There is plenty of romantic erotica written by men on StoriesOnline.net I’ve written back and forth with some of the authors, many of whom are good enough to get published - except for the assumption that men just can’t write romance. It may be more explicit than bodice-rippers (or at least less likely to need to obscure the acts and organs with flowery language). Most of the stuff on free written erotica sites is Sturgeon’s Law raised to the tenth power (if I see one more “nerd acquires superpowers and a harem” story I’ll puke) but there are some genuinely good writers.
I am a guy, and I “get” lesbian romance the same way I assume women “get” heterosexual romance. So I read lesbian romance.
On the other hand, I still look for those romances “on the side” of genres I already enjoy, rather than as a genre in itself. I like superhero comics, so I read Batwoman and Secret Six (before DC’s editorial meddling killed them). I like military fiction, so I read My Soldier Too. I prefer to read lesbian romance, but I won’t read something from a genre I don’t like just because it’s also a lesbian romance.
Just to clarify for curiosity’s sake, do you mean actual romance, or erotica/porn for lesbians? Do these books you read focus on the relationship between the lesbians?
If so, I find that interesting. It’s probably fairly common to fetishize sexual relationships between two women, but a man actually engaging in the mushy love part of the story is a little surprising and refreshing.
Well I’m a straight male, (50) and I guess I have the romance gene.
Now I do ‘like’ playboy style photos, but they do get boring after a while. I do have some specific tastes that never get old. But put me squarely in the ‘romance’ side of things. I don’t like casual sex. (sex outside a committed relationship) I like romantic movies, comedy or serious, but really I like all types of movies. Sense and Sensibility is one of my all time favorite movies. I rarely have to time to read and have only read one “romance” novel. It was literally given to me free with purchase at a bookstore. So I read it. It probably wasn’t great if it was ‘free with purchase’ so that may be why I laughed at it so much.
AT the end of the day my relationships are the most important things to me. Not my job or possessions,
Someone up thread said that a home life/wife is something you get as a side on your way to doing other things.
I feel the opposite. I feel my main purpose in life is to have relationships. Husband, father, brother, friend, are the titles I want to spring to people’s mind when they think of me or have written on my tombstone not some “job”. My job is to let me pay my rent and buy my food. I have never found ‘personal satisfaction’ in my ‘job’. And I have felt this way most of my life.
Personally I’m glad that women today are more free to be sexual beings. That it is normal for a woman to want sex, or to think about sex in an abstract fashion. (which I do, a lot. A whole lot)
So I’m weird.
I once heard the term ‘romantica’ applied to books like 50 Shades implying that straddles romance and erotica and making it ‘safer’ for women to pick up.
Yes, he ties her up and spanks her but it’s romantic!
Sure, no disagreement there. It’s not like reading a romance novel is going to make you an expert on relationships by itself. (Of course, if you read a few different novels and see how the different characters react, you’re getting a pretty good idea that you’ll have to see what works for any particular woman.)
On the other hand, let’s think about it with the dryer analogy. We’ll take two people who have never used dryers themselves: Person A has memorized the Sears Kenmore manual. Person B thinks he might have seen a dryer once at the back of the hardware store. Now we set both of them down in front of a brand new LG dryer. While both of them are in for a steep learning curve, I think we can confidently say that A has a good head start (all else being equal).
(And let’s remember that my comments were to a poster who said, in essence “I have relationship problems and my therapist recommended a romance novel. That’s stupid. I think she’s incompetent and she pisses me off, so I should pit her.” In the context of working with a female therapist, you’d have a sounding board to make sure you’re not making unwarranted assumptions about what you read.)
Perhaps romance is the equivalent of porn for women, but not the way that’s usually meant. Perhaps the difference is that women often like their romantic literature to be almost purely about romance, with little else to go with it, the way that men often like their porn to be pretty much pure sex with little if any plot to hold it together.
When genres are more mixed, then it just gets called or assigned whichever label is more appealing to the target demographic. Spice Weasel called Shards of Honor a romance novel for example, a label it never occurred to me to give to it despite the romance between Cordelia and Aral being central to the plot; I’d have called it “military sci-fi” if asked.
It was recommended to me as ''sci-fi romance" which IME is almost never a thing, so I had to try it. Aral Vorkosigan is the only character in any romance book that I have found worthy of swooning over. Sr. Weasel was less enthralled because he really didn’t feel a lot of passion between the characters. There are no declarations of undying love and heaving bodices. Aral and Cordelia act like they’re married pretty much from the moment they meet. It’s a different kind of love. But, to me, a much more compelling and realistic one.
But you’re not the only one who had to be pointed out that it is a romance.
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I rarely have to time to read and have only read one “romance” novel. It was literally given to me free with purchase at a bookstore. So I read it. It probably wasn’t great if it was ‘free with purchase’ so that may be why I laughed at it so much.
[/QUOTE]
Most of the romance novels I have ever picked up have a very superficial notion of love, which is why I ultimately find them unsatisfying. A good chunk of them are terribly written.
