nastya > Status Update

Is that from Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women? I loved a lot of those essays, maybe I am due a reread particularly when I am suffering from currently-published romance enui!

(And this is very true to why slash fiction, mm romances can be so popular with female readers including me.. Not that I can explain regarding me, but it can be liberating to read about other...)

Hirondelle wrote: "Is that from Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women? I loved a lot of those essays, maybe I am due a reread particularly when I am suffering from currently-published romance enui!

(And this is very t..."

Yes! I only read glimpses of quotes by Laura Kinsale, I was thinking about buying the book, but it is pricey. Is it worth it, do you think? Are other essays good? But yeah, I am reading a very bad romance book at the moment - Fourth wing - with a very weak romance and hero, made me think about what makes romance good, and who's better on this topic than my favorite dame of heterosexual historical romance. I also thought about mm romances, and how often they feel exciting, not spending any time on the topic that bore me like virginity, yet they tend to have more adventure because in historical romance, men obviously had a lot more freedom to even go somewhere.

But this makes sense, right? I don't know how is it for men, but as a girl who was reading Jules Verne and Dumas all my childhood I was Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen , I was d'Artagnan, I was Mowgli. I wonder if boys are reading Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre, do they identify?
But the triangle in romance and androgynous reader is fascinating concepts.

If true, this strikes me as very sad—that an entire genre would present the demographic of its target readers as categorically uninteresting and to be objectified! Why should women readers be fed only men as dynamic characters, and women as objects whose best hope is to be desired by a (much cooler) man?

Not that I haven’t seen books with this dynamic, but I think I take a very different approach to it than the author of the quote.

Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship wrote: "If true, this strikes me as very sad—that an entire genre would present the demographic of its target readers as categorically uninteresting and to be objectified! Why should women readers be fed o..."

Because there's a lot happening when you read and enjoy romance: some identification with the heroine, some identification with a hero, enjoyment by reader of desire he feels for her and her enjoyment of being desired. Because of patriarchy and predominate heterosexuality in our culture when women read romance they tend to assign her active, dominant, possessive self to the hero and her "feminine" parts to the heroine. A cooler man in this story is still her. All of us have feminine and masculine inside of us. Changing culture will definitely change this dynamic, and obviously it's not something universal. The topic of desire is complicated and multi-faceted and so fascinating.

I own the book,and I remember loving a lot of it (particularly a bit when somebody mentions the woodiwiss books and why nobody is reading books for the TSTL heroine) then, BUT it was likely 25 or more years ago and it's inevitable I would read things differently. I do not know how 2024 would read those essays - but you are making want to go an archeological survey and find my copy and read it (Probably I will not, and even if I try I just might not find it, but if I do I will write about it!)

I think boys mostly do not read to figure out about how girls think or feel, but then again boys tend to not read as much, plain and simple. But it is incredibly interesting to me what makes a genre a genre, what is it I am looking for when I pick a book from all the clues given by publisher and author in imprints, blurbs, cover and all, and how I react to a book in relation to its purposed promise as a genre book (even when the "genre" is supposedly plain and simple literature).

About Fourth Wing, good luck, I quit at chapter 2 and not sorry. But I think there is one thing called the 4thWing clause, when you find a book or author and you totally realize it is not GOOD but it's fun, except my 4th wing is not 4th wing.

And I miss 1990s-2000s historical romances. Prime Loretta Chase, Liz Carlyle, Mary Balogh (prime! Not current one) or Judith Ivory or Connie Brockway all publishing every year maybe several times a year...

Hirondelle wrote: "I own the book,and I remember loving a lot of it (particularly a bit when somebody mentions the woodiwiss books and why nobody is reading books for the TSTL heroine) then, BUT it was likely 25 or m..."

It looks to me that romance writers that work for me are just Kinsale, Mia Vincy and maybe KJ Charles at one point, but I got tired of her, I've read too much and it became samey :)

The fourth wing is just fascinating to me at this point because of how much it doesn't work.
I hope new generation of boys will get better at it. Remember how not that long ago they tried to hide that Rowling was a lady because boys won't pick it up? And those books have a boy main character!