and short-lists for literary prizes that many works in the field would otherwise merit.
     “Genre ghettoes” create problems for consumers as well. For example, if a reader was first introduced to “science fiction” by reading a “hard” SF work and didn’t like it, the reader may now believe he or she won’t like anything in the genre, even though “hard” SF is only part of what constitutes SF. Or some movie-goers may stay away from anything labelled “fantasy” because they think it must have dragons or wizards or elves.
     The “genre ghetto” problem extends beyond the SF boundaries to all other genres. Mysteries and thrillers and horror and romance and historical fiction, though representing market segments often far larger than those for “literary fiction”, also don’t receive much attention from “serious” reviewers. And when a novel by a “serious” author conforms to a popular genre, it’s typically going to be reviewed as something other than the genre — either the genre is ignored or the work is deemed to be uniquely differentiated from what is implicitly assumed to be the inherently poor quality of the popular genre. This seems to be the sort of distinction Hilzoy tried to make between Jane Austen, who wrote “novels”, and other romance novelists, who write something else.
     The flip side of a consumer thinking “I liked X and Y so I’ll probably like Z” is “I didn’t like X so I won’t like Y and Z”, which may or may not be accurate. The most frustrating downside of “genre ghettoes” (for artists or distributors or fans who would like to see a novelist’s work more widely read) is a consumer’s assumption that “since the people who like X are people I don’t identify with (geeks, young women, old farts), I know I won’t like X or Y or Z.” That’s a problem that the “romance genre” suffers from more than any other — it’s read mostly by women, so it comes with a built-in bias against it for most men and some women. And the Fabio covers just reinforce that bias.
     But we all self-identify with consumer groups — that’s what so much of advertising (and book covers) is all about — so the pros and cons of genres as marketing categories are facts of life that artists and distributors will try, on the one hand, to exploit and, on the other, to circumvent.
     ——————–
     II. Hilzoy’s Remarks
     So with that background, let’s return to Hilzoy’s comments. Here’s how I parse her comments.
     1. “Romance genre fiction” (using genre as a marketing classification, not an artistic category) is different in kind, not just degree, from “real” novels.
     2. “Real” novels are composed of (a) the “Jane Austen” exception — some subset of romance genre fiction (using genre as an artistic category) that the marketplace views as “literature” (and therefore in a “classic” marketing category, not a “romance” marketing category) plus (b) some undefined subset of novels in all other genres (used both as a marketing and an artistic category), and (c) all “literary fiction” (treating “literary fiction” as both an artistic and marketing category).
     3. This difference in kind is based on form/content rules unique to the “romance genre” (marketing category) and the distinctive motivations of consumers of “romance genre” products (marketing category).
     I am a big consumer of fiction (though little of the contemporary “literary fiction” category), and this set of distinctions doesn’t work for my reading experiences. I have two problems. The first is that I see Hilzoy’s distinction within the “romance genre” (as artristic category) — between “real” novels and something else — as having at its heart the old, familiar debate about elite versus popular culture. The second is the distinction implicit in Hilzoy’s description of the “romance genre” that, as compared with other genres (used in the marketing sense), “romance” is something other than a genre of fiction — which, since I doubt that anyone would make the same claim with respect to other popular genres, seems to reflect some sexist assumptions.
     A. Distinguishing between “real” novels and un-novels within the “romance genre”
     I’ll start with the distinction Hilzoy tries to make between “real” novels in the romance genre like “Pride and Prejudice” and fiction which is something else, let’s call them un-novels, which are being produced today and which share many elements (form and content) with “Pride and Prejudice”. Hilzoy seems to be saying that the un-novels are “romance” in the marketing sense, whereas Jane Austen is a “classic novel” in the marketing sense — though it should be noted that the explosion of Austen-related movies and TV adaptations has also placed Austen in the “romance genre” in the marketing sense in recent years. However, Gary is pointing out that, in terms of artistic categories and what may be of interest to readers, both romance un-novels and romance “real” novels, as defined by Hilzoy, are novels in the “romance genre”. Furthermore, Gary stresses that there are many novels that are in other genres (marketing and artistic categories) that also fall in the “romance genre” (artistic categories) and could be marketed as “romance”.
     First, let me reiterate what others have noted about the “rules” of the romance genre (using genre as a marketing category). Within the “compulsory figures” that Hilzoy describes, there’s an enormous variety. Though the romance genre taken as a whole, like all popular fiction, has become more sexually explicit (and more violent), still today, some romance un-novels have no more than a chaste kiss, and others are highly erotic from page one. Some are comedies of manners and others are rousing adventures. Some are light and sweet and others are dark and brooding. Some have “alpha” heroes and clueless heroines, and others have feisty competent heroines or nurturing heroes.
     i. Elite vs popular and “art” vs “commerce”
     Hilzoy is focusing on what I believe to be a marketing distinction, which is an artificial distinction in “kind”. It merely reiterates the past two centuries of empassioned but mostly unproductive cultural debates over high-brow/low-brow, elite vs popular culture, “art for art’s sake” vs commercial production, “serious” works vs “light” or “escapist” pablum, etc. The debate shows up in all categories of “art” — especially literature (think recently graphic novels), music, architecture, and more recently, movies and television.
     The “Jane Austen” distinction is like arguing that Mozart created “real” music but that Miles Davis or the Beatles created something else, some sort of un-music. Or arguing that seminal romantic comedies like “It Happened One Night” or “Bringing Up Baby” are “films” because they’ve become classics but the romantic comedies of recent years pushed out by the studios, like “When Harry Met Sally”, are just escapist entertainment, just “movies” we consume along with our popcorn. In marketing terms, Mozart and the Beatles are certainly in different categories of music (or genres if you will) — classical and rock-and-roll or pop — but they’re both “music”. Same with “classic” romantic comedies and contemporary romantic comedies — different in marketing terms, but not in artistic kind.
     Gary, having spent much of his adult life in the science fiction/fantasy or speculative fiction universe is especially sensitive to that debate since a lot of great fiction of the past half century has been relegated to the “not serious literary works” category by the sort of mentality which defines works in popular genres as inherently less worthy or valuable than works aimed at a more “intellectual” market. It’s not that anyone is claiming that all SF/F merits attention as great literature, but rather that the maintenance of genre walls gives power over defining what is good literature to a small elite. Which, dare I say it, is a bit “elitist”.
     The attempt to distinguish between “real” novels and “something else” seems to be based, in part, on the argument there is a difference between “art” and “commercial production”. I think such a distinction is both artificial and fluid. I speak from my own reading experience. Most of what I read would either be labelled “genre” fiction — SF/F, historical fiction, historical romance, “who-dun-its”, police procedurals — or 19th century literature, with a few 20th century authors mixed in. A substantial chunk of the 19th c authors I adore were very “commercial” — Dickens, Trollope, Scott, Dumas, Balzac — and produced for a particular market in mind. These authors had to produce within certain commercial conventions in order to fulfill their audience’s expectations — the implicit “contract” between author and reader — just as most of today’s “genre” authors do. The commercial dimension doesn’t make their works any less “real” as novels.
     ii. “Serious” vs “light” reading
     Hilzoy also seemed to be suggesting that “real” fiction should be distinguished from “something else” on the basis of why readers choose to consume a particular work — that “real” novels aren’t read for relaxation, or that a piece of fiction read for relaxation or that can stimulate sexual interest isn’t a “real” novel. Again, I find the distinction between “serious” and “entertainment” fiction doesn’t really lead to a difference in kind between “real” novels and un-novels.
     Personally, I don’t invest time in reading anything that I don’t find “entertaining” or that isn’t at least to some degree “escapist” in the sense of taking me to worlds I’ve never seen or people I’ve never met. (That’s the basis of my bias against much “literary fiction” — it often doesn’t take me to places or people I’m interested in.) That “romance genre” novels are relaxing and entertaining doesn’t make the genre something other than a genre of fiction. I read both Proust and Georgette Heyer to “escape” or to be entertained, though Proust demands more of my complete attention because of the complexity of his prose — but it’s also possible to read both authors closely as commenting on romantic relationships within European class and gender constraints. If I’ve had a demanding day and want to relax, I’m more likely to pick up PG Wodehouse than Tolstoy, but certainly both produced great writing, and both explored romantic relationships. I read neither as a self-improvement exercise or to put hair on my chest.
     iii. Qualitative comparisons within and across genres
     So I don’t think that trying to identify “real” novels on the basis of distinguishing between “art” vs “commerce” or “serious” vs “entertaining” holds up very well. Rather than try to distinguish between “real” novels and “un-novels”, I think we should view fiction within various genres (including “literary fiction” as a genre in itself) as on a continuum of quality dimensions the way we do movies.
     The fact that all movies can be classified by genre, both in terms of art production and of target audience, doesn’t mean that we can’t make distinctions among movies on the basis of different dimensions of quality. But nor does it mean that we can automatically assign “quality superiority” to certain genres over other genres. The majority of movies are and have been highly derivative of movies which came before. Though all movies are marketed to meet audience genre expectations — which is one of the main purposes of trailers — a few distinguish themselves by originality and/or perfection of execution. But all of them are movies. They are all made with the hope they will reach a large number of paying viewers, either in theatres or through other distribution forms. They all hope to entertain. The fact that an X-rated movie will produce sexual arousal that some viewers (men and women) prefer to a Hustler centerfold doesn’t make an X-rated movie an un-movie. Just because “Pirates of the Caribbean 1” was hugely successful and didn’t try to do anything other than provide escapist entertainment didn’t make PotC an un-movie. Though the majority of movies, even the most popular, can be classified as “trashy” or “mediocre,” some are more serious than others, some challenge the audience more than others, some are executed better than others, some (a very few) will become classics watched for generations to come.
     The same can be said about “romance genre” fiction (whether we are using a marketing or artistic classification) — all are novels, whether written in 1815 or 2008. The majority are “trashy” (though even the “trashy” have to be reasonably well executed or the author or publisher won’t sell in the future), a few are very good novels, and even fewer are great.
     B. Distinguishing between “romance” and other genres
     The second problem I have with Hilzoy’s clarification is that her description of what constitutes a romance genre “un-novel” could be applied to any popular genre. It’s true that she explicitly states she is not commenting on other genres because of her lack of familiarity with them, but I think it’s hard to keep other genres out of the discussion. Let’s set aside SF/F — which as a “genre” has its own self-definition challenges and internal genre wars — and just look at other forms of popular fiction with which I’m sure all of us, including Hilzoy, are familiar even if we aren’t regular readers in those genres. It seems to me that, regardless of what you personally believe of the quality of their work, we’d never say Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “real” novels, but Elmore Leonard or PD James write un-novels; or that Edgar Allen Poe wrote “real” novels but Stephen King or Anne Rice write un-novels. But it’s all too common to find the sort of suggestion Hilzoy makes — that Jane Austen wrote “real” novels but contemporary “romance genre” authors write “something else”.
     “Who-dun-its” and spy thrillers and westerns are every bit as much defined by the “rules” of the particular genre, and authors who write genre novels are well aware of the genre’s conventions. The reader has certain expectations — such as, in a “who-dun-it” that we will learn the answer, that the author doesn’t cheat, and that by the end, some sort of order, which had been upset by the murder, will be on the way to being in place in one fashion or another. The author can bend or break the “rules”, but if the author loses the reader, doesn’t meet the reader’s basic expectations for the genre, the book is going to be a wall-banger.
     Much of popular fiction — and movies and TV shows — is formulaic and fairly non-demanding — sort of “macaroni and cheese” comfort food. Or what dutchmarbel called “braincandy.” But the familiarity element doesn’t convert popular novels into un-novels any more than a big boxoffice grossing action-adventure movie is somehow an un-movie. Some of that “braincandy” is very tasty even if it’s not terribly nutritious, and some of that “braincandy” has some vitamins and minerals lurking within.
     I also don’t think “reasons for consumption” is a helpful way to distinguish between romance and other genres. The novels in other popular genres are every bit as much consumed — by women and men — for relaxation and stimulation as romance un-novels. The principal distinguishing characteristic for “romance”, as anyone marketing “romance” fiction will tell you, is that women taken as a group enjoy relationship stories more than men taken as a group, and anyone looking for relationship stories knows s/he can find them in the “romance section” — so women are the primary consumers of what is marketed as “romance”.
     I’m not going to get into the “porn” debate because it’s a hopelessly murky category and we’ll never agree on the basic definitions necessary for a discussion. What we should note, however, is that the range of sexually explicit or arousing prose in the “romance genre” is enormous — from absolutely chaste “inspirational” romance (yes, the fundies have entered the romance field as a sub-genre) to erotica. Still, we can make the same observation for the huge range of romantic/sexual elements that can be found in many of today’s thrillers or detective stories or literary fiction. And (outside of a few school districts and libraries in certain US states), we don’t lump those other “bound volumes of words” (otherwise known as books) into the “porn” category.
     There are two main differences in terms purely of sexual content between “romance” and other genres (including literary fiction). First, because a “romance” focuses on a relationship, any sexually explicit content will stand out, or be more visible in terms of plot and characterization. And second, if you’re hunting for sexually explicit writing, it’s easier to locate it in the “romance section” of your bookstore or Amazon than it is in other popular genre sections or in literary fiction — not that there’s necessarily lots more of it in “romance,” but it is definitely easier to find.
     So to that extent, I’d agree with Hilzoy that, for some women, some romance novels are analogous to Hustler centerfolds for men. But for much of “romance” fiction, the sexual element is about on a par with going to the movies to oggle the eye-candy, whether it was Clark Gable looking up the stairs at Vivien Leigh (my beating heart, fan, fan), or choosing a movie today because it stars Johnny Depp or Daniel Craig or Brad Pitt or George Clooney.
     To conclude: A work of fiction of any genre (including “literary fiction”) that is consumed primarily as “entertainment” is no less a “book” or a “real” novel than a work of fiction that is “serious” or has merited the appelation “classic” literature. That “romance genre” novels (in the marketing sense of genre) conform to certain genre conventions and are most often read for “entertainment” doesn’t make them un-books or un-novels any more than any other genre of fiction. The primary, and overwhelming, distinction between “romance genre” fiction and other genres that are consumed as “entertainment” is simply that women are the major consumers of “romance.” That distinction shouldn’t make us view “romance genre” fiction as different in kind from any other form of fiction, which also must satisfy the conventions (reader expectations) specific to its genre.

