Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I have had this anthology since it was release, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to get through it, in part because I haven’t yet made it through the Holly story, which is first.  After the disappointment of Holly’s Courting Midnight, I’ve really been feeling that she’s just pumping them out too quickly, because despite the magic of the first two upyr books and the first demon book, the follow-ups have, IMO, been increasingly tepid.  The fact that her work is always likeable saves it to some degree, but it feels really burned out to me. 

Maybe I’ll skip ahead and try the Brook story, which is the other one I was initially interested in.

Listen. I need to hear about the barbed cock.  :bug:  You can’t just toss that out there and walk away, you cruel Bitch!

>>because of COURSE it stimulates some supah-sensitive spot in her giney that a normal cock cannot hope to reach, instead of, say, shoving squarely against the bladder or cervix or something like that. <<

But it's not sharp? I thought the cat-barb things were sharp? Yo, mutha-fucka, did you just stab me in the cervix? Huh-uh. That is SO not cool. But. . . if you could run a slide to check for chlamydia, that’d be great.

Thanks for the lesson, Ms. Candy.

OMG@the Lora Leigh! My roommate bought some of her ebooks so she sent me one (EC people please don’t eat her, she only did this once)? It was scary! It was about some sort of...three couples...that lived together! And had sex with each other! But...I think...all the guys were brothers? And they could read each others minds? Or their wives’ minds? Maybe it was the women with the psychic abilities?

I don’t remember! Because the squick factor got too much for me about 20 pages in and I deleted it. I call it “The White Trash Sexual Commune” book.

So while I’m a fan of Holly and Walker I just spent a few hours in the bookstore to read both of their stories and then reshelved it.

And I more or less agree with your take on their stories. Unlike Robin though I enjoyed Courting Midnight a lot, obviously riffing off the Austen Regency style without being imitative.

I thought the Meljean story seemed like a bad condensation of what might have been a decent novel.  The Holly story was okay because it was her voice, and I was already familiar with the world.  High squick factor on the Lora Leigh with me as well, not because of the bestiality but because feisty never excuses TSTL for me.  I skipped much of Blood Kiss:  bland describes it very well.

>>: a spunky, horny modern woman in her 20s who’s in possession of both her own house and her virginity, with no convincing reasons, moral, religious, or otherwise, given as to why this is so.<<

This is why I love the SB's.  You catch the real structural errors in the story--what moral or religious reason could this woman have for having her own house in her 20's?  She buried her parents in the basement?  She won the lottery? She's the only survivor of a cult mass suicide? The mind boggles.

>>If this short story were a little old lady, I’d push it into oncoming traffic.<<

Which is why the SB’s should also be writing the cover blurbs.

Blood Kiss alienated me before the stroy got going simply by virtue of the characters’ names.

Roman Mongtgomery and Julianna Capiet? Wink wink, nudge nudge. Get It? Romeo and Juliet? Montague and Capulet? Uggghhhh. Forced myself to read it only to discover that Roman had to protect her from gang rape by, eh, forced seduction? Blecch.

But I liked Falling for Anthony a whole lot more than you did--although it would have benefitted by being longer.

*from being longer.

Damn grammar.

I wasn’t being critical, Candy, it tickled me that owning her own house was right up there with the hot-yet-still-a-virgin scenario.  I mean, how _does_ a 20 year old get her own house?  It’s every bit as bizarre as the other!

Woot! I’ve been bitcherized!

*He-Man: “I have the power!” dance*

Squished and an urge to haddock-slap the heroine are what I’ve read most often in reviews (though not quite as entertainingly)—duly noted and improved upon (I hope.)

Er, though when I think about the latest mss again, maybe not the squished part.

Now off to link, and pull out all the good bits about how I made you shiver. Ah, yeah.

Yes, it’s your local neighbourhood vet (local in the cybersense) delurking after Candy’s call. Tom cats don’t have a single barb on their penises, they have lots of little ones around the tip, a bit like one of those strange spiky fruits, dragon fruits or whatever (not as many spikes as a lychee). A bit like a horse-chestnut’s spikes. But obviously these spikes are made of penis, not horn or anything, so they don’t actually damage the female. And they aren’t big enough to be obviously visible to the casual naked eye. The spikes develop under the influence of testosterone, so if the cat’s neutered, they atrophy.

What next? Do werewolves have bones in their penises, like dogs?

What about wererams or werekangaroos? They’d have exciting penises… Shall I go on?!

