Another remark on “insta-lust”
Earlier today, @respectingromance wrote this great post in defence of the use of “insta-lust” in romance novels, which I happen to agree with completely. There was one other thing that occurred to me on this subject later. I don’t want to add it to that post because that post is great as it is.
What’s really striking to me about a dismissive attitude towards characters who fall immediately in lust is how it plays into some of the problematic messages sent to women (in particular) in a patriarchic framework. To wit: we’re told that we’re not supposed to be sexual creatures, that our sexuality (and to some extent our bodies) are not really ours but rather belong to a man, and that feeling sexual desire for anyone except (perhaps) our One True Love is cheap and demeaning and something to be ashamed of.
If the heroine has just met the hero, and the author has her immediately lusting after him, but does not play the insta-love trope card, the heroine is lusting after a man she is not in love with. She is, of course, going to fall in love with him later, but she hasn’t done it yet. And this is, if you ascribe to the views in the previous paragraph, distasteful, and a sign that she is not a good sort of woman. She should not be feeling sexual desire until she is in love, or at least in an emotional state closer to love. Only Bad, Bad Women would fall in lust at first sight, and we all know that Bad, Bad Women are disposable in romance novels.
I also think that our society is just deeply uncomfortable with lust in general, even though we try to pretend we’re not. Western culture has this long history of seeing the body as grotesque and shameful, and true love as something that should be “pure,” a matter of minds and souls rather than bodies -- certainly not rooted in something as base and animal as lust. I think that’s actually a very harmful school of thought, personally, but I don’t feel like writing about that right now, so I’m not going to. BUT ANYWAY I think that’s part of what underlies this.
Anyway, I happen to believe that women are totally sexual people, and that we’re as likely to develop lustful feelings as men are, and also that this is not only a feature of Bad, Bad Women, so, you know, three cheers for insta-lust. I mean, yeah, some authors write it clumsily, and others have their characters only belatedly becoming aware that their foil is mega-hot, which can be fun. But I think @respectingromance is totally right that there is absolutely nothing wrong with having characters act like actual human people, lust and all.