216. “Sorry, Gary; evidently I missed it.”
     Sorry, I meant to write “I wrote a comment yesterday […] but then deleted it.”
     Apologies that I was unclear in letting that fall out.
     As it happens, I write a fair amount of stuff into these little comment boxes that I end up deleting in whole or part, just about every day that I comment here.
     “I’ll try to choke back the impulse, from now on.”
     Thanks. It’s not a big thing; I like and respect you, and you have a few habits in writing that annoy me at times. That’s all.
     That’s true of a number of folks, though their number is vastly smaller than the people who annoy me whom I don’t like and respect.
     I have had few friends in my life with no annoying characteristics. Probably none, but I’m leaving open the possibility.
     So having a few annoying qualities isn’t a big deal for me.
     And, obviously, I have more than a few annoying qualities myself. I wouldn’t dream of arguing otherwise. I annoy myself at times, and not even only just retrospectively.
     So while I’ll, of course, still defend myself if I feel the need, and if I believe that the specific complaint about my having been annoying in some remark was a misreading, or unjustified, I would never deny that I amn’t genuinely in the wrong or at fault, at times.
     Thus I’m dependent on other people whom I like and wish to be friends with finding my own annoying characteristics forgiveable, if not necessarily for an hour here or there, and so I’d never regard being mildly annoyed with someone I regard as a friend as a big deal.
     This is, after all, why we call them “annoyances,” and not “lifetime deal-breaking things we can’t put up with.”
     Those are different.
     “…so my opinions relative to what you’re writing should have the same or less weight as anyone else’s….”
     Me, I weigh the importance of people’s opinions according to my own feelings for the person, how much respect I do or do not have for them, how much respect for their opinion in a given area of knowledge I have, and a bunch of other variables about that individual, and the importance of the opinion, and the context in which it’s uttered, and the like, myself.
     And I like you, Slarti, aside from when you annoy me, and I respect you, although not necessarily every opinion on every topic, particularly when it’s in an area you don’t know much about, and most particularly when I can’t figure out what you’re referring to.
     But there isn’t anyone whose opinion on everything I always have the highest regard for.
     Now, back to the caber-tossing.

217. Nora: I don’t think your work is less than a work by a mystery, SF, horror, etc. author. I never meant to say that romance was less valuable than other genre fiction, or for that matter than non-genre fiction. All I wanted to do in the relevant bits of what I wrote was to say: look, I don’t know much about SF, and I am absolutely not trying to talk about it for that reason, so please don’t take what I say about genre romance to apply to genre fiction generally. I said that because, at some point, people were talking as though whatever I said about genre romance had to be something I thought was equally applicable to horror, SF, etc., and I didn’t think that at all. I mean, genres differ. But I didn’t mean anything about which are “lesser”.
     For Gary, about standing by what I say: I tend to think that when I make a factual statement and it’s wrong, I might actually mislead someone, and should correct it; whereas when I make a stupid judgment, I should clarify instead, leaving my original stupidity evident to the world.

218. the business has (as I understand it) a lot of ties to organized crime, something which pornography shares with the drug trade
     It **had** ties to organized crime. These days anyone with a camera and a house can make porn — there’s no way that organized crime can limit porn. (That might be as true in other countries, such as Russia, Belarus, etc)
     ===============
     … and the Story of O are certainly pornography, but they aren’t visual.
     The Story of O was made into a fairly seamy movie (unlike the movie versions of Fanny Hill), so, in at least one form, it was visual.
     ===================
     Every genre has basic reader expectations. In Romance those are: A central love story, emotional commitment, sexual tension, conflict, a happy or uplifting ending.
     What would you say are the reader expectaions of a “genre” mystery (I would think that a crime and a “Playfair” solution would be among them), or SF or Fantasy?

219. “Given that fact, though, I am at a loss as to how to interpret what you say here.”
     Reading your post, and what you say: it’s unchanged, and you stand by it.
     I’m just responding to your post. To what you say in it.
     As I said, if you weren’t standing by it, that would be different. Feel free to amend your post to withdraw those assertions if you don’t stand by them.
     Meanwhile, you’re claiming what you’re claiming what you’re claiming.
     With added explanation.
     So: are there romance novels that are good novels? Can you name three? Are romance novels “novels,” or not? Are romance novels something that can’t be compared to “novels,” or not?
     “I took it to be obvious that I was not claiming that they were not, literally, books.”
     So what are you claiming?
     If I hand you ten manuscripts, and said “show me which ones are novels and which aren’t novels,” what will be the criteria that you, Hilzoy, professional book publishing editor, use to determine which ones might not be “novels” because they are “romance non-novels”?
     You’re making a claim that shold be falsifiable in reality. So: what are the criteria we can use to falsify your claim?
     If it’s defensible, falsifiable claim, we can test it. So: criteria?
     “No, I’m just responding to people who think I am talking about works that are plainly not genre romance, on the grounds that (apparently) what I say about genre romance must be what I think about genre fiction generally.”
     Okay. Please, if you can, define how you know what is and isn’t “genre romance,” the category that is uniquely unlike all other fiction, and which isn’t comparable to fiction in any way, but only to puzzle books and other not-fiction, please, when handed ten manuscripts.
     Thanks muchly.
     As a secondary question, do you have any explanation why professional fiction editors and publishers haven’t, that I’ve noticed, noticed that romance novels aren’t novels, and are uniquely unlike other genres in that novels aren’t novels?
     Why do you think it is that there don’t seem to be many genre fiction writers across the board making this claim, or holding to that notion as conventional wisdom?
     Do they just not recognize the reality due to their prejudices? Or how do you explain the non-prevalence of this view among professional genre editors and writers? Does most everyone just have it wrong?

220. The second use of “genre” (and sub-genre) is as a marketing category. An identifiable audience has emerged for books or movies or TV shows that share certain elements (and don’t have other elements).
     I would add that I’ve heard that bookstores put pressure on publishers to assign books to one specific genre (is a book about a cop invetivating werewolves “mystery” or “SF/F”?). This way, the bookstores can shove the book into the pigeonhole you describe below.