OK Alsion- give. Now we NEED to know about the reproductive organ weirdness of the animal kingdom. As soon as possible, please.

Thanks ever so

OOps.

ALISON

didn’t mean to change your name on you....

Embi--there’s an entertaining book called How They Do It, by Robert A. Wallace, which is about what you’d think it is.  And yes, porcupines do do it carefully.

Shall I go on?!

Yes, please. Ever since childhood when I read the bit in “My Family and Other Animals” about snails’ love darts, I’ve been curious about this sort of thing. But the thought of examining photos gives me the squick for some reason, and I can only watch these bits on nature programs through my fingers because it feels too voyeuristic. Besides, David Attenborough is too polite to go into detail. Some good explanations from a vet would be just the ticket, ‘cos in this case, pictures are waaaayyy to much for me.

Cross my heart I’m not perverted, it’s just that this sort of thing makes my brain fizz with delight at how weird and amazing the world is. And I think it’d be fun to bring this sort of stuff up when rowing with creationists.

But obviously these spikes are made of penis

This is, by far, my favorite sentence ever written. Hee!

I’d also like to hear about exciting penises. Pretty please?

Oh Candy, I’m pretty tolerant of group scenarios as well, it was the fact that the three males involved were brothers. Or the women were sisters. There was a significant sibling mix in this group. Although yes, barbed cat penii rates higher on the Squick scale.

OK, will post more fun penis facts later on, when children in bed!!

fizznuck

hee!

PZ Myers’ blog (Pharyngula) has lots of penis entries, especially concerning squid and other cephalopods.  :-) Just google Pharyngula and penis.

A friend told me some great stories about pigs and their corkscrewy penises, but I somehow doubt we’ll be seeing any were-boar books soon.

Arethusa: Oh yeah. I blew right by the sibling thing in your explanation. Holy crap on a crap cracker, MASSIVE squick factor.

Alison: YOU ARE AWESOME. More wacky penis facts! We demands it!

EAP: Did you see the bit in the BBC Mammals series about aquatic mammals, in which we get to see the humpback whales and their prehensile penises? Watching that while listening to David Attenborough narrate assorted whale penis facts in his plummy tones was perhaps one of the more surreal TV moments I’ve encountered.

Then, of course, there’s the bit in one of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Werehunter novels where the wolfish hero’s penis gets so abnormally huge while he’s inside the heroine that he has to cast a spell on her so she’ll forget how long it took for the thing to decompress.

Or did I dream that one night after way too much tequila?

Okay, anyone have a picture of a horse-chestnut?

I had no clue that dogs had a, uh, bone in their bone.

When it comes to nature shows, I much prefer watching them ‘do it’ than watching them get eaten by a tiger or something.

CindyS

I think Lora Leigh has a fantasy about barbed penises because all the heroes in her books have them (other than teh contemps, and then those guys are doing their SILs). 

Though I should send you the book I’m reading now.  See, there was this wolf and this guy and this rape...only the guy was liking it....uh yeah.

“Okay, anyone have a picture of a horse-chestnut?”

Courtesy of google: http://www.dereila.ca/dereilaimages/HorseChestnutFruit.jpg

Unless you mean the chestnut that’s part of a horse (the grey scab-like thing on the inside of the left front leg above the knee and on the left hind just below the hock (they’re on all four legs, but not visible in the picture - http://www.worldclasswarmbloods.com/ramiro_zbigcrop.jpg)), which was my first thought, but the having spikes part confused me until I looked up horse chestnuts and saw the other type.

Alison can confirm this for me, but I believe that after dogs have mated, they are, er, tied together for a period of time.  The dog literally can’t withdraw until the penis shrinks again.  From what I’ve heard, it’s pretty humorous, because the dog and the bitch are pretty much just standing there, sometimes facing away from each other by now, looking embarrassed.  The mood is totally over, and you can imagine them making uncomfortable small talk:

“Um, so, uh...do you like kibble?”

I think werewolf stories should incorporate this fun fact.

Yeah, one of the Kenyon books touched on this. (Heh. Touched.) I think I remember the hero trying to hide the fact that his orgasm went on for a couple of minutes.

the BBC Mammals series about aquatic mammals

Prehensile?!? Discussed in DA’s excited-yet-hushed tones?!? I missed that series. Gutted. But… it’s available on DVD. So I may be able to eventually peel my fingers from my bashful eyes and watch it in full cetaceous glory. This might be better than the (non-DA) one about gay animals.

