When you think of a romance fan, what type of person comes to mind? Perhaps it’s a woman dragging her boyfriend to a “chick flick” he begrudgingly agreed to, or a woman home alone watching romcoms on repeat while lamenting her lack of luck in real life. Maybe you think of the more recent archetype of a BookTok influencer, shamelessly posting smutty excerpts from her favorite romance novels, or a K-drama addict fangirling over clips where the main couple’s hands are about to brush. For the most part, the prototypical romance fan is a woman with “childish” tendencies, a misogynist assumption that rarely gets challenged on social media.
I am a romance fan who doesn’t fit any of these descriptions. The idea of being in a relationship, especially with a man, disgusts me. I actively shun conversations about romantic pursuits. If I get the feeling someone is romantically interested in me, I practically try to beat them away with a stick. If I were a character in a romance, I’d be the best friend doomed to become a spinster, despite all the guys the lead tries to set me up with. That is, until another not-as-hot-as-the-male-lead-but-cute-enough guy is ready and willing to put up with my frigid nature. He proposes to me at my best friend’s wedding, and we live happily ever after. Yay!
…This all sounds so cliché, degrading, painfully heterosexual, and yet, I am inexplicably drawn to the genre. What is it that keeps me coming back?
In 2008, Netflix began streaming at no extra cost to its physical rental service subscribers, my parents being one of them. We downloaded the Netflix app on the Wii, and my offerings expanded to everything labeled under “kids.” Netflix’s sorting at the time grouped most anime under “kids.” This included shows like Ouran High School Host Club, which isn’t necessarily for adults, but for an 8 year old… questionable.
However, the premise intrigued me. An androgynous girl as the lead? And she disguises herself as a man? I knew this was the show I was waiting for. Mulan was one of my favorite movies growing up, and this sounded like some alternate version of that. Instead of going to war, Haruhi has to pay off her debt (so, sort of the same thing). Eventually, she gets closer to the other members of the club and a few of them even harbor feelings for her! Even though Haruhi had a casual attitude towards gender presentation, she was still able to find friendship and love, and that hit hard. The mousy girl didn’t need to become a feminine beauty, she was allowed to just be. As a child who didn’t identify with femininity, Haruhi reflected how I was. (I even cut my hair in an attempt to copy her style, but it ended up really poofy instead.) Though I didn’t have a label for it then, this was one of the first times I was really aware that my gender wasn’t exactly female.
Fast forward to now, and I’d wager I spend more than a fourth of my TV and film time watching romances. Classic screwball comedy, 2000s rom coms, Asian romance dramas, even things not explicitly labeled as romance. If it has a strong romantic element, my interest is immediately piqued. As a not-straight, not-cis person, I find so much to love about the genre. At its best, romance provides me with emotional, women-centric stories that not only provide an idealized view of reality, but negotiates with reality as well.
My experience viewing romance is best described by José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification: “To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.” In other words, even though I am not being directly represented on the screen, somehow a straight urban middle class romance is “representing” me. The queer potential of romance (even in non-queer stories) is often overlooked. But take a look at any online fandom for long-running soap operas and teen dramas, and they are filled with women and queer people. The heightened emotionality appeals to the queer sensibilities of camp, parody, and kitsch.
These sensibilities are especially highlighted in the films Down With Love (2003, dir. Peyton Reed) and Átame! (known in English as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1989, dir. Pedro Almodóvar). Both films offer critiques of heterosexuality: Down With Love focusing on courtship rituals, and Atame! on marriage. They revel in perfectly color-coded and impeccably dressed sets, exemplifying the fantasy of romance in film.
Down With Love parodies Doris Day and Rock Hudson sex comedies with a post-feminist twist, highlighting just how little dating standards and gender roles have changed since the 1960s. Here, love is a highly gendered performance, where neither side is totally honest to each other. Barbara Novack (Renée Zellweger) and Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) are not the type to settle down and get married. For Barbara, this means completely cutting men out of her life, detailed in her new book, the titular Down With Love. This book explodes in popularity, causing swathes of American women to leave their relationships and seek careers. The infamous playboy Catcher Block is part of the men affected by this book, and in his dejected state, he runs into Barbara. Realizing they never met face-to-face, Catcher creates the identity of Zip Martin, a soft-spoken astronaut and wholesome Southern loverboy (made extra hilarious with McGregor’s silly accent). Barbara is surprised to meet a man that doesn’t scorn her for her book, and the two unwittingly fall in love. Down With Love is incredibly playful, working in the constraints of the time period it is paying homage to. Even in a prudish society, sex is constantly talked about, tiptoed around, and gestured towards, so much so that even relatively tame 1960s romcoms were dubbed “sex comedies.” The advice in the book Down With Love could easily be spouted by a TikTok pop-feminist influencer today – such as a section on how to condition yourself to associate sex with chocolate as a way to remove the need for male sexual partners (“decenter men,” anyone?). Down With Love’s phone call scene takes it as far as it can go short of the characters shown having sex. In this scene, the phone call is shown with a split screen like the phone calls in Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back. Instead of the separator being static, it shifts positions as the characters go about their activities while on call, leading to various visual gags. It highlights that, for all the posturing of innocent romance, there is only one thing on the characters’ (and audiences’) minds. By the end of the film, Catcher is subordinate to Barbara, the CEO of her own magazine. He eagerly proposes to her, excited for a relationship where he is not in power. This, too, is a fantasy. The film’s sardonic undercurrent never lets up, with the pair getting Las Vegas married and vowing to end the battle of the sexes with their new book, Here’s to Love.