221. Wow.
     Who knew?
     I may need to pay a visit to my local Borders.
     Thanks –

222. To conclude: A work of fiction of any genre (including “literary fiction”) that is consumed primarily as “entertainment” is no less a “book” or a “real” novel than a work of fiction that is “serious” or has merited the appelation “classic” literature.
     Especially since some of what we now deem “classic” was itself the popular and/or commercial fiction of its day (and, to be intentionally obtuse about the “book” concept, some of it was serialized, only being assembled into book form later).
     Ultimately, I think Hilzoy is trying to argue that her point was to critique Allen’s analogy *as an analogy* and that therefore she was saying nothing inherently derogatory about genre Romance. But as you and Gary
     have pointed out, Hilzoy’s own argument against Allen on that point was built on certain assumptions and implications that DO involve judgments about Romance fiction. Whether they conform around the speculative “why women read them” or around their formalistic characteristics, those judgments cannot be negated by focusing on the original analogy critique, IMO, because they are not merely elements of logic but are rather value judgments in and of themselves.

223. Me: What nadezhda had the patience to say.
     (Among other things I bring to this discussion is having gone through about eight million iterations of this topic, and its arguments, and innumerable essays on on it, over the past forty years, so I can’t begin to have the patience to adequately start recapitulating more than a few bits and pieces: that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

224. ~Nora: I don’t think your work is less than a work by a mystery, SF, horror, etc. I never meant to say that romance was less valuable than other genre fiction, or for that matter than non-genre fiction. All I wanted to do in the relevant bits of what I wrote was to say: look, I don’t know much about SF, and I am absolutely not trying to talk about it for that reason, so please don’t take what I say about genre romance to apply to genre fiction generally.~
     But then how *aren’t* you saying it’s less than other genre or non-genre, when the statements you’ve made are–Romance is constricted–which all genre is, and your list of constrictions was inaccurate. That you perceive real novels as works of freedom and imagination. When you perceive then as something women read in order to daydream, and that you must assess genre Romance (not genre fiction) differently from other books–I can only conclude that you’re stating the genre, and the work inside it, is less than other areas of fiction.

225. I found Nadezhda’s comments really helpful. For what it’s worth, I took the difference between genre romance and non-genre fiction to be (in her terms, which clarify a lot) the existence of a particular implicit contract between writer and reader, one that involves certain particular rules. I also excluded Jane Austen largely because I think that whatever she was doing, no such implicit contract could have been a part of it — as I think I said earlier, when you basically invent a whole genre (or: write something that is subsequently taken to be one of the models for a whole genre), you aren’t doing the same sort of thing as someone who works within that genre once it’s already established.
     If I had been writing a whole post about romance, instead of just tossing off a stupid remark, I would probably have thought about what things about me I knew, but other people might not, and so I should (a) make explicit, or at least (b) think about so that I didn’t just stumble into an ongoing war that I hadn’t noticed because it’s a war I don’t care about. I didn’t, and that was dumb. So, for the record:
     I have no interest in the split between popular culture and highbrow culture, or in dissing popular culture. I do think that the expectations people have of certain sorts of books, and the reasons they read them, differ, and in some cases differ according to genre, and that this is good to bear in mind when making the kinds of claims Charlotte Allen made.
     I like at least some of the genres in genre fiction. I never really got into SF, at least recent SF. Horror is almost entirely lost on me. The genres I like best are mystery and romance. The (contemporary) romance novelist I like best, and would cite in response to whoever asked about that above, is Nora Roberts.
     I generally find the reasons people read different things fascinating. I don’t tend to think that allegedly highbrow reasons are better than allegedly lowbrow reasons, etc., etc. I do think that asking why people tend to gravitate towards one rather than another type of fiction illuminates both the people and the fiction in question.
     But I didn’t do that, and that was a huge mistake.

226. I would say that basic reader expectations of genre mystery are: A mystery, puzzle or crime, the perpetrator and the protagonist, motive, clues to the resolution of the mystery, puzzle or crime, and the resolution of same.
     But while I write suspense, and some police procedurals, I’m not, essentially, a Mystery writer. One who is might know better than I.

227. Both run-of-the-mill porn and run-of-the-mill romance fiction are often consumed out of unmet needs for intimacy and real attachment.
     That’s why the market for each is large.
     Ah, look at all the lonely people …
     Posted by: joel hanes
     Nonsense. I don’t know anything about porn, but I read and write romance novels, and it’s silly to say that it’s about “unmet needs”. Romance novels are mostly read by women. Many, many women. Do you think most or even many womrn are deeply lonely, have many unmet intimacy needs? Huh? The same people who have families and children and lovers and friends and jobs– who teach and design things and work in offices and schools and hospitals?
     You really, really don’t know what you’re talking about. Readers in general, and I’d submit (knowing many more romance readers than you do) romance readers in particular, have lots of intimacy and attachment. What they seek in their reading is often an escape from the responsibilities attendant upon intimacy and attachment, just a little space at the end of a very busy day where they can follow their own interests. Nothing pathological– no more than tennis or whatever the heck you do to relax. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with their lives.
     The problem is, I suspect, that this is a woman-dominated profession (though Gary Farber, I’d adopt you if I could :), and a woman-dominated genre, and whenever you have thoughtless and uninformed denigration like this, you have to wonder if sexism is involved. Why would what interests a lot of women indicate “the need for intimacy and attachment”? I mean, really. If you’re going to choose one gender with attachment and intimacy problems, why women? Think it through.
     All reading is a form of escape from the everyday world (along with much else, of course). To assume that means that “the everyday world” of readers is empty or boring or wrong shows a lack of understanding not just of reading, but of life. There’s plenty of time for all sorts of fulfilling activities, and none of us should have to answer to joel or anyone else for our choices. But since I’m doing that– I know literally hundreds of romance readers. They are pretty much like everyone else, except they read a lot, and they’re predominantly female. And they don’t let anyone tell them they’re wrong or miserable or whatever to read what they choose to read.

228. “…whereas when I make a stupid judgment, I should clarify instead, leaving my original stupidity evident to the world.”
     We’re talking about fine points of blog etiquette, which of course reasonable people can have reasonable different preferences as regards, but I’m in no way suggesting that you disappear your previous words. (That would be something I feel is Not A Good Technique, myself, but others will differ, and their views are no less valid than mine.)
     I was suggesting that if you wish people to take you as withdrawing or not standing by your words, that you do so, and by that I mean marking them in such a way that it is clear they are withdrawn. Such as with a strikeover, or by bracketting them with “I withraw this,” or however you find it most aesthetically pleasing, nor not displeasing, to so indicate that which you are withdrawing.
     Disappearing what you wrote in favor of a rewrite is not what I was suggesting.
     Merely that if you don’t want to make a claim you’ve made, that you withdraw it. Or not.
     But if you’re not withdrawing it, then you’re standing by it.
     Adding stuff isn’t withdrawing stuff, or not standing by it. That’s all.
     And, obviously, if you wish to stand by what you said for all eternity, you’re free to do so.
     But so long as you stand by it, it’s your stated opinion, so people may disagree.
     “But I didn’t mean anything about which are ‘lesser’.”
     How can a non-novel be an equally valuable and worthwhile novel as any other novel, when it isn’t a novel? I don’t follow.
     How can we compare two novels, if one isn’t admitted to be a novel, and it’s claimed that there are no commong points by which they can be judged?
     This doesn’t seem to make any sense to me: could you please explain how that works? Thanks.
     The point is that, in fact, there’s plenty of commonality between a good novel published as genre romance, and a good novel published otherwise. Publishing choices do not, in fact, change the quality of a piece of writing.
     And real people have to sit there and decide what imprint to buy a novel under. It’s not an abstract theory.
     But I’ve never heard of anyone saying “well, that might be better for our X mystery imprint, rather than our G, H, or I romance lines, but shucks, since we could do okay with it as a leader next March under the H imprint, it’s not a novel after all, and thus we can’t do it as a mystery!”
     This doesn’t describe the real world of publishing. Or genres.
     “…I would add that I’ve heard that bookstores put pressure on publishers to assign books to one specific genre”
     It’s not a matter of bookstores pressuring publishers; it’s a matter of the simple fact that you have to market books so as to best reach the people who would want to buy them.
     This is an awkward business, and the less stereotypical a manuscript is, the more awkward (and less likely to be successfully published and reach its audience) it is apt to be.
     But it’s not anything anyone at any level of the book business with a clue has to be told, let alone “pressured” with.
     But this is why book covers wind up as semiotic signifiying tools: they’re marketing tools, and that’s all, along with whatever artistic/design qualities they hold, of course. And it’s why genres exist.
     But it’s also why genres don’t have anything like clearly defined borders, and can’t.
     And thus why making absolute generalizations about what is and isn’t published in a genre is absurdly impossible.
     It just factually isn’t so.

229. And Hilzoy, Modleski, though interesting, is hardly considered cutting-edge in romance fiction scholarship. She and Janice Radway always seemed to write about romance readers as “the other”, which is intriguing, but if you happen to be “the other,” you spend a lot of time reading their work and saying, “Huh? That doesn’t sound like me.” Radway especially had a lot of (I think unexplored) class issues, and anyway, the major work of both of these writers is pretty outdated just because scholarship moves a lot slower than genre publishing.
     If you want a more updated academic response to romance fiction (and genre fiction in general), check out this blog:
     http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/

230. Right, I know I said I was going to stay out of it, but since Jane Austen’s name has already been thrown into this conversation I thought it only right to let her have her own say, so here’s an excerpt from her own ‘Defense of the Novel’:
     “Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” — Such is the common cant. — “And what are you reading, Miss –?” “Oh! it is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.”
     You can read the whole thing at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeart.html#dfensnovl,
     together with the explanation that in Austen’s day most of the writers of novels were women and most of the reviewers were men, “So in Jane Austen’s day, novels actually had something of the same reputation that mass-market romances do today”.
     The more things change…

231. For what it’s worth, I took the difference between genre romance and non-genre fiction to be (in her terms, which clarify a lot) the existence of a particular implicit contract between writer and reader, one that involves certain particular rules.
     And I think that the point some of us have been trying to make is that we don’t agree with your assumptions about the terms of that contract.
     I think you’d readily admit, given your comments about Allen, that even within that contract there are value judgments being made about both the reader and the book, even though they may not be negative or positive, per se.
     Also, why wouldn’t an implicit contract have existed between Austen’s books and her readers (I assume you mean her contemporaries, not 21st century readers)? P&P would have been quite recognizable within the context of other novels of sentiment and sensibility (via Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, etc.), even as it added new elements that we now associate with Romance. Then there’s Fanny Burney, who, while far less known to current readers, just as properly stands as a foremother of what we now call genre Romance, along with Maria Edgeworth and others.

