(no subject)
Jan. 19th, 2008 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThe vindaloo recipe on the back of the Penzey's vindaloo spice bottle? Not bad at all. I use a medium amount of vindaloo spice, halve the suggested water, add a cup of yogurt, and throw in a handful of chopped cilantro as a garnish. I also use less salt than they suggest. However, it's dead easy and quite yummy. You might give it a whirl some day when you're in the mood for half-assed Indian food.
Here follows the first of what will probably be several posts on getting a methodology to support A Longitudinal Study of Idealized Heteronormative Sexual Experiences, as Limned By Romance Novels, 1980-2008, my proposed entry into the genre of satiric research papers. I'm hoping for something more useful than the sort of support you might get if you taped popsicle sticks to a limp prick in order to use it for shagging. That kind of support would be funny, but real data would be even funnier. I realize that this sort of crap is called soft science but there's still no reason for having poor data to back up the mockery.
I want to do a satiric research paper. Actually, for real, this is a shining thing that right now is the most appealing idea ever. It looks like it would be loads of fun. Yeah, there'd be some work, but still. Wouldn't that be totally fucking hilarious? The theory that I have, here, is that it'd be interesting to examine the romance novel genre (by date -- a broad survey of the practices occurring in the literature every five years or so would be particularly useful) for what romance novels tell us about normative attitudes towards assorted sexual practices. I think we can all agree that romance novels are a mass-market, LCD sort of lowbrow literature. They're formulaic. But... a lot of women buy them. A lot. They take up huge swaths of shelf space at yer average bookstore. I think they have something to tell us and I rather expect that *what* they're going to tell us is that, these days, expliciticity is through the roof and the variance in practices has spread more than Moll Flanders. (Not married to Ned Flanders, people. That was *Maude* Flanders.)
Measuring this, though, is going to suck. There's going to have to be data-gathering, not just data from what I have in my stash, but also data from outside my stash. It is going to have to be a fairly broad data pool, so's to encompass the genres available to me. I'm going to have to read authors whose work I *do not like* on any level. I do think, though, that I can do this fairly quickly and without spending a huge amount of money.
What sort of data would we like to see in this study of romance novels? Interesting question. One of the things I'd like to take a look at is the difference, if any, between what you get in "historical" romances vs. what you get in "modern" ones. I'd like to see if there's a difference between the "divorcee" and the "single, never-been-touched" novels. (The romance novel is a very tightly controlled and marketed thing. There's an entire genre of "second chance at love" books out there. For real.) I'd like to see if there's a difference between the "under a flag" romances, those written as Harlequin Silhouette books, and the stuff that is more freelance. (The stuff for H and S is very formulaic, written-to-a-standard, and I wonder if the author-based-marketing books are any different.) I'd love to take a look at the practices depicted, the average onset of activity, the... you know, if I did this like a read-along purity test... it'd be a rigorous method of data-acquisition and ALSO a fun fill-in-the-blank thing that I could do while reading.
I'd need a form for collecting information...
Book title, author, publication date (book must be between 1980 and 2008 to qualify for this study).
Is book a historical romance or a modern romance?
Is book Harlequin, Silhouette, other chain-romance-novel, or by an author?
Name of heroine:
Name of hero:
Is heroine a virgin when book starts?
Is hero a virgin when book starts? (Sometimes they tell us this.)
Page # of the scene wherein our hero beds the heroine for the first time.
Hashmark checklist of practices *involving the heroine* that are depicted in book (it's okay if they're by "the bad guy"):
kissing the heroine
messing with boobs of heroine
guy's got his hand down her pants/up her skirt
he goes down on her
she's got her hand down his pants
she goes down on him
fucking, him-on-top missionary
fucking, her-on-top missionary
fucking, doggy-style (marketing, we need a better name for this. srsly.)
rape scene
anal sex
any kink (explain)
other sexual activity (please explain)
instances of vaginal intercourse that do not result in female orgasm for the heroine?
instances of vaginal intercourse that do not result in male orgasm?
any instances of bisexuality anywhere?
any discussion of birth control and/or HIV status?
does anyone at all in the book wank, either alone or for an audience?
does the book end with the heroine married to the guy?
