That’s it. They also don’t always write the heroine to be the most beautiful, but she’s compelling to the guy anyway.
This brings up a question I was afraid to ask as its own thread. One romance novel has the guy marvelling that even though he had been with scores of women and knew all about great sex, he had just had the most powerful orgasm of his life with the heroine, who gets under his skin and is not the greatest beauty he had been with. :o So my question is, is there really such a difference in powerfulness of male orgasms??
My biggest pet peeve about romance novels is the obligatory rape scene which is not rape because she likes it (ugh).
My second best is this. Gramps was a womanizer; Grandma thinks he’s never cheated on her. But then, she also thinks that when he tried to take my 11yo brother to a brothel to be “made a man”, it was somehow the boy’s fault.
I realize that a good chunk of my teen crush of Aragorn came from the whole “dark, mysterious stranger” thing, but well, I wasn’t really interested in taming him, unlike that half-elven better-than-thou slut…
Too tiresome, specially since their sex drive seems to apply mostly at night. Can you find me a morning-person nerdy sex machine? Male, please.
I’m not that much into romance novels–but I read plenty of science fiction & fantasy. And a few mysteries.
I see myself as Mary Russell–the brilliant, unconvential heiress who married Sherlock Holmes. Their adventures have been recounted in an excellent series by Laurie King.
However, intellectuals need not apply. That’s another thing I’ve noticed: Romance heroes are typically intelligent, but they are never passionately interested in knowledge and ideas for their own sake. Even the “dark brooding loners” brood over their personal history, never over some existential crisis or loss of faith in a belief-system or what-should-I-do-with-my-life or any of the other kinds of emotional traps to which intellectuals are uniquely vulnerable.
Computer geeks and scientist-inventors are acceptable (provided they are tall, muscular and handsome), but that’s because they have good earning potential.
Agreed. A male orgasm can be a transcendant experience that leaves you gasping and panting and sweating and unable to move for several minutes, or it can be something about as intense as a sneeze and only slightly more pleasant, or anything in between.
I don’t know about fantasizing, but I do know that Ivylad was quite the hound before I met him.
I will tease him about it every now and then…I was the complete opposite of the girls he went out with. (He never dated, it was dinner, sex, dinner, sex, sex, sex, drinks, sex, day at the beach, sex, etc). I was smart, a college student, and shall we say less gifted in the “rack” area than his normal hottie.
Somehow he fell for me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t set my cap for him, it just happened. He still wonders what the hell it is about me…
The romance genre makes me wonder whehter it’s just one, or both, of my X chromosomes that is defective. I’m female. I love to read. I enjoy a variety of “fantastic” fiction and have demonstrated my ability to to suspend disbelief. I have made periodic, concerted efforts to get into the genre by reading multiple book recommended specifically for my tastes. And every time they leave me feeling somewhere between “eh” and stone cold. It’s only courtesy of the SMDB that I’ve even found some that I didn’t find actively offensive, for the same reasons cited by other posters. I have yet to find my fantasies represented in romantic fiction (any medium, although the novels are usually the furthest from what interests me) and if it’s out there, I’m not sufficiently motivated to expend the time and effort necessary to find it.
In other words, no “one true love of a tomcat” fantasies here.
I don’t see why you would even try, Selkie. Why work to get into a genre you don’t like and that leaves you “stone-cold?” I’m not in the least interested in romances either, but I don’t consider it to be a genetic flaw.
I’ve never tried, though; my mother is a librarian (and now I am too) and when I was a young teen she was working at a teeny little branch. Every week, without fail, she would talk about the people who would come in, return 20 Harlequin books, and check out 20 more. If I so much as glance at a romance novel on the grocery store rack, her voice pops into my head! It works for V. C. Andrews books and Stephen King as well.
In part because pop culture fascinates me (even the parts I don’t like can often be instructive), in part because I often find “women’s issues” interesting, but mostly because I didn’t want to miss good stuff out of preconceived notions about the genre. I was (still am) a science fiction nut who avoided horror and fantasy for the longest time because I thought the former was always about gore and the latter about elves/unicorns/other trappings of high fantasy. Still not into gore and still allergic to elves etc., but through genre exploration I found niches within both genres that now consume a major part of my reading time. I didn’t want similar preconceptions to blind me from what romances had to offer.
I was kidding about the genetic flaw part, but the insane popularity of romances does make me wonder just how atypical a representative of my gender I am. I think the occasional check is good for me, in that it helps remind me not to overgeneralize from my own experiences and interests.
Well, I don’t know that you are that atypical, there are a lot of women who sneer at romances or just don’t find them appealing. Although, Romance covers a much broader territory than I think some people realize. On the other hand, there are certain cliches and highly predictable patterns which are represented in romance which just don’t appeal to everyone. And there are those of us who enjoy romance novels even though the events which take place bear no resemblence to what we want to have happen in real life.
(I’ve been reading a bunch of Young Adult fiction lately. Most of what I’ve read I’ve enjoyed, but one convention shared by most of these books is some highly dramatic, life-changing BAD THING occuring. Now this might be due to selection bias, most of these I picked out after skimming through a book on good books for teens which is probably predisposed to list a lot of books with such crises in them. But on the other hand, reading these books make me want to pick up a romance next, because in most cases BAD Stuff doesn’t so much happen as it almost happens. The heroine may be kidnapped by the bad guy, but the hero gets there in time to rescue her, etc. (My tolerance for the more suspenseful romantic suspense is limited.) I might settle for a cozy mystery instead.)
Maybe some time I’ll get up the nerve to start a thread asking for details.
I’ll get my white coat and glasses ready!
