The post/poll last week at Dear Author about the use of condoms in contemporaries generated an intense but mostly polite conversation about the role of contraceptives in genre romance and whether PSAs and/or sex education were a necessary part of the romance genre. The long, long comment thread prompted me to think about a messages of genre romance and assumptions that I was perpetuating.

At one point, LoriK commented:

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned that really bothers me is the underlying assumption that of course any hero or heroine is “clean”. I have zero interest in romance novels becoming safer sex lectures, but I’m bothered by the subtle message that those who are worthy of love & an HEA don’t have STDs.

STDs are not divine punishment for sin, they’re a consequence of behavior. Sometimes people make mistakes or get unlucky, but that doesn’t reduce their worth as human beings. As I said earlier, I have a major problem with people being willfully foolish, but there are plenty of wonderful people in the world that have or have had an STD. They still deserve an HEA just as much as those of us who haven’t.

Just like love & “knowing someone well” don’t protect you, neither does being a good person. Unless you’re defining good as “only 1 sex partner your entire life and that partner has also never been with anyone else”. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to live one’s life, but it’s pretty harsh to say that doing anything else makes someone bad or unworthy.

While the comment was not directly to me particularly, it could have been, because I had commented:

I hate reading descriptions of a hero coming inside of the heroine (spurting, squirting, bursting, etc.), especially if said bursting occurs without any talk about birth control and disease prevention. If the conversation happened, my frustration is may be lessened or alleviated entirely, depending on the content of the convo. I wish that mainstream contemporary romance included more open conversations generally, though. Usually it’s just “I’m clean”, without any mention of the last blood test or high risk behavior. Sounds clinical, which could yank a reader out of the story, but I’m knocked out of the story just the same when I stop and think, “Unprotected sex! With a modern day Duke of Slut! Do you know where that’s been?!”

While I would never say that anyone who once had an STI/STD (or currently has one) was undeserving of an HEA or otherwise “less than”, that it the underlying message of my comment, isn’t it? Clean vs. unclean. Because if a hero or heroine has not lived his or her life disease-free,they won’t be getting a happily ever after . . . at least not in mainstream romance.

I don’t know that this rule is written down anywhere, but it seems to be relatively well-enforced. Sexually transmitted diseases belong to villains. Heroes and heroines are never so unlucky as to get caught by any of their impulsive or foolish behavior. And it isn’t just genre romance that tells us this – look at mainstream media generally. I can think of very few characters who have or have had an STD and who are also positively portrayed, or who get an HEA or HFN while being HIV positive or having admitted to some sort of STI.

The stereotypical negative characters were easy to think of:

+Boyfriend of the heroine in Jo Barrett’s This Is How It Happened (Not A Love Story) – he’s the bad guy of the piece, having herpes and insisting on condomless sex without telling his girlfriend about the herpes.

+Boyfriend of a friend in Whitney Gaskell’s Pushing 30 – another bad boyfriend, this one also hid his herpes from his girlfriend.

+Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John and the Private Matter – the bad guy of the book had the pox, I think. Or maybe syphilis.

+Geoffrey in Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and to Cherish, is, among other things, dying of syphilis. Plus he’s a jaded, dissolute spendthrift who abandons his wife, then returns to smash her happiness.

The characters portrayed positively were much harder to think of:

+Erin McCarthy’s Flat-Out Sexy – the hero is sterile because of an undiagnosed STI as a teen, and he struggles with that, but still gets an HEA.

+Sophia and Dave in Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series – they admit to each other that they have both had an STD in Into the Fire. Sophia’s history is not clear, but Dave caught his from an Evil Spy Woman who used him, so we’re back to the STD=Bad Guys trope, however positively Sophia and Dave might be drawn as characters. They are both due to get their HEAs, either separately or together, in Dark of Night, due out next week.

+Queer As Folk – Ben, a main character, is HIV positive from the moment he is introduced to the series; he gets an HEA or at HFN, while the show acknowledges that his health is an on-going issue and also sometimes a stress on his relationship with his partner, Michael.

+General Hospital – Robin Scorpio, a recurring character, has been HIV positive for years. She has a successful career, recently had a child, and appears to have earned her HEA…inasmuch as any soap opera character can have a reliable HEA.

Are there other examples out there of positive characterizations? I’d love to hear about them, so that I can add them to the TBR list.

Given the millions of people who have experienced some sort of sexual malady, whether they knew it or not, it seems odd that so few heroes and heroines ever mention or consider the possibility. It’s like the inverse of the ducal population in historical – there are many more fictional dukes than there ever were in reality; inversely, there are fewer social diseases in fiction than in reality. Perhaps the volume of virgins and/or under-active heroines explains the lack for the women, but what about the men? Modern day Dukes of Slut seem to abound. With all of the secret babies that proliferate in genre romance, wouldn’t STDs and STIs accompany them?

It goes back to the fantasy, I suppose. Perfect health as part of the perfect happiness and future. But must it? Would you read a romance if you knew that the hero or heroine was HIV positive? And could eventually develop full-blown AIDS? Would you think less of a heroine who was sterile because of untreated chlamydia? Would either (or both!) the hero and heroine having herpes make their HEA less valid for you?

Edited to add italicize phrase above, which I accidentally cut out. 1/22/09

This entry was posted by JMC on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.