When I was married to wife # 1 she would throw away my Playboy magazines, but one day I picked up her magazine and found two articles more pornographic than anything in Playboy.
Do I understand correctly that “stroke story” is textual porn for men? I tried to google it but it only turns up stories of people with heart problems.
I am quite curious to know how they differ. Could you go on about that?
Which is pretty much why you can generalize about women and casual sex - they do a lot less of it because the consequences for 99+% of our evolutionary history have been much more severe.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For anyone who understands simple math, not even math arithmetic. At any given moment there is the same number of women with men that aren’t theirs as men with women who aren’t theirs. So the okd saw that men have a lot of women and women don’t run around as much as men do cannot be true and that fact can be understood by anyone who has passed 3rd grade.
Yes, but not on my phone! Give me a bit to get home, and I’ll have it for you.
Most people, men and women, love a bit of romance in their narratives. It’s unmanly to admit it, but I quite enjoy a good old fashioned love/hate will they / won’t they story in a comedy or a thriller…
But pure romance? As in “The Notebook”? Without anything else? Nah. Not the right kind of hormones for that.
I’m not sure if either of these rise above adolescent junk or one-dimensionality, but L. Ron Hubbard apparently wrote some romances during his pulp days, probably using pseudonyms. I also attended a few screenwriting workshops run by a total hack, one of my least favorite people in the world (for reasons that have nothing to do with his career), who had written some romances, also under a female pseudonym.
Also, “Anal Schoolgirls” is a great band name.
I don’t have the right kind of hormones for that. I once picked up a Nicholas Sparks book when I was in Mexico and there was literally that and two other books to read (both of them about divorce.) Even reading it in a second language I could tell it was badly written. After the first two chapters, I remember thinking, ‘‘Let me flip to the scene where he finds out she’s secretly a journalist (or whatever) and they have a big confrontation and spend months apart brooding…’’ Sure enough.
People like Nicholas Sparks and that 50 Shades of Grey lady give me hope, however, that my own shit might get published some day.
[QUOTE=dracoi]
In this particular book, the girl loses her virginity in a scene where she runs away from the guy, is chased down into the forest, where he shoves her against a tree, covers her mouth so she can’t protest and has his way with her. After that she has an interior monologue that amounts to “I’m so glad he didn’t listen to me. I only said no because society says I should. Now that I’ve had sex for the first time, I’m a real woman and I can give myself to him fully!” And this was a book written under a female-sounding name published in the 80’s or 90’s.
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Yeah, that’s… fairly typical of what I’ve encountered. Some of the earliest stuff I had access to as a kid (think 10ish years old) was VC Andrews, which is all about the rape and incest. It’s actually the internal narrative you’re describing that I find most troublesome. I can’t help but wonder if the fact that this stuff was ubiquitous when I was a pre-teen and teen in any way shaped what I find interesting now, as an adult woman. It’s hard for me to like rapist characters in romance books, if you can imagine, but in erotica it suits me fine. That might sort of illustrate my point that there really is a difference between the two things.
This was an exception but encapsulated something about romance novels: Our heroine was captured by a gang of roving ne’er-do-wells and raped daily by their chief. (ick) Anyway, they run across this woman in some town who is poor and just scraping by, who basically expresses envy that something exciting is happening to this heroine?! Somehow it paralleled some stereotypical housewife with no excitement in life reading this dramatic book.
Heh my wife told me as a young teen she found a bunch of bodice rippers her mom had and she was like ooo wondering what all the excitement was about and she found them disturbing.
Rape out the wazoo, a woman forced to have sex with a dog, one was set on a slave plantation and had both rape of slaves and rape by slaves.
She said she was turned off more than anything, I was like man maybe your mom was just a freak, she was like nope these were mainstream published romance novels.
:eek:
It used to be that romantic movies were designed to appeal to both men and women - movies like Top Hat and Some Like It Hot. Now most movies are more narrowly targeted - there are a lot of chick flicks and guy flicks. At their worst, the guy flicks are either completely unromantic, or have a sort of knucklehead view of romance (Knocked Up, for instance). The chick flicks at their worst are formulaic junk designed to push women’s emotional buttons.
There are exceptions. Enough Said is a recent movie that I wouldn’t classify as either a chick flick or a guy flick.
BTW, I’m not a dinosaur who thinks that movies were better in some golden age. Most popular art from any era is crap. There are great movies being made today, but they’re great in different ways from yesterday’s great movies.
The Fault in Our Stars? Unless by “adolescent junk” you meant YA lit.
I’m questioning this assertion you’re making.
Wiki’s definition of romance is:
As Shodan has pointed out, women are more prone to like dealing with emotional things. Men are more prone to like things dealing with libido.
