Romance but not *that* romance
Or...why caveating dark romance in every social media conversation about romance is likely doing the opposite of what's intended
Yesterday I made a fairly innocuous post about not worrying about teens reading romance in response to a post by Dr. Candice Nicole about how research indicates "young men expect sex to be pleasurable, whereas young women hope sex will be pleasurable. What would be a way to change that?"
What a great point to flag and question to ask. I quoted the thread saying:
This is why I will never agree with the worry about teens reading romance novels. For a lot of girls and women, romance novels are the first time they are exposed to the idea that physical intimacy can and should be enjoyable, pleasurable, equitable, respectful and, importantly, consensual.
It's Threads. I wasn't trying to unpack the nuance of consent in a quick post, merely attempting to highlight that romance novels aren't just a form of escapist reading but have value like any piece of fiction, in exposing someone to concepts that they might not be experiencing or hearing in their lives.
Something happened in the replies to my post that I found fascinating. And I'm not at all judging or saying folks are wrong for these responses. Merely that I found it compelling, as I've witnessed this elsewhere, the need to caveat that the recommendation or allowance of romance reading doesn't include Dark Romance.
I don't feel the need to defend my wording because it's short format, I was speaking of romance broadly and it's impossible to caveat every possible nuance in a statement like "the worry about teens reading romance novels".
Heather Bryant
But I'm deeply curious about what the actual impact is of this constant need to call out Dark Romance as the exception to what is safe or okay to read and how we can strike the balance of making sure readers are informed while not creating an appealing act of defiance for young readers, the infantilization of women as readers and—dangerously—a target on a subgenre and a weak spot for attacking the Romance genre as a whole.
Creating a Problem
You can manufacture problems. It's not hard. Take a concern that is, on its face, a reasonable concern.
Dark Romances are complicated depictions of the nuance of human desire, sexuality, relationship dynamics and mental health and require a level of literacy and maturity to fully process and contextualize.
Associate that concern with a vulnerable population (without empirical evidence that it's something that actually affects that population at a significant scale).
Therefore we should be careful about making it easily accessible to kids and impressionable or vulnerable women.
Mention it constantly even when it's not the direct topic.
Yes, reading romance is great, but Dark Romance is different...
Amplify the possibility of potential exposure lurking everywhere.
It's often packaged as seemingly innocuous book with an illustrated cover but it's not innocuous.
Don't forget the bad-faith reception so common on social media.
You didn't say you disapprove of it, so you must think it's perfectly fine!
So you preemptively distance yourself from that potential response.
I'm not saying Dark Romance is bad, but I worry about...
Throw in some latent, internalized shame or insecurity about reading romance at all.
I read romance, but not that romance [which is much more taboo and scandalous].
Add in true existential threats that have people legitimately worried about the bigger picture.
They're banning books and especially books that depict relationships and sexuality.
Multiply it by the scale of internet communities and you have what feels like a Big Problem.
Creating Targets
It's completely understandable as to why readers and authors feel the need to publicly disclose their Concern about Dark Romance when you consider the various multiplying factors.
Mainstreaming the reading of romance as not being something shameful or a larger statement about a person's propriety is still a fairly recent thing. For many readers, it's still a thing. I think it's fair to say there is still a lot of folks are only just coming into their comfort with disclosing their reading of romance without hedging it as "silly" or not real reading. And that will always be a thing for readers as they traverse the personal growth of confidence in their selves and what they like or don't like.
At the same time, no matter how comfortable readers get, we still very much live in a world in which things women like are going to be mocked and twisted. To talk about reading romance, especially online, is to still put a target on oneself for the troll who will appear in the replies with condemnation.
What's truly dangerous about the frequent rhetorical distancing of Dark Romance as something dangerous is that it creates an entry point, not just to the trolls, but to the real live book banners and purity culture crusaders who will use the impression of a Big Problem, to come after not just Dark Romance, but the larger Romance genre itself.
Those folks do not care about the nuance. They do not care about the actual data and they do not care about whether something is a concern that can be handled at the level of discourse or an actual problem in need of a rules and regulations solution. They care about perception. They care about quotes they can twist.
They care about being able to take "these books are complicated" and turning it into "these books shouldn't be allowed at all."
Streisanding Taboo
Every time it's explicitly mentioned that Dark Romance isn't appropriate for young readers, guess what suddenly looks super appealing to the young reader who is being a young person naturally pushing boundaries and seeking markers of their own maturity?
