Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  The truth of the matter is, although rape scenes have largely disappeared from romance novels published from the early 1990s onward, they were ubiquitous in romance novels from the early ’70s to the mid-’80s. Hell, if the heroine only got raped by the hero in a romance novel, she was lucky. Rosemary Rogers and Catherine Coulter, among others, wrote infamous gang-rape scenes, in which the heroine is completely and utterly brutalized.

  But there’s some contention as to whether rapist heroes do, in fact, exist. Jayne Ann Krentz, for one, argues in “Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness” in Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women that there’s no such thing as rape by a hero in romance—that what people have labeled “rape” is, in fact, an unusually aggressive seduction that is “intense and unrelentingly sensual.” She goes so far as to compare the rape of the heroines to the seduction of private eyes in hard-boiled mysteries and of the heroes of thrillers by dangerous dames. According to Krentz, these heroes are passive and rarely initiate the seduction, and their resistance is token at best. If these aggressive seductions by women who present real threats to the heroes (they’re often the prime suspects) aren’t labeled rapes, then doing the same for romance novels is hardly fair.

  This dismissal by Krentz, which heavily implies that the rape accusations are due to sexual double standards, is downright puzzling, because some rape scenes in romance novels aren’t quite as she describes. There’s no passivity on the part of the heroine, and no seduction on the part of the hero. The heroine often explicitly says no, and in the vast majority of instances, they’re not feeling ambivalent about allowing the hero to seduce them—they’re actively fighting him off. Some of the heroes, such as Anthony Welles of Catherine Coulter’s Devil’s Embrace, actually tie the heroine down as she weeps and struggles. During the act, the heroines feel considerable pain; screaming and crying from distress is not uncommon. If they do feel pleasure, they loathe themselves for responding sexually to the hero.

  All this may still be subject to interpretation, since the line between forced seduction and outright rape is fuzzy at best, except for this fact: The hero and heroine often agree that the heroine has been raped. When both the characters agree that the hero’s turgid battle ram of love has slammed into the heroine’s postern of passion without her consent, it makes it more difficult to deny that rape has, in fact, occurred.

  Ultimately, Krentz’s comparison using private eyes would be analogous to the typical rape scenario in romance novels only if the dangerous dame had tied the hero up as he’d kicked and screamed and struggled, then donned a strap-on and showed him a good deal of what-what in the butt, all while the private eye wept and felt humiliated because he’d had a hard-on. Then, in the aftermath, the hero questioned his sexuality, full of loathing for himself and vowing to hate the heroine forever. It’s okay, though, because by the end of the story, the private eye falls in love and ends up marrying the dangerous dame. She’s right: he’d come to enjoy the penetration with time.

  Labeling romance-novel rape as not-rape and calling it a day is too easy a route. Whether or not the hero’s violations constitute rape according to the standards of the books when they were written, and whether or not some readers and authors are able to accept them as rapes, the majority of romance readers today and almost all outsiders interpret the actions as rape. The romance community—authors, readers, commentators—need to accept rapist heroes as part of the genre’s history and take a good, long, hard, look at the workings of rape in romance. It’s an ugly part of romance’s past. We must look at it.

  NONCONSENSUAL SEX: IT’S HISTORICALLY ACCURATE; THEREFORE, IT MUST BE OKAY!

  “It’s historical accuracy!” is one of the more popular banners waved around by readers on discussion boards and Amazon.com reviews when the issue of romance-novel rape is brought up. Women were nothing more than chattel back then, goes the logic, and men had more freedom to rape—they didn’t even necessarily know what they were doing was wrong. This argument does a disservice both to males and to history. While marrying for love was not the norm (blame the Victorians for that particular idea), rape has almost always been decried as socially unacceptable—more than socially unacceptable, actually: it’s one of the most consistently recognized criminal acts, with deliciously gruesome punishments ranging from death by stoning to castration. Just about any code you can think of—from the Torah to Augustus Caesar’s Lex Iulia to modern-day statutes governing sexual assault—recognizes rape as a serious crime.

