A recent essay in a British medical journal declares that the romance genre is not just a diverting fantasy. Rather, its portrayal of idealized love and sex promote unreal expectations and unsafe sexual behavior.
So declared Susan Quilliam, British sexologist and agony aunt, the U.K.'s rather dramatic name for an advice columnist.
Quilliam asserts that "a huge number of issues" that she and others see in clinics and therapy rooms can be traced to the influence of romantic fiction, where emotional decisions regularly trump rational ones.
Romance readers "say they can distinguish fact from fantasy," Quilliam wrote in the July 6 issue of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care. "But when it comes to making life decisions, are they not much more tempted to let the heart dictate simply because they are romance fans?"
One source cited in Quilliam's piece is the dissertation of Gretchen Anderton, who received her Ph.D. from Widener University in Chester in 2009.
Anderton, currently in the Peace Corps, was unavailable to discuss her work.
But Betsy Crane, an adviser on Anderton's dissertation, says her student's paper does not support Quilliam's central thesis.
"Going back to Gretchen's abstract, I was actually struck by the line that said women were able to differentiate between fantasy and reality," said Crane, whose program bills itself as the world's largest accredited graduate program in human sexuality.
According to Anderton's study, most readers she surveyed felt strongly that romance novels did not negatively influence their behavior or expectations and that they were able to maintain this separation between romance novels and real life, because "they do not read romance novels in an information vacuum."
In her editorial, Quilliam seeks to draw another worrying difference between sexual-health professionals and the authors of romantic fiction.
