Psychology Today has a blog column called “Love’s Evolver”, and a recent article called “How Much Do Romance novels Reflect Women’s Desires?” was getting some discussion on Twitter yesterday.
Taking down critics of the romance genre is not my usual bailiwick — there are other bloggers with much bigger audiences who can marshall community responses much more effectively – but I thought I might have a different perspective to share.
In the article, Maryanne Fisher, an associate professor of evolutionary psychology at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S., studies Harlequin romances (she doesn’t actually read them, finding them “formulaic”. Guess she doesn’t read mystery, thrillers, spy novels, sci fi or fantasy either!), and draws some conclusions about women’s desires. Here’s what her “research” shows:
So, basically, women are reading stories where they meet a ‘bad boy’ or cad and then he manages to turn around and become a doting dad. She gets the best of both worlds! And the way that this dual-hero is solved for readers is the hero claims that he’s loved the heroine since the very start, and that reason he had to behave so badly was to hide the fact that he was overwhelmed by his love for her. Either that, or she made him see the error in his ways.
What woman doesn’t swoon at this? What woman can resist wanting a daring, confident, attractive man who also is so deeply in love with her that he can’t even look at another woman? And he wants to marry her, on top of it all. She’s having her cake and eating it too. She gets all the benefits without any of the costs. The cad won’t expect hot, casual sex and then take off- he becomes the dad, who, given his history, isn’t boring.
A lot of romance readers chimed in, on Twitter and on the article itself, to point out the many problems here:
- that all women read romance for the same reason
- that all Harlequins – let alone the whole genre! — can be summarized in this way
- that we can jump from what romance readers read to what romance readers actually desire in real life
- and from there to what all women desire
The author’s “research” was reported in the Guardian earlier this year:
Theorising that mating instincts, developed over thousands of years, mean that women want a wealthy, fit, fertile, committed man, the researchers speculated that titles published by Harlequin – the owner of Mills & Boon – would be heavy on words such as baby, father and paternity; wealth, tycoon and billionaire; marriage, engagement and bride; and handsome, attractive and athletic.
…
Cox and Fisher concluded that Harlequin romance novel titles were “congruent with women’s sex-specific mating strategies, which is surmised to be the reason for their continued international success”.
(By the way, folks might be interested to know that several HQN authors, such as Sharon Kendrick and Penny Jordan, felt very positively about the study, which included scanning and retrieving these buzz words in some 15,000 Harlequins, narrative apparently being totally irrelevant to this study of … books.)
But here’s the thing: the author is an evolutionary psychologist, which means she doesn’t have to worry any of these things. She can read every romance novel in existence, and the conclusions she draws from it about human psychology will still be undermotivated. Leaping from small poorly chosen samples to grand claims about what all humans are wired to be like is what evolutionary psychologists do, and they do it with special relish when they are proving retrograde things about gender, love, and sex.
Take a recent Time Magazine article, “The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older Women Lust”:
A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America’s most sexually industrious.
As per usual, Time breathlessly and uncritically reports this study. But doesn’t it worry a thinking person that some three-quarters of the participants in the study were recruited on Craigslist????? This isn’t just a limitation of the study, it is a tragic flaw.
Here are some more “findings” from a 2005 piece in Slate.com by Amanda Schaffer:
One of EP’s academic stars, David Buss, argues in his salacious new book The Murderer Next Door that men are wired to kill unfaithful wives because this response would have benefited their distant forefathers. [Former Harvard President] Larry Summers took some cover from EP this winter after his remarks about women’s lesser capacity to become top scientists. And adaptive explanations of old sexist hobbyhorses—men like young women with perky breasts and can’t stop themselves from philandering because these urges aided ancestral reproduction—are commonly marshaled in defense of ever-more-ridiculous playboys.
Starting to see a theme here?
Check out about this gem on women’s innate preference for the color pink:
“We expected to find gender differences, but we were surprised at how robust they were,” said Anya Hurlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University. “They appear to give biological and not simply cultural substance to the old saying: pink for a girl and blue for a boy.” Using rapid reactions to flash cards, the survey, published in today’s issue of Current Biology, is the first to show that human colour preference can be broken down into two spectra: red-greenness and blue-yellowness. While men plumped for a wide variety of favourite tones across both, women overwhelmingly went for the red end of the red-green axis.
Yes, because getting adults in the west who have been socialized their entire lives to associate pink with feminine to respond to flash cards is the way to prove something about our prehistoric ancestors.
Or this (from a WSJ review of Adapting Minds)
Evolutionary psychology claims that men prefer fertile, nubile young women because men wired for this preference came out ahead in the contest for survival of the fittest. The key study here asked 10,047 people in 33 countries what age mate they would prefer. The men’s answer: a 25-year-old.
Evolutionary psychologists don’t bother taking the time to reject plausible alternatives to their view, for example, that our engagement in useful behavior could be an accident, a predisposition of our physiology rather than a trait selected by our environment, or learned behavior. Evolution is right, but there are a lot of other players in the game — other evolutionary pressures and non-evolutionary ones that must be accounted for. But evolutionary psychologists just … don’t care.
So rather than telling the author to read more romances, or to actually talk to romance readers, suggest she find a new research paradigm. Because no amount of knowledge of the romance genre or its readers will justify the leaps an evolutionary psychologist believes she is entitled to take.
Finally, if you object to the study, consider why Harlequin hired the author as a consultant. Is Harlequin hoping to increase sales by tapping into EP “research” to pick its titles? Looks like it to me.
