There are a number of resources online that discuss the different “waves” of feminism, and a good one can be found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/. Not only does it present the three waves, but it also discusses the various objections to using that terminology (much of which I agree with, but still find the labels handy for situations like this, where we’re illustrating with broad strokes).

As for discussions of the topic. Angela Toscano wrote an article on the narrative function of rape in Romance for the JPRS: http://jprstudies.org/2012/04/a-parody-of-love-the-narrative-uses-of-rape-in-popular-romance-by-angela-toscano/. Liz Mc2 wrote an interesting blog post about the female body: http://myextensivereading.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/reading-about-bodies-links-on-the-body-feminism-and-romance/. And I’ve composed a couple of articles for Dear Author, which contain numerous links and some fantastic discussion. The first is my theory of reader consent: http://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion/sexual-force-and-reader-consent-in-romance/. I also wrote on last week in response to the AAR fracas: http://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion/title-here/. There are others, as well, but that’s a start.

Where do I start?

Well, with an easy one. Thanks so much for mentioning Sharon Marcus’s extraordinary BETWEEN WOMEN. Do you discuss this book anywhere online or in print? I’d love to see it. I once blogged about her first book, APARTMENT STORIES, which I also loved.

I met Sharon, and learned about her work, btw, when she was my son’s professor at Columbia — and let me also say that she was one of the most committed, energetic mentors a graduate student could have, as well, of course as a gifted teacher. But even if she weren’t all that, dayenu, it would have been enough simply that she wrote BETWEEN WOMEN, which seems to me some kind of high water mark of engaged feminist scholarship — knowing where she comes from and striking out for something new.

Might she be an example of what you call Third Wave feminism? Tell me more, feminist grandmas want to know. And my bad for not hanging out more often at Dear Author to hear the arguments (If you’d like to link to any particularly interesting ones, I’d be delighted to follow them).

As for fantasy — I think you’re dead-on right that we need to talk about it in itself, and not simply or always in relation to romance. For starters I’d point to some of the brief, provocative remarks in Eve Sedgwick’s A DIALOGUE ON LOVE.

And as for how the whole enchilada/war on women thing goes together… oy, so huge, another time for that…

I think the description of Roiphe’s pathology is spot on, and I wonder if it’s just that so many women gravitating to books like 50 Shades are too young to remember the 70s, or just not educated in the history of second-wave feminism. I was way too young to catch the likes of Nancy Friday and Erica Jong when they emerged, but I still think they’re notorious enough to be visible to more women than they seem to be today. And that’s curious to me, in the same way as the breathtakingly widespread and systematic rollback of women’s rights. I think Gloria Steinem was correct in scolding all of us who benefited so directly from 70s feminists but who have not done enough to ensure that those same hard-won rights are available to generations yet to come. I fully admit that I had a sense of entitlement about those rights, and watching them being stripped away is frightening and overwhelming.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that IMO, until women truly comprehend the extent to which our freedom of sexual fantasy is intertwined with our general political freedom in socially tangible ways, and until we find a way to keep the momentum of this re-awakened awareness going, we’re going to continue to cycle through these periods of battle, forgetting, and rediscovery, with only sporadic forward movement.

As for the historical record, I highly, HIGHLY recommend Sharon Marcus’s Between Women, which casts what will be, for many, a whole new light on Victorian womanhood: http://www.amazon.com/Between-Women-Friendship-Marriage-Victorian/dp/0691128359. Another wildly misunderstood era is that of the Colonial Puritans, although Richard Godbeer’s Sexual Revolution in Early America is helping to unveil the fascinating truths there (especially when read alongside Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good Wives, which is still a staple for understanding the role of women in Colonial America). If you’ve ever read the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, you can feel the erotic undercurrent of her spirituality, and it’s not exactly hidden.

Within the Romance community, I do think quite a few of us are discussing these issues — I know we’re having some good conversations at Dear Author. One difficulty is that there are still some schisms in the community regarding what is perceived as unfair criticism of the genre for being too feminist/not feminist enough, and there are also some powerfully negative perceptions of feminism. Even the split between second wave and third wave feminism figures in (I’ve gotten my third wave self involved in a few scuffles).

One thing I do wish we’d move away from as a community, though, is the construction of the issue in terms of PC/non-PC, in part because I’ve gotten oversensitized to accusations of PC from those who are trying to defend a patently offensive position (e.g. to defend outright racism or sexism). But also because I think even the non-PC label suggests that there’s something deviant or abnormal about sexual fantasies for women that, statistically speaking, are not only extremely common, but of longstanding origin. I think we need to re-frame the whole discussion to start from a place where female sexual fantasy is normal and common, rather than feeling like we need to defend certain fantasies or certain Romance tropes/devices. I don’t know if, when, or how that’s going to happen, but I think it would go a long way to challenging real-life patriarchal resistance to female sexual autonomy.

To flaunt this book in the early 1920s, Alexander Walker suggests in his biography of Valentino, was to flaunt your emancipation and daring; to enjoy openly its primitive sexual fantasies was to show a truly modern insouciance in the face of the fashionably shocking vagaries and transgressive energies of human feeling celebrated in modernist and jazz-age primitivism. Such energies and drives had recently been highlighted by Freudian psychoanalysis and by the popularizing of the new science of sexology which had led to the publication, in the same year as The Sheik, of Marie Stopes’s manual, Married Love. In one way at least the book’s open treatment of female sexuality contributed to its popular version of modernity. (Wintle 294-95)

And here’s a bit about audience reactions to the film sequel toThe Sheik:

In 1927, Valentino starred, just before his death, in the much more firmly directed and beautifully photographed Son of the Sheik, based on Hull’s own sequel. A scene in which the breeched, booted and bare-chested star was strung up and whipped caused delirium and fainting among the female audience. (Wintle 293)
——
Wintle, Sarah, 1996. ‘The Sheik: What Can be Made of a Daydream’, Women: A Cultural Review 7.3: 291-302.

This is so interesting; it seems to me you’re associating these earlier novels in the context of a period of sexual reform (not to speak of the Women’s Suffrage movement). Which — on an extremely speculative level — would suggest that potboiler popular erotic fiction for women is likely to be associated with an intellectual climate where reform issues are at least being fought out.

I’ll leave out the link and hope the comment gets through this time. Re copies of The Sheik, it’s available online via Project Gutenberg.

And why doesn’t the San Francisco Public Library have a copy of THE SHEIK? Or even our interlibrary loan facility, Link+ …./!

the publication of the novel and the release of the film starring Rudolph Valentino in the eponymous role unleashed “sheik fever” in the western world. In the U.S.A., the book went through fifty printings alone in 1921, and it was the first novel to appear on the bestseller list for two consecutive years (Leider 153). It was continually reissued in paperback throughout the 1920s to 1960s, while it sold 1,194,000 copies in hardback by 1965 (Blake 67). The New York Telegraph estimated that over 125,000 people had seen The Sheik within weeks of the film’s opening in 1921. It screened for six months in Sydney, Australia, and ran for a record forty-two weeks in France (Leider 167-8). (Teo)

As far as readers are concerned, though, “Hull’s papers tell us little about what influenced her to write The Sheik, while definitive information about specific readers’ responses to the novel is non-existent because of the lack of reader surveys carried out” (Teo).

Teo, Hsu-Ming. “Historicizing The Sheik: Comparisons of the British Novel and the American Film,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).