232. Robin: certainly some implicit contract would have existed between Austen and her readers; just not the one between authors of genre romance and their readers that I was talking about.
     Nora Roberts: I didn’t take genre constraints to be opposed to quality.

233. “…I took the difference between genre romance and non-genre fiction to be (in her terms, which clarify a lot) the existence of a particular implicit contract between writer and reader, one that involves certain particular rules.”
     “Non-genre fiction,” to use your terms, very much tends to have implicit contractural terms, the first of which is most often I Am Not One Of Those Trashy Genre Works; Even If I Have Some Of Their Tropes, I Am Not One Of Them, I Am To Be Judged Differently.
     apollonia: “(though Gary Farber, I’d adopt you if I could :)”
     I’m single and heterosexual, for what it’s worth. 🙂
     (And charming and loveable and loving under my crusty, prickly, exterior!)
     I’d add to the comments about the “mystery” genre is that it’s as full of subgenres, and the blurring between them, as all the other genres: we’ve got cozies, hard-boiled, procedurals, locked-box/room puzzles, romantic mysteries, science fiction mysteries, and so on and so forth.
     And, of course, the whole “genre” of slipstream points out the absurdity of trying to maintain genre boundaries, or issue Absolute General Rules for them.
     There just isn’t a discrete set of works that are “romance genre” and another discrete set of works that are “other genre fiction” and a final discrete set of works that are “non-genre fiction.”
     This isn’t to say that genres don’t exist as a broad and blunt tool, because they do. It’s to say that they don’t have discrete borders and that they are written and read in many different ways, both within and across genres.
     There’s no possible way to identify all the books that would absolutely belong in one category, but absolutely not another category, and thus there can’t possibly be a discrete set of “genre romance fiction” that adheres to a set of rules wholly separate from that of other fiction, and which have no qualities in common, and must be judged by separate criteria.
     The idea that works of fiction can be absolutely identified as belonging wholly to one genre, but not another, or absolutely identifiable as “genre” versus “non-genre,” absent the silly criteria of what kind of cover they have, or what line they were published in, may well be a conceptualization that lives in some people’s heads, but it isn’t real, it doesn’t describe reality, it doesn’t describe what the people who professionally work in or are knowledgeable as a matter of expertise in genre fictions view as reality, and it’s, I’m afraid, a nonsensical claim that would best be reconsidered.

234. What would you say are the reader expectaions of a “genre” mystery (I would think that a crime and a “Playfair” solution would be among them), or SF or Fantasy?
     The Dutch SF/F/Horror usenetgroup I’ve been a participant in for more than a decade has extensive tagwars. Immense discussions about wether ‘American Gods’ (now freely available via Harper Collins’ website) is fantasy or horror, or wether Star Wars is SF or Fantasy. I use Librarything and thus must tag, but take the easy way out; I just tag double, or triple if necessary.
     But usually SF has our current world as a starting point and than goes “what if” and extrapolates from there. Unless the “what if” is magical/mythical, that falls under fantasy.

235. @Gary: I know you’ve been through infinite iterations of these discussions, so I’m rather flattered that you accepted my attempt to summarize some of the terminology and issues in the genre wars.
     @hilzoy: Glad you found my categories useful. I was pretty sure you didn’t realize when you opened the “romance genre” discussion that you’d walked into a red-hot war zone. And I was also pretty sure that you were trying not to create a distinction based on popular vs elite culture.
     However, as Gary notes with respect to your use of “non-genre fiction” (by which I assume you mean what I call “literary fiction”), it’s also become a marketing, if not an artistic, genre. I agree with Gary’s remark, which is not all that tongue-in-cheek:

     “Non-genre fiction,” to use your terms, very much tends to have implicit contractural terms, the first of which is most often I Am Not One Of Those Trashy Genre Works; Even If I Have Some Of Their Tropes, I Am Not One Of Them, I Am To Be Judged Differently.

     As you can see from Susanna’s quote of Jane Austen, the whole issue of women’s literary products — as both authors and readers — has a long history of being marginalized and ghettoized. So we have to be a bit careful that we’re not dragging some widely-shared and poorly-examined assumptions into how we talk about “romance” fiction — whether directly or by analogy.
     I doubt you would have thought to make a similar set of distinctions between “chick flicks” and “real” movies, either based on genre conventions or that “chicks” consume them (unlike the reasons for consuming “real” movies) because they’re escapist or sexually interesting.
     You wrote:

     I generally find the reasons people read different things fascinating. I don’t tend to think that allegedly highbrow reasons are better than allegedly lowbrow reasons, etc., etc. I do think that asking why people tend to gravitate towards one rather than another type of fiction illuminates both the people and the fiction in question.

     Indeed. We could say the same for movies and TV as well. And both artists and distributors ask themselves that question all the time, as they try to communicate successfully with their eventual audience, or find that audience.
     @Robin:

     Then there’s Fanny Burney, who, while far less known to current readers, just as properly stands as a foremother of what we now call genre Romance, along with Maria Edgeworth and others.

     You took the words out of my mouth. Jane Austen, like any artist, was building on, reacting to, or in the case of Udolofo, frex, subverting works that came before, both for her own artistic expression and as a way of meeting or challenging her readers’ expectations.
     

236. First, I’m very flattered you enjoy my work.
     Second you say: ~I didn’t take genre constraints to be opposed to quality.~
     If this is true, none of what you said makes sense to me. I’m not being deliberately obtuse here. It just doesn’t. You must assess Romance differently than non-genre. You do noy say you asses GENRE fiction differently than non, just Romance.
     Because–at least in part–due to what you see as constraints. Yet all genre fiction has a genre framework. All genre fiction, not just Romance. And that has been pointed out and illustrated several times. What is it, specifically about genre Romance that causes you to feel this separation?
     And really, how can you say you didn’t mean to say that the genre constraints (I say framework) you see don’t oppose quality in your mind when you’ve termed Romance (not genre again, just genre Romance) as other, as porn?
     I can’t figure it out, and it may be I simply won’t be able to as I see a big contridiction in your statements, and you don’t.

237. Radway especially had a lot of (I think unexplored) class issues
     I’d like to expand on this by quoting from Radway’s 1991 “New Introduction” to her Reading the Romance (1984). In it Radway writes about how “feminist intellectuals” might provide “support to romance readers and authors: “To find a way to provide such support, however, or alternatively to learn from romance writers and readers is not easy, for we lack the space and channels for integrating our practices. Our segregation by class, occupation, and race, once again, works against us” (18).
     Every time I read that I’m staggered. You’d have to assume that Radway was a little green alien from another planet for that comment about being segregated by “class, occupation, and race” to make any sense. Possibly she knew what she meant, but to me it makes as much (or as little) sense as saying that romances are “not ‘books.'”
     and anyway, the major work of both of these writers is pretty outdated just because scholarship moves a lot slower than genre publishing.
     Thanks for mentioning Teach Me Tonight, Apollonia. As you say, we’re working on producing more up-to-date scholarship. A fair bit of more recent work’s already been published (e.g. by Pamela Regis and Juliet Flesch) and Eric’s reviewed much of it. Some of us at TMT have got a couple of volumes of essays we’re working on at the moment. There are also going to be eight panels on the romance genre at the forthcoming ACA/PCA Conference (pdf of the program schedule), including one session on the “Preparation & Development of the Encyclopedia of Romance Fiction”.

238. ~Both run-of-the-mill porn and run-of-the-mill romance fiction are often consumed out of unmet needs for intimacy and real attachment.~
     And run-of-the-mill mystery fiction is consumed out of unmet needs for violence, crime or detective work.
     Run-of-the-mill SF is consumed out of unmet needs to be abducted by aliens.
     Run-of-the-mill horror is consumed out of unmet needs to be or combat monsters.
     Funny, I read all these genres. My intimacy and real attachment needs are met just fine through my husband, my family, my friends.
     I have no desire to commit crime or solve one, fly in a space ship or travel to another dimension, or confront monsters.
     I just like to read stories that appeal to me.

239. >One possible analogy, >
     Hilzoy, here is the problem. You keep making analogies. Why? None of the analogies seem really on-point, and you seem to see that because you keep adding on other analogies. Maybe the problem is analogies?
     Analogies are meant to relate something unfamiliar to something familiar. We’re all readers here; therefore, reading isn’t unfamiliar to us, and doesn’t need to be compared to some exec doing a Powerpoint presentation, or auto mechanics, both of which are actually a bit LESS familiar than a reader sitting down and reading a novel.
     Readers read. What they read is their own choice, and that’s where this all breaks down. There’s really nothing particularly exotic or in need of analogy when a reader chooses, say, a Joy Fielding book from the library and a Nora Roberts book from the bookstore and a Jonathan Franzen from the TBR (to be read) pile.
     The assumption seems to be that romance readers are different from most readers, a thing apart. But they really aren’t. They’re just readers who like to read romance, and most like to read other things too. And they read romance for sensible reasons (they like it), as they read everything else for sensible reasons (because they like it). And romance novels are just novels with a particular focus, and no, that focus isn’t sex particularly, but romance, love, that sort of thing that didn’t used to be considered pathological or, for that matter, the province only of women.
     Some romance novels are bad, some are good, some are great. The limitations of the genre are a lot less than many of you seemed to think– for example, the wildly successful Stephanie Plum stories use a first-person detective-style narration, mystery plots, and a rather gritty urban setting. And the wise-gal heroine? She can’t decide (11 books and counting) between her two boyfriends. Hmm. Doesn’t sound too limited to me– and certainly doesn’t sound like the “limited” stories some of you have described.
     It’s a huge genre, with much variation, and allows for plots which include suspense elements, sf elements, or whatever the author and line go for. Nora there– hi, Nora!– has a whole series set in the gritty future, and the heroine is a foul-mouthed and happily married homicide detective. So?
     So let’s see… it’s like an auto mechanic, see? But this auto mechanic can also fix trucks! And spaceships! And… and that hem of your pants which is coming down! And your drippy sink! And your runny nose too. And… okay. So it’s more than a mechanic. Hmm.
     What’s the need for an analogy when the reality is right here all around you? Analogies can be helpful, but sometimes they actually impede understanding. Why not just ask?