The rest of your post was beautiful, by the way.
Gotta drop another rec, for romance readers and those who are simply curious about the genre: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. This is an awesome resource both for smart and funny romance book reviews (if you read Go Fug Yourself, this site has a similar tone) and for essays about the romance genre itself. The comment sections are almost as good as the posts, and there are a number of established romance authors who comment there.
If you’re in this thread and have never read a romance novel, here’s a link to their book review tag so you can see what the genre is like at a glance: Book | Review Types | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
Some of the assumptions in this thread about what kinds of elements feature in Romance Genre novels are either offbase, outdated, or don’t take into account the wide variety of types of Romances. For one thing – and I don’t know how representative of the genre these are, but they’re clearly common – all the romances I’ve read** have featured heroines who are either plain-looking or poor or otherwise disadvantaged, and the heroes are guys with the depth to see past the women’s disadvantages and fall in love with the woman as she truly is, and the hero usually has Issues of his own. Not “Beautiful Useless Woman Meets Handsome Wealthy Man and Are Perfect in Their Perfect World”.
But anyway, if you read some of the reviews on that website, you’ll get a sense of what typical plots and character types are out there.
**True, I’ve only read about 5-6. 
Your original claim was that men don’t read romance novels because they are already sufficiently nurtured. You’re now saying that the determining reason they don’t is because of the stigma of appearing feminine. It’s as if you had said, “Men don’t usually wear skirts because they don’t get hot enough” and I responded, “Well, then you’d expect men who are hottest to be most likely to wear skirts” - and only then did you bring up that you thought the determining factor was about appearing feminine. If that was the case all along, why even bring up the nurturing aspect? It seems like even you agree now that it doesn’t make a difference.
I think the idea is a bit silly, partially because the idea that women are less nurtured in modern western society is a bit silly.
I suspect that it is mainly a matter of marketing. Men will not read a “romance”, but they will read a book that is marketed as something else that contains romance.
What about the tender romance bwteen Ned Beatty and Bill McKinney? How Bill whispered sweet nothings in Ned’s ear in the woods?
Even rock songs many times have lyrics about issues of love, loss, romance, etc. and all the feelings that come along with that. I think music is one of the few outlets men have available to them to express and validate those emotions w/o social ridicule.
Some of each. Some of it is erotica, but some is “actual romance,” where there might be a sex scene at some point but it’s mostly about the relationship.
How did you find the show The L word?
I’ve never seen it.
Men do have ‘romantic’ fantasies.
As a young boy, the romantic fantasy that is foisted on you is the fantasy of romantic death. Your own death. Being killed in a war, defending your country or your comrades.
“Men” find this romantic.
Speaking of SF, Arthur C. Clarke has written some of the worst SF romance ever. His “Songs of Distant Earth” contains some of the most appallingly bad love scenes of all time. It’s even worse than the Star Wars prequels. Clarke can write some awesome “purple prose” nature scenes (he’s one of the only authors that makes taking a trip across the surface of the moon sound, like, a totally awe-inspiring experience), but his love scenes are, well, there’s no actual love there. People meet and their clothes immediately come off for some not-well-explained reason.
To be fair, science fiction tends to struggle with portraying believable human relationships in general. There are some wonderful exceptions, of course. But I don’t really think of characterization as a strength of science fiction novels as a genre.
The Onion takes on chick lit.
Is it me, or is this a subversion of the trope? How else would the boyfriend know so much about this book if he weren’t reading it himself?
You remember when Lawrence Summers had to resign as president of Harvard because of his speech speculating on the reason for the under representation of women in engineering and science professors and researchers at top institutes?
(I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall that) as part of his speech, he recounted that he and his wife had tried to raise their children without the typical gender stereotypes. They gave trucks to their daughters and dolls to their sons, only finding their daughter using the trucks to play house with a daddy truck, a mommy truck, and a baby truck, then their sons using the dolls for war games.
He speculated that since it was coming as such a young age, that there may be a biological component to the play.
Certainly, this type of thing is a continuum and not a sharp difference, but I do wonder how much is biology and how much is society.
A question for others. Many, if not most of the conversations I have with other men tends would be classified as “non-fiction” if it were books. We talk about history or politics. My wife tends to talk lots more about relationships with her friends.
One of my wife’s best friends met her now husband after we got married. I heard a lot of the play-by-play and the early stages, when it wasn’t really clear if they were going to get serious and then if they were getting married or not.
About the same time, one of my best friends met his now wife, they dated and then got married, he and I were golfing buddies and went weekly. I knew much more about the relationship of my wife’s friend and her boyfriend than I did about my best friend’s relationship. His was “going well.” Hers was minutely discussed and analyzed.
I read about this kind of thing on line, but how common is it? Obviously there is a continuum, but I wonder if this is one of the reasons for the difference in the gender make up of the readership.
I grew up mostly as a reader and didn’t really have friends, and