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9 Is Female to Romance as Male Is to Porn? We (romance writers) think of pornography as something exploitative and dehumanizing. . . . That isn’t what turns women on. . . . Women are turned on by . . . romance. —Candice Proctor, “The Romance Genre Blues or Why We Don’t Get No Respect,” 2007 The pairing up of women with romance and men with pornography has a comfortably familiar ring in our society. And yet, as the anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner wrote asked about the close association of women with nature in a famous article from which I take this chapter’s title, “What is our evidence that this is a universal fact?”1 Actually, there’s something odd about the formulation in my title that doesn’t exactly hold up when closely examined in our society. It’s common knowledge that far more women buy romance novels and watch romance movies than men do, and that more men than women are fond of hard-core porn. Yet we also know that men do fall in love regularly, with profound consequences for their lives, and still marry for love, so they say, in shockingly high numbers (though even Americans marry more infrequently than formerly). Moreover, women have become the fastest-growing audience for pornography .2 So it does seem that men have emotions and women just may be interested in sex, after all. All this tells us that pleasure, whether “romantic” or sexual, has a complex relationtogenreasanexpressionofimagination .Justtoconfusethepictureevenmore, the defining gestures of desire in the stylized genres of romance and pornography, like the actual social enactment of both sex and romantic love in people’s personal 171 172 the glass slipper lives, are steeped in the dye of gender, as feminism has made us aware. It’s impossible to talk about these categories without also talking the talk of gender. But again, the connection between gender and genre isn’t as simple as it appears in heterosexual romantic and sexual stories. For example, a fascinating aspect of romance and porn as representations is that both frequently play with the reversal of gender expectations: romance by depicting the emotional power women have over men, and porn by representing the assertiveness of women’s desire. In romance the man is often reduced to jelly in the hands of the woman he adores, while in pornography the fantasy woman who actively invites or demands sex is arguably as popular as the one who has to be seduced or forced.3 And surely the way these switches play with clichés about emotionally aloof men and sexually virtuous women enhances the pleasure of these genres. By the time you consider both traditions and the enjoyable reversals of traditions, those diehard stereotypes of gender, sex, and love start breaking down in ways that yield no easy answers to the question in my title. One way to explain these nuances in the genres is to see that they are as much about power as pleasure. If romance is the dream language of the dominated, porn is that of the dominator wishing for the slave to be happy, or at least on call. We might say romance explains brutality in men—“If you can’t lick ’em, you might as well love them”—whereas porn says, “If you can’t love them, you might as well lick them.” Each contains wishes for power through personal manipulation , and each also may contain its own contradiction, wanting to be ravished and swept away. But power and pleasure are never simple concepts, and the power of pleasure, or pleasure in power, even less so. Texts designated as pornographic and romantic have been called liberating or oppressive at different times and places, and either might be elevated as high culture (as when sexual representations have been part of ancient religious ritual, or romance demonstrates noble, chivalrous traits) or denigrated as harmful or silly. My point is that they are not natural categories or natural opposites, as they are often assumed to be. It might be more useful to see them as parallel investments of meaning, permitting us to experience a need whose possibility of existence may not be fully recognized in social relations, reified in the body of the desired. The Interdependence of Porn and Romance They do share complementary traits. Porn appears to divide the world into good and bad in order to enjoy the bad, as if it can only be enjoyed if it is bad; romance similarly divides the world, as if it...

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