  Why? Because even at the nadir of women’s rights, women were still acknowledged as being valuable commodities, and rape damaged the goods—especially if the woman was valuable politically or economically, and was a virgin. Rape, if nothing else, was an infringement on the possessory rights of the husband or father over the body of the woman, and held a high potential to muddle paternity.

  The definition of rape has changed in tandem with the conceptions of a woman’s personhood. The focus wasn’t always on consent and the violation of that consent, as it is now; the focus used to be on women as property and how the rape would affect their market value. Marital rape wasn’t recognized until a few decades ago, for example; ditto the rape of sexually experienced unmarried women.

  Evidence of violent assault on the part of the rapist and resistance on the part of the victim were often important parts of the definition. For example, Deuteronomy 22:23–24 exacted capital punishment on the victim as well as the rapist if the act took place in a city and the victim didn’t cry out loud enough to be heard; in contrast, 22:25–27 exempted the victim if the same act was committed in the country. The idea that insufficient resistance by the victim invalidates rape because the lack of consent was not unequivocal has remained in the popular conception of rape to this day, even if it no longer has a place in our laws.

  By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, however, the violation of the woman’s will became an integral part of the common-law definition of rape, but notions of female identity and sexual purity meant that actions like marital rape or the rape of sexually promiscuous women were considered impossible—paradoxical, even.

  However, the vast majority of the rapes in romance novels don’t fall into these narrow exceptions. Almost all of the heroines raped are young virgins of good birth, and the heroes, while almost without exception notorious rakes and scoundrels, are typically great lovers who avoid virgins because they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

  Some of the rapes occur because of a genuine misunderstanding about the heroine’s sexual experience, but the message is muddled because when the heroine’s virginity is revealed, the rapes don’t always stop. The first rape in The Flame and the Flower, for example, occurs because the hero assumes the heroine is a prostitute, but subsequent rapes occur even after he finds out she’s actually a gently bred virgin girl, though the hero assures the heroine that she’ll come to enjoy it if she’d stop struggling. Oftentimes, the rapes occur despite the knowledge of, or specifically because of, the heroine’s virginity; for example, in Devil’s Embrace by Catherine Coulter, the hero deliberately rapes the heroine to prevent her from holding on to any hope that she can return and marry her then-fiancé with honor.

  RAPE IN ROMANCE AS PERMISSION TO WRITE ABOUT SEX

  Another popular argument—and one that holds up better under analysis—is that the rape scenes gave the heroines permission to explore their sexuality without appearing to be a slut (the wages of which are either death or ridicule—sexually promiscuous women are either villainesses or comic sidekicks, neither of which tend to fare particularly well in romance). Sexual autonomy and expressing honest desire just Wasn’t Done by Nice Girls worthy of a true Happily Ever After; by having their control taken away, the heroines were also exonerated of all moral blame for ultimately becoming sexually active and for enjoying her sexuality.

  There’s still an underlying tension, however. Even if the heroine is excused from the taint of sexual promiscuity, she is still culpable for the
hero’s sexual brutality. Whether it’s because she’s completely sexually irresistible, or whether it’s because he’s punishing her for some wrongdoing, whether real or imagined, the focus is often on the heroine and the effect her physicality or behavior has on the hero. The centrality of the heroine is crucial in romance novels, especially Old Skool romances written primarily from the heroine’s point of view, but it also reinforces ideas that women are inherently sexually dangerous. The act is not the man’s fault because the heroine somehow made him do it, either by tempting or goading him beyond bearing.

  And pleasure, schmeasure: during the rape, especially the first several times it occurs, the heroine rarely feels pleasure. The rape is, in fact, accompanied by pain—the physical tearing of the hymen is presented as excruciating, while shame and disgust predominate the emotional landscape.

