On several occasions, I’ve heard Christian women being warned of the dangers of too much chick lit in their reading habits and too many romantic comedies in their viewing habits. More than once I’ve heard the analogy that these things are to women what pornography is to men. This article from a woman at Capitol Hill Baptist Church expresses the arguments clearly and persuasively. There are some important things for women to read here about appropriate expectations for men and marriage. But as it has before, this kind of argument makes me uncomfortable for two very different reasons.

First, and I want to say this first because I really don’t think anyone else is saying it at all, chicklit and chick flicks are not pornography for women, pornography is pornography for women. There is a myth which the church seems to have bought into completely that women are not interested in pornography. That this sin is exclusively a male sin. Women are instructed not to listen when a preacher addresses the men in the church about this issue. For a long time, I believed this lie too. And then I discovered the internet.

One of my pastimes on the internet is writing and reading fanfiction. You don’t have to hang out in that world for long before you realise two things: By far the majority of those involved in writing fanfiction are women; a very large proportion of what is written is pornographic.* There is a smaller but related world of fanart in which the same two facts are true. Women are writing, drawing, reading and looking at pornographic images ALL THE TIME. And if these women are there on the internet, they are somewhere in real life. Maybe one of them is in your church. And you are complicit in her sin if you are continually sending her the message that her sin cannot exist because of her gender.

The second point that I want to make is that romance is a Christian concept. The gospel is a romance. The narrative of the Bible is a romance. The happy ever after ending is real. There is a marriage to look forward to, when the bridegroom of our dreams will consummate our relationship, will draw us into perfect intimacy with him, and will satisfy us forever. Of course it’s not a good thing when the shadow and the type is mistaken for the reality. Husbands are not Jesus. They cannot restore us and redeem us. But here’s the thing. When we read other kinds of books and watch other kinds of films and see Christian themes in them, we praise those stories. We think it’s a good thing to use narratives that revolve around ideas of sacrifice or substitution, of faith and hope, of transformation and redemption. It seems to me that it’s just as much of a good thing to hear the stories of the bridegroom winning his bride.

So, you know what, I am going to keep reading the romances. They may not have quite the same emotional intensity as the Song of Songs, but in their own way, they do keep me hopeful as I look forward to the most romantic, most wonderful, most glorious happy ending ever.

* I don’t think this means that fanfiction automatically equals porn. There are lots of sites that won’t host anything with a high rating, and many others that don’t allow open access to stories with a high rating. There are safe places to be involved in the fanworld, but there are a lot of places where it is not safe at all.