I’ve given some of my friends who don’t read romance carefully-screened favorite books, and they liked them…but they won’t just go out and buy one without being able to have a friend vouch for it, because of the rape and abuse triggers (and I agree with the previous poster who said emotional abuse is just as bad.)

The genre as a whole would sell more books, I think, if it were possible to tell from the back cover blurb the level of violence.

0

You have my respect. Sorry for my hot reaction. That’s my big addiction, I’m afraid.

Everyone–

As a new reader of romance, I DON’T know the code, and I am grateful to those of you who have delineated it. That’s a help. I buy most of my books online, but even so, I don’t have much time for solitary browsing.

As for the library, well, I live in a very small town. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. Gee whilikers, do I love shopping online! It’s just me and the Fed-Ex dude, and I’ve told him I’m buying all those books so I can study gardening. Also, no matter how many people read a book from the library, the author only benefits once. So, buy living authors, check out the dead guys. Except Steinbeck. Buy Steinbeck.

If I gave the impression that rape had to be excised from romance, to suit me, then I spoke amiss. What I don’t want is for rape to be rewarded. Rape happens in real life, sigh, I know. And now, thanks to my temper, so do all of you. I’m praying for all of you to get Sally amnesia right after you read this.

What I want in a romance is a heroine who’s no dumber than I am.

A heroine who thinks she’s going to have an HEA with her rapist (or with anybody’s rapist, for that matter) is too stupid to live, and probably won’t.

Chronic emotional or verbal abuse is also a horrible thing, and whether it’s worse than physical abuse depends on who’s talking. Maybe abusive people can spot victims and know right away, “I can take her,” or “I can put her down for years and she’ll still put out for me and iron my shirts. And support me.” Hey, does, “If you scream I’ll kil you” count as verbal abuse?

Rochester is not my idea of a hero, either. That was one of the things (one of several things) that ruined HOW NANCY DREW SAVED MY LIFE for me, despite its appealing title and cover.

Lady Chatterly’s Lover–tried to read it. Bored me spitless. Well, at least it bored me to the point that I found it preferable to go out into the frozen Kansas night to look for a convenience store with some interesting books in it. Like Dermagraphics Monthly or 50 Crowd-pleasing Ways with Pig Innards.

But, honestly, honestly, please, to the Romance Gods: the heroine does not ride off into the sunset with her rapist. Please. It’s just stupid. And I do mean that as flat and as un-nuanced as it sounds. She should ride off alone–I’m good with that–, when the story fits. Escape, rising above it, outgrowing a stupid relationship, all of these are acceptable HEA for me.

Now, bring me that sunset.
You are a very smart bunch, even the ones I disagree with.

0

And BCB, re: scenes that damage. Yes, that scene in that movie damaged me and for the longest time, I couldn’t understand why. It kept replaying in my head, and with each viewing, it reduced me to a five-year old cowering in a corner. It made me want nothing more than to curl up into a little ball and protect myself from pain. Just writing about it is enough to make me recoil.

It is only now, through therapy, that I understand why that scene triggered such a strong reaction in me. The shrink likens it to a veteran with PTSD who hears a military jet fly over and runs for cover.

But I don’t blame the movie for inflicting pain on me. Many, MANY, women saw that movie and read the book it was adapted from, and found an empowering message in there for them. Should the producers have denied them that, just to avoid hurting me?

I shouldn’t have seen the movie opening night. I shouldn’t have seen the movie without actually trying to learn something more about the book than that lots of women seemed to love it.

The studio shouldn’t have marketed it as a female-empowering carefree comedy. A movie trailer that shows a convertible full of young, laughing, hooting, carefree women driving down the highway late at night is NOT responsibly marketing that movie.

0

Sometimes, the books I buy are bad – I mean really bad. (I find it hard to believe there’s an audience for such poorly written swill, but then I remember that I AM the audience – I bought the darn book.) And sometimes I buy books that are well written, but I don’t like anyway, because I don’t like what happens in the book in some way. That’s what I get for buying based on cover shorthand.