Currently glued to Planet Earth. The promos for this week’s programme, “Caves” tantalise with a mention of a “400m vertical shaft”. I anticipate many unintentional double entendres for the bat-eared reader of purple prose. If there are blind worms or eels in them thar’ caves, I’m gonna snicker uncontrollably.

...so abnormally huge while he’s inside the heroine that he has to cast a spell on her so she’ll forget how long it took for the thing to decompress. Decompress! Hee!

Can’t remember this SK gem, but it reminded me of the “Witch Queen of Vixania” books. My best friend and I as teenagers discovered them lurking among battered collections of stories from the “Oyster” and the “Pearl” in the brown-paper-wrapped section of the 2nd-hand book stall run by the adult with a fairly lacksadaisical approach to age-appropriate reading material. They’re burned in my brain as the gold standard for weirdness in published fiction. Not bad at 25p apiece, and far more entertaining than all those tediously naughty nieces and wicked uncles.

If you’ve read them, you’ll know about Brod whose “mightiness” increased stupendously and proportionately with his growing earth magick until he was in serious danger of over-balancing. Then there were the priestesses who went to extraordinary lengths and widths to serve him properly. To say nothing of the giantesses, aphrodisiac bees whose sting drives people into a fatal lustful frenzy and regenerating virginities. Although come to think of it, I don’t recollect any horse-chestnuts of the kind whose seeds become conkers. Or the horse-leg ones, either.

Anyhow, I really, really cannot recommend these books lowly enough. They were written by Anonymous, whose well-fertilised imagination crashes gleefully through most taboos while generating more printed material and horrified fascination in readers than la Cartland. Besides, they’re probably out of print. Or ought to be.

Hah, the only chick I ever met with a house at 20 got it because she got some sort of fat disability payoff because she could never work in her chosen field again. (Don’t ask me how she swung that.)

Anyhoo, I totally agree that if you’re over the age of oh, 22 or so, and are still holding on to the Big Cherry, and if you are not a religious fundie, there had BETTER be some kind of explanation for this beyond “oh, just never met the right chap.” Sorry, but it’s downright unbelieveable in this day and age and I choke every time I see something like that. My best friend just wrote a book where the heroine is a virgin for no reason whatsoever, and I told her we needed SOME kind of backstory for this, because otherwise it’s unbelieveable.

For the record, the only two girls I know who are still virgins and over 25 IRL are because (a) she had a verbally abusive dad who abandoned her and has decided she NEVER wants a romantic relationship, and (b) she had a babysitter who was too sexually interested in her. The second girl claims she’s a “strict Christian” who won’t even hold hands with a guy before marriage, but given how she almost always only dates out gay men, I somehow don’t think Christianity is exactly her problem. Anyway, you need an explanation for this behavior these days, dammit.

Jeri, about the dog thing...haven’t found it in fiction yet, but Morgan Hawke comes close in her (vampire?) “star” books.

Only on SB...I’ll be laughing all morning, while sweating away in the sewing room...totally overcommitted volunteering for daughters dance and school drama dept.  You’ll see, Freebird will be sucking up all your time for years and years yet. So it’s important to know where the information and entertainment are to be found!!!

Who chooses your verification words?

Read through the review and the comments chuckling madly, but the thing that popped out was the title of one of my favorite books in the whole world, “My Family and Other Animals”
Now there’s a wonderful read.

I just recently discovered books about half-animals fucking human women senseless and, I must say, these books are, well ....

highly entertaining.

Gee, I’ll have to re-think my sexual fascination with convicts and start sizing up the neighbourhood pets. 

Oh YAY!! A new hobby!

“Anyhoo, I totally agree that if you’re over the age of oh, 22 or so, and are still holding on to the Big Cherry, and if you are not a religious fundie, there had BETTER be some kind of explanation for this beyond “oh, just never met the right chap.” Sorry, but it’s downright unbelieveable in this day and age and I choke every time I see something like that. My best friend just wrote a book where the heroine is a virgin for no reason whatsoever, and I told her we needed SOME kind of backstory for this, because otherwise it’s unbelieveable.”

Really?  I’m almost that age and haven’t had sex yet.  Not for any religious reasons, nor has anything horrible happened to me.  I do come from a somewhat conservative (Chinese, if it makes a difference) family, but it’s not like we have strict rules about sex before marriage or dating or any of that sort of stuff.  I like to think I’m fairly normal (though a little on the shy side, except it seems on posting about stuff like this on the internet), minus having horses—hmm, maybe that’s a reason?  Never outgrew the horse-crazy phase :-).