Is there anything I'm missing? Anything? I'm open to suggestions, here. Also, later, there will be statistics and stuff. Maths. I'm going to maybe need help with those, though I do have a statistics textbook here somewhere.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a complete list of the employed circumlocutions for penis. That, too. Florid, purple prose welcome here! (This metric is, of course, for the lulz.)
I think I need to make a photocopyable form, here.
The game plan here is to divide the books into year-bands, or possibly cohorts (eg 1980-1984, 1985-1989, 1990-1994, 1995-1999, 2000-2004, 2005-current kind of a thing) and then look at the data to see what there is to see. Graphs! Charts! Tables! How much data, btw, do I need for this to work? There have to be enough oysters for it to look like an actual stew, here. I would hate to have a less-than-representative sample of the works available to me. Twenty per cohort from a publisher (harlequin or silhouette), twenty per cohort that are "author" books. We're right now going to limit the selection to books involving actual humans. I don't want books with werewolves or elves or vampyres or other magical things. I want normal-people romance novels, okay?
This seems like a lot of books, but I read alarmingly quickly. Romance novels, in particular, I go through like a knife through butter. (Still, that's a daunting amount of reading. Anybody want to volunteer? It's fill-in-the-blank stuff, for real.) So that's forty books in a five-year span, six by forty is 240? That's not so bad. No duplication of authors (we're gonna go by 'published' author name and ignore the fact that many romance authors write under several names), must have at least one book in each year of the cohort. Of the forty books per cohort, half should be historical romances, ten of those on the publisher side and ten from the "author" side.
I think that'll do. And now... I've got to drive into town and turn on the heat for the empty apartment for the night so that the pipes don't freeze. When I get back, I can sort through my books to see what I have on hand and what I'm going to have to beg/buy/borrow/steal. Fortunately, there's a handy used bookstore in Everett where I can probably even-up swap my trashy romances for other trashy romances of the same-shit, different-day variety. And there's Ivy, who has buckets of romance novels. Aisha has buckets of romance novels. La's friend Amy has buckets of romance novels. I think I'll be fine for source material that doesn't cost me money.
Here follows the first of what will probably be several posts on getting a methodology to support A Longitudinal Study of Idealized Heteronormative Sexual Experiences, as Limned By Romance Novels, 1980-2008, my proposed entry into the genre of satiric research papers. I'm hoping for something more useful than the sort of support you might get if you taped popsicle sticks to a limp prick in order to use it for shagging. That kind of support would be funny, but real data would be even funnier. I realize that this sort of crap is called soft science but there's still no reason for having poor data to back up the mockery.
I want to do a satiric research paper. Actually, for real, this is a shining thing that right now is the most appealing idea ever. It looks like it would be loads of fun. Yeah, there'd be some work, but still. Wouldn't that be totally fucking hilarious? The theory that I have, here, is that it'd be interesting to examine the romance novel genre (by date -- a broad survey of the practices occurring in the literature every five years or so would be particularly useful) for what romance novels tell us about normative attitudes towards assorted sexual practices. I think we can all agree that romance novels are a mass-market, LCD sort of lowbrow literature. They're formulaic. But... a lot of women buy them. A lot. They take up huge swaths of shelf space at yer average bookstore. I think they have something to tell us and I rather expect that *what* they're going to tell us is that, these days, expliciticity is through the roof and the variance in practices has spread more than Moll Flanders. (Not married to Ned Flanders, people. That was *Maude* Flanders.)
Measuring this, though, is going to suck. There's going to have to be data-gathering, not just data from what I have in my stash, but also data from outside my stash. It is going to have to be a fairly broad data pool, so's to encompass the genres available to me. I'm going to have to read authors whose work I *do not like* on any level. I do think, though, that I can do this fairly quickly and without spending a huge amount of money.