240. It’s not a matter of bookstores pressuring publishers; it’s a matter of the simple fact that you have to market books so as to best reach the people who would want to buy them.
     Well, yes, but a “bricks and mortar” store is going to have to file a book in one particular spot, whereas an electonic store can, if they wish, link a book to multiple genres (and other “descriptors”).
     To give a concrete example, Kit Whitfield’s book Bareback (Benighted in the US) is a mystery set in a world where 90% of the population are werewolves. Barnes and Nobles would have to decide if it was Mystery, SF/F or General Fiction. Amazon could have it linked to all three, plus British Authors, and whatever other links they wanted.
     Or take Laura Hamilton’s work. They always srtruck me as more Romance than Fantasy, but I’ve always seen them in the SF/F section. An on-line store could sell them as both (or neither — the store doesn’t **have** to have genres at all).
     See also marbel’s post about allowing multiple “tags” in “LibraryThing”.
     (Which is to say that smart folks are realizing that the “intertubes” are allowing them to market to whole new groups of people in entirely new ways.)

241. Robin: certainly some implicit contract would have existed between Austen and her readers; just not the one between authors of genre romance and their readers that I was talking about.
     But I’m still not getting how that’s significant in any way that illuminates genre Romance as distinctive in any way beyond having certain formalistic characteristics that allow us to call it “Romance.” I mean, a 19th century reader likely had a very different contract with Dickens than 21st century readers do (and since Dickens wrote serialized fiction, he’s a good example here, I think).
     As Nadezhda pointed out, the contract theory works best as a marketing tool, but even then it has downsides and problematic aspects that come with trying to apply any general rule to diverse human tastes and circumstances. So at some level, I think talking about genre Romance meaningfully precludes a straight contract theory, because not only will individual differences exist among readers (and among artists/books), but also because contextual differences (how do we evaluate the contract a 19th century reader of Austen had with her books from within our 21st century context?) complicate anything beyond the most superficial (and therefore incomplete) system of classification. At which point we move into the realm of distinctions without difference or differences that relate more to the reader than the genre.

242. Nora, in fairness, though, I’d say that there’s some truth to significantly modified versions of those statements.
     For instance, if we changed them up slightly, as in “one of many ways some run-of-the-mill SF can enjoyed is insofar as it fills our recurring need to stretch our minds to imagine what the experience of meeting truly alien beings would be like,” and “one of many ways some run-of-the-mill mystery fiction can enjoyed is insofar as it fills our recurring need to examine the causes and meaning of violent events or crimes, and why people engage in them, or to engage in the exercise of mental detective work as we follow characters we’ve gotten to know and enjoy,” or “one of the ways run-of-the-mill horror fiction can be read is out of a need to examine the nature of our fears, and what terrifies ourselves, and others, and why, and how people deal with their fear, or to read an imaginative tale that uses these themes, or specific fears as metaphors, to tell an intriguing and satisfying story,” or….
     Of course, by even beginning a rewrite such as this, I’m forced to start expanding, even in the most limited and cursory fashion, the descriptive universe of why people read what they do and what they get out of it, as well as what the author may be trying to put into it, beyond the Procrustean box of inherently-not-like-any-other-fiction absoluteness that Hilzoy has inadvertently trapped both her assertion and herself into, for now, but there is a connection to some truth there.
     As in many things in life, insisting on absolute definitions and limitations of fiction genres is a reductionism too far.
     Romance fiction is, of course, not off in a Special Education class of its own.

243. Jane Austen, like any artist, was building on, reacting to, or in the case of Udolofo, frex, subverting works that came before, both for her own artistic expression and as a way of meeting or challenging her readers’ expectations.
     Exactly. And, of course, there are the ways in which readers take a work and give it meaning beyond or even in contradiction to an author’s conscious intent, because of that incredibly complex and dynamic relationship between reader and text. And that, IMO, moves a genre along as much as any conscious choice on the part of an artist or a publisher.

244. Well, yes, but a “bricks and mortar” store is going to have to file a book in one particular spot, whereas an electonic store can, if they wish, link a book to multiple genres (and other “descriptors”).

     No argument, but this seems to be a complete non-sequitur from anything I said. Am I supposed to be disagreeing for some reason, or… what’s this related to? Or were you addressing someone else’s comment?

245. I would have to say LKH work is not Romance, nor marketed as such. I’m sure she would agree.
     There is no central love story (key), no emotional commitment, no happy or uplifting ending. Sex and a female protagonist doesn’t equal Romance.
     Readers or Romance may enjoy her books. Most readers of the genre read widely, and not just within Romance.
     I would also disagree that Evanovich’s Plum books are Romance–and am sure she would classify them otherwise. Again, neither are they marketed as Romance, though many who read Romance enjoy them.
     Mileage may vary, certainly, but the central love story has always been the core of the genre, imo.

246. ~For instance, if we changed them up slightly, as in “one of many ways some run-of-the-mill SF can enjoyed is insofar as it fills our recurring need to stretch our minds to imagine what the experience of meeting truly alien beings would be like,” Etc~
     Then we would have to change the springboard to: one of the many ways some run-of-the-mill Romance can be enjoyed as in fills a need to explore the emotional journey of people falling in love.
     Do that, and no argument.

247. Incidentally, though, Jeff, bookstores often buy more than one copy from a book, and thus are capable of selling them from more than one shelf, which sometimes is done.

248. “Do that, and no argument.”
     That’s where I’m trying to get hilzoy. 🙂
     Of course, in parallel to a couple of her remarks, it’s likely that if I haven’t succeeded by now, I won’t. Repeating myself won’t help.
     But maybe others will succeed where I fail. I’m an optimist about Hilzoy’s sense and intelligence, even though we all have our blindish spots at times.
     And at least it’s not — I strike an heroic and self-admiring pose here — just me alone in a thread, doing my “oh, Gary’s just going on stubbornly about some point only he cares about” thing, again.
     Which role I am so often — okay, occasionally — cast in, oh the pity, oh the inhumanity!
     🙂

249. Nora Roberts: I had decided that I had already dug myself far enough into a hole, and apparently failed to clarify anything, and so I should just forget it and live with whatever reputation for idiocy I have acquired as a result of this post. It happens. 😉 However, as I said, I enjoy your work a lot, so I think I owe you. So here goes:
     My basic reaction, when I read the Allen piece, was to think: look, she’s comparing the wrong things. I wasn’t thinking: how dare she sully my precious literature with these romance novels, etc.; just: it’s the wrong comparison. Why dumb? Because I do think that many people read romance for different reasons, and in different ways, than they read other kinds of fiction. Not necessarily better or worse ways; just different. And that that being the case, Allen’s basic point was wrong in the way it would be wrong if you tried to say something about software engineers’ taste in books on the basis of the fact that they read a lot of manuals, or priests’ on the basis of the fact that they spend a lot of time reading the liturgy. I thought: these are not comparable.
     I thought this because I do, in fact, think that many people read romance novels with a set of quite specific expectations in mind, and that whatever their reasons for doing so, they are probably often different from their reasons for reading stuff that doesn’t come with those expectations. I do not mean to imply that their reasons are better or worse; just that choosing to read a work in which, for instance, you can confidently expect that the hero and heroine will end up together, after a series of (hopefully interesting) complications; that the hero and heroine will both be admirable, though at first neither of them might fully recognize this about the other; and so on, is different from choosing to read a work in which just about anything might happen. There is, at least for me, something comfortable in knowing that I can take all those things for granted in romance, as I can take a different set of things for granted in mysteries, and can focus instead on how well, and with what kind of imagination or flair, a writer is working within those expectations.
     I also think that this has something to do with the nature of female romantic/erotic sensibility. Here I’m a lot less sure of myself, but offhand I would think that it is non-accidental that more women than men tend towards media involving developed characters and plots rather than, say, photographs; or that romance novels involve obstacles and complications and deferments, more than whatever men tend to gravitate towards. Your mileage may vary, of course. But I do think that romance novels in some way “fit” women’s romantic/erotic sensibility in a way that no genre of fiction fits men’s.
     Anyways, the basic thought was: comparing what women read to what men read without taking this into account is silly.
     I then decided to express this thought in what strikes me, in retrospect, as an unimaginably dumb way. Here it may be relevant that while I have some experience in trying to anticipate and defuse misunderstandings in political arguments, I have no such experience when it comes to this topic.
     I then compounded this by cleverly neglecting to say that if I had to compare men and women on the basis of what they use for romantic or erotic fantasy/wish fulfillment, I think women come out way ahead. One reason I didn’t say this was the obvious reply was: well, you’re female, so you would think so. I think this reply is wrong, but the whole topic came up more or less in passing, I didn’t want to get into that. The result of that clever decision was that it ended up sounding as though I thought that romance was, I don’t know, no better than porn or sudoku, whereas I actually don’t think that. (I did say ” Personally, I think they come out fine in either comparison”, but that, quite understandably, got lost.)
     I completely, totally regret the way I said this. I am open to persuasion on the underlying point. But it — the one I was trying to make, not the one I was, completely understandably, taken to have been trying to make — was not about quality. Though, as I said, I completely see why it was read that way, which is the biggest, though not the only, reason I regret having written it that way.

250. Further clarifications and caveats: “men’s romantic/erotic sensibility”, “women’s”, etc: of course, these are huge generalizations, and will not hold across the board, and so on.
     Yes, there are sets of expectations for any kind of fiction. Likewise, when I wrote that genre romance seemed to me more like the compulsory elements part of figure skating and non-genre fiction more like freestyle, the difference isn’t that freestyle has no constraints; and the difference between a villanelle and free verse is not that free verse can be just anything (even a tractor-trailer or a prime number.)

