Cross-posted from Romance Junkies

I have a confession. I like bad girls.

I’m not talking about the whiny brats, the passive-aggressive victims, and the casually cruel. I’m talking about those women who don’t conform to society’s expectations and who use every resource they have to thrive. The sluts, the b*tches, the fighters and the survivors. Those are the bad girls I like…and I’d like to see more of them in romance novels.

The alpha male in need of redemption is standard romance fare, but turn the tables so that the heroine is the dark wounded soul, and folks get up in arms! This may be because women make up the vast majority of romance readers and we can be a bit hard on our own gender. It may also be that women romance readers want to be the heroine, or at least be friends with her, and no one wants to think of herself or her friends as emo loners. Of course, this raises the question…if we don’t want a bad girl for a friend, why do we want a bad boy as a lover?

I think it may have to do with the way women see our traditional role, and what we value about ourselves. It’s said that women are the civilizers of society. Even though women now work full-time, we’re still primarily responsible for homemaking, childcare, and juggling the social calendar. I was particularly struck by all the writers at the Romance Writers Convention of America apologizing for the way their writing impacted their ability to do laundry and clean the house–something I don’t ever remember hearing from a male writer, or a male recipient of any other award.

We can blame a patriarchal system for these expectations that women shoulder, but it might also be that women cherish their traditional role in society and look for romance in it. We can admit it. There’s a sense of satisfaction to be derived from the idea that your wild, previously anti-social, hunk of a man is now a happy and productive member of suburbia because…of you. Your love transformed him. Your ability to turn a house into a home gave him a sense of peace and belonging.

He was an angry loner, a fierce mastodon hunter who needed no one, until he saw the flames of your inviting hearth and decided to make little mastodon hunters with you. For thousands of years, men have worshipped women for precisely this. It’s an old fantasy. Maybe the oldest fantasy. It’s a powerful fantasy and I’m not about to tell anyone that they shouldn’t derive pleasure from it.

But I hope that society has evolved enough that we can enjoy other fantasies too. That we can enjoy stories about women in search of their own redemption. About women who don’t coax men into conforming to social rules, but who help men break them. I like to write stories about those kinds of women, and my debut novel with Harlequin Nocturne features a bad boy and a bad girl whoboth need redemption.

The heroine of Poisoned Kisses is a nymph of the underworld with daddy issues and a dark past. She does some pretty awful and desperate things, not least of which includes impersonating the hero’s long lost love in order to seduce him. The hero is a former soldier, a peacekeeper turned arms dealer. He’s lost himself, convinced his good intentions make up for all his monstrous acts. I loved that Marco is the kind of hero who could be redeemed by a passionate woman who could forgive his sins and make of him a better man. But I also loved that he was the kind of hero who could love a bad girl for all her flaws and help her become the best nymph she could be.

So, what do you say? Do you want to see more bad girls in romance?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 20th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. 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.