Do I want a warning label? No way! I don’t want authors finding themselves in the position of writing with some beaurocracy’s guidelines in their heads. Can you picture Heyer’s agent saying, “Georgie, great book, but I just can’t sell a book with an “attempted rape within” warning on it. You’ll have to make him nicer”. Or what about Bronte’s agent – “Charlotte, you’ve got to change this – the adultery label is a sales killer.”

I take responsibility for what I buy. If I’m afraid the contents MIGHT offend me, I shouldn’t buy it.

Mary

0

I’ve been thinking about the various descriptions people have given of their negative reactions to reading certain scenes in books. There are many books I have not finished reading over the years, and the reasons for that have varied widely. I try not to think about it, but I remember there was one book that caused what I could call an extreme negative reaction.

It was a book I read 20 or so years ago. No, I will not tell you what it was. My then-husband warned me not to read it, said it would upset me. So of course I had to read it. Dummy. The beginning of this book was so boring, so completely banal, I could hardly stand to turn the next page. I was about a third of the way into it when I figured it had to get more interesting, so I skipped ahead to the middle of the book. And landed in a scene of such unspeakable horror that even now I hesitate to remember it. It wasn’t just the physical torture, though that was bad enough, but the victim’s awful realization about what the pain signified and the mental and emotional anguish that came with the knowledge of what had been/was being done to her. It was bad.

I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to throw up or pass out. I guess it was the classic fight or flight response. Racing pulse, ringing ears, graying vision, clammy hands, nausea and absolute panic. It was immediate and it was devastating. I tend to read a lot of thrillers and crime novels, but I have never encountered anything so depraved or evil, not in fiction and not in real life.

It wasn’t that the scene brought back painful memories or re-created a past trauma, which I suspect is what happens for some people when they read about a rape or other abuse. This was something that was harmful in and of itself. Reading that scene damaged me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if reading a rape scene in a romance has this same effect on some people (and I don’t know if it does, since no one here has described it quite that way – or perhaps they have and I wasn’t paying attention), then maybe I need to re-think my attitude about all this. Maybe it’s not enough to say, “Well then, stop reading it. Put it down.” I just don’t know.

And yet, as awful as that experience was, I’m still not sure I believe the publisher had an obligation to warn me. Though it took me a very long time to find a measure of forgiveness for that writer. There is a risk involved in allowing someone to tell you a story.

This discussion has left me with much to consider.

0

0

I don’t forgive overt cruelty at all (can’t make me do it either!)

I also have some damage that will only be made worse by reading some things. Sheesh, some folks take vitamins, run 3 miles and only eat organic produce for the same reasons. Reading can heal just from pleasure and from “oh, so THAT’s how you can react to that!” type of learning.

Yes, I live for a HEA ending, I refuse to read anything where the hero or heroine dies at the end, where you slog through misery after misery only to have a piss poor sorta kinda ‘didn’t we grow!’ ending or where a clearly insane abuser turns nice—- just cuz.

And yes, I’m a total friggin’ coward.

0

0

Anyway, I would’ve been the poorer for it, because Guy Gavriel Kay is an extraordinary writer, who creates a depth of emotional truth that is beyond “worth reading”. Sometimes it hurts (A Song for Arbonne is excruciatingly painful), and he’s not someone I re-read much, because I rarely seek out emotional distress, but I’m really glad to have read them.

And I love Lois McMaster Bujold. I don’t agree with all of her views (she seems to be far more anthrocentric than I buy, and she seems to be a lot more hopeful than I – i.e. it’s always better to be alive than not), but she does a lot of extraordinary things with her characters that make me think and want to argue with someone.

I’m not trying to put down (and especially not call Najida – a person courageous enough to put herself out there for criticism – a coward) anyone whose experience is different – but mine tells me that good writing, even on profoundly unpleasant subjects, can have unexpected results. As opposed to exploitative trash – for which, I agree, life is far too short.

0

Which leads me to another thought. I’ve always loved historicals. I don’t care if the hero is a bad ass, as long as the heroine isn’t a wimp. But I don’t enjoy historicals set in the U.S. I think it is the degree of separation. Somebody else’s history is more “glamorous” than my own. I don’t say that’s logical, its just the way I feel.

