Think romance novels are trash? That's a stereotype — one that's not necessarily true.
In college during summer and holiday breaks, I worked in a mall bookstore.
Our most popular promotion was a summer one: buy two books, get one free. Romance readers loved it. One afternoon, an older woman filled up a milk crate with books and told me as she paid that it was her "favorite day of the year."
Our stockroom guy, who liked parachute pants, muttered "loser" when she left. I wasn't surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if someone said it to me today, nearly 20 years later. Romance novels have been labeled as bad, stupid, insipid, and for "losers" since long before parachute pants existed.
Unfairly, romance novels are still pushed aside as "mommy porn" or the default favorite of lonely, cat-laden spinsters.
In reality, romance novels made up 23% of the U.S. fiction market in 2016 — proof that they deserve more credit than they get.
Romance gets trashed, says Sarah Wendell, co-founder and mastermind of Smart Bitches Trashy Books, because "it traffics in emotion and empathy and personal connection and values happiness."
It's also a business run by women that sells to women. The Nielsen Romance Buyer Survey has consistently tracked women as making up more than 80% of romance-novel buyers. "It is mostly women in publishing houses that work in the romance genre. It's women who are reading it. We are telling our stories to ourselves," she says.
That said, the genre isn't without its problems.
Ironically, romance novels are incredibly diverse in subject and not so much in substance. Subgenres abound: from pregnancy romances to Amish romances to shape shifter romances to male/male romances written for heterosexual women to BSDM books that make "Fifty Shades of Grey" look tame.
But when it comes to people, traditional romance publishing, like the rest of publishing, isn't as diverse as the general population (only 7.8% of books published by romance publishers in 2016 were written by people of color), but romance writers were also among the "earliest to figure out how to make self publishing work and form small group publishing enterprises to publish their stories," Wendell says. "When women of color and from other marginalized communities weren't reaching readers through traditional publishers, they made their own careers and made their own enterprises and connected with other readers."
Popular coverage doesn't often embrace the more modern, diverse side of romance novels, though, and still leans heavily into the "bodice rippers" stereotype, even though that style of romance largely fell out of popularity in the 1970s. The criticism of romance fiction often doesn't line up with the reality. "You just come back to 'it's s**t fiction because women read it,' and the people who condemn it very seldom read it themselves," says John Market, author of "Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry 1940 to Present."
When The New York Times Book Review dedicated its cover to romance novels in September 2017, for example, they gave the assignment to Robert Gotlieb, an 87-year-old white man. The results are about what you'd expect.
But in February 2018, the Times launched a romance column — indicating that, perhaps, the genre is finally being taken seriously.
Still, I don't expect it to be the norm. As long as women are treated as though their greatest value is still determined by what their bodies can provide for men, books written for and by women will be treated like dirt too.
"If those attitudes are there about the woman's place as a sexual object, then we've got a long way to go," Market says. "Since the books are about women's sexuality and focuses on the sexual aspect and emotions revolving around love, it tends to be put down as fluff."
This article was originally published by The Lily, a publication of The Washington Post, and is reprinted here with permission.
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
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Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.