A friend recently sent me a YouTube series of a reader/reviewer absolutely sending up one of Colleen Hoover’s books. I highly enjoyed the series, and it further cemented my decision to never, ever, ever touch a book by Hoover.
At the tale end of the series, the reviewer made jokes about how the novel’s heroine seemed to be running away from the male lead. Our intrepid protagonist left her apartment and got into a cab after this guy revealed he was effectually manipulating her into loving him.
I believe the YTer was cheering: “Yes, girl, run! That’s right!”
And I couldn’t have agreed more. When someone reveals that they’re deranged enough to commit crimes because they’re angry—even during an understandable period of grief—and then they manipulate you into a relationship with them to assuage their own guilt? It’s time to head for the hills or call the cops or something.
Sadly, the protagonist caught a cab and ran straight into the male lead’s arms. Because of course she did. This is a romance, isn’t it?
It led me to ponder: why are so very many contemporary romance novels actually doubling as horror stories?
Traditional Romance Novels Are Predicated on Female Subjugation and Alpha Males
In the Hoover novel, the heroine instantly forgives the male lead once she “understands” where he’s coming from. This is absolutely not unique to Hoover; in fact, it’s pretty much par for the course in romance novels.
Hoover’s books is a blatant example of it, but other romance novels feature “softer” versions of it. A friend was telling me about a popular couple in Sarah J Maas’s series. The hero comes by important knowledge that affects the heroine’s health. He chooses not to divulge that to her. That is manipulative af, no bones about it. The condition could literally kill this woman, and the hero knows that. And despite knowing that, he simply withholds the information. That is medical abuse, at best.
The way the book frames it, I’m told, makes it seems as though his withholding is “in her best interests.” That should lead us to question things. Is it really in her best interests not to be told about a condition that could kill her? Is it really in her best interests for men to decide what’s in her best interests?
This is a form of paternalism, wherein men are expected to “take care” of women, who are always somehow incompetent. If you’ve read any Victorian literature, this attitude should be very familiar. Women just don’t have the brains to make decisions. Women are too emotional, and therefore they are silly and need to be treated like children. Only men can make rational and logical choices using their big, masculine brains, so women should always defer to the men in their life.
The Idea Women Can “Fix” Men
The idea that women are emotional is also at play in Hoover’s scenario. Paternalism is still present to some degree, because the male lead is manipulating this poor woman. The other part of the equation here is that our heroine is expected to be the custodian of the man’s emotional health. It’s totally fine that he’s a deranged arsonist who nearly killed her because he was (perhaps understandably) angry.
There’s no telling what this man would do if someone broke his heart. Light their house on fire? Maybe he’d actually succeed in killing this girl the second time around. What this guy really needs is therapy, not a romantic relationship—and yet, here we are.
There is a lot of this trope in romance novels. The idea is that the love of a good woman will fix a man who is fucked up in some way or another.
This is particularly apparent in Hoover’s work. Our heroine absolves her love interest of his guilt and any negative feelings he might experience over this situation. She assures him that she loves him, so he doesn’t need to worry. And she forgives him for the horrific injury he’s caused her. In fact, she goes so far as to say that what he did is not just understandable but forgivable.
Again, this idea isn’t unusual. Women are posited as incapable of any kind of rational thought, but they are also expected to be the managers of everyone else’s emotions. In the case of Hoover’s work, this is obvious. Our heroine is soothing her love interest’s feelings, validating them, and uplifting him.
Transferring Men’s Emotions to Women
In this process, men are able to transfer their emotions to women. Men, after all, aren’t supposed to feel anything but anger. In Hoover’s work, the woman becomes the keeper of the man’s emotions. The FMC takes pains to reassure him that all the actions he’s taken are totally understandable. She takes on the emotional burden of feeling for him, allowing him to go back to being that stoic / angry alpha male.
Thus it’s all right that the man’s “romancing” of a woman doesn’t look like romance. Instead, it looks like him heaping all his feelings on her and saying, “Deal with this, because I can’t.” And Hoover positions this as romantic, because he’s having these feelings he can’t possibly deal with because he loves this girl.
The idea that women should be the manager or keeper of men’s emotions is part and parcel of a culture that asks women, first, to be emotionally attuned, and then also asks men to parcel away their emotions and lock them in some deep vault labeled “unmanly shit.” This then allows men to deny that they have feelings. Since women have “all the feelings,” emotions can continue to be “girly.”