On the subject of rape in romance, I think its a very tricky thing for an author to negotiate. On the topic of rape fantasy, its not my cup of tea but the fantasies of others is none of my business. Add to that the fact that it has long been a part of the romance genre and you get the picture that a lot of might have the same fantasy. Otherwise it never would have got past the first book. I also think its important to distinguish that the rape fantasy seem to have more to do with being submissive than being a target of violence. Okay, its a hair-thin line; but the line exists. Its why some of us can tolerate scenes with a bad ass pirate having his way with TSTL heroine.

And, GP, I really like the frog analogy. That’s how evil succeeds – a little bit at a time until you no longer know the difference.

0

I still stand by my opinion that many readers want to be able to choose books to suit their mood and that misleading back-cover blurbs and covers can get in the way of that. But I can see why too detailed blurbs/descriptions would spoil the reading experience that other people are looking for; I wouldn’t want a list of spoilers on back covers either. It seems to me that the reason we have back-cover blurbs, quotes from other authors or from reviews, and pictures on the cover is to help the reader select books, and given that publishers do ‘label’ the books in this way (again, maybe I was causing confusion by using the term ‘label’ when I meant ‘something that gives some indication of the content’), it only makes sense for them not to choose covers and blurbs which mislead readers.

On the specific point of rape, I think it’s good that readers and authors can discuss the many different ways in which rape and verbal abuse are portrayed in the genre (e.g. as a ‘fantasy’, as a grim reality, as perpetrated by the villain, as something the hero does but then must atone for etc). The nuances and different perspectives (both the author’s and each reader’s) obviously make a big difference to how each novel is read. For example, I read a romance recently (a historical) in which the heroine had been gang raped a couple of years before the beginning of the novel. The reader wasn’t given flashbacks of how the heroine had felt at the time, so that helped keep the reader at a distance from the events emotionally. In addition, the rapists then conveniently murdered each other/committed suicide/died in an accident. That was maybe a rather tidy ending, but it certainly created a very different reading experience from a novel in which the hero rapes the heroine, shows little remorse, and all is concluded with a HEA (which is how I understood the events depicted in Fallen Angel). So yes, no big red stickers with ‘rape’ written on them, because that would lack any kind of subtlety. But blurbs like the one for CtC seem like a good idea, because they’re more nuanced and, without giving too much away, tell the reader of the mood/setting/issues she/he should expect.

0

We all have our reasons for reading. Books I hate, I hate because they hurt to read, the trigger bad memories or have people who I don’t want to know…. They’ll stay with me when I don’t want them there. So why look for pain when life will give you plenty without asking?

Call me a coward, but I know I look for what I do in a book and why I read.

0

Verbal abusers, while they share some traits, may have other psychological disorders that ARE treatable and ‘curable’ in a sense. Like bipolar, schizo-affective disorder or certain types of IED etc can be treated with therapy, meds etc. I’m not saying they’ll be saints, but the root cause can be brain chemistry and damage.

I do view them as two types of individuals with two types of prognosis. I’m splitting hairs, but that’s what I do when I read a book. Some things can be dealt with, cured or at least addressed.

Others, to be blunt, need to be locked away forever.

0

Please do not think you should ever apologize to me (or anyone else, for that matter) for expressing an opposing opinion or pointing out a different perspective. Surely you realize that my anger, which in this case is more accurately described as frustration, has all the significance here of a pesky insect buzzing around your head.

There are few things I find more frustrating than a discussion or forum without dissention or variety of opinion. I love a good debate. It’s damn hard to have one of those if everyone is sitting around nodding in agreement. Or prefacing every comment with a disclaimer.

And I really liked your comparison using chronic/acute pain. Very interesting way to look at it.

0

*sniff sniff* coffee….

0

You’re right. Poor Zorro. There just has to be some flair about it-windswept hair? Too per usual. How about a red shirt? That way-contemp or historical, we know it’s coming? *g*

Andi-Maybe. But we had immature expectations and insecure views of ourselves that fed into that scenario? Not enough frontal lobe electric snapping? I don’t know.