  And in the few instances in which the heroine does feel pleasure during the rape, it’s often accompanied by a generous serving of self-loathing. She feels that her body has betrayed her, eerily echoing how actual rape victims feel when they feel sexual pleasure during their assault. However, these portrayals of aggressive male sexuality tend to grate modern sensibilities more because of how differently rape is viewed today, thanks to the No Means No movement and a better understanding of how rape affects its victims. Older conceptions of what actually constituted a rape controlled the depictions of romance-novel rape in Old Skool romances, so the scenes often substitute other things for consent, such as pleasure (if she feels pleasure, it’s not rape), or gentleness and lack of injury (if she’s not torn and bloody, it’s not rape). To a resistant reader, all these factors are irrelevant, because the heroine does not consent; the hero’s reassurances that she’ll eventually enjoy it, or that her struggles will only make it hurt more, actually make the rape more egregious, not less. However, for the less resistant reader, any pleasure the heroine may feel against her will and the loss of control by the hero is proof of his passion for her; it underlines how the sexual interactions between hero and heroine will eventually lead to the happy ending.

  The fantasy of a heroine being forced to relinquish her autonomy—and to feel pleasure against her will in the process—may be deeply appealing to some readers by explicitly allowing them to vicariously abdicate control, providing an escape from the control they need to maintain in their real lives. Conflicts in the reading emerge when the heroine clearly isn’t deriving any pleasure from the abdication of control, but this assumes that the reader identifies strictly with the heroine. Some of the tension goes away if you accept that many readers often engage in a process that is simultaneously masochistic and sadistic. It’s masochistic because they enjoy experiencing the suffering of the heroine—it’s cathartic, after all, and it’s a safe way to exorcise insecurities and demons. It’s also sadistic because they also enjoy watching a heroine—who’s often quite deliberately grating and annoying—receive her comeuppance, either by taking a more detached outsider viewpoint or by identifying with the hero.

  The security offered by the Happily Ever After is nothing to sniff at, either. Because the readers are guaranteed a happy ending, they are able to assure themselves that no matter how brutal the hero may be to the heroine, or how much she declares her hatred for him, all will work out for the best, and the hero’s assurances that the heroine will come to enjoy the sexual interactions in the future will come to fruition. The readers occupy a superior position; they know that the heroine is wrong, and that happiness and orgasms will burst forth like veritable Care Bear Stares, except with more jiggly bits, by the end of the book. The Happily Ever After, while often decried as one of the most limiting aspects of a romance novel, provides a secure anchor to the reader and allows a romance author considerable leeway in the sorts of conflict she can present, as long as she doesn’t cross a reader’s personal line in the sand, beyond which no happy ending can be possible. Rape is that line in the sand for many readers today; it wasn’t for most of the readers in the past.

  THE IRRESISTIBLE WOMAN’S MAGIC HOO HOO TAMES THE UNTAMABLE MIGHTY WANG

  Romance-novel rape in Old Skool romances, like popular conceptions of rape at the time, depend in many ways on the myth of the irresistible woman and the then-prevalent view that sexual violation stemmed from sexual desire, as opposed to a sexualized way to exercise anger and power. The focus was on the woman’s sexuality and the uncontrolled responses it elicited, instead of on the responsibility the perpetrator had in securing consent and restraining his behavior.

  In some ways, the myth of the irresistible women is appealing: even though it exonerates the man of the responsibility (He couldn’t help himself! Her blazing beauty addled him! Her Magic Hoo Hoo could not be resisted!), having the ability to drive men mad with desire gives the heroine considerable power, even if it’s not a power that can ultimately be wielded for her own ends.* Significantly, the Old Skool hero is unfailingly portrayed as being completely in control of all his responses—jaded and cynical, in fact—except when it comes to the heroine, which in turn infuriates him. After all, he’s the premier cocksman in all the land, and here comes this insignificant little chit who’s making him spooge prematurely, even though all she does is move her body with shy, clumsy inexperience during the dance as old as time. Even worse, after getting a sample of the heroine, he finds that no other hoo hoo in the land will do, because lo, she is in sole possession of the Magic Hoo Hoo. Women he formerly found luscious are now overblown and undesirable. This leads to more anger and even more highly charged interactions, until he’s forced to acknowledge his feelings for the heroine and eventually gentles his treatment of her. The heroine, in being raped and having her will overborne, gains power because the hero himself is no longer in full control of his actions. The fact that the hero Loses His Shit every time he’s around the heroine is an indicator of True Lurve instead of a True Need for a Restraining Order.

