That’s a great passage from Kinsale, and I agree with it from personal reader experience. I do wonder if anyone has studied this question.

I don’t know. I think Sarah Frantz may have done some work that deals with readers’ preference for the male POV in romances. It does appear to be a strong preference — there are many readers who won’t read first person (heroine only) POV romances. Also, though this may or may not pertain — m/m romances are growing more popular but f/f romances don’t seem to be.

Heck, maybe women who fantasize about rape read rapes in romance because they want to identify with the rapist: the fantasy becomes not a sex fantasy but a power fantasy.

I think it may even be possible to identify with both. I know that when I read a redemption story, it gives me hope because I identify with the redeemed character, regardless of that character’s gender. While “adversary transformation” may be part of what’s going on for the reader, I think it’s likely that “self-transformation” is also a factor. Books with big character arcs (so long as they are well-written enough to be convincing) help me believe that I too can become a better person.

I am also very wary of biological explanations. Thank you for tracking down that link and more information on the Salmon and Symonds research.

Janine,

That’s a great passage from Kinsale, and I agree with it from personal reader experience. I do wonder if anyone has studied this question.

Heck, maybe women who fantasize about rape read rapes in romance because they want to identify with the rapist: the fantasy becomes not a sex fantasy but a power fantasy.

While I agree that “adversary transformation” is a salient feature in many romances, especially those featuring rakes, there are so many problematic assumptions in the JSR article, it’s breathtaking.

women identify with the lead female character

This assumption is often made in discussing the genre (whether or not the romance under discussion includes rape), and I wonder if it has been proven. Ever since I read Laura Kinsale’s essay, “The Androgynous Reader: Point of View in the Romance,” which appeared in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, I have questioned it. To quote from Kinsale:

Perhaps the most intriguing conundrum of hero-identification is the joy romance readers take in the “fractured hero”: the ripped-up, torn apart, brought-to-his-knees alpha male. Once again, this is a pheomenon that has widely been interpreted in the light of presumed heroine-identification. Modleski has argued that it represents a female revenge fantasy: “…all the while [the hero] is being so hateful, he is internally grovelling, grovelling, grovelling.” Others have emphasized, like Krentz, the mythic struggle of the female to civilize and bond to the male, or, like Radway, the creation of a comforting fairy tale of perfect romantic love. In these interpretations an emotionally shattered hero presumably would be a tamed one, providing the reader the vicarious satisfaction of the heroine’s success.

Perhaps so. But I would like to point out one salient fact. During the height of the reading experience–when the reader feels that wrench of emotion, the tingle in the spine, the full and authentic inner twist of reader identification with a character in an emotional cataclysm–when Rhett says to Scarlett, “Frankly, my dear…”; when Ruark Beauchamp of Shanna raises an inhuman “raging howl…from the wagon accompanied by repeated thuds against the heavy wooden door”; when Clayton Westmoreland shatters the brandy glass in his hand in Judith McNaught’s Whitney My Love; when Slade in Nora Roberts’ A Matter of Choice growls, “I love you, damn it. I’d like to choke you for it” — who, may I ask, is the reader at that moment?

Not the heroine, basking in female revenge or bonding triumph.

Oh, no. She’s the hero.

Quoted under fair use. Interesting, no?

I looked up the Salmon and Symonds and the synopsis says that:

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography underscore how different female and male erotic fantasies are. These differences reflect human evolutionary history and the disparate selection pressures women and men experienced, say the authors of this thought-provoking book. Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons review the fundamental importance of evolutionary history to human psychology, discuss how male and female sexual psychologies differ, and then demonstrate how sex differences in erotica illustrate this.

I tend to be rather wary of explanations of differences between men and women’s behaviour which is based on suppositions about evolution because I think so much of gender difference is constructed by culture. I don’t know though, what evidence Salmon and Symons provide in support of their ideas.