“Anyhoo, I totally agree that if you’re over the age of oh, 22 or so, and are still holding on to the Big Cherry, and if you are not a religious fundie, there had BETTER be some kind of explanation for this beyond “oh, just never met the right chap.” “

How about “‘Cause nobody wants me?”

Try lowering your standards.  It works wonders for your sex life.

What I want to know, Cassie, is do you own your own home?  I found that much more unbelievable than holding onto one’s virginity well into the 20’s.  After all, there’s nothing wrong with having standards about who you sleep with(and I’m not being snarky!).  It was the home ownership part of that story I found unreal.[g]

Oh, no.  I live at home.  Well, actually, I’m at university, so not at home currently, but, no, I don’t own my own home.  That might be a bigger issue in the family (if I were in the position to own a house, that is, and I’m not) as I think we (all the kids) are expected to live at home until we get married (or are quite a bit older, at least).  It hasn’t ever been discussed or explicitely stated by TPTB but it’s the way things have been done.  And, being the eldest, I might also inheret my parents.

Oh, and I co-own a house with my 22 year old brother because my grandma didn´t want my evil stepmother to sell the house if (God forbid) my dad dies before her. I´m 27.

Comparative Penis Anatomy, as promised… (warning: squicky for some..)

also known as Fun Penis Facts. This was my most memorable anatomy lecture in vet school ever, and in fact is the ONLY lecture I can remember more or less verbatim, 20 years + later. I wonder why?

Marsupials (koalas, wallabies, opossums, etc) mostly have bifurcated (Y shaped) penises with two tips. This is to match up with the females, who have two vaginas. This is less bizarre than you might immediately think, because in the embryo the reproductive tissue forms as two little strips on either side of the body, which then fuse together in the middle; only in some species the fusion is less complete than in others. Only marsupials have two vaginas: rabbits, however, have one vagina but two cervixes (cervices?) and the uterus is Y shaped, as it is in most animals (dogs, cats, ferrets, pigs, all have Y shaped uteruses - people are the odd ones out). The rabbit’s penis is not particularly exciting, but rabbits retain the ability throughout life to suck their testicles back into their bodies when frightened, which is a pain if you are a vet trying to find them. Guinea pigs have testicles which are, I’m pretty sure, bigger than their brains,although I can’t say I’ve ever made any measurements.

Moving swiftly on… Obviously all penises have to have some sort of intermittent erectile system, because to be permanently erect is kind of inconvenient. There are two basic solutions to this - the vascular system, like people, where the penis swells up with blood, and the fibroelastic system, like bulls, where the penis at rest (as it were) has an S bend in it, and becomes erect by sort of going PING! so that the S bend straightens out. So bulls have narrow yet incredibly long penises. I have to say I don’t remmeber much more about the FE system, because my practical experience with bulls, intimate or otherwise, is almost non-existant.
Boars do have corkscrew shaped penises, as someone else posted, and sows have corkscrew grooves in their cervixes, so that artificial insemination catheters for pigs are a very interesting shape. But I must admit I never really understood this, because when a boar mounts a sow he doesn’t rotate round and round on the way in, does he, so how does this work? And is this where the expression “a good screw” came from?
Rams have a little thing called a urethral process at the ends of their penises, and when they ejaculate the UP spins round and round like a Catherine wheel (if you know what that is: could be a British cultural term like horse chestnut apparently seems to be), or like a lawn sprinkler, so that the semen is sprayed around in a circle at the entrance to the ewe’s uterus. Apparently shepherds used to cut the UP off because they thought it was a worm, which seems a shame. Rams can mate an astonishing number of times in 24 hours, I forget how many, but they only produce a weeny volume of ejaculate each time, hence the UP to make things more efficient, I suppose.
Dogs do indeed have penis bones, called os penises. I think whales do too. Occasionally dogs sustain penile fractures, which must be very painful, esp if the broken bone damages the urethra (urine tube). Now and again you’ll see an os clitoris on a bitch’s X ray, which is a little squicky. There are a few hermaphrodite Cocker Spaniels in my neck of the woods, and that’s really bizarre.
Dogs and bitches do tie when mating, as someone said. The dog’s penis is rigid all the time because of the bone, but when it’s aroused there’s a huge bulby bit at the base which swells up massively, and when the dog and bitch mate, the bitch’s vulva clamps down around this holding them together, which is why they are tied together, usually for about 20 minutes during which both parties generally seem fairly bored and confused, and stand around panting with their eyes bulging slightly, in my experience.  Dogs also produce massive volumes of ejaculate, about 100 ml I think (what’s that - 1/2 a cup in American?) You don’t want to know how I know this. One of the more surreal experiences I’ve had was obtaining semen underperforming stud dog, using a technique familiar to me in other situations, while the bitch he was meant to be mating was held nearby by a *very* gay kennel boy. But enough of that.