251. “I wasn’t thinking: how dare she sully my precious literature with these romance novels,”
     For one thing, Allen said “chick-lit,” which is a different publishing category.
     My only other comment in response to your perhaps final comment, Hilzoy, is that how you dug this hole doesn’t matter in comparison to the ease with which you can dig yourself out, which is by way of putting some energy into understanding that the distinction you’ve tried to create and draw between “romance fiction” and “all other fiction” isn’t one that can be made to accurately reflect the real world of romance fiction and all other fiction; it’s not, when examined more closely than you have so far examined in your writing, valid. A universal and absolute distinction isn’t there. It can’t be made to be there. It’s an incorrect description of that which is possible, as well as reality.
     If it were possible, you’d be able to answer the query I put forward, as to what criteria you’d use to distinguish Real Novels from Not Real Novels, Romance Non-Novels, if handed ten manuscripts.

252. No argument, but this seems to be a complete non-sequitur from anything I said.
     Incidentally, though, Jeff, bookstores often buy more than one copy from a book, and thus are capable of selling them from more than one shelf, which sometimes is done.
     I’m done. Any comment I make here would more properly belong at TIO. I’m sure you’ll have 15 paragraphs in response to this — have fun.

253. Hilzoy wrote:
     “But I do think that romance novels in some way “fit” women’s romantic/erotic sensibility in a way that no genre of fiction fits men’s.”
     I don’t know that I’d agree with the above. I think (para) military adventure stories and westerns fit this category for men.
     Next come the genres with some more overlap as horror and thriller and then we move into speculative fiction/SF/F and then onto romance/erotic romance on the other side of the reader spectrum.
     There will be readers of both genders for all these genres, but I think a good case can be made for a transition from mostly male to mostly female readers if we were to examine the genres in the order I proposed.
     I really think you are too hung up on the idea of women as ‘reading the other’, the written specifically for them as women. Women buy something like 80% of ALL books, which means all genres, all literature, all non-fiction.
     I am convinced that we could name a romance novel for any plot line, however outrageous or non-romancy looking, you might want to throw out there, except for a non-HEA.

254. “…is different from choosing to read a work in which just about anything might happen.”
     I’m quite sure that a whole lot of things can’t happen in “non-genre fiction” without turning it into genre fiction, save by the definition that if a non-genre writer writes it, it isn’t genre fiction, or that it “has literary value,” so it definitionally isn’t genre material.
     Which is a tautology, and while useful if one chooses to adopt it — it makes things ever so much simpler — it’s something that attempts to justify tend to, well, at least they often have humor value. Especially if it comes with a helping of “I’m not making any value judgments.”
     “Non-genre fiction” typically is limited to “real” settings, most often in contemporary settings.
     If fantastic or speculative things start to happen, or the setting is elsewhen, and not purely historical fiction, then it’s either Literary Fiction Because It’s By A Literary Writer And Therefore Not Genre, Because It’s Good, So Let’s Call It Magic Realism, Or Slipstream, Or Speculative Fiction or Next Week’s Flavor Of The Month, or it’s stuck in genre.
     There aren’t any third choices.
     So either one buys the “Get Out Of Genre Free” card, tautologies a nickel off on Tuesdays, or it turns out that “non-genre fiction” is one of the most highly limited and restrictive categories of fiction, with the exceptions tautologically excluded.
     This approach doesn’t take one far when confronted with ten unlabeled manuscripts.

255. The only thing I’d ask, actually, is for people who actually want to have an opinion to ask people who really do know more- readers and writers of the specified genre, and scholars who study the genre and also the nature of the reading experience.
     I have to say that being a romance reader has made me much more careful not to unthinkingly and automatically diss other people’s leisure activities. If I don’t play videogames, what the heck am I doing assuming that I know what people, or any particular person, gets out of playing videogames? I can of course assume that they’re in it because they’re secretly violent, or because they’re avoiding intimacy, or because their body has been taken over by some weird virus, or… But I simply don’t know, and so I try not to assume I know. And heck, if I’m interested, I can just ask. “So, young man, what’s playing that game feel like to you? What difference is there between a game you think is great and one you don’t much like? What characterizes the games you will buy outright, and which you rent first, and which you won’t even bother with?”
     Same thing with readers and their books. We have but to ask, and I bet we’ll get far more interesting answers than we can make up based on our own preconceptions.

256. I understand better some of what you were trying to get across, but–to me–your platform was very shaky. By assuming why women read Romance–specifically Romance–and separating that from other fiction, even other genres, the platform cracks.
     Certainly people, I think, read romance for the emotion, the commitment, the love story–and some for the sex (if the book contains it). But these expectations don’t remove it from other fiction because there are ALWAYS reader expectations.
     But I just don’t think one can assume people read Romance for wish fulfillment or erotic fantasy. Most read it for what they hope will be a good love story with interesting characters who find each other. It’s no more wish fulfillment than when I pick up a Mystery and I’m looking for a good puzzle with interesting characters, and good will overcome evil. (And the sex if the book contains it.)
     Romance and Erotica are not the same thing. There is within the genre Erotic Romance, but that’s one spoke on the wheel, not the whole of the genre.
     From Gary: ~Therefore the distinction you’ve tried to create and draw between “romance fiction” and “all other fiction” isn’t one that can be made to accurately reflect the real world of romance fiction and all other fiction; Romance/Erotic–not the same thing.~
     This is the core of the problem for me, too. By singling out this one genre, from all the rest, you seemed to be saying this genre was not valid literature, because of what it is, and why you assume it’s read.
     I don’t think you’re an idiot, by any means.
     I seriously suspect Allen is.

257. One, I hope very really truly last(ish!) thought: as previously pointed out in this thread, academics nowadays study the romance field, and romances, just as the MLA discovered science fiction, and fantasy, and the mystery field, starting in the Seventies, and accelerating thereafter.
     This factually refutes the claim that romance novels can’t be approached like other novels. Doesn’t it? Am I missing something?
     Second, as a practical matter, if, um, that large east coast Middle Atlantic State university you teach at has an English Department — and I see they do — I’d suggest chatting with any of the faculty whose field is popular literature — assuming anyone there does — examining the available courses doesn’t suggest anyone actually does, alas: it seems to be entirely classics and expository writing, so perhaps I’m reduced to, instead of suggesting that you chat with some of them about this subject, that you find, whether online, or elsewhere, some of the many English professors and students with a focus on pop culture, and discuss this, and see where it goes. The people so far disagreeing with you don’t seem to be doing it out of misunderstanding what you’re saying — though I could be wrong, of course, and that’s what we’re all doing.

258. Hilzoy, re: your latest post, I don’t think we needed further clarification. You seem to think that your dissenters here had a problem with what you said because they didn’t understand it. I think they did. I certainly did. I think we’re all saying it’s wrong.
     “I do, in fact, think that many people read romance novels with a set of quite specific expectations in mind…”
     Fine. So long as you understand and acknowledge that people read everything with certain expectations in mind, none the least of which is to simply be entertained.
     “I then compounded this by cleverly neglecting to say that if I had to compare men and women on the basis of what they use for romantic or erotic fantasy/wish fulfillment, I think women come out way ahead.”
     Exactly how do you think this would have helped your argument? This statement assumes that the only reasons that women read romances are for “romantic or erotic fantasy/wish fulfillment.” This is where I have a big problem with your argument. There are many, many reasons that people read romances. There are many reasons that people love romances. Some read for titillation, sure. Some read for fantasy. Some read for entertainment. Many of us read them because we are interested in reading a relationship story—a story about the healing power of love, the struggle between two people, the triumph over emotional hurdles, even the exploration of religious faith, or the empowerment over a traumatic childhood and how those relate to love. Can you see how reducing it to “erotic fantasy/wish fulfillment” is insulting?
     It’s not that I think that you compared romance to porn or Soduku and it came up lacking. My problem is that you compared them to romance novels at all.

259. “I don’t know that I’d agree with the above. I think (para) military adventure stories and westerns fit this category for men.”
     They certainly literally have historically done that on literal publishing lists by actual mass market paperback publishing houses.
     I’ve worked on those.
     But that’s just literal category publishing, which — let me be clear — isn’t a metaphor.
     (And there’s an awful lot less of that category as category, bottom-of-the-list publishing, than there used to be, at least last I looked, though the itches get scratched in other ways; mostly it’s either published as non-category, above-the-line, or available in media other than a series of disposable, perhaps numbered, paperbacks. Basically, the writers largely either moved above the line — Elmore Leonard, say — or perished. Last I looked, which is to say I’m a bit out of date at this point.)

260. Nora:

     From Gary: ~Therefore the distinction you’ve tried to create and draw between “romance fiction” and “all other fiction” isn’t one that can be made to accurately reflect the real world of romance fiction and all other fiction; Romance/Erotic–not the same thing.~

     Just to be clear, you seem to have taken a partial quote of mine, and added to it, within the “~” that you seem — my apologies if I’m misunderstanding your intended usage — to be using as quotation marks.
     To be clear, I wrote:

     […] the distinction you’ve tried to create and draw between “romance fiction” and “all other fiction” isn’t one that can be made to accurately reflect the real world of romance fiction and all other fiction; it’s not, when examined more closely than you have so far examined in your writing, valid.

     Although I certainly agree that “Romance/Erotic–not the same thing” as regards fiction, and as regards genre labels (I say “labels,” not “definitions,” because absolutely confining definitions are not possible), I didn’t write that: just to be clear.
     “By singling out this one genre, from all the rest, you seemed to be saying this genre was not valid literature….”
     And while I may continue to misread Hilzoy, she seems to be continuing to say that that which is published as genre romance can’t be examined or approached or read in any of the same ways that “literature” or other genres can.
     If that’s a misapprehension of mine, Hilzoy, please do correct me, because it’s the essence of what I understand myself to still be disagreeing with you about.
     I’m asserting that this, in fact, a factual error.