What sort of data would we like to see in this study of romance novels? Interesting question. One of the things I'd like to take a look at is the difference, if any, between what you get in "historical" romances vs. what you get in "modern" ones. I'd like to see if there's a difference between the "divorcee" and the "single, never-been-touched" novels. (The romance novel is a very tightly controlled and marketed thing. There's an entire genre of "second chance at love" books out there. For real.) I'd like to see if there's a difference between the "under a flag" romances, those written as Harlequin Silhouette books, and the stuff that is more freelance. (The stuff for H and S is very formulaic, written-to-a-standard, and I wonder if the author-based-marketing books are any different.) I'd love to take a look at the practices depicted, the average onset of activity, the... you know, if I did this like a read-along purity test... it'd be a rigorous method of data-acquisition and ALSO a fun fill-in-the-blank thing that I could do while reading.
I'd need a form for collecting information...
Book title, author, publication date (book must be between 1980 and 2008 to qualify for this study).
Is book a historical romance or a modern romance?
Is book Harlequin, Silhouette, other chain-romance-novel, or by an author?
Name of heroine:
Name of hero:
Is heroine a virgin when book starts?
Is hero a virgin when book starts? (Sometimes they tell us this.)
Page # of the scene wherein our hero beds the heroine for the first time.
Hashmark checklist of practices *involving the heroine* that are depicted in book (it's okay if they're by "the bad guy"):
kissing the heroine
messing with boobs of heroine
guy's got his hand down her pants/up her skirt
he goes down on her
she's got her hand down his pants
she goes down on him
fucking, him-on-top missionary
fucking, her-on-top missionary
fucking, doggy-style (marketing, we need a better name for this. srsly.)
rape scene
anal sex
any kink (explain)
other sexual activity (please explain)
instances of vaginal intercourse that do not result in female orgasm for the heroine?
instances of vaginal intercourse that do not result in male orgasm?
any instances of bisexuality anywhere?
any discussion of birth control and/or HIV status?
does anyone at all in the book wank, either alone or for an audience?
does the book end with the heroine married to the guy?
Is there anything I'm missing? Anything? I'm open to suggestions, here. Also, later, there will be statistics and stuff. Maths. I'm going to maybe need help with those, though I do have a statistics textbook here somewhere.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a complete list of the employed circumlocutions for penis. That, too. Florid, purple prose welcome here! (This metric is, of course, for the lulz.)
I think I need to make a photocopyable form, here.
The game plan here is to divide the books into year-bands, or possibly cohorts (eg 1980-1984, 1985-1989, 1990-1994, 1995-1999, 2000-2004, 2005-current kind of a thing) and then look at the data to see what there is to see. Graphs! Charts! Tables! How much data, btw, do I need for this to work? There have to be enough oysters for it to look like an actual stew, here. I would hate to have a less-than-representative sample of the works available to me. Twenty per cohort from a publisher (harlequin or silhouette), twenty per cohort that are "author" books. We're right now going to limit the selection to books involving actual humans. I don't want books with werewolves or elves or vampyres or other magical things. I want normal-people romance novels, okay?
This seems like a lot of books, but I read alarmingly quickly. Romance novels, in particular, I go through like a knife through butter. (Still, that's a daunting amount of reading. Anybody want to volunteer? It's fill-in-the-blank stuff, for real.) So that's forty books in a five-year span, six by forty is 240? That's not so bad. No duplication of authors (we're gonna go by 'published' author name and ignore the fact that many romance authors write under several names), must have at least one book in each year of the cohort. Of the forty books per cohort, half should be historical romances, ten of those on the publisher side and ten from the "author" side.
