Just pondering how society seems to have relegated all things romance to the domain of women. From romance novels to rom-coms, guys aren’t supposed to be interested in that stuff. The stereotype is that you mostly endure it to enhance your chances of getting laid.
I don’t believe that everyone conforms to the gender stereotype, but I am wondering what it is about the romance genre that appeals to women so much more than men.
It’s not like men are immune to falling head over heels in love. It happens all the time. Romance is equally a part of men’s lives as it is a part of women’s lives.
Yet for some reason this is a slice of human experience that seems more interesting to women than men, on the purely abstract level.
Personally I (a woman) have a love-hate relationship with romance. The idea appeals to me but I almost always have issues with how it is executed within the ‘‘romance’’ genre. Most of the time I’m saying to myself, ‘‘That’s not love, that’s infatuation, anyone can have that.’’ Also I find a lot of it really boring. I’m more interested in love in the context of some other larger plot. But I do write in the romance genre and have ever since I was a little kid. I have never really had a desire to write anything else. I guess I feel compelled to get it right for a change (by my own standard of what is ‘‘right.’’)
So I’m curious about the prevailing theories about why there is a such a gender disparity when it comes to interest in romance-themed art and entertainment. It would be awesome if those theories weren’t sexist, but that may be expecting too much.
The romance genre equivalent for men is porn. Sorry if that sounds sexist, but when men fantasize (in general) that’s what happens, and when women fantasize (in general) romance lit happens.
The reason is probably because of the differing evolutionary strategies of the sexes - men can impregnate lots of different women and women need the support of men to survive pregnancy and child rearing. So men dream of lots of women, and women dream of one (powerful, high-status) male who will take care of them.
It’s not sexist, but so literally true as to provide less insight than one would think. Women definitely get off sexually to romance novels.
My original theory was that romance for whatever reason represents long-term security for women, but I don’t understand how that would also not to true of men. Even in a relationship dictated by the strictest of gender roles, there must be something desirable for a man about the security of having a mate and a household to come home to, and all of that.
This is not exactly false, but it’ wildly oversimplified (it’s more or less what I learned in my evo-bio class freshman year of college, then you take more advanced classes and learn it’s not quite true). Male (and especially female) reproductive strategies are actually much more complicated than that.
There are a few studies, one is captured in the book “Reading the Romance” (which is a little dated now) (Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature: Radway, Janice A.: Amazon.com: Books)and found that women read romance novels at least in part to escape from poor IRL relationships and specifically a lack of being nutured and taken care of. Romance novels almost universally portray a couple overcoming obstacles to reach a mutually satisfying relationship status in which the woman is seen as an equally important partner.
Also, this is more of an observation, men are usually ignorant of the sexual content of romance novels. A lot of women read them because its far more socially acceptable/less stigmatized than other sources of pornography. (setting aside that small subset of very chaste romance). An interesting question is why don’t men read as much printed porn as women?
I used to work in the industry, and I’m not sure there’s any justification for the presumption that women read romance novels because they are more interested in love.
Specifically, while men certainly like variety and casual sex, women do too, to some extent. There are species of birds out there that were thought to epitomize long term pair bonding monogamy, for a very long time. That was before modern genetic techniques showed that they actually had a high rate of false paternity, and that the female birds were actually trying to nail down a monogamous partner and then have, um, ‘extra pair copulations’ with sexy passersby whenever he left the nest.
It does in real life, but in fantasy the preference is for large numbers of women to have sex with you at the drop of a hat.
I understand what you are saying here, but unfortunately we are running up against something that is very hard to communicate.
Men are that way, because that’s the way men are. I don’t think you can break it down any further than that, unless you want to talk about evolutionary causes and effects and stuff like that.
Why do men like to look at naked women? Because we are wired that way. Why doesn’t the fantasy of a mate and a household appeal to men? Because we are not wired that way.
That doesn’t mean that either the desire to live in a model for Architectural Digest, or the desire to have Miss January take off her bra the instant you enter the room, is wrong. It’s just that the explanation is so completely straightforward that it is hard to accept. Why do you like that? Because we do. Why don’t you like that? Because we don’t.
I like comedy romance movies. I’ll watch those regardless of my getting laid prospects. But I can’t say I’m a big fan of the dramatic romance genre. There are exceptions though, Jane Eyre comes to mind.
I feel like it would be pretty hard to generalize about women and casual sex, given that for much of human history the consequences of casual sex have been so much higher for women than for men. I’m talking specifically about pregnancy.
Hello Again, thanks for that fascinating response.
Well, I think evolutionary biology is real, but I also think there must be some point at which changing social expectations and circumstances affect what one fantasizes about and/or wants out of life. It wouldn’t surprise me if women’s attraction to the romance genre did have to do with shifting social roles and expectations… particularly because, I mean was it ever as much of a thing back in the day? Have women (generally) always been infatuated with romance-oriented entertainment, and men (generally) not? Or is this something that has changed over time?