This Harms Men and Boys
This leads to the problem of toxic masculinity, where men are only allowed to express themselves via anger. We can see this in Hoover’s male lead, actually. He’s grieving the tragic loss of his mother. Understandably, perhaps, he looks for someone to blame and lands on the heroine’s father. While experiencing heightened emotions around something so fraught is understandable, the male lead acts on his rage and engages in acts of violence that harm other people.
This is not healthy, normal, or sane. As I said before: this guy needs therapy, not a girlfriend. But there’s the deep-seated idea within our culture that the “love of a good woman” will solve all of a man’s problems.
Often, women also end up managing emotions in the sense that they live with abusers. It’s not a stretch to think that Hoover’s male lead, with his propensity toward violence and harm when he’s under duress, would become abusive. He’s already harmed the heroine in more ways than one—emotionally manipulating her, and, yes, physically harming her. So why wouldn’t we imagine that, you know, one day, in a fit of rage, he’ll hit her? It’s not a stretch to imagine him yelling at her. And his stalking and manipulative behaviour suggest he’ll engage in other forms of abuse as well.
Why Do We Think This Kind of Toxicity Is Romantic?
That leads to me to conclude that Hoover’s novel isn’t actually a love story—it’s a horror story. The YT reviewer was right to be cheering for the heroine to book it out of town in the cab. This guy is a nightmare, and if we care about the heroine, she should get far, far away from him.
How is it that so many “romance” stories actually mimic what are often real-life horror stories for women? It, unfortunately, comes back to what women are conditioned to believe as a result of existing in a patriarchal society.
From an early age, girls are trained to think of themselves as more emotional. Emotional reactions are often encouraged in girls—not necessarily negative ones, but positive emotions are certainly encouraged. Girls are also encouraged to be more nurturing. They are encouraged to play with dolls and “care” for them, whereas boys are often discouraged from this kind of play. Domestic play often encourages girls to take on roles as the “wife” or “homemaker.” Boys will take on roles as “fathers” and “breadwinners.”
This type of play often merely mimics what children see in the world around them. The idea that women stay home and take care of others is reinforced in virtually every arena. Even at school, most teachers are female, and they work with children. Especially in elementary school, teachers are engaged, to some degree, in “care taking.” This extends to high school, in some ways. Female teachers often purport that they care deeply about their students and engage in more emotional labor than their male counterparts.
Boys Also Experience Conditioning
Boys are also subjected to ideas about emotional men early on. Many will hear versions of the old adage “boys don’t cry,” while others will witness violence and abuse in their home settings. These attitudes may be imparted to them by media, but also by male relatives. In today’s environment, more young boys are also being exposed to the “manosphere,” which promotes toxic masculinity and misogyny.
Girls, on the other hand, are trained to accept this divide and embrace the idea that they can, should, and will do the majority of emotional labor in almost every relationship they have. In fact, girls are further trained to see “strong” men as more desirable than “weak” men.
This is where the fascination with “alpha males” likely begins. There is some evidence to suggest there may be a biological factor, in that women may prefer men who appear to be good providers. In the wild, a “good provider” was someone physically strong. Males who are violent are more likely to engage in combat—whether with a sabre-tooth tiger or another aggressive male who is seeking to harm children or steal food and so on. So there may be a predisposition for human females to look for mates who can provide this.
Nonetheless, women today say they’re looking for men who can be more emotional—because raising children, especially in modern times, is less about keeping them safe from bears and more about supporting their emotional growth and health.
To be fair, a mate who can support the emotional wellbeing of children has long been an important part of humanity.
What we’re looking at is likely a cultural propensity to favor men who are violent, and, as a result, a culture that fosters a preference for that kind of mate in women.
The Male Gaze in Romance Novels
Thus, although romance novels are largely written by women for women, the male gaze invades. Women are taught to desire violent men, so their wildest fantasies inevitably feature those same men. When they then put pen to page, they write the same kind of men they desire—over and over.
If a romance writer isn’t writing their own desires on the page, then they are likely mimicking what they’ve seen other (successful) writers in the genre do. Thus we end up with the toxic tradition of women falling into the arms of toxic men—even when they should actually be horrified by what those men have done.
There are certainly writers who are working to break this trend. Yet the fact remains: lots of romance novels are actually closer to horror stories, with abusive men being glorified as the pinnacle of romantic love partners.
If you read most of these books with a female gaze—not a male gaze pretending to be feminine by sexualizing and objectifying the male characters—then you would probably see just how close these supposed love stories are to horror stories.
Of course, some people like things that way. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the kind of story that you do. It would help us all immensely, though, if most women admitted they liked these horror stories—not romances.