261. Gary, sorry, my cut and paste skills were off.

262. “Many of us read them because we are interested in reading a relationship story”
     I don’t recall anyone making the actual point that many romance readers read various romance writers — not all romance readers and not all their romance reading, but some — because they admire and enjoy the writing of that writer.
     Which is to say, the primary reason most people often read many of their favorite writers: for the writing. For the language. For the word choices and character choices and plot choices, and for their admiration of the writer’s skills at making those choices.
     This is a primary reason many readers read much fiction, though it’s hardly the only reason.
     There’s no distinction in this motivation in reading a novel published under a romance imprint, and reading any other novel.
     Setting aside the illogical conclusion that the same novel, depending on which imprint it’s published under, has to be read in a way that can’t be compared to the way it would have been read if picked up under another imprint.
     Which happens a lot, by the way. This is why I had the experience of M*ra G*nsburg screaming at me on the phone one day, back in the mid-Nineties, because we’d irrevocably and unforgivably insulted Yevgeny Zamyatin and all his family and heirs and all of Russian literatue, by publishing (her translation of) We with a dreaded “sf” on the spine under the “Avon” imprint instead of under the previously-done “Bard” imprint reserved for “literature.” (Bard was then in the process of being murdered in its sleep by our new editorial director as insufficiently mass market.)
     Good times. Anyway, it turns out that novels don’t actually change the way they can be read depending on what’s on the spine or cover, and that, in reality, such decisions are sometimes made quite arbitrarily. I don’t know how the idea that it’s impossible to read them the same way is compatible with reality.

263. That is part of the problem, of course, that many critics or whatever they are don’t realize that much general fiction is actually coming right out of the genre traditions, and is mostly just marketed to a group outside the genre. That doesn’t make those books BETTER necessarily (though it usually makes them sell better). It’s actually a good deal harder to impress someone who has read a lot of romance or horror or detective than to impress someone for whom the narrative structure and themes are new. I remember a friend who never reads mysteries going into panegyrics about Name of the Rose (which was allowed reading for him because it was “lit fic,” for all it was based rather closely on Sherlock Holmes :). He was so amazed that the detective was so smart and figured the mystery out in the end.
     In fact, those of us in the romance writing community have speculated that the way to “break out” is NOT to move beyond romance tropes, but rather to write a romance novel and really, really push the conventions to the max– the hero was disfigured in heroic action in the war, the heroine has to disguise herself as a boy, the villain is as elegant and saturnine as the devil himself, the setting is lush and inspiring– oh, heck, go ahead, set it in the Scottish Highlands– really push every button since Ivanhoe. Then go out and get a “general” agent, one who has never read much less sold a romance novel, and have that agent submit only fiction editors who have never worked with romance novels. Then it can be a “breakout bestseller.” 🙂
     I remember when Tami Hoag “broke out” into mainstream suspense, some reviewer wrote that it was a magnificent debut. Yeah, if you don’t count her 17 earlier Harlequin romantic suspense novels.

264. While you folks fiddle, Charlotte Allen burns.

265. Incidentally, Charlotte Allen did a chat today.
     A shame this wasn’t mentioned here before it happened.
     It’s full of informative and deep exchanges, such as:

     Washington: Why did you write this piece?
     Charlotte Allen: Totally for fun.

     Or:

     West Lafayette, Ind.: Your idea of fun is to paint a (horribly inaccurate) picture of your sex as stupid?
     Charlotte Allen: How about an accurate picture?

     It’s equally enlightening turtles all the way down.

266. Hilzoy, you wrote: “I do think that many people read romance for different reasons, and in different ways, than they read other kinds of fiction.”
     And I can’t help but think that in that single sentence you’ve just hit upon that core assumption that’s been driving all of this. And I’d suggest the problem is that your assumption isn’t true. People don’t read romance differently. They read it for the story.
     Call it what you like, and shelve it where you will, it’s always been about the story. Modern writers in all genres (even those who, by your definition, aren’t “confined” by genres) aren’t so far removed from all those storytellers throughout time who spread their blankets in the marketplace and gathered people round to hear their tales.
     And if the story is a good one, people stay and throw you coins when you have finished, and perhaps they even come again next week to hear you tell another tale. And if the story’s not so good, they move along and choose another corner next time.
     Whether I’m reading Vonnegut or Dickens or a Harlequin, I’m reading for the story. I’m not reading them in different ways, or with any expectation at all other than to be, however briefly, lost within the world the writer has created.
     So in my opinion, humble though it is, if you examine that belief of yours more closely, you might find it isn’t true.
     But rest assured, I understand you’re not an idiot. And kudos for attacking Allen’s rant.

267. Oh, jeez.

268. *Is tired from watching Hilzoy crawdad*
     All this pontificatin’ has plum worn me out. My y’all do know how to go on…and on…and on. Not sure if it’s actually crawdadin’ or tail chasin’ though.
     Genre fiction is Genre fiction regardless of WHAT genre it is. All genre fiction follows some sort of formula. For that matter, so do movies.
     Romance is not somehow LESS because of it’s content and to say it is is insulting.

269. First time here and I have to say, “WOW.” My thanks to all the commenters for the great discussion I just read. What a treat to read a discussion that doesn’t degenerate into name-calling or obscenities. It was very nice to see that even as he disagreed with Hilzoy, Gary took the time to defend her. If this was typical of this site, I look forward to visiting more often. But, having read the thread in one sitting, I’m a little bleary and will look at your archives later.

270. “Romance is not somehow LESS because of it’s content and to say it is is insulting.”
     That’s not what Hilzoy has been saying; she’s been saying — as I, clearly imperfectly, understand it — that romance fiction is different from other genre fiction, and from “non-genre” fiction, in a way that makes romance fiction not “comparable” to other fiction.
     This is a position many of us have been thoroughly disagreeing with, but it’s not the same position as “saying” that romance fiction is “less” than other fiction in some way.

271. Oh, jeez.

     Indeed.

272. Gary, you will HAVE to post the contest winners.

273. Oh, jeez
     There are a number of things I could note, but I wouldn’t want them to be taken the wrong way. But I do want to ask, Gary, does the ‘Oh, jeez’ mean that you didn’t give permission?

274. Gary,
     the perception of hilzoy ‘saying’ that romance is “less than” comes from her assertion that romance is equal to porn and/or sudoku, not just from her ill-advised assertions on how and why romance readers read in their chosen genre.
     She keeps saying that she believes that readers read romance for different reasons than they read other genres.
     While this may characterize her own approach to romance reading, this is absolutely incorrect as has been pointed out to her again and again by those who actually read in the genre regularly.

275. I think it means something like: Gary was sufficiently taken aback by the attention that he made a comment consisting of only two words and one link.
     Which has to be some kind of record, not that I’m keeping track or anything.

276. It also makes the stricture of 200 words or less kinda ironic.
     I agree that Hilzoy possibly made a mistake in suggesting that how she reads romances is how everyone else reads them, but just as that isn’t necessarily true, I’m not sure if one should say just because all the people I hang out with read it in this way, that’s the way it _is_ read.

277. “…I’m not sure if one should say just because all the people I hang out with read it in this way, that’s the way it _is_ read.”
     Who said that, in which comment?

278. This, gary
     While this may characterize her own approach to romance reading, this is absolutely incorrect as has been pointed out to her again and again by those who actually read in the genre regularly.
     ‘absolutely incorrect’ seems to suggest that there is a way that romances are or should be read, and I’m not sure if that is the case. I didn’t want to call anyone out in particular, but there seems to be a problem of competing ways of reading a genre. While one can take issue with Hilzoy’s perceived overgeneralization, the answer is not to make the opposite generalization but I think that by pulling one person out, it seems more like an attack and several people have made comments that I think are similar.
     Umberto Eco has an interesting meditation (google cache) on something that I think is related to this when he writes about how we can view repetition and concludes with an imagining of how we might view a single episode of Columbo if it were the only exemplar we had
     Since at this point I am playing what Peirce called “the play of musement” and I am multiplying the hypotheses–in order to find out, maybe later, a single fruitful idea–let us now reverse our experiment and look at a contemporary TV serial from the point of view of a future neoromantic aesthetics which, supposedly, has assumed again that “originality is beautiful.” Let us imagine a society in the year 3000 A.D., in which 90 percent of all our present cultural production had been destroyed and of all our television serials only one show of Lieutenant Columbo had survived.
     How would we “read” this work? Would we be moved by such an original picture of a little man in the struggle with the powers of evil, with the forces of capital, with an opulent and racist society dominated by WASPs? Would we appreciate this efficient, concise, and intense representation of the urban landscape of an industrial America?
     When–in a single piece of a series–something is simply presupposed by the audience, which knows the whole series, would we speak perhaps of an art of synthesis of a sublime capacity of telling through essential allusions?
     In other words, how would we read a “piece” of a series, if the whole of the series remained unknown to us?
     Such a series of questions could continue indefinitely. I started to put them forth because I think that we still know very little about the role of repetition in the universe of art and in the universe of mass media.

279. “but just as that isn’t necessarily true, I’m not sure if one should say just because all the people I hang out with read it in this way, that’s the way it _is_ read.”
     The point is– there is no ONE way to characterize how people read anything. All we’re calling for is a recognition that there is no uniformity here. The fact that the people I hang out with read differently means— you simply can’t generalize, so why not accept that romance readers, like every other reader, are individuals and can’t be dismissed as one way or another?
     It takes only one exception to disprove a generalization– and commenter after commenter has provided more than one exception. So can we bury the generalization and let readers read what they want to read for whatever reason they have?
     Personally, as a writer, I’m just glad that people still read. I’m not going to assume there’s anything strange about their choices. If they buy books, I love them. 🙂

280. While this may characterize her own approach to romance reading, this is absolutely incorrect as has been pointed out to her again and again by those who actually read in the genre regularly.
     ‘absolutely incorrect’ seems to suggest that there is a way that romances are or should be read, and I’m not sure if that is the case.

     No, it doesn’t.
     I can’t speak to the intent of the writer, but the text clearly says no such thing.
     (Any more than I wrote anything that implied that I hadn’t given permission for my name to be used at that other blog.)
     What that passage you quote clearly states is that Hilzoy is incorrect in asserting that there is only one way to read a text, specifically the texts of romance novels.
     That’s all it says.
     “While one can take issue with Hilzoy’s perceived overgeneralization, the answer is not to make the opposite generalization….”
     And yet no one has but you, so nice straw (wo)man.

