what makes readers see behavior as negative?

[deborah]

Y'all have seen The Popular Romance Project, right?

Popular romance sells. And it reveals deep truths about people and cultures, fantasies and fears. The statistics are staggering: According to the Romance Writers of America, romance fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales in 2008, and romance was the top-performing category on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.


The Popular Romance Project will explore the fascinating, often contradictory origins and influences of popular romance as told in novels, films, comics, advice books, songs, and internet fan fiction, taking a global perspective—while looking back across time as far as the ancient Greeks.

I'm thrilled that I got the opportunity to participate. My post "Hero or Stalker?" addresses some of the questions I've been having watching students respond to the behavior of male love interest in young adult romance. I've been realizing as I teach how much the reading transaction is influenced by the reader's genre expectations, and how much of those themselves are influenced by genre in a given place and time. My post explores this by looking at Margaret Mahy's The Changeover and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. If you are interested, come and contribute to the conversation!

Comments

Re: This reflects a serious double-bind in real life too.

[fox1013]

What I'm confused about in your comment is the way in which you appear to be moving goalposts without realizing it. You appear to be saying that while of course in real life these behaviors aren't on the same continuum, in fiction they are. And that's simply not true. Aside from a few extremes, behavior like that isn't held up as appealing in fiction.

When you look at fiction on a meta level, the reason stories work is that the two precise characters chosen click in some way that makes for an interesting narrative. We don't hear about the 40 other girls who realized Edward was watching them sleep and either pressed charges or moved away; they don't fulfill the extratextual demands of a love story. Edward may have felt the same way about all of them, but it doesn't matter; the very concept of fiction mandates that the two characters at the forefront will be the ones to form that connection.

It's not sexual attractiveness that determines whether behavior is creepy; someone very attractive can be super creepy. As Deborah said multiple times, the constructs of fiction allow for implied consent. Because, as you say, there is no author in real life, the only way to achieve consent in life is to actually discuss and negotiate it. This is not a slippery slope.