Heh. Around my way, what we call it is evo-psch-bollocks.
As to Harlequin, no idea why they funded the study, but I could have sworn that they recently said they were dropping the Virgin/Billionaire titles.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by victoriajanssen and Vassiliki Veros, ReadReactReview.com. ReadReactReview.com said: Read it:: About that Pyschology Today article on Harlequin… http://bit.ly/cQJnn2 [...]
Potentially slightly off-the-track comment:
It’s curious, though, that the majority of romance scholars/researchers tend to focus on category romances, almost exclusively, as part of their works when the majority of romance readers seem to read and discuss single title romances a lot more. Almost as if readers consider category romances as throwaways. That category romances are some kind of mental snacks. So, I think it’s already flawed when a scholar or researcher focuses on category romances only.
The paper by Fisher and Cox referred to in the Guardian article is
Cox, Anthony and Maryanne Fisher. “The Texas Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride: An Evolutionary Interpretation of Romance Fiction Titles.” Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 3.4 (2009), 386-401.
I analysed it in some detail at Teach Me Tonight and I’d agree with you that it fits the “theme” you found. Which is why I think the following quote, which I found in another paper to which Fisher contributed, and which I quoted in my post at TMT, is so deeply ironic:
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with focusing on a single aspect of a huge subject. Certainly if one wants to make generalisations about the whole genre, then it would be necessary to have read a wide range of romances, but if one wants to write a history of Harlequin (as Grescoe has done) of Mills & Boon (as McAleer did) or chart the changes in HM&B novels over the decades (as Dixon did), then the focus on a particular company and its novels is entirely justified.
Edited to add: Since I’m currently working on a book focussed on HM&Bs, I’m got a focus on them myself. That said, when I’ve written more general articles about the genre, I’ve tried to include a range of different romances, from a variety of publishers and subgenres.
I can’t believe I’m defending Evolutionary Psychology, but while I fully agree that the Psychology Today article was dreadful, I don’t think it’s any more representative of the field than any other pop culture version of academic work. There’s a lot of crap in ev psych, just like there is in any academic area that has possible applications to real-world questions. Maybe it even has more. But bashing an article that treats all romances as equivalent to HMB by bashing an entire sub-discipline triggers my irony alert, especially when the supporting evidence comes from places like Time and Slate.
If people didn’t want incredibly simple answers to incredibly complex and often unanswerable questions, these kinds of articles wouldn’t be written over and over again. And Psychology Today wouldn’t even exist. Would that we lived in that world!
@Sunita:
Just to clarify:
My supporting evidence come from these sources:
Adapting Minds
Elizabeth Lloyd. Also see this article .
Jerry Fodor
Stephen Jay Gould
Even practicing EP’s acknowledge they rely on an outdated evolutionary framework. For example:
@Laura Vivanco: I suspected you had posted on this, but I didn’t have enough time to do a proper search so thank you for chiming in.
More later, thanks for your comments!
Oh for crying out loud – so as a gender, we’re all idiots and evolutionarily pre-programed sluts wearing pink aprons and shooting bad boys come-hither glances…
Uh…not.
The colour preference study is particularly interesting in light of the fact that historically boys wore red which was thought to have war like overtones and girls wore blue as it was considered to be passive. The ‘pink for girls, blue for boys’ meme is less than a hundred years old.
@Jessica: Ah, okay. Some of those are what the writers in your embedded quotes were discussing, and I admit I have serious skepticism when journalists explain academic research which they aren’t trained in, so I’m generally more comfortable with a discussion of the actual research.
Just to clarify, I agree that a lot of the work is overblown and draws ridiculous and unsupported conclusions about specific contemporary behavior by individuals. But ev psych has had quite a bit of impact in other fields and people who bash ev psych will often comment approvingly about work that draws on it (not you here but in other places). That strikes me as inconsistent, not to mention raising the baby/bathwater problem.
Then again, I still don’t get why people think Malcolm Gladwell is so good, so I’m clearly missing something somewhere.
Jessica – I’m not a huge Gladwell fan, but Blink was interesting, albeit too long. He could have said what he had to say in a few chapters – or an article. Besides, the concept is derivative – it comes from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
I recently came across a paper which suggests that the romance genre’s alpha male may have originally been based on ideas from evolutionary psychology. There are some problems with that paper too, but it’s interesting, so I’ve just put up a post about it, to contribute to the discussion.
Hey, thanks for this post. How distressing to read about this so-called scholarship, but your treatment of these articles was certainly entertaining. But hey, how you really feel about evolutionary psychologists?
As I said on Twitter, what a pile of crap. I don’t think it’s worth wasting any more words on it. EP is responsible for so many stupid, stupid newspaper columns, ‘research’ papers and garbage spewed on blogs and chat lists in place of real discussion.
Grrrr
Although I have to say that I sort of delight in Time’s diction in referring to middle-aged women as “sexually industrious.” There are all kinds of implications packed into that word choice.
I’ve not read the Harlequin paper but I don’t object to evolutionary theories about why women read romance – indeed it makes sense to me, as a contributing factor for some readers anyway, if not ‘the answer’ (I don’t think there is a single answer). I’m very conscious that romance is formulaic and that I am seeking out and reading essentially the same story over and over, and yes, for me, the appeal of the hero as a(n ultimately) reliable male (whether in his alpha or beta form) is a very big part of that. Having said that, I can understand how infuriating you find scanty research and unwarranted conclusions.