Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 151

Patriarchy, the Christian Romance
Novel, and the “Ecosystem of Sex”
In a 1977 Le Monde review of the film Enqu te sur la Sexualit'e
[Inquiry Into Sexuality] by Michele Foucault, a culture’s pervasive shift in
consciousness to an ideal of sexual tolerance is used to find meaning in the film
participant’s varied responses to questions about sex in their lives. The film’s
director, Paolo Pasolini, randomly interviewed people on a beach, ball-playing
children, bored bathers, clusters of prostitutes on the boulevard, and workers
from factory jobs. To rationalize the responses, Foucault points out that “the
older people fear a regime that will upset the old ensured ecosystem of sex (with
the prohibition of divorce that binds the man and the woman unequally, with the
brothel that figures as a complement to the family, with the price of virginity
and the cost of marriage)” (Foucault 1994, 230). Young and old people alike
mistrust the change. Foucault declares the atmosphere, “The Gray Mornings of
Tolerance,” and theorizes, “they know that it [the transformation] is tied to
economic transformations likely to renew the inequalities of age, fortune, and
status” (1994, 231). Would that Westerners be as alert to their own culture’s
transformation in sexual ideology, changes in the Western ecosystem of sex, and
question the inevitable ramifications that affect inequalities.
This paper will focus on one aspect affected by Western culture’s
changing ecosystem of sex: romance fiction. Specifically, we set out to examine
Christian or inspirational romance fiction (IRF), especially in relation to secular
romance fiction. The ever-growing market for ERF over the last ten years of the
twentieth century is astonishing, and while there is considerable historic
criticism of the secular romance fiction market, few have ventured into the
magnetism of the IRF market. First-hand interviews with women who read IRF
offers curious insights which have direct connections to Western culture’s
current ecosystem of sex. Many authors of secular romance fiction have changed
the role of their female protagonists to personify a woman that more resembles
today’s accepted feminine qualities: strong-spirited, in control of her life,
determined to accomplish the goals she sets for herself, and quite sexually
uninhibited.
Are women reading romance fiction simply for a “good read” as some
romance novel authors suggest? Alternatively, there seems to be an underlying
need for some women to validate their relationships with men in a patriarchal
society. Feminists, such as Kate Ellis, have long criticized the romance fiction
market as “patriarchal indoctrination by which women learn to see themselves
as objects for men” (Ellis 1987, 217). To begin to unravel this phenomenon, it is
helpful to consider the size of this burgeoning market, and specifically when the
IRF market began to come into its own.