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

Maili, in her usual Very Interesting Linkage, pointed out a couple of conversations on the Romantic Times boards in which people ponder: why erotica? Why erotic romance? Why do so many people obviously love sexually explicit romances? Why are we buying them by the bucketload?

The short answer is: Because we enjoy getting turned on.

Am I being too obvious, here?

Oh, but then these books are appealing to prurient interests! They’re nothing but PORN! some people might cry.

See, this is the part that gets to me, every time. So reading certain books makes certain nubbins perk up in interest and raises the probability of the reader engaging in hot monkey sex (or hot monkey nubbin-rubbin’) exponentially. Is that bad? It’s another sensation that’s stimulated when one reads books. Why are sexual urges especially evil or bad or dangerous?

I read books not just to learn or to edify myself, but for the emotional impact. This is especially true of fiction. Basically, I want to lose myself in a foreign body. This means feeling everything the characters do. That means experiencing their grief, their terror, their joy, and yeah, their sexual ecstasy.

Why is sexual arousal much less acceptable than the grief many women’s fiction books attempt to make you feel, or the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush horror novels, adventure stories and thrillers try to inspire? Why is it OK to watch a person die in a novel, feel his every last death throe, but not OK to watch a person celebrate life in one of the most primal ways possible?

To me, it’s just one more sensation. And generally speaking, a book that successfully makes me feel a whole gamut of emotions and sensations is a very successful book. A novel that inspires no feeling or only one predominant emotion is generally not a book I’ll want to keep around. That’s why I have never really enjoyed Susan Johnson’s work; they turn me on, but I feel nothing BUT turned on through much of the book, and by the end my brain feels numb and tired from a surfeit of this one sensation. Emma Holly, on the other hand, puts me through my paces: her love scenes are more plentiful and more explicit than most Susan Johnson novels I’ve read, but I actually care about her characters and the actual story, not just the sexy bits of the action.

Reading is an inherently voyeuristic, invasive activity. Decrying how one activity is more unacceptably voyeuristic than the other strikes me as kind of odd. It’s OK if reading about all that sweaty bump-n-grind makes you uncomfortable. We all have our thresholds, and among many cultures, sex is a very difficult threshold to breach. You don’t have to read the books--by all means, read only books rated “warm” or cooler in the AAR sensuality rating scale. There are plenty of excellent books that don’t contain a peep of sex, and I’ve read and enjoyed many of them. But calling genres that feature explicit sex pejorative names or making insinuations about people who enjoy reading about the rumpy-pumpy? That’s just being an assclown.

And we all know assclowns make baby Jesus cry.

Wendy asked a few days ago whether blog owners have the right to censor speech on their blog. Then Shannon picked up the gauntlet and answered it, then Wendy elaborated on it further.

I agree with what Wendy says about how so-called obscene language holds no actual power to hurt; they have only as much power as we allow them to. On the other hand, I think of blogs as a person’s personal kingdom. They’re free to do whatever they like with it, and that includes censoring, deleting or otherwise defacing comments that are left on the blog. Electrolite (now incorporated into Making Light), for example, has a most interesting “disemvowelling” feature, which basically removes all the vowels from particularly obnoxious comments, which is so ingenious and funny I can’t help but cackle at the idea and wish I were cool and smart enough to implement something like that here--but then the most obnoxious commenter in these here parts is ME.

And let me note here that I don’t LIKE it when people delete comments or ban users based solely on potty-mouth. I think it’s really fucking retarded. But then, I’m free to come to this here space and air how retarded I think it is.

All this preamble is leading up to this, the Smart Bitch policy on comments and language used in comments:

If you’re not a spammer, have at it, kittens. You feel the urge to spew some filthy language, gratuitous or not, in the comments? DO IT. In fact, the more creatively filthy, the better. So c’mon, bitches, motherfuckin’ show us what you got, you turdgobbling, cuntslapping, gerbil-molesting, Barbra Streisand-loving assbutlers.

p.s. Screw you, Wendy, you queefhuffing polesmoker. Now I’m all super-paranoid about my quotation mark usage. WAH!

Caro said, I’ve never found the Amazon New Releases particularly helpful because the only thing they seem to list is what’s at the top of the sales list.  Far more useful is the recommendations that are based on my ratings and past purchases, because if there’s an author I click “not interested” for, they don’t show back up in the list.

So, this is an interesting question: what does Amazon recommend for you? 

I decided, because I am a sucker for buying more books when the last thing I need is to distract myself from all the things I have to accomplish this summer, to check out the New Releases in Romance on Amazon.com. Usually I use the Books(not)Free service for my train reading material, but as I become more and more obviously pregnant, and as it gets more and more humid and unpleasant outside, I find myself seeking cold, air-conditioned, dark spaces in which to lie down in silence and read. I’m going to read faster than the BnF can ship me books, so perhaps a few emergency purchases are in order.

Perhaps there’s a good recommendation in the top new books in romance this summer.

Did anyone else own a copy of The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales?

Reading Sarah’s excellent entry about so nice heroines and one of the comments about how many romance novels perpetrate the helpless woman mythos found in most fairy tales got me thinking about this book. And really, it’s way too good not to share, though sadly it’s out of print.

The first story, “The Practical Princess,” is probably my favorite. Princess Bedelia was blessed with the usual fairy godmother gifts at her birth--beauty, wit, etc. etc. But one fairy godmother decided to gift her with common sense. Everyone needs common sense, after all, even princesses. The king was puzzled by the gift, though. Why would a princess need common sense?

But whaddaya know, the fairy godmother was right. The awful, ugly, greedy Lord Garp tries to trap Bedelia into marriage, and she foils him at every turn, and in the end she rescues a very cute prince--all with her common sense.

The book is filled with stories like these. Some of the heroines are beautiful, a few are not (there was one who was excessively freckled, if I remember correctly), but all of them kick ass and save the day (and usually the prince).

I miss this book. It’s packed away in a box somewhere in Malaysia. I’m going to see if I can find a copy here in America.