“You were a virgin, Jess.”

“Yes.” This time she didn’t deny it. “And the reason I was still a virgin was because you’re the only man I’ve ever wanted. I was never interested in anyone else. Even when I thought I hated you, I still didn’t want anyone else.”

– Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant, Sarah Morgan (Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd, 2010)

I pretty much picked that first reference at random. Bought was the first Mills & Boon I ever actually purchased (I say purchased; at the time of writing it was still a free download on Amazon) and it was absolutely everything I thought a contemporary romance would be, so it holds a special, slightly nauseated place in my heart. It was a lucky choice, though, because a great deal of what I want to say about this trope is contained in this book.

My first romance novel. I promise it’s cheesy in a whole different way than it looks.

There’s a lot of – entirely justifiable – outrage over how prevalent the virgin heroine is, even today. I am not going to go into the whole problematic mess that is the idea that a woman’s ability to love truly and purely is somehow connected to her physical “purity”, or the idea that a woman can only give herself fully to a lover – as if that’s a healthy focal point for a relationship anyway – if she’s unclaimed territory when the book begins, so to speak. (You would not believe how many romances I’ve beat myself over the head with in which the hero cries “I can’t take this anymore! I don’t care if you were a dirty slutty hobag before we fell in love! I love you anyway! …wait, you were a virgin? OH THANK GOD YOU BELONG ONLY TO ME NOW”.)

This’d be pretty much the standard response to non-virgins in many romance novels. Source: Smart Bitches Trashy Books, link at end of post

Nor am I going to touch on the huge double standard that is the the common pairing of the virginal heroine with the Virile Manly Man, who has explored delightful bedroom adventures with many a lady fair – but still takes the heroine’s virginity as proof that she’s someone special. (But of course has nevertheless been totally respectful of all of his previous partners. Of course.) I may write about them sometime, but this is an overview with a word limit, so I’ll put some further reading links at the bottom of the post and we can call it even for now.

She spans all genres, does the virginal heroine (insert your own pun here. Yes, I said insert. No, I didn’t mean – look, just go and sit in the corner, okay?), and some are easier to deal with than others. The historical probably has the most easily explicable virgin heroine of all; it’s history! We know what women were like in history! Virgins were the most highly prized of all the ladies, weren’t they? Non-virgins were cast out and shunned and other antisocial-type punishments as well, and they would never marry, so any heroine worth her salt is going to have to be a virgin, or she’s not going to be good enough for the hero. Duh. It’s historical accuracy! Everybody’s actions always correspond perfectly with prevalent attitudes of the time, didn’t you know that? The paranormal and fantasy genres get away with it pretty easily as well, often with some kind of mystical bond that predestines the two central characters for one another – although that doesn’t necessarily preclude one of the characters having had sexual relations beforehand. Sound like a contradiction? I don’t think it is – more on that in a moment.

Which brings me neatly to the virgin heroine who gives me the most trouble; the contemporary one. This lady can be anyone, you guys. She’s a businesswoman or a hairdresser or a secretary or a recluse. She’s shy, or she’s loud and brash. But she always has this part of her that is…untouched, as it were, and I’ve seen authors who will write themselves around some pretty amazing corners to keep that so. She’s never found the right guy. She’s never experienced sexual desire before, or if she has it’s been fleeting or fumbling enough to ignore – this is overwhelmingly common. Which brings me back to Bought, with its heroine who waited through an entire book for a hero she was never even really sure she wanted, because the true and deep love she felt for him superceded all other possible emotional connections.

In some ways, it’s not just the heroine who gets this. A discussion on I (Heart) Presents brought me this, from an interview with romance author Julia James:

I must say, I’ve done this several times, when the hero, realising the heroine is a virgin, goes to great lengths to ensure her first experience is really special, and, of course, in doing so, makes it really special for himself as well. In a way, she gives him her physical virginity, and in exchange he gives her his emotional virginity.
[Source]

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has its own epithet for the hero’s “emotional virginity”; they call it his coming into contact with the Magic Hoo-Hah. (The hero’s counterpart for this is the Mighty Wang, if anyone was interested.) The principle is pretty much the same; somehow, during sex, the hero and heroine exchange a piece of each other that nobody’s ever seen or touched before. And, because of the underpinning idea that men are physical creatures where women are emotional ones, that usually translates to the heroine being physically untouched before she meets the hero, and nobody ever having touched His Heart¹.

In a lot of ways it is this, more than a heroine’s physical virginity, that worries me about the trope as a whole. Because it’s been occurring to me more and more often than the virginal heroine does not necessarily need to be a virgin, per se; the second most commonly occurring version of this trope that I’ve read, usually in contemporaries, is one in which the heroine has had sex. Not, in most cases, often – maybe once or twice, and always with the man she fancied herself in love with before she met the hero. But she didn’t really enjoy it; it was uncomfortable or even painful, and after that relationship ended she never really thought of doing it again, and she figured she’d never really understand what about it was so much fun.