Átame! blends romcom and horror to provide a sharp commentary on heterosexual institutions – after all, “it’s hard to tell them apart,” as one of the characters says. Ricky (Antonio Banderas) is released from a psychiatric hospital and kidnaps his favorite actress Marina (Victoria Abril), convinced that he can make her fall in love with him. Over the course of the film, we see their power struggle and realize that they are, in a way, already married. Even though Ricky seems to have a proclivity to violence, he still makes sure to get Marina’s medication and improve the comfort of the tape and ropes used to bind her, and even makes food and fixes appliances around her apartment. Despite these considerations for her comfort, it does not change her physical reality. Much like how many wives fade into being merely an accessory for their husbands, she is still unable to move and speak when he is gone. To Marina’s credit, she does try to escape multiple times. On the one occasion she is allowed outside, she even tries to tell her doctor she needs help. Unfortunately, her doctor is utterly charmed by Ricky, and chides Marina for her drug-addled past instead, reflecting how women face the brunt of the blame for marital issues. Eventually, because this is a romcom, Marina falls in love with Ricky after he goes through a particularly rough night when getting her medicine. Solidifying how much he truly cares for her, they share a lengthy night of passion. It is here that the power dynamic between them seems to truly shift. Marina is in control, literally switching to a position above Ricky, and she tells Ricky what she wants from him while he meekly follows. (Notably, Átame! was integral to the creation of the NC-17 rating, which it received not for its climactic sex scene, but for its comparatively mild representation of female masturbation.) In a later scene, Ricky is about to leave the apartment without binding her, and Marina insists he do, fearing herself that she may escape. This is an analogue to how many women negotiate within their own circumstances. Her life as an ex-drug addict porn star turned B-movie actress is already so troubled and stigmatized, Ricky may be the only option. Rather than continue with her precarious career under a boss who sexually harasses her, why not find some stability with her kidnapper who is madly in love with her and also knows many trades (and also happens to be Antonio Banderas)? In classic romom fashion, the film ends with them driving off into the horizon. Marina is crying while Ricky and her sister (Loles León) sing along to “Resitiré!”, seemingly commenting on Marina’s own failure to resist. The credits roll to a rather horrific sounding piece by Ennio Morricone. Marriage is a prison, but men are not the ones being punished.
With slews of social media posts complaining about the lack of deep female characters and women-focused stories, I am left wondering – though there’s no accounting for taste – why more people don’t try getting into romance stories. When I watch a romance, I’m really all in for the female characters. Romance is perhaps the only genre that requires the female characters to be agents in the story in order to be good, hence why the genre is so gendered as something “for women.” In a world where most media is made for audiences assumed to be straight, white men, romance is one of the few spaces where female creatives and perspectives are prioritized, and women are a worthy demographic to consider.
I frequently see the criticism that mainstream romance stories limit women’s experiences to relationships with men, but in a misogynist society, is this not a reflection of how most women navigate the world? I find it much more interesting to see how women negotiate within their realities. It’s a space to explore exactly what being a woman and forming relationships with men means. For instance, I recently watched the K-drama Love to Hate You, and though it never used the word “feminist” (an extremely controversial word in South Korea), I saw many feminist ideas in it. It ends with the female lead rejecting marriage and children with the male lead, and this doesn’t affect his desire to be with her. Romantic K-drama is criticized for its idealized representations of men when Korean men are notoriously sexist, accused of being some soft power ploy to keep women in their place, but do these critics know how many female writers and directors are involved in K-drama? How is this ending encouraging women to settle down and have children? Asian pop culture in general is particularly driven by women’s media (see also: shōjo manga, Thai BL, and boy groups). I find it hard to believe these critics even know anything beyond a few pictures they see scrolling through Netflix, relying on some mix of orientalist fear and sexism instead.
This is not to say romance (or any women-driven media) is free from bigotry. Queer and non-white people still struggle to be heard, and the stories are bound to reflect this. Queer romances and romances involving interracial couples and non-white leads are often used as more of a surprise (and marketing tag). But at the same time, I do not think fiction, especially fiction as fantastical as romance, needs to be viewed so pedagogically. When I see sentiments that women who read and watch romance are too stupid for something “good,” equated to “porn addicts,” and personally setting back feminism for their tastes in casual fiction, I find it hard to believe most of these critiques are coming from a place of good faith and genuine engagement with the genre rather than paternalistic concern. It is precisely due to these attitudes that romance, one of the pillars of genre fiction, fails to be respected in the same way as crime, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Romance audiences are continually undervalued and disparaged, when the genre itself features the most insight to women’s status and gender politics overall. Romance helps hold a mirror to our own ideas surrounding friends, family, sex, and marriage, as well as indulging in our own fantasies about what a world truly moved by love can look like.
