ironically that awful Excstasy book I reviewed had the hero wondering “will it fit?” and the heroine, a nurses, saying “of course it will. babies fir through there.” It was the only lick of sense in that dreadful book.

I love Irigaray, even though French psychoanalytic feminism is so 1980s.I’m glad I still get to engage with her by teaching it.

And because ultimately it’s about what moves you as a reader about a couple, what books you go backand reread, who you remember and want to be like or want to meet someone like the men they meet. I’ve just been blow away lately by Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady that had a cover that appears to be advertising the virtues of a highly conditioned male chest – a cover that hid one of the best times I’ve had with a historical fiction romance in many a year. Talk about your unexpected heroine! And yes, this is about scholarship but it is also about great reads.

Coincidently, my romance readers book group read an Emma Darcy earlier this year and we all hated it. Finding it old fashioned and not representative of good categories or romance in general.

I’ve said many times in the past that the distinction for me is in the attitude found in the books – not the actions. Which explains why I never could get all that worked up over the discussions centering around forced seductions, unless I’d actually read the story in question and the attitude within struck me as wrong.

Not the actions.

And the Darcy books are an excellent example of holdover attitudes that people want to believe are gone from romance novels. Well, yeah, they are. From most of them. But there are certain lines, one in particular and we all know which one it is, that aren’t simply reprinting the same books over again. They’re continuing to create new books with many of those same attitudes in them.

I’m just not sure who the target audience for that line of books are any more.

So, we can talk about romances having this feminist undercurrent all we want to but even back in the 70s, 80s and even 90s, I’d seen this thread of something that stunk suspiciously of a counter-influence present in some of the stories. I remember thinking way back years ago that a woman couldn’t have written some of the books I was reading and that’s why I stopped reading some of the lines. That is not an insult to male writers. That was simply a suspicion about the attitudes I was seeing in the books.

So to see someone base even a line of an academic paper about feminism in romance on one of those very authors is more than simply disturbing to me as a longtime romance reader. Misleading would not even be the half of it to me.

Either learn about the books, all the books, or stop talking about them as if they know anything about them at all. Then I might be able to respect what they have to say.

Coincidently, my romance readers book group read an Emma Darcy earlier this year and we all hated it. Finding it old fashioned and not representative of good categories or romance in general.