Even LGBT romance has its own version of this, in the form of the straight-person-turned-gay (rarely if ever is there a story of a straight person turning bi), who had sex – even lots of sex! – with the opposite gender, but never really experienced attraction before meeting their same-sex true love. Which is a plausible enough narrative, in fairness, but loses something in that the true love in question tends to be the only person our straight-turned-gay hero/ine experiences any kind of attraction towards at all.

I’ve seen justifications of this, and I can see why it’s popular. If romance is fantasy-fodder, what creates a more perfect fantasy than two people exploring new emotional ground together so that you, the reader, can vicariously experience all of that awe-struck joy and wonder? You only fall in love for the first time once, after all, and this creates a world in which the first time you experience this all-consuming emotion is also the only time. You wander into this amazing place, all innocence, and you are thrilled and delighted – and then you never have to leave again. What could be more perfect than that?

Okay, who here has witnessed somebody they’re close to fall in love for the second (or third or fourth) time? And – and I’m aware that not everybody does this – who’s also seen them perform this amazing feat of selective memory, where suddenly their past relationships no longer really “count”? Oh, sure, they’ll say, we had some good times, it was fun while it lasted, but it was never really all that – I always knew something was missing. And now I’ve found it, because this – this – is the real thing.

Who’s seen that repeated over and over again through a cycle of partners?

Because watching that happen? That’s the kind of feeling this trope gives me. I want to be happy that this kind of “mine is a love that I’ve never yet loved” tabula rasa brings happiness to people, but – I can’t. It kind of depresses me, if I’m honest. I’m more a believer in there being A One (or more than one One!) than there being The One, but I wasn’t always, and even when I wasn’t I’ve always kind of thought – so what if somebody’s not The One? Do they have to be secondhand? Even in Fantasyland, is it so important that every single other relationship a person has before they meet The One be denigrated like this? Even stories about a person loving again after they’ve lost a partner to death suffer from this kind of “it was never like this before, this person is touching a part of me that has never been touched” thing, bar a very rare few.

There are exceptions to this, of course. I’m desperate to get my hands on A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant, which unfortunately is only out in print, but features a courtesan heroine who actually enjoys sex, even before she meets the hero. I recently read a pretty damned excellent book by Molly O’Keefe called Can’t Buy Me Love, whose hero and heroine are many things, but untouched ain’t one. In LGBT-ish fiction, and incidentally also one of the “very rare few” widower-whose-previous-relationship-meant-quite-a-bloody-lot books, Deirdre Knight’s Butterfly Tattoo has two people loving again without discounting their prior experience. And the hero’s bisexual. Right on.

So that’s Virginal (Emotionally and Physically) Heroines (with the occasional Hero). Next up, I…haven’t actually decided what I’m covering yet! Enjoy the mystery.

Further reading:

• Recap: Virgin Heroines in Harlequin Presents
• Virginity as Shorthand: the virgin and the playboy strike again (ClitLit)
  
• Virginity Cliches In Romance (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books)

1. Anybody ever saying this sentence out loud is required by law to finish it up with a single emo tear.

I’ve been weirdly obsessed with romance novels for about the past two years. I read my first one a lot longer ago than that – I abducted and read, over a period of about three weeks, a romance with a name I can’t remember about a Japanese lady falling in love with an American man just after World War II during my breaks in volunteering at a nursing home – but I didn’t really think all that much about them for a while afterwards. Then I stumbled upon Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and started following it because, damn, those ladies are hilarious, and from there started following Dear Author as well, who focus on snark a little less (although they can also be pretty funny) but who are nevertheless thoughtful and insightful in their reviews. For a long time, I was an avid follower of the romance industry without ever actually having picked up more than two romances.

And then I got a Kindle for Christmas.

You guys, for the reluctant obsessive, ebook readers are poison in super-convenient button-clicky packaging. Thanks to its extreme user-friendliness and the large number of freebooks available on the Amazon website (in case anybody is worried that I’m being paid for advertising, the wireless keeps breaking and sometimes the thing refuses to charge) I have something like one hundred romance novels on my Kindle now – a conservative estimate, not taking into account non-category romances and books debatably qualified for the title. I can’t stop reading them, and I can’t stop talking about them; I am fascinated by romance novels, in spite of the fact that more often than not picking one up guarantees that I will spend half the book with my jaw clenched to the point of pain. It’s a guilty pleasure, if by “pleasure” you mean “bafflement-inducing” and “guilty” you mean “thing that I am liable to be judged for”.