Well, pregnancy is part of it, but I think the bigger problem was that (in many societies, historically) women could face a wide range of socially imposed penalties (up to death by stoning, in some cultures) for adultery and/or premarital sex.
And men who are unsatisfied with their sex lives look at porn. Women don’t consume porn nearly as much as men (yes, yes, I know all the female Dopers are going to chime in with repeated posts about how they love porn, but they aren’t typical and most porn is for men and everybody knows it and I don’t need a damn cite), and men don’t consume romance novels as much as women do (same as above, except a whole bunch of male Dopers aren’t going to proclaim their love of Harlequin romances).
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I feel like it would be pretty hard to generalize about women and casual sex, given that for much of human history the consequences of casual sex have been so much higher for women than for men. I’m talking specifically about pregnancy.
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Which is pretty much why you can generalize about women and casual sex - they do a lot less of it because the consequences for 99+% of our evolutionary history have been much more severe.
Speaking just for myself, I’m not interested in porn (for both aesthetic and moral reasons), but I’ll occasionally read some hot stories or romance novel.
Yeah but there is a whole element to the romance-fantasy that is not about sexual gratification. I wouldn’t say the same is true for porn. If romance novels and rom coms were only about getting off I think they would have a lot more sex in them. There is romance and then there is straight-up erotic fiction, and there’s a difference.
I’ll tell you what prompted this thread. I recently read a science fiction romance novel that was recommended to me by a male friend. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the novel, but the entire thing centers on two people who have fallen in love. He said that when he first read it, it had to be pointed out to him that it was a romance novel. He was very much in the frame of mind of thinking, ‘‘Oh, this is good sci-fi.’’
I found that interesting because my reaction to the book was, ‘‘Oh, this is good sci-fi romance.’’
I thought it was interesting how he didn’t even perceive it as part of the romance genre.
One factor is that women (tend) to find other people’s relationships more interesting to think about than men do. We don’t just sit around and listen to friends either complain about or enthuse about their SOs because we’re nice enough to put up with it - to varying extents we actually care about how that relationship contributes to the friend’s well-being. We don’t limit this giving a crap to real people, so we care about fictional characters’ relationships too.
I must not have been clear - romance lit and porn are about very different things. I agree with you on that, but that is my point. The element in romance fantasy that appeals to women does not appeal nearly as much to men (78+% of romance lit readers are women - pdf).
Which reinforces what I think we agree on - the elements in romantic lit that appeal to women do not appeal all that much to men. If a novel is just about relationships, it is not generally going to appeal to men. Likewise, erotica that is just about sex is not going to be as appealling to women as it is to men.
Nothing really to add about the reasons behind it, but a couple of anecdotes:
I had a male HS friend who loved reading romances. He was hilarious to talk to about them. He was always bitching about the heroes “My god! He’s disgusting! On page 32 he had lice! Just telling me that he got rid of them is not enough. I can’t read this!” That was about a book by, I think, Julie Garwood. He never finished it. But he definitely read others and we’d all argue about the relative merits of so-and-so hero and such-and-such heroine. Great fun. I stopped reading romances not that long after HS and only recently picked them up again for a brief while. Now I’m back to my normal of not reading them again.
Also, my first husband liked rom-com movies. One of my brothers does, too. Both of them more than I do.
Look at action movies. How many actions movies involve the man falling in love with a female character, or rescuing a female character he already loves? In most, we get some kind of romance in between action scenes.
For a man, a mate and a household are perceived as something you need, but it’s something you do on your way to your “real” goal. We’re expected to be out there doing something to provide for that household. I don’t know how much of this is biological and how much is cultural, but it’s certainly there. At its core, I think has a lot to do with the aggressiveness and competitiveness put there by testosterone.
Anyway, since we perceive romance as something we do on the side of our real goals, a book that centers only on romance appears incomplete to us. We’re kind of scratching our heads: “OK, so they’re in love. That’s nice, but who’s going to kill the bandits, plow the farm, and manage corporate mergers?” It’s not happily ever after until he’s providing an income and winning recognition from his peers for being awesome at something.
It seems that “romance for women” and “romance for men” both tend to make romance and sex effortless in some sense. And in both, the emphasis is off how awesome you (the identified-with protagonist) are and on either 1. how awesome you look, or 2. what awesome thing you did.
Which makes sense, culturally. Women are given kudos for being pretty, so “female” romance books are often all about how pretty the heroine is and how she doesn’t have to do anything else. Men are given kudos for accomplishments, so “male” romance movies are often about how awesome the hero’s actions are and how he doesn’t have to do anything else. In both, the protagonist has a love interest fling themselves at them and adore them.
That’s interesting because you’ve just nailed the problem I have with romance novels and movies and such. The book I’m writing takes place in the middle of a Civil War, and all of my characters have Shit to Do. That’s how I would change the genre. An action movie with romantic elements makes way more sense to me than a book about a relationship that exists in a vacuum. There is no point to love if it’s not in the context of some broader reality.