(reprinted from another blog of mine at hotchicksandstrangers.blogspot.com)
In keeping with the theme of my last post, I just finished a book called "Dangerous men and Adventurous Women," which is a collection of essays on the appeal of the romance novel.
There was a lot of cool stuff in the book, especially about the male lead's role as being the hero and the villain at the same time, but one of the most interesting passages was almost an aside. It had nothing to do with the love story, but about the women's looks in the romance novel. It's something I had never noticed before until the essay's author (Kathleen Gilles Seidel) mentioned it, and it struck me as a really interesting point.
Here's Seidel:
"Almost all romance heroines are labelled as physically attractive...In most cases, I assert, this isn't much more than a label.
It is a rare romance that really explores the question of what it is like to be beautiful. In real life, people respond to loveliness in complex ways. Some become conciliatory and fawning; others become defensive. This doesn't happen in a romance. The hero admires the heroine's appearance in a fairly straightforward, sexual way, and other characters don't seem affected by it much at all. After the initial description, the heroine's beauty is rarely mentioned except in the sex scenes.
"The fantasy, I believe is not to be beautiful, but to have an identity for yourself that is not caught up in your appearance...That [being attractive] sounds like a good idea, having a body you can admire when you are buck-naked in your own bathroom. But what clearly seems a better idea, a more appealing fantasy, is to walk by that mirror and simply not care."
In keeping with the theme of my last post, I just finished a book called "Dangerous men and Adventurous Women," which is a collection of essays on the appeal of the romance novel.
There was a lot of cool stuff in the book, especially about the male lead's role as being the hero and the villain at the same time, but one of the most interesting passages was almost an aside. It had nothing to do with the love story, but about the women's looks in the romance novel. It's something I had never noticed before until the essay's author (Kathleen Gilles Seidel) mentioned it, and it struck me as a really interesting point.
Here's Seidel:
"Almost all romance heroines are labelled as physically attractive...In most cases, I assert, this isn't much more than a label.
It is a rare romance that really explores the question of what it is like to be beautiful. In real life, people respond to loveliness in complex ways. Some become conciliatory and fawning; others become defensive. This doesn't happen in a romance. The hero admires the heroine's appearance in a fairly straightforward, sexual way, and other characters don't seem affected by it much at all. After the initial description, the heroine's beauty is rarely mentioned except in the sex scenes.
"The fantasy, I believe is not to be beautiful, but to have an identity for yourself that is not caught up in your appearance...That [being attractive] sounds like a good idea, having a body you can admire when you are buck-naked in your own bathroom. But what clearly seems a better idea, a more appealing fantasy, is to walk by that mirror and simply not care."
That's just my guess. Not like I'm the resident expert in them, but my wife does have over a thousand (no exaggeration).