281. fordcity,
     There is this interesting tension between the notion of ‘no uniformity’ and any kind of mass market. I think there are some generalizations to be made, and understanding why they exist is ultimately enlightening. But my point was that saying that Hilzoy is ‘absolutely incorrect’ is as much a generalization as anything else. The answer to bad generalizations is not to reject them altogether, it is to come up with better ones.
     I’ve been thinking of why we read, and how it maps on my own reading, and I can think of the following ‘ways of reading’ (or ‘reasons why we read’ I suppose)
     -to identify with a particular character or situation
     -to disidentify with a particular character, seeing him or her get their just desserts
     -to get information in some form
     -to get an insight into who the writer is (a favorite for graduate schools)
     I can’t think of any other reasons, but are there as many reasons as there are readers? That seems a bit too much.
     But Gary gives me the impression that he is cross with me, so I will leave it there.

282. “But my point was that saying that Hilzoy is ‘absolutely incorrect’ is as much a generalization as anything else.”
     No, it isn’t. Disagreeing with a claim that something can only be read in one way isn’t a “generalization”; it’s a specific disagreement with a claim that isn’t just a generalization, but a claim that delimits two specific sets and asserts that they have nothing in common, and cannot be compared. That’s more than just a generalization, although I don’t know if there’s a specific term for it, either.
     Generalizations, though, are things that can have limited truth, up to a point, but which may fail somewhere beyond a certain point.
     Objections to generalizations aren’t inherently or necessarily generalizations themselves, though.
     “But Gary gives me the impression that he is cross with me, so I will leave it there.”
     No, not at all. I just believe you misread. And that you do that on occasion. I misread on occasion, too. Naturally, sometimes that’s annoying, particularly when it’s me who is misread, but mostly I just shrug, and sometimes I offer a correction, without being annoyed or feeling cross in the slightest. Just part of the day.
     Mostly I just let misreadings slide, actually.
     Of course, I rarely reply just to say I agree with you — or anyone — either, which is more than not.
     “and I can think of the following ‘ways of reading'”
     Among those you left out: Pleasure in writing, in language, itself.
     Pleasure in having one’s imagination stretched by new ideas, or concepts, or facts, or ways of thinking, or descriptions of exotic settings, or maybe just by good enough bulls**t.
     Interest in understanding characters unlike one’s self. Or in understanding societies unlike one’s own. Or in better understanding one’s own society.
     A real minority taste: pleasure in appreciating inventive writing structures. It’s pretty uncommon, but a few people are highly into it.
     Another small minority, but still not uncommon, reason some people read fiction to learn more about how to better write it. Never underestimate the number of wannabe professional writers.
     Another reason: to experience a comforting environment, or to revisit familiar characters one enjoys hearing from. This is a primary reason why series are so popular in genres, and neither does it mean a book in a series can’t stand alone and be as excellent as a non-series book — which isn’t to say all do, of course, since many don’t.
     Not that you were trying to be definitive, of course; just tossing a few more reasons into the hopper.

283. Well, to get back to the text, as they say:
     While this may characterize her own approach to romance reading, this is absolutely incorrect
     I took the second ‘this’ as having the antecedent of ‘hilzoy’s approach to reading’, not ‘hilzoy’s belief that this is the way everyone reads romances’. I now can see your reading, but I don’t think that proves that mine is non-existent. Which is why I didn’t want to name any names, in order to make it clear that it was an impression I got, not a meaning that someone was trying to get across.
     And I apologize for misreading ‘Oh, jeez’, it’s a phrase that I would use if I had no knowledge that something was happening, which is why going to the link surprised me when it said that it was with your permission. If it hadn’t been with your permission, I would have judged the page much more harshly, which is why I asked, not to question your usage.
     The reasons for reading you give are interesting, though I thought some of them would go under trying to get information. There’s again an interesting (at least to me) typology of the type of information one gets out of a document, so while examining a page to see what the kerning could be argued to be getting information out of the document, so is reading it to find the deeper structure of the work or even to find the meaning of life. In fact, the harsh reading of a work, in order to find inconsistencies and mistakes, is, at some point, ‘anti-reading’, because it doesn’t grant the author some measure of trust. Someone can (and probably will) correct me, but I am under the impression that the unreliable or untrustworthy narrator is a rather late notion (speaking of literature as a 3000 year evolution), which says a lot about the nature of trusting the author.

284. Somewhat tangential, but somewhat not, to your question about reasons people read, LJ, some notes from Kate Nepveu on a Boskone panel from the other week.

285. Thanks for that Gary, interesting, though I imagine that it must be really fascinating if you have an in-depth knowledge of the titles they list.

286. Yeah, I’ve known one of the panelists since I was sixteen, and one of the other panelists since she was 16, and am quite familiar with the works and writers mentioned, which I knew you were unlikely to be, but I figured there was little harm in giving a pointer.
     On the other hand, there wasn’t particularly anything new in it for me; I just happened to be reading it, and thought it might have a bit of applicability here, and also offer a bit of a window into how such discussions go from within a genre.
     People active in the genres, whether professionally, or as highly knowledgeable fans, tend to spend a gawdawful amount of time, month in and month out, talking about the latest arguments, but also being around the perennial debates, such as definition wars, which are always regenerated wherever genre people congregate, simply because there are always new people coming in, and restarting the perennials.
     You know how that works, I’m sure.
     Anyway, I’ve lived through a lot of years in which I was constantly around such discussions, both in person and in writing, since 1971, so there aren’t a lot of new arguments I haven’t heard yet on the perennials, and my opinions are both more than a litte considered, and not held by me in a tentative way.
     Another way to put it is that I got sick to death of, and impatient with, a lot of the perennials by about 1978.
     🙂
     (Similarly, I don’t tend to leap with joy when political blog threads start a gun control, or abortion, or Israel-Palestine, go-round, again. Oh, yay.)

287. Slightly OT, I mentioned this thread to my wife, last night; something to the effect that there was a heated dispute, and then Somebody showed up to further argue. She interrupted me at that point and asked “It wasn’t Nora Roberts, was it?”
     Sometimes I just have to scrape my jaw off the floor; that was one such. She’s an admirer, if that explains anything, although she has more of a preference, in general, for the Regency stuff, which she refers to as historical fiction. Whether it’s better than or not as good as (or, so different from that comparison is meaningless) Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, I can’t say, never having read any of it.

288. My jaw also dropped to the floor yesterday.
     I read this at Sadly no!:
     “I said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans because it finally opportunity to a huge number of New Orleans residents living in passive dependency on welfare to get out of New Orleans and change their lives for the better.”
     That was said by Charlotte Allen in the WaPo chat about the piece which started this discussion here. The on-topic talk is…let’s say, interesting, too.

289. although she has more of a preference, in general, for the Regency stuff, which she refers to as historical fiction. Whether it’s better than or not as good as (or, so different from that comparison is meaningless) Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, I can’t say, never having read any of it.
     One Georgette Heyer beats three Neal Stephenson’s any day of the week.

290. “One Georgette Heyer beats three Neal Stephenson’s any day of the week.”
     But his are bigger.

291. “Gary, you will HAVE to post the contest winners.”
     The post I linked mentioned that they’d be posted there, as they were here.
     This may have been updated since you last looked with a couple of more links to blogs talking about this thread. Or maybe not.
     Amusingly, incidentally, at the moment, Turner Classic Movies has The Wind And The Lion running.

292. I write regarding the recent entry about reports of Hillary Clinton’s perhaps prescient yet undocumented council to her husband during his presidency on how the US should react to the genocide in Rwanda in the 90’s (advice which was not followed, btw). And regarding the ensuing skepticism of whether she ever voiced anything intelligent or insightful during Bill’s presidency, citing the timing of such revelations – during this highly competetive race for the Dem. nomination) as nothing more that political advertising.
     Reportedly, in the early days of the Rwandan genocide, Hillary advised her husband on how she thought he, as president leading the most powerful nation in the world, should react. Bill Clinton has recently admitted that following her approach would have saved many lives and stayed the conflict that became exhaustively drawn out.
     I was perplexed when I read the reactions to this admission. Perplexed that those arguing that Hillary had never discussed this with then-president Bill Clinton said that because there were was no “official documentation,” i.e. meeting minutes, etc. of such discussions, was an argument strong enough to withstand common sense.
     Why would there be documentation of a wife expressing her opinions to her husband?
     We are all aware that Hillary had enormous influence during the preceding decade simply by virtue of sleeping in the same bed as the most powerful man in the most powerful nation in the world. They likely discussed many weighty issues casually. They might have talked about Rwanda while getting ready for bed, about gays in the military while laying in bed together, maybe about a woman’s right to choose and the moral issues of abortion over breakfast. Do you expect documentation of these conversations, of how she may have advised him or swayed his opinion?
     Over the years, Bill has had no reason to admit that his wife had given gim sage advice, and that he had made a mistake in not following it. Undoubtedly, every US president regrets some decisions made during their time in office. Given the benefit of hindsight, and time to see how their decisions beared either sweet or bitter fruit. Who expects them to detail every one of their mistakes?
     Bill Clinton allowed this story to come to light at a time when the damage done to his own presidential legacy was worth the price of demonstrating Hillary’s prescience and wisdom.
     The timing of such a revelation doesnt diminish the light it sheds on Hillary’s character or judgement. Of course this was politically motivated. But honestly, in our society, what isnt? Every facet of our culture demonstrates that one will provide something only with the expectation of gaining something in return.
     Crys

293. Rainslove: I don’t know whether you read the actual post I wrote on this topic (it’s on the main page.) But I wasn’t just saying that there were no official minutes, which would be silly. I thought that it was odd that Clinton had not only failed to persuade her husband to intervene militarily, but to do any of the smaller things that would really have helped Rwanda, or even to refrain from doing any of the things the Clinton administration did to prevent others from helping.
     If Clinton did, in fact, urge her husband to do something about Rwanda, that’s great. But, frankly, there is no sign at all that she did — where a “sign” includes not just minutes of meetings but reminiscences from people (including Clinton herself) written before this campaign, indications that Bill Clinton was trying to do something about Rwanda, etc.

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