In the history of getting teenagers to show restraint, saying they aren't mature enough probably has the highest fail rate for getting them to not do the thing.
If the goal is young readers to not seek out out books they may not be prepared to fully contextualize (and yes, I said "may not be prepared" not "aren't prepared" but that's a whole other conversation to have), we have to be intentional about how we talk about Dark Romance.
I don't know that constantly mentioning with a tone of concern and without the nuance that's difficult on social media, is the way to go about it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about the complexities of Dark Romance at all. We absolutely need to be. But I don't know that we're going about this the right way. And I don't know that the nature of character-limited social media replies without nuance is the forum for it.
The scale of Dark Romance
If the mentions of Dark Romance were to be the sole source of data on how many Dark Romance books are out there, one might be led to believe that it's a significant percentage of all romance books.
Structured data here is not really accessible, but anecdotal data suggests that dark romance is still a small subset of the romance genre.
On Reddit, the Dark Romance forum is 42,000 redditors while the Romance Books forum is 351,000 redditors. Of course there is overlap and there's no way to measure lurkers who don't join the sub but simply look it up. This is just one data point but it's a data point about the likely most-engaged readers who care enough about a thing to join a community about it.
In publishing overall, there are hundreds of thousands of books published each year. Likely millions if we were able to count all the self-published titles as well. So what are the actual odds of Dark Romances ending up in the hands of a reader who is vulnerable to not fully understanding and contextualizing what they read? I don't know that it's as high as we are creating the impression it is.
One of the reasons I think that is—and I say this with affection—we romance readers are weird. We read far more books that most other genres. We tend to be voracious. We go from one book to the next easily and pretty quickly. Those of us who read voraciously also tend to talk more about it. There is an engagement with the act of reading that I think is unique in books. There's a reason the genre is so large and such a significant percentage of books sold.
We read a lot. We talk about what we read frequently. We seek out recommendations frequently. Then we read more.
And what is easy to do when you are deeply engaged with something? Assume or perceive a similar level of engagement by others.
Guess who's probably not reading as many books as a Romance Reader? The folks everyone is worried about.
The Irony
It's me. I wrote a whole defense of talking about a subgenre I don't read that much of unless you count things that are Dark but not labelled Dark. So, I'm not a fervent reader and even I feel compelled to say maybe we should pause and think about how we talk about it.
I don't worry about it as much because I was that vulnerable teenager who read romance books. Romance books were where I got to see relationships that, while not necessarily healthy by 2020s standards, were still leagues ahead of what I was witnessing in real life.
I don't think this is survivorship bias speaking because people, and I'm including teenagers in this, are capable of a lot more understanding than we sometimes remember. There are a lot of young readers living far more dark circumstances than some of the adults who read Dark Romance for entertainment. The world is complicated and imperfect.
There are nearly 2,000 books on the shelves in my office and thousands more on my device. Across all kinds of genres. I love books and I'm a voracious reader by any standard. And yet, I know that books are not our only source of reference for what is normal or acceptable in life.
I worry about anything that potentially adds shame, infantilizes readers, generalizes about what people can and can't handle and creates opportunity for those who hate books to weaponize our own conversations about books.
Let's keep talking about books, but books matter because words matter, so let's also think about how we talk about books. Especially the ones we're not comfortable with.
Why don't I seek out Dark Romance?
The main reason I don't read it is because there is not (yet) enough nuance in the marketing and discussions about it that I've seen for me to find the ones I want to read. Maybe I'm missing this because I'm not immersed in the active reader community. There is no clear definition of what Dark Romance is or is not. And I don't see a distinction made between what I think are two very different types of dark romance.
I think there is Dark Ship Romance and Dark World Romance.
Dark Ship Romance is I suspect what most people are talking about when they say "Think of the Children!", because the concern is about normalizing or appearing to condemn unhealthy relationship dynamics. These are the stories where the dark actions occur between the MCs, either intentionally or unintentionally as a result of their character and mental health pathology. These books can contain violence and abuse between the main characters.
Dark World Romance is the space in which the MCs inhabit a dark world and can experience all manner of dark acts and situations but it's not perpetrated against them by the other main character or if so, it overlaps with the unintentional part of the Dark Ship Romance. Frankly, it's arguable that a lot of older (and even contemporary) romances with MCs, particularly the female lead, experiencing all manners of assault, abduction, stalking, and other events and comes across as treating those events as to be expected for women are Dark World Romances.
For myself, I'm not interested in the first type but if the second is identifiable as such, I'll read it.