I think that'll do. And now... I've got to drive into town and turn on the heat for the empty apartment for the night so that the pipes don't freeze. When I get back, I can sort through my books to see what I have on hand and what I'm going to have to beg/buy/borrow/steal. Fortunately, there's a handy used bookstore in Everett where I can probably even-up swap my trashy romances for other trashy romances of the same-shit, different-day variety. And there's Ivy, who has buckets of romance novels. Aisha has buckets of romance novels. La's friend Amy has buckets of romance novels. I think I'll be fine for source material that doesn't cost me money.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 09:13 pm (UTC)Does the hero pretend to rape the heroine, or start out, and seduce her?
Sex in uncomfortable places, such as under a conestoga wagon.
Yes, I'm remembering stuff from previous readings.
Is the book a series about a couple who either never find happiness or are seeking it in each other AGAIN.
Rosemary Rodgers - Sweet Savage Love. arg.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 04:04 am (UTC)Does the hero pretend to rape the heroine, or start out, and seduce her? -- Covered under rape scene.
Sex in uncomfortable places, such as under a conestoga wagon. -- I don't have or really want a metric for this. It's not a common enough trope to be worth messing with.
Is the book a series about a couple who either never find happiness or are seeking it in each other AGAIN. -- I haven't run across this in my readings.
I probably *should* have a check box for "Hero is other -- indian, Raj, viking, Scots" because there's an entire genre of American Indian smut that I have a real solid early 1990's sampling of, including one by that plagiarizing woman in the news lately.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 09:47 pm (UTC)So if you leave out the paranormal stories you'll be leaving out the big trend in the 2005-today era romances.
Also, you might want to add a category for genre--paranormal, mystery, action adventure...even for whether or not either the hero or heroine are of color (some bookstores divide out the "African-American Romances", though Borders doesn't).
I wouldn't worry too much about separating Harlequin and Silhouette (these days they're part of the same publishing house anyway), but you might want to make a separate sub-study of the introduction (and departure) of the various lines of Harlequins--because there are now suspense and paranormal and Christian (Inspirational) and somewhat explicit and very explicit and Americana-focused and etc. etc. variations on the theme.
Also a lot of "name" authors got their start with Harlequin and Silhouette (Nora Roberts and Linda Howard and that woman who writes mystery novels...not Iris Johansen the other one...damn it...). Anyway, that might be interesting to look at as well.
You might want to hook into the forums over at "Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books" (http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/)--they might be able to help with the research. Or help provide cheap/free romance novels. (Every fan has a shelf full of them.)
Further data points to consider:
Children--there appears to be a vaguely icky outbreak of romance novels (at least on the Harlequin racks) with pregnant heroines and/or infants or small children.
Attitude toward these sexual practices--I read a Harlequin Blaze (their most erotic line) the other day where the hero deliberately coming on the heroine was considered "raw" (as a natural consequence of intermammary sex, which was also made a bit of a deal of though that was a character thing--the heroine was sensitive about her breasts).
And finally:
If you are willing to trust other people with the research, you could possibly gain a bigger data-set by sharing your worksheet and letting other people (friends you know and trust, or the folks at Smart Bitches, what have you) fill in the blanks as they're reading as well.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 11:12 pm (UTC)I really don't want to have to read assorted vampire/werewolf smuttiness. I will, if I *have* to, read about time-traveling scotsmen. How about we avoid this issue by filling in the back catalog years before, y'know, supernatural romances became big. Maybe I'll get bored before things come to a head on the vampire romance novel front.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-19 11:53 pm (UTC)I don't mind reading some of those for
youthe sake of science.no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 12:44 am (UTC)At the moment, I'm filling in the list of what-I-need from the stacks in my house. It is rather alarming how many romance novels I actually own, dusty though they be. The only bright spot, here, is that I didn't pay for very many of them.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-20 01:21 pm (UTC)Incest.
hero or heroine is adopted (sometimes they're madly in love with a brother or sister only to find that it's okay to have sex because they're not linked by consanguinity).(especially in old regencies).
sparring over inheritance?
mistaken identity.
Just some other thoughts.
I agree, not the wide ranging genre of the supernatural, which does exclude all those Barnabas collins romances from the 60s.