You can only be dominated if you allow yourself to be, and in stories like that I have more passionate feelings about the heroine than the hero. Meaning I want to slap her and ask her why is she letting herself be treated like that? I want her to rise to the occasion and put on her big girl boots. I’ll still trust the writer and read though. I’m easy to please, just make the story payoff (harder done than said, I know). The problem is those expectations are different with everyone, and to smack a label on it is going to be more problems than it’s worth.

What happens when the writer and publisher knock heads over the label? What does that mean if a writer won’t push her characters because she’s afraid of the label? What if sales aren’t as good and she gets dropped because she had the label? It’s a pit of vipers, I tell you.

0

0

It’s not the way I read. When I’m reading, the characters feel to me like real people whose actions I’m observing. Obviously I do know that a story is just a story, but while I’m reading it, it feels real, and the characters feel real, and so I relate to them the way I would to real people. This means that if something’s supposed to be understood as a fantasy for the reader, I’m likely not to pick up on that unless it’s really clearly marked as being the character’s fantasy. Oh, and I never fall in love with romance heroes. I’d think of that as me committing adultery and them being unfaithful to the heroine. And of course I know they’re not real, but they feel real while I’m reading.

Maddie’s adultery didn’t count as adultery for me, because she was mentally divorced as soon as she decided to ring a lawyer. But I was really annoyed with Phin when he threw the alarm clock and lamp. Quite apart from the waste of a perfectly good clock and lamp, it seems to me that while it’s all very well for people to have discovery fantasies, it’s not really very fair on the third party who comes across the people who have the discovery fantasy. Maybe Amy was OK about it but I’ve been somewhat startled when I’ve come across people having sex in public places, and I wished they hadn’t. They really weren’t aesthetically pleasing in the slightest. (That last bit sounds like the sort of comment Oscar Wilde would make, possibly. I also think they were lucky the person who came along wasn’t someone who would have been really shocked and upset.) It seems to show a lack of consideration for others. It was different when Nick walked in and saw Darla naked (and when she saw him naked later on) because that was accidental.

0

I think the idea of the reader giving consent for the heroine is a good one, too. If you consider the reader a co-author, as I do, filling in the white spaces in the text with her experiences and preferences, then the white space may be where the approval is given or withheld. One reads a book and says, “Oh, but she really did love him and want him,” and another reads the same book and fills the white space with terror and revulsion.

I remember writing the scene where Maddie commits adultery in Tell Me Lies and thinking, “This is only going to fly if the reader wants it to happen, if she participates in this decision vicariously, so that she’s as culpable as Maddie.If she joins with Maddie in wanting it, she can’t turn on Maddie later for doing it.” I wonder if there’s something similar at work, where a reader reads a romance and wants the sex scene to happen, and accepts the rape because she wanted the closure of that scene, and her acceptance becomes the heroine’s acceptance?

0

First of all I would like to apologise for making a generalisation, because I didn’t mean to upset anyone, and obviously I was generalising and making assumptions.

But let’s suppose that I had made that comment because, in your words I just ‘assumed my audience were intelligent adults who, if they are offended by something they read will put it down unfinished’, would that then be OK? You seem to have kept reading, despite the fact that the comment made you angry. Did you do that in the hope that perhaps these issues could be resolved/some common ground would be found? Maybe not, but sometimes when I’ve read something upsetting in a novel my reaction is to keep reading in the hope that some catharsis will ensue from reading the book.

And sometimes by the time one’s read the disturbing comment/passage, one might just be too deeply involved in the novel/discussion to be able to stop thinking about it. Like the example that was given of a film, what you’ve already read/seen may be enough to traumatise you even if you could leave/stop reading.

