(no subject)

[which_chick]

You people had better start laughing at what passes for humor around here or we'll go back to me whining about the localized incompetence of the greengrocers in my world instead of making with the mockery of (a) pornish Restoration poetry and (b) romance novels and (c) only be sure always to call it please "research". If those greengrocer posts of yore somehow became your halcyon days of wonder through the vaseline'd lens of memory, well, far be it from me to keep you from such happy thoughts. Go get lost in the archives. The rest of you, we're currently doing Restoration porn, romance novels, and soft-science research papers. Try to keep up and also, laugh at the jokes -- it makes me feel better about myself.



Didn't you used to have a sheep fur fetish or something? Yes. Sheep project coming along nicely, spun up a bunch more of the fluffy brown leicester wool this morning while watching Black Adder #2. From that delightful video, I have salvaged a number of gems, including the absolutely wonderful "bury her in a y-shaped coffin" one. If you're a constant reader, you'll be able to spot material from Black Adder after I've filed the serial numbers off and am trying to pass it 'round as my own work. Keep a sharp eye (PoTC) -- there will be small prizes for the kiddies! Also I am looking gently and not-at-all hurriedly into the buying of a spinning wheel, which everybody should have seen coming since two months ago when I said that there was absolutely no need whatsoever for me to go buy one of those, no need at all. My mother apparently also bought me some sheep but she hasn't sent it my way yet, not sure what is up with that. Oh, and the HoHI are going walkabout without me next week as I mail 'em off to mom so that she may show to her students what can be done with an excess of free time and a surfeit of OCD. She thinks it will be motivational. I think it'll be more like the Scared Straight of knitting, but what do I know?

But about this research paper. Dark was the sky and crisply cold the air, with snow that grated brokenly underfoot when I took the newly-forged sheet (as yet unprinted, just handwritten-forged) and approached my first victimless romance novel. Some poor paperback had to be first to submit to the battering of my blunt tool. The unlucky one was Prince of Swords by Anne Stuart, 1996. It's a historical novel, author-based, and thus in the naming scheme, it comes up as 1995AH1 (cohort, A for author or S for series, M for modern or H for historical, number in the list of books for that cohort). See? It looks scientific already! Plus then we can have references to the science-ish lables of the books within the paper. Everybody knows that it's more science-y if you've got more barriers between the reader and the actual data. More barriers are better!

So how'd my tool hold up under the stress of battle? Not too badly. There were a couple of things I discovered a need to have metrics for.

First off, I'd forgotten, having fallen out (Not the tool. The tool did not fall out. In romance novels, nobody ever, ever has too-vigorous sex with a slippery, round-two-or-three, somewhat less-stiff stiffy with attendant fallout issues. Refer to the title of the paper again: Idealized Heteronormative Sexual Experiences. All of this has got nothing to do with reality, though I assure you I'm going to mock the lack o' reality until I get tired of it, which, given my stamina for that sort of puerile humor, may be some time off.) of the reading of het romance novels, how frequently Our Hero takes Our Heroine's Hand and plops it on top of his boner. Generally this act is read as a "feel how hard I am for you!" sort of a thing, which I guess is nice. I can't help but think, though, that the effectiveness of this strategem has got to be limited to women who have never spent much time around actual men before and who might, therefore, be fooled into thinking that an erection was, y'know, hard to come by. (*snort* I was going to use the word difficult instead of the word hard but there's always that joke in my mind, rising inconvenient, unbidden, and insistent, rather like the erection of a teenaged boy. Hey, Kzin, what's the difference between "hard" and "difficult"? --- *pause* --- If it's not hard, it's more difficult! LULZ! So, I didn't opt for difficult.) Anyway, I'm going to have to add a category for "he takes her hand and plops it on his (mostly clothed-at-the-time) boner" or similar because there's enough of that going on that there needs to be a category for it. Personally, I don't see why he can't just grind it against her thigh like normal men, but what-evah. It could be he's doing the hand-plop thing because it's the only way he's ever going to get her hand on his cock, poor fellow. I think the hand-plop (That's what I'm calling it.) events should be counted differently than her actually going for his cock of her own free will. They're two different things and should be counted differently. I've made a note.

Also, in the interests of keeping things nice and scientific, I've decided to call the category for "penis circumlocutions and epithets" The Nine Billion Names of God. I think that'll work nicely.

Other than that, it went well enough. This being a historical, bedding-of-the-spirited-virgin sort of book, they didn't get to anything particularly kinky and even the not-so-kinky happened largely off-screen. Looking at the body of data, though, I'm going to need a spreadsheet for tracking this.

Brother-the-younger, who is probably the most appreciative reader I have (obviously, besides myself), called today to say that he, at least, has been very amused by me of late and would I please keep it up. (Certainly. At least, certainly until I get bored. I shall have to work on my stamina.) He also mentioned that his wife had volunteered to help read for the satiric research paper. It was at that moment that I knew, for sure, that he'd married the right woman.