  And because the rape is portrayed either as the heroine resisting destiny or the hero’s inability to control his desire for the heroine, two other aspects of romance-novel rape make it more palatable.

  First, the rape is rendered more palatable as long as the violator is somebody the reader would find attractive. Therefore, the rape is okay as long as the rapist is sexy, beautiful, and has pots of money—not as okay if the violator is old, ugly, or (and this is harped on as being synonymous with moral turpitude in older romance novels) fat.

  Second, the fictional rapist, unlike a real-life rapist, is completely reformed by the lovesauce emanating from the heroine’s Magic Hoo Hoo, which is the fount of all healing, happiness, and contentment. Whether or not he ever actually apologizes or acknowledges the wrongness of his acts during the course of the book, the ending holds the promise of future behavior that, while not completely bereft of shitmonkey moments, is at least a reasonable approximation of what a decent human being should act like. As Jayne Ann Krentz notes in “Trying to Tame the Romance,” the outcome is much more satisfying when the heroine successfully tames a truly dangerous creature instead of a milquetoast fop. The eventual taming of a sexually dangerous and aggressive hero thus allowed women a safe space to explore—and invert—the power relationships in a rape. Romance-novel rape ultimately placed women in control.

  AWAKENING SLEEPING BEAUTY

  Romance-novel rape also serves as an awakening for the heroines, who are often repressed about or completely unaware of their sexuality. Sleeping Beauty needs to be awakened, but not with a mere kiss. The hero’s violation is a way of waking the heroine up to the inevitability of her conquest and the rightness of their love, a way of forcing her to see that will she, nil she, the hero is the right one for her. The literal rape and violation of the heroine’s will is translated into a metaphorical ripping aside of her doubts and reservations, forcing the heroine to acknowledge the fact that she’s a sexual creature, except romance novels starkly contrast with previous literary traditions because the heroine’s sexuality is portrayed as a good thing, not a force to be
feared and punished—as long as she expresses it exclusively with the hero.

  The rape then becomes not-rape because he is the hero, and his worldview is the normative view. The hero is generally right about everything, from the dire consequences should the heroine attempt a foolish stunt to the fact she’ll eventually beg for his hot, hot mansauce. If the heroine is infatuated with somebody else, the other man is usually portrayed as too weak or too stodgy for her feisty ways; the hero assures her she would’ve run roughshod over the rival, consequently become bored, and lose respect for him. The sexual aggression becomes a way of contrasting the hero with the less sexually effective rival. The idea implicit in most Old Skool romances seems to be that an aggressive, lively woman needs an even more aggressive, lively man to “tame” her, a term that shows up with regularity in Old Skool romance novels; like much of the fiction of that time, lack of aggressiveness in males is often presented as emasculating.

  THE MARTYR THEORY

  Romance-novel rape, because of the way it’s framed, may appeal to readers for its martyr fantasy value. This is especially true in which the hero feels great remorse for his acts and grovels for forgiveness by the end of the book. Oftentimes, the heroine is the only one who knows she’s virtuous and doing the right thing, despite horrible misconceptions by the hero. The readers, however, are privy to her virtue, thus making them complicit in her virtue and martyrdom. In the hero-normative world of the Old Skool romance, the hero finding out he was wrong about the heroine’s sexual purity was pretty much the only victory allowed the heroine, and this victory, because of its incredibly limited nature, is disproportionately satisfying. The catharsis and vindication when the hero apologizes by the end of the book are especially delicious as a consequence.