Anyway, perhaps what I should have said is that people very often choose books to suit their mood. Sometimes people are in the mood for something more cheerful, sometimes they’re not. A study of ‘heavy readers’, i.e. ‘people who read upward of a book a week’ (Sheldrick Ross & Chelton 2001: 52) found that:

The bedrock issue is the reader’s mood [...]. Mood, of course, varies. When readers are busy or under stress, they often want safety, reassurance, and confirmation. They will reread old favorites or read new books by trusted authors. When life is less stressful, they can afford to take more risks. They may want to be amazed by something unpredictable and might pick books on sheer impulse, even through random selection of an author’s name. (2001: 52)

Catherine Sheldrick Ross & Mary K. Chelton, 2001. ‘Reader’s Advisory: Matching Mood and Material’, Library Journal (February 1): 52-55.

And ‘non traumatising’ and ‘safe’ emotionally certainly doesn’t have to mean intellectually unchallenging or bland.

Jenny wrote: “why I can read a rape in a historical like To Have and To Hold or read the scene in Devil’s Cub where Vidal menaces Mary, and think, “Fabulous book,” but if you took those exact same scenes and made them contemporary, I don’t give a damn how good the writing is, I’m outraged.”

I wonder if that’s because the historical setting gives you a sense of distance and in some way acts as a signal to you that what you’re about to read is, in some ways, more of a ‘fantasy’, about something that’s not real. And/or there’s maybe a feeling of ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ so the reader makes allowances for historical heroes who rape because you don’t expect them to have been exposed to messages about ‘no means no’. I don’t give that lee-way to historical characters because they know it’s wrong. Rape has always been considered wrong with exceptions for marital rape, which wasn’t recognised, or rape of prostitutes or, in the case of the aristocracy, rape of peasants which I suspect they’d have found much less troubling than the rape of a female aristocrat (certainly it’s treated that way by Andreas Capellanus, but then it’s not clear how much of his work is intended to be read as a parody and how much really reflects his true attitudes to courtly love). But you still get plays like El Alcalde de Zalamea in which an aristocrat rapes a peasant, is then killed in revenge by the whole village, and the King sides with the village. And as it happens I never thought that Vidal would actually go through with rape. His father comments later on in the novel that Vidal is more honourable than he is, and as far as I could make out, he’d always had willing sexual partners before, so I think he’d have stopped when he saw that Mary was really distressed. Except she shot him first. But I digress.

Micki said that ‘Jenny has stalking, murder and at least one rape fantasy scene in her books’. Yes, that’s true, but when Jenny has a rape fantasy scene it’s clearly marked as ‘the heroine participating in a fantasy’ it’s not a fantasy in which the heroine thinks it’s rape but the reader may respond to it as fantasy. So, in my mind, Jenny is arguing that it’s OK for the heroine to have rape fantasies (which I’d agree with) but she’s not creating a rape fantasy which involves the real rape of the heroine. When the heroine really is being raped, then perhaps responses depend on how ‘real’ the reader feels she is. Some people think of heroines as sort of place-holders, so they maybe give consent for her, or perhaps they’re distanced from the action by a fantasy or historical setting which says to them ‘this is not real’ (so rape in a historical, or rape carried out by a vampire or werewolf says ‘not real’ clearly enough to them that they don’t feel threatened/traumatised the way they might if they read a real account of rape, or rape in a contemporary romance). And apologies in advance if I’m generalising and have missed out anyone’s reading process. I’m just trying to summarise some of the responses I’ve seen expressed, but I’m not saying these reasons apply to all readers or that they are the only possible responses among those who can enjoy a book which includes a rape of a heroine by a hero.

As for whether rape is or worse/more damaging than emotional abuse, I think it’s a bit like the difference between acute and chronic pain. Both can be life-threatening, but although chronic pain may also lead to death and can make someone’s life a misery, it’s generally people with acute pain who end up in Accident and Emergency Departments. The people with chronic pain usually get put on longer waiting lists (and are sometimes told that it’s all in their minds). That doesn’t mean that their pain isn’t important or real, because it is, but people sometimes seem to overlook it, or postpone doing something about it, because the person still seems to be able to function relatively normally, whereas a person who’s got obvious and acute needs will tend to get instant attention and no-one will doubt that what’s happened to them is painful.

And on the technical issue of finding Cary’s blog, just click on her name, and it’ll take you there. The link’s already embedded in her posting name.

0