Are rich alpha guys still sexy in Trump era? Romance novels reflect women’s changing fantasies
Sarah MacLean rewrote an entire book after Trump’s election because she couldn’t stomach her male protagonist. Meanwhile the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements are causing a profound shift in what appeals to female readers
In early November 2016, Sarah MacLean was 275 pages into writing her latest historical romance novel, The Day of the Duchess. She had hit all the right buttons – a titled (and entitled) duke; a beautiful, estranged wife touched by scandal; and an insurmountable challenge the pair had to mount before they could, well, mount each other.
Then Donald Trump was elected and MacLean couldn’t bear her hero any more.
“I woke up on November 9 and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says The New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”
Why educated, professional women in China aren’t marrying – new book explores the ‘leftover women’ phenomenon
Romance is a huge industry – the genre is worth more than US$1 billion in the US alone. Yet to some, it might seem a jarring relic among the current, wider conversations about sexual politics and gender equality. It is fair to say it is not the most respected of genres. Hillary Clinton recently described it as books about “women being grabbed and thrown on a horse and ridden off into the distance”.
MacLean, the author of 12 romance novels and a Washington Post columnist, was in a tight spot with The Day of the Duchess: the novel was due just three weeks after Trump’s election. She called her editor. “I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ It was a bad day. But my editor was also a wreck about the election and understood.”
So MacLean rewrote the entire book, giving extra context to the character of Malcolm Bevingstoke, the Duke of Haven. Now he is a changed man, one who works hard to get a second chance and earns it.
“In my early books I was willing to say they change over time,” MacLean says. “That book though, I was like, ‘I can’t even stomach this guy, he’s not sexy.’”
Romance has not always had much regard for empowering women. The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss, a 1972 novel regarded as the first “modern” romance, sees the heroine raped four times in the first 100 pages. But then again, when it came out, marital rape wasn’t a crime, and single women could not get credit cards in the UK or US.