Comments

[sara-merry99.livejournal.com]

I do not always comment, but I do tell folks that your LJ is worth reading for the delightful prose, even if they don't know you. :D

I'm personally rather fond of the hand-plop...mostly because being hand-plopped was one of the hotter experiences of my early sexual life. ::koff::

I like your scientific reference for the penis epithets. :D

When you have a completed version of your worksheet, I will be happy to start reading series (or category) romances for you. :D

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I'm making a mostly-final version of the worksheet today, going to give it a test run this evening. Should it suit, I'll email a printable version to interested parties some time next week. I'm still not sure how I'm going to coordinate the readings so as to avoid book overlap. Maybe I'll just keep a master list of books that are included in the study, split out in the cohort/umbrella/timeframe divisions because there should be ten in each of those. So, there'd be a list of (for example) 1990SM(1 to <10) and you'd only have to check against those less-than-ten (because if there were ten in the list, the category would be complete) to find a suitable work. That wouldn't be too bad, would it?

Now, about having different data-gathering people... I'm concerned about the quality of the data, specifically about having some sort of bias in the way things are counted. I can either have one person do all the readings (but that's a lot of novels) or I can spread out the readings to those who are willing to put in their free time for a note of thanks on the paper and accept the fact that my data isn't going to be pristine *or* randomized. Call me a slut if you want, but I'm willing to sully the data if it means I can get out of reading the vampyre smut. (Were this a formal, funded research effort, I'd make all of the information gathering squad read the same book once and check their individual results against a close reading of my own to see that everyone was counting things the same way. I'd also be running random pairs of information gatherers on the same texts to see if they differed statistically-significantly from each other in their information gathering. That sort of foolishness, though, takes more time and money than I actually have. Soon as I get me some funding, we'll do that stuff. You betcha.)

Oh, and I'll need some sort of standardized reporting form for the data, to make it easier to input into a spreadsheet. Yeah. And something to do with the Nine Billion Names of God besides just reciting them in a singsong-y middle-eastern droning chant. I think that's the only not-a-number metric I'm collecting outside of hero/heroine names and the title/author of the book. Should there be "kink" or "other" that needs explanation, those would also be not-a-number datum points. That bridge, I'll cross when I get to it.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

I will consent to re-read some of the tomes of my child (teen) hood in the pursuit of knowledge.

So long as I have that form to check for each.

Now, I've been looking for a gothic romance called The Devil Boy for years. It was a nice little romance, but my Mom found it, and thinking it was satanic for some reason (far from the truth. She was a governess and the boy was severely allergic to thing and badly behaved).

Should you have a checkmark for Governess, and child's father falls in love with?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

There will be a handout and a "how should I evaluate the answers to each of these" set of guidelines for filling out the handout. It'll be ready early next week. I'll also have, posted, what I have for reading materials in the assorted categories so that helpful volunteers can fill in unfilled parts of the research body of material.

I am not really interested in social roles or sorts-of-plots because, while they're the framework in which Boy Meets Girl, they're not particularly relevant to *me* in terms of teh hawt sex0r, which is the defined scope of the research at hand. Remember, I'm doing Idealized Heteronormative Sexual Experiences, here, not Women Unliberated: An Examination of Power Dynamics involving Money, Class, and Ethnicity in Modern Romance Novels... though someone else is certainly free to write that paper with my (our) data. I am not particularly up for that beyond adding the needed data points to the data collection process. Anyone who would like to take that bit (it's a pelham!) in his or her teeth and run with it, be my guest. Do we have any takers??

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

It's always hard, swollen, and hot.

Just pointing that out.

[electroweak.livejournal.com]

Hey, Kzin, what's the difference between "hard" and "difficult"? --- *pause* --- If it's not hard, it's more difficult! LULZ!

When you said I would never hear the end of this, I didn't quite imagine that we would be hearing this as we were nearing the end of the first decade of the third millennium. You play for keeps, ma'am! I bow to you.

Anyway, I recommend against banding the novels by hemidecade. You may find a lot of things break across more than one five year period, which may make those changes harder to track.

Mind you, I'm also imagining some kind of database-backed research tool into which you would enter your raw data. Graphs! Structured queries!

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

When you said I would never hear the end of this, I didn't quite imagine that we would be hearing this as we were nearing the end of the first decade of the third millennium. You play for keeps, ma'am! I bow to you.

I'm torn between "I'd rather you knelt" (with attendant leer, natch) and "Blind pigs tend to remember their acorns, as they are so far and few between" but I think I'll go with the following, instead: I've never actually thanked you for not strangling me. I know it must have been a challenge, at times, and it's no excuse to state that you blush so prettily that I couldn't resist. (I could have resisted, but what would be the fun in that?) Thank you for not strangling me, on an ongoing basis, since we've had the pleasure of one another's company.

I'm banding the novels by hemidecade partially to facilitate data collection and to avoid duplicate novels. It's to make it easier for humans to look at the list. I expect that there will be usefulness in running the numbers by year as well as by chunk (and I was planning on so doing) -- that's why the master book list has the novel-year as well as the cohort-year-group.

As for a database-backed research tool into which I would enter raw data: That would be so unbelieveably cool that... that... words fail me.