So what brings me to all the jaw-clenching? Well, I’ve been a reader ever since I was a kid – I’ve tried pretty much every genre of fiction, from fantasy to crime to sci-fi to sci-fi fantasy crime – and category romance is, without question, the most formulaic genre I have ever come across. It’s baffling. I mean, every genre has its stock characters and tropes, but while there are things that crop up a lot in, say, fantasy, as far as I can see the only thing really required to write a fantasy novel is the strong enough conviction that what you’re writing is fantasy. Write a category romance, and your story is pretty much plotted out for you. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the submission guidelines for Mills and Boon Modern Romance (the UK version of Harlequin Presents):

Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations…When the hero strides into the story he’s a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what – and who – he wants and he isn’t used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity, and he will do anything to make the heroine his. Though she may be shy and vulnerable, she’s also plucky and determined to challenge his arrogant pursuit.

Modern Romance explores emotional themes that are universal. These should be played out as part of highly-charged conflicts that are underpinned by blistering sexual anticipation and released as passionate lovemaking…

Got that? So, your story has to be somewhere “exclusive and jet-set” (what does “jet-set” actually mean in this context? I sort of expect the entire thing to be set in the Business Class lounge at Stansted) and your hero needs to be a Romance Novel Hero, you know, hot and alpha and, well, willing to be kind of creepy if he thinks it’ll help. (Bonus points if he’s so manly that his manliness bursts out of the cover – for reference, please see the pictured-below edition of The Very Virile Viking, one of the most beautifully alliteratively-titled works of romance that I have ever come across.) And your heroine needs to challenge him but also be vulnerable to him. And they need to clash and eventually express that clash through a lot of hot sex.

Yes, there are a lot of variations you can play out on that theme – which I suspect is why publishers like Mills and Boon are a long way away from getting stale – but ultimately this frame is pretty limiting, and it makes it easier to see why romance novels are stereotyped as all the same. And this moulding of the romance novel storyline doesn’t stop with the publishing guidelines; the romance novel review websites I follow do downgrade books that fail to deliver on agreed-upon “romance trademarks”, although in fairness the only one that seems to need strict adherence is that of the HEA (that’s Happily Ever After, to those of you who use their time much more wisely than I do). Even that strikes me as strange, because while I can understand it as a trend – if, as common theory purports, romance novels are wish fulfilment fantasies, why wouldn’t they have a happy ending? – I can’t wrap my head around it as the thing which makes a romance novel romantic. More on that later.

Which brings me, finally, to this: Why do I think it useful to subject romance novels to feminist analysis? Aren’t they just, as a friend of mine once put it, “granny porn”? Is there any mileage in analysing such an outdated form of trashy entertainment from a feminist perspective?

I obviously think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And here’s why: most romance novel writers are women, writing for a female audience. I’ve read some (very good) romance novels written by men geared towards women, but only a very few, and they tend to focus on gay male couplings – in other words, not part of the main body of mainstream romance publishing. (LGBT people in romance novels is a whole ‘nother article.) More troubling is that most of the flaws and foibles of romance tropes that persist even today – virginal women, marriage and babies or nothing, and the time-honoured classic of “forced seduction” – are overwhelmingly shrugged off as “it’s just wish fulfilment”.

Is it?

As a lifelong avid reader, I’m no stranger to escaping into a good book. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who don’t really want a relationship in which the man takes charge, sweeps the lady off her feet, and loves her with a love that’s never been loved before until her resolve melts into baby-making funtimes, but can still get into a traditional romance plotline just for kicks. But is this still (or has it ever been) so overpoweringly The Female Fantasy that it’s the go-to, the default, the only world a romance fan wants to escape into? Why are these elements so built into “women’s” fiction? And what, in the end, does that tell us about the cultural narrative that has been built around us?

Those are the questions I want to answer; they’re the main thing going around in my head every time I pick up a new romance, and they are what keeps me reading whenever I finish one that has made me want to drill a hole through my skull. (Which isn’t all of them! Some are quite good. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about them.)

To get us started, though, over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a rundown of what I think are the five most central tropes or stock characters in romance novels. It’s going to be difficult to whittle the list down that far, but I’ll power through it. Honest. I don’t really need this university education.

Over the course of the series, I’ll look at the trope itself, where, when and how it shows up in different genres, and how I think it’s been adapted for the modern romance novel, because if there’s another thing that seems to be true of romance? It’s that they never throw anything away. I…am no one to judge on that, as anybody who’s seen my living space will be able to attest, but there’s an impressive level of trope-hoarding that goes on around here, and I’m going to show you why. I’ll also be probing a bit into what that means for romance storylines as a whole.

So stay tuned for Instalment One, which is going to be the aforementioned Virginal Heroine! Are you excited? I’m excited.

See you then!

• Rei (not to be confused with Rai, who writes our Gamer Diary!) is a small but strident university student who is from London but primarily based in Cambridgeshire, except for when she lives in Japan. She is reluctantly obsessed with romance novels, and is starting to think that it is they who are addicted to her; she also likes general reading, general writing, martial arts and acting in pantomimes. In her spare time, she tries to come up with things to do in her spare time. She is often spotted hanging around the tea-and-coffee-making facilities, looking impatient. And we are very pleased and proud to welcome her to Team BadRep!