Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 155

Ecosystem of Sex
151
As we pointed out with Foucault earlier, people fear a regime that will
upset the old ensured ecosystem of sex. The rise in acceptance of ERF was the
result of a backlash among fundamental Christians against the onslaught of
sexual permissiveness, the radical feminist stance against heterosexuality, and a
growing feminist movement for a woman’s right to move out of a life that
revolved totally around domesticity and into the workplace with equal status to
men. Viewed all together, one could consider this to be an overall stance against
patriarchy. A closer look at IRF plot scenarios validates this assumption.
In Janette Oke’s benchmark IRF novel, Love Comes Softly (1979), it
takes the entire novel, 188 pages, for Marty to fall in love with her new husband,
Clark1. He asks her to marry him as she is leaving her first husband’s funeral,
pregnant with her dead husband’s baby. Marty accepts Clark’s proposal. As they
live on the frontier of the American West, she has little other alternative than to
marry this man (whose own wife died recently) and care for his 16-month old
daughter. The story is also of Marty’s “conversion to the Lord.” She was a
Christian before marrying Clark, but certainly not as devout as Clark. When
Clark prays before he eats his first meal with her, she comments that she was not
that accustomed to someone “who had a God outside of Church” (Oke 1979,
24).
The story emphasizes the hardships for females in frontier life:
burdensome work, cramped winter isolation, and the joys of simple new clothes.
Clark is portrayed as the perfect man and husband, always doing just the right
things for Marty. When her baby is bom, he loves it as his own. She, on the
other hand, is slow to be completely attentive to him and trust her feelings for
him. She has to learn to be a better person. Her desire to love him, to
consummate the marriage, does not happen until the last page of the book.
IRF plots carry the message that all things are possible to those who
love God and keep His commandments. God is love, so a relationship that
includes God is a stronger, deeper one. God is the center of the conflict
resolution and the source of a protagonist’s growth, strength, understanding,
wisdom, and love (Jeffers, personal communication with Becker). Yet it might
come as some surprise that through the use of traditional Christian patriarchal
values, in many ways, the protagonists of IRF novels actually have more agency
than those of the secular brand. Where secular romance novels often demand the
heroine to eventually capitulate and realize she simply must give herself to the
love of the hero, IRF plots very often force the heroine to “save” the hero for
Jesus and God’s love. The irony is firmly noted by one former Bostonian radical
feminist who had become a born-again Christian in 1986:, “Yes, the heroine
must save the male for a male god before she can love him. Before I was bom
again, this would have really upset me.”2
IRF plots are as varied as secular plots, however, and vary drastically in
the amount of religious vernacular as well. The plots are often the reverse of the
simple plot synopsis given above—it is the male hero who must save the