Unrealistic Expectations?

One of the primary feminist complaints about pornography is that is promotes unrealistic expectations. This point has already come up on The Visitors’ Center here. I’ve also heard people jokingly suggest that romance novels play a parallel role, encouraging women to have unrealistic expectations that ordinary men can’t live up to. I’d never heard this argued seriously, though, until I read this fascinating post about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

The comments in particular blew me away:

2)Edward is completely unrealistic.
The reason that so many teenage girls have a crush on Edward is the same reason he is an unrealistic representation of men. He constantly wants to know what Bella is thinking and feeling and he’s so completely emotionally in tune with her that he always says just the right things to her without her ever having to help him out. They never have to work at their communication. They never have to work at anything. It seems to me that young women tend to have too much of an idealized image of relationships anyway. Do they really need something to feed their idea that they can have a relationship that will completely fulfill all their emotional needs?

and

I have constantly heard of boyfriends who are utterly bewildered about their girlfriends’ obsession with Edward. My painting teacher last semester said that when she was at Costco, she saw a group of young men walk over to a stack of Twilight books and begin discussing how their girlfriends were all obsessed with the books. She said as they walked away, one of them said, “What’s Edward got that we don’t have?” It’s kind of a funny story, but if you do a mental reversal of roles here, it doesn’t seem as funny. Imagine a group of girls standing near a stack of Lara Croft films at Costco, looking at each other in confusion and saying the same thing.

and

One evening my roommate came into the living room and said, “What page are you on?” I said, “page ##.” She said, “I just finished that part, and Katherine, no man is ever going to love us that way. This is why I hate boys.”

and especially

I agree about Edward being the absolute fantasy of a man for Mormon teenagers. He’s dangerous (a vampire!) but not really (he’s good!). He is hot but doesn’t care. He’s rich but doesn’t care and doesn’t have to work for it. He is powerful but is helpless before Bella’s charms after only a glimpse of her. He is attentive and loyal and thinks only of her. He is, in a word, perfect, and he bears about as much resemblance to a real person as an airbrushed Pamela Anderson. I was talking to a married friend who was shocked by how much she loved them. I get passionate and obsessed with works of fiction all the time and have learned to enjoy it and let it go when I’m done, but this was the first time it happened to my friend. She read them in part because she was having a hard time with her husband, and, to say the least, they didn’t help.

“Am I being unfair in comparing him to Edward?”
“Are you kidding? Yes.”

It is fantasy romance fiction, and if anyone does take it seriously as a model for how a relationship should work, I think that’s as damaging to one’s psyche as looking at movie porn and expecting real life relationships to resemble those.

Regardless of what you think of the Twilight series, these comments seem to indicate pretty clearly that it’s possible for romance novels to create (potentially harmful) unrealistic relationship expectations. What I’m wondering is why there’s always such an outcry about the sauce for the gander while we hear almost nothing about the sauce for the goose. I have a few possible theories:

1. Fantasizing about a partner who is superhumanly attentive and thoughtful is more noble than fantasizing about a partner who is superhumanly beautiful.
2. The proportion of men who look at porn is far greater than the proportion of women who read romance novels.
3. It only takes a glance to see what fantasy an erotic image is selling, whereas to discover the same about a novel you have to read a whole book.
4. Many people who condemn porn actually mean for erotic literature to be included since it can’t always be divided so neatly into written vs. visual and especially not into “what men like” vs. “what women like.”

I think the reason is a little bit of all of these, as well as a question of empowerment. If someone can’t tell fantasy from reality — and if merely entertaining a fantasy makes that person incapable of ever being satisfied by reality — then ultimately that person is the one who’s going to suffer and be perpetually unsatisfied. Men and boys (being more empowered) are more likely to say “your unrealistic expectations are your problem” whereas women and girls are encouraged to see their own opinions of themselves as less important than their partner’s opinion of them.

That’s not to suggest that the portrayal of women in stories and the media is unimportant. The public face of women is critical for shaping attitudes, which is why I’ve written a number of posts for the feminist media blog The Hathor Legacy. As in the media in general, I’d like to see a lot more diversity and realism in the erotic arts since the audience is not well served when producers constantly go with the simple, low-risk choice of serving up nothing but the same old same old.

Still, in a specialized genre in which the whole point is to revel in the fantasy of the ideal partner, isn’t the charge “it’s unrealistic” a bit of a ridiculous complaint…?