Ferrets, like cats, are induced ovulators, but female ferrets are induced to ovulate not by spiky penises but by being bitten on the back of the neck. If a female ferret isn’t mated, she remains on heat indefinitely and will eventually get bone marrow suppression and die from oestrogen toxicity, which puts a whole new meaning on the expression “pining for luuurve”. Therefore all pet female ferrets need to be spayed.

Enough for one comment, I think.

Wow. I don’t know what to say other than wow...and maybe ick. Yeah.

...i liked this anthology thingy.

does that make me weird?
sure, the barbed penis thing was weird, but...i didnt mind...:-/

Thanks Alison, that was quite fascinating.

Is it wrong that when I got to this bit: Dogs also produce massive volumes of ejaculate I immediately thought of that movie Van Wilder?  More to the point, I thought, “Huh, so that whole thing with the dog and the pastries could actually happen.” (Now who’s thinking, “Mmm...they’re so warm!”?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?)

Allison, thank you for the animal sex ed. course. Very interesting. I noticed that you didn’t mention cats. I’ve been thru cat heat twice in the last 15 years. It was horrible.

When I first got my Basset hound after not owning a dog for a very long time I was petting him and rubbing his stomach. He was on his back and I noticed an enormous bulge at the base of his penis (he’s neutured) and freaked. I got on the phone to a vet office that was still open all panicked about this bump, what was it?!  The tech says, “that’s arousal.” I said, “Oh” (didn’t seem like much else to say) and hung up. I’ve heard of other people doing the same thing. I laugh at them.

Now why can’t a woman be a virgin at 22 years? My generation was anxious to shake it lose as soon as possible but I did know a few women that were holding on to their cherry. I didn’t think that much of it.

Ummm Don’t see why it’s impossible for a chick to not have lost her virginity by twenty-two. Fairly recently lost mine, and I didn’t think it was any big deal that it was at my age...but I guess it must be abnormal judging by what you guys are saying, and there wasn’t any real reason why I didn’t loose it any earlier…

I lost mine at 19 to the guy who’s now my husband, but I could imagine having gone through college not losing it.  I was never one for parties or drinking and kept to myself outside a small group of friends.  I never wanted to just “lose” it, always figured I’d wait until I met the right guy.  Which I did, but only through a series of odd happenings, or we would never have crossed each other on campus.

Wow. Thank you Alison. The ram thing? I think my brain just exploded. Catherine Wheels!?! Bonfire Night will never be the same… So my burning question now is: who will write the first work of were-ram romantica?

And doesn’t the whole ferret-biting to ovulate/unmated females dying of lust thing remind anyone of a certain vampire romance mythos? Not so much brooding creatures of the night as ferret fetishists. Oh joy!

Umm… and the virginity thing? While I agree that virgins in their mid-twenties are unusual these days in western culture, I wouldn’t consider it weird. To me, this implies that a woman should “lose it” by a certain age, which smacks somewhat of historical views on spinsterdom. True, many women have cultural or religious reasons to wait for marriage, but others I know have delayed things until their 20s. Not because of traumatic experiences, either (as far as I’m aware).

Why shouldn’t a woman wait until she feels ready, whatever age that might be, rather than bowing to social or peer pressure? It’s an important life choice rooted in emotion, character, history and all those interesting things that writers love. That’s why it needs to be explained in a romance. We’re so damn lucky that these days we have this choice, but it’s one we should make for ourselves. It shouldn’t matter whether a person loses their virginity at 16 (or whatever the legal age is for you) or 61, as long as it’s their decision and one that they’re comfortable with.

Of course, the romance industry is weird in the way it fetishises virginity. But it’s not just physical virginity, but mental as well (for want of a better term). So the numbers of virgins in romance are disturbing, but for me it’s more because of the way their prevalence, backstories (or lack of, as Candy noted) and plots imply they’re more deserving of an HEA than a sexually active women. And I hate, hate, hate how they are completely ignorant of their sexuality until the hero “awakens” them, at which point they turn into raging nymphomaniacs (but only with him). This sort of tyranny in the name of true luuuurrrrvvve takes away the heroine’s ability to choose. And that bites like a mating ferret.

