My Irony Meter Runs Amok

After skipping last week's entry due to a combination of laziness and bummed-outed-ness (because I wasn't at the RWA conference in Atlanta like almost everyone in the romance writing world), I'm pumped up for this week's entry. You see, I've been reading posts in the romance blogosphere the past few days that are seemingly unrelated but have tripped my irony meter right off the scale.
The first (though the most recent, chronologically speaking) comes from author Shana Galen/Shane Bolks on Jaunty Quills, excerpted below:

I guess I got my first taste of the literary scorn for genre fiction when I signed up for a novel-writing class after I finished my first book. The instructor read our first submissions, and during the second class, she assigned everyone outside reading. Most of my classmates had to read books on character, dialogue, plot. I was told to read books on feminist theory.

Apparently it wasn’t so much plot or point of view that I needed help with (though I certainly could have used help on both!). The instructor was more concerned with her stereotype that romance novels shows women as weak creatures who need a man to save them.

Fortunately, I ignored her advice and kept writing romance because, for me, writing a romance novel is a feminist statement.

The second is the kerfuffle over a letter written to Romance Writer's Report (the RWA's magazine) by Jan Butler essentially castigating RWA for allowing books portraying "alternative" relationships (e.g., homosexual, bisexual, polyamorous) to be published under the banner of "romance". I won't bore you by reproducing the letter either in full or in part here, but if you want the gist of it, I suggest you read the excerpt on Kate Rothwell's blog. You can also read a host of comments in response to the original letter, as well as Ms. Butler's own defense of her position, in both Kate's blog and on Smart Bitches.

Now, I'm sure at this point, you're wondering what connects these two topics in my pitiful little mind.

In a nutshell, it's this: romance, however varied its forms and permutations, can't please either the left or the right. To the highbrows on the educated left, romance is too conservative. It's anti-feminist and demeaning to women. (The fact that most romances portray women's sexuality in healthy and empowering ways seems to have escaped their notice.) But then to the right, romance is equally contemptible for being too progressive. "Perversions" aside, there's too much sex and, by extension, too much feminine empowerment, and conservatives long for the days of the sweet love stories in which the hero and heroine didn't consummate their relationship until after they were married and then only in the most euphemistic of terms. (When were those days, again? I remember reading a few Harlequins of this variety when I first started reading romance in the late 70s, but I pretty quickly graduated from those tame things to Bertrice Small and the like. The hotter the sex, the hotter the romance!)

Last week, I heard this quote from Aldous Huxley:

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

And my first thought was, "Damn, I'm never going to be an intellectual!"

And even though I am happily plugging away on writing my own historical romance novel and enjoying (almost) every second of it, I am not immune to what I perceive as the scorn in which romance is viewed in the wider world. Despite the fact that romance is an incredibly popular genre and that I read and enjoy it myself, I feel compelled to apologize for writing something so trivial and, well, non-literary. I don't fool myself that I'm writing the Great American Novel, but then I wonder: who's to say the Great American Novel can't be a romance? Not to say that it would be mine, mind you!

But why the hell not?

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, if you'd like to read about RWA Nationals from a first-timer, check out my critique partner Lacey Kaye's blog. Her take on the conference is both informative and hilarious.