Can we blame it on the patriarchy?

On older heroines in romance novels, part two

Psst: This is the second post about older heroines. Read the first post here.

We are often told that the lack of older female character representation in romance is a marketing problem. Older being somewhat subjective—perhaps it it 36 or 40 or simply “above the magical age of 29.” I have been told this repeatedly over the years by esteemed bloggers and editors. They gravely say there is no “cute marketing term” for sexy novels about women 36+. To which Eva Leigh says, “It’s a pretty damning indictment to insist that older heroines aren’t “cute,” that we’re expected to be cute, and that cuteness is what’s valuable about a woman, rather than, say, her intelligence, her sagacity, her experience, and her self-actualization.” 

To which I say, fuck cute.

To which I also say New Adult. When publishers wanted to catch that audience that devoured the Twilight series but wasn’t ready for Fifty Shades of Grey, they invented “New Adult” which means romance novels that take place among young folks in those first years out of the nest, probably at college. These characters are too young for a full on HEA (happy ever after) so we created the HFN (happy for now). The goal was to appeal to young readers who would stay with us until they are ready for “grown up” romance and…then what?

“Mature Romance” sounds x-rated (and confusing as most romance is probably x-rated). “Older romance” and “Later and Life” sound blah.  “So much of the terminology about aging has negative connotations,” says Karen Booth, author of Grey Hair Don’t Care. Karen founded the Seasoned Romance Facebook Group but credit for the name goes to her friend Maggie Wells. “Seasoned Romance” is the term I’ve heard most often, but all of them have been slow to catch on. 

Before we all start brainstorming to solve this problem, let’s ask if it really is a problem. 

Dr. Sandra Antonelli, who writes “seasoned romance” or whatever you want to call it, and describes herself as a “PhD champion for older women” who writes “romcoms for grownups” has a suggestion: “We could simply call it romance and work on dismantling the ageist scaffold. I mean really work on tearing down that structure. Maybe we could think of a cute name for that?”

Let’s just call it a romance

When we say that the lack of older representation in romance is due to a marketing problem or a lack of a “cute” marketing term for it, I see an interesting concession that there is an interest in it. Publishers aren’t saying “no one pitches these titles to us” or “readers give zero stars to the few titles we’ve tried with older heroines.” But here’s a suggestion from Dr. Antonelli: “Market it, advertise it, and shove money at it the same way a romance with a younger heroine would be marketed and advertised. The spotlight needs to be removed or shifted from ‘how old is the heroine’ to the romance itself—you know, the standard ‘the hero is hot, and he has it bad for the heroine’ routine.” 

This echoes what has happened and still sometimes happens to romances featuring Black characters—it gets shelved in the “African-American studies” section of the bookstore where it is unlikely to find it’s readership of people who want romance novels and thus shop in the romance section. Then publishers mistakenly think there isn’t an audience for those type of books. It’s a connection problem, not a content problem.

Let’s just call it a romance novel. Full stop. 

What are we so afraid of?

But still. Ageism is “the last acceptable bias” in the words of Dr. Antonelli. It isn’t about marketing or branding, it’s overcoming the deeply ingrained way we as a culture and society view older women. We can’t fix the marketing or branding until we overcome the way we view aging and older folks. 

“Women are unsubtly taught that our value lies in our beauty and that only youth is beautiful, which cleverly boils down to a woman being worthless when we get older,” says Booth. So we have a hard time concocting a “cute marketing term” because we are deeply resistant to seeing older women as sexy and interesting. 

We also are resistant to seeing them live independent lives of their own. 

I am reminded of a TikTok video I saw on Instagram recently: A grown man talking to the camera about how he’s always flummoxed when he calls his mom and she doesn’t pick up because she is too busy to talk. “What are you doing besides being my mom?” he wonders. And I laughed because that experience has happened to me. (Turns out my mom was on shamanic journeys. As one does). But the point is: We struggle to imagine mothers and/or older women generally as having lives of their own and a sense of themselves distinct from their role as wife/mom.

So to see a character like that fleeing the nest and having adventures of her own that do not include us can speak to a fear of losing our caregivers. I’d say it’s the same reason why folks get so upset about women reading romance or working outside the home or voting or doing anything that takes them away from making sure dinner is on the table and being free to take our call. 

There are plenty of negative stereotypes for older women—the old maids, the dried up spinsters, sad cat ladies, frumpy moms, crotchety dowagers, etc, etc. “In believing and perpetuating the negative stereotypes about aging, we harm ourselves and our future selves,” says Dr. Antonelli.  “The notion that ‘if you can’t see it you can’t be it’ fits here.” 

We have the capacity to change the narrative.

“Most creative decisions for popular media are still overwhelmingly made by men, and they’re mainly concerned with representations of women that they determine to be attractive, which, to their minds, older women aren’t,” Eva Leigh points out.  How daunting to go about changing the minds of men. But first, I think women need to change their own minds about aging first. If we can do that, female romance authors will write sexy and fun stories that will change how we all consider older women.

Ideas about older women have become so ingrained in us of female folks that even we have a hard time seeing ourselves as heroine-worthy past a certain age. Look again at my editor and myself, both 36, thinking a heroine of our age was “daring and edgy” and “unsaleable.” 

“We don’t (or seldom) see older romance heroines, which leads to believing we can’t be older romance heroines,” Dr. Antonelli says. “But we can be crazy, menopausal, cat-loving, frumpy, grandmas with grey roots. And the more we see getting older as negative, the more negative our experience of aging will be.” 

And I would add: the more we see aging as a negative, the less we are inclined to read or write or watch these stories. Especially with romance, as this is a happy place for so many. 

But if we can shift how we think about these heroines, we can change things, especially in Romancelandia. There are a few things about the romance genre that makes it perfect to be the driving force for change. I wrote an entire chapter on this for Dangerous Books For Girls, but I’ll note a few things here: The lower cost of production for a romance novel (versus, say, a feature film) means it’s affordable to take risks with stories that tweak reader expectations. Likewise, because of the volume of romance—most authors doing one or more books a year—it’s more affordable to take a risk on something new and still maintain a career. Because of the close conversation between authors and readers, we can cultivate a warm reception for stories, even ones that do things a little differently. We don’t have to convince men in Hollywood. We just have to convince ourselves. 

But I also think the reason we are turned off by stories of older women is because we can be turned off about stories of powerful women. As discussed in part one, stories featuring older heroines are often stories of women who did the thing they were supposed to do (respectable marriage, children) and are now doing their own thing no matter what anyone thinks or says. They can’t be scared into small, confining behavior or expressions of themselves because they are no longer afraid of the threat that if they don’t get married and have kids they will, in the immortal words of Bridget Jones, “die alone and be found three weeks later, half-eaten by wild dogs.”

“It’s not a surprise that women are denied voices and representation at the time in our lives when we are most knowledgeable as well as disinclined to take society’s shit,” says Leigh. I agree that it’s not a surprise or a coincidence. 

These heroines are no longer constrained by fear or shame. And to show them being gloriously, unabashedly loved for the person they become when they are no longer shrinking themselves is powerful and radical. So no, we don’t need a cute marketing term. We need respect for women of all ages.