If romance is part of a man’s life, it is likely IMO that it’s the man trying to please his partner. I suppose there are some men who are naturally emotional about romance, but I think there’s a hormonal difference and different cultural influences that cause women to be more emotional.
Romance is also a fairly new construct, according to Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth. IIRC, he says it started with the troubadors, and their popularizing those types of genres. Before that, relationships were largely contractual and didn’t have the chivalrous aspects to them. It’s not really an innate trait.
I was also a little fuzzy on what you mean by romance novel, so I looked it up. Here’s another wiki definition:
By its definition, it’s supposed to be emotionally satisfying, which again leans more to women than to men.
The wiki definition limits the genre more than the examples in this thread. That novel that LC Strawhouse linked was horrifying and wouldn’t fit under the definition. I would seriously like to unsee that thing. Gah!
To be honest, we guys get totally screwed over by romance. Its something we learn early on “its a lot easier to get laid than it is to get loved”.
You dont know how many guys find a woman and fall head over heals in love with her. Yeah, shes the one. I’m totally committed to her. I want to marry her. I will give up all my weird ways for her. I will move heaven and earth for her… etc…
Then, she tells you… you are coming on too strong, that she still wants to be free, that she just wants to be friends, that she still wants to date other people…
We feel like our hearts have been ripped out. We feel lied to. We feel used.
Screw romance.
Oh… THEN a few years later she gets in contact with you and says she wants to get back with you because she’s tired of dating losers, her eggs are getting old, and she wants FINALLY a good man to settle down with.
It isn’t just porn, it’s rape porn. I find the popularity of any kind of rape porn scary, although I’m not sure whether more or less than that of “nobody ever touches another person” romances. You know, the kind that makes The Notebook read like a Playboy letter.
Romance as a genre, sure. But don’t tell me that the relationship of Helen and Paris was contractual - it was a breach of contract of the first order; the book of the Bible which I think is called Song of Solomon in English isn’t about no contract law either. Elements of romance have been there since forever; the question is, before those elements got separated, where the romantic parts of stories the bits where men went for a pee, and the action bits the ones where women checked their hair, or not?
Romance in literature goes back at least as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the goddess Ishtar tries to woo Gilgamesh. He spurns her with predictable results.
Do you think men corner the market on getting screwed over by romance? Seriously? Yes, you get your heart stomped on a thousand times. That’s life. You either keep playing the game or you punk out. If you punk out, you lose, forever.
Since we’re talking in broad generalizations, my impression is that men are a lot slower to fall in love but when they do, they exude romance, quite naturally.
Not necessarily; I’ve got firsthand testimony of guys who “knew she was the one” within the hour, while she took longer, and we’ve had threads about that where many guys said it was so for them. They’re pretty hard to search for (common, very short words), but here’s a couple.
Do you believe in love at first sight?
Love at first sight?
In two of those cases I know firsthand, her friends were referring to him as “her boyfriend” within days; she took months to stop saying “nah, he’s just a friend”. Both of them were women who had a Life Plan which simply did not include a boyfriend at that particular time, it may be that they actually fell in love way before admitting it to themselves, but the two gents still had to work pretty hard at it.
Quote my brother: “I married her because, half an hour after meeting her, I knew she was the person with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”
I figured answers of either “damn, that sounds like the lyrics to a bolero” or “yeah well, and because she said ‘yes, well, ok…’ after almost three months” wouldn’t be well received 
Just to clarify, by ‘‘slower to fall in love’’ I didn’t necessarily mean taking more time, I mean if you asked the average man, at the end of his life, how many times he’d been head over heels in love, his number would probably be smaller than the average woman’s number. I think women, in general, can fall in love more readily than men, perhaps because we are inundated with the idea of love as the be-all and end-all of existence, we often find ourselves hoping for it even when it’s not the real thing. While it’s certainly possible for a man to fall in love with ‘‘the idea of love’’ I’d place bets it happens more for women, and I’d bet that has a lot to do with social programming.
On preview regarding the threads you posted: Sigh. Ain’t love grand? Screw the haters. Love is the be-all and end all of existence. What’s more inspiring for humans than two people becoming the very best versions of themselves?
a) That would only be true if there were no stigma attached to men doing things perceived as “female” in our society. It’s like if I say “Women often wear skirts when its too hot for pants” and you respond, “than can only be true if men also choose to wear skirts when its hot.” There is no point at which hot weather will prod the majority of men to wear a skirt to work.
b) If you ask a big group of married women “does anyone take care of you, the way you take care of your family” the answer of the majority of women, especially mothers, would be somewhere between “no” and “are you high?”