Good point EAP.  I do wish it was explained more often. 

THough I also don’t see women with just a few satisfying sexual relationships.  it’s either she’s a virgin, or she’s this take-charge sex goddess.  Or even sadder, the sex goddess who’s really a virgin…

Well the impression I’ve gotten here is if you haven’t lost it by a certain age then something is wrong with you. Honestly, I just never cared that much. It wasn’t a matter of waiting till it felt right, or waiting for the right guy or family pressure. Just didn’t. So I don’t see anything wrong with the chick being in her mid twenties and still a virgin and why should we find anything abnormal about it?

I was 21 when I lost my virginity.  It was not a situation where I was waiting for “The Guy” I just wanted my first time to be with someone who I knew and liked.  It seemed like every time I dated a guy long enough to feel comfortable taking that next step, something would happen and we would break up. 

I will admit that I did feel a bit like a freak.  Now, at the age of 34 that seems ridiculous to me, but at the time it was embarassing.  I mostly felt that way because when people heard I was a virgin the generally assumed I was either super religious, or in the case of guys, assumed that I would expect to marry the first guy I slept with.  Nothing sends a 18-22 year old guy running for the hills quite like a girl who they suspect has a drawer full of “Bride” magazines.

It seems easy to say that I should have just not told people, but when you are in college, sitting around with a group of your friends, talking, and sometimes drinking, and the subject turns to sex, you either have to leave, lie, or fess up.

EAP:
Marry me.

After all the pressure I´ve been receiving -even from my mother- the last few months to loose it (why does people have to “loose it” or “get rid of it” as if it was a problem?) finally I can have a good speech to shut them all up.

Thanks!

Re: virgins in their 20s, especially in Romancelandia:

I know that several people choose to remain virgins for various reasons--religious conviction, wanting the first time to be truly special and with somebody they’re in love with, past sexual trauma, raised in sexually conservative households, just never met anyone who made them feel the zingy zingy, volunteered at a clinic and had a traumatic viewing of a syphilitic penis, etc. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that women have to lose their cherry by a certain age in order to be considered, well, valid, acceptable people. Sexual choices are sexual choices, and I can respect ‘em even if I find some of them puzzling.

But the virgins in Romancelandia tend to be...well, kind of pathological, and much in the way EAP has described. And there are so very MANY of them, that whenever I encounter Yet Another Non-Friggin’ Virgin in a contemporary romance and she’s all spunky and horny and what-not but I can’t see WHY she’s not a virgin other than so the hero can be Mr. Deflowerer Deluxe, my left eyelid twitches. Because let’s face it: virgins in their 20s in modern-day America are the exception, not the rule.

It’s good to break the mold in fiction, but the mold should be broken convincingly, and for good reason. I can buy into just about anything in fiction--I have read and loved books about blood-sucking corpses in love, for god’s sake--but there needs to be a certain authencity in the characters’ motivations, or the story generally doesn’t work for me. In “The Breed Next Door” in particular, I’d say just about NONE of the characters’ motivations were convincing to me, and Lyra’s inexplicable virginity is just one of them.

Nicole has a good point, too: there seems to be a distressing lack of sexual experience middle ground in Romancelandia. The heroine is either a virgin, a faux ho who’s a virgin, a ho who’s really a virgin in her heart, or a sex goddess. Gah.

I keep seeing references to “sex goddesses.” Is that a euphemism for “slut,” or something else?  Can’t say I’ve run across any Aphrodites in my literature lately.  I must be reading the wrong books.

I can recall only one author who has consistently written heroines who don’t fall into that virgin or whore trap: Miranda Lee.  Based on the number of times she’s done it, I can only assume it’s been a conscious choice on her part to make her heroines ‘realistic’ in their sexual histories and that makes her unique among the Harlequin-published authors I’ve read. 

While there always seems to be a little *something* that keeps most of her stories from breaking through to greatness, I’ve cut her a lot of slack because I so appreciate how she will matter-of-factly insert into the story (where appropriate for the character of the heroine) that she’s had past boyfriends and that she’s had past sexual experiences.  I’ve also liked how, when there has been any judgment of a negative kind made by the hero for that past sexual experience, there’s always been a reason grounded